Schjeldahl and Art

"A great critic," according to Oscar Wilde, "is susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us." So it is with Schjeldahl, a man burdened with the kind of sensibility that in others turns crippling. "Give me a Rembrandt in a subway station toilet and a flashlight and I'm happy," he told me over a diner hamburger. The owner of a contrarian, prickly personality a friend described as "aggressively shy," the 65-year-old critic has seen his share of difficulties: a bit of hard-earned penury, a divorce, problems with booze, a lifetime spent nursing his olympically formed doubt. About the latter, Schjeldahl quotes De Kooning: "No fear but a lot of trembling." Incredibly for a veteran of the trenches, his "trembling" extends to writing at length. "I'm a river navigator," he told me later over a walk in Central Park. "I need the bank behind me and one in front. Over 2,000 words and I'm toast."
The only national chronicler of the expanding circus of art, Schjeldahl has spent four decades writing for publications like ARTnews, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and The Village Voice. At The New Yorker since 1998, Schjeldahl transitioned from writing weekly to bimonthly copy, while zeroing in on his favorite subjects. There is painting, on which he has had a schoolboy crush since ogling Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto in Italy (he describes a second life-changing epiphany, seeing Warhol's flower paintings in Paris, as "someone kicking open the doors of a blast furnace"), and beauty, a concept he describes as "the A-bomb of art criticism." "Paintings are the longest, most important vacations from myself," Schjeldahl volunteers with characteristic frankness. On aesthetics, he can be just as personal: "Beauty is as important to the organism as digestion."
A writer whose reviews have, on occasion, been scathing enough to peel the bark off a tree, Schjeldahl is a critic best known for his enthusiasms. A carrier of a sharply calibrated style of compression—"two ideas per sentence," he has said—Schjeldahl's writing acquires special probity when it turns to subjects dear to his heart. A Velázquez portrait ("The textures are an express elevator to heaven"), Cindy Sherman's photographs ("This is photography as one-frame moviemaking"), fireworks ("an everlasting miracle of human invention")—these and other favorite things are capable of moving him to some of the highest expressions of pleasure on record. Self-exposures as much as pointed raves, Schjeldahl's staunchly intelligible passions constitute the most immediate, articulate, unapologetically delightful takes on contemporary art we have.