Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #10 "Tables For Two: Tony Luke's"

Nick Paumgarten (New Yorker illustration)

Nick Paumgarten is one of my favorite New Yorker writers. Over the last fourteen years, he’s produced more than four-hundred-and-thirty pieces, including profiles, reportage, Talk stories, “Table For Two” columns, and newyorker.com posts. I want to celebrate his work. During the next few weeks, I’ll pick what I consider to be his ten best pieces and briefly comment on each of them. Today, I begin with my #10 choice, his classic “Tables For Two: Tony Luke’s” (April 11, 2005). 

This brief piece is so delectable it’s worth quoting in full:

Funny that, of all the regional cuisines to migrate to New York, the last should be that of South Philadelphia, where the cheesesteak is king—and not just king, but a large and unruly monarch. This is obstinately so at Tony Luke’s, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The cheesesteaks here are about a foot long, and they are served without the benefit of being cut in half. As a result, as you eat one, the structural integrity starts to go; well-cheesified clumps of steak ooze out the sides. Quick flanking bites along the roll’s perimeter don’t much help, and soon you find yourself pushing the thing into your mouth like a log into a chipper. In the brief period between the beginning and the end of this process, and in the moments immediately afterward, as you decimate a stack of napkins, you may conclude that there has never been a better sandwich, and you will pine for another. This is where the cheese fries come in.

In Philly, Tony Luke’s has several outlets. The one here is a franchise, opened by Evan Stein, a Villanova native who spent two months last year living with Luke himself and apprenticing in the flagship stall, on East Oregon Avenue. Every ingredient is the same, down to the moderately tough rolls and the Liberty Bell deli paper. Stein even emulated the take-out setup: yellow fluorescent light, stool-and-counter layout, concrete floors resembling a sidewalk. Occasionally, there are authentic customers, too: expats in Eagles caps demanding hoagies “wit” (as in with onions) and wondering when Stein is going to start serving “breffis” (April 1).

As for the cheesesteak particulars: at Tony Luke’s they don’t chop the meat. They sort of slice and scramble it. And they are not dogmatic about Cheez Whiz; you can go for finer stuff without shame. The irony is that the signature sandwich here isn’t the cheesesteak but the roast-pork Italian, a marvellous concoction of spicy roasted pork, sharp provolone, and broccoli rabe. The hint of bitterness is so peculiar that you can be excused, as you stuff it in lengthwise, for thinking that it is good for yiz. 

Every sentence is perfect. I smile every time I read it. The line that always gets me is “Quick flanking bites along the roll’s perimeter don’t much help, and soon you find yourself pushing the thing into your mouth like a log into a chipper.” What an image! It’s so real I feel I’m actually shoving that Philly cheesesteak into my own salivating chipper. What “Tony Luke’s” tells about Paumgarten’s style is that it’s strongly imagistic. It calls up vivid pictures. This will be confirmed repeatedly as we look at other examples of his extraordinary work. 

August 26, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nicola Twilley’s “Trailblazers.” It’s about the use of prescribed burns to prevent megafires. The first paragraph hooked me:

Before Terry Lim handed me an aluminum flask filled with a blend of gasoline and diesel and asked me to set fire to the Tahoe National Forest, he gave me a hard hat, a pair of flame-resistant gloves, and a few words of instruction. “You want to dab the ground,” he said. “Just try to even out the line.”

I read that and just kept going right to the end. What a trip! First stop was the Sagehen Creek Field Station, twenty miles north of Lake Tahoe, in the eastern Sierra Nevada (“When I drove there, in May, there were still patches of snow in the shade, but the banks of Sagehen Creek were dotted with the first buttercups of spring”). Second was a hike through the Sagehen Experimental Forest. Third was a hike along Caples Creek, in the Eldorado National Forest, just south of Lake Tahoe. And fourth was a visit to the Illilouette Creek wilderness area, in Yosemite National Park, resulting in this superb passage:

On a two-mile hike to one of three monitoring stations she maintains there, we passed perhaps only a hundred and fifty feet of what most people would consider picture-postcard Sierra Nevada forest—dark-green, conifer-packed woods with a rust-colored carpet of fallen pine needles. The rest was a surprising patchwork of landscapes: rush-filled meadows, crisscrossed with fallen logs; large, sunny grasslands punctuated by a few big trees; copses of young pines and willows; and recently burned expanses, where the ground was brownish black, spattered with delicate pink flowers and adorned with carbonized trunks, gleaming and sculptural.

Along the way, I learned about megafires, prescribed burns, drip torches (“The lit cannister of fuel I was holding, known as a drip torch, had a long, looped neck that emitted a jaunty quiff of flame”), masticators, slop-overs, and other interesting things (e.g., “Lodgepole pinecones do not open until heated by fire“; “Black-backed woodpeckers dine almost exclusively on seared beetle larvae”). 

Twilley’s engaging first-person approach and vivid nature descriptions (“A foot-long alligator lizard skittered in front of me, pausing to pump out a couple of quick pushups before vanishing into the brush”) remind me of the work of John McPhee and Ian Frazier. I’ve been wondering if there’d ever be a successor to those two greats. Maybe Twilley is the one.  

Sarah Nicole Prickett's "Magic Mirror": On Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm (Photo by Kevin Sturman)

I’m having second thoughts about Sarah Nicole Prickett’s “Magic Mirror” (Bookforum, Summer 2019). Yesterday, I deleted my post in which I agreed with her that “malice” is one of Janet Malcolm’s favorite words. As a key to Malcolm’s work, “malice” is overrated. After reading and rereading Prickett’s absorbing essay (as well as the longer version of it on bookforum.com), I realize that the Malcolm I relish – the superb describer, the brilliant analyst – isn’t there. Malcolm’s subtle comparison of Ted Hughes’s two versions of his foreword to the Journals of Sylvia Plath (The Silent Woman); her patient tracing of Freud’s concept of the unconscious through his case histories (“Dora”), her contrasting two versions of Walker Evans’ photo of the tenant farmer’s wife (“Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.”), her ardent defense of Joseph Mitchell’s “fabrications” (“The Master Writer of the City”); her comparison of the various biographical renderings of Chekhov’s death (Reading Chekhov); her close reading of the court documents in the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova (Iphegenia in Forest Hills) – these and many other memorable analytic moves are what I admire most in Malcolm. She is a comparative analyst extraordinaire. And she writes beautifully – where beauty means clarity, verve, candor, and subtlety. Prickett doesn’t touch on any of this. The closest she comes to getting at the essence of Malcolm’s writing is when she refers to Malcolm’s “typically gloves-off examination” of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina (in “Socks”). Yes, Malcolm’s writing is “gloves-off.” But that doesn’t make it malicious; it makes it delicious. I devour it. 

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #1 John Updike's "The Thing Itself"

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Beekeepers (c. 1567-68)

I begin and end with Updike. He’s the greatest pleasure-giver of them all. It was through his work that I first discovered, many years ago, the joys of reading exhibition reviews. His three collections of art writings – Just Looking (1989), Still Looking (2007), and Always Looking (2012) – are among my favorite books. To conclude this series, I choose his wonderful “The Thing Itself” (The New York Review of Books, November 29, 2001; included in his 2007 essay collection Due Considerations) as my #1. It’s a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2001 Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. In it, Updike wrote,

What we treasure in Bruegel is his realism – the sense we get that through him we are looking into the sixteenth century more clearly than through any other artist of the time. The taste of actual atmosphere, of a bygone Europe’s climate, in the winter paintings Hunter in the Snow (1565) and Census at Bethlehem (1566) and Adoration of the Magi in the Snow (1567); the heavy, itchy heat of summer captured in the drawing Summer (1568), its two principal figures clothed in such respectful detail that peasant costumes could be reconstructed on their model; the moment of Halloween shock preserved in the one surviving woodcut based on a Bruegel drawing, The Wild Man or The Masquerade of Orson and Valentine (1566), a token of the widespread pagan remainders, the bizarre festivals and costumes which enlivened quotidian existence in Europe much as electrically promulgated entertainment does now; the surreal reality of the basket-headed Beekeepers (c. 1567-68); the imposing, intricately rigged ships, some of them with sails filled to bursting, presented in etchings based on vanished Bruegel drawings: of such is Bruegel’s gift to us, the life of his time seized at a coarser, more mundane level than the myth-minded artists of Italy descended to. His drawings are not the main part of his gift, but they are the basis of it, where his eye and hand began, and where they laid claim, through the medium of his prints peddled to an anonymous public, to a new form of patronage.

