Rereadings: Peter Schjeldahl's "Let's See"

This is the third in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Peter Schjeldahl’s delectable Let’s See (2008). 

I say “delectable” because, for me, this book is like a deluxe box of Godiva chocolates – seventy-five of Schjeldahl’s New Yorker art pieces, including passages that, when I first read them, went straight into my personal anthology of great art writing. This one, for example, on the work of Caspar David Friedrich:

The pictures don't give; they take. Something is drawn out of us with a harrowing effect, which Friedrich's use of color nudges toward intoxication. What at first seem to be mere tints in a tonal range combust into distinctly scented, disembodied hues: drenching purples and scratchy russets, plum darks and citron lights. One doesn't so much look at a Friedrich as inhale it, like nicotine. Friedrich is an artist of dusky fire, of twilight that sears. It is well worth sticking around for his shuddery pleasures, laced with something cold and weird.

And this, on Manet:

But his bouquets are substantial presences in penetrable space. “I would like to paint them all,” Manet said of flowers. So he did. Every blossom feels at once unique and suffused with the memories of a million kin. When a bright-yellow petal curls down around a salmon-colored shadow, it’s as if a bard of roses were singing a secret of the tribe. The glass vases abolish mystery. We observe the sustenance of cut stems, crazed by refractions through the wettest water you’ve ever seen. Each of Manet’s paintings raises its subject into a present time that forgets the past and ignores the future. Each is a lesson about dying: don’t. Only be alive.

And this, on Fra Angelico’s The Annunciatory Angel: 

The androgynous angel, in pink robes with a slash of blue, leans forward as if into a gust of wind, one hand on his chest and the other beginning to advance in a gesture of offering. The face is intent but serene. A swiftly brushed wing, of brown feathers, merges with the gilt background, above a swath of patterned floor in convincing perspective. The delicately roughened surface texture gives sensuous immediacy—suddenness, even—to a figure that feels less lit and shaded than made of materialized light and shade.

Schjeldahl’s style is exquisite. One of its hallmarks is brilliant epigrammatic compression. Examples in this collection abound:

On Henri Matisse: “His contours are like the borders of wetness left by waves on a beach.”

On Vija Celmins: “She divorces the subject from experience, then returns it to experience as painting.”

On Willem de Kooning: “One senses spontaneity at a filtering remove; it’s like hearing jazz over the telephone.”

On Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: “He is a positivist of silk and skin. If one can’t touch it, the hell with it.”

On Joan Mitchell: “There isn’t a wrong note in her cadenzas – only a swarm of piquant, fugitive grace notes falling like loose change.”

On Cézanne: “Cézannes can seem to have as many centers of attention as they have brushstrokes.”

On Robert Bechtle: “Bechtle zeroes in on the always seen and never noticed – without giving it importance.”

On Jackson Pollack: “If we want to be precise about what Pollock did – drawing in the air above a canvas with a paint-loaded stick – the mot juste is ‘dribble.’ ”

Another aspect of Schjeldahl’s signature compression is his use of zero articles, creating delicious mash-ups of verbal color and texture, enacting the art he’s describing:

Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint.

Warm colors yearn forward; black bites back; silver is everywhere and nowhere; all, as thick substance, configure a wall-like surface.

Wet resin turned clayey oils pellucid. Colors—greenish-brown chiaroscuro background, pale peachy flesh with bluish insinuations—sang. I think I went, “Ah!”

In this book, notwithstanding the occasional gripe (“Why, oh why must she have a goddamn movie magazine open on her lap?”), the governing principle is pleasure: “the indispensability of pleasure”; “living pleasurably”; “One work after another attains a sublimely pleasurable stillness and silence”; “Even when I’m disappointed with the spirit of one of his works … I can’t help but get pleasure from it.”

To end, I’ll quote from one of Let’s See’s best pieces, “Vermeer,” in which there’s a line that could serve as Schjeldahl’s credo: “Pansexual heat glowed in dim rooms that smelled of dust and varnish.” No, just kidding. That’s from his terrific “Thomas Eakins.” Here’s the “Vermeer” line: “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look.” 

The pleasure of Schjeldahl’s work is the pleasure of looking through his enthralled eyes. I love him.