The New Yorker & Me: Andrew O'Hagan on Joan Eardley's "Catterline in Winter"

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 Galchen, 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, December 16, 2021

Andrew O'Hagan on Joan Eardley's "Catterline in Winter"

Joan Eardley, Catterline in Winter (1963)

Andrew O’Hagan, in his wonderful “At the Hunterian” (London Review of Books, November 4, 2021), calls Joan Eardley’s Cattlerline in Winter (1963) “her masterpiece.” I agree. I saw it a few years ago at Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in a show titled “Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place.” I found it transfixing. Here’s O’Hagan’s description of it:

In her masterpiece, Catterline in Winter (1963), she brings her eye back to what passes up there for dry land, but the aperture is now widened by the ocean and what she saw there and what that seeing did to her style. The cottages are deliquescent, tilting like a giant wave under the ominous sky and a heartbreaking blob of moon, evoking untold winter nights and natural histories, untold spots of time and human watchings. Here is the night at the end of the world. You can feel the sea-spray overhead and the crunch of frozen grass underfoot. You see a path. But mainly what you see is the scale of the forces ranged around us and the beauty of things we can’t know.

That “The cottages are deliquescent, tilting like a giant wave under the ominous sky and a heartbreaking blob of moon” is inspired! It catches the picture’s peculiar blend of semi-abstraction and post-impressionism. There’s a splotched, dripped, scraped, scratched rawness to it that I relish. It’s not picturesque, and doesn’t want to be. Some might call it ugly. I don’t. It speaks to me. It depicts a place I’d love to roam, feeling “the sea-spray overhead and the crunch of frozen grass underfoot.” It appeals to my taste for melancholy.