The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe - Review and Essay by Aidan Hickey

These reviews were intended to offer opinions on books about painting technique. But, on the occasion of the opening of Contemporary Dublin, perhaps we may consider a more elevated topic? 

Those of us who persist with traditional picture-making take for granted that we have no claim to artistic seriousness. We do however, on occasion, ponder the current meaning of “serious” visual Art. If that’s a question that interests you, there are fascinating answers to be found in The Painted Word, a slim volume written by American novelist Tom Wolfe, in 1976.

Until the mid 1970s, Wolfe was as happy as the rest of us to accept the official line on Modern Art History… that is… Post-Romantic artists, in 19^th century France rejected the “literary” basis of Academic painting. They wanted to paint “real” subjects, not illustrations of History, Mythology or popular Morality.  This dedication to the exclusively visual - by Realists, Impressionists and Post Impressionists - forged the “permanent revolution” of Avant-Garde Art.

Then, one Sunday in 1974, Wolfe read this - from the critic-in-chief of the New York Times - “in looking at a painting today… to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.” 

Wolfe was shocked! Could this be an admission that the purely visual experience we’d been taught to expect from Modern Art was no longer the point? He concluded that it was...“Modern Art has become completely literary: the painting and other works exist only to illustrate the text.”   (In this new situation, “text” is the theory behind the particular “ism” the painter identifies with.) 

Over the following 90 pages, Wolfe examines the great Revolution’s 360⁰ turn. How, he asks, did Painting become the very thing it had tried to escape? 

Wolfe’s writing is too sharp and his research too complete for me to make any attempt at précis. My only advice, for anyone still reading this is... find the book and enjoy it. What can be said, however, is that he convincingly describes how the Avant-Garde was “taken up”, in the 1920s, by members of an upper-class determined to distance themselves from the vulgarity of modern popular culture. What they needed was a new secular religion… and Modern Art provided the perfect tabernacle.  
  

Later, influential critics Greenberg, Rosenberg and Steinberg sought to create an intellectual framework for the endless, accelerating “Quest for the New”… But, as the years passed, each “discovery” needed to be more esoteric than the last. Room for intellectual manoeuvres contracted. By the time Minimalism and Pop Art arrived the Revolution had entered an uncontrollable spin. 

Tom Wolfe was not alone in his awareness of the “Painted Word”.  Eight years earlier, the distinguished English critic, Edward Lucie-Smith had written…  “It is possible to feel that painters and sculptors have turned critic, and that the galleries are filled with their theses. But can one look at theses forever? I mean, without yawning?”  
       

In 2002, Donald Kuspit, Professor of Art History and Philosophy at NY State University, wrote The End of Art. He believed that the nihilistic theorizing of Marcel Duchamp - reanimated by Pop Art - signalled “the end”.  The Avant-Garde... its dreams of revolution notwithstanding... had been integrated into “the establishment” – as entertainment. Art, Kuspit wrote, is now … “an amusing diversion rather than an aesthetic revelation”.   
                

Which brings us back to Contemporary Dublin... It’s good of the organizers to give us this opportunity to see the very latest things.   And we should all  visit the Exhibition… preferably clutching a copy of The Painted Word… to discover... what?  That the Emperor has, by some miracle, acquired an amazing new wardrobe?