Best of 2018: Talk

João Fazenda, illustration for Michael Schulman's "Grasshopper"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Michael Schulman, “Grasshopper,” October 15, 2018 [“He took a breath. ‘Moving along: you also serve a beef-tartare tostada?’ (Correct.) ‘And that has some fried grasshopper on it?’ (Actually, the insect is toasted over a wood fire, Bazdarich said. Radcliffe, his pencil trembling, scribbled ‘toasted’ ”)].

2. Anna Russell, “Leafy Greens,” July 9 & 16, 2018 [“Hydroponics are a slippery slope. You might find yourself, one Sunday morning, at a Santa Monica farmers’ market, loitering among the apples, say. You come across a bunch of papalo, a leafy herb native to central Mexico, and toss it in your mouth (your tastes are expansive; a papalo leaf is nothing to you) and wham!: a brand-new flavor. Suddenly, you’re up at all hours, watching vertical-farming videos on YouTube, ordering seed packets from eBay, buying rhizomes—rhizomes!—and worrying about spider mites. You get some fennel crowns and a pouch of parasitic wasps, and you’re on your way”].

3. Anna Russell, “Reunion,” September 17, 2018 (“Once, he arrived to find cello parts scattered around the room, attended to by different experts, like an intensive-care unit”).

4. Anna Russell, “Caffeinated,” March 19, 2018 (“In Think Coffee, a man in a blazer, holding two hot drinks, waited while the pair examined the dimples on the compostable lids. ‘Decaf, cream, and black—that’s all,’ Specht said”).

5. Anna Russell, “Close Shave,” February 5, 2018 (“Ralph applied shaving cream and started to make short, silent strokes with a straight razor. A fan rattled; outside, a bus pulled away from the curb”).

6. Amy Goldwasser, “Wet Ink,” November 12, 2018 [“After finishing uptown, a few hours later, they went to Maffia’s apartment, to make ink. One batch was pure pokeberry juice (vivid magenta). Another included five varieties of acorn boiled with rust from various sources—nuts and bolts, wire, brackets—and a drop of gum arabic. It came out a complicated silver-gray”].

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Angel in Hastings,” April 23, 2018 [“The contrast between the back seat’s spacious, buttery interior and the driver’s livery (T-shirt, worn jeans, jean jacket) is sharp enough to make you wonder if the car is stolen”].

8. Sam Wasson, “Yes, And,” July 23, 2018 (“Levy furrowed his eyebrows and did an impression of a lugubrious rabbi. ‘What a place to lose a cow,’ he said”).

9. Lauren Collins, “Invitation,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“De Rougé lifted his laptop so that the Inserras could get a better look at the room’s pistachio-colored moldings. Then he turned around so they could see all the way down the gallery—a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot view”).

10. Nicolas Niarchos, “Cartography,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“He swivelled the antenna, and the music turned into a burst of Creole”).

Best of 2018: Illustrations

Bendik Kaltenborn, illustration for Andrew Marantz's "Friends in High Places"

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2018:

1. Bendik Kaltenborn, illustration for Andrew Marantz’s “Friends in High Places” (January 9, 2018).

2. Chris Gash, illustration for Alexandra Schwartz’s “Margin of Error” (October 29, 2018).

3. Icinori, illustration for Andrea K. Scott’s “Goings On About Town: In the Museums” (July 2, 2018).

4. Jeff Östberg, illustration for Anthony Lane’s “Extralegal Actions” (September 17, 2018)

5. Tom Bachtell, illustration for Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16, 2018).

6. João Fazenda, illustration for Michael Schulman’s “Grasshopper” (October 15, 2018).

7. Jorge Colombo, illustration for Neima Jahromi’s “Bar Tab: Marie’s Crisis” (May 7, 2018).

8. Roman Muradov, illustration for Russell Platt’s “Goings On About Town: Rites of Spring” (April 2, 2018).

9. Paul Rogers, illustration for Anthony Lane’s “Courting Disaster” (January 15, 2018).

10. Richard McGuire, illustration for Alex Ross’s “The Sounds of Music” (August 27, 2018).

11. Ariel Davis, illustration for Steve Smith's "Goings On About Town: Gesamtkunstwerk" (October 22, 2018)



12. Ben Kirchner, illustration for Ian Frazier's "Airborne" (February 5, 2018)

Best of 2018: GOAT

Jorge Colombo, "Ophelia" (2018)

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Elizabeth Barber, “Bar Tab: Ophelia,” April 23, 2018 [“At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want”].

