About Last Night

From 2009:

Of all the countless newspaper and magazine pieces that I’ve written over the years, one of the most immediately consequential was “Too Cool to Cash In, Favorite of the Few,” which appeared in the Sunday New York Times in 1997. It was a posthumous profile of the jazz musician Joe Mooney, who had a brief but potent vogue that I described in the opening paragraphs of the piece….

Read the whole thing here.

“Commentators on the political scene tend in retrospect to regard the figures who emerge into prominence as totally derisory. Understandably so. It is extremely difficult, as I know from personal experience, to spend time with one or other of them without reaching the conclusion that some accomplished clown like Peter Sellers has substituted for him.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time

I wrote a Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column in 2015 about Edward G. Robinson’s art collection. It’s no longer widely remembered, but Robinson, the greatest of all big-screen gangsters, was Hollywood’s first major collector of fine art. (Lest we forget, he also played a murderous, sexually frustrated amateur painter in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street.) He wasn’t exaggerating when he proudly wrote in his autobiography that he put together “one of the greatest collections of French Impressionist art ever assembled by an American.”

As I pointed out in my Journal piece, Robinson was by way of being an all-around aesthete:

A classically trained stage actor and classical-music buff—his friends included George Gershwin and Igor Stravinsky—he started purchasing Impressionist and Post-Impressionist canvases in earnest on a 1936 trip to Europe, five years after “Little Caesar” made him a superstar. Eight years later, he built his own private gallery to house the hundred-odd paintings in his collection. New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Washington’s National Gallery exhibited 40 of them in 1953, and the lineup included Bonnard, Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir and Van Gogh.

What began as a hobby turned into a compulsion, so much so that he and his first wife and son sat in 1939 for Édouard Vuillard, who did a pastel portrait of them. “It is short of a masterwork,” Robinson cheerfully admitted. “Paintings on commission usually are. But it beats hell out of a Kodak snapshot.”

“La famille d’Edward G. Robinson” was still in private hands when I wrote that column, and I was unable to locate an online reproduction, which made it impossible for me to write about it any more specifically. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder how good it really was, and I was especially curious to know what Vuillard, who evolved late in life into an important (and well-compensated) society portraitist, had made out of Robinson’s ferociously distinctive bulldog features.

A couple of nights ago, Mrs. T and I were watching an old Robinson film, Brother Orchid. All at once a light went on in my head, and I opened my laptop and started searching for “La famille d’Edward G. Robinson.” To my amazement and delight, I managed to track down within a matter of seconds what Paul Harvey used to call “the rest of the story.” It turns out that two months after my column appeared in the Journal, the owners of the pastel gave it to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which has since posted an image on its website, coupled with a complete provenance:

1939, commissioned by Edward G. Robinson (b. 1893 – d. 1973), Beverly Hills, CA; about 1956, passed to his former wife, Gladys Lloyd Robinson (b. 1895 – d. 1971), Los Angeles; October 26, 1960, Gladys Lloyd Robinson sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, lot 81, sold. 1985, Nathan Cummings (b. 1896 – d. 1985), New York; November 13, 1985, Cummings estate sale, Christie’s, New York, lot 115, sold. 1987, sold by Hilde Gerst Gallery, New York, to Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Weiner, Boston; 2015, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Weiner to the MFA. (Accession Date: September 24, 2015)

“Passed to his former wife” is a euphemism: Robinson was forced to sell off most of his collection in 1956 as part of a nasty divorce settlement, though he managed to assemble another, similarly impressive one prior to his death in 1973. But he seems not to have made any effort to buy back “La famille d’Edward G. Robinson,” and it’s easy to see why when you look at the pastel, in which his ex-wife figures very prominently. I doubt he much cared to be reminded of her.

Vuillard’s late portraits aren’t as admired as they ought to be, as I pointed out when I reviewed a 2003 National Gallery of Art retrospective of his work:

Guy Cogeval, general curator of “Edouard Vuillard,” has also sought to refute the widespread notion that Vuillard spent the last two decades of his life (he died in 1940) doing little but turning out judiciously flattering society portraits. I don’t see how anyone can hold to so rigidly dismissive a view of late Vuillard after seeing his tough-minded, even harsh 1933 painting of the couturier Jeanne Lanvin in her Paris office. The hard, unflattering glamour with which he portrays this aging doyenne of fashion is reminiscent of Sargent, another great portrait painter whose psychological acuteness has often been overlooked by critics obsessed with his well-to-do clientele.

