About Last Night

In my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I sound off on the Berkshire Museum’s planned sale of important works from its permanent collection. Here’s an excerpt.

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Norman Rockwell’s greatest painting is being hijacked—by the museum that owns it.

“Shuffleton’s Barbershop” is a 1950 portrait of three amateur musicians that Rockwell gave to the Berkshire Museum, located in Pittsfield, Mass., not far from Stockbridge, his home. Widely known and loved, the painting is even admired by critics who sneer at the rest of his homey oeuvre. Nevertheless, the Berkshire Museum is putting it on the block, along with a second Rockwell painting and 38 other works by such major artists as Albert Bierstadt, Alexander Calder and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

The reason? Van Shields, director of the Berkshire Museum, wants to “reboot” (his word) the institution, transforming it into a museum of science, history and the arts full of up-to-the-minute interactive technology. The price tag is $60 million—$20 million to renovate the museum’s 1903 building and the rest for a much-needed endowment. The art is being sold to pay the tab because, in the bland language of the museum’s press release, it is “deemed no longer essential to the Museum’s new interdisciplinary programs.”…

Because art museums are public institutions whose collections are held in trust, strict rules govern the “deaccessioning” (selling) of works from their collections. Rule No. 1 is that art can be sold only to acquire more art, and the Association of Art Museum Directors further stipulates that proceeds may never be used “as operating funds, to build a general endowment, or for any other expenses.” Not surprisingly, the AAMD and the American Alliance of Museums issued a joint statement calling the proposed sale “an irredeemable loss for the present and for generations to come.”

The Berkshire Museum, however, is not an art museum per se. A collection of 40,000-odd objects ranging from Hudson River School paintings to mummies and stuffed birds, it’s reminiscent of the New England “historical societies” that John P. Marquand described in a novel as charmingly eccentric muddles of “aboriginal arrowheads, muskets, candle molds, foot warmers, pine dressers, Chippendale sideboards, Lowestoft, pewter, and whales’ teeth and four-poster beds.” Indeed, its eccentricity was part of its charm.

But can such an old-fashioned curiosity shop hold its own amid newer outposts like Mass MoCA and expanded, revitalized institutions like the Clark Art Institute—not to mention the Rockwell Museum itself? Probably not. In any case, the Berkshire Museum has already evolved into something closer to a children’s museum, a place where no one goes to see art….

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Read the whole thing here.

“With Johnson, even at his most ferocious, one is aware of his essential humility and his recognition that he, like the objects of his wrath, is a deeply flawed creature. He is endearing because his vanities and pleasures are ours. He is a hero on a human scale, one we can emulate.”

Patrick Kurp, “‘Elegant & Pleasing Thoughts’” (Anecdotal Evidence, June 2, 2017)

The opening credits of Something Wild, a 1961 film directed by Jack Garfein and starring Carroll Baker. The score was composed and conducted by Aaron Copland and the titles were designed by Saul Bass:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“What monster first slipped in the idea of progress? Who destroyed our conception of happiness with these growing-pains?”

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

From 2007:

I still find it all but impossible to sit down and write a full-length letter by hand, in part because I’m left-handed and so have always found penmanship (as they used to call it once upon a time) awkward and ungratifying. I started using a typewriter at the age of ten and learned how to touch-type six years later, and since then I’ve mostly restricted my handwritten communication with the outside world to postcards and very brief notes. Despite my advancing age and old-fashioned inclinations, e-mail and blogging somehow seem to suit me better. I guess I’m just a post-postmodern man in a hurry…

Read the whole thing here.

“It seems to be much easier to make an audience cry than it is to make them laugh. There are many music-lovers who won’t even admit that humour has a place in what we call classical music. These are people who have no difficulty recognising sadness, tragedy, grief, majesty and grandeur—because these are serious attributes, and they want their beloved music to be ‘serious.’ For them jokes are made of cheap, vulgar and inferior matter that cannot be tolerated on the altar of High Art.”

András Schiff, “Did You Hear the One About…” (Guardian, May 28, 2009)

The credits and opening scene of Harvey, starring Art Carney as Elwood P. Dowd. This version of Mary Chase’s play, adapted for television by Jacqueline Babbin and Audrey Gellen and directed by George Schaefer, was originally telecast by CBS on September 22, 1958, as an episode of DuPont Show of the Month:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Of course to read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without—who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him?—and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint–pot.”

W. Somerset Maugham, “The Book-Bag”

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s new production of Twelfth Night. Here’s an excerpt.

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With two Broadway successes, “Hand to God” and “Present Laughter,” under his belt, Moritz von Stuelpnagel is now looking like the most talented director of stage comedy to come along since John Rando. So it’s happy news that he’s upped his personal ante by staging “Twelfth Night” for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. It is, after all, a big leap from Noël Coward to Shakespearean comedy, one that many similarly talented directors never attempt. Funny though “Twelfth Night” is, most of the laughs don’t come of their own accord: They need careful, knowing tending in order to explode on schedule. But Mr. von Stuelpnagel knows his comic stuff, and he’s given us a show that’s every bit as enjoyable as its predecessors.

Unlike most modern-day Shakespeare directors, Mr. von Stuelpnagel has chosen not to overlay his “Twelfth Night” with a high concept: It’s a colorfully stylized modern-dress staging, but otherwise the show keeps to the center of the theatrical road. The cast is mostly young, and the actors themselves perform Palmer Hefferan’s incidental music in a cheerfully rough-and-ready manner….

Hudson Valley always has fine clowns on tap, and Kurt Rhoads and Sean McNall, who play Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek, set the tone for the show, with the emphasis placed squarely on broad, bawdy comedy. (Without getting too graphic for the readers of a family paper, suffice it to say that Sir Toby appears to be suffering from a fairly severe case of prostate trouble.) Anyone seeking temporary surcease from the rigors of the present moment will find it in abundance here….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Twelfth Night:

The climactic scene from Seven Men From Now, directed by Budd Boetticher, written by Burt Kennedy, and starring Randolph Scott and Lee Marvin. The score is by Henry Vars:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)