Peter Schjeldahl Books

In his introduction, Rob. Storr describes Schjeldahl as fashion's 'watchful scribe'. It's a fine tribute and sets out what distinguishes Schjeldahl as a particular type of poet/ critic in the romantic tradition of Baudelaire and Whitman. So don't pick him up anticipating reams of jargon and esoteric art analysis, or structuralst theorizing. He speaks smart, 'for the fan in the stands'. I never knew Schjeldahl until he came to visit and travel to Uluru with me in 1986. It was a totally engaging 3 or 4 days and I became a fan of his enthusiasms as they then appeared, mostly in Art in America. I scrambled in our library for back issues to catch up on this infectious and radiating intelligence. At the time, he was very big on Kiefer, and in fact, suggested I fly south to Adelaide and catch the German show with its crop of current maestros, then current at the gellery of S. Australia, curated by the indefatigable, Ron Radford. Fortunately, most of his best writing til 1990 is packed between these covers, and his piece on Kiefer is among them. It's his gift and passion that even people I neither know much about, or do not care for, can be resurrected under Peter's gaze. I don't share his enthusiasms for Schnabel, Warhol, Nauman, Salle, Polke or Koons for instance. But Schjeldahl is generous with his praise and perspicacious with his more cautious notes, never dismissive or superior. This last quality is demonstrated in his defence of Rothko from the bullying Bobby Hughes. His caning of Wyeth's 'Helga' series pops the balloon on Helga hype and delivers uncharacteristically cool truths about his art being completed by reproduction and of Wyeth's place as'mass reassurer and avatar of the Art myth'. To read Schjeldahl is to be refreshed. He's still at it and enjoying writing for the New York Times. A recent review of Hillary Spurling's great volumes on Matisse will surely make it into his next collection.

This is a collection of reviews and essays written by the Oscar Wilde of art critics. Known for his witty and engaging column at the Village Voice, and his more recent post at the New Yorker, Schjeldahl has also contributed pieces to the New York Times, and most of the major art magazines. From the abstract expressionists to the simulationists, this book focuses mainly on the artists and movements of the last half of the 20th century.

I loved this book. It was informative, intelligently written, and highly entertaining. I found Schjeldahl to be a rare critic who is genuinely excited by the work he sees and admiring of the many artists he writes about. He may not always like the work, but he always gives it a fair and honest review. In turn, he opened up my mind to the possibilities of what art is and can be.

Il montrait sa soeur Sophie qui mourait jeune, entouree de toute la famille. Mais il montrait chacun a l'age qu'il avait a l'epoque de la peinture, et non pas a la mort de la jeune fille. Car la douleur durait a jamais et unifiait toute la famille pour toujours. Puis avec des tetes d'une femme et d'un homme, gravees et multicolorees, il cessait de suivre le style repandu des japonais de faire une seule couleur d'un seul troncon de bois. Son prefere de tout son oeuvre etait Sick Child II, en tant que sa premiere lithographie en couleur. Mais son Scream est le plus reconnu, en tant que l'image la plus frappante du 20eme siecle.

He was bound determined not to paint people reading and women knitting, but instead to show people who breathed emotions into his darkly suggestive prints. "Death in the sickroom" showed family members at the ages when they were painted, not when his sister Sophie died; it expressed unity in grief as one of death's longlasting effects by seemingly overlapping planes flowing together across bleakly empty areas, starkly B&W contrasts, and stiffly posed mourners frozen in misery. "The mirror" heads of a disembodied man and woman was his first woodcut to give up the Japanese method of printing each color with a separate woodblock; instead, he jigsawed blocks into pieces according to compositional design, linked each piece with a different color, and put everything back together into a multicolored print. He considered his "Sick child II" his most important print: his first color lithograph, it focused on the diseased upper chest and the head in profile facing right against a large pillow in order to gaze with tragically meditative resignation into the flatly patterned looming void on the far right. However, his "Scream" became the most compelling image for the late twentieth century: it expressed terror before the universe by powerfully decorative lines reverberating through the starkly opposed black lines and bleakly white voids of pulsing land and sky. Elizabeth Prelinger and Michael Parke-Taylor have applied reader-friendly illustrations and text to their catalog of the Vivian and David Campbell exhibition. Their SYMBOLIST PRINTS OF EDVARD MUNCH goes down good with PROGRESSIVE PRINTMAKERS by Warrington Colescott and Arthur Hove, PRINTS AND PRINTMAKING by Antony Griffiths, EDVARD MUNCH by Josef Paul Hodin, and THE PRINT IN THE WESTERN WORLD by Linda C Hults.

