'Art's Willing Executioner'

THE NEW YORK SUN
June 4, 2008

'Art's Willing Executioner'
by James Panero

A review of 'Let's See' by Peter Schjeldahl

Art critics are like thoroughbred horses: They risk breaking down after a short period on the track. It came as a surprise, then, when the New Yorker appointed Peter Schjeldahl as its critic in residence 10 years ago: By 1998, Mr. Schjeldahl had already been around the course more than once. Born in Fargo, N.D., in 1942, he had been writing for the Village Voice since 1980, and before that for ARTnews, Seven Days, and the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. Back in the late 1960s, the New Yorker's hiring of the Abstract Expressionist critic Harold Rosenberg came as a temporary reprieve from the slaughterhouse. For Mr. Schjeldahl, one wondered if the job would be a similarly green pasture in which to natter on into oblivion.

But Mr. Schjeldahl found his second wind at the New Yorker. He has regularly filed tuneful columns of readable stories with tight structure and interesting twists of phrase informed by his years as both a journalist and a poet. (By the 1960s, Mr. Schjeldahl was already a published poet in the New York School; he abandoned poetry around 1980 to pursue criticism.) Mr. Schjeldahl's latest volume of selected writing, 75 essays from a decade at the New Yorker running through 2007, has now been published as "Let's See" (Thames & Hudson, 256 pages, $29.95).

Those 10 years make for an interesting case study of art, one framed by the unprecedented rise in the market value of postwar and contemporary work — now a global infatuation — and an art-world giddiness that seems untouched, or is perhaps even encouraged, by crises in the economy and the war on terror. The art critic of today must function as a gossip columnist, a stock analyst, and a lifestyle guru. Mr. Schjeldahl plays these roles with brio: At the New Yorker, he has kept up with the art of his times all too well.

At its best, Mr. Schjeldahl's craft produces one-liners that are pleasing and illustrative: "[Gauguin] had the kind of petty run-ins with local authorities that dog arrogant misfits in resort towns everywhere." "One doesn't so much look at a Friedrich as inhale it, like nicotine." Lucian Freud "is less a painter than 'the Painter,' performing the rites of his medium in the sacristy of his studio." "All Picasso's pictures are dirty." Such zingers are ready for Bartlett's.

But the anthology left me wondering how Mr. Schjeldahl's achievements, many but minor, stack up against his shortcomings as a responsible critic. It is not so much that Mr. Schjeldahl has bad taste. As a libertarian sensualist, he is rather preconditioned not to have taste at all, or at least to have sublimated his taste for the purposes of having his readers "engage with art of every kind," no matter how terrible or reprehensible the art might be. In fact, Mr. Schjeldahl belittles taste here as only a "sediment of aesthetic experience, commonly somebody else's." It is interesting to note, however, that in disregarding taste, he heads right for the tasteless — leading me to suspect that Mr. Schjeldahl knows what good taste is all along but chooses to ignore it.

At times, this tastelessness can be unnerving but relatively harmless. Mr. Schjeldahl's ceaseless promotion of the histrionic contemporary artist John Currin, for instance, would put a publicist to shame. He calls Mr. Currin "as important an emerging painter as today's art world provides," whose "virtuosity has overshadowed that of everybody else in the field." He also manages to name-drop Mr. Currin into essays where you would least expect it, including a review of El Greco, and one of Victorian fairy paintings.

Over the past decade, about the last thing the overheated art market needed was more praise for artists like Mr. Currin. But Mr. Schjeldahl sent his coals to Newcastle — or rather, to the Gagosian Gallery — at the expense of endlessly more deserving and underappreciated artists.

Too often in the decade covered here, Mr. Schjeldahl followed the money rather than good conscience. Faced with market forces, he bids "goodbye to critics functioning as scouts, umpires, scorers, clubhouse cronies, and occasional coaches." Rather than regret the loss of critical authority, he welcomes collectors to the driver's seat. "Preposterous amounts of money seem to concentrate the mind," he says. Yet considering the overvaluing of artists like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and yes, John Currin, the facts just don't bear this out. I doubt Mr. Schjeldahl even believes it.

Far more damning than Mr. Schjeldahl's abdication of critical judgment, however, is his embrace of art used for violent ends. Mr. Schjeldahl came out of the Generation of 1968 with a weakness for violence, which often translates into an affection for fascist and Nazi imagery. He rightly bristles at politicized art, but I find his willingness to aestheticize politics just as disturbing. (There is a difference between the two: Walter Benjamin famously wrote that communism pursued the former strategy, while fascism adored the latter.)

"Art love does not accord with good politics, good morals," Mr. Schjeldahl said in a 2004 interview. "Hitler had rather good taste, certainly in architecture and design. I think the Nazi flag was one of the greatest design coups in history."