Would that “La famille d’Edward G. Robinson” had been part of that show! I would have enjoyed pointing out that Vuillard placed the world-famous actor at the extreme left edge of his group portrait, cropping his head and body so that they are not quite fully visible. Might that have been an obliquely witty reference to his subject’s celebrity? We cannot know: Robinson’s brief mention of the pastel in his autobiography is, so far as I know, the only thing that has ever been written about it until now. In any case, it pleases me greatly that “La famille d’Edward G. Robinson” has finally resurfaced, and I hope to take a look at it the next time I’m in Boston. Alas, it’s not presently on view, but perhaps I can manage to nudge the MFA into hanging it.

Entirely aside from the fact that Vuillard’s pastel is an unpretentiously lovely piece of work, I can’t think offhand of very many other paintings by great artists—Andy Warhol and Norman Rockwell don’t really count—of equally great movie stars. Top-tier artists, it seems, have tended not to be drawn to film stars as subject matter, though there are several noteworthy exceptions to the rule. John Singer Sargent sketched John Barrymore in 1923, Marc Chagall painted Charlie Chaplin in 1929, and Salvador Dalí did portraits of Shirley Temple, Laurence Olivier, and Harpo Marx (the first two of which aren’t very good, in my opinion, but there’s no accounting for taste). More recently, and consequentially, Willem de Kooning’s Marilyn Monroe, painted in 1954, is all of a piece with his “Woman” series, arguably his most important body of work. As for sculptors, a friend reminds me that Isamu Noguchi made a charming bust of Ginger Rogers in 1941 that is now owned by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Nevertheless, these exceptions are exceptions to a rule that has otherwise held pretty firm throughout the first century of movie stardom. It makes me wonder whether major artists (photographers self-evidently excluded) are disinclined by nature to devote time and energy to portraying faces so ubiquitous and familiar as to necessarily resist the profound imaginative transformation that is the essence of great art. If so, though, it’s surely at least as revealing that no other movie stars, so far as I know, seem ever to have thought to commission portraits from artists comparable in stature to, say, Vuillard or Noguchi.

Whatever the explanation, “La famille d’Edward G. Robinson” is a work of real distinction, one of a handful of its kind, and for that reason alone, it deserves to see the light of day. Here’s hoping!

Salvador Dalí is interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge on Panorama. This program was originally telecast by the BBC on May 4, 1955:

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

“I also learnt at an early age the great truth that the twentieth century is an age of almost inconceivable credulity, in which critical faculties are stifled by a plethora of public persuasion and information, so that, literally, anyone will believe anything.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review Classic Stage Company’s off-Broadway repertory productions of two plays by August Strindberg. Here’s an excerpt.

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In “Tootsie,” Michael Dorsey, who can’t get cast as an actor because of his well-deserved reputation for being aggressively earnest and impossible to work with, swears to his skeptical agent that he’s “in this business to make money.” The agent’s reply: “Really? The Harlem Theatre for the Blind? Strindberg in the Park?” To get the joke, you have to know that August Strindberg, Sweden’s greatest playwright, has an equally well-deserved reputation of his own for being depressing beyond belief. That’s the main reason why professional productions of Strindberg’s 60-odd plays, written between 1869 and 1909, are rare to the point of nonexistence in this country—I’ve reviewed two in the past 16 years—and why Classic Stage Company’s decision to mount his two best-known plays in repertory is important by definition. Neither staging is ideal, but both are effective, and if you haven’t seen much of his work, this is an admirable way to get your card punched.

