The New Yorker & Me: January 25, 2021 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.

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

January 25, 2021 Issue

Opening this week’s New Yorker, I was delighted to find a painting by Jane Freilicher, a beautiful red, pink, and green work called Untitled (Still Life with Large Plant and Cityscape), c.1990, illustrating Andrea K. Scott’s absorbing capsule review of Kasmin Gallery’s new exhibition “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World.” Freilicher’s The Painting Table (1954) is one of this blog’s touchstones (see here). Scott writes,

For more than fifty years, as Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop, then to Minimalism, and on to Neo-Expressionism, until art’s isms exhausted themselves, Freilicher devoted herself to painting “eternally fixed afternoons,” to borrow a phrase from Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poem “Chez Jane.” (In addition to being a phenomenal artist, Freilicher was a muse of the New York School.) In the attentive tradition of Pierre Bonnard—and with a similar passion for color—Freilicher, who died in 2014, at the age of ninety, found beauty at home, whether in her Greenwich Village apartment or at her house on the East End of Long Island. The best of these luminous views unify inside and outside—and still-life and landscape. The fifteen works in the exhibition “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World,” at the Kasmin gallery, lean into the artist’s interior side.

That nails it: “attentive tradition of Pierre Bonnard”; “passion for color”; “found beauty at home.” Let’s give a huzzah for Freilicher’s distinctive, delectable art.