November 17, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I enjoyed Hannah Goldfield’s “Takes” tribute to Anthony Bourdain’s “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” She says,

The voice he introduced in “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” is not just brash and ballsy; it reverberates with style and poetry, from its tantalizing opening lines: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.”

Yes, I agree. Bourdain’s voice is transfixing. I first encountered it in The New Yorker’s great September 6, 2021 “Food & Drink” archival issue. The essay is called “Hell’s Kitchen.” It originally appeared in the April 17, 2000 New Yorker. What a piece of writing! It's a first-person-present-tense account of a day in Bourdain’s life as chef at the Manhattan restaurant Les Halles. Here's a sample:

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

“Prick,” “grab,” “throw,” “heat,” “throw,” “heat,” “take,” “place,” “spin,” “pour,” “sear,” “sauté,” “slide,” “deglaze,” “add,” “sauté,” “deglaze,” “give,” “put,” “heat,” “load” – over twenty action verbs. Bourdain's writing thrillingly enacts the kinetic reality of his Les Halles kitchen.

2. The title of Hilton Als’ piece (the newyorker.com version) caught my eye: “Robert Rauschenberg’s Art of the Real.” I thought to myself, Real? What’s real about it? Rauschenberg’s art isn’t real. It’s about as unreal as you can get. The art of the real is a matter of seeing things as they are. Rauschenberg fails this test. But after reading the piece, I get what Als is saying. He’s referring to Rauschenberg’s use of real materials – real tires, real quilts, real chairs, real bicycles. “Art is more powerful when it incorporates the real,” Als says. Okay, but look what Rauschenberg does with these real things. He combines them, daubs them with paint, and makes them his own. Look at Monogram (1955-59). A stuffed Angora goat girdled with a tire. Als describes it: 

The goat had a goatee, horns, and a long-haired silver torso. Its head and neck were streaked with several colors of paint, as though it had put on makeup while drunk. Not only that—there was a black-and-white rubber tire around its middle.

Als describes his youthful encounter with Monogram as “one of the more destabilizing experiences of my life.” I’m sure it was. Monogram is an unforgettable artwork. But it’s not realism – not even close. Some critics have suggested that it signifies anal sex: see, for example, Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1981). Leo Steinberg found this interpretation too reductive. He saw the imposition of the tire as “an act of appropriation.” In his great Encounters with Rauschenberg (2000), he wrote,

As the artist would later encircle a car key with paint and a bicycle with neon tubing, so here – to make it his own. The goat alone – even with signature paint on its muzzle – did not look Rauschenbergian enough, until joined with its tire in definitive incongruity. 

Als, in his piece, also refrains from extracting any specific meaning from Monogram. The closest he comes is by asking these questions: 

I thought about “Monogram” ’s layers for years. I knew that goats in mythology were often mischievous, symbols of randiness and disorder—“queer” animals. Was that goat a combination of the real, the queer, and the mythic? Was I?

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955-59)

My Cubist Summer

This month I’ve been happily immersed in two superb essays on Picasso’s Cubism – T. J. Clark’s “Cubism and Collectivity” (included in his 1999 collection Farewell to an Idea) and Leo Steinberg’s “The Intelligence of Picasso” (included in his posthumous 2022 collection Picasso). It’s fascinating to compare them. 

In “Cubism and Collectivity,” Clark considers some of Picasso’s most extreme works of Cubism, e.g., Man with a Pipe (1911), Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”) (1911-12), and The Architect’s Table (1912). To describe these strange, elusive paintings, Clark uses “grid”: “Look at the way the buttons in Man with a Pipe are rolled along various lines to apexes or points of intersection on the grid, like zeros in a three-dimensional sum....”; “The grid had been, and still was, essentially a compositional device....”; “The grid is never entirely part of the perceptions it totalizes....” “I should say that Picasso’s grids are very often, perhaps most often, stretched or filled to breaking point.” And this beautiful passage on the grid in “Ma Jolie”: 

It is filled with the luminous, the dappled and glistening, the chequered shade, the translucent and half-penetrable – indicators that geometry had somehow now been divulged by seeing. Lines are invaded by light. The grid shivers again with Cezanne’s perceptual uncertainties, not the Douanier’s confidence in the sign.

Clark changed my view of Picasso’s grids. He lit them up – “lines invaded by light.”

Steinberg wasn’t a fan of the grid. In his “The Philosophical Brothel” (also included in Picasso), he wrote,

New York painters and critics valued Cubism less as a body of work than as a modus operandi, a pictorial “strategy” that offered escape from the pitfalls and sinkholes of deep perspective. The so-called Cubist grid was an ideated flat-level armature that enabled a painter, any painter whatever, to traverse the expanse of a canvas without falling through. Rather than seeing Picasso’s Cubist creations as part of an artist’s personal inventory, continually feeding into the rest of the work, the supposed structure described by the term “Cubist grid” was depersonalized. [“The Philosophical Brothel”]

In “The Intelligence of Picasso,” Steinberg didn’t use “grid”; he used “facet,” “arris,” and “watershed.” For example:

From this moment forward, the arris or watershed in Picasso’s work gets off an amazing career: during the following year, 1908, he works every rounding surface to a sharp ridge. Every swell becomes discontinuous, breaking against an arris. Planes define themselves as prismatic facets. And not body planes only: in a back view, at bottom center, even the interval between the thighs joins in the faceting, as if solids and void deserved the same stepwise pacing from any one point to whatever lies next. Picasso here disavows all continuous surfacing – the kind you caress; he is plotting the incidence of watersheds in a faceted system. 

