“I wish that I could save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog’s-ear place of these pages the warning, ‘Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.’”
George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day
As part of our long-term project of staying at all six of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses that can be rented for overnight stays, we launched our vacation by flying to Pittsburgh and driving from there to Polymath Park, the rural resort to which Wright’s Duncan House, which was previously to be found in Illinois, was moved in 2002, just ahead of the wrecker’s ball.
The Duncan house is one of a group of prefabricated houses designed by Wright and manufactured by Marshall Erdman that were built in the Fifties. (AnotherWrightprefab is located in Staten Island.) It’s the only one open to the public, so this was our first chance to get a look at what Wright had in mind when in 1955 he started to design a house that, unlike any of his earlier residences, would be suitable for mass construction….
In order to divert those of you who, like me, are sticking close to 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.
The latest of these images is of “Dock at Newport,” an 1893 etching by John Henry Twachtman, my favorite American impressionist, whose paintings hang in every major American museum—the Phillips Collection owns six of his paintings and pastels—but who is not nearly so well known to the general public as he deserves to be. I’ve yet to see a museum retrospective of his work, which is too bad, since he is, in my opinion, the only American impressionist whose work is consistently comparable in quality to that of his more famous French counterparts. Indeed, Duncan Phillips went so far as to call him a “great master” whose paintings “are all modern in mind…and serve as connecting links between the past and the present.”
Twachtman’s paintings, alas, are far beyond my means, but he was also superbly accomplished at etching, and his efforts in that medium remain affordable, if rather less so than when I first started collecting. “Dock at Newport” was the second work of art that I purchased, all the way back in 2003, and if memory serves, I bought it from a print dealer for a modest three-figure sum. That surprises me now, since “Dock at Newport” exists in only thirty lifetime impressions and has always been regarded by critics as one of his very finest etchings. It was, for instance, singled out for extended mention in what appears to have been the first review of Twachtman’s etchings, written by Margery Austen Ryerson and published in Art in America in 1920, eighteen years after the artist’s death:
The “Dock at Newport” is full of the delicate evanescent light effects that he loved….We see here too his sense of rhythm. He plays or he gently dances his values. It is darkest just where it makes the print more beautiful to have it darkest and it grows lighter just where it will bring all into a harmony. We notice the same fine sense of gray in this work that is in his paintings of snow and water and mist.
Like many noteworthy prints, “Dock at Newport” is based on a preexisting painting, “The Landing, Newport,” which was done in 1889. It’s not as good as the later etching, which probably explains why it remains in private hands to this day: Twachtman was still working out his mature style, in which French and Japanese influences clearly played a part but which was nonetheless entirely his own. His twenty-nine etchings, of which “Dock at Newport” was his last, are more clear-cut than his later paintings, a few of which teeter on the edge of abstraction, but they are no less individual, and you can see from looking at the earlier painting how he had become himself by the time he created “Dock at Newport.”
“Dock at Newport” hangs in the passageway that leads from the dining room to the kitchen of my apartment in Manhattan, where it keeps company with a watercolor by Jane Wilson and prints by Childe Hassam, Alex Katz, Louis Lozowick, and John Marin. I look at it every day, as I have ever since I acquired it seventeen years ago. It is a little masterpiece at whose simple, almost spare elegance I never fail to marvel, and now that I no longer have a companion with whom to share it, I find a measure of consolation in its timeless beauty.
“But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat—it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice ‘at the closing of the day,’ I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Folger Shakespeare Library’s webcast version of a 2008 revival of Macbeth co-directed by Aaron Posner and Teller. Here’s an excerpt.
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I’ve reviewed “the Scottish play” (as it’s famously known to superstitious theater prople) 13 times in this space since 2005, and of those productions, only two were total duds. The rest enacted Shakespeare’s terrible tale of unchecked ambition in an uncommonly wide variety of ways. I’ve seen “Macbeth” performed by a gaggle of bloodthirsty schoolgirls, set in the Soviet Union during the Great Terror, even mounted in the manner of Japanese Noh theater. The possibilities it offers for cogent, creative reinterpretation appear to be endless…
While I’d hesitate to say which of those 13 “Macbeths” I liked best, the one of which I have the most indelibly specific memories is the version co-directed by Aaron Posner and Teller (Penn’s silent partner) in 2008 for New Jersey’s Two River Theater Company and the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, a live performance from the Washington run was recorded and is now streaming on the Folger’s website. Viewing it has confirmed all my impressions of the show, which I saw twice, once in each city, the second time purely for my pleasure. It is a “Macbeth” of explosive dynamism, a high-speed production running for just over two hours (the text has been extensively but discreetly trimmed) that is both flamboyant and essentially serious. The directors call it “a supernatural horror thriller,” which is true enough but a bit misleading. Stage magic, stage violence, stage blood: All are here in copious quantities, yet all illuminate, rather than obscuring, the play’s timeless truths about humankind’s flawed nature.
The stage magic is the most spectacular element of this “Macbeth,” as well as the one about which I can say the least without spoiling the endless surprises that Teller has pulled out of his bottomless bag of tricks: Vanishing actors, floating daggers that materialize out of thin air, even a pre-show announcement that is…well, let’s just say interrupted and leave it at that….
