October 31, 2022 Issue

One of the hallmarks of Peter Schjeldahl’s exquisite writing style is its poetic compression. David Remnick, in his “Postscript: Peter Schjeldahl,” in this week’s issue, touches on this quality when he says, “And a voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice – epigrammatic, nothing wasted.” Here are half a dozen examples from Schjeldahl’s most recent collection, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (2019):

The buzz of a Friedrich occurs when what have seemed mere tints in a tonal composition combust as distinctly scented hues – citron lights, plum darks – and you don’t so much look at a picture as breathe it.

Gradually the slot-eyed, sutured hoods give way to lima-bean-shaped heads as weighty as cannonballs, with cyclopean eyes transfixed by paintings, books, and bottles or staring into comfortless space. Belligerent arms wield garbage-can lids, and legs form grisly chorus lines on red and black killing grounds. Cigarette butts, old shoes, and studio detritus accumulate: junk for the junkman’s son. 

But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his picture’s smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color.

The effects serve sharply limned figures whose sculptural roundness, warm flesh, splendid raiment, and distinctive personalities leap to the eye. Anatomical details enthrall: hands that touch and grip with tangible pressures, masses of hair given depth and definition by a few highlighted strands.

At a quiet coast in a world at war, Mondrian reduced a pier, the ocean, and starlight to a digital code: this horizontal a wave, that vertical a gleam. It is not representation. It is a construction, shimmering in the mind.

I’m just in a mood – enhanced, now, by the thought of the inexplicably, 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.