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.

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