Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art
- 1 Apocalypse Now: Heinrich Von Kleist’s Sublime Deframing of Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch Am Meer (1810)
- 2 The Kleistian Sublime Is Now: Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman
- 3 The Clouding of Perception: Seeing The (Un)Real Potential for Abstraction in the Poetry and Science of Goethe’s Clouds (1821)
- 4 In the Service of Clouds or Optical Illusion?: Romanticism, Pointillism, and Impressionism
- 5 Driven to Distraction and from Abstraction: The Birth and Death of Abstract Art in Gottfried Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich (1854/55, 1879/80)
- 6 Inside the Mind and Outside the Margins: The Unruly Lines of Paul Klee, André Masson, and Cy Twombly
- Epilogue: Laocoön and His Sisters: The Future of Literature and Art
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue: Laocoön and His Sisters: The Future of Literature and Art
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art
- 1 Apocalypse Now: Heinrich Von Kleist’s Sublime Deframing of Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch Am Meer (1810)
- 2 The Kleistian Sublime Is Now: Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman
- 3 The Clouding of Perception: Seeing The (Un)Real Potential for Abstraction in the Poetry and Science of Goethe’s Clouds (1821)
- 4 In the Service of Clouds or Optical Illusion?: Romanticism, Pointillism, and Impressionism
- 5 Driven to Distraction and from Abstraction: The Birth and Death of Abstract Art in Gottfried Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich (1854/55, 1879/80)
- 6 Inside the Mind and Outside the Margins: The Unruly Lines of Paul Klee, André Masson, and Cy Twombly
- Epilogue: Laocoön and His Sisters: The Future of Literature and Art
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs… . There, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes… . Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until … it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture … and came out the other side as Art Theory!
—Tom Wolfe, The Painted WordWHEN TOM WOLFE first published The Painted Word in 1975, his book was guaranteed to receive a sound critical drubbing. Given what I know of Mr. Wolfe, I have no doubt that he anticipated and likely delighted in the rancor that his essayistic take on modern art incurred. After all, one does not take aim at the most influential members of the art establishment and New York intellectualism, nearly an institution unto itself, and expect to be placed on a pedestal in the press or invited to the next gallery opening in SoHo.
Accordingly, the book “hit the art world like a really bad, MSGheadache- producing, Chinese lunch,” as Rosalind Krauss put it with a few well-painted words of her own. Predictably, the art world responded by tossing its MSG-laced leftovers into the garbage in the best way it knows how: with caustic pretentiousness dismissing Wolfe as a philistine too ignorant to understand, let alone write about art and its critics. To be fair, Wolfe does not make a mockery of the entire art world; his social criticism is leveled less at the artist than at the art critic—three such critics in particular. Bearing the brunt of the author's wrath are the “kings of Cultureburg”—the unholy trinity of Leo Steinberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Clement Greenberg—who, as he charges, dominate the art scene with their theoretical writings and are complicit in what he sees as an increasing estrangement between modern art and the average audience.
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- The Myth of AbstractionThe Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, pp. 243 - 258Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021