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 Galchen, 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.

Sunday, August 2, 2020

July 27, 2020 Issue


Andrea K. Scott’s “Goings On About Town: Leidy Churchman,” in this week’s issue, is a beauty – worth quoting in full:

 Is there anything Leidy Churchman can’t paint? Among the subjects of the twenty-one paintings in the New York phenom’s show at the Matthew Marks gallery, which was interrupted by the pandemic, are a fever-dream bedroom, a moonrise, a girl on a bike, a rose garden, a monkey-filled forest from the Ramayana, hypnotic abstractions, and a laundry-room sign. The palette runs from monochrome black to hot purple and pink; dimensions change from a scant dozen inches to more than ten feet. The only logic at work is intuitive, even oracular. The mood is less image-overload restless than it is optimistically omnivorous—Churchman seems hungry to paint the whole world in all its mystery and ordinariness, two categories that often collide here. In Churchman’s deft hands, a cropped closeup of an iPhone 11 assumes a third-eye mysticism worthy of Hilma af Klint. 


That last sentence is inspired!


Leidy Churchman, iPhone 11 (2019-20)

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