February 6, 2017, Issue

Peter Schjeldahl says there’s poetry in David Salle’s paintings. He says they’re “a distillation of the poetic powers that are essential to painting” (“Fresh Paint,” in this week’s issue). He’s said this before. In his “David Salle” (The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991), he wrote, “Salle’s unabashedly literary intelligence and playfulness – his way of pushing around the meanings of images much as poets push around those of words – appeal to me mightily.” Schjeldahl’s poetry analogy suggests an approach to Salle’s enigmatic art. I’m not sure I buy it. The best poetry, for me, springs from more than just “pushing around” words. Clive James, in his Poetry Notebook (2014), writes, “There is a notion of bedrock throughout Shakespeare’s work almost to the end: a notion that the essential meaning, the deeper consideration, has to be protected against all transient distortions, including the poet’s own gift for … words.” It seems to me that Salle’s paintings lack this sense of a “deeper consideration.” They lack bedrock. Take his Sextant in Dogtown (1987), for example, which is used to illustrate Schjeldahl’s piece. Schjeldahl describes it as follows:

Here, three abutted panels present grisaille images, clearly from photographs, of a woman awkwardly posing in a bra, with and without panties. (Offensive? Sure, and plainly on purpose, but smoothly at one with Salle’s attitude toward all his subjects.) A small inset panel pictures a dead bird. Above them, in acrid colors, are images of antique clown dolls and a cartoon of a top-hatted seafarer wielding a sextant.

It’s an intriguing combination of images and colors. Viewed as an abstract, it’s almost ravishing. Perhaps that’s the way it should be considered. Forget meaning. Seek bedrock elsewhere.

Postscript: This week's issue also contains Luke Mogelson's extraordinary "The Avengers of Mosul." I'm still absorbing it. I'll post my comment in the next day or so.