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Art: Dike Blair,” November 26, 2018 (“A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life”).

3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Miznon,” April 30, 2018 (“It seems almost unfair to compare Miznon pita to any other pita. Miznon pita is plush, Miznon pita is pillowy—I would happily take a nap on a stack of Miznon pita. It’s as stretchy and pliant as Neapolitan pizza dough, its surface similarly taut and golden brown, glistening ever so slightly with oil. It cradles whatever you stuff it with as supportively as a hammock, efficiently absorbing the flavors of herb-flecked ground-lamb kebab, roasted mushrooms, or spicy fish stew”).

4. David Kortava, “Bar Tab: Mehanata,” August 6 & 13, 2018 (“After downing four shots each, the financier and his associates egressed the cage, divested themselves of their ideologically laden attire, and stumbled over to some stripper poles, where they permitted themselves to dance, clumsily and with inane delight, to ‘Celebration,’ by Kool & the Gang. Nearby, a graffiti portrait of Karl Marx had no choice but to take in the scene”).

5. Richard Brody, “Movies: Fig Leaves,” May 21, 2018 (“Though the film is silent, Hawks’s epigrammatic rapidity is already in evidence—the characters talk non-stop with such lively, pointed grace that viewers might swear they hear the intertitles spoken”).

6. Doreen St. Félix, “Art: ‘African American Portraits,’ ” August 20, 2018 (“But there is a depthless artificiality to the stock scenery, which makes the sitters seem as if they have been dropped into a placeless limbo. An altering occurs when an institution puts relics of real and recent life behind glass, making them into art objects. The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific stories”).

7. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Lee Krasner,” October 29, 2018 (“Linear geometries partner with biomorphic curves in a dominant palette of red, yellow, and blue. Zinging orange and chartreuse have guest-starring turns, and Léger-like black lines maintain order”).

8. Talia Lavin, "Bar Tab: Anyway Café," April 30, 2018 [“Behind the blond-wood bar at Anyway Café, the bartender is whittling a horseradish root, slicing off long pale strips with a little knife. They are bound for one of the large jars of vodka behind her, which are infusing, slowly, with ingredients including black currants, beets, honey, and ginger. These fierce spirits are mixed into the bar’s signature Martinis: Katherine the Great (pomegranate vodka, black-pepper vodka, rosewater), Madam Padam (blueberry vodka, champagne). 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”]. 

9. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“Oil paint lends itself to Thiebaud’s canvases like buttercream to cake, and his works on paper are every bit as delectable”).

10. Neima Jahromi, “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” July 23, 2018 (“On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut”).

2018 Year in Review

Jorge Colombo, "The Honeywell" (2018)

Behold another fat stack of New Yorkers – forty-eight of them, each a tremendous source of reading pleasure. It’s fascinating to watch the pile grow, starting in January with the first solitary issue. At the beginning of each year, I always wonder whether the magazine will be able to match the quality of its previous year. And each year, it always does. 2018 was no exception. Among the highlights: 

1. The appearance of three of my all-time favorite writers: John McPhee (“Direct Eye Contact,” March 5); Ian Frazier (“Airborne,” February 5; “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23; “The Day the Great Plains Burned,” November 5); and Janet Malcolm (“Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29). I treasure their work.

2. Three extraordinary reporting pieces: David Grann’s “The White Darkness” (February 12 & 19); Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man” (August 20); Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” (November 26).

3. Anna Russell’s wonderful “Talk of the Town” stories, including “Close Shave” (February 5), “Caffeinated” (March 19), “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16), and “Reunion” (September 17).

