Archives for August 12, 2008

Mrs. T and I are working our way from Maine to New Hampshire to Massachusetts, then back to Maine. We spent Sunday night in Portland, where we stayed at the Pomegranate Inn, a bed-and-breakfast that is also a gallery. Having spent the preceding weekend on a two-masted schooner whose quarters are close, we were glad to be able to spread out and relax. The innkeeper left an attractive assortment of books in our room, including William Faulkner’s The Hamlet, Graham Greene’s The Lost Childhood, John Marquand’s So Little Time, and a folio of Adolph Gottlieb’s pictographs, and we ate our breakfast crêpes beneath an acrylic abstract by a Maine painter named Honour Mack. Pretty arty, huh?
From Portland we drove to Manchester, where we spent the day visiting the Currier Museum of Art and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Zimmerman House, which was built in 1950 and is now owned by the museum. The Currier’s small but choice permanent collection includes a dozen noteworthy paintings by Arthur Dove, Adolph Gottlieb, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, Joan Mitchell, Jules Olitski, Mark Rothko, Charles Sheeler, Andrew Wyeth, and Neil Welliver, all of which are on display and very much worth seeing. The crowning glory of the museum, however, is the Zimmerman House, a flawlessly executed specimen of Wright’s Usonian style that was bequeathed to the Currier by its original owners, whose ashes were scattered in the backyard garden. One of the docents who showed us around the house grew up in the neighborhood–she still lives there–and told us that the local children referred to their ultra-modern home as “the monkey house” when it was under construction.
Not only is the house in near-mint condition, but it contains all of the original furniture that Wright designed for the Zimmermans, including a custom-crafted four-rack music stand. Isadore Zimmerman and his wife Lucille were both serious amateur musicians who hosted concerts in their living room, and Wright’s stand permits the members of a string quartet to play facing one another. Of the twelve Wright houses that I’ve stayed in or toured, this is the one that I find most aesthetically perfect, though the Seth Peterson Cottage runs it a close second (Mrs. T prefers the Muirhead Farmhouse).
As if all that weren’t exciting enough for one day, it so happens that yet another Wright house is located only a few blocks away from the Zimmerman House. The Kalil House remains in private hands but is easily visible from the street, and if you should happen to have $1,900,000 to spare, you can buy it. (Go here to see listings for the seventeen other Wright houses that are currently on the market.) Alas, Mrs. T and I forgot to bring our checkbook, so we settled for looking longingly out the windows of the tour bus that drove us from the Currier to the Zimmerman House and back again.
I’m playing semi-hooky from my duties as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, by which I mean that I haven’t been to any shows since last Tuesday, when I saw Hair in Central Park. This morning, though, I’ll be writing a column about Shakespeare Santa Cruz (which we visited last weekend) and the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of Around the World in 80 Days (which I saw a couple of weeks ago) in Room 3 of the Bedford Village Inn. As soon as it’s finished, Mrs. T and I will eat breakfast, pack our bags, hop in the car, and pay a visit to Paul Moravec, my operatic collaborator, who’s been holed up at the MacDowell Colony for the past few weeks. Then we’ll go see the Peterborough Players do Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which was written in (and about) Peterborough, New Hampshire.
From there we head south…but that’s enough for today. Breakfast awaits!

Should you happen to be anywhere near the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth this month, I strongly suggest that you pay a visit to Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism, a show consisting of forty-odd canvases painted by Hartley in New Mexico between 1918 and 1924. I made enthusiastic mention of Hartley’s little-known New Mexico paintings when I blogged last week about my recent visit to Santa Fe, and one of the images I posted was a reproduction of Valley Road, which belongs to the Cincinnati Art Museum but is currently part of the Amon Carter show.
I wish I could say that I’ll see you there, but I’m otherwise occupied in another part of the country! The show is up through August 24, so if any of you are lucky enough to see it between now and then, be sure to write and tell me what I’m missing.

“It is always the prosaic person who demands poetic subjects.”
G.K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson