Schjeldahl was the art critic for ‘The New Yorker’ for 24 years until his death in October of 2022.  As a long-time subscriber, one of the first things I did when a new issue dropped through the mail slot was to check the Table of Contents to see if there was a new review by Schjeldahl.  They were always the highlight for me (besides the cartoons, of course).

His reviews of gallery shows, museum exhibitions, and new books on artists and their work were invariably engaging.  Written from a place of deep knowledge and experience in the art world and full of fine phrasing including, invariably,  words that I not only didn’t know but which looked made up.  They weren’t.  Schjeldahl was a learned and humorous critic writing with a fine eye for the new as well as a fine appreciation for the old.  He instinctively understood the difficulty or impossibility of rendering a three dimensional world in the two dimensional plane of canvas or paper.

This collection of his writings that appeared in ‘The New Yorker’ during the last three years of his life begins with his eponymous essay written when he was diagnosed with fatal lung cancer.  Totally lacking in self-pity, the wide-ranging essay became an instant classic. When a new immunotherapy treatment resulted in an unexpected period of remission, Schjeldahl plunged back into his world of galleries, museums, and books with vigor and a heightened sense of the possible.  Writing about the greats of the past  (Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Goya) as well as the stars of the modern art scene (Mondrian, Morandi, Guston, Richter, Judd, Albers), he was also open to new forms and artists from the Whitney Biennial to gallery shows. Among the artists he introduced me to in this volume were Robert Colescott, Oscar Howe, Walter Price, and E. McKnight Ridder–all new to me and quite fascinating.

Through all of these reviews, his ironic humor and creative phrase-making make reading what could be dry stuff, engaging and interesting.  Here’s his writing on Joseph Albers’ colorful squares:  “Naming the colors that Albers used is a non-starter, even with an allowance for the physiological fact that all of our color perceptions are hopelessly subjective and indescribable–an evolutionary primitive function of our brains. (Tell me what red is. Take your time. I’ll wait.)” Or this sentence while discussing a favorite book of mine, “The Sleeve Should be Illegal”, a series of essays about works at the Frick: “What is at issue, after all, is only art, a holiday of the spirit on the crowded calendar of life lived.”    And then there’s this wonderful observation in his review of paintings and drawings by Walter Price at the Greene Naftali gallery:  “The forms of his eloquently colorful art, which mingles imagery of banal manufactured objects with evocations of fire and water, can seem at once to fly apart and somehow to precipitate ineffable harmonies. They qualify as decorative in the way the climbing a Himalayan peak might be deemed recreational.”  That’s exceptionally good writing!

If you love looking at paintings, drawings, and/or sculpture; if you like to view the history of the world through works of art; or if you enjoy incredibly good writing, try this book.  It’s not meant to be read straight through like a novel, but dipped into from time to time when you need a dose of good writing or a reminder that there is beauty in the world.  There are two previous books of Schjeldahl’s art criticism, “Let’s See” from 2008 and “Hot, Cold, Heavy Light: 100 Art Writings”. I’ve read the former and look forward to reading the latter.  Schjeldahl’s occasional visits to my world are deeply missed but we are fortuante to have these collections to still read his discerning work.