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).

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #5 Julian Bell's "At the Whitechapel"

Wilhelm Sasnal, Anka (2001)

Julian Bell has written several of this decade’s greatest exhibition reviews – where greatness means perceptive, original, stylish, rich, pleasurable. I devour his work. Highlights include “The Mysterious Women of Vermeer” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011), “At the Whitechapel”: Wilhelm Sasnal (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012), “Taking a Wrench to Reality”: Cubism (The New York Review of Books, December 4, 2014), “At the National Gallery”: Caravaggio (London Review of Books, December 15, 2016), “More Light!”: David Hockney (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017), and “At Tate Britain”: Van Gogh (London Review of Books, August 1, 2019). Of these, my favorite is “At the Whitechapel,” on Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition of work by Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal. I relish this piece for at least three reasons: 

1. Its frank assessment of Sasnal’s Pigsty (“This foreground swathe of green, streaked at high speed with a six-inch brush, strikes me as phoney”).

2. Its memorable praise of Sasnal’s Anka (“There is a tiny, impassioned wedge of orange between the chin and neck in Anka, a portrait of his wife, for which I would gladly forsake every abstract Richter ever painted”).

3. And this gorgeous sentence that went straight into my personal anthology of great art writing: “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.”