Raising the flag

The Teachout Museum, my collection of midcentury-modern American art and its forerunners here and in Europe, contains two prints by American impressionists who were active around the turn of the twentieth century, John H. Twachtman and Childe Hassam. The Twachtman print, an elegant little 1893 etching called Dock at Newport, was one of the very first pieces I bought all the way back in 2003. Hassam’s Storm King, an arrestingly modern-looking lithotint dating from 1918, came into my hands in 2014 after years of searching, and is now conspicuously displayed in my apartment.

As it happens, I don’t care at all for Hassam’s better-known etchings—I find them fussy—but lithography brought out a freer, more adventurous streak in his work, and there is one other print of his that I have long sought, Avenue of the Allies. Also made in 1918, it is a lithographic monochrome pendant to the well-known series of thirty-odd brightly colored “flag paintings” that Hassam made during and after World War I. They portray different parts of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, on which the flags of all twenty-two of the allied nations were displayed as part of the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive. Taken together, these paintings are now widely thought to be his greatest works, recalling as they do the various series paintings in which Monet repeatedly returned to the same subject—haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament—at different times of the day and under widely varying atmospheric conditions.

It goes without saying that to own one of the flag paintings would be far beyond my modest means. (To give you a notion of what they cost, Jacqueline Kennedy acquired Avenue in the Rain for the White House art collection in 1963, and it currently hangs in the Oval Office.) The lithograph, however, is masterly in its own way, full of light and air and as fresh in its feel as “Storm King,” and I have been keeping an eye out for an affordable copy ever since I first became aware of it.

The miracle, as is so often the case, came from an unexpected quarter: a flawless copy was offered for sale by a London auction house late last year. Since Hassam is all but unknown in Europe and the flag series is so specifically American in its appeal, it occurred to me that I might be able to knock down “Avenue of the Allies” with a low-ball bid, and sure enough, I got my price. It was even sold to me in a handsome frame that I saw no reason to change, and it now hangs next to “Storm King” on a wall close to my desk.

“Avenue of the Allies” is one of the first pieces of art that I have bought since Hilary’s passing and without her counsel, but I feel pretty secure in saying that she would have liked and approved of it. I wish she could see it now.

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“Childe Hassam, Artist: A Short Personal Sketch,” a silent short subject  produced in 1932 by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows the artist at home and at work: