May 8, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jackson Arn’s excellent “Early Bloomer,” a review of MOMA’s “Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time,” a show of O’Keeffe’s early drawings and watercolors. Arn finds O’Keeffe’s oil paintings “technically unexciting.” But he loves her watercolors. He says, 

With watercolors, O’Keeffe was an intuitive, surprising artist, but only because she was a technically rigorous one first. Choosing the right paper narrowed the range of outcomes without avoiding risk altogether. In 1916, she opted for a tissue-thin Japanese kind that warps with the slightest moisture. In the resulting quartet of “Blue” watercolors, the paper looks like a desert, but the brushstrokes seem as fresh as rain; it’s a controlled demolition of the blank page.

My favourite passage is Arn’s description of O’Keeffe’s three portraits of Paul Strand:

O’Keeffe is great with skies, suns, mountains, and smoke. With people, she’s more hit or miss. The Delaney portraits are nice, though head-only; the nude self-portraits are as stiff as first-year figure drawings. Tellingly, the three best portraits in the exhibition, watercolors of her friend Paul Strand, don’t look like anyone (though, as the critic Thomas Micchelli helped me notice, they do look like someone’s intestines, floating in a many-colored cloud). O’Keeffe is nobody’s idea of a comedian, but the Strand trio could almost be a prank: the great black-and-white photographer gets thrown into a smeary rainbow dunk tank.

That last sentence made me smile. This is my first experience of Arn’s writing. I enjoyed every word. More Arn, please. 

Bishop's Wasps' Nest, McPhee's Caribou Antlers

I'm fascinated by bones, feathers, shells, fallen nests, and other natural remnants. Two writers who've shown a similar interest in such things are Elizabeth Bishop and John McPhee. Bishop, in her great poem, “Santarém” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1978; included in Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems), remembers traveling up the Amazon, stopping briefly in the town of Santarém, and while there, seeing an empty wasps’ nest on a drugstore shelf (“In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist / had hung an empty wasps’ nest from the shelf: / small, exquisite, clean matte white, / and hard as stucco”). She says, “I admired it / so much he gave it to me.” She takes it back to her ship:

Back on board, a fellow passenger, Mr. Swan,
Dutch, the retired head of Philips Electric,
really a very nice old man,
who wanted to see the Amazon before he died,
asked, “What’s that ugly thing?”

McPhee, in his wonderful piece “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; Book I of his Coming into the Country), describes hiking with two companions in the central Brooks Range of Alaska and finding numerous caribou antlers protruding from the tundra:

Moving downhill and south across the tundra, we passed through groves of antlers. It was as if the long filing lines of the spring migration had for some reason paused here for shedding to occur. The antler, like the bear, implied the country. Most were white, gaunt, chalky. I picked up a younger one, though, that was recently shed and was dark, like polished brown marble. It was about four feet along the beam and perfect in form. Hession found one like it. We set them on our shoulders and moved on down the hill, intent to take them home.

I see myself in these passages. I, too, have lugged home found bones, horns, and skins from my Arctic travels. They are, in my eyes, the ultimate souvenirs. A mere glance at one is sufficient to trigger memories of the trip that resulted in its discovery. Others, looking at these irregular, organic oddments respond the way Mr. Swan does in “Santarém”: “What’s that ugly thing?”

After I’m gone, my mementos are likely headed for the trash. Their significance immediately disappears when the memories attached to them are snuffed out. What distinguishes Bishop’s wasps’ nest and McPhee’s caribou antlers is that, so long as there are eyes to read, they will endure.

Credit: The above artwork is Georgia O'Keeffe's Summer Days (1936).

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #10: Sanford Schwartz's "Georgia O'Keeffe Writes a Book"

For me book reviews are the ultimate brain candy, a delectable dulce de leche mix of description and analysis. From the time I started reading The New Yorker, in 1976, it's been (and continues to be) a prime source of terrific book reviews. Over the years, I’ve devoured hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. To celebrate the magazine’s brilliant book reviewing, I’ve decided to compile a “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011.” Today, I start with my #10 pick, Sanford Schwartz’s wonderful “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book” (The New Yorker, August 28, 1978; included in Schwartz’s 1982 collection The Art Presence). Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue to build the list, concluding with my #1 choice.

In “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book,” Schwartz reviews O’Keeffe’s memoir, titled simply Georgia O’Keeffe, which Schwartz accurately describes as “a short text that weaves its way through a large, portfolio-size book of color reproductions of her oil paintings, pastels, and watercolors.” His piece brims with inspired writing:

Every sentence seems to have been held up to the light, and tapped for soundness.

Her voice is hauntingly off-key: it is always a shade too remote, too headstrong, or too naïve.

They [O’Keeffe’s paintings] are souvenirs of a way of life that is based on the idea that all experience can be seen aesthetically.

But the passage that really struck me, imprinting itself on my consciousness forevermore (i.e., until Thurber's "claw of the sea-puss" finally gets me), is this one:

If O’Keeffe’s are often the paintings that we are attracted to when we begin our careers as museumgoers, it may be because, especially when we come to them in our adolescence, they are among the first paintings that give us an inkling of what style is – of the way every nuance in a work of art can come back to one conception, and the way you can hold that conception in your head, as if it were a real thing. Hemingway does something similar when we first read him. He takes the anonymity out of language, and shows how personal and three-dimensional the use of words can be, how a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving.

How a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving. God, that's a gorgeous line! I read it, reread it, absorbed it, and mentally stored it away as something never to be forgotten. In fact, Schwartz’s review made such an impact on me that I tore it out of the magazine and saved it. I’m looking at its yellowing pages right now as I type this, thirty-three (!) years later.

As a result of reading Schwartz’s “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book,” I went out and bought the large-format Penguin paperback of O’Keeffe’s Georgia O’Keeffe. And when Schwartz’s collection The Art Presence was published in 1982, I went out and bought it, too. To this day I count them both among my favorite books. I’ve never forgotten the great review that led me to them.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.