🏴He sometimes reminded me of Marvel Comics Stan Lee, not just in looks, but as in his auteur appearances in the New York artworld, pulling the virtuoso verbal strings. Pulling my strings. Every trip to my brother in San Francisco, I went to my favourite place in the world at the time, the Berkeley second-hand bookstores, with my future wife, & scavenged for art criticism & philosophy for hours. Every plane trip back I would read him. He was an away ally at a time when there were no home-grown ones. I quoted him a lot in the early days. He was definitely formative. Scrap that: completely formative. And weirdly, I quoted his less assured speaking voice over his magisterial prose. He could be clipped at times, when the poet & critic came together at a sharp point. Lingering beauty towards incision was his dance. And sure, he was autobiographical, & personal, and as Katy Siegel called him, “a feeler”. So what! He didn’t like art with a backstory. So he was a painter’s critic above all else. His “Seven Days” & “Village Voice” years were his urgent best: like Saltz; Indiana; Visceros-Faune. His New Yorker years institutionalised his writing into what can only be called live obituary. And although I still read & enjoyed & stole from him, unlike Pulitzer Saltz, he had transformed from a critic who wrote for the artist to one who wrote for his readers. In a Q&A following his lecture “The Critic as Artist” over a decade ago, he admits regret that he can’t write weekly due to the New Yorker having more critics than pages &, with less emphasis, the legendary editorial process of the magazine. His exclusive subject became the big artist, the big show in town. When I read his piece “The Art of Dying” in 2019 I was sad, & ever since momentarily waiting for the day to come, which was yesterday. His advice for artists in art school: “form a group”. His advice for art critics: “live in a big city where you can afford to lose one friend a day”. But he also said: “When you live in a cosmopolis, you have to learn to dance.” He was a sensualist-realist.—James Merrigan