September 12, 2022 Issue

It’s time to talk about Leanne Shapton. She has a new series of swimming pool paintings in this week’s New Yorker. That’s one reason to talk about her. Another is the great job she’s doing as The New York Review of Book’s new art editor. She’s enlivened the covers of that excellent publication immensely. And she’s contributed some wonderful illustrations of her own. This one, for example, a portrait of Henry David Thoreau, for Brenda Wineapple’s “New England Ecstasies” (March 10, 2022): 

Shapton is a superb watercolorist. I first encountered her work back in 2012, when I read Jordan Awan’s “Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Pools,” newyorker.com (August 15, 2012). Awan’s piece is accompanied by a slideshow of twelve Shapton swimming pools, including this cream-green abstract beauty, titled “Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre, Brantford, Ontario”:

Now, in this week’s issue, Shapton has a new set of swimming pools, this one called “The Swimming Scene: Sunset Park Pool” – nine exquisite paintings of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park Pool, each representing a view of the pool at a particular time of day, each with a caption describing what is happening at that moment. For example, here’s the “4:05 P.M.” painting and its caption:

4:05 p.m. Twenty people in the pool. Then forty. More families, more small children in swim diapers. With no diving board, the most popular move is running hard to the edge and jumping. Splashing like cymbals.

Shapton's luminous pools are cool and inviting. They make me want to go for a swim.