"Le Tout New York on a Cubist Horse"

After my run through of the Picasso exhibition at the AGO, which I wrote briefly about here, and which I will expand upon soon, I remember reading a scathing article/book/review of his work, namely that his talent as a painter was negligible, and that he didn't have much of a training. I thought it was Roger Scruton (whose book Beauty I recently bought and will review in full soon) who wrote it, or possibly Kenneth Clark in his book Civilization, which I also have.

Looking online, I found this interview of Tom Wolfe by National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Bruce Cole, where Wolfe states that Picasso didn't have the training nor the skills of an artist. Below is part of the interview:

Cole: Since Picasso, the hallmark of great art has been originality, which was certainly not the case in the preceding periods. Since everyone is original now, how do you know who is original? There are no boundaries anymore.

Wolfe: Well, the art world decides for you. That's, that's really what happens. Tom Stoppard in his play, Artist Descending a Staircase, has one of his characters say that imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Cole: I do think you're seeing a return to the object and the figure. But my question is can you ever put it back together again after artists have really seen things in different ways?

Wolfe: Often the artists simply have not been taught. They don't know enough about draftsmanship to do it. They don't know enough about color. They don't know enough about light and shadow. You can see a lot of it in Picasso.

Picasso left art school at the age of fifteen, on the grounds there was nothing more they could teach him. This is extolled in biographies of Picasso. Unfortunately, he never learned perspective. In his realistic period, early in his life, there's never a room with perspective. He puts a figure or two and a stick of furniture in the foreground, and everything beyond them is fog. He never really learned anatomy. In many of his realistic pictures, fingers and thumbs are like a bunch of asparagus that you buy in the grocery store. He was never very good on things like foreshortening. If I were as ill-prepared as Picasso or Braque I would have thought up a name like Cubism, too, as a way of legitimizing one's lack of skill.

I think that the book I'm looking for is Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word, with the sections on Picasso. Below are the chapters of the book:

Chapter I: The Apache Dance
Chapter II: The Public is Not Invited (and Never has Been)
Chapter III: Le Tout New York on a Cubist Horse
Chapter IV: Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
Chapter V: Hello, Steinberg…
Chapter VI: Up the Fundamental Aperture

I will get a hold of The Painted Word (which I thought I had in my book collection) to re-read and to review.