Archives for May 2006

My new Arnold Friedman lithograph arrived yesterday, just in time for me to drop it off at the framer before leaving for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this morning. It was even more beautiful than I’d expected, so much so that I gasped when I took it out of the package, as did my houseguest.

“Can you believe I only paid $225 for it?” I asked her.

“Omigod,” she replied, looking slightly embarrassed. “I’ve paid more than that for shoes.”

“Alas, how miserable their good looks made him! The pain of watching beautiful young girls, the isolation of desire! They reminded him of the figures in one of those pictures by Watteau that are instinct with the beauty of the moment, the fugitive distress of hedonism, the sadness that falls like dew from pleasure, as they stand, fixed in the movement of the dance, beneath the elms, beneath the garlanded urn.”

Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool

I spent Memorial Day weekend in Philadelphia and Baltimore, seeing Arden Theater’s production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and CenterStage’s production of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, a 1995 play by Lynn Nottage. I caught up with Nottage (along with most of the rest of the New York critics) in 2004, when two of her later plays, Intimate Apparel
and Fabulation, were premiered in the same season. Seeing them in such close succession made me a fan, which is why I went out of my way to catch Crumbs from the Table of Joy in Baltimore.

My travels began with a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where I took in Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. Wyeth is an odd case, a self-evidently gifted artist whom few art critics take seriously save as a technician. I am, for the most part, one of their skeptical number, though I do like his splendidly accomplished drybrush watercolors, a few of which are to be found in this crowded (in all senses) retrospective. I don’t care at all for the large-scale paintings, which have always struck me as essentially false, all but quivering with an embarrassed romanticism poorly concealed beneath a cloak of pretended austerity. It’s the paintings that most people love, though, and I wish I could agree with them. Dr. Johnson said of Gray’s Elegy that “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” I agree–but not when it comes to Wyeth.

From there I took myself to Old Town, Philadelphia’s historical district, which is full of excellent sights to see, most of them very close indeed to the Arden (it’s next door to Christ Church, where Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross worshipped, and around the corner from Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest residential street in America). It’s also full of excellent restaurants, and I had an unusually good meal at one of them, a place called Fork that I commend to your attention should you find yourself in that famous part of town. Alas, I spent an exceedingly disagreeable night at the Independence Park Hotel, which put me up in a room that was hot, stuffy, and noisy, then served me a continental breakfast that bordered on the inedible. I won’t be back, save at gunpoint.

As for the two shows, you’ll have to wait until Friday to hear about them. In the meantime, I’ll be off again very early Wednesday morning, this time to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where I’ll be seeing five plays in two and a half days and partaking of whatever other delights the city of Ashland, Oregon, may have to offer me. I plan to bring along my trusty iBook, so it seems fairly likely that I’ll be blogging at some point or points during my stay, but don’t be surprised if my postings are erratic between now and week’s end.

Till…whenever!

I spent a good-sized chunk of last week writing a lengthy essay for Commentary about Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ Art Czar, the new biography of the art critic Clement Greenberg. Eight years ago I reviewed an earlier book about Greenberg, Florence Rubenfeld’s Clement Greenberg: A Life, and it occurred to me that it might be useful for me to revisit my earlier piece. For the most part I stand by what I wrote about Greenberg (and Rubenfeld) in 1998, but there was one passage that jumped out at me:

Greenberg became closely identified with a group of painters known as the “color-field abstractionists,” whose work he believed to be the culmination of modernism. He praised the work of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski in disconcertingly lavish terms, curtly dismissing all competing artists as minor….

Greenberg’s critics were right about one thing–his history-driven theory of modernism was too neat by half–just as he himself was mistaken about a great many things, not least the long-term importance of the color-field painters, whose work he loved.

Eight years later, with Olitski’s Forward Edge and Noland’s Circle I (II-3) hanging on the walls of my living room, I find myself in a what-was-I-thinking mood. Such drastic changes of mind do happen to me on occasion, most recently in the case of the playwright August Wilson, of whom I thought poorly until I was lucky enough to see a very good production of what I’m told is his best play. Whenever that kind of thing happens to me, I try to come clean about it, in public if at all possible.

As I explained in The Wall Street Journal four years ago in a column called “The Contrite Critic”:

I’ve changed my mind about art more than once, and in so doing I’ve learned that I not infrequently start by disliking something and end up liking it. Not always–sometimes I decide on closer acquaintance that a novel or painting isn’t as good as I’d thought. More often, though, I realize that it was necessary for me to grow into a fuller understanding of a work of art to which my powers of comprehension were not at first equal.

The music critic Hans Keller said something shrewd about this phenomenon: “As soon as I detest something, I ask myself why I like it.” I try to keep that in mind whenever I cover a premiere. I don’t mean to say that critics should be wishy-washy, but we should also remember that strong emotions sometimes masquerade as their opposite.

Brooks Atkinson, for example, panned the original production of Rodgers and Hart’s “Pal Joey” in the New York Times, calling it “drab and mirthless.” When he saw the 1952 revival, he knew he’d been wrong, and said so in print: “In 1940

“Revelations about a writer’s life should not affect our independently formed critical assessment of his work. They may, however, confirm or explain reservations about it.”

David Lodge, “The Lives of Graham Greene” (courtesy of Kate’s Book Blog)

“I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.

“I wish you could see just one of the ineradicable pictures I have in my mind today. In this particular picture I am sitting among clumps of sword-grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we have just taken. We are looking out over a vast rolling country to the rear.

“A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill.

“All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.

“The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.

“On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.

“They don’t slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.

“In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory–there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.

“The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men.”

