Someone’s been sending me peanuts–the styrofoam kind, to be exact. These malign little chunks of plastic and air may well be the best possible thing with which to pack a box containing a framed work of art, but they also have a sneaky way of insinuating themselves into every corner of the room in which the box in question is opened, which is what happened yesterday afternoon when I took delivery of a well-sealed carton containing the latest addition to the Teachout Museum, a lithograph by Jules Olitski. No sooner did I pry it open than whoom! The whole living room was ankle-deep in white peanuts.

Time out for a little backstory. After I delivered the first two chapters of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong to Harcourt last week, I figured I owed myself a present in return for all that hard work, so I started looking around for a new piece of art. I ran across Olitski’s 1995 lithograph Forward Edge in an online auction the very next day, and fell in love at first sight.

By coincidence–or not–I’d only just become seriously interested in Olitski, who prior to that time had been little more than a name to me. To be sure, I’d been wanting for some time to acquire a piece by an important color-field painter to go with my copy of Helen Frankenthaler’s Grey Fireworks, but I already had my eye on Circle I-6, a 1978 Kenneth Noland monoprint. Alas, I never did manage to track down an affordable copy (affordable by me, that is), so instead of going off half-cocked and buying something simply to be buying something, I sat tight and waited for inspiration.

Three weeks ago, Ann Freedman of Knoedler & Company
sent me a copy of Jules Olitski: Six Decades, the catalogue of a small-scale retrospective in Miami curated by Karen Wilkin, one of my favorite art critics. (It’s up through the end of May, should you happen to be in the vicinity.) The first paragraph caught me off guard:

Jules Olitski celebrated his eightieth birthday, in 2002, by exhibiting a series of recent paintings titled With Love and Disregard. The no-holds-barred canvases were so surprising, muscular, and energetic that the uninitiated could have been forgiven for thinking they were the work of an extravagantly gifted, fearless newcomer….Only a lifetime of making and thinking about paintings could generate work at once so obviously indifferent to ordinary notions of beauty (and that much maligned idea, taste) and so confident. Art historians call this kind of brilliant, assured inventiveness in the work of long-lived artists who continue to challenge themselves “late style.”

As always, Wilkin had backed up her provocative words with a shrewd and illuminating choice of paintings, and as I flipped through the catalogue, I felt myself getting onto Olitski’s wavelength for the first time. By the time I was done, I resolved to add him to the Teachout Museum at the earliest opportunity–which came, improbably enough, just two weeks later.

Even in electronic reproduction, Forward Edge took my breath away, and two years of intensive collecting have taught me to trust that kind of immediate, unhesitating response. I put in an absentee bid, then left town for a wedding. No sooner did I get back to New York than I found that Forward Edge had been knocked down to me for well under my top price.

Further proof that my decision to buy Forward Edge was in tune with the will of the universe came when I hung it yesterday afternoon. I’d planned to spend most of the evening moving things around, but I hit the sweet spot on the very first try. It was as though my living room had been waiting patiently for the arrival of something of whose existence I was hitherto unaware. (I guess it is like falling in love, isn’t it?) Now I can’t wait to show off the Teachout Museum to the next person who comes calling. For the moment, though, I mean to spend as much time as possible curled up on my couch, basking in the subtly altered mixture of harmonies that fills the air of my home.

Art is good. Life is good. I could do without all those damn peanuts, though.

“Tony’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. There was a weight on Charles again, the same old weight, and it was heavier after that brief moment of freedom. In spite of all those years, in spite of all his striving, it was remarkable how little pleasure he took in final fulfillment. He was a vice-president of the Stuyvesant Bank. It was what he had dreamed of long ago and yet it was not the true texture of early dreams. The whole thing was contrived, as he had said to Nancy, an inevitable result, a strangely hollow climax. It had obviously been written in the stars, bound to happen, and he could not have changed a line of it, being what he was, and Nancy would be pleased, but it was not what he had dreamed.

