Archives for 2017

“What is divine in man is elusive and impalpable, and he is easily tempted to embody it in a concrete form—a church, a country, a social system, a leader—so that he may realize it with less effort and serve it with more profit. Yet the attempt to externalize the kingdom of heaven in a temporal shape must end in disaster. It cannot be created by charters or constitutions nor established by arms. Those who seek for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.”

Hugh Kingsmill, The Poisoned Crown

Regular readers of this blog know that Giorgio Morandi is one of the modern artists whose work I love most. I’ve written about him often, most notably here and here, and I’ve long dreamed of owning one of his etchings, a medium of which he was a supreme master. Indeed, I actually dared to bid on a Morandi etching at Sotheby’s in 2003, an experience that left me feeling more or less the way I felt when, long ago, I foolishly sat in with my betters at a Kansas City jam session and got blown off the stand.

As I discovered to my chagrin that day, Morandi’s etchings already cost a bit too much in 2003 for me to comfortably afford. Since then their price has gone up even more, and I’ve known for some time that my dream was unlikely to come true. But I kept on hoping for a bargain, and earlier this month I stumbled onto what looked like one. The website that I use to keep up with art at auction informed me that a house in upstate New York had put three Morandi etchings up for sale—all of them for three-figure reserves.

Needless to say, I was suspicious. Small-time auction houses sometimes try to pass off comically obvious Morandi forgeries as authentic, and these etchings were being offered for sale without any information about their provenance save for this homely statement:

The Morandi’s [sic] were consigned by a young plumber working on a house renovation where the buyer’s [sic] instructed the crew to throw all leftover property away; there was a large portfolio containing 16th through 20th century engravings, etchings, lithos, old master drawings, etc. and the Morandi’s [sic] were among those; considering the amount and quality of the portfolio we are confident that these are genuine prints made and signed during the artist’s lifetime.

Yeah, sure, I thought.

Nevertheless, all three etchings looked real at both first and second glances, and the more I thought it over, the more plausible their shared backstory sounded. Who, I asked myself, would go to the trouble of forging an etching by Morandi, then try to sell it at a small-time auction house? Art forgers know far more efficient ways than that to make money.

I pulled my well-thumbed catalogue of Morandi’s etchings off the shelf and went to work. Before long I was satisfied that all three etchings were at the very least based on the real right thing. I e-mailed the auction house to request additional photos, then compared them with photos posted on the websites of museums that own copies of the etchings in question. At length I came to the conclusion that all three etchings were in fact authentic and that the auction house, never before having had occasion to sell a Morandi, simply didn’t know what they were worth.

After talking it over with Mrs. T, I placed modest bids on two of the etchings, one of them my favorite and the other hers. Then I settled down to wait, checking the house’s website at regular intervals. In due course other people placed bids of their own, and I raised my own bids accordingly, gloomily assuring myself that a smart dealer with deep pockets would sooner or later move in for the kill.

The auction took place on Sunday afternoon, midway through a rehearsal for Billy and Me. I asked the stage manager to call a five-minute break just before the two etchings went on the block, then pulled up the website on my MacBook. I was quickly outbid on the etching that Mrs. T favored, but nobody else bothered to place a higher bid on the one I preferred. The virtual hammer went down, I let out a delighted whoop, my colleagues cheered, and Mrs. T and I were the proud owners of one of fifty known pencil-signed copies of “Veduta della Montagnola di Bologna,” a 1932 landscape portraying a scene from Morandi’s Italian home town. (Another copy of the same etching is owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) What’s more, we knocked it down for the merest sliver of what we would have had to pay for a similar piece at Christie’s or Sotheby’s.

All of Morandi’s etchings are distinguished, but “Veduta della Montagnola di Bologna” stands out among his landscapes. James Panero made particular mention of it in his New Criterion review of the same 2008 show that was my first “in-the-flesh” encounter with Morandi’s graphic oeuvre:

The hatch marks have an all-over effect. Morandi defines his objects entirely through their tone, using a texture of lines woven like linen, reflecting the weave of the printed paper, to darken the areas around and beneath the lemon and bread. In Veduta della Montagnola di Bologna (View of the Montagnola in Bologna, 1932), these textures become more abstracted, largely uniform fields of pattern—a dense but even hatchwork of diagonal, vertical, and horizontal lines for a field in shadow, a more open pattern for areas in sun.

