About Last Night

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: 

Somerset Maugham is interviewed by Alan Pryce-Jones in 1965 for Wisdom, an occasional series of TV profiles of older “cultural icons” that aired on NBC from 1952 to 1965:

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

“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.”

Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

Steely Dan’s two appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, performing “Josie” in 1995 and “Cousin Dupree” in 2000:

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

“You know, I’ve always figured the waiting is what they pay me for. The acting I do free.”

Edward G. Robinson (quoted in Charlton Heston, In the Arena)

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about two important tributes to the Great American Play. Here’s an excerpt.

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When Al Hirschfeld died in 2003, the obituary published by the New York Times, in which his pen-and-ink theatrical caricatures had run, bore the following headline: “Al Hirschfeld, 99, Dies; He Drew Broadway.” Even though he also drew movie and TV stars and pop celebrities of all kinds—the subjects of his 10,000-odd drawings, paintings and prints range from Jack Benny and Liberace to the cast of “Frasier”—it was Broadway with which Hirschfeld’s name was and is most closely linked. The vaulting, swooping energy of his caricatures, which embodied the personalities of his subjects without stooping to malice, was inimitable, and no one has been able to take his place.

Hirschfeld drew Broadway for so long that it is possible to put together a nearly unlimited number of subject-specific exhibitions of his work. The latest one, “‘It Goes So Fast’: ‘Our Town’ by Al Hirschfeld,” is an online show of 10 drawings assembled by the Al Hirschfeld Foundation and curated by Howard Sherman….

Mr. Sherman is also the author of the recently published Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ in the 21st Century (Methuen), an important book consisting of oral histories of 12 productions of the play that have opened since 2002 and prefaced by a richly detailed 34-page overview of the original Broadway production and the play’s subsequent history up to the turn of this century….

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Read the whole thing here.

Go here to watch Al Hirschfeld draw Paul Newman as the Stage Manager in Our Town: