The New Yorker & Me: Amy Sillman's Gorgeous Blooms

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, October 29, 2020

Amy Sillman's Gorgeous Blooms

Amy Sillman's Floral Still Lifes (Photo by Calla Kessler)

One of the most beautiful online art shows I’ve seen recently is Amy Sillman’s “Twice Removed,” at the Gladstone Gallery, NYC. Hilton Als, in his “Goings On About Town: Art: Amy Sillman” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2020), says of it,

The splendor of Sillman’s new show at the Gladstone gallery lies in its restlessness. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on paper, canvas, and linen, the painter’s fecund imagination finds its expression, first, in a number of abstract images made up of bold dark lines that suggest Sillman’s interest in collage, less in terms of juxtaposing one texture next to another than in drawing, with paint, one image on top of another, the better to give fuller credence to both. These various collisions are very exciting, and come to rest in her paintings of flowers, which convey some of the lush despair and loneliness of van Gogh’s sunflowers and irises but are mostly about the spontaneity that is Sillman’s stock-in-trade: the flowers are the visual manifestation of her blooming mind.

I agree. Sillman’s blooms are delightful. Jason Farago, in his “Amy Sillman’s Breakthrough Moment Is Here" (The New York Times, October 8, 2020), writes,

The great shock of the Gladstone show are the smallest works here: the flowers she painted every morning, all alone in her humble North Fork rental as the virus spread and the temperatures rose. A posy of peonies, their petals rendered as splotches, dense as a bowling ball. A single drooping sunflower, and then a bouquet of them, in a simple jug.

Sillman’s online Gladstone exhibition brims with gorgeous abstracts and floral still lifes. I wish I could own one.