Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Andy Friedman on Andrew Wyeth


Andy Friedman, "Wallpaper, Kuerner House" (2017)



















Recently, searching newyorker.com for a review of the movie Wind River, I stumbled on a wonderful piece by Andy Friedman that I hadn’t seen before. Titled “A Journey in Pictures for Andrew Wyeth on his Centennial Birthday,” it’s a sort of annotated sketchbook – beautiful watercolors of scenes and items that Friedman noted when he visited the Brandywine River Valley Museum of Art, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to see the “Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect” exhibit.

I’m drawn to Wyeth’s painting. I relish its expressionistic strangeness – the absorbed microscopic way skin, hair, fur, fabric, etc. are rendered. I relish its off-kilter angles and bird’s eye views. Most of all, I relish its undertow of melancholy. Friedman touches on this when he notes that Wyeth’s Pennsylvania pictures “are painted with reticent shades of melancholy ochre.”

Friedman’s sketches reflect Wyeth’s close attention to plain, ordinary-looking things. I particularly like his depictions of the frontispiece of a light switch in Wyeth’s studio and the crumpled wallpaper in the Kuerner house. Friedman writes, “In another room, the wallpaper has shrivelled like a blossom in reverse.”

Friedman’s “A Journey in Pictures for Andrew Wyeth on his Centennial Birthday” is delectable. I wish I’d discovered it earlier. If I had, I would’ve included it on my “Best of 2017” list. 

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