The Burnt Orange Heresy

The Burnt Orange Heresy by Charles Willeford

Nothing exists.

If anything exists, it is incomprehensible.

If anything was comprehensible,

it would be incommunicable.

- Gorgias

PART ONE NOTHING EXISTS

1

Two hours ago the Railway Expressman delivered the crated, newly published International Encyclopedia of Fine Arts to my Palm Beach apartment. I signed for the set, turned the thermostat of the air-conditioner up three degrees, found a clawhammer in the kitchen, and broke open the crate. Twenty-four beautiful buckram-bound volumes, eggshell paper, decide edged. Six laborious years in preparation, more than twenty-five hundred illustrations- 436 in full-color plates-and each thoroughly researched article written and signed by a noted authority in his specific field of art history.

Two articles were mine. And my name, James Figueras, was also referred to by other critics in three more articles. By quoting me, they gained authoritative support for their own opinions.

In my limited visionary world, the world of art criticism, where there are fewer than twenty-five men-and no women-earning their bread as full-time art critics (art reviewers for newspapers don't count), my name as an authority in this definitive encydopedia means Success with an uppercase S. I thought about it for a moment. Only twenty-five full-time art critics in America, out of a population of more than two hundred million! This is a small number, indeed, of men who are able to look at art and understand it, and then interpret it in writing in such a way that those who care can share the aesthetic experience.

Clive Bell claimed that art was "significant form' I have no quarrel with that, but he never carried his thesis out to its obvious conclusion. It is the critic who makes the form(s) significant to the viewer! In seven more months I will reach my thirty-fifth birthday. I am the youngest authority with signed articles in the new Encyclopedia, and, I realized at that moment, if I lived long enough I had every opportunity of becoming the greatest art critic in America- and perhaps the world. With tenderness, I removed the heavy volumes from the crate and lined them up on my desk.

The complete set, if ordered by subscribers in advance of the announced publication date-and most universities, colleges, and larger public libraries would take advantage of the prepublication offer-sold for $350, plus shipping charges. After publication date, the Encyclopedia would sell for $500, with the option of buying an annual volume on the art of that year for only $10 (same good paper, same attractive binding).

It goes without saying, inasmuch as my field is contemporary art, that my name will appear in all of those yearbooks.

I had read the page proofs months before, of course, but I slowly reread my 1,600-word piece on art and the preschool child with the kind of satisfaction that any well-done professional job provides a reader. It was a tightly summarized condensation of my book, Art and the Preschool Child, which, in turn, was a rewritten revision of my Columbia Master's thesis. This book had launched me as an art critic, and, at the same time, the book was a failure. I say that the book was a failure because two colleges of education in two major universities adopted the book as a text for courses in child psychology, thereby indicating a failure on the part of the educators concerned to understand the thesis of the book, children, and psychology. Nevertheless, the book had enabled me to escape from the teaching of art history and had put me into full-time writing as an art critic.

Thomas Wyatt Russell, managing editor, Fine Arts: The Americas, who had read and understood the book, offered me a position on the magazine as a columnist and contributing editor, with a stipend of four hundred dollars a month. And Fine Arts: The Americas, which loses more than fifty thousand dollars a year for the foundation that supports it, is easily the most successful art magazine published in America-or anywhere else, for that matter. Admittedly, four hundred dollars a month is a niggardly sum, but my name on the masthead of this prestigious magazine was the wedge I needed at the time to sell free-lance articles to other art magazines. My income from the latter source was uneven, of course, but with my assured monthly pittance it was enough-so long as I remained single, which was my avowed intention-to avoid teaching, which I despised, and enough to avoid the chffly confinement of museum work-the only other alternative open to those who selected art history as graduate degrees. There is always advertising, of course, but one does not deliberately devote one's time to the in-depth study of art history needed for a graduate degree to enter advertising, regardless of the money to be made in that field.