Are Frankenthalers Beautiful?

Helen Frankenthaler, Mauve District (1966)

Are Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings beautiful? I’m inclined to say yes. Peter Schjeldahl said no: “The upshot for pleasure-seeking eyes is that her paintings aren’t only not beautiful, they aren’t even pretty” (The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990, 1990). 

Schjeldahl’s judgment seems harsh. Is he right? Recently, two New Yorker critics looked at Frankenthaler’s work. They express a more appreciative view. Adam Gopnik, in his “Fluid Dynamics” (April 12, 2021), writes, 

By using the paint to stain, rather than to stroke, she elevated the components of the living mess of life: the runny, the spilled, the spoiled, the vivid—the lipstick-traces-left-on-a-Kleenex part of life. 

Gopnik focuses on Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” technique. I think he’s right to do so. That was her great discovery – thinning her paints with turpentine and letting them soak into a large, empty canvas. He says, 

What’s impressive about the early soak-stain Frankenthalers, of course, is how unpainted they are, how little brushwork there is in them. Their ballistics are their ballet, the play of pouring, and a Rorschach-like invitation to the discovery of form. Paramecia and lilies alike bloom under her open-ended colors and shapes. 

Zachary Fine, in his “Let It Bleed” (January 12, 2026) takes a similar approach. He writes, 

Instead of treating the “blank” canvas as some heroic arena where a painter goes to battle with predecessors or inner demons, Frankenthaler saw it for what it was: thousands of off-white porous fibres, usually cotton duck or linen, woven together into a deceptively smooth surface. For centuries, painters had primed canvases, building up layers of thick pigment and glaze to create the illusion of luminosity and depth. But Frankenthaler diluted her paints with turpentine, so that they’d stain the raw canvas like blood on a bedsheet. 

Looking at Frankenthaler’s work formally, i.e., in terms of her soak-stain technique, rouses my tactile sense. I want to reach out and touch its paint-soaked skin. Right there, I think, is the source of its beauty.

June 23, 2025 Issue

There’s not much in this week’s issue that catches my eye. The magazine isn’t the problem. It’s me. I’m jaded. My range of interests is getting narrower and narrower. Usually, when I’m in this funk, “Goings On” bails me out. But even that stimulating section seems lacking this week. I miss art reviews. I miss Jackson Arn. I miss Peter Schjeldahl. I miss poetry reviews. I miss jazz reviews. I miss photography reviews. I miss good formalist book reviews like the ones James Wood writes. I miss Janet Malcolm. About the only thing I really like in this week’s issue is Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin’s witty artwork illustrating Hannah Goldfield’s “Ladies' Night.” It’s amazing what those two can do with a Sharpie, transforming a tall glass of foamy beer into a basketball hoop.

Writing Red

Jackson Arn, in his wonderful “Royal Flush” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2025), says, “Look at Warhol’s Red Lenin or STIK’s Liberty (Red) and feel the wet raspberry splatter you.” I love that line. Some of my favorite art descriptions involve red. For example:

In Quappi’s bone-white face, her red lips assume a sweetly wry expression while visually exploding like a grenade. – Peter Schjeldahl, “The French Disconnection” (The New Yorker, March 8, 1999)

In the flesh, a single beautifully judged swipe of washed-out Indian Red, tracing the collar of the child’s T-shirt, jumpstarts the picture into succulent immediacy. – Julian Bell, “At the Whitechapel: Wilhelm Sasnal" (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012)

The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity. It must have been painted with the same pigment, at the same moment, as the wild red of the horseman’s turban, which itself has the look of a bleeding bald skull. Maybe the plume of blue tassels issuing from the red like a tuft of hair is meant to evoke a scalping. The two reds – the turban-scalp and the boiling nostril – insist on the beauty of blood. – T. J. Clark, “A Horse’s Impossible Head” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019)

“Red is the first color, the strongest color, the one that stands for color itself,” Arn says. He’s right. He claims some people are scared of it. He’s probably right about that, too. I’m not one of them. I love red. There’s a strange red painting by N. H. Pritchard called Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69. Do you remember it? The New Yorker used it to illustrate one of Peter Schjeldahl’s last pieces – “All Together Now” (April 11, 2022). Schjeldahl said of it, “Red Abstract / fragment is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.”

Red is a rich, fascinating subject. Arn explores it beautifully. 