“‘Well, Tony,’ he said, ‘I guess that means I can send Junior to Exeter,’ and Tony Burton was asking why Exeter? He would not send any boy of his to Exeter.

“They were on a different basis already, now that he was a vice-president. Automatically, his thoughts were running along new lines, well-trained, mechanically perfect thoughts, estimating a new situation. There would be no trouble with the directors. There were only five vice-presidents at the Stuyvesant, all of the others older than he, most of them close to the retirement age, like Tony Burton himself. For a moment he thought of Mr. Laurence Lovell on Johnson Street but Mr. Lovell would not have understood, or Jessica either, how far he had gone or what it meant to be a vice-president of the Stuyvesant Bank. Nancy would understand. Nancy had more ambition for him than he had for himself. Nancy would be very proud. They would sell the house at Sycamore Park and get a larger place. They would resign from the Oak Knoll Club. And then there was the sailboat. It had its compensations but it was not what he had dreamed.”

John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

A reader writes:

Your “Entries from an Unkept Diary” for today
reminds me that I
want to thank you for helping me seem somewhat cool to my 22-year-old
daughter. I have passed on my CD’s of The Lascivious Biddies and Erin
McKeown (which I discovered from ALN) to load on her ipod and she lent
me the Garden State soundtrack. Your young friends not only keep you up
to speed but through you help an even older geezer find musical
connections to his daughter. I gave up rock in the mid seventies and
listened mostly to classical music and more recently to jazz (I have
discovered some outstanding female jazz vocalists thanks to you) but
finding out about some of the recent eclectic and alternative music out
there is great fun. Thanks!

Like I always say, this is a full-service blog.

I have an interesting chore ahead of me this afternoon. I’ll be attending my first meeting as a newly elected member of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, which is not a social club: we convene each May to vote on the annual Drama Critics’ Circle awards, which will be announced May 24 at a bash to be held at the Algonquin, with Edward Albee as our special guest. Don’t expect any blogging about our double-secret conclave, though, unless a fistfight breaks out, in which case I’m on it like a bonnet.

Coincidentally, this year’s Tony nominations were announced yesterday. (For a complete list, go here.) According to Jesse McKinley of the New York Times, the big story
was who didn’t get asked to the party:

In the competition for leading actor in a play, Denzel Washington, appearing at the Belasco as Brutus in “Julius Caesar,” was left off the list, as was Jeff Goldblum, who plays a curious cop in Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “The Pillowman.” In the leading-actress category, meanwhile, Jessica Lange was passed over for her performance as the mother in a revival of “The Glass Menagerie,” and Natasha Richardson was overlooked for her work in another Tennessee Williams revival, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

None of this, of course, was at all surprising to anyone who keeps a reasonably close eye on theater in New York. The real surprises will come when the awards are handed out on June 5. In the meantime, I thought it might be amusing to do a little preliminary handicapping, so here are my personal picks for the major prizes, accompanied by a smattering of cynical who’s-really-gonna-win commentary

At dinner last night I was served by a friendly brunette with a girl-next-door face who looked oddly familiar to me. Midway through the meal, the coin dropped, and I said to her, “Forgive me for staring, but you look just like an actress who got nominated for a Tony this morning.”

I just got back from the New York State Theater, where I saw New York City Ballet dance An American in Paris, Christopher Wheeldon’s new George Gershwin ballet. I’ll have more to say about it later on, both here and in my Washington Post column, but here’s something I want to mention right now: I must have heard An American in Paris at least a hundred times, and it still makes me smile. Premiered in 1928, it remains to this day as fresh as tomorrow morning’s dandelions.

“The critics’ circle was in session when he arrived. They met in the Asshole Room of the Hotel Asshole, as far as Max was concerned. His mind tasted quite foul now, and spewed little bits of garbage into his mouth. He had better not talk too much tonight. He had not written his review, and he felt guilty and hungover about that; not, as he had hoped, roguish and liberated. They sat at a long baize-covered table with various-colored potions in front of them, looking, to Max’s yellow eye, like wizards, alchemists, dwarfs.

Here’s the official press release: