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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 18, 2004

TT: Consumables

May 18, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I lunched with Supermaud at our preferred downtown hangout, La Palapa Rockola (this time we played it smart and stayed out of the sun!), and spent most of the evening at a banquet. Nevertheless, I managed to quaff a good-sized portion of art before, in between, and after those two meals:


– I paid a visit to the press view of The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, the first of three planned exhibitions of paintings, sculpture, and drawings left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Henri Matisse’s son, a noted New York art dealer who died in 1989, and his wife, who died three years ago. Alas, it didn’t do much for me, which isn’t to say that it doesn’t contain a number of beautiful pieces, most of them by Matisse the elder. But even the Matisses (most of them works on paper) didn’t really gain from being shown as a group, while the more distinguished items by other artists seemed oddly familiar. “Tall Figure,” for instance, is a first-class Giacometti bronze, but I’ve seen plenty of Giacometti bronzes that are just as good and look pretty much the same as this one. In any case, most of the really memorable pieces aren’t even from the so-called Matisse Collection: they were purchased from Pierre Matisse’s gallery long ago, either by the Met or by private collectors, and were already part of the Met’s permanent collection. As for the “new” pieces by artists other than Matisse p

TT: Almanac

May 18, 2004 by Terry Teachout

“Carl Ender’s criterion for buying a picture was that it should repel his senses and his intelligence. Only then could he be sure of having bought a valuable modern work. Long years of practice had brought him to the stage that he would be automatically impressed by anything he disliked, and would react to anything he liked with indignant suspicion. It was by such a method that he had secured his reputation of having an

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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