"Kabbalah Anyone?" — NYRB, April 1976

Leon Wieseltier took Hess's reading apart in the New York Review of Books; Hess answered in the same issue. A public, named, printed fight about whether an art historian may hang a mysticism on a dead painter.

⭐⭐⭐ THE BEST THING IN THIS WING, AND IT IS AN ARGUMENT RATHER THAN A PICTURE. It is also the discipline this whole pack needs: the moment you can read anything as Kabbalah, you can read everything as Kabbalah, and then you have said nothing. ⚠ The app takes no side. Newman's biographer Amy Newman splits the difference — the field has given the influence "both too much and too little weight", and his kabbalistic talk may have been performance, "like telling jokes, or singing arias" — while the archived notes look like real theoretical engagement.