Such enthusiasm, a targeted irresponsibility, gets repeated more than once in the current collection. Mr. Schjeldahl describes "October 18, 1977" by Gerhard Richter, another son of the'60s, as "a suite of fifteen somber paintings [belonging] to a tiny category: great political art." Yet Richter's hagiographic icons (not all that well painted, by the way) simply mythologized murderous German thugs.

In fact, Mr. Schjeldahl reserves his highest praise for Der Führer himself, whom he describes as "masterly once he found his métier." Hitler, Mr. Schjeldahl informs us in a review of Nazi art, "embraced cleanly abstracted and geometric styles, which later informed his own design work (notably the stunning Nazi flag) and his shrewd patronage of the gifted youngsters Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer." I have deliberated over what is the most odious part of this remark, and I have settled on the use of the word "youngsters" to describe Riefenstahl and Speer. For Mr. Schjeldahl, it's as if Nazi propaganda was little more than after-school high jinks committed by the Little Rascals.

Mr. Schjeldahl's disagreement with the curator Deborah Rothschild in this same review is telling. He begins with a quote from Ms. Rothschild: "The union of malevolence and beauty can occur; we must remain vigilant against its seductive power." That sounds pretty reasonable, but Mr. Schjeldahl offers a quick retort: "I disagree. We must remain vigilant against malevolence, and we should resign ourselves to the truth that beauty is fundamentally amoral."

Why a critic should feel obligated to accept and even champion beauty in the service of wickedness is incomprehensible to me. Mr. Schjeldahl embodies the critic as an accomplice. At his best, he is gleefully sly. At his worst, he is art's willing executioner.

'The Art of the Art Biography'

THE UNIVERSITY BOOKMAN
Spring 2008

'Sketches of Painterly Lives: The Art of the Art Biography'
by JAMES PANERO

Recently I met up with an agent to discuss my next book. What about writing a biography of an artist?, he suggested. What about the research?, I responded. As an editor and art critic for a monthly magazine, I just couldn’t see clearing my calendar for a decade. Not to worry, the agent said: Academics do research; writers write biographies.

Giorgio Vasari, the great biographer of the Italian Renaissance, would have most likely agreed. His Lives of the Artists of 1550 was notoriously loose with the facts. Never one for scholarly remove, he also heralded his fellow Florentines at the expense of Venice: We would have to wait until the second edition to read of Titian. But Vasari was both a painter and a writer. With his unique temperament he applied the biographer’s craft of the classical age to the artists of the Renaissance: from Cimabue in the 13th century through the artists of the Quattrocento to Il Divino, the divine Michelangelo of the 16th century. “I have striven not only to say what these craftsmen have done,” Vasari writes in Lives, “but also . . . to distinguish the better from the good and the best from the better, and to note with no small diligence the methods, the feeling, the manners, the characteristics, and the fantasies of the painters and sculptors.” Lives is more than a parade of the facts. It is an artistic statement and a luxuriant as fine as any Italian fresco. Think of John Richardson’s gossipy defense of Picasso, only applied to the Florentine Renaissance.

Vasari called biography “that which truly teaches men to live and makes them wise, and which, besides the pleasure that comes from seeing past events as present, is the true end of that art.” By following his own advice, Vasari wrote the narrative of an age and the benchmark of the genre.

The Journal of Eugene Delacroix is one work of literature that brought Vasari to the modern era. Walter Pach, the great, early American writer of modernism, translated from the French in my 1946 edition of this fascinating memoir. Delacroix was anything but a hopeless, breathless romantic. His journal carries forward the biographer’s art and, like Lives, comes off as great conversation. Here Delacroix deliberates on everything from the importance of serious painting to his next meeting with Chopin. In an entry from 1847, Delacroix dashes off the following calculations:

All the great problems of art were solved in the sixteenth century. . . . The perfection of drawing, of grace, and of composition, in Raphael . . . Of color, and of chiaroscuro, in Correggio, in Titian, in Paul Veronese . . . Rubens arrives, having already forgotten the traditions of grace and of simplicity. Through his genius he creates an ideal once more.

Here he is on Monday, October 23, 1849: “I read the terrifying list of the riches, of the monuments of all kinds which disappeared from the churches during the Revolution. It would be curious to write something on this subject in order to edify people as to the most evident result of revolutions.” And here he is on Sunday, March 11, 1849: “Beethoven’s compositions are in general too long.” This is a story of art we can relate to, one with voice and a soul.

My problem with many of the long, single-artist biographies of today is that they tend to contain very little art.

My problem with many of the long, single-artist biographies of today is that they tend to contain very little art. You cannot quote a painting the way you can a novel, a letter, or a line of poetry. To compensate, modern-day biographers might toss in everything about an artist but the kitchen sink. Or we get a clutch of color reproductions. But without direct contact with the work, in the safety of trivial observation, the art biography now lacks heart.

Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist, escaped Marx only to be done in by Freud. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, who won the Pulitzer Prize for De Kooning in 2005, built up their story of the artist around a tyrannical mother and a hardscrabble upbringing in Rotterdam.

