I was supposed to see two shows yesterday, Assassins in the afternoon and a workshop performance featuring a friend that night, but I read the invitation to the second show wrong and thought the curtain was at eight o’clock instead of five. Fortunately, I noticed my mistake at seven, just as I was getting ready to shut up shop, go downstairs, and catch a cab. Instead of making a pointless trip to the theater district, I found myself with an unplanned night off, and decided to spend part of it rehanging some of my prints.
It happens that I’ve just acquired a new piece for the Teachout Museum, a copy of Fairfield Porter’s Broadway, the 1971 color lithograph I chose at your recommendation to adorn the dust jacket of A Terry Teachout Reader. (I bought it here, in case you’re looking to make a purchase from a very nice, very reliable Chicago-area dealer.) It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll have to shift some other pieces around when it does, so I opted to do a bit of preparatory puttering. Since I’m going to hang Broadway over the mantelpiece, the place of honor, I moved the Wolf Kahn monotype that currently occupies that space to a spot over the living-room closet. That’s where I’d hung my copy of William Bailey’s aquatint Piazza Rotunda, not very happily, so I took down the Porter poster that hangs over the door to my office and put Piazza Rotunda there.
No doubt all this sounds boring, perhaps even precious, but hanging the art you own is an inescapable part of owning it, and it’s surprising–astonishing, really–how completely the look and feel of my living room have been altered simply by switching a couple of prints. It makes the prints look different, too, not just the ones I moved but all the others that hang around them. Best of all, I can now see Piazza Rotunda from my love seat, the spot where I normally sit when I’m alone, and I find my refreshed eye going to it constantly. Alas, I must make a special “trip” to the other side of the room to look at the Kahn, but it’s the first thing you see when you open the front door, and since most of my guests like it best of all my prints, it’ll be as if I’d given them a present.
As for the Porter poster, a handsome reproduction of Lizzie at the Table used to publicize the Whitney Museum’s 1984 Porter retrospective, it’s going on permanent loan to a neighbor who recently had a baby (a thoroughly appropriate gift, too, since the “Lizzie” of the painting was Porter’s own baby daughter). Meanwhile, there’s a big empty space over my mantelpiece, waiting patiently to be filled by Broadway, which is not only beautiful in its own right but also a visible symbol of my proudest professional achievement to date, the Teachout Reader.
Anyway, that’s how I spent my Sunday evening. I hope you had half as much fun.