Debunking, with Style

The Painted Word By Tom Wolfe Farrar, 121 pp., $5.95 Five years ago Tom Wolfe, New Journalist, Social Observer, spiritual grandson of H. L. Mencken, earned himself at least temporary immortality by coining the phrase “radical chic,” to describe the party conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein gave in honor of the Black Panthers. (Pow!) Now Mr. Wolfe has found another target: abstract art chic together with its most fervent proponents, art critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg, high priests of the isms which have convulsed American painting from Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s to Conceptualism today. En route (Mr. Wolfe’s essay is as riddled with italicized French expressions as the menu at La Caravelle) he manages a few sideswipes at Hilton Kramer, holder-forth on art for the New York Times, as well as such culture heroes as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, et al. The results will delight those who have long harbored dark suspicions that modern art beginning with Picasso is a put-on, a gigantic hoax perpetrated on a gullible public by a mysterious cabal of artists, critics, dealers, and collectors aided and abetted by Time and Newsweek. Those who take modern art somewhat more seriously will be disappointed; not all of Mr. Wolfe’s barbs find their mark.

It’s really a pleasure to see such beautifully literate mincemeat made of Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg (Green Mountain, Red Mountain, Stone Mountain), over whose obfuscations on art and artists, art lovers have been yawning for lo! these many years. Their influence on the art world of the Fifties and Sixties was undeniable, though they were not alone; one suspects that Mr. Wolfe would have added the Metropolitan Museum’s Henry Geldzahler to his list had his name translated to a colored mountain rather than—not so inappropriately—a gold payer. Certainly all of them reveled in their celebrity status and enjoyed wielding their clout, Greenberg in particular: as a member of that eminently respectable coalition of high IQs, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, he tried to blackball a writer from membership on the ground that his attack on Abstract Expressionism proved he was a Communist, since Stalin and Khrushchev persecuted abstract-artists.

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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The Painted Word By Tom Wolfe Farrar, 121 pp., $5.95 Five years ago Tom Wolfe, New Journalist, Social Observer, spiritual grandson of H. L. Mencken, earned himself at least temporary immortality by coining the phrase “radical chic,” to describe the party conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein gave in honor of the Black Panthers. (Pow!) Now Mr. Wolfe has found another target: abstract art chic together with its most fervent proponents, art critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg, high priests of the isms which have convulsed American painting from Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s to Conceptualism today. En route (Mr. Wolfe’s essay is as riddled with italicized French expressions as the menu at La Caravelle) he manages a few sideswipes at Hilton Kramer, holder-forth on art for the New York Times, as well as such culture heroes as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, et al. The results will delight those who have long harbored dark suspicions that modern art beginning with Picasso is a put-on, a gigantic hoax perpetrated on a gullible public by a mysterious cabal of artists, critics, dealers, and collectors aided and abetted by Time and Newsweek. Those who take modern art somewhat more seriously will be disappointed; not all of Mr. Wolfe’s barbs find their mark.

It’s really a pleasure to see such beautifully literate mincemeat made of Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg (Green Mountain, Red Mountain, Stone Mountain), over whose obfuscations on art and artists, art lovers have been yawning for lo! these many years. Their influence on the art world of the Fifties and Sixties was undeniable, though they were not alone; one suspects that Mr. Wolfe would have added the Metropolitan Museum’s Henry Geldzahler to his list had his name translated to a colored mountain rather than—not so inappropriately—a gold payer. Certainly all of them reveled in their celebrity status and enjoyed wielding their clout, Greenberg in particular: as a member of that eminently respectable coalition of high IQs, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, he tried to blackball a writer from membership on the ground that his attack on Abstract Expressionism proved he was a Communist, since Stalin and Khrushchev persecuted abstract-artists.