Stevens and Swan are two of the best magazine critics around, but in their book they strangely make few distinctions between good and bad de Kooning. In compiling their document of facts, a chronicle of de Kooning’s dalliances and alcoholism written in excessive detail, the writers also abdicate to others their responsibilities as critics. How the authors feel about de Kooning is left an open question. Here is a book where I wondered what ever happened to Vasari’s exhortation “to distinguish the better from the good and the best from the better.”

Henri Matisse was the 20th century’s great colorist; this we know. But what we did not know, until now, is that the abundant joys in his work emerged out of an armored spirit. “What I want is an art of balance, purity, an art that won’t disturb or trouble people. I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my paintings.”

In her two volume biography of Matisse, Hilary Spurling offers an impassioned defense of Matisse that would make Vasari proud. She writes in Matisse the Master, her second volume: “The longstanding, at one time almost universal, dismissal of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century as essentially decorative and superficial is based, at any rate in part, on a simplistic response to the poise, clarity, and radiant colour of Matisse’s work that fails to take account of the apprehensive and at times anguished emotional sensibility from which it sprang.”

Spurling can herself fall victim to an overabundance of detail. But thanks to her we now have two thoroughly researched volumes as a corrective to critical failures, by a British biographer who eschews both academic nonsense and art-world prejudice. And by recognizing the connections between Matisse’s paint treatment and the textiles manufactured in his hometown of Le Cateau—observations that became the subject of a marvelous exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005—Spurling teaches us how to see Matisse in a new way.

Finally, one recent book demonstrates that you don’t have to write at length to get art biography just right. In just over 200 pages of Marc Chagall, recently published by Schocken, the writer Jonathan Wilson has crafted an artfully written art biography that captures its subject in the same kaleidoscopic palette as Chagall painted. This is not a biography that settles on describing an artist’s life. It is a book that looks out from the artist’s work.

“The man in the air in my paintings . . . is me,” Chagall said to an interviewer in 1950. “It used to be partially me. Now it is entirely me. I’m not fixed anyplace. I have no place of my own.” In the air, floating over the mundane non-essentials of an artist’s life, that’s where Wilson finds Chagall.

Wilson begins his book with the acknowledgment that “sophisticated art aficionados weren’t supposed to love or even like Chagall. His lovers and his rabbis, his massive bouquets and his violins were equally dubious, equally cloying, not kitsch, but living somewhere dangerously close to that ballpark.” Chagall deserves more, and Wilson proves it. As an artist, Chagall discovered a unique resonance between the modern Jewish Diaspora and the modernist condition. Born Moishe Shagal in 1877, in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, Chagall utilized the color-and-line principles of the French avant-garde to document the “twilight of a Jewish world.” Two hundred pages later, by engaging the style of Chagall’s work, Wilson returns his subject from the dustbin of college poster art to the skis above Vitebsk, where he belongs.

Russell Kirk, no stranger to writing about art, believed that biography could “apprehend the spirit of an age better through the lives of its great personages than through chronicles of events.” An art biography that takes flight, Marc Chagall brings Vasari, and Kirk, up to the present day. Now where’s my agent when I need him?

Eat, Pray, Love

Dara writes:

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the best-selling book of spiritual exploration, Eat, Pray, Love, has a remarkably engaging voice. Rarely does the conversational tone translate effectively into prose. But Ms. Gilbert nails it. Her style is a marvel of humor, sassiness, and folksiness. In a word: irresistible. And why should one resist? Readers haven't, as her book has sold a gazillion copies.

Good for her...and for Jhumpa Lahiri? I noticed an interesting similarity between Gilbert's book and Lahiri's latest. Both end on a beach--the former near Bali and the latter in Thailand--around the time of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Lahiri's relentlessly fatalistic outlook dictates that the catastrophe will claim one of her characters, while Gilbert's doe-eyed optimism requires that her characters remain safe. Is there any way Lahiri was rebutting Gilbert in the end of her work? Probably not. But I like to contemplate the possibility.

Lahiri, and Indian American writer, has her antennae up for racism. Gilbert devotes one third of her book to time she spent in an Ashram in India--time during which she describes Indian culture as delightful and Indian girls as eminently charming. Her descriptions are a tad prone to caricature--which perhaps irked Lahiri? Perhaps she wanted to puncture the pretty bubble Gilbert draws around South Asia.

The similar descriptions that conclude their books struck me. Lahiri's character Kaushik lowers himself over the side of the boat and "lets go." Later we learn the tsunami claimed him. Gilbert--herself a character in her book--and her lover Felipe dip into the water from their boat and stride safely to shore. Many people dismiss Gilbert's book as whiny chick-lit. Perhaps Lahiri is one of those who can resist Gilbert's charms? Shunning fantasy, Lahiri plants a flag in the territory of realism.