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Archives for July 28, 2016

N.C. Wyeth’s secret life

July 28, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I report and reflect on an exhibition of the “serious” paintings of N.C. Wyeth. Here’s an excerpt.

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I can’t remember the last time I heard a screenwriter, a mystery novelist or a show-tune composer express regret for having embraced so “lowly” a calling. Nowadays, popular artists know that what they do is valuable in its own right. It hardly seems possible that when Aaron Copland went to Hollywood in 1939 to score Lewis Milestone’s film version of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” many of his fellow highbrows were sure that he was finished as a classical composer. Today, they’d ask him for a letter of recommendation.

2895b4c9f2e36de0889cd8f30a2805cfI thought of Copland’s film scores when I went to see “N.C. Wyeth: Painter,” an exhibition on display through December 31 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. Wyeth, who died in 1945, was the father of Andrew Wyeth, perhaps the most famous and beloved American painter of the 20th century. In his lifetime, though, N.C. was equally famous—though not as a maker of what we stubbornly continue to call “fine art.” He was, rather, the most highly paid commercial illustrator of his day. While Wyeth is now mainly known for having illustrated such children’s classics as “Robinson Crusoe,” “Treasure Island” and “The Yearling,” his work also appeared on the covers of mass-circulation magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, and in ads for Cream of Wheat and Lucky Strike cigarettes….

But Wyeth believed that he was squandering his great gifts. Unable to regard illustration as anything more than “the art of journalism, to be rendered in the manner of painting,” he dreamed of being praised as “a painter who has shaken the dust of the illustrator from his heels!!” So he spent his spare time working on landscapes, portraits and studies of life in coastal Maine, where he spent his summers. He saw these paintings, which bear such homely titles as “The Harbor Herring Gut” and “Fisherman’s Family,” as “the beginning of more important self-expression,” and they were intended not for magazines but galleries—and, eventually, museums….

tumblr_kz57jfyvNl1qa4s0qo1_r1_1280Art critics and historians haven’t had much to say about Wyeth’s “serious” work. David Michaelis, author of “N.C. Wyeth,” an excellent 1998 biography which argues that his illustrations deserve to be taken very seriously indeed—a point of view now generally accepted by scholars—wrote off Wyeth’s “independent” paintings in a single curt sentence: “He deliberately intended these paintings to be taken as statements of his most personal feelings, yet he left out or deflated the very pictorial elements that made his canvases most his own.”

To visit the Farnsworth, however, is to realize that Mr. Michaelis got it almost exactly wrong. These burgeoningly vital, at times near-primitive paintings, whose bold swashes of magenta and turquoise recall the Fauvism of André Derain and Henri Matisse, make Andrew look prim….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

So you want to see a show?

July 28, 2016 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, closes Sept. 10, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, closes Jan. 1, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, closes Sept. 4, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes Oct. 2, original production reviewed here)

G-Janet Dacal with Jeremiah Ginn in Goodspeeds Bye Bye Birdie. (c)Diane SobolewskiIN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Bye Bye Birdie (musical, G, closes Sept. 8, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Measure for Measure (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• Company (musical, PG-13, extended through Aug. 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Fully Committed (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

Almanac: Thomas Jefferson on democracy and ignorance

July 28, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (January 6, 1816)

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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