Ernie Pyle, Scripps-Howard dispatch from Tunisia, May 2, 1943

I just got back from the Jazz Standard, where Sarah and I heard Roger Kellaway‘s first set. It was stupendous.

Kellaway is currently fronting a piano-guitar-bass trio, which he claims to be the fulfillment of a “childhood dream.” Oscar Peterson led just such a group in the Fifties, and Kellaway, a lifelong Peterson fan who has always enjoyed playing without a drummer, knows how to make the most of the elbow room afforded by that wonderfully flexible instrumentation. Russell Malone is the guitarist, Jay Leonhart the bassist. The three men opened the set with a super-sly version of Benny Golson’s “Killer Joe,” and within four bars you knew they were going to swing really, really hard. So they did, with Kellaway pitching his patented curve balls all night long, including a bitonal arrangement of Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” and what surely must have been the first time that the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” has ever been performed by a jazz group.

Everybody in the band (including vibraphonist Stefon Harris, who joined the trio for “Cotton Tail,” “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and “52nd Street Theme”) was smoking. Kellaway, though, was…well, I really don’t have words to describe the proliferating creativity and rhythmic force of his piano playing. Sarah did pretty well, though: “Did you see my jaw drop?” she asked me when it was all over. Russell Malone, with whom I chatted between sets, put it even more tersely. “That man is scary,” he said, shaking his head.

After I came home, I looked up my Washington Post review of the last time I heard Kellaway in person, a two-piano gig in 2004 with Bill Charlap at the second keyboard:

I was lucky enough to be at Birdland when Roger Kellaway and Bill Charlap gave the best live two-piano jazz performance I’ve heard in my entire life. The bedazzlingly eclectic Kellaway, who has been holed up on the West Coast for years, finally decided to head east and show the rest of the world his formidable stuff. For his long-delayed return…he joined forces with Charlap, who usually prefers suave understatement to single combat. Not this time: Kellaway was loaded for bear, and Charlap rose to the occasion. Their version of “Blue in Green” suggested an off-the-cuff collaboration between Bill Evans and Maurice Ravel, while the ferociously competitive “Strike Up the Band” with which they set the evening in motion sounded like two guys shooting roman candles at each other in a locked room. (“Lotta black notes on that page,” Charlap said to me afterward, grinning slyly.)

This set was that good.

Kellaway and his colleagues will be at the Jazz Standard through Sunday night. If you’re anywhere near New York City between now and then–and I’m talking about a five-state radius–do your damnedest to come hear them. If not, fear not: IPO, Kellaway’s new record label, is taping the engagement for release on a forthcoming live CD. In the meantime, go out right this second and get a copy of Remembering Bobby Darin, the first album by the West Coast edition of Kellaway’s Peterson-style trio.

What are you waiting for? Get moving!

UPDATE: Here’s a link to my Washington Post review of the CD reissue of Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet. Buy that, too.

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on my recent visit to Chicago, where I saw Chicago Shakespeare‘s production of Henry IV and the
Court Theatre‘s revival of Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage. Both are smashing:

Next month Chicago Shakespeare Theater takes “Henry IV,” staged by Barbara Gaines, the company’s artistic director, to Stratford-upon-Avon, the Bard’s home town, where it will be performed as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s year-long RSC Complete Works Festival. In preparation for that trip, Chicago Shakespeare is presenting a month-long run of “Henry IV” on its home turf. I rank it among the best Shakespeare productions I’ve seen in recent years, though it will be interesting to see how Ms. Gaines’ no-nonsense approach fares with English critics, most of whom seem to prefer their Shakespeare smothered in political sauce and dished up with a garnish of gimmickry….

Patricia Hodges is best known for having replaced Mary Tyler Moore two seasons ago in Neil Simon’s “Rose’s Dilemma,” an ungrateful task that she brought off with the utmost panache. She is no less satisfying in “Lettice and Lovage,” investing her larger-than-life part with a vibrant, stage-filling physicality that pulls laughter out of you like a magnet. Ms. Reiter is equally good as Lotte, the mousy bureaucrat who unexpectedly finds in Lettice a kindred spirit. I don’t know whether she and Ms. Hodges have ever acted together before, but they’re definitely in tune, and their palpable rapport has much to do with the production’s appeal….

No link, of course (megasigh). If you care to read the whole thing, of which there is much, much more, go out and buy a copy of today’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with immediate access to the full text of my review, along with Joe Morgenstern’s Pulitzer-winning film column and plenty of other worthy art-related copy.

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I ask whether “safe art” (to borrow a phrase used recently by a friend of mine) is ever worth experiencing. My answer? You better believe it.

To find out what I have in mind, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

Envy is the lot of the unwealthy art collector. I picked up a price list at the opening of Hollis Taggart Galleries’ Arnold Friedman retrospective on Wednesday, and it reminded me that any hopes I have of owning one of Friedman’s oil paintings–even a very small one–are contingent on my selling Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong to Hollywood, or something at least as implausible.

I returned home feeling both elated (having just looked at four roomfuls of exquisite paintings) and depressed (knowing that none of them would ever be mine). Then it occurred to me to see if any Friedman-related bargains were to be found on the Web. I searched for “Arnold Friedman lithograph,” and what did I find? This. A few more keystrokes revealed it to be a pencil-signed 1940 Friedman lithograph for sale by the Philadelphia Print Shop for the unlikely-sounding price of $225. “That I can afford,” I muttered hopefully, and fired off an e-mail asking if it was still available. Answer came there eight hours later, and now the latest addition to the Teachout Museum is en route to my door via UPS.

The moral? You can’t always get what you want, but if you try some time, you just might find something (A) close enough for jazz and (B) a whole lot cheaper. And yes, I’m feeling incredibly smug….