Archives for May 23, 2006

Thanks to the vagaries of modern-day air travel, I spent far more time than necessary going to and from Chicago, and am feeling a bit dilapidated as a result. For this reason, I’ll leave it to Our Girl to tell you all about our action-packed long weekend, which we spent dining on Chicago-style encased meats (elk sausage, mmmmm!), sitting on the aisle at Chicago Shakespeare
and the Court Theatre, and watching the Stanley Cup playoffs and a half-dozen reruns of House, to both of which OGIC thoughtfully introduced me.

Now, if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I need to do some work for hire. See you tomorrow.

– “Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint” opens tomorrow at Hollis Taggart Galleries. Curated by William C. Agee, who also wrote the catalogue, this show is the first full-scale retrospective of Friedman’s paintings to be seen anywhere since 1950.

I last wrote about Friedman in a Washington Post review of a 2003 exhibition of Tommy LiPuma’s collection of modern American art:

If you’ve never heard of Friedman, who died in 1946, you’re not alone. So far as I know, none of his work is currently hanging in any museum (though the Museum of Modern Art owns a good Friedman, “Sawtooth Falls”), and he almost never gets written up nowadays. Clement Greenberg, long the top handicapper of American art, praised his late paintings to the skies, calling them “an important moment in the history of American painting.” Strong words, coming from the critic who put Jackson Pollock on the map–yet even his fervent advocacy wasn’t enough to keep Friedman’s name alive.

To understand how good Friedman was, take a long look at “Still Life (Petunias),” the prize of the LiPuma collection. In the foreground is a vase of flowers whose vibrantly colored petals all but burst off the canvas. (The thick, crusty surface was heavily worked with a palette knife.) Hanging on the wall immediately behind the vase is the lower half of an abstract painting–Friedman’s way of underlining the subtle relationship between abstraction and representation. The juxtaposition of the two genres is both witty and thought-provoking, unveiling fresh layers of implication at every glance.

I was amazed to learn that “Still Life (Petunias)” was owned by Tommy and Gill LiPuma. If their names ring a bell, it’s because you probably know Tommy in a different guise: He’s a big-time record producer, the man who helped put Diana Krall on the charts. I’ve met him once or twice, but I had no idea that he and his wife were interested in art, much less that they were true connoisseurs whose independent-minded taste has inspired them to assemble what is almost certainly the largest private collection of Friedmans in the world….

“Sawtooth Falls” and “Still Life (Petunias),” the second of which you can view by going here to read the complete text of my Washington Post piece, are two of the forty-seven paintings included in “Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint,” which is up through June 30.

For more information, go here.

– Roger Kellaway opens Thursday at the Jazz Standard, where he’ll be performing through Sunday with an East Coast version of the King Cole Trio-style piano-guitar-bass trio heard on his latest CD, Remembering Bobby Darin. In addition to Russell Malone on guitar and Jay Leonhart on bass, he’ll be joined by the splendid vibraphonist Stefon Harris.

Kellaway is one of my all-time favorite jazz pianists. I’ve written about him many times, most extensively in a 1995 Wall Street Journal profile in which I called him “the greatest unknown pianist in jazz.” (You can read that piece here.) That’s still true, alas, but a trip to the Jazz Standard will leave no doubt of why Kellaway is universally and extravagantly esteemed by his colleagues.

Sets start at 7:30 and 9:30 each night, with a third set at 11:30 on Friday and Saturday. For more information, go here.

“Rain’s only value, for Miss McGee, was that it reminded her how precious was good weather. She despised rain. But she knew that to the earth, rain was as necessary as sunshine. Could it be, she wondered, that the vice and barbarism abroad in the world served, like the rain, some purpose? Did the abominations in the Sunday paper mingle somehow with the goodness in the world and together, like the rain and sun feeding the ferns, did they nourish some kind of life she was unaware of?”

Jon Hassler, Staggerford