Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2026 July 17 • Friday

Decades ago I read Charles Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy. I remember being blown away by it but other than that it had something to do with art and a painter, I couldn't remember much about it.

It's a short book so I decided to read it again.

The basic story is about an art critic named James Figueras who has worked hard to establish himself as one of the few solidly respected, influential and powerful operators in his world.

It's a hustle and requires a certain amount of choreography but he's actually sincere, a true believer in art with knowledge, taste and passion.

He's also a serious writer. Words are his medium and they're as important to him as paint is to a painter.

Jacques Debierue is a famous and famously reclusive painter, a legend in the art world and one of its most important and defining figures, whose work encompasses several of the major schools of the twentieth century and indeed seems to have inspired their very creation.

It turns out that Debierue is living in Florida and a millionaire art collector will set Figueras up with the opportunity to interview him and see his current work.

This would be the scoop of all scoops and would level Figueras up to unassailable heights. It would be the proverbial golden ticket.

The only catch is that Figueras has to steal one of Debierue's paintings for the millionaire art collector.

This isn't a moral or ethical problem for Figueras, merely a logistical one.

I didn't mind reading this book again but I wasn't as impressed with it as I was the first time.

Willeford's prose style is smooth and witty and understated, but a lot of the book depends on an attitude toward "art" that was, I think, left for dead a long time ago.

A blurb on the back of the book, from the Nashville Tennesseean, asserts boldly that "Nabokov would smile and approve" but I'm extremely confident that Nabokov would have thought this novel was worthless garbage and wouldn't have gone much further than the first few pages.

I myself don't think it's worthless garbage but it is very dated in its "art" talk as well as its tedious misogyny. The main female character is a depressing cartoon and not actually a realistic person but a couple of lazy writing devices: a way for the author to dump tons of exposition on the reader, by having Figueras constantly spewing hundreds of words to her so that she/the reader can have the necessary information, and a catalyst for plot movement.

The ending of the book, which I had found so thrilling and satisfying decades ago, no longer even makes sense to me.

I didn't mind reading it, but I'll be surprise if this is one of Willeford's best.