I confess that before I read Steinberg’s essay, I didn’t know what an arris is. The dictionary defines it as “a sharp edge formed by the meeting of two flat or curved surfaces.” Steinberg first used it in his description of the cheekline in Picasso’s Self-Portrait (1907):

In the 1907 Self-Portrait, the cheekline runs wild, lancing, impaling the ear. The line, black and rigid, flouts the ostensible anatomical program – cooperating neither with skin tone nor with the requisite continuities. It signifies a change of plane at the cheek from front to side on a receding slope – and that’s all it will do. With chin or eye socket it makes no connection; and that’s why it looks wrong. How shall we explain this wrongness? And explained it should be, if we believe in Picasso’s intelligence; because intelligence should be intelligible.

Steinberg explained it: 

So what about this cheekline that is clearly too long and too inorganic? Picasso has abstracted it from its bedding. In the given context, the line still tells as an arris, defining a change of planes – but without adhering to the planes it supposedly turns. Does this sound absurd? Can a ridge at the junction of planes, as in this early Picasso, exist apart from those planes? Think of the arris down the prow of a ship – can you imagine it without the planes it defines? Yet this is exactly what Picasso conceives. He wants the arris seen apart from its connection with body – as an idea: not a thing but a meaning. And by making it unanatomical, inorganic – black, rigid, and overlong – he dissociates that line from its physical cause, from the bulk it articulates, almost as an abstracted sign.

Steinberg called that cheekline “the most fertile single line drawn in the twentieth century.” He tracked Picasso’s subsequent use of it. He saw it as the source of Cubism:

From this moment forward, the arris or watershed in Picasso’s work gets off an amazing career: during the following year, 1908, he works every rounding surface to a sharp ridge. Every swell becomes discontinuous, breaking against an arris.

Clark doesn’t see it this way. He doesn’t see Cubism as a continuous line of development. He says, “I believe we can best understand the painting Picasso did in 1911 and 1912 if we see it as not issuing from the process of inquiry of the previous three years.” Where Steinberg saw a continuum, Clark sees a break. The break comes in 1911, in Céret: 

What the pictures from Céret posit is a hypothetically complete and alternative system of representation, which they have found and instantiate. Nothing could be more different from the manner and matter of the paintings done in the years before.

In Céret, Clark argues, Picasso “changed course. He made his way back to the world of phenomena.” He looks at the work Picasso did the previous summer, in Cadaqués; he sees a significant contrast. The Cadaqués paintings “speak a uniquely spare, impalpable, diagrammatic language: they are, and have always recognized to be, Cubism near freezing point.”

Interestingly, Steinberg, in his piece, looked closely at a Picasso painted in Cadaqués – Harbor at Cadaqués (1910) – and found it “lovely.” He wrote,

The boat, half reclaimed by its atmospheric surround, dissolves into quivering accents, tokens of planar change accentuated by light. The component parts of the boat are still recognizable: stem and stern; the hint of a mast; the ribbing of its concave; the phantom anchor at lower right; while the browns of the boat’s wooden fabric melt in blueing air.

So much for “Cubism near freezing point.” 

Clark’s governing aesthetic is strangeness. His taste is for “Cubism’s deep, wild, irredeemable obscurity.” The Cubism that appeals to him are the dense, complex grids of Man with a Pipe, Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”), The Architect’s Table. Clark revels in their strangeness. I do, too. But I have a question. Do they describe anything? Clark says yes:

The fragments of planes, lines, lighting, and spacing that make up the texture of “Ma Jolie” may or may not have forfeited “their former descriptive functions” ... but they clearly still carry their former descriptive appearance. They are full of the kinds of particularity, density, and repleteness that usually go with visual matching. They still look to be describing.

Steinberg said yes, too, but less emphatically: “Only minimally do the objects evoked serve as analogues to exclusively visual data.” But when he said this, he wasn’t looking at extreme Cubist paintings like Man with a Pipe, Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”), The Architect’s Table. He was looking at spare works of diagram and collage – Fruit Bowl, Bottle, and Bread Loaf on a Table (1912), Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table (1912), and Bottle, Glass, and Violin (1912) – that appear to be cousins of the 1910 Cadaqués paintings. Of Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table, he said, 

I love the airy brightness of it, every object conceived in thought, without clotting embodiment. If some find these products of Picasso’s nightlife unappealing, I hope, at least, they’ll respect the intelligence of their maker. My own pleasure in them derives partly from their elegant clarity, their cool; and in part from their wisdom.

That’s a perfect note to end on. These two great essays expanded my appreciation of Picasso’s Cubism immensely. Highly recommended.

