Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #10: Sanford Schwartz's "Georgia O'Keeffe Writes a Book"

For me book reviews are the ultimate brain candy, a delectable dulce de leche mix of description and analysis. From the time I started reading The New Yorker, in 1976, it's been (and continues to be) a prime source of terrific book reviews. Over the years, I’ve devoured hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. To celebrate the magazine’s brilliant book reviewing, I’ve decided to compile a “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011.” Today, I start with my #10 pick, Sanford Schwartz’s wonderful “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book” (The New Yorker, August 28, 1978; included in Schwartz’s 1982 collection The Art Presence). Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue to build the list, concluding with my #1 choice.

In “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book,” Schwartz reviews O’Keeffe’s memoir, titled simply Georgia O’Keeffe, which Schwartz accurately describes as “a short text that weaves its way through a large, portfolio-size book of color reproductions of her oil paintings, pastels, and watercolors.” His piece brims with inspired writing:

Every sentence seems to have been held up to the light, and tapped for soundness.

Her voice is hauntingly off-key: it is always a shade too remote, too headstrong, or too naïve.

They [O’Keeffe’s paintings] are souvenirs of a way of life that is based on the idea that all experience can be seen aesthetically.

But the passage that really struck me, imprinting itself on my consciousness forevermore (i.e., until Thurber's "claw of the sea-puss" finally gets me), is this one:

If O’Keeffe’s are often the paintings that we are attracted to when we begin our careers as museumgoers, it may be because, especially when we come to them in our adolescence, they are among the first paintings that give us an inkling of what style is – of the way every nuance in a work of art can come back to one conception, and the way you can hold that conception in your head, as if it were a real thing. Hemingway does something similar when we first read him. He takes the anonymity out of language, and shows how personal and three-dimensional the use of words can be, how a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving.

How a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving. God, that's a gorgeous line! I read it, reread it, absorbed it, and mentally stored it away as something never to be forgotten. In fact, Schwartz’s review made such an impact on me that I tore it out of the magazine and saved it. I’m looking at its yellowing pages right now as I type this, thirty-three (!) years later.

As a result of reading Schwartz’s “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book,” I went out and bought the large-format Penguin paperback of O’Keeffe’s Georgia O’Keeffe. And when Schwartz’s collection The Art Presence was published in 1982, I went out and bought it, too. To this day I count them both among my favorite books. I’ve never forgotten the great review that led me to them.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.