Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Friday, May 3, 2019

April 22, 2019 Issue


Peter Schjeldahl’s mention of Gerard ter Borch, in his capsule review of the Metropolitan Museum’s In Praise of Painting exhibition, in this week’s issue, caught my eye. He calls Ter Borch a “key figure” in the Dutch Golden Age of painting. I haven’t thought of Ter Borch in a long time. I know his work through Zbigniew Herbert’s brilliant “Gerard Terborch: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” included in Herbert’s 1991 essay collection, Still Life with a Bridle. In that piece, Herbert noted, among other things, Ter Borch’s “mastery in rendering the consistency of objects, especially fabrics, from rustling cool silks to meaty wool that absorbs light.” See, for example, the luminous pink satin dress and the velvety pile of an upholstered chair in Ter Borch’s A Young Woman at Her Toilet with a Maid (1650-51), one of six Ter Borchs currently on view at the Met. 
Gerard ter Borch, "A Young Woman at Her Toilet with a Maid " (1650-51)

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