Wonderful book but nowhere does the discripton indicate that the book is not in English. It is in Geman. If you don't read German and want to just look at the pictures then buy it.

Although the "Centerfolds" were shot back in the 1980's it took until now for them to be all collected in a book collection. They are some of Cindy Sherman's best work and they are presented beautifully in this very wide shaped book. The book was hard to get a hold of as it was specially produced by an art gallery, but as a fan it is a great addition to the "Complete Film Stills" book. Highly recommended.

Caveat emptor: Two books dated 2003 have the title "Cindy Sherman Centerfolds." Both contain 12 landscape-orientation self-portraits of the photographer made up and dressed up as adolescent girls that were originally shot in 1981. But the books' designs and contents are different.

The first one was produced as a limited edition of 1850 which was apparently recalled. It has an incorrect ISBN of 0970909039*, is 29.5cm wide and 15cm high, has a light blue cloth cover, is 44 pages in length, was designed by "Honest, NYC," and was printed in Iceland. The photos are presented full-bleed on the right-hand pages, with blank pages facing them. An essay by Lisa Phillips in a rather large font is interspersed among the photographs. The captions (untitled #92, #87, #85, #88, #86, #89, #95, #93, #94, #90, #96, and #91a) are at the end. The dust jacket features orangish Untitled #93 with Sherman as a "blond with red rimmed eyes and matted hair tucked under rumpled black sheets" (per the essay).

The later regular edition (ISBN 0970909020) is 22cm wide by 25cm high, has a black cloth cover, is 50 pages in length, was designed by "Stella Bugbee, Giampietro + Smith," and was printed in Germany. In this book the Phillips essay is found in normal-size font on pages 5-7. The twelve photographs (untitled #92, #87, #91, #85, #88, #95, #89, #86, #93, #94, #90, and #96) follow on two-page spreads with white around them. Pages 32-47 have 1981-1982 essays by Peter Schjeldahl, Roberta Smith, and Andy Grundberg. The dust jacket has a detail of bluish Untitled #92 with Sherman in a tartan skirt and white blouse.

Which is better? If you are a book collector, you'll want the wide-format limited edition due to its rarity and "artistic" presentation. But those interested in Sherman's art are better served by the regular edition for several reasons. For one, it has more text than the limited edition. For another, the presence of the book's gutter in each photo in the regular edition gives a more "centerfold-like" feeling (although I suppose fold-out photos would have been even more effective). Finally, when I compared the photos in the two editions, the ones in the limited edition were slightly cropped, the worst example being Untitled #86 on page 17 in which you cannot see Sherman's eyes at the far right.

If you're unsure which edition a bookseller has for sale, use the "Contact This Seller" feature in the "Used & New" section of Amazon.com!

* That ISBN belongs to "Laurie Simmons Photographs 1978/79."

Cindy Sherman is now an established household art figure, a photographer who spends her life costuming herself and arranging her settings to recreate or reinterpret other people both famous in art history and in other arenas. These works are no longer shocking or startling, but the twelve 'Centerfolds' in this fine little book show her at an early stage in a career that has since burgeoned.

As far as the Centerfolds themselves, each is a self portrait in different but drab dress and moods. While the concept of viewing the standard plain woman in the guise of what is usually associated as a Playboy etc venture of sizzling sensuality is a solid idea, the photographs themselves tend toward a sameness that makes them less interesting than her current work.

Still, this was a pioneering commission by Artforum magazine that never made it to print and we are fortunate to see the images that found no home until the museums sought them out due to her growing fame. It is another moment in history that bears observing. Grady Harp, May 05