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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Street scene

April 27, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In order to divert those of you who, like me, are staying home these days, I’ve been posting images of some of the prints and paintings that hang on the walls of the Manhattan apartment that I shared for many years with my late wife Hilary—the “Teachout Museum,” as a friend calls it. My latest image is of Broadway, a six-color lithograph made in 1972 by Fairfield Porter, one of America’s most underappreciated visual artists, who was identically accomplished as a critic.

While Porter isn’t exactly a household name, many connoisseurs consider him one of the greatest American artists (and art critics) of the twentieth century, an astonishingly original representational painter whose style fuses two seemingly disparate idioms: the intimate domestic realism of Bonnard and Vuillard and the excitingly free brushwork of Willem de Kooning and the other abstract expressionists.

It was in both of his twin capacities that Porter first opened my eyes to the visual arts, as I wrote in an essay about the origins of my art collection. I discovered his work on a 1995 visit to Kansas City:

I went to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, where I saw a 1960 painting by Fairfield Porter called Wheat.It is deceptively simple—a bluish-gray rectangle of open sky and a smaller rectangle of tan-colored wheat, separated by a farmhouse, three trees, and a barn.

Though Wheat is one of Porter’s best paintings, there is nothing obviously prepossessing about its uncomplicated composition. But something about Wheat struck me with the force of revelation. Was it the way in which the artist freely yet evocatively portrayed a landscape as familiar to me as the house in which I had grown up? Whatever the reason, it spoke to me as had no other painting, and I went straight to the museum shop to find out more about the man who made it.

The shop had no books about Porter in stock. Instead, I found Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935-1975,a paperback volume of Porter’s art reviews. By a stroke of luck, I had been awakened to the pleasures of painting by one of the finest artist-critics of the 20th century, a major American painter who wrote about art with the same distinction that the composer Virgil Thomson brought to his writing about music. Like Thomson, Porter had a plain-spoken, no-nonsense style that emphasized description over theorizing—“criticism,” he wrote, “should tell you what is there”—and his thoughtful words helped me make sense of the transforming experience I had undergone. As I read what he had to say about painting and painters, I became excited about art—really excited—for the first time in my life.

Like so many of his other prints, Broadway is closely related to a painting by Porter, Broadway South of Union Square. As always, the planes, contours, and color scheme of the painting have been simplfied to arresting effect, and the results remind me of something that Porter said in one of his essays, a remark that I have often had occasion to quote in this space and elsewhere: “When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: ‘Make everything more beautiful.’”

In this case, however, the lithograph actually came before the painting, which was completed in 1975, the last year of Porter’s life. I have no idea why this was so, and since the painting is in a private collection, I can only judge its quality at a remove. Nevertheless, I have a feeling that I would still prefer Broadway to Broadway South of Union Square if I were to see them hanging side by side, for there was something about the necessary simplifications of the lithographic medium that brought out the very best in Porter as his life drew to a close.

I first came across Broadway when I was searching for an appropriately American image to put on the cover of A Terry Teachout Reader, whose essays all deal with various aspects of American art. I loved it at first sight, as did my editor at Yale University Press, who replied, “It’s elegant, classy, and a bit nostalgic without the treacle.” I decided to acquire a copy of Broadway after my book came out in 2002, and found one on sale a few months later. It has since been prominently displayed in the two New York apartments that I shared with my beloved Hilary, an exquisite work of art that is also a symbol of my own work as a critic and creative artist who has a powerful attachment to American modernism.

Now that the streets of Manhattan have been emptied by illness and fear, I look each day at the crowded, bustling sidewalks of Broadway and remember with heartache and longing what once was—and will once again be.

Just because: Mack Sennett appears on This Is Your Life

April 27, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Mack Sennett is the guest on This Is Your Life, hosted by Ralph Edwards. This episode was originally telecast live by NBC on March 30, 1955:

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

Almanac: Robinson Jeffers on cremation

April 27, 2020 by Terry Teachout

It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said,
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame—besides, I am used to it.
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.

Robinson Jeffers, “Cremation”

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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