How I love that “surreal reality of the basket-headed Beekeepers.” It perfectly captures my own Bruegelian way of seeing.

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #2 Peter Schjeldahl's “Édouard Manet”

Édouard Manet, Asparagus (1880) 

Peter Schjeldahl is my hero. Anyone who follows this blog knows that. Why do I like him so much? I think the answer is that he’s developed a style – an unmistakable, original, brilliant, personal style. The challenge is to pick a piece that fully expresses that style. For me, the quintessential Schjeldahl piece is “Édouard Manet,” which originally appeared in the November 20, 2000, New Yorker under the title “The Urbane Innocent,” and is included in his wonderful 2008 collection Let’s See. It’s a review of the Musée d’Orsay’s 2000 exhibition Manet: The Still Life Paintings. Here’s a sample:

Many people regard Manet as ironic. I don’t. I think he is witty and profound, often simultaneously. Consider two paintings of asparagus, both from 1880. The first one shows a bundle of pale, tender stalks on a bed of greens on a marble table. It was bought by a collector who insisted on paying a thousand francs instead of the eight hundred that Manet had asked. The second painting, of a single stalk perched on the table’s edge, arrived at the collector’s door with a note: “There was one missing from your bunch.” This little work, the payoff of a wispy jest, happens to be one of the most magical paintings in existence. It concentrates sensual arousal in a manner that verges on the sexual but remains in the realm of food and furniture. Its fullness of life suggests a thought: Manet ate the asparagus after he painted it. Painting and eating, art and sociability, loving and liking all flow together – even in a glance at a stray vegetable. Only Manet could have made such a picture.

Concentration of “sensual arousal” is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style, too. Consider his description of Manet’s floral paintings:

But his bouquets are substantial presences in penetrable space. “I would like to paint them all,” Manet said of flowers. So he did. Every blossom feels at once unique and suffused with the memories of a million kin. When a bright-yellow petal curls down around a salmon-colored shadow, it’s as if a bard of roses were singing a secret of the tribe. The glass vases abolish mystery. We observe the sustenance of cut stems, crazed by refractions through the wettest water you’ve ever seen. Each of Manet’s paintings raises its subject into a present time that forgets the past and ignores the future. Each is a lesson about dying: don’t. Only be alive.

That “When a bright-yellow petal curls down around a salmon-colored shadow, it’s as if a bard of roses were singing a secret of the tribe” is exquisite! The whole piece is exquisite. And the ardency of its message is unforgettable: Only be alive. 

August 19, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Adam Gopnik’s wonderful Talk story, “If You Listen,” about “what may be the most eccentric and original keyboard instrument in the history of Western music.” Gopnik beautifully describes it:

Called the Vessel Orchestra, it consists of thirty-two vessels from the Met’s vast collection of statuary and objets. When carefully miked and connected to a keyboard, the vessels, each with its own resonance, can be induced to play a two-and-a-half-octave scale, flats and sharps included. Stretched across the fifth-floor gallery of the Breuer, the Vessel Orchestra comprises a hallucinatory intersection of objects—from Persian religious figurines to contemporary ceramics and Deco portrait busts—and offers a set of pure tones that, pealing out from thousands of years of vessel silence, have enticed many composers, including Nico Muhly, to write music for it.

Here’s another superb passage:

The vessels, placed on pedestals of different heights, are configured out of musical order, to emphasize their range and varied provenances. Beer walked among them. “This boat sings a G,” he said, pointing at a Chinese dragon-boat vase. “This earthenware temple by William Wyman, from 1977, that’s a beautiful F, and this very early portrait bust by Gaston Lachaise is our A-flat.”

That “ ‘This boat sings a G,’ he said, pointing at a Chinese dragon-boat vase” is delightful.

