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Archives for October 23, 2019

The middlewoman of modern art

October 23, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about Edith Halpert, whose career as a pioneering gallery owner who specialized in modern American art is memorialized in a new exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum. Here’s an excerpt.

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For most of us, art dealers and gallery owners are the missing links of art history. Unless you’re a collector or a well-informed historian, you probably haven’t heard of any of them. The only dealers ever to have been widely known by name in this country were Joseph Duveen, the man who sold Europe’s Old Master paintings to America’s gilded-age financiers, and Leo Castelli, who was largely responsible for spreading the word about the Pop artists and other luminaries of the ’60s and ’70s. Yet they’re the essential middlemen who help get art out of the studios and into the hands of collectors—the first step on the long road to posterity.

Consider the case of Edith Halpert, the founder of New York’s Downtown Gallery, which opened in Greenwich Village in 1926 and soon became one of the most influential galleries specializing in modern American art. Not only did she support and figure prominently in the careers of such important painters of the time as Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler and Max Weber, but she was also instrumental in bringing American folk art to the attention of major collectors like Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (they shared a special liking for traditional weathervanes).Thousands of paintings and other works originally sold by Halpert now hang in such public collections as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Washington’s Phillips Collection….

Now New York’s Jewish Museum is seeking to bring this seminal figure back into the modern-art conversation by presenting “Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art,” the first exhibition to be devoted to her career. On display through February 9, it contains 100 works that were either sold by Halpert or went into her personal collection, which was auctioned off in 1973. Organized by Rebecca Shaykin, who has also written a first-rate monograph, “Edith Halpert, the Downtown Gallery, and the Rise of American Art,” that doubles as the catalogue, it’s a compact, elegant show that is both comprehensively informative and a delight to visit….

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Read the whole thing here.

The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (7)

October 23, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the order in which I first heard them.

7. Bartók Rhapsodies for Violin and Orchestra and Berg Violin Concerto, played by Isaac Stern and accompanied by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic (Columbia)

It used to be that when you lived in a small town far from the nearest big city, you bought what the local stores sold or what you could order by mail from Sears, Roebuck, and not much else. The notion that you might someday be able to boot up your laptop, click a few keys, and have a record “delivered” to you electronically within seconds was the stuff 2001: A Space Odyssey was made of. Laptops didn’t exist back then, much less digital sound files, and it certainly never occurred to me that I would live long enough to see Sears teetering on the edge of extinction.

Hence I got my first copy of Isaac Stern’s 1959 album of works for violin and orchestra by Béla Bartók and Alban Berg not from Amazon or iTunes but from Keith Collins Piano Company, a store in Smalltown, U.S.A., that sold records on the side but whose main business was furnishing the musically inclined children of Smalltown with pianos, organs, guitars, clarinets, trumpets, and other instruments. It was there that my parents bought me a Scherl & Roth student-model violin, my first musical instrument, purchased on the installment plan. By contrast, Collins Piano had only a couple of bins devoted to classical records, but since there was no other place in town that sold such recherché fare—Smalltown had no record stores at all—I contented myself with whatever was in stock, occasionally screwing up the nerve to place a special order for a specific album.

I can’t imagine how a record of concerted works by Berg and Bartók made its circuitous way into the classical bin at Collins Piano. Granted, Isaac Stern and Leonard Bernstein, the album’s conductor, were as famous in 1969 as it was then possible for American classical musicians to be. But Berg and Bartók wrote modern music, meaning that it didn’t sound at all like Mozart, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky, much less Dolly Parton or Glenn Miller, and if I hadn’t saved up my allowance to purchase that particular album, which had all too clearly been gathering dust for a long time, I’ve no idea who else in Smalltown would have done so.

I brought it home, put on Bartók’s First Rhapsody, and was instantaneously thrilled to the marrow by its strange but potent blend of soaring lyricism and harsh, slashing dissonances. Never before had I heard such a piece, and I resolved on the spot to seek out more music by Bartók and learn who he was and why he composed that way. I didn’t know it at the time, but a door in my unformed artistic consciousness had just swung wide open, never to close again.

By then I was studying the violin myself, so I ordered the sheet music from Collins Piano. The finger-twisting double stops in the first movement defeated me, but I kept on sawing away at them, and in due course I got to where I could stagger all the way through the piece. I have a feeling that the results sounded rather more like Jack Benny than Isaac Stern, but I did manage to play the First Rhapsody just well enough to imagine myself performing it in front of an audience some time in the distant future. That never happened, alas, but I still love the piece, and I expect that this will always be my favorite recorded version.

(To be continued)

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The first movement of Béla Bartók’s First Violin Rhapsody, performed by György Pauk, Iván Fischer, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo at a 2000 concert:

Carnegie Hall Salutes Jack Benny, a TV program originally telecast by CBS on September 12, 1961. Also featured in addition to the comedian are Isaac Stern, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Roberta Peters, Van Cliburn, and the Benny Goodman Sextet (with Red Norvo on vibraharp). The performances, filmed during a Carnegie Hall concert, include a comedy version of the first movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto played by Jack Benny and Stern. Benny performed this piece at benefit concerts for symphony orchestras throughout America:

Jack Benny talks about Isaac Stern on The Dick Cavett Show. This episode was originally telecast by ABC on February 21, 1973:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

Snapshot: Gene Kelly and Sugar Ray Robinson dance a duet

October 23, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Gene Kelly and Sugar Ray Robinson dance a duet in the opening sequence of “Dancing: A Man’s Game,” an episode of Omnibus hosted by Alistair Cooke and originally telecast by NBC on December 21, 1958:

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

Almanac: Alfred P. Sloan on power and responsibility

October 23, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“You are a senior executive of a big company and you know the first rule: authority and responsibility must be congruent and commensurate to each other. If you don’t want authority and shouldn’t have it, don’t talk about responsibility. And if you don’t want responsibility and shouldn’t have it, don’t talk about authority.”

Alfred P. Sloan (quoted in Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander)

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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