Let’s See, the title of Peter Schjeldahl’s “Writings on Art from The New Yorker,” falls blandly from the pursed lips of an elderly docent. Schjeldahl’s prose—full of life and humor, breezy, aphoristic, intelligent, and opinionated—allows him to strut his stuff. He is a critic who gives as much pleasure when you disagree with him as when your minds meet. He can be a whetstone on which to sharpen your own wits and complete your thoughts. He can also sum up complex matters, enjoying the brilliant flash of his insights as he does so. But he is not a “let’s see,” take-the-long-view, look-deep art writer. “I don’t get beyond my first impressions of artworks so much,” he writes, “as rerun them—having second and third first impressions.”

Schjeldahl’s statement is in response to one of the twenty questions writers and art world luminaries—Dave Hickey, Deborah Solomon, Steve Martin, and others—posed to him in lieu of an introduction. This approach draws from Schjeldahl more varied remarks than he might have included in a written introduction, while emphasizing that his opinions and ideas serve no formal agenda. He winningly admits that his “muse won’t play except at standard length columns,” and displays his talent for aphorism: “Nothing ruins a critic like pretending to care,” or, “I want to say the most interesting things that a work lets me say and nothing that it doesn’t,” and, “An utterance that sounds good isn’t always right, but one that sounds bad is inavariably wrong.”

The limitation of this entertaining collection of reviews—there is one short profile of the gallerist Marian Goodman—is that it covers nine years of major museum shows. Readers will not encounter Schjeldahl gallery-going or, with the exception of the painter John Currin, discovering artists new to him. His subjects have been chosen for him, meaning that many of his readers will have seen at least some of the same shows and will have their own opinions.

I scribbled in the margin of every one of these seventy-five essays, but have room only for highlights. I remain unconvinced that Currin and Gerhard Richter are the major painters Schjeldahl says they are. I can’t see Currin’s “subtle painterly rhetoric,” because his paint handling is often ordinary and his subject matter—hugely breasted, anatomically awkward women, for one—distract me from craft. Schjeldahl responds ecstatically to Richter’s “stillness and silence,” where I see emotion restrained to the point of withholding.

Schjeldahl is dead wrong on late Guston. The painter did not find “peace” in his late “cartoon personae,” but creative tumult. Schjeldahl is perfect on de Kooning: “The middle is where de Kooning liked to be, deploying his gifts and skills in the tactical emergencies of an uncertain battle.”

Schjeldahl began as a poet in New York, learning from John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. He writes with Ashberian clarity and O’Hara’s verve, and loves what he’s doing. His joy makes you want to go look at pictures.

William Corbett teaches writing at MIT. Hanging Loose published his new book of poems, Opening Day, in April.

To continue reading this feature in our August/September issue, you can subscribe to Art New England by clicking the "Subscribe" icon below, or purchase a copy at your local newsstand or book retailer. Additional questions? Call (617) 782-3008 and ask to be connected to our circulation department.