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #3 T. J. Clark's "The Chill of Disillusion"

Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks (1483-1486)

In this series, “Top Ten Exhibition Reviews,” I’ve emphasized description as a key critical component. Another important element is comparison. The best critics are always comparing. One of the most memorable exhibition reviews I’ve ever read is T. J. Clark’s “The Chill of Disillusion” (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012, a review of the National Gallery’s 2012 Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, in which he thrillingly compares the two versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks. Clark puts us squarely there, in the room with the two paintings: 

In the middle room of the Leonardo show at the National Gallery you can swivel on one heel and see, almost simultaneously, the two versions of his Virgin of the Rocks. They face one another across 15 yards or so. There is no reason to think the two paintings will ever share the same space again, at least in my lifetime, and maybe they never have before. For the longer one looks at the pictures and puzzles over what scholars have to say about the scrappy documents that mention them, the less likely it seems that Leonardo painted the one in sight of the other. 

Clark contrasts, among other things, certain details: the drapery (“The most striking case is the way the Virgin’s robe meets the ground. In Paris it crumples slowly, heavily, elaborately: one feels the material falling and spreading as the result of its own weight and consistency. And it is gently analogised with the folded rock strata below. All of this is gone in version two”); the light (“In the Paris painting – we are sometimes advised to despair in the face of its dirt and discoloured varnish, but again, the present showing coaxes the object back to life – there is a time of day, I think, a sunset touch; and the condition of the atmosphere is worked out in the detail of light in the foreground. Experts talk about the later version going further with Leonardo’s mature investigations of modelling and materialising the illuminated body – the contours and orientation of the Virgin’s face are good examples – and they are right; but the substance, the cold three-dimensionality, is abstract. The light is not of this world”); the river and mountain landscape (“In the Paris painting it is otherworldly, yes, but for that very reason familiar. Its space and atmospherics are those of the Alps going north from the Lakes, the wild Chiavenna we know Leonardo delighted in; and the onset-of-sunset glow reminds us of everything in non-supernatural experience that regularly transfigures things and makes them mysterious – makes nature not ours. Substituting glacial blue for pale yellow, as I reckon Leonardo did in 1508, is putting a (marvellous) lantern slide in place of a true act of memory and imagination”).

As he proceeds, it appears Clark prefers the Paris version. Regarding the cold unworldly light of the London picture, he says, “what goes by the board in London is the very thing we may value most in Italian painting: the sense of the sacred belonging to a reality we recognise, and one whose strangeness is built from the strangenesses of nature.” Then, suddenly, he pivots: 

I go too far. The London picture is prodigious. The point of description cannot be to demote or belittle it – in a sense I think we have never, since Wölfflin, given the painting its due – but to grasp what kind of prodigy it is. 

He considers another detail – the unfolded yellow lining of the Virgin’s cloak. He writes,

In the Paris picture (whatever the changes brought on by time) there was a connection, I am sure, between the yellow fold and the light in the sky. The lining, spellbinding as it is – separate from and superior to its being a condition of some stuff in the sun – is a dream condensation of the yellows of late afternoon. In Paris the lining still has softness: it is conceivable as folded, touched by human fingers. The yellow emerges, at first quite gradually, from under the stretched canopy of blue. It is the inside of a garment spilling out. We may see it as a concentration of the landscape light, but also as a way of bringing that far light closer – optically, seemingly accidentally – in a manner that viewers can accept as actually happening, here among the rocks.

Then he asks, “Does any of the above apply to the fold in London?” His reply:

I doubt it. The lining in 1508 participates in the painting’s overall crystalline abstraction – its nearness without tangibility. It is of the essence of the London panel – the key to its invention of a new kind of pictorial space – that everything in the foreground, yellow, blue, marble grey, ghostly grey-green, takes on from the world in the distance only the river’s bleak cold.

My coarse summary of Clark’s exhilarating review fails to do it justice. I know zilch about Renaissance painting. But I know great art writing when I see it. In his effort to “grasp” what kind of prodigies these two paintings are, Clark soars:

Look again at the angel in Paris with the pointing finger. There had never been a figure like it before in painting, and there never would be again. It is not just the foot on the grass and the pointing finger that are uncanny: it is the pose as a whole, spreading out laterally, half turning towards us, but meeting our eyes from an utter remoteness; and the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery; and the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion. No wonder all this – this overflowing wish-fulfilment – had to be corrected in 1508. The London angel’s drapery is still elusive, but at least now it adheres to a possible anatomy: it does not just seem to occur as the brush tries out a new colour. Colour drains away. The angel’s shoulders come out of their carapace. The figure is clear and coherent (comparatively) but also (comparatively) unfelt. It is as if the invention had been put back inside a box – robbed of its first fairytale unfolding.

