There isn’t a single subject that Adam Gopnik’s prose can’t bring to life. As staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986, he has written about practically everything, including, just in the last year, Proust, gun control, the Beatles, and the Marquis de Lafayette. But it’s when he starts writing about art that things get particularly delectable: “the runny, the spilled…the lipstick-traces-left-on-the-kleenex” life and style of Helen Frankenthaler; “the paint, laid on with a palette knife, that deliciously resembles cake frosting” technique of Florine Stettheimer; “the monumental and mock-monumental that tango in the imagination” of Claes Oldenburg.

And perhaps the reason why Gopnik, who has a graduate degree in art history from NYU’s Institute of Fine Art, is able to write about art with such lucidness and latitude is that he isn’t just knowledgeable about art; he adores it. The charge, the perfume, the misty spray of the orange peel that is evoked when you stand in the Arena Chapel - everything that, if you’re not careful, becoming a professional in your creative field will neutralize.

We talked about being docents in large museums, how to hook your audience, how to write a poem about art, Vladimir Tatlin, Steve Martin, Stephen Sondheim, the incompatible forces that create beauty, and the noble truths of art creating and art writing: eye to hand, and I to you.

Adam Gopnik has authored numerous books and has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. During his tenure at the magazine, he has written fiction, humor, book reviews, personal essays, Profiles, and reported pieces from abroad. Gopnik has won three National Magazine Awards, for essays and for criticism, and also the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March of 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2021 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur. He lectures widely, and, in 2011, delivered the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s fiftieth-anniversary Massey Lecture. His musical, “Our Table,” opened in 2017, at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven, and his one-man storytelling show, “The Gates,” played at the Public Theatre in New York.

Images Referenced: