Traveling show

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.