Credit: The above illustration is N. H. Pritchard's Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69).

June 17, 2024 Issue

I have absolutely no interest in what Ye did to his Tadao Ando beach house. Or do I? I dislike Ye (formerly Kanye West) and the vulgar lifestyle he represents. Yet I devoured Ian Parker’s “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” in one delicious gulp. What hooked me? I confess it was the perverse spectacle of destruction, of seeing a gem of architectural art intentionally smashed with a sledgehammer. Parker writes,

Saxon’s videos include one in which he’s helping topple one of the chimneys. Another shows someone swinging a hammer at a bathroom’s black-and-white marble walls. A third demonstrates how a handsome glass balustrade, the kind you’re almost bound to find in a modern museum, shatters into windshield fragments when you tap its corner with a sledgehammer. In a fourth, Saxon and another man are demolishing the hot tub with two jackhammers. “There was so much rebar in the concrete,” Saxon told me. “It was absolutely brutal.”

Ye, through his agent Saxon, also tore out all the Ando custom wooden cabinetry. Crazy! Parker tries to show that Ye had his own design in mind, that he was pursuing his own particular aesthetic. He says,

Ye revealed to Saxon—although not all at once—that he wanted no kitchen, bathrooms, A.C., windows, light fixtures, or heating. He was intent on cutting off the water and the power (and removing the house’s cable and wiring, which ran through the concrete in plastic tubes). He talked of clarity, simplicity, and a kind of self-reliance. “He wanted everything to be his own doing,” Saxon told me. In one cheerful text from Ye to Saxon, in response to a report of the day’s demolition, he wrote, “Let’s gooooo . . . Simple fresh and cleeeeeean.”

I don’t buy it. It’s like Al Weiwei deliberately dropping his Han dynasty urn. Peter Schjeldahl said of that dubious action,

We’re told in the show’s catalogue that photographs of Ai dropping a millennia-old Han-dynasty urn, which smashes on the floor, “captures the moment when tradition is transformed and challenged by new values.” That likely reads better in Mandarin. The act strikes me as mere vandalism. [“Challenging Work,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2012]

Peter Schjeldahl's "The Art of Dying"

I see there’s a new book out by Peter Schjeldahl. It’s titled The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022. Schjeldahl is one of my touchstones. I welcome this new collection. I’m sure I’ve read most of the pieces in it, when they originally appeared in The New Yorker. But it’s great to have them all gathered in one volume. I avidly look forward to re-reading them in this new collection.  

March 25, 2024 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his “All That Glitters,” in this week’s New Yorker, calls T. J. Clark “the most eloquent Klimt hater.” What’s that based on? I had to dig to find out. It turns out that, in 2010, Clark wrote a letter to the London Review of Books, responding to correspondence generated by Michael Hofmann’s “Vermicular Dither” (London Review of Books, January 28, 2010), a review of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, in which he (Hofmann) refers to Klimt as “the Kitschmeister.” Clark writes,

I have no dog in the ring as regards Stefan Zweig; but as Gustav Klimt has come up in your correspondence, and even been claimed as ‘one of the greatest painters ever’, I do want to say that when I read Michael Hofmann’s verdict on the artist I found myself breathing a sigh of relief (Letters, 11 February). At last someone had dared state the obvious. As for ‘greatest painters ever’, there is a special place in the hell of reputations for those who tried hardest for the title in the first years of the 20th century: the Frank Brangwyns, the Eugène Carrières, the Anders Zorns, the John Singer Sargents, the Giovanni Segantinis. Not that these artists are uninteresting. Someone with a strong stomach and a taste for tragic irony should write a book about large-scale and mural painting in the two decades leading to Mons and Passchendaele. But taken at all seriously – compared with their contemporary Akseli Gallen-Kallela, for example, let alone the last achievements of Puvis de Chavannes – the greats of Edwardian Euro-America strike me as Kitschmeisters through and through: early specialists in the new century’s pretend difficulty and ‘opacity’, pretend mystery and profundity, pretend eroticism and excess. Klimt has a place of honour in their ranks.

Arn is right. There's no love there. By the way, I wasn't doubting Arn's word. I just couldn't recall ever reading anything by Clark about Klimt. And I've read a lot of Clark. I devour him.

