June 13, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Peter Schjeldahl’s “Scaling Up,” a review of two art shows. It’s opening line made me smile: “I relish the abundance of relatively—and poignantly—dud paintings in ‘At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism,’ at the Whitney Museum.” It’s both a devastating judgment (the Whitney show is full of duds) and an aesthetic revelation (Schjeldahl has a taste for such things). What constitutes a dud? Schjeldahl tells us:

The distinguishing test, for me, is scale, irrespective of size: all a work’s elements and qualities (even including negative space) must be snugged into its framing edges to consolidate a specific, integral object—present to us, making us present to itself—rather than a more or less diverting handmade picture.

Who are the “dud” artists? Schjeldahl names them: Manierre Dawson, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Patrick Henry Bruce, Max Weber, Elie Nadelman, Gaston Lachaise, Joseph Stella, Oscar Bluemner, Ben Benn, Agnes Pelton.

Wait a minute! Elie Nadelman? I recognize that name. John Updike wrote a wonderful essay on him, “Logic Is Beautiful” (The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003; included in his 2007 essay collection Still Looking), in which he says of Nadelman’s bronze Suppliant (c. 1908-9), “How could one not love her?” But rereading this piece today, I see that Updike wasn’t a Nadelman fan. He wrote,

There is a hermetic quality to his statues, as if they have been sealed against infestations of illogical detail. In his later work, the layer of sealant gets thicker and thicker, and toward the end his figures, fingerless and all but faceless, seem wrapped in veils as thick as blankets.

So I guess Schjeldahl is right; Nadelman is a dud. But he’s an instructive dud. His featureless sculptures show the value of detail. As Updike said, “Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars.”