"Before I read 'The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins,' it hadn’t occurred to me that saxophonists must watch what they eat so as not to have 'an accidental elimination' while playing."

"Before I read Robert Hilburn’s biography of Randy Newman, I didn’t know Newman was kind of lying in interviews when he said his song 'Short People' was about prejudice. 'I just thought it was funny,' he said. 'The Art of Dying,' a posthumous collection of writings by the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, came out this year. He was ill with cancer when he compiled it. He wrote: 'I swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you.'"

Writes Dwight Garner, the NYT book critic and my favorite garner, in "Our Book Critics on Their Year in Reading/Jennifer Szalai, Dwight Garner and Alexandra Jacobs look back at the books that 'offered refuge from the wheels grinding in our heads'" (NYT).

"A spectacular historical show of art and documentation, 'New York: 1962-1964,' at the Jewish Museum, addresses the exact years of my tatterdemalion arrival, from the Midwest..."

"... as an ambitious poet, a jobber in journalism, and a tyro art nut. I gravitated through the time’s impecunious Lower East Side poetry scene into the booming though not yet oligarchic art world....  The eruptive early sixties launched many folks on all sorts of trajectories. After intriguing for a trice, some quickly flamed out or stalled, suggesting to me a theory, which I kept to myself, of Temporary Meaning in Art: get it while it’s hot or miss it forever, at a cost to your sophistication. Others, at the margins of fame, hung fire for unjustly belated recognition.... [F]ew women at the time were given their due, which should accrue to them in retrospect. New to me is a garish relief painting, from 1963, by the underknown Marjorie Strider, of a glamour girl chomping on a huge red radish, that could serve as an icon of Pop glee and sexual impertinence crossed with proto-feminist vexation."

Writes Peter Schjeldahl, in "When New York Ruled the World/A spectacular show of art and documentation at the Jewish Museum captures New York in 1962-64, an era of near-weekly advances in all of the arts" (The New Yorker).

I like the word "underknown." It's underused.

And "tatterdemalion."

"Nearly a year of being disheartened by the online garishness and promotional smarm of digitized images has set me up to rediscover the pungency of direct aesthetic experience."

"There can be no meaningful discourse about art divorced from that. Intellectual appreciation starves for want of it. The less you see, the dumber you get." 

Writes Peter Schjeldahl in "The Revelations of an Unlikely Pairing/In a show at Zwirner, the soft cosmos of Giorgio Morandi’s domestic tableaux is relieved and refreshed by the architectonics of Josef Albers’s squares" (The New Yorker). 

How awful is it not to be looking directly at paintings? Schjeldahl takes a strong position.

"The picture of a plastic box containing a joint is a nice bit of stoner fun, but it also evokes the glass-cube sculptures of Larry Bell, another of the artists whose work Hopper..."

"... and Hayward collected (and whom Hopper photographed). A neon Motel Alaska sign, with a glowing index finger illuminating a nocturnal streetscape, echoes a Duchampian credo that Hopper was fond of, that the artist of the future will 'point his finger at something and say it’s art.' Pointing fingers recur in the tender image of two hands—one an adult’s, one a toddler’s—hovering over a mud puddle, a moving study of Hayward and Marin."

From "Dennis Hopper's Quiet Vision of Nineteen-Sixties Hollywood" in The New Yorker.

"Hayward" is Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper's first wife. "Marin" is the daughter of Hayward and Hopper, and she is the "energetic steward of [Hopper's] photographic legacy." I'll say! Getting a New Yorker article with sentences like those quoted above is kickass stewardship.

I looked up Brooke Hayward in Wikipedia. Oddly (and speaking of photographs), the only photograph of her there includes Groucho Marx:



It's a really nice photograph of Groucho too. He and Hayward starred in "The Hold Out" on General Electric Theater (on TV in 1961). It was a serious dramatic role for Groucho, and the look on his face is not Groucho being Groucho (and thinking the serious thought, this is a seriously beautiful woman) but playing the part of a man who (according to the caption) "disapproves of his teenage daughter's (Hayward) marriage." She's quite beautiful, but nothing about her says "teenager." In fact, the actress was 24. Today, you could be 54 and look like that.

Speaking of artist-name-dropping sentences in The New Yorker and wives named Brooke, I was continuing to read "The Art of Dying/I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?" by Peter Schjeldahl, and I came across what I will declare the best really long sentence I have read in the 16-year history of writing this blog:

I went back to college in Minnesota for a year, dropped out for good, returned to the Jersey City job for three months, unwisely married, spent an impoverished and largely useless year in Paris, had a life-changing encounter with a painting by Piero della Francesca in Italy, another with works by Andy Warhol in Paris, returned to New York, freelanced, stumbled into the art world, got a divorce, which, while uncontested, entailed a solo trip to a dusty courthouse in Juárez, Mexico, past a kid saying, “Hey, hippie, wanna screw my sister?,” to receive a spectacular document with a gold seal and a red ribbon from a judge as rotund and taciturn as an Olmec idol.

