Sanford Schwartz's "Artist Stories" - I

This summer, I’m immersed in Sanford Schwartz’s great Artist Stories (2025), a rich Godiva chocolate box of his best work from the last twenty years or so. Schwartz is one of my heroes. I’ve been reading him since 1978, when his wonderful “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book” appeared in The New Yorker. That piece is included in Schwartz’s first collection, The Art Presence (1982) – one of my favorite books. 

Schwartz’s new collection contains many old friends – pieces I first read in The New York Review of Books, e.g., “Eakins” (originally titled “The Philadelphia Story”), “The Genius of the Family” (on Vuillard), “Ladies in Satin” (on Gerard ter Borch), “Peter Doig” (originally titled “Enchanted & Ominous”), “Louise Bourgeois” (originally “Daring and Disturbing”), “A Walker in the City” (originally "An Eye on the Tremors," on Peter Schjeldahl), and the brilliant “The World at Night” (originally "The Drama of the World at Night," on George Ault). 

I’m currently about one-quarter of the way through Artist Stories. My favorite piece so far is “Eakins,” a review of the Metropolitan Museum’s 2002 exhibition of the work of Thomas Eakins. Here’s a sample:

In the Max Schmitt painting, set on a warm, sunny, autumn day on the Schuylkill River, with our sculling champ momentarily drifting by and other rowers and a steamboat in the distance, every element in the superbly designed picture—the wood boat; the stone house on the shore; the steel bridges in the distance; the water; the far distant riverbank; the now leafless branches; the very clouds, which are as elegantly shaped as the boat—is felt as oil paint itself and as the exact, tangible texture of the thing being represented.

That’s a description of Eakins’s superb Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871). Notice Schwartz’s appeal to our sense of touch (“felt as oil paint itself and as the exact, tangible texture of the thing being represented”). He’s highly conscious of tactile values – one of the reasons I admire his writing. 

I’ll post more of my responses to this delectable book as I go along. Today’s note is just an introduction. 

Thomas Eakins, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871)