The New Yorker & Me: Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #5 Julian Bell's "At the Whitechapel"

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.

Friday, August 16, 2019

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.”