Postscript: Just as an off-set to Clark’s acid verdict, consider what Peter Schjeldahl said about Klimt’s “Adele”:

With the best of will—and I have tried—“Adele” makes no formal sense. The parts—including the silky brushwork of the young lady’s face and hands, which poke through the bumpy ground as through a carnival prop—drift, generating no mutual tensions. The size feels arbitrary, without integral scale in relation to the viewer: bigger or smaller would make no difference. The content of the gorgeous whatsit seems a rhyming of conspicuously consumed wealth with show-off eroticism. She’s a vamp, is Adele; and for whom would she be simpering but the randy master, Herr Klimt? The effect is a closed loop of his and her narcissisms. They’re them, and we aren’t. I think we are supposed to be impressed. And let’s be. Why not? Our age will be bookmarked in history by the self-adoring gestures of the incredibly rich. Aesthetics ride coach. ["Changing My Mind About Gustav Klimt's 'Adele' "]

I love that “gorgeous whatsit.” Can kitsch be beautiful? Schjeldahl said yes. 

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #10 "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' "

George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's (1909)

Time to kick off my “Top Ten New Yorker & Me” archival series. Each month I’ll look back and choose what I consider to be one of this blog's best posts. Today’s pick is "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' " (July 26, 2012):

George Bellows’s great boxing paintings Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent "Young and Gifted" (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), describes Stag at Sharkey’s as follows:

The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.

David Peters Corbett, in his An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters (2011), says of Both Members of This Club:

The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef.

“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.

But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection (Woman) Writer], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”

What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s “Hopper’s Polluted Silence,” Still Looking, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club with Bellows’s bloodless Dempsey and Firpo (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”

Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said in her great "The Treasure of Comanche County" (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005) about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates relishes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.

December 11, 2023 Issue

What to make of Parul Sehgal’s “Turning the Page,” in this week’s issue? It’s a survey of several recent memoirs by or about critics, including Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet (on life with her father, Peter Schjeldahl), and Robert Boyers’ Maestros & Monsters (on his long association with Susan Sontag and George Steiner). I’m a fan of the work of Schjeldahl, Sontag, and Steiner. The key word here is “work.” I don’t give a damn about their personal lives. Whether they were rotten parents or fickle friends is immaterial to me. It’s their work that matters. That was Flaubert’s belief; it’s mine, too. Occasionally, a memoir appears that is itself a work of art. Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), on his friendship with V. S. Naipaul, is an example that immediately comes to mind. Are Calhoun’s and Boyers’ books in that league? Sehgal doesn’t say. She doesn’t comment; she doesn’t quote. She’s flying at a ridiculously high altitude. Come down to the ground, Sehgal. Get some ink on your hands.

Postscript: As for Sehgal’s notion that the work of critics like Kael, Schjeldahl, and Sontag is a form of “unselfing” – “the ability to channel someone else” – that’s just crazy! Kael would hoot if she read that. She didn’t channel anyone but herself. Same for Schjeldahl and Sontag. That’s what made them such great stylists. To paraphrase Kael, unselfing is for sapheads. 

Frans Hals's Extraordinary "The Laughing Cavalier"

Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier (1624)

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “The Man Who Changed Portraiture” (newyorker.com, November 3, 2023), reviews the National Gallery’s Frans Hals exhibition. He notes that Hals painted only portraits and calls him “the most talented one-trick pony of the seventeenth century.” He says of him,

His genius boils down to a contradiction: loose, unblended smears of paint that create the flesh-and-blood likeness of a human being. The late works of Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt would all head in this direction with their “rough” manner, but Hals achieved a kind of scary immediacy that seemed almost foreign to the medium—a photographer suddenly among painters.

A photographer suddenly among painters – I like that. It gets at Hals’s exquisite precision. See, for example, his famous The Laughing Cavalier (1624) – the intricate pattern of the man’s doublet, the gold buttons, the subtle shades of black in his cloak, the ornate geometric design of his lace cuffs, the rich layering of his white ruff, the gold handle of his rapier. This is incredibly detailed, artful painting. You can almost feel the texture of that ruff and hear the rustle of the sumptuous cloak.

Which is why I question Fine’s conclusion. He writes, “Hals was a painter of fundamentally modest means with a deep intuition for his medium.” Fundamentally modest means? Come on! The Laughing Cavalier is having a good laugh over that one. How about “acutely descriptive”? That’s what Peter Schjeldahl said of Hals’s painting (“Haarlem Shuffle” (The New Yorker, August 1, 2011). I agree with Schjeldahl. 