Credit: The above illustration is Pablo Picasso's Woman with a Zither ("Ma Jolie") (1911-12). 

Pablo Picasso, Harbor at Cadaqués (1910)

Leo Steinberg's Distinctive Geometrical Style

Jed Perl, in his absorbing “See More, Think More” (The New York Review of Books, May 13, 2021), a review of three recent collections of Leo Steinberg’s essays, gets at some of Steinberg’s most powerful ideas, e.g., simultaneity and ambiguity, but scants what I view is his most original contribution to art criticism – his distinctive blend of geometry and figuration. Steinberg loved words like “orthogonals,” “convergences,” “perpendiculars,” “obliques,” “verticals,” “diagonals,” “volumetric,” “trapezoid.” He combined them with vivid metaphors and similes to create inspired feats of quasi-abstract art description. This, for example:

For all its tectonic carpentry, the armature of floorboards and panels allows no averted planes, not even thinkable ones, so that the environment of both solid form and spatial containment becomes resistless like the limitless diaphane of outdoors. [Description of Picasso’s Reclining Nude and Seated Woman, study for L’Aubade, May 4, 1942; from Steinberg’s brilliant “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” Other Criteria, 1972]

And this:

Visually, choreographically, the motive force in the picture is the flare of Christ’s arms, and it is to their action that the whole picture responds. As Christ’s hands clear a site for themselves, his nearest neighbors roll back, make way, and fall into responsive diagonals. The redisposition of these flanking triads with respect to the table is instantaneous. On our left, parallel to the right arm of Christ, one oblique trine runs elbows-out from John to Judas. On our right, Thomas and Philip align with the startled St. James. Both trines together confirm the divergence of that central arm’s spread. They absorb its momentum and relay it, further amplified, to the tapestried walls, so that the walls, too, seem to expand, fanning out in remote obedience to the charge of Christ’s arms. [Description of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1490s); from Steinberg’s superb Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, 2001]

“Tectonic carpentry,” “armature of floorboards and panels,” “averted planes,” “spatial containment,” “responsive diagonals,” "flanking triads," “oblique trine” – this is the stuff of Steinberg’s wonderful geometrical style. He saw art in terms of its spatial order, and he invented a way of writing about it that expressed it exactly. 

Ian Frazier's "A Vast and Terrifying Saga"

Iqaluit Beach, 2007 (Photo by Lorna MacDougall)

Ian Frazier, in his wonderful “A Vast and Terrifying Saga” (The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2017), a review of Annie Proulx’s new novel Barkskins, writes,

“Brokeback Mountain” and Proulx’s other Wyoming stories, many of them found in her collection Close Range, get their power from the [western] myth’s dependable high-lonesome twang, but they stay in the mind because of the details. Nobody, old-timer or otherwise, has a better eye for the physical, geographic, geologic, flotsam-strewn American West.

This is a considerable compliment from a writer whose own eye for “physical, geographic, geologic, flotsam-strewn” places is extraordinary: “spavined barns, bladeless windmills, crumpled stock tanks, tree-sheltered homeplaces with home missing, fallen-down corrals, splintered stock chutes, rusting farm machinery” (Great Plains); “an armchair, a pink plastic bottle in the shape of a baby’s shoe, a pile of shingles, an old-fashioned TV antenna, beer cans, a rusting John Deere swather” (On the Rez); “crumpled-up Caterpillar treads, school bus hulks, twisted scaffolding in rats’-nest heaps, rusted gold dredges, busted paddle wheels, crunched pallets, hyperextended recliner chairs, skewed all-terrain vehicle frames, mashed wooden dogsleds, multicolored nylon exploded to pompoms, door-sprung ambulance vans, dinged fuel tanks, shot clutch plates, run-over corrugated pipe, bent I beams, bent rebars, bent vents” (Travels in Siberia). 

I relish these junky lists. I, too, am drawn to such stuff. When I lived in Iqaluit, Nunavut, I used to walk the beach, marveling at the mishmash of plywood shacks, torn tents, broken-up boats, twisted tarps, frayed ropes, cannibalized snowmobiles, decaying caribou skins, scattered tools and engine parts, on and on. What accounts for their attraction? For me, it’s the sheer chaotic randomness of it all, what Leo Steinberg, in his description of Robert Rauschenberg’s great Washington’s Golden Egg, called “disjunction by juxtaposition” (Encounters with Rauschenberg, 2000).

But for Frazier, I think the attraction is deeper. I think it’s an aspect of his elegiac impulse – his intense awareness of and lament for life’s ephemerality. There’s a tinge of this in “A Vast and Terrifying Saga” when he notes that the western myth is

always looking back to what’s been lost: to the days of the buffalo before white men came, to the fur-trapper rendezvous blowouts of the 1820s, to the open cattle range of the 1870s, to the unplundered plains of recent memory before strip-mining for coal and fracking for natural gas and oil – all of it lost and gone forever and mourned, as Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar spend the rest of their lives mourning the summer when they were young and in love in their sheep camp on Brokeback Mountain.

In “A Vast and Terrifying Saga,” Frazier salutes a fellow western elegist.