Writing with short, incisive clarity, Peter Schjeldahl has examined visual art with clear eyes and no artspeak for the New Yorker since 1988. One hundred of his thoughtful essays, none of them prolix and some shorter than a single page, are collected in 'Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light.' His interests span ancient Greece and Old Masters through Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He gets to the point with a sharpened pen. On Pablo Picasso, who crowed “I'm God! I’m God!” to the women in his portraits, Schjeldahl writes, “It must have killed him to die."