Wow! That “the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion” is amazing. The whole piece is amazing – a review that’s every bit as good as the two masterpieces it describes. 

Postscript: I hasten to add that “The Chill of Disillusion” is not the only Clark piece I treasure. Others include “Grey Panic” (Gerhard Richter), “The Urge to Strangle” (Henri Matisse), and “Relentless Intimacy” (Paul Cézanne). All are “Top Ten” material.

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #4 Simon Schama's "Through a Glass Brightly"

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665)

Simon Schama is a superb describer. His brilliant New Yorker exhibition reviews of the 1990s – “True Grid” (Piet Mondrian), “California Dreamer” (David Hockney), “Dangerous Curves” (Ellsworth Kelly), to name three that come quickly to mind – abound in wonderful descriptions of paintings. Here, for example, from “True Grid,” is his memorable depiction of Mondrian’s The Sea:

In The Sea (1912), a tour de force of self-conscious painterly display, the rhythm of the waves is partly abstracted into over-lapping fish-scale forms, which are defined with dashing black curves and are folded into the marine grey-green of the scowling North Sea. As if he were moving with the tide, Mondrian mimetically performed the motion of the waves by applying the color, wet in wet, in little undulations that snake over the entire surface of the painting.

As if he were moving with the tide– how fine that is. On the strength of it, I’m tempted to make “True Grid” my #4 pick. But there’s another strong contender to consider: Schama’s splendid “Through a Glass Brightly” (The New Republic, January 8-16, 1996; included in his 2004 collection Hang-Ups), a review of the National Gallery of Art’s Johannes Vermeer (November 12, 1995 – February 11, 1996), containing, among other felicities, this exquisite description of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665):

In Vermeer’s miraculous confection, the light, originating who knows where, fills the opal face, itself an enlarged echo of the jewel, and shines from reflections standing at the edge of the hazel iris, executed by Vermeer with a single stroke of lead white continuing from the surface of the cornea to the edge of the dilated pupils. Exactly modeled through the gentlest shadowing on the right side of the forehead, nose, and jaw, this face manages to keep a perfect proportion while somehow conveying the distinct possibility that at any minute it might retreat and dissolve once more into black invisibility. 

That imagining of the “distinct possibility that at any minute” Vermeer’s turbaned girl “might retreat and dissolve once more into black invisibility” is inspired! Schama’s “Through a Glass Brightly” illustrates the power of description. It’s my #4. 

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #5 Julian Bell's "At the Whitechapel"

Wilhelm Sasnal, Anka (2001)

Julian Bell has written several of this decade’s greatest exhibition reviews – where greatness means perceptive, original, stylish, rich, pleasurable. I devour his work. Highlights include “The Mysterious Women of Vermeer” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011), “At the Whitechapel”: Wilhelm Sasnal (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012), “Taking a Wrench to Reality”: Cubism (The New York Review of Books, December 4, 2014), “At the National Gallery”: Caravaggio (London Review of Books, December 15, 2016), “More Light!”: David Hockney (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017), and “At Tate Britain”: Van Gogh (London Review of Books, August 1, 2019). Of these, my favorite is “At the Whitechapel,” on Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition of work by Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal. I relish this piece for at least three reasons: 

1. Its frank assessment of Sasnal’s Pigsty (“This foreground swathe of green, streaked at high speed with a six-inch brush, strikes me as phoney”).

2. Its memorable praise of Sasnal’s Anka (“There is a tiny, impassioned wedge of orange between the chin and neck in Anka, a portrait of his wife, for which I would gladly forsake every abstract Richter ever painted”).

3. And this gorgeous sentence that went straight into my personal anthology of great art writing: “In the flesh, a single beautifully judged swipe of washed-out Indian Red, tracing the collar of the child’s T-shirt, jumpstarts the picture into succulent immediacy.”

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #6 Jed Perl's "Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkorn"

Richard Diebenkorn, Window (1967)

I’m in a jam. Picks one through five are set. Only slot #6 is open. There are four possible choices to fill it: Richard Dorment’s “Journey from Nebraska” (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2006), on the Museum of Modern Art’s Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective; Jed Perl’s “Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkorn” (The New York Review of Books, January 19, 2017), on the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Matisse/Diebenkorn; Marina Warner’s “At the V&A” (London Review of Books, June 4, 2015), on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Savage Beauty; and Christopher Benfey’s “Wyeth and the ‘Pursuit of Strangeness’ ” (The New York Review of Books, June 19, 2014), on the National Gallery of Art’s Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In.

Oh god, this isn’t going to be easy. I love these pieces. They brim with wonderful descriptions. For example:

Once again, after you marvel at the elegance of Marden’s palette of khaki-green, dark gray, and mauve, you step close to examine the brushed surface of each canvas. Once again, the bottom edges are left unpainted so that you see the layer of white under the field of green, a splash of black under gray, scarlet under mauve. The value and intensity of each final color is carefully judged so that no one color is more powerful than any other, creating a sense of classical stability and equilibrium. But that’s only on the surface. For all the painting’s aesthetic decorum, when you walk around to its side you discover smears of scarlet paint on the edge where the canvas is tacked over the stretcher. Like a flash of red petticoat under a haute couture dress, it affords us a glimpse of the emotions the artist concealed, damped down, kept out of sight. [Richard Dorment, “Journey from Nebraska”]

Two of his finest paintings in “Matisse/Diebenkorn,” Interior with Doorway (1962) and Window (1967), feature the humblest of folding chairs. There’s something almost aggressively American about making a folding chair the subject of a large painting. At “Matisse/Diebenkorn,” the Californian’s dark-toned Interior with Doorway is juxtaposed with Matisse’s equally dramatic Interior with a Violin (1918). Matisse, who played the violin, offers a glancing reference to another great tradition – to classical music. I admire Diebenkorn for trading the Old world comforts of Matisse’s violin, its lustrous wooden form set ever so snugly in a velvet-lined case, for the blunt, no nonsense power of an inexpensive folding chair. That folding chair, so Diebenkorn seems to be telling us, is all he has to work with. And damned if he doesn’t make it work. [Jed Perl, “Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkoen”]

The word ‘deportment’ seems to have vanished along with aspidistras and parlours, but the concept hasn’t: Alexander McQueen’s designs, spectacularly displayed at the V&A in Savage Beauty (until 2 August), changed the way you walked, and not just because you were raised up on jewelled chopines like a Venetian courtesan in a period of acqua alta, or forced to balance like a tightrope walker on feet encased in hulking armadillo shoes, which did for his runway models what pointe shoes did for ballerinas after Marie Taglioni first stuffed her ballet slippers. But while Taglioni became an ethereal fairy, the armadillo shoes and fabric sheaths printed with snakeskins of the last, astonishing McQueen collection, ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ (2010), turned their wearers into aliens, creatures of the deep and outer space, something computer-generated from the film Avatar. [Marina Warner, “At the V&A”]

Wind from the Sea was among the first paintings in which he tried to express some of those things. A partially opened window, with billowing curtains decorated with crocheted birds momentarily in flight, almost fills the frame, revealing – through the frayed and disintegrating lace – a view of a field traversed by a curving dirt road, a narrow line of evergreens on the horizon, and a silvery sliver of the sea. The mood of this monochromatic painting, all grayish greens giving way to greenish grays, is timeworn and melancholy, even if we don’t know that among the distant evergreens is a family graveyard, the same one in which Wyeth himself is now buried. [Christopher Benfey, “Wyeth and the ‘Pursuit of Strangeness’ ”]

How to decide? Well, art is in the details (my favorite maxim). That bit about “the blunt, no nonsense power of an inexpensive folding chair” in Perl’s piece is inspired. In a close contest, it’s the difference-maker. Perl’s “Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkorn” is my #6. 

