There's  been a brouhaha about Bob Dylan’s paintings at the Gagosian uptown, which the gallery claimed were inspired by his travels through East Asia, but turn out to have been copied from famous existing photos of East Asia.  It’s obvious that the paintings are from a novice.  They’re not pretty.  (Richard Prince calls them, kindly, “workmanlike.”) The colors are muddled, the handling is awkward, and there are spots of blank canvas popping through in all the wrong places.  And it’s obvious that the scenes weren’t painted from life; they’re stiff compositionally and weirdly flat.  But there’s something else going on too – the stirrings of someone grappling with the language of painting.

Is it even possible for Dylan to be a great painter?  He’s a brilliant lyricist, and it would seem that language and painting reside at opposite sides of the imagination.  Each painting feels like it’s made up of smaller pieces strung together; it doesn’t spring from one place.  Dylan fans (remember, this word came from “fanatics”) have traced almost every painting to an original source.  But there are a few that feel more than imitative and somewhat synthetic, like La Belle Cascade, which evokes Picasso and Cezanne.  In the end it’s touching that someone who’s mastery of English is so absolute would want to learn a new language at all.