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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 30, 2006

TT: Coming and going

May 30, 2006 by Terry Teachout

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!

TT: Fair play

May 30, 2006 by Terry Teachout

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

TT: Almanac

May 30, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“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)

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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