Let’s See

Critic Peter Schjeldahl’s passion for art runs like an erotic charge through Let’s See. Picasso, for example, leaves him “shaky with pleasure and not so much sent on my way as seduced and abandoned.” Compared to Picasso, Matisse is a less formidable formal innovator, but “at a party, it often happens that the person you find most glamorous is not the one you think of when it’s time to go home.”

This intimate approach is most successful when applied to historical or established artists, a preference Schjeldahl has indulged for the last ten years at The New Yorker. The 75 essays collected here cover work ranging from the commodity art of Holland’s Golden Age to David Hammons’s installations. Rounding out the book are a profile of the dealer Marian Goodman, a discussion of museum architecture, and opinions on Americanness and the amorality of art (as seen in Aztec death cults and the Third Reich).

A beat reporter and aspiring poet in his youth, Schjeldahl combines unfretted, elegant prose with strict attention to facts. He is white-hot on the art he loves (his reviews of Vija Celmins and Joan Mitchell are not so much evaluations as mash letters), amusing when he’s bored and most interesting when he’s not sure how he feels. He reserves a special peevishness for academics (perhaps he thinks they aren’t having enough fun), but can deliver accurate summations of contemporary theory when he has to. Along the way, he struggles to discover what combination of beauty and meaning, formal and conceptual innovation, accident and intent, have enabled great works of art to endure beyond their time. “Beauty presents a stone wall to the thinking mind,” Schjeldahl writes, but in his case not for long.