One of the great joys for any good art critic is the discovery of an artist he didn’t know. Grimmer souls than I — and, shockingly, many curators — assume that if they haven’t heard of an artist, he can’t possibly be any good. There are countless artists, though, and we can’t know everything about every one of them. Oskar Stoessel (1879–1964) did ring a bell, but Bryan Garner’s new biography, The Etcher, gives the Austrian émigré and portraitist of FDR, eight Supreme Court justices, and many more his overdue place in the sun.
Garner is a law professor at Southern Methodist University, the resident grammarian of National Review, and a lexicographer, whose Legal Writing in Plain English is essential reading for judges, especially those who think they’re kings, as well as for lovers of the English language. He has also co-written books with Justice Antonin Scalia, no slouch when it comes to good writing — or to deploying the word-stiletto between the ribs when faced with lazy, impure logic.
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