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.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

On Willem de Kooning


Willem de Kooning, Composition (1955)























Stephen Ellis, in his excellent “Willem de Kooning: Acrobat with a Paint Brush” (NYR Daily, June 1, 2019), says that de Kooning’s paintings “refuse to be defined as either ‘representational’ or ‘abstract,’ flitting restlessly between these notional polarities.” This connects with a memorable observation that Peter Schjeldahl makes in his essay “Willem de Kooning,” included in his new collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: “His art is not abstract, just relentlessly abstracting.” 
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