The New Yorker & Me: December 2, 2019 Issue

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.

Monday, December 2, 2019

December 2, 2019 Issue

Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Il Fiorista,” in this week’s issue, mentions one of my favorite artists: “Daytime is perhaps the best time to eat here; the beautiful dining room, designed by the architect Elizabeth Roberts, with a psychedelic pastel motif hand-painted on the walls by the artist Leanne Shapton, is especially lovely in natural light.”

A few years ago, I posted a note here called “Shapton’s Shapes,” in which I said,

Even though Leanne Shapton’s blue-and-cream watercolor of two “vintage clothes hangers” appeared in the magazine more than two months ago, (see "Recently Favorited," September 21, 2015), I find myself still thinking about it. The images are recognizably clothes hangers; likeness hasn’t been abandoned. Yet, they’re also pure shapes, as simply and fluidly painted as Chinese calligraphy. Are clothes hangers beautiful? I didn’t think so until I saw Shapton’s exquisite watercolor. I guess that’s what draws me to it. It embodies what, for me, is one of art’s main purposes – “to give the mundane its beautiful due” (John Updike).

Shapton’s ravishing watercolor collection The Native Trees of Canada (2010) is one of my favorite books. Next time I’m in New York City, I want to visit Il Fiorista, order one of its botanical tipples (the Drunken Sunflower sounds enticing), and soak up the ambience, including those lovely Shapton-painted walls.