October 23, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his “The French Connection,” in this week’s issue, says of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863-65), “You can’t really appreciate Olympia unless you feel the rude slap of its shortcomings.” I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Peter Schjeldahl had a more memorable response:

Here's a pop quiz: in Olympia, how many things is the model, Victorine Meurent, wearing? Time’s up. Six: a high-heeled slipper (its mate has come off), a ribbon choker with a pearl attached, a pair of earrings, a bracelet with another dangling jewel, and a flower, perhaps a hibiscus, in her hair. Every item renders her more naked, of course, as do the fully clothed black maid proffering a gorgeous bouquet, the bristling black cat, and the sumptuous topography of fringed coverlet, yielding pillows, and wrinkled sheets. Without all those objects, the painting would be a nude. With them, it’s a general-alarm fire.

I love that passage. It’s from Schjeldahl’s great “The Urbane Innocent” (The New Yorker, November 20, 2000). 

Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863-65)

Ryan Ruby's "To Affinity and Beyond"

Great to see Bookforum back in business! There’s an absorbing piece in it by Ryan Ruby called “To Affinity and Beyond.” It touches on a lot of things I’m interested in – criticism, interpretation, argument, description. It’s a review of Brian Dillon’s new essay collection Affinities: On Art and Fascination. Ruby calls it “a kind of manifesto for an anti-critical criticism.” What’s “anti-critical” about it, says Ruby, is its lack of argument:

If nothing Dillon writes “pursues an argument” or is “built to convince,” it is, in part, an attempt to make a virtue of the limitation he confesses in Essayism: “I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument.” He associates argumentation with the academy, whose procedures of making “judgments and distinctions” are foreign to a sensibility that prefers describing objects and noting correspondences between them. 

I relish argument. Many of my favorite critical essays are fiercely polemical, e.g., Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hell,” Janet Malcolm’s “A Very Sadistic Man,” James Wood’s “Hysterical Realism,” Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares.” Argument gives criticism a piquant bite. But I don’t think it’s essential to its effectiveness. Description, on the other hand, is key. “All first-rate criticism defines what we are encountering,” Whitney Balliett said in his Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats (1983). Peter Schjeldahl said something similar in his Let’s See (2008): “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.”

April 3, 2023 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his “Art: Tina Barney,” says of Barney, “Only when she realized she could get closer to the truth by staging it—by subtly combining fact and fiction—did her pictures really come together.” I’m not sure how staging pictures gets closer to the truth. For me, truth is based on fact, not fiction. Peter Schjeldahl said of Thomas Struth’s staged Pergamon photos, “There is a subtle but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for the camera”: "Reality Clicks" (May 27, 2002). I agree. 

2. Johanna Fateman’s description of Helen Frankenthaler - “a mercurial colorist moving between pours and the palette knife, translucent washes and clotted impasto” -  strikes me as perfect: see “At the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler.” 

3. Richard Brody notes the release of a new Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne film – Tori and Lokita. The Dardennes are among my favourite directors. Their The Kid with a Bike (2011) is a masterpiece. Brody says of their new film, it “has the ardour and the specificity of investigative journalism.” That appeals to me mightily. I think I’ll check it out.  

4. It’s great to see Burkhard Bilger back in the magazine. His last New Yorker piece, the excellent “Building the Impossible," appeared November 30, 2020. His new piece, “Crossover Artist,” begins and ends with an elephant orchestra (“But no one could hear what the elephants were humming to themselves, in the deep subsonic of their own frequency, as the drums clattered and gongs crashed”). It's a profile of neuroscientist and musician David Sulzer, brimming with interesting musicological facts and observations. Example: 

A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.

I enjoyed “Crossover Artist” immensely.    

Hal Foster on T. J. Clark

It’s been a while since I last fell in love with a writer’s style. I think I’d have to go back to 1998, when I first encountered Peter Schjeldahl’s art writing in The New Yorker. Now I find myself crazy about the style of another art writer – T. J. Clark. Why Clark? What is it about his work that draws me to it? Reading Hal Foster’s recent review of Clark’s latest book, If These Apples Should Fall, helps me answer that question, at least tentatively. 

