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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 2006

TT: Familiar faces

April 27, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Carl Van Vechten is one of those fascinating minor characters who, like Zelig or Forrest Gump, was forever popping up in the damnedest places. At various times in his life (he died in 1964) he was a music critic, a dance critic, a novelist manqué, a self-appointed publicist for the Harlem Renaissance, and—perhaps most lastingly—a self-taught photographer who specialized in celebrity portraits. (He was also gay, and his hitherto unknown homoerotic photos are about to be published for the first time.) He seems to have known everybody who was anybody, and if they were famous he took their pictures. The Library of Congress Web site has a pretty good online gallery of his portraits, many of which, like his 1936 study of Bessie Smith, remain among the best-remembered images of their subjects. Yet few art critics have had anything to say about his work save in passing, and though I know a reasonable amount about him—one of his portraits of H.L. Mencken is reproduced in The Skeptic—it wasn’t until yesterday that I finally saw an exhibition of his photographs.

It happens that I recently had occasion to mention Van Vechten in the fourth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, so he was already on my mind when I heard that James Cummins Bookseller, an Upper East Side dealer in rare books, was putting on a show of Van Vechten portraits. I dropped in to take a look, and was—not to put too fine a point on it—dazzled.

“Carl Van Vechten Portraits” consists of sixty-four photographs, virtually all of them of artists whose names are known to this day, including James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, George M. Cohan, Aaron Copland, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Gielgud, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Sinclair Lewis, Joe Louis, Henri Matisse, Somerset Maugham, Joan Miró, Laurence Olivier, Eugene O’Neill, Jerome Robbins, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Virgil Thomson, Evelyn Waugh, and Orson Welles. (The show also features the same Mencken photo I used in The Skeptic.)

The catalogue contains an introduction by Rachel Cohen that includes this revealing passage:

And this, I think, is one of the nicest ways to see Van Vechten’s photographs—as parties. At a party, one person leads to the next—in each individual photograph there is the constant sense of the social scene, almost as if the party is going on in another room and Van Vechten and the subject have just stepped in here for a minute so that they can make themselves heard. It’s this quality that makes the collected body of work absolutely unlike that of any other photographer I know—it is a world of hundreds upon hundreds of relationships, of people who were neighbors and friends and artistic collaborators, who signed one another’s petitions, and smashed furniture at one another’s parties and cheered for one another’s achievements. You could begin with almost any photograph in this catalogue, or in the whole exhibition, and trace your way through the lives of almost everyone included.

Nice—and yet you don’t come away with the impression that Van Vechten was an especially serious artist, which I think is just about fair enough. His portraits lack both the personal stamp and the ultimate intensity of high photographic art. I don’t know that I’d be likely to recognize any of the ones I didn’t already know as Van Vechten’s simply by looking. He was no more (and no less) than a gifted amateur with a good eye and access to a lot of very famous people. Yet there is something, maybe even quite a bit, to be said about the comparative stylistic anonymity of his approach. What you see when you look at his 1940 portrait of Charles Laughton is the man himself, tortured and unsure, with no glossy overlay of self to confuse the issue. What you see when you look at, say, Irving Penn’s wonderful 1947 double portrait of Mencken and George Jean Nathan is—well, Irving Penn.

I suspect it makes more sense, then, to approach Carl Van Vechten’s portraits as historical documents rather than art objects. But however you choose to see them, they’re definitely worth seeing.

Alas, Van Vechten seems never to have photographed Louis Armstrong, which is too bad: I would have loved to include one of his portraits in Hotter Than That. As I was leaving the building, though, I walked past the Margo Feiden Galleries, in whose show window I saw a gorgeous Al Hirschfeld caricature of Satchmo. It was exactly the kind of serendipitous moment that New York offers in daily profusion—the reason why, in spite of everything, I live here and wouldn’t dream of leaving.

* * *

“Carl Van Vechten Portaits” is up at James Cummins Bookseller, 699 Madison Avenue, through Saturday.

TT: Almanac

April 27, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“But like all well-bred individuals, and unlike human anarchists, the cat seldom interferes with other people’s rights. His intelligence keeps him from doing many of the fool things that complicate life. Cats never write operas and they never attend them. They never sign papers, or pay taxes, or vote for president. An injunction will have no power whatever over a cat. A cat, of course, would not only refuse to obey any amendment whatever to any constitution, he would refuse to obey the constitution itself.”


Carl Van Vechten, The Tiger in the House

TT: One life to live, many to tell

April 26, 2006 by Terry Teachout

A reader writes:

I was disappointed, to say the least, when I read a while back that the
title of your new book would be Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis
Armstrong
. Why, you say? Do I hate subtitles? Do I hate Louis
Armstrong?


No, it’s because you’re using that ridiculous phrase A Life of —–. When I first saw that in a subtitle a few years ago, in
something like (to make up a book), America’s Poet: A Life of Robert
Frost
, I immediately thought, what a silly use of language–did the
man have several lives? No, he had one. Someone’s writing about it,
therefore it should be The Life of Robert Frost.


Now, Armstrong may have done enough with his to fill up two or three
normal lives, but he, too, had only one. So I say it should be Hotter
Than That: The Life of Louis Armstrong
.


And yes, I think I know how it must have started. When my make-believe
Frost book was submitted to its editor, he, in a fit of political
correctness, said, “Oh, we can’t use that title. ‘Life’ means biography
in the literary world. Someone might think we’re saying that this book
is the biography of Frost–the one, the only, the best. No, no, no, we
can’t do that, it might hurt someone’s feelings.” And silliness won
another small victory.


I know that it’s currently a popular way to phrase it, but that doesn’t
make it right (and thank God, many authors are still using The Life of —–, for example, John Szwed’s excellent So What: The Life
of Miles Davis
). “Life,” in the title of a biography, means just that,
someone’s life, the time they spent on earth. It doesn’t mean
“biography,” at least not in the real world.


So I’m begging you, man, change it back to the phrase that’s worked
fine for hundreds of years–it’s not too late! Strike a blow for
common sense!

Alas, my subtitle has what I regard as an impeccable and dispositive precedent, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, written by yours truly. I explained in the preface why I gave it that name: “This is a life of Mencken, not the life. I have made no attempt to be exhaustive, so as to avoid being exhausting.” As you see, it had nothing to do with political correctness (don’t make me laugh!). I simply felt–and feel–that every biography is by definition one person’s interpretation of another person’s life, a selection from and arrangement of the available facts, and that since multiple interpretations of the same facts are not only possible but inevitable, the title should indicate as much.


As for the larger question of the meaning of “life,” The New Shorter Oxford defines it as, among other things, “A written account of a person’s history; a biography.” That usage dates back to Middle English.


Here endeth the lesson. (Nice try, though.)

TT: My day

April 26, 2006 by Terry Teachout

– 6:30 a.m. I wake without prompting, having slept for just five hours–not uncommon for me on days when I have a morning deadline. I descend from the loft, fix and eat a low-fat multi-grain English muffin and a bowl of cereal with skim milk, and start writing my drama column for Friday’s The Wall Street Journal, a review of The History Boys, Lestat, and The Wedding Singer.


– 10:35 a.m. The column is done. I e-mail it to my editor, change clothes, and go to the gym for a session with my trainer.


– 12:05 p.m. Dripping with sweat, I return to the apartment and check my e-mail. My editor isn’t finished with the column, but I find in the box an e-mail from Shellwood, a new British record label based in Surrey whose Web site says it is “dedicated to recording light music, mostly from the 1920-40s.” To my amazement, they’ve released a Cy Walter CD called The Park Avenue Tatum and want to know if I’d like a review copy. I respond in the aggressive affirmative. Walter was a legendary cabaret pianist who is now remembered (if at all) for having played two-piano accompaniments with Stan Freeman on a couple of albums recorded in the Fifties by Mabel Mercer and Lee Wiley. I’ve never heard any of his solo recordings, none of which has previously been reissued in any format, and I’m curious, to put it very mildly.


– 12:35 p.m. No word yet from the Journal, so I take a shower and go out a second time. I stop by the post office (where I hear a man use the expressions “Hel-lo?” and “I don’t think so!” in consecutive sentences) to mail my mother a souvenir menu from the White House mess, at which I dined last month. Next comes lunch at Good Enough to Eat (where I hear a woman use the words “condescending,” “colonialist,” and “eco-variety” in a single sentence). Then I go to the bank, the drugstore, and the grocery store. My hands twitch as I stroll past a short stack of three boxes of Mallomars, to which my attention is drawn by a handwritten sign: “Last batch of the season!!” The spasm passes and I fill my cart with low-calorie foods instead, feeling virtuous as I pay the cashier.


– 2:25 p.m. Back to the apartment again, where Tuesday’s snail mail (none of it worth reading) has arrived, as has the edited version of my column, lightly salted with the usual editorial queries, all of them helpful. I make the necessary fixes and e-mail the revised column back to the Journal.


– 2:45 p.m. I decide to spend the rest of the afternoon looking at art. Acting on a tip from an “About Last Night” reader, I take a crosstown bus to the Metropolitan Museum to see a small but choice-sounding show of Stieglitz-period American works on paper. Alas, it’s no longer on display (though the signs are still up) and I’m not in the mood to look at anything else. Even a wallful of mostly unfamiliar Arthur Doves fails to do the trick. I depart in a state of moderate dudgeon, immediately dispelled by the beautiful spring weather (it was supposed to rain today, but didn’t).


– 4:20 p.m. I watch a BBC documentary on Bette Davis
stored on my DVR. What on earth do people see in her? I mean, I like All About Eve as much as the next guy, but who cares about those other movies she made in the Thirties and Forties? I’d take Ida Lupino any day. In search of insight, I consult David Thomson, who answers my question with his usual pithiness: “Davis was a vulgar, bullying actress, who made mannerism a virtue by showing us how it expresses the emotion of the self.”


– 5:50 p.m. No show tonight! I wrestle briefly with the compulsion to spend the evening tinkering with Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Inspired by Thomson, I choose instead to pop a Mikl

TT: Almanac

April 26, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“In this country, you never pull the emergency brake, even when there is an emergency. It is imperative that the trains run on schedule.”


Friedrich D

TT: Words to the wise

April 25, 2006 by Terry Teachout

– Spanierman Gallery is about to open a major exhibition of the works of John Henry Twachtman, the greatest of the American impressionists. “John Twachtman (1853-1902): A

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

April 25, 2006 by Terry Teachout

• One of the travails of writing a biography of a great artist is that you find yourself returning repeatedly to certain words and phrases–especially superlatives. The nice thing about word processing is that it’s possible to search your manuscript for repeated words. The bad thing is that if you’re not careful, you become compulsive about it.

A couple of months ago I started keeping a list of words and phrases I suspected I was using too frequently in Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. In the past week or two I’ve been going over the first five chapters of Hotter Than That with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, looking for redundancies and personal clichés. It occurred to me (that’s one of the latter, in case you haven’t already noticed) that it might amuse you (there’s another one) to see the list:

already

at least

astonishing
brilliant/brilliance

by now/by then
claim/claimed
countless

crisp
dazzling
doubtless

expansive

from then/now on

glowing
golden
great
henceforth

himself/itself
hurtling

in fact
irresistible

major
mentor

no doubt
no less

nor did
not that

of course

protégé

recall/recalled

remember/remembered
small wonder/no wonder
soaring

spectacular

striking
surprise/surprising

thereafter

to be sure

virtuoso/virtuosic

• Writing one-sentence summaries of movies is surely one of life’s more thankless tasks (though it can be done, like everything else in life, with flair). Be that as it may, I confess to having giggled when the following précis of The Station Agent popped up on my TV screen yesterday: “Two people try to befriend an anti-social dwarf.”

That seems just a bit on the bald side, don’t you think?

TT: Unopened sacks in the mailroom

April 25, 2006 by Terry Teachout

The “About Last Night” e-mailbox has been discovered by art-world publicists, who are flooding it with press releases. I suppose that’s an improvement on the Viagra-type spam I used to get by the carload, but it’s still irritating.


I’m doing my very best to keep up with all the bonafide reader mail (I just answered a ton of it). If you should fail to hear back from me more or less promptly, though, that’s the reason why. Apologies.

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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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