October 18, 2010 Issue

No writer I know of deploys “drench,” or variations thereof, to greater effect than Peter Schjeldahl. In his great essay, “Our Kiefer” (included in his 1991 collection The Hydrogen Jukebox), he says, “Kiefer’s Pollockian machines – with their heart-grabbing yellows, blacks, and browns that affect like tastes, sounds, and smells and their incorporation of photographs that drench the mind in tones of memory – evoke a quasi-religious feeling of delicious, melancholy, slightly masochistic abasement before sheer ancientness.” This is without a doubt one of the most gorgeous sentences I’ve ever read. It is Schjeldahl at his sensuously responsive best. Here’s another of his “drench” descriptions - this from his review “America” (The New Yorker, April 17, 1999; collected in Let’s See, 2008), in which he says of Arshile Gorky, “He developed drenchingly songful modes of abstracted thicknesses and thinnesses …” My god, I find that ravishing! And now, in Schjeldahl’s “Big Bang,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, he’s at it again, this time in an exquisite description of Barnett Newman’s “Vir Heroicus Sublimis”: “the painting is as drenching and as elevating as an organ chord in Bach.” I eat it up! His magnificent “organ chord” analogy set off a reverberation in my memory. He’s used it before. His celebratory review of the 2006 Betty Woodman retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, a review inexplicably missing from Let's See, contains this memorable description of the color in Woodman’s vase “Portugal”: “an indigo like an organ chord, at once rumbling and clarion”: see "Decoration Myths" (The New Yorker, May 15, 2006). I love Schjeldahl’s writing. But I have to wonder if he’s becoming just a shade too mellow these days. In “Big Bang,” he reviews MOMA’s “Abstract Expressionist New York,” which you would think, if it’s going to put Abstract Expressionism on full show, would contain lots of de Kooning and lots of Joan Mitchell. In “Big Bang,” Schjeldahl calls de Kooning “the all-time best of the American painters,” and in a previous review (“Tough Love: Joan Mitchell,” The New Yorker, July 15, 2002; also in Let’s See), he calls Mitchell “not just the best of the so-called second-generation Abstract Expressionists – a status already hers by common consent – but a great modern artist.” According to “Big Bang,” there are only four de Koonings in the MOMA show, and only one Mitchell. This seems to me to constitute a major fault in the show. Yet Schjeldahl glosses over it, saying only that the curator, Ann Temkin, “is candid about how the tastes of her forbears at MOMA account for the paucity of works” by de Kooning and Mitchell. How is it that this palace of high art failed to recognize and seriously collect two of the greatest Abstract Expressionists? Schjeldahl doesn’t say. He calls the show “terrific.” I’m wondering if he’s losing his critical edge.