Foster’s piece, titled “Not Window, Not Wall,” appears in the December 1, 2022 London Review of Books. In it, Foster says, “The book’s primary emphasis is on perception – Cézanne’s, Clark’s and our own – and its distinct translations into paint and prose….” Yes, I think that’s one element for sure. Another is Clark’s “resistance to resolution.” Foster writes, 

Resistance to resolution is what he values most in Cézanne, and in this respect his prose is true to the painting, even mimetic of it. As Cézanne confronts his motif again and again, so Clark confronts Cézanne. 

Foster gets at a third ingredient of Clark’s style when he says that Clark’s attention becomes “almost obsessive.” I think Foster’s most apt description of Clark’s form – the one that speaks to me – is “diaristic.” He says If These Apples Should Fall “returns to The Sight of Death in style, since the new book is also sometimes diaristic….” Right there, I think, Foster nails it. Reading Clark is like reading a great diary, in which we’re privy to the writer's thought processes as they evolve. As Foster says, “Clark invites us in on his reflexive meditations.” 

My favourite passage in Foster’s piece is this one:

Like a passionate friend tugging at one’s sleeve in a museum, he constantly enjoins us to see, to compare, to reconsider, and the intensity of this viewing-and-reviewing can be a bit wearing. 

All true, except the last part – I’ve never found Clark to be wearing. For me, it’s quite the opposite; I find his writing exhilarating.

Postscript: One of these days, I'll post my review of Clark's If These Apples Should Fall. It's one of the best books I've ever read. 

Best of 2022: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Anthony Lane's "Living for the City"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Gorgeous? Oh, yeah.” | “Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”);

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “All Together Now,” April 11, 2022 (“Red Abstract / fragment” (1968-69) is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.” | “Where art is concerned, death need be no more than an inconvenience, and, as in the case of Pritchard, being all but invisible may turn out to have been merely a speed bump”);

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Scaling Up,” June 13, 2022 [“The distinguishing test, for me, is scale, irrespective of size: all a work’s elements and qualities (even including negative space) must be snugged into its framing edges to consolidate a specific, integral object—present to us, making us present to itself—rather than a more or less diverting handmade picture.” | “Inexhaustibly surprising smears, blotches, fugitive lines, and incomplete patterns feel less applied than turned loose, to tell enigmatic stories of their own”);

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Dutch Magus,” October 3, 2022 [“Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch”];

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Stilled Life,” October 10, 2022 (“Then there are the still-lifes of remarkably unremarkable windowsill miscellanies: some random fruit and bits of studio gear transfigured by a happenstance of daylight”); 

6. James Wood, “By the Collar," April 11, 2022 (“These public events have the irresistible tang of the actual, and around them O’Toole—who has had a substantial career as a journalist, a political commentator, and a drama critic—beautifully tells the private story of his childhood and youth. But because the events really happened, because they are part of Ireland’s shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history, they also have the brutishly obstructive quality of fact, often to be pushed against, fought with, triumphed over, or, in O’Toole’s preferred mode of engagement, analyzed into whimpering submission. His great gift is his extremely intelligent, mortally relentless critical examination, and here he studies nothing less than the past and the present of his own nation”);

7. Anthony Lane, “Living for the City,” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“ 'The Worst Person in the World' strikes me as believable, beautiful, roving, annoying, and frequently good for a laugh. Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle”);

8. Alex Ross, “Moonlight,” January 31, 2022 (“Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly”);

9. Merve Emre, "Getting to Yes," February 14 & 21, 2022 ("From these two sentences, a whole history of literature beckons - a sudden blooming of forms and genres, authors and periods, languages and nations. Why is 'dressingown,' like 'scrotumtightening,' a single retracting word, as if English were steadying itself to transform into German?");

 10. James Wood, "The Numbers Game," December 19, 2022 ("There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them"). 

2022 Year in Review

Illustration by Seb Agresti, from John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa 3"

Begin with a drink. In tribute to the brave people of Ukraine, I’ll have one of those borscht Martinis that Talia Lavin wrote about a few years ago: “Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim” (“Bar Tab: Anyway Café,” April 30, 2018). Mm, that hits the spot! Slava Ukraini! 

