November 19, 2018 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his wonderful “No Escape,” in this week’s issue, compares a Whitney Museum roomful of Warhol’s multihued “Flowers” to “a chromatic car wash – you emerge with your optic nerve cleansed, buffed, and sparkling.” It’s a great line by a devout Warholian who’s written many inspired lines about his hero. In his “Going Pop” (The New Yorker, September 24, 2012), he says of Warhol’s Day-Glo pink and chartreuse Elsie the Cow wallpaper, “My breath still catches when I behold that bovine Hallelujah Chorus.” Schjeldahl loves that wallpaper. He’s commented on it in all three of his New Yorker Warhol pieces. In “Warhol in Bloom” (March 11, 2002), he writes,

Uncharacteristically infected with hubris, he bade farewell to the art world with a quintessentially nineteen-sixties show of shocking-pink and chartreuse cow wallpaper and drifting Mylar balloons. I recall the opening, at which the stoned mood was a kind of exquisite stupidity.

And in his new piece, he says,

Speaking of color, a room in which many of Warhol’s multihued “Flowers” of the sixties adorn his chartreuse-and-cerise “Cow Wallpaper,” from the same period, is like a chromatic car wash. You emerge with your optic nerve cleansed, buffed, and sparkling.

That line makes me smile. Millions of words have been written about Warhol’s ingenious art, but I’ll bet no one has ever before compared it to a “chromatic car wash.” Schjeldahl’s image perfectly conveys the wet-in-wet splashy brilliance of its subject. 

March 4, 2013 Issue

Pauline Kael, in the Introduction to her great For Keeps (1994), said, “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” Peter Schjeldahl could say the same thing. Bits of his life are embedded here and there throughout his reviews. For example, in his splendid “Warhol In Bloom” (The New Yorker, March 11, 2002; included in his 2008 collection Let’s See), a review of the Tate Modern’s 2002 Andy Warhol retrospective, he hints at the circumstances that clinched his decision to become an art critic:

Announcing that pleasure will be the show’s keynote, De Salvo [Tate curator] begins with a group of Flowers – large silk-screen paintings from 1964 and 1967 that ring changes on a motif of flat hibiscus blossoms against a grainy ground of grass blades. (Warhol cribbed the image from a tiny black-and-white ad in a magazine.) The choice elated me, because a Flowers show in Paris, in 1965, was one of two experiences I had that year that inspired a vocational devotion to art. (The other was a Piero della Francesca fresco in Tuscany.)

Now, eleven years later, we learn the details of Schjeldahl’s epiphanic Piero della Francesca encounter. In his lovely “Heaven On Earth,” in this week’s issue, Schjeldah writes:

One hot August, when I was twenty-three, I traversed Tuscany on the back of a Vespa driven by a painter friend, George Schneeman. We had seen Piero’s magnum opus, the “Legend of the True Cross” frescoes, in Arezzo, which I found bewildering, and were headed northeast, to the artist’s home town of Sansepolcro, the site of his famous “Resurrection of Christ” (“the best picture in the world,” according to Aldous Huxley), which I also failed to make much of. Then we stopped at a tiny cemetery chapel, in the hill town of Monterchi, to see Piero’s highly unusual “Madonna del Parto.” An immensely pregnant but delicately elegant young Mary stands pensively in a bell-shaped tent, as two mirror-image angels sweep aside the flaps to reveal her. One angel wears green, the other purple. Here was the circumstantial drama of a ripeness with life in a place of death. George told me a sentimental, almost certainly untrue story that the work memorialized a secret mistress of Piero’s who had died in childbirth. This befitted the picture’s held-breath tenderness and its air of sharing a deeply felt, urgent mystery. In another age, the experience might have made me consider entering a monastery. Instead, I became an art critic.

That “held-breath tenderness” is inspired! Schjeldahl is one of The New Yorker’s most distinctive stylists. I enjoy his work immensely. And to think it all began forty-eight years ago with Andy Warhol and Piero della Francesco – amazing! 

September 24, 2012 Issue

It’s interesting to compare Peter Schjeldahl’s excellent “Going Pop,” in this week’s issue, with some of his other Warhol reviews. He’s written at least four previous pieces: “Andy Warhol” (The 7 Days Art Columns, 1990); “Warhol and Class Content” (The Hydrogen Juke Box, 1991); “Andy’s Place” (“Critic’s Notebook,” The New Yorker, September 19, 2005); and “Warhol in Bloom” (The New Yorker, March 11, 2002; included in Let’s See, 2008). Warhol is crucial to Schjeldahl’s blissed, ‘60s way of seeing. In his early “Andy Warhol,” he calls Warhol’s 1965 Paris Flowers show a “conversion experience.” He says something similar in “Warhol in Bloom,” a review of Tate Modern’s 2002 Warhol retrospective, installed by Donna De Salvo:

Announcing that pleasure will be the show’s keynote, De Salvo begins with a group of Flowers – large silk-screen paintings from 1964 and 1967 that ring changes on a motif of flat hibiscus blossoms against a grainy ground of grass blades. (Warhol cribbed the image from a tiny black-and-white ad in a magazine.) The choice elated me, because a Flowers show in Paris, in 1965, was one of two experiences I had that year that inspired a vocational devotion to art. (The other was a Piero della Francesca fresco in Tuscany.)

