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.

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.