From “The Painted Word,” which appeared in the April 1975 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.

People don’t read the morning newspaper, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974, like I was, slipping into that great public bath for a million souls which is the Sunday New York Times. Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened: I noticed something! I was jerked alert by the following:

Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial— the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.

Now, you may say, My God, man! You woke up over that? But I knew what I was looking at. Without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away. What I saw before me was the critic in chief of the Times saying: these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.

All these years, I’d made my way into the galleries of upper Madison and lower SoHo waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings into my optic chiasma. All these years, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, I could see. I’d had it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” but “believing is seeing,” for modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

Naturally le moderne put a burden on theory. Each new movement, each new ism in modern art, was a declaration by the artists that they had a way of seeing that the world (read: the bourgeoisie) couldn’t comprehend. “We understand!” said the culturati, separating themselves also from the herd. But what inna namea Christ were the artists seeing? Here theory came in. All we ask for is a few lines of explanation! You say Méret Oppenheim’s Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), consisting of a fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, is an example of the Surrealist principle of displacement? You say the texture of one material—fur—has been imposed upon the forms of others—china and tableware—in order to split the oral, tactile, and visual into three critically injured but for the first time fiercely independent parties in the subconscious? Fine.

But none of the Abstract Expressionist paintings that remain from the palmy days of 1946 to 1960—and precious few are still hanging except in museums and the guest bedrooms of Long Island beach houses, back there with the water pitcher left over from the set of dishes the newlyweds bought for their first apartment after the war—not even Pollock’s and de Kooning’s, make quite as perfect a memorial to that confident little epoch as the Theories.

Theories? They were more than theories, they were mental constructs. No, more than that even . . . veritable edifices behind the eyeballs they were . . . castles in the cortex . . . crystalline. . . . In time these theories seemed no longer mere theories but axioms, part of the given, as basic as the four humors had once seemed in any consideration of human health. Not to know about these things was not to have the Word. The Word—but exactly. A curious change had taken place at the very core of the business of being a painter. Somehow the ethereal little dears were inapprehensible without words. In short, the new order of things in the art world was: first you get the Word, and then you can see.