Saturday, October 25, 2014
October 20, 2014 Issue
If you admire Peter Schjeldahl’s style, as I do,
you’ll relish his “Shapes of Things” in this week’s issue. It’s his fourth
essay on Matisse since he joined The New
Yorker. The others are “Twin Peaks” (March 3, 2003), “Art as Life” (August
29, 2005), and “The Road to Nice” (July 26, 2010). Matisse is one of
Schjeldahl’s touchstones. In “The Road to Nice,” he calls Matisse’s The Piano Lesson “my favorite work of
twentieth-century art.” It’s fun to read Schjeldahl’s Matisse quartet and
cherry-pick the best lines. In “Twin Peaks,” he says Matisse’s contours “are
like the borders of wetness left by waves on the beach.” In “Art as Life,” he
defines Fauvism as “a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s
eyes.” In “The Road to Nice,” he notes “the black-contoured, zero-gravity,
incredibly sumptuous ciphers of fruit” in Bowl
of Apples on a Table and says, “Even close to a century after the fact, an
ancestral voice in my head shrills, ‘You can’t do that in a painting!’ (But,
guess what?).” That parenthesis is pure Schjeldahl. And in this week’s “Shapes
of Things,” he says, “When Matisse is at his best, the exquisite friction of
his color, his line, and his pictorial invention – licks of a cat’s tongue – overwhelm
perception, at which point enjoyment sputters into awe.” Licks of a cats tongue – you can’t say that in criticism.
(But, guess what?) Of the four pieces, my favorite is “The Road to Nice,” in
which Schjeldahl audaciously compares Matisse’s The Piano Lesson to Hitchcock’s Psycho: “Like Psycho, The Piano Lesson unfolds the secret of
its coherence by seemingly precipitous but precisely calibrated jumps and
starts.” And the final paragraph, in which Schjeldahl says, “I’m just in a mood
– enhanced, now, by the thought of the inexplicable, inchoately thrilling arc
of black paint that slashes Matisse’s Portrait of Olga Merson (1911) from chin
to left thigh – to insist on a hierarchy of sensations that favor the
experience of being tripped cleanly out of ourselves and into wondering glee,”
is elating. That “inexplicable, inchoately thrilling arc of black paint” is
inspired. The whole sensuous, eloquent piece is inspired! It’s Matissean.
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