The word “abstracted” is the key. As Morandi himself remarked in a 1955 interview, “I also believe there is nothing more surreal and nothing more abstract than reality.” Looking at “Veduta della Montagnola di Bologna,” which is both self-evidently “realistic” and profoundly, even mysteriously unreal, you can see at once what he meant.

The frustrating thing about being an American fan of Morandi’s work is that you hardly ever get to see it. Even those museums that own paintings by Morandi seldom bother to hang them, and I’ve never seen any of his etchings on display save on the rarest of occasions. Now, though, Mrs. T and I will soon be privileged to look at “Veduta della Montagnola di Bologna” as often as we like. It is a privilege that we will never, ever take for granted.

From 2007:

I find it all but impossible to believe that nearly two decades have gone by since I met Maria Schneider. I had the good luck to hear Maria’s music when she was just getting started as a bandleader, and the good sense to recognize that it bore the stamp of something more than mere talent. From then on I followed her work closely, and when I started contributing profiles to The Wall Street Journal a few years later, she was at the top of my short list of people about whom I wanted to write. So far as I know, “At 33, a Composer of Note,” which was published in the Journal on October 7, 1994, was the first time anyone wrote at length about Maria outside of the jazz press, a fact of which I have long been sinfully proud…

Read the whole thing here.

“The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Debate on Spiritualism” (Illustrated London News, March 15, 1919)

Sallie Wilson and American Ballet Theatre perform Antony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire, preceded by a featurette in which Tudor and Agnes de Mille talk about Tudor’s choreography. The score is Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. This performance was originally telecast on PBS as part of a 1973 documentary called American Ballet Theatre: A Close-Up in Time:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Liffey did not like to display weakness: and weakness admitted is the very stuff of good friendship.”

Fay Weldon, Puffball (courtesy of Sara Kramer)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of The Band’s Visit. Here’s an excerpt.

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The best musical of the year has made it to Broadway. After a successful but far too short off-Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater, “The Band’s Visit” has moved uptown with all of its wondrous charm and warmth intact. Directed with supreme finesse by David Cromer and performed by the best cast imaginable, this small-scale show is fine enough to fill you with fresh hope for a genre that has lately been running on fumes….

Adapted for the stage by Itamar Moses and David Yazbek from Eran Kolirin’s 2007 Israeli film, “The Band’s Visit” is the story of a fictional occurrence that was, as one of the characters readily admits, “not very important.” The eight members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, it seems, have traveled to Israel from Egypt in order to perform at an Arab cultural center located in the city of Petah Tikva. Such, at any rate, is their intention, but they’re sidetracked en route by a mispronounced consonant: Since there is no “p” sound in Arabic, most English-speaking Egyptians automatically replace that consonant with “b.” Slightly fractured English being the lingua franca of the modern-day Middle East, the musicians inadvertently find themselves in Bet Hatikva, a hopelessly provincial desert village whose cultural attractions consist of two restaurants, a roller rink, and a concrete “park” devoid of grass or trees.

In less knowing hands, this mishap might easily have been played for farce and nothing more. But while “The Band’s Visit” gets plenty of well-deserved laughs in its opening scenes, Messrs. Moses and Yazbek are hunting bigger game. We soon discover that the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra and the bored residents of Bet Hatikva who spend their days “waiting for something to happen” all have something in common: They long for their little lives to be enlarged by love.

Some of the rest you can guess for yourself, but part of what makes “The Band’s Visit” so special is that it steers clear of the obvious….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Band’s Visit:

The trailer for the original film version of The Band’s Visit:

Thelonious Monk plays a solo version of “Just a Gigolo,” by Irving Caesar and Leonello Casucci. This performance was originally telecast on Japanese television on May 23, 1963:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)