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"The Unfazed Art Spectator" by Brett Busang - No Sale
Thursday, July 20, 2006
No Sale
Some years ago, I tried to interest the National Portrait Gallery, which has re-opened here in the nation's capital, in a painting I'd bought at an antique store in Lower Manhattan. I thought The Gallery might perk up at the thought of owning a portrait of a distinguished American author and critic whose stock had fallen over the years, but was not yet
- thanks to his influence in the theatre - the dicey thing critical stock can often be. His name was George Jean Nathan and, if his star has dimmed, that's only the fault of people who fail to identify him with quotes (or near-quotes because I'm guessing) like: "I drink so that other people will be interesting." He and H. L. Mencken founded The Smart Set, which every serious writer wanted to get into - the way everybody of that ilk wants to get into the New Yorker today.
He, Nathan, wrote a little drunk scene for The Glass Menagerie for his girlfriend who'd originated the role of Laura. That scene has been excised from published versions of the play, but ran on Broadway for a goodly while.
The portrait was done by a popular illustrator of the Teens and Twenties and shows Nathan as dapper and handsome. (Nothing I have heard about him would contradict this image.) Aside from the money, one of the reasons I wanted the Portrait Gallery to take an interest was, to my lights, a nearly noble one: I wanted the picture safe from me, an inveterate traveler, from whom nothing precious or permanent would ever get a decent rap. It's not that I wasn't careful about such things. It's the nature of being on the move. You don't keep pictures on the wall if you know you've got, as it were, term limits on the space you're living in. Such was my situation at the time - and, if I knew me, such would be my situation for some time to come. I felt as if I were just "keeping it alive" until more nurturing hands could take the painting and cuddle it up a bit.
In those days, you made calls and wrote letters. I did both, and was invited to send a slide of the picture. I was surprised to learn from the National Portrait Gallery, my best possible quarry, that it already had a picture of Nathan. I even said that to the guy I reached on the phone after learning this.
He mentioned the name of the artist, of whom I had never heard, and thanked me for my trouble.
This National Portrait Gallery must be bigger than I thought, to already have such a portrait! So I looked back over our correspondence and found a reproduction of the portrait the gallery said it had. It showed a hypertense gentleman in a periwig. Hmmm, thought I:
something about this picture doesn't wash. Of course, the George Jean Nathan of the early Twentieth Century could've had an illustrious ancestor who'd dodged real, instead of paper, bullets; made a better mill-wheel; or laid the foundation for later successes with steam and sail. He could've been a pamphleteer - the first writer in the family. At any rate, he was apