My art engine has finally turned over after a week-long stall. Here’s what’s I’ve been up to:
– I hung the Teachout Museum’s latest acquisition, Neil Welliver’s Night Scene, a thirteen-color woodcut (my first) made in 1982. I spent a pleasant hour yesterday afternoon standing on a rickety ladder, juggling three other prints in order to find exactly the right spot for “Night Scene.” Figuring out where to hang a piece of art is half the fun of owning it. (Well, maybe not half, but you know what I mean.)
As it happens, I already own one Welliver print, an unsigned lithograph called “Canada Geese,” so I rehung that one in my sleeping loft, which strikes me as the very height of low-budget luxury!
– I read George R. Gaddis’ Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America. Austin was the man who turned Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, long a sleepy backwater far from the beaten path of even the most assiduous museumgoers, into a major center of activity for the modern movement in America. (It was solely because of Austin that the world premiere of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts took place at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and he also played a key role in bringing George Balanchine to this country.)
Gaddis’ book is solid and informative, but I’m struck by a major failure of interpretation on his part: he doesn’t seem to have understood that the common thread running through many, perhaps most of Chick Austin’s innovations, from Four Saints to his twin passions for the neo-romanticists and seventeenth-century baroque art, was his taste for camp. (I’m not absolutely sure, but I don’t think the word “camp” appears anywhere in Magician of the Modern.) This strikes me as close to inexcusable, especially given the fact that his book is reasonably frank about Austin’s bisexuality. While you certainly don’t have to be gay to grasp such matters–I’m as straight as a stick–it’s hard to imagine a homosexual writer making the same mistake.
– I’ve taken of late to viewing movies in half-hour chunks of in-between time, a practice facilitated by my digital video recorder. Last night I finished watching Howard Zieff’s Hearts of the West, a sweet little spoof of the “B” westerns of the Thirties. Jeff Bridges, the star, looked impossibly youthful in 1975. It’s hard to imagine that he would someday metamorphose into the Mitchumesque star of noir-flavored films like The Fabulous Baker Boys (which I adore).
– Today I’m nibbling at They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray’s 1949 film version of Edward Anderson’s Depression-era novel Thieves Like Us. It was Ray’s first movie, the only one of his major films I hadn’t seen (it’s not available on DVD, and I’m not sure there was ever a VHS version, either–thank you, Turner Classic Movies!). More as I make my way through it, but I’m already dazzled by Ray’s pioneering use of a helicopter to film the opening sequence. It’s excitingly rough and jumpy, nothing like the slick, swoopy aerial cinematography to which we’ve long since become accustomed.
– Now playing on iTunes: Bill Evans’ 1977 trio version of “You Must Believe in Spring,” newly reissued on CD. Mmmm.
Enough for now. Alex Ross will be knocking on my door at any moment for a private view of the Teachout Museum. This reminds me to remind you that Alex now has a Web site, The Rest Is Noise, which I added to the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column last night. It’s not quite a blog (though it seems to be evolving into one willy-nilly), but it does contain links to Alex’s New Yorker essays on music, which I never fail to find provocative and stimulating.
After lunch, it’s back to the grindstone (I’m in the process of updating my playgoing schedule for the next couple of months), after which I’ll be heading down to the Atlantic Theater to see Jay Johnson’s The Two and Only, a one-man play by and about a ventriloquist, which I suppose means that it’s really a two-man play, right? Either way, you’ll be reading about it in The Wall Street Journal at some point in the near future.
In the meantime, enjoy the weather–I see warm sunshine out my office window, and hope to experience it at first hand sooner or later!