“The Dance of Death,” the only one of Strindberg’s plays that gets done with any frequency in the U.S., is being performed in Conor McPherson’s 2012 version, a small-scale modern-English adaptation of the first half of the play from which three characters have been excised, thus making it much easier (and less costly) to stage. In addition to cutting “The Dance of Death” in half, Mr. McPherson has sharpened its humor to the point where it plays almost like a comedy, albeit one of a peculiarly acrid sort, the kind in which a long-married couple (Cassie Beck and Richard Topol) spend an evening slashing away at one another with vicious glee…

Victoria Clark, the director, is better known as one of the top musical-comedy singers in town. She has staged “The Dance of Death” in the round, italicizing its comic moments, and David L. Arsenault’s set and Tricia Barsamian’s costumes keep the production solidly rooted in the 19^thcentury (the play was first performed in 1901). The performances are generally good…

I can’t quite say the same about “Mies Julie,” though not because of any inadequacies in the production, which is directed by Shariffa Ali with stingingly harsh vigor and acted with like impact by a cast led by Elise Kibler (who looks like she wandered in from a Tennessee Williams revival in which she played a naughty girl) and James Udom. The problem here is Yaël Farber’s 2012 adaptation of “Miss Julie,” which transplants Strindberg’s 1888 play to modern-day South Africa and covers it with a foot-thick frosting of up-to-the-second racial politics.

It’s not that you won’t get the point: Both versions tell the story of a young woman who lusts after one of her servants and is devastated by her desire. The catch is that “Miss Julie,” which was last seen in its original form on Broadway in 1962 (in Swedish, no less!), will likely be almost entirely unfamiliar to most of those who see this production….

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Read the whole thing here.

The John Wilson Orchestra plays a medley of cues composed by Scott Bradley for MGM’s Tom and Jerry cartoons, performed live at the 2013 BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The cartoons from which these cues were drawn are “Smitten Kitten,” “Sufferin’ Cats,” “The Framed Cat,” “Cat Fishin’,” “Just Ducky,” “Jerry and Jumbo,” “The Cat Comes to Dinner,” and “Mouse for Sale”:

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

“Atheism is, I suppose, the supreme example of a simple faith.”

G.K. Chesterton, Where All Roads Lead

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I look at an important new tendency in charitable giving. Here’s an excerpt.

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New York’s Museum of Modern Art closes for renovations in June. When the museum reopens on Oct. 21, it will have 30% more gallery space. The price tag for the expansion is $450 million, more than $200 million of which comes from the estate of David Rockefeller, MoMA’s most open-handed donor, who died in 2017 at the age of 101. To be sure, $200 million is chump change in the fantasyland of pop culture. (It cost $316 million to make “Avengers: Infinity War.”) But when it comes to the fine arts, that’s very serious money—the biggest single donation that MoMA has ever received.

From coast to coast, our national landscape is dotted with fine-arts institutions that exist because of people like Rockefeller….

Unfortunately, big-ticket philanthropy is in the middle of a protracted sea change that is already having a direct effect on the arts. Thirteen years ago, the Journal reported that younger new-money donors were increasingly choosing to give it not to fine-arts organizations but to humanitarian causes like AIDS research and education reform. In 2013, Bill Gates put his seal of moral approval on this new tendency by declaring in an interview with the Financial Times that donating money “to build a new wing for a museum rather than spend it on preventing illnesses that can lead to blindness” was, in his words, “slightly barbaric.”

When I wrote about Mr. Gates’ remarks in this space, I observed that I had yet to hear “any groundswell of support among the rich for Mr. Gates’ rigidly utilitarian view of charity.” Apparently I was a little tone-deaf. Nowadays, everybody in the arts is taking nervous note of what the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance described with alarm in a 2018 report called “Beyond the Check: A Roadmap for Engaging Individual Donors.” According to the GPCA, “younger donors” are “shifting away from arts and culture in their philanthropy.” Moreover, studies show that they’re less likely to make big-ticket gifts to any charitable cause—and when they do, such gifts are rarely arts-related….

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Read the whole thing here.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

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ON BROADWAY:

• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, closing Apr. 7, reviewed here)

• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Ferryman (drama, PG-13, Broadway transfer of London production, reviewed here)

• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

• My Fair Lady (musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Prom (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• True West (drama, PG-13, closes Mar. 17, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

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IN PROVIDENCE, R.I.:

• Macbeth (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Mar. 3, reviewed here)

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CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Ah, Wilderness! (comedy, G/PG-13, reviewed here)