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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Anew

February 21, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I came home from the gym one day last week to find that my houseguest, a woman with good taste and a sharp eye, had rehung several pieces in the Teachout Museum. We’d talked about it a few days before, so it didn’t come as a total surprise, but I was still startled to find Degas’ Dancer Putting on Her Shoe on the north wall of my living room (directly beneath Neil Welliver’s Night Scene), Vuillard’s Petites etudes dans le square next to the bathroom door (directly beneath Jane Freilicher’s Late Afternoon, Southampton), and Hans Hofmann’s Woman’s Head in place of the clock that used to hang over the door to my kitchen (it now hangs over my stove).

Like most art collectors, I spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over what to put where, and I tend to leave things in place once I decide where they “belong.” It had been at least six months since I’d hung anything new, and longer still since I’d moved any of the pieces I already owned. Because of this, I’d forgotten the emotional effect of moving a familiar piece of art, which is not unlike moistening your index finger and inserting it in an electrical outlet: first you’re horrified, then you’re thrilled. Moving just one piece makes the whole room look different, and moving several pieces can freshen an entire collection–if you move them to the right places. Fortunately, my guest hit the bull’s-eye three times in a row. The only catch was that I had to straighten up the living room at once in order to properly appreciate her handiwork, but no sooner was I done than I sat down on the couch and spent ten ecstatic minutes doing nothing but looking at the walls.

Several days have gone by, yet I still feel a buzz whenever I open the front door and step into the living room. It’s as if I’d bought three brand-new pieces of art. “A change in the weather,” Proust wrote in The Guermantes Way, “is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” That’s what my guest did: she changed the weather inside my apartment, and now I’m basking under a new sun in the sky.

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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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