November 16, 2020 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl is the most original New Yorker stylist since Pauline Kael. His tone, rhythm, texture, diction, syntax are instantly recognizable. One of his favorite words is “drench.” It figures in some of his most ravishing lines. This one, for example:

Kiefer’s Pollockian machines - with heart-grabbing yellows, blacks, and browns that affect like tastes, sounds, and smells and their incorporation of photographs that drench the mind in tones of memory – evoke a quasi-religious feeling of delicious melancholy, slightly masochistic abasement before sheer ancientness. [“Our Kiefer,” The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991]

In this week’s issue, he deploys it again, to marvelous effect:

Gilliam broke ranks with the movement—or extended it—in the mid-sixties, when he began draping vast unstretched paint-stained and -spattered canvases from walls and ceilings, creating undulant environments that drenched the eye in effulgent color. [“Off the Wall,” a review of Sam Gilliam’s “Existed Existing,” at Pace Gallery, New York]