4. Hannah Goldfield’s ravishing “Tables For Two” food descriptions. 

5. All the “Bar Tab” columns, and the wonderful Jorge Colombo artwork that illustrate the newyorker.com versions.

6. Peter Schjeldahl’s brilliant exhibition reviews, and his notes for “Goings On About Town.” Schjeldahl is the magazine’s supreme pleasure-giver. 

I could go on and on. Instead, over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I loved most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another splendid year. I’d be lost without you. New Yorker without end, amen! 

December 24 & 31, 2018 Issue

Dylan Kerr’s absorbing Talk story, “Birds of a Feather,” in this week’s issue, tells about an exhibition of avian art at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Kerr reports that the show includes “some two dozen taxidermied birds from the National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C.” He describes what the Cooper Hewitt curators saw when they visited the Museum of Natural History:

When the curators were granted access, the experience was shocking. “It’s just row after row of drawers,” De León said, as the crystalline song of a resplendent quetzal rang out from a speaker. Méndez, who speaks with a soft Mexican accent, nodded gravely. “You cannot help but, first of all, smell the formaldehyde,” she said. “And then you open, and you open to death.”

Reading that passage, I recalled another New Yorker piece on taxidermied birds – John Seabrook’s brilliant “Ruffled Feathers” (May 29, 2006), in which he describes, among other things, the bird collection of Britain’s Natural History Museum:

The collection is housed in a new building that abuts the museum, which is now open to the public. The bird skins, the feathers still as soft as the day they were shot, in some cases a hundred and fifty years ago, lie on their sides in acid-free cardboard boxes, in large white cabinets that form long spooky corridors stretching the width of the building. 

Illustrating Seabrook’s piece is a beautiful, sorrowful Martin Schoeller photo of ten tagged bird skins. Here’s a detail from it:

Martin Schoeller, "Bird Skins" (Detail)

December 17, 2018 Issue

“A Ford Galaxy, shining and growling, inches into the garage beside the house, with a shadowy figure at the wheel.” I love that line. It’s from Anthony Lane’s “Housebound,” a review of Alfonso Cuarón’s absorbing new movie, “Roma,” in this week’s issue. “Roma” tells the story of a maid named Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio), who works for a wealthy family in Mexico City. I saw it a couple of nights ago on Netflix. Lane likes the movie. After reeling off several complaints about it – too pat, too fancy, too complacent – he says, “Yet here’s the thing: ‘Roma’ is persuasive in its beauty. It wins you over.”

Well, it didn’t win over Richard Brody. In his “There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma’ ” (newyorker.com, December 18, 2018), he criticizes it for its “effacement” of Cleo’s character – “her reduction to a bland and blank trope that burnishes the director’s conscience while smothering her consciousness and his own.” Brody may have a point. Even so, it doesn’t ruin the film. As Lane says, “It is the clarity of Cuarón’s eye, and the sea-like sway of his remembrance, that compel you to trust the tale he tells.”

John McPhee's "The Patch"

I see John McPhee has a new book out called The Patch. There’s an excellent review of it by Alex Abramovich in Bookforum’s current issue. McPhee is one of The New Yorker's all-time greats. A new book by him is a major event. I look forward to reading and reviewing The Patch in the coming weeks. I can’t think of a better way to start the new year. 

December 10, 2018 Issue

Louis Menand, in his “Faking It,” in this week’s issue, says,

There have always been writers who cheated on the pact. A case most people know is that of James Frey’s 2003 memoir of recovery from addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine, “A Million Little Pieces.” The book was hugely popular, but it turned out to be partly fabricated, something Frey was forced to admit on television under the interrogation of Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen “A Million Little Pieces” for her book club and thereby made it a best-seller.

The “pact” that Menand refers to is the “autobiographical pact,” which he defines as “the tacit understanding that the person whose name is on the cover is identical to the narrator, the ‘I,’ of the text.” But in the case of A Million Little Pieces, it wasn’t Frey’s identity that was in issue; it was his fabrication of its contents. Frey represented fiction as fact. This isn’t a breach of the autobiographical pact; it’s much more serious than that. It’s a violation of the ironclad injunction governing all nonfiction: Don’t mess with the facts. John McPhee, in his Draft No. 4, puts it this way: 

It is sometimes said that the line between fiction and nonfiction has become blurred. Not in this eye, among beholders. The difference between the two is distinct.

