The Painted Word

The author derails the great American myth of modern art in a scathing, witty, uncompromising critique of American art from the 1950s through the 1970s. Reprint. The Painted Word charts the erratic course of the social history of Modern Art from it beginnings in revolution - a revolution against literary content in art - to its present state, in which it has become, quite unconsciously, a parody of itself, obsessedly devoted to the pronouncements of certain guru-critics, to the point of reductio ad absurdum, to the point where - turnabout being fair play - it has become as literary, as academic, as mannered, as clubby, as the salon painting agwinst which it first rebelled The apache dance......Page 11 The public is not invited......Page 21 Le Tout New York on a Cubist Horse......Page 29 Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat......Page 35 Hello, Steinberg......Page 61 Up the fundamental aperture......Page 79 Epilogue......Page 95 ALL THE MAJOR MODERN MOVEMENTS EXCEPT FOR de Stijl, Dada, Contructivism, and Surrealism began before the First World War, and yet they all seem to come out of the 1920s. A critically humorous examination of American modern art since the 1900s