The top story of 2022 was Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The New Yorker covered it superbly, publishing at least a dozen pieces, including Masha Gessen’s “The Devastation of Kharkiv, Ukraine” (March 22, 2022), Jane Ferguson's "A Search for Survival Outside Kyiv" (March 15, 2022), Keith Gessen’s “The One Place in Lviv Where the War Was Never Far Away” (March 29, 2022), Joshua Yaffa’s “The Siege of Chernihiv” (April 15, 2022), Luke Mogelson’s “Collecting Bodies in Bucha” (April 6, 2022), and David Kortava’s “In the Filtration Camps,” October 10, 2022. I devoured them. If I had to recommend just one, it would be Luke Mogelson’s brilliant “The Wound-Dressers” (May 9, 2022). Here’s a sample:

To prevent the Russians from penetrating Kyiv, the Ukrainians had destroyed the main bridge over the fast-moving Irpin River. Several buildings on the south side of the river had been hit by Russian shells, which had also killed some fleeing civilians. To the north, explosions sounded and smoke filled the sky above another nearby suburb, Bucha. Russian forces had stalled there, and waves of residents were now arriving—abandoning their vehicles at the edge of the caved-in bridge, clambering down a high embankment, and crossing the icy currents on a treacherous walkway composed of pallets and scrap lumber. Passenger buses idled, ready to bring displaced Ukrainians to downtown Kyiv. People advanced single file, lugging bags and suitcases; some hugged dogs, cats, or babies to their chests. Elderly men and women with canes and walkers staggered haltingly over the rickety planks.

For me, the #1 literary story of the year was the loss of Peter Schjeldahl. He died October 21, 2022, age eighty. He’s one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on his name in the “Labels” section, and you’ll find 138 references to his writing. Schjeldahl spun his special brand of magic right to the end. Here’s an excerpt from his wonderful “Dutch Magus” (October 3, 2022), a delectable review of Hans Janssen’s Piet Mondrian: A Life:

Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch.

That “Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral” is inspired! 

Another highlight this year was the appearance of Volume 3 of John McPhee’s on-going personal history “Tabula Rasa.” These pieces are ingenious assemblages of time and space – memories interwoven with story ideas that McPhee never got around to developing. For example, in Volume 3, there’s a wonderful section called “Citrus, Booze, and Ah Bing” that begins with how he came to write his 1967 classic, Oranges, segues to a fascinating account of a 2004 road trip he took in central Kentucky, checking out distilleries (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”), and ends with a visit to an Okanagan Bing cherry orchard (“Dessicated. Lovely. Irrigation-green. Trees punctuated with deep-red dots”). If you relish McPhee’s writing, as I do, you’re sure to enjoy this latest “Tabula Rasa” instalment. 

One of my favourite New Yorker writers, Rivka Galchen, had a great year, producing three marvellous pieces – “Change of Heart” (February 22, 2022), “Who Will Fight With Me?” (October 3, 2022), and “Sound Affects” (October 17, 2022). “Who Will Fight With Me?” is a fond remembrance of her father. Here’s an excerpt:

It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did.

And while we’re at it, let’s give a huzzah for my favorite section of the magazine – “Goings On About Town” – a weekly smorgasbord of delectable notes on, among other things, art, movies, music, and restaurants. Here, for example, is Richard Brody on King Vidor’s 1928 silent film Show People:

Winking cameos abound: Davies takes a second role, as herself; Vidor plays himself, too; Charlie Chaplin, slight and exquisite, brings a Shakespearean grace to his self-portrayal as a humble moviegoer; and a long tracking shot of stars at a studio banquet table plays like a cinematic death row, displaying such luminaries as Renée Adorée, William S. Hart, and Mae Murray, just before they were swept away in waves of sound.

Other highlights: Five book reviews by my favourite literary critic James Wood, including his recent "The Numbers Game" (December 19, 2022); two wonderful pieces by Joy Williams (“Mine Field,” July 11 & 18, 2022, and “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future,” August 5, 2022); Hannah Goldfield’s sublime “Tables For Two”; and Laura Preston’s delightful “Talk of the Town” stories “Incidental Masterpieces” (April 4, 2022) and “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). 

Any disappointments? The only one I can think of is the absence of Dan Chiasson. He hasn’t appeared in the magazine since May 31, 2021. Not sure if he quit or was fired or is just taking a break. But I miss his subtle close readings.

Enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I enjoyed most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another glorious year of reading bliss. 