Interestingly, Menand, in his piece, identifies “three traditional lines of defense” for books like A Million Little Pieces:

1. The surrogacy defense – “This is the theory that, although a particular event recounted in the book may not have happened to the author, it happened to someone. Such a book, then, is really the life story of a group. The memoirist should be understood as representing all African-American men in the era of Jim Crow, or all indigenous people in Guatemala. Experiences common to the group are therefore legitimately represented as happening to a single, quasi-allegorical figure.”

2. The higher-truth defense – “This is the argument that fabrications and exaggerations in books like these are in the service of more fully conveying ‘what it is really like’ to be Guatemalan or in recovery or whatever the theme of the life story happens to be. 'A Million Little Pieces' tries to capture the experience of recovering from addiction. Readers don’t care whether these things literally happened to James Frey, because they didn’t buy the book to find out about James Frey. They bought it to learn about addiction and recovery. James Frey’s job as a writer is only to convey that experience.”

3. The literature professor’s defense – “Forget about whether the story ‘truly’ happened to some ‘real’ person—a philosophical rabbit hole. We are judging words on a page. Either they work for us or they don’t.”

I find these arguments unconvincing. McPhee speaks for me. So does Janet Malcolm. In the Afterword of her great The Journalist and the Murderer, she says,

The writer of nonfiction is under contract to the reader to limit himself to events that actually occurred and to characters who have counterparts in real life, and he may not embellish the truth about these events or these characters.

No philosophical rabbit hole there.

"Bar Tab" 's Last Call?

Jorge Colombo, "Super Power" (2017)

Looks like “Bar Tab” is kaput. The last one was Neima Jahromi’s “Bar Tab: The Uncommons,” in the November 19 New Yorker. Since then, there’ve been five straight issues sans “Bar Tab.” I miss it. I miss the fabulous cocktails: Diamond Reef’s The Penichillin, Et Al’s The Fuck You Steve, The Penrose’s Baby Zombie, Camp’s The Dirty Girl Scout, Rose Bar’s Notorious Nude, Existing Condition’s popcorn-infused rum-and-Cokes, Primo’s signature vodka Martini, “served with an anchovy skewered under an olive” (Colin Stokes, “Bar Tab: Primo’s”), on and on. I’m getting thirsty just thinking about them. 

I miss the vivid bar descriptions: “Visiting Super Power, with the gentle glow of a blowfish lamp, the fogged windows dripping hypnotically with condensation, and the humid, coconut-scented air, was exactly like being on a cruise, but everyone was wearing wool.” Remember that? It’s from McKenna Stayner’s wonderful “Bar Tab: Super Power.” Earlier this year, a “Bar Tab” appeared that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker writings: Elizabeth Barber’s “Bar Tab: Ophelia.” Here’s a taste: 

At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want. 

I miss “Bar Tab” ’s sensuous details. For example:

Lattes are served with delicate feathers etched in foam; the music is unobtrusive; and the soft glow from teardrop-shaped fixtures stipples drinkers’ faces with chiaroscuro.  [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Cocoa Bar”]

With eyes closed, one might mistake a flute of the honey-hued jasmine variety for a very dry prosecco, save for the intense floral perfume that lingers after each sip. [Wei Tchou, "Bar Tab: 29B Teahouse"]

Better yet was the Falling Up, with bourbon, apple brandy, Cynar, lemon, fresh ginger, and port. Served in a brandy snifter, piled high with pebbled ice, like a sno-cone, and garnished with an elaborately carved wedge of gala apple, it swirled cloudily in the glass, looking gloriously silly. [Sarah Larson, “Bar Tab: Wassail”]

I miss all that great stuff. Please, New Yorker, tell me it isn’t true. Tell me “Bar Tab” will soon be back, intoxicating as ever.     