The unwise marriage was not to the wife named Brooke. She arrived later. Like Hopper's Brooke, Schjeldahl's Brooke was an actress. We're told she quit acting after her best line in a movie was edited out, perhaps because Sean Connery thought it was stealing the scene from him. The line was about how nonsmokers were "in the hospital dying of nothing."

"Twenty-some years ago, I got a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir. I ended up using most of the money to buy a garden tractor."

"I failed for a number of reasons. I don’t feel interesting. I don’t trust my memories (or anyone’s memories) as reliable records of anything—and I have a fear of lying. Nor do I have much documentary material. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, because I get spooked by addressing no one. When I write, it’s to connect. I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them. Susan Sontag observed that when you have a disease people identify you with it. Fine by me! I could never sustain an expedient 'I' for more than a paragraph. (Do you imagine that writers speak 'as themselves'? No such selves exist.) Playing the Dying Man (Enter left. Exit trapdoor) gives me a persona. It’s a handy mask."

From "The Art of Dying/I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?" by Peter Schjeldahl. Schjeldahl is 77 and dying of lung cancer. This is quite a long essay — about death — but there's a highly enjoyable breeziness about it.

I chose that passage in part because it had a tractor and, then, potatoes. And because I identified with the feeling of being "beset... by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames" and that reminded me of what I was reading about Adam Driver earlier today, that he had "a tendency to try to make things better or drive myself and the other people around me crazy with the things I wanted to change or I wish I could change." I'd said, "I do think there's a great range in how minutely people examine and reexamine their failings and imagined failings."

I'm a longtime fan of "Renoir Sucks at Painting," and now here comes the New Yorker art critic, Peter Schjeldahl with "Renoir's Problem Nudes"...

... subtitled "An argument is often made that we shouldn’t judge the past by the values of the present, but that’s a hard sell in a case as primordial as Renoir’s." And I can see people at Instapundit getting exercised about about the political judgment of high art.

First, I must observe that Schjedahl doesn't mention Max Geller, called "the leader of a group called Renoir Sucks at Painting" in the 2015 Atlantic article "Why Absolutely Everyone Hates Renoir/The protestors in Boston who declared even God despises the maligned Impressionist might be on to something."

Schjedahl is speaking out now — 4 years after "Renoir Sucks" peaked — because there's a new exhibit, "Renoir: The Body, the Senses." He writes:

The reputation of the once exalted, still unshakably canonical, Impressionist has fallen on difficult days. Never mind the affront to latter-day educated tastes of a painting style so sugary that it imperils your mind’s incisors; there’s a more burning issue. 

The art historian Martha Lucy, writing in the show’s gorgeous catalogue, notes that, “in contemporary discourse,” the name Renoir has “come to stand for ‘sexist male artist.’ ” Renoir took such presumptuous, slavering joy in looking at naked women—who in his paintings were always creamy or biscuit white, often with strawberry accents, and ideally blond—that, Lucy goes on to argue, the tactility of the later nudes, with brushstrokes like roving fingers, unsettles any kind of gaze, including the male. I’ll endorse that, for what it’s worth.

Lucy makes the painting sound better than it is.  I don't see what's bad about a painter of nudes being sensuously involved with the fleshly characters he's depicting. Why leap to calling it sexist? My guess? It's way to justify the exhibition of this insipid stuff. It's not bad painting; it's bad politics — and that infuses the show with modern-day relevance.

Here, take a look:

Schjedahl writes, "Renoir’s women strum no erotic nerves in me," and he complains about "the carnal tapioca, the vacant gazes, the fatuous frolic." But:

Everything in Renoir that is hard to take and almost impossible to think about, because it makes no concessions to intelligence, affirms his stature as a revolutionary artist. 

"Almost impossible." The reason I find it hard to think about is that I'm not sure what is meant by making "no concessions to intelligence." It cannot be that Renoir is intellectually challenging! I think it must mean the opposite, that Renoir didn't have any intellectual aspirations.

He stood firmly against the past in art and issued a stark challenge to its future. 

Renoir doesn't seem firm and stark at all. He's more... gelatinous. But Schjedahl is probably just saying that Renoir distinguished himself from the earlier academic style and later artists distinguished themselves from Renoir.

You can’t dethrone him without throwing overboard the fundamental logic of modernism as a sequence of jolting aesthetic breakthroughs, entitled to special rank on the grounds of originality and influence. 

He belongs on the time line. That doesn't mean he belongs on a throne.