Archives for January 30, 2020

Traveling show

January 30, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Part of the point of collecting art is that you needn’t leave home to look at it. This is especially comforting when life becomes too complicated for you to visit museums or galleries. On account of Mrs. T’s latest hospital stay, I had to pass up seeing a major exhibition of abstract paintings by Hans Hofmann, an artist whose work I love passionately. Fortunately for us, Mrs. T and I had a Hofmann of our own—an especially choice photolithograph—and now, to my surprise and delight, we have two.

Hofmann wasn’t greatly interested in printmaking, and his paintings are too expensive for us to even fantasize about owning one. (When it comes to collecting, Mrs. T and I are strictly small-timers.) So far as I know, he made only two screenprints, one in 1952 and the other in 1961, and I’d never been able to find an affordable copy of either one. Then I got lucky last August and succeeded in knocking down Composition (1961), a small silkscreen with hand coloring in oil that was printed in an edition of fifty copies. Because Hofmann made only two color prints, this one is quite scarce and typically costs more than we feel comfortable paying. The copy in question, however, was put up for auction by an Italian house at a three-figure reserve that was, to my astonishment, roughly a tenth of what we would have had to bid in the U.S. (Hofmann isn’t well known in Europe). What’s more, nobody else bid on it.

Buying art from Italy turns out to be a horrifically complicated business, so much so that it took nearly four months for me to untie all of the requisite bureaucratic red tape. But I sliced through the final Gordian knot a couple of weeks ago, and “Composition (1961)” arrived by overseas courier yesterday, just in time to console me for not having been able to see “Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction” in Massachusetts. It is what print collectors call a “rich impression,” one whose illusion of depth is so powerful that I gasped when I took it out of the package and saw it “in the flesh” for the very first time.

It happens that Mrs. T doesn’t much care for “Woman’s Head,” the Hofmann that I bought back in 2005, just before we met, which hangs over our living-room couch alongside equally striking prints by Milton Avery, Richard Diebenkorn, John Marin, and Joan Mitchell. I’m guessing, however, that “Composition (1961)” will fit neatly into the space previously occupied by “Woman’s Head,” and my plan is to hang it as soon as it comes back from our trusty framer. First, though, I’ll bring it to New York-Presbyterian so that she can get a look at the latest addition to the Teachout Museum, which is small enough for me to tuck under one arm. She hasn’t seen any art since entering the hospital in December, and my hope is that it’ll brighten her life to hold “Composition (1961)” in her hands and imagine how it will look over the couch.

That’s another joy of collecting art: sometimes you can take it with you.

UPDATE: Here’s how it looks on the wall.

Great expectations

January 30, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, occasioned by the unsealing of a crate of love letters sent by T.S. Eliot to Emily Mann, I write about artists who have sought to use posthumous publication to shape the way they are viewed by posterity—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Earlier this month, the contents of a crate of love letters written by the most famous poet of the 20^th century and sealed for the past half-century were finally made available to researchers by Princeton University. The crate contained 1,131 letters sent by T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale, the woman whom the author of “The Waste Land” was long thought to have loved prior to and during his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, which ended when Haigh-Wood died in a mental hospital in 1947. Simultaneous with the opening of the letters, which were left by Hale to Princeton on condition that they not be made available for public viewing until 50 years after she and Eliot had died, Eliot’s estate released a frigid letter in which he sniffily informed posterity that Hale had neither loved nor had “sexual relations” with him. Moreover, he added, she was “not a lover of poetry” and “was not much interested in my poetry,” claiming that she “would have killed the poet in me” had they married after Haigh-Wood’s death.

As literary time bombs go, Eliot’s letter, which he wrote specifically to be opened when and if Hale’s letters became public, is more than a little bit catty. But his determination to put Hale in what he took to be her place is hardly unprecedented. Artists of all kinds have gone to considerable trouble to sound off from beyond the grave. H.L. Mencken, for example, left behind a stack of autobiographical manuscripts, including a 2,100-page diary and a pair of book-length memoirs, “My Life as Author and Editor” and “Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work,” that he bequeathed to Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library and placed under a 35-year time seal at the time of his death in 1956. Published between 1989 and 1994, these works amounted to an extended attempt by Mencken (in his words) to rewrite “the literary history of the United States in my time,” depicting such celebrated contemporaries as Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis “precisely as I saw them.”….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.