December 3, 2018 Issue

Now here’s a cool idea – “An Archival Issue.” This is a first, as far as I know. “This week, we’ve opened the archive and republished stories, essays, poems, drawings, and cartoons that evoke New York in deeply personal ways,” say The Editors in “Talk of the Town” ’s opening piece, titled “The City of Dreams.” The Table of Contents is a smorgasbord of interesting selections, including Frank McCourt’s “New in Town” (originally published in the February 22 & March 1, 1999 issue), Hilton Als’ “Spinning Tales” (August 26 & September 2, 1996), James Baldwin’s “Letter From a Region in My Mind” (November 17, 1962), Nancy Franklin’s “No Place Like Home” (October 16, 1995), Dawn Powell’s “A Diamond to Cut New York” (June 26 & July 3, 1995), and many other delicious morsels in the “Talk” and “Critics” sections, as well. My favourite is Franklin’s “No Place Like Home,” an essay on her sixteen-year conflicted relationship with her Upper West Side apartment – “a misbegotten shell of a space,” she calls it. Her descriptions of the apartment’s flaws are quite funny. For example:

If I’m reading in bed and someone next door closes any door in that apartment, the wall behind my head gives a little shudder, and when someone walks down the long hallway next to the wall my floor creaks. I can hear sneezes, the ringing of a telephone, light switches being flipped, the clatter of pots and pans. I hear voices all the time, though only once have I been able to catch a complete sentence: “Oh, my God, I forgot to iron a blouse for tomorrow!”

And, as she candidly admits, her own domestic dishevelment (she calls it “slippage”), is part of the problem:

Eventually, after I’d spent several years living alone, the thick coats of discipline that my parents had applied to me began to peel off in large chunks, revealing a psychic infrastructure with progressive mettle fatigue. Does it really matter if I make the bed? Mmm, let me think. . . . No. I used to be incapable of leaving dishes in the sink overnight, but I gradually loosened up to the point where I could ignore them for days. So what? I’ll get to them. Is there any reason I should pick up that Lord & Taylor flyer announcing a sale that ended three months ago off the floor and throw it away? Name one. And if I’m done with the ironing board, wouldn’t it be a good idea to put it away, so I don’t have to do a subway-turnstile hip swivel every time I walk by it? I guess.

I laughed when I read that. I identify with the “creeping chaos” of Franklin’s home life. When she says, “My life wasn’t adding up; it was just piling up,” I know what she means.  

November 26, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Antony Huchette's snowy illustration for “Goings On About Town” ’s “Celebrating the Holidays” is delightful.

Antony Huchette, "Celebrating the Holidays" (2018)

2. Also in GOAT, Steve Futterman’s note on Carol Sloane at Birdland caught my eye, reminding me of Whitney Balliett’s 1987 Sloane profile, in which he describes her singing as “conversation put to music” (“Carol Sloane and Julie Wilson,” The New Yorker, April 6, 1987).

3. Frédéric Bazille’s gorgeous “Young Woman with Peonies” (1870), illustrating Hilton Als’ “At the Galleries: ‘Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today’ ” helps offset Janet Malcolm’s startling opinion, expressed in her recent “Six Glimpses of the Past,” that open peonies are “blowsy and ugly.”

Frédéric Bazille, "Young Woman with Peonies" (1870)

4. Peter Schjeldahl’s GOAT note on Dike Blair is a beauty, and is worth quoting in full:

Blair has been painting coolly beautiful little still-lifes of ordinary things in ordinary places for so long that, by now, they seem almost to paint themselves, for their own enjoyment. A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life.

5. Richard Brody reprises his brilliant capsule review of Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” in this week’s “Goings On About Town,” and why not? It’s one of his best pieces. The last line is sublime: 

And Hawks brought to fruition his own universe of hints and symbols to conjure the force that rules the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she steals his clothes, she names him “Bone,” and the mating cries of wild animals disturb the decorum of the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist in a swanky bar gives viewers an answer key.

6. Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing “Degrees of Freedom” tells about an extraordinary neuroscientific experiment in which a paralyzed woman’s brain is directly connected to a robotic arm. Khatchadourian is a superb describer of complex technological devices and procedures. His description of the implanting of the microelectrodes in the woman’s brain is unforgettable. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth.

Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” is every bit the equal of his great “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012). I enjoyed it immensely. 

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.