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #7 Peter Campbell's "At Tate Modern"

Mark Rothko, Red on Maroon (1959), section four of the Seagram mural

Sometimes a single line impinges my consciousness, imprinting itself in my memory. Example: “It is as if the picture was a radiator the heat of which drives you back.” I read that and became an instant Peter Campbell fan. It’s from his wonderful “At Tate Modern” (London Review of Books, October 23, 2008; included in his 2009 collection At…), a review of Tate Modern’s Rothko: The Late Series. The picture referred to is unidentified. Campbell described it as a “single canvas” filling most of one of the long walls. Is it Rothko’s rich “Red on Maroon” (1959)? Even a digital reproduction of that beauty radiates heat. Actually, Campbell’s evocative description could apply to almost any of Rothko’s deep red-on-maroon or red-on-red-on-red or black-on-purple-on-black murals, in which, as Campbell noted, “glazes, underpainting, overpainting, and the contrast between matt and gloss surfaces all have a part to play.”

Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old": Gopnik v. Brody

Two New Yorker pieces deepen my appreciation of Peter Jackson’s brilliant WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old: Adam Gopnik’s “A Few Thoughts on the Authenticity of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old” (newyorker.com, January 14, 2019) and Richard Brody’s “They Shall Not Grow Old, Reviewed: The Indelible Voices in Peter Jackson’s First World War Documentary” (newyorker.com, February 19, 2019). It’s interesting to compare them.

Gopnik is struck, as I was, by the “immediacy of the imagery.” He says,  

The immediacy and sudden contemporaneity of the film makes one feel the inferno of the Western Front as one never quite has before. Mud and rats, sandbags and trenches, sniper fire and mortar attacks—all of these things that we’re accustomed to experiencing abstractly through a distancing veil of archaisms and antiquity are suddenly real before us.

In contrast, Brody considers the soundtrack to be the “core of the film.” He writes,

The movie was made using elaborate manipulations of archival footage from the Imperial War Museum, and that technical work is its highly publicized raison d’être. But it proves utterly inessential to the dramatic power of the stories that are told in the movie—literally told, not by way of the images but on the soundtrack alone.

It’s that “alone” that causes me difficulty with Brody’s argument. As far as he’s concerned the images in They Shall Not Grow Old “are mainly just illustrative—a sort of visual backdrop and temporal space-filler, stretched and condensed to suit the soundtrack.” 

But surely that’s too reductive. For me, the power of Jackson’s film derives from both the imagery and the soundtrack. I think Gopnik gets it right when he says, “Though the immediacy of the imagery is in itself astounding, the addition of a vocal track only adds to the effect.”

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #8 Sanford Schwartz's "David Park"

David Park, Ball Game on the Beach (1953)

For me, one of the most important things an exhibition review can do is bring news of an artist I haven’t heard of before. I’m indebted to Sanford Schwartz for leading me to the work of two wonderful painters – David Park and George Ault. I’ve already posted an appreciation of Schwartz’s two Ault pieces, “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corner” and “The Drama of the World at Night” (see here). Both are “Top Ten” material. His “David Park” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1985; included in his superb 1990 essay collection Artists and Writers) is equally great, containing several memorable descriptions of Park’s work. For example: 

The most contemporary aspect of Park’s work is his sense of space. In the 1953 Ball Game on the Beach, one of his very best paintings, a boy is about to throw a beach ball to a group of fellows who run along the sparkling beach, their arms outstretched. The painting is like a photo from Life crossed with a Maori carving, all done in Halloween oranges, yellows, blacks, whites. The fellows on the beach are gesticulating stick figures: they are jaggedly drawn and painted, with parts of their bodies orange, parts black. The boy is naturalistically drawn, and our viewpoint is so close to his upraised arms and the ball he holds that we feel we’re “with” him, and that the stick figures in the distance might be in his imagination. In another first-rank picture, Berkley Jazz Band, of 1951-53, seven musicians are crowded into a small room, playing; we’re below them, looking up through their backs and faces to a bit of ceiling at at the top of the picture. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust to the dark browns, maroons, and tans; we have to search to see where all the hands and faces are. And there is a fearless passage of painting: the clarinet player’s shirt is a rich red, the background wall is a dark brown, and Park brings them together without any “air” between them, like two hot, strong, different sounds.

That last line is sublime. I first read it thirty-four years ago; I’ve never forgotten it.