In “Andy Warhol,” Schjeldahl says, “I love Warhol, with a fan’s love. It isn’t so much a warm place in my heart, an organ not notably engaged by this artist, as it is a flat spot among the folds of my brain, from where said brain got run over in the ‘60s.” Almost fifty years on, has Schjeldahl’s Warholian passion cooled? Not at all. According to his latest piece, it’s hotter than ever. In “Going Pop,” a review of the Met’s “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” he refers to Warhol’s “triumph,” "clairvoyance,” “greatness,” “command,” “genius.” He says, “The gold standard of Warhol exposes every inflated value in other currencies.”

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1967

What impresses me about Schjeldahl’s Warhol fixation is the case he repeatedly and persuasively makes for Warhol as colorist, as painter. His “Warhol and Class Content” contains a fascinating description of Warhol’s silk-screen technique that emphasizes its “painterly” aspect:

There is no sense of pastiche about Warhol’s portraits. Their form evolved from his silk-screened multiple images of the sixties, with the important addition of a technique, derived from certain dime-store fine-art reproductions, that involves printing the image on a prepared irregular surface, giving the illusion of “original” facture. Warhol transforms the technique by using it very broadly, for a variety of ends; there is no Lichtenstein-like satirical acknowledgment of its source. Still, a lot of people, Newsweek’s art critic among them, fall for the commonsense illusion that the acrylic paint is applied on rather than under – or is perhaps identical with – the silk-screen enamel. The fact is that nearly all color, including that of eyes, lips, and hair, is laid down before the screening; only occasionally and sparingly does Warhol add important touches with a brush, adjusting the balance of photo and paint in paint’s favor. The wet-in-wet handling (where it is thick; often it is flat, posterlike) dries before receiving the image, which gets its “painterly” look from being distorted by the topography. Warhol had developed the aesthetic and expressive possibilities of this technique in nonportrait paintings for years, notably in a series of large, mysterious near abstractions called Shadows. His ability to improvise with it has reached such a point of casual assurance that one can easily miss its virtuosity.

In the same piece, Schjeldahl also adverts to Warhol’s “endlessly variegated palette of aggressively ‘odd’ flavorful hues and tints.” In “Warhol in Bloom,” Schjeldahl says, “Warhol was a supreme colorist who redid the world’s palette in tart, amazing hues such as cerise, citron, burnt orange, and apple-green.” And in “Going Pop,” he describes Warhol’s two 1967 self-portraits (“One of them gravitates toward glowering reds, set off by a sudden yellow, and the other toward blackish blue, with blood orange, ochre, and aqua”) and says,

Warhol’s eye for improbable chromatic harmonies cannot be overrated. He once said that he wanted to be Matisse. He may have meant only that he wanted that kind of fame, but his potently symbolizing way with colors – which, like scents, are a royal road from the outside world to our emotions – merits comparison with Matisse, in a spectrum of hues that postdate the Frenchman’s palette.

Granted, other critics have praised Warhol's color, too [e.g., Sanford Schwartz, in his "Andy Warhol The Painter" (Artists and Writers, 1990)], says that Warhol “still seems audacious in his use of silver and turquoise, lavender, orange, and brown”). But their descriptions seem bland in comparison with Schjeldahl’s. Like his hero Warhol, Schjeldahl bedazzles. I love him, with a fan’s love.

Second Thoughts: Schwartz’s “Andy Warhol The Painter” does contain at least one inspired line: “But the actual pictures have a powdery and breathing surface; you want to get close to the canvas itself.” 

April 30, 2012 Issue

In order for me to enjoy Sasha Frere-Jones’s pop music reviews, I have to treat them as abstractions. The reason for this is that I cannot abide electronic music, which is what Frere-Jones mostly writes about. But Frere-Jones’s writing, considered as pure writing, is wonderful. His “Sound Machine,” in this week’s issue, contains a number of marvelous descriptions (e.g., “After a brief spray of notes, a white scrim fell, revealing the band members, each wearing a skintight bicycling outfit covered with luminescent white lines in a grid formation, as if they were being tracked on a green screen for later animation”). Frere-Jones says that Kraftwerk is “the Warhol of pop.” That analogy is valid, in my opinion, only if Kraftwerk’s electronic sound has an element that is equivalent to the painterly look of Warhol’s silk-screens. Yes, Warhol said he wanted to be a machine. But, as Peter Schjeldahl points out in his 2002 review of the Tate Modern’s Warhol retrospective, he also “wanted to be Matisse” ("Warhol In Bloom,"The New Yorker, March 11, 2002). Schjeldahl says, “Warhol was a supreme colorist who redid the world’s palette in tart, amazing hues such as cerise, citron, burnt orange, and apple-green.” It’s not clear to me from Frere-Jones’s review that Kraftwerk’s music has this Warholian aspect. In fact, his inspired description of the arpeggio in Kraftwerk’s “Computer World” as feeling “a bit like bubbles rising through mercury” points the other way - towards monochrome and monotone.