December 5, 2022 Issue

I see in this week’s issue there’s a show of Betty Woodman ceramic sculptures at the David Kordansky Gallery in Manhattan: see Johanna Fateman, “Art: Betty Woodman.” Woodman is one of my favorite artists. Her vases are among the glories of modern art. I first read about her in a piece by Peter Schjeldahl, called “Decoration Myths” (The New Yorker, May 15, 2006), a review of Woodman’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. He said of her, “At the age of seventy-six, she is beyond original, all the way to sui generis.” He described the colour of one of her works, a vase titled “Portugal,” as "an indigo like an organ chord, at once rumbling and clarion. It’s only décor, but what décor!” The Kordansky exhibition features an abundance of Woodman’s works. You can see many of them at davidkordanskygallery.com.

Betty Woodman, Seashore (1998)

Who Should Succeed Schjeldahl?

Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Alex Remnick)

Peter Schjeldahl is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, The New Yorker needs to have an art critic. Who are some of the possibilities? I see Hilton Als had an “Art World” piece in last week’s issue. But I'm not sure he’s the right guy for the job. He's too caught up in identity politics. I’d like to see someone in the position whose values are governed more by pleasure than anything else. And I’d like to see someone who writes with an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, formally coherent personal style. Here are some candidates I’d consider if I were picking the magazine’s new art critic: 

1. David Salle 

2. Wayne Koestenbaum

3. Gini Alhadeff

4. Susan Tallman

5. Johanna Fateman

The best living art writer is T. J. Clark. But his thinking might be a shade too metaphysical for the New Yorker job. The perfect choice is Salle: see his brilliant series of art pieces for The New York Review of Books. 

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. 

Postscript: Peter Schjeldahl 1942 - 2022

Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Gilbert King) 

This is a sad day. I've just learned of the death of Peter Schjeldahl. He died yesterday, age eighty. He’s one of my heroes. If you click on his name in the “Labels” section of this blog, you’ll find 135 references to him. There’s a fine tribute to him on newyorker.com: David Remnick, “Remembering Peter Schjeldahl, a Consummate Critic.” And there’s an excellent obituary in The New York Times: William Grimes, “Peter Schjeldahl, New York Art Critic With a Poet’s Voice, Dies at 80.” Grimes says of him, “He was first and foremost a visual pleasure seeker, on the prowl for new thrills.” I’ll always remember his response to Vermeer’s art: “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look” (“The Sphinx,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2001). That could serve as his epitaph. 

I’m going to miss Schjeldahl’s writing enormously. Fortunately, he left behind several resplendent collections, including The Hydrogen Jukebox (1991), Let's See (2008), and Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (2019). I’ll post a longer tribute to him later. He is and always will be one of my touchstones. 

October 3, 2022 Issue

Three excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Rivka Galchen’s “Who Will Fight With Me?”; Ed Caesar’s “Seize the Night”; and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Dutch Magus.”

Galchen’s “Who Will Fight With Me?” is a fond memoir of her father. It brims with her signature blend of inspired description and original perception. Here, for example, is her remembrance of her father’s lack of vanity:

It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did.

Caesar, in his brilliant “Seize the Night,” profiles d.j. Mladen Solomun, “master key to the pleasure of thousands.” Solomun presides over the Ibizan night club Pacha. Caesar takes us inside the club for a Solomun set: 

Reaching the d.j. booth from the street feels like a psychedelic re-creation of the Steadicam shot in “GoodFellas”: after walking past a security guard, you enter a garden filled with sculptures of unicorns, giraffes, and naked women, then follow a winding corridor, lined with red lights, that leads you past a bustling kitchen and mixed-sex bathrooms into the main room of the club, where you pass through the V.I.P. area and, finally, down a small flight of stairs. The loudness is engulfing. Mesmeric hexagonal light panels rise and fall over the dance floor in response to the music, making the club feel like a living organism. 

My favourite part is Caesar’s description of losing his notebook on Pacha’s dance floor:

Many ravers near the decks had pupils like bath plugs, and they greeted Solomun’s approaching set ecstatically. The roiling hook of “Dos Blokes” poured into the club. Like almost everybody present, I raised a hand in the air. While doing so, I dropped my notebook, then spent an uncomfortable minute crawling amid dancing feet to retrieve it. Solomun flashed a thin smile but hardly acknowledged the clamor. He was at work.

Schjeldahl’s “Dutch Magus” is a delectable review of Hans Janssen’s Piet Mondrian: A Life. It’s especially good on Mondrian’s rhythm as the essence of his art:

Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch.

That “Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral” is inspired! 

All three pieces are great. I enjoyed them immensely.