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So in The Painted Word Wolfe tries to come across as the little boy looking at the Emperor's new clothes. In fact, his account of the art world reads more like an eleven-year-old's written report on a pornographic movie. The lad is spry and attentive at first. He can see things moving up and down and in and out, buttocks heaving, breasts jiggling. He has heard about sex but never had any. Consequently he has no inkling of what the real transaction between these absorbed couples might be, or why the glazed audience is staring so raptly at the screen. His state is incomprehension, broken by fits of naughty giggles.
Wolfe seems to know virtually nothing about the history of art, American or European. What sort of mind could describe the reserved and cultivated Georges Braque as "a Montmartre boho of the primitive sort" who "waited for his old comrade Picasso's imminent collapse as a painter and a human being"?
Scissors and Paste. There is no sign that Wolfe has bothered to verify a fact, check a source or even do a day's consistent reading in a library. To nail the dozens of elementary howlers in his text would require almost as many pages as The Painted Word takes. One example will do for all. Wolfe on social-realist art in the '30s: "Even Franz "Kline, the abstract painter's abstract painter, was dutifully cranking out paintings of unemployed Negroes, crippled war veterans and the ubiquitous workers with open blue workshirts and necks wider than their heads." In fact, he never painted such pictures. Either Wolfe is making them up, or he cannot distinguish between Franz Kline and Ben Shahn.
Nor can he handle his fantasy's archvillains, Critics Rosenberg, Greenberg and Steinberg. Wolfe is naive about critical power. The idea that Jackson Pollock was Clement Greenberg's ideological puppet in the '40s and '50s is sim ply not true: Greenberg did Pollock a great service by writing about his work intelligently and with passion, but he did not "tell" Pollock how to paint. (That dubious privilege would be reserved for weaker artists in the '60s, who wanted to attach themselves to Greenberg's by then mythical aura as a trend spotter.) In any case, Wolfe is inept at dealing with thought, and his account of Steinberg's and Greenberg's criticism is utterly garbled. He cannot treat their writings as argument, only as manipulation. He seems not to have read them, only read about them. He imagines, for instance, that Greenberg somehow invented the issue of pictorial flatness, which had been a subject of continual debate among European artists and critics since the days of Maurice Denis and Paul Gauguin in the 1890s.
Wolfe has an astute eye for what he knows about: namely, the pretensions of art consumers and the stratagems by which the chic of New York use new art as a tool for social climbing. There he is on home ground, being in every sense part of his frothy and fashion-ruled subject. He was there. But he was not in any of the places where art was made or serious thought about it discussed. The world of production, as against consumption, is alien to Wolfe. Hence the scissors-and-paste flavor of The Painted Word. It is not just wrong history; it is not even firsthand reportage. There has been a long fall from — remember it?-the New Journalism.