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March 19, 2007
TT: Effects of light
I’ve been busy. (What else is new?) Among other things, I took Sarah to Chris Thile’s Zankel Hall concert and saw Curtains, Jack Goes Boating, and Propeller’s all-male stagings of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night. I also dined with two good friends, cranked out a fair amount of prose, and reread my favorite classical-music autobiography, Carl Flesch’s Memoirs, from which I’ve previously extracted a couple of almanac entries. This time I ran across the following pithy remark: “A teacher who is only interested in great talents is like a man who only seeks the company of rich people.”Chris’ concert was an event of no small significance, and I'll be curious to see whether the reviews convey that fact. The Blind Leaving the Blind, the centerpiece of the program, is a forty-minute-long multi-movement work for voice and bluegrass quintet that is through-composed. A few theater composers, most notably Stephen Sondheim, Adam Guettel, and Michael John LaChiusa, have broken away from the repeating-chorus song-form model to forge large-scale musical structures rooted in the language of popular music, but I can’t think of very many pop musicians who’ve attempted anything as ambitious as The Blind Leaving the Blind. Some of the seams are joined a bit too loosely, but the piece still works, and the spectacularly fleet-fingered members of the Tensions Mountain Boys, Chris’ new band, are equal to the technical challenges he's flung at them.
The rest of the concert was devoted to songs from How to Grow a Woman From the Ground, the Tensions Mountain Boys’ debut album. It’s a winning piece of work that I commend to your attention, though what I really want to hear is a studio recording of The Blind Leaving the Blind. No piece as complex as this can be fully taken in at first hearing, and I’m eager to listen to it at my leisure.
In between these varied activities, I hung a new piece of art, a watercolor by Jane Wilson that I bought a month ago but couldn’t take home with me on the spot because it was part of a show at DC Moore Gallery. I’ve been a fan of Wilson’s work ever since I wrote about her for the Washington Post in 2003, and it gave me great pleasure to hang “Breaking Light” directly below Fairfield Porter’s Isle au Haut and Jane Freilicher’s Late Afternoon, Southampton.
This is the first piece of art I've bought from a Fifth Avenue gallery, and I was struck by how the staff treated me once I made it clear that I wasn't just browsing. "I'm wondering whether you have any other Wilson watercolors in inventory," I told the young woman at the front desk. All at once the boss materialized from out of nowhere, whisked me into a back room, and started hanging art on the wall. I couldn't help thinking of the scene from Pretty Woman in which Richard Gere informs the snobby manager of a clothing store on Rodeo Drive that he's planning to spend a really offensive amount of money on Julia Roberts. The fact that the watercolor in which I'd expressed interest was a modestly priced five-by-seven miniature made the experience even more satisfying. The only thing nicer than being treated as if you were rich is being treated that way when it's obvious that you're not.
It was snowing when I hung “Breaking Light” last Friday, and the light from my window was chilly and grey, so I warmed the air by putting on Aaron Copland’s Violin Sonata, a gentle, modest piece that I hadn’t heard for some time. Listening to Copland’s music in a room whose walls are covered with American art reminded me of a “Sightings” column I wrote for The Wall Street Journal late in 2005:
What do the music of Aaron Copland, the dances of Paul Taylor, the paintings of Stuart Davis and the novels of Willa Cather have in common? They’re all American—and all-American. You can’t listen to five bars of “Appalachian Spring,” or read a paragraph of “My Ántonia,” without catching the tangy scent of American modernism. It’s as familiar as the smell of wood smoke on a cold November evening. You can also hear it in the brassy bite of the trumpet cadenza that launches Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” just as you can see it in the last shot of John Ford’s “The Searchers,” that unutterably poignant moment when John Wayne turns from his reunited family and walks alone into the desert….
All this was on my own mind as I paid a visit to “Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art,” a handsome little show on display through Dec. 31 at the National Academy Museum in New York. Put together by the museum of Dartmouth College, it consists of eighty exceedingly well-chosen works on paper by such noted artists as John James Audubon, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Arthur Dove, Jacob Lawrence, Jackson Pollock, Agnes Martin, Romare Bearden and Lee Bontecou.
As this list suggests, “Marks of Distinction” offers a cross-section of American art so wide-ranging in style as to make a casual visitor wonder whether any generalizations about our art can possibly hold true. But as I walked through the galleries, I was struck anew by the web of common temperament that knits together the best of these works, different though they may look at first glance.
One aspect of this temperament is an overarching sense of loneliness—rarely oppressive, certainly not neurotic, but omnipresent all the same. The landscapes in “Marks of Distinction” are usually unpeopled, the cityscapes anonymous, the portraits stoic to the occasional point of outright facelessness. Even in a festive scene like Charles Demuth’s “Beach Study No. 3, Provincetown,” the three brightly colored bathers are suspended in a cold white void, just as the ship in Lyonel Feininger’s “Seascape with Cloudy Sky” sails an empty sea. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to find in this quality a reflection of a land of illimitably vast expanses, a place where even the most crowded city offers its dwellers what E.B. White called “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”
Another thing I noticed time and again in “Marks of Distinction” was a certain brisk informality. We are a people in love with change, which may explain why our artists like nothing better than to catch images on the wing, recording them in explosive flurries of brushstrokes that suggest the dynamism of American life. Perhaps that’s why many of our finest modernists chose to cultivate the excitingly ambiguous middle ground that separates literal representation from pure abstraction. It’s a short step from the cubist turbulence of John Marin’s all-but-abstract “Sea Piece in Red” to the landscape-evoking expressionism of the profoundly mysterious untitled mixed-media sketch by Joan Mitchell that is my favorite piece in the show.
Above all, American artists are natural-born empiricists, passionate disbelievers in theory who seek truth through the immediate experience of the senses, then set it down on paper without excessive regard for whatever rules and regulations may happen to be in fashion at the moment. Ours is a nation of Gatsbys, homemade and self-created, and our best artists share something of the same determinedly unacademic individuality. That’s why the 80 works included in “Marks of Distinction” are at once so stylistically diverse and so recognizably American, two sides of a coin on which is stamped the motto that sums up our wonderful country without a wasted word: Out of many, one.
I'll stand by that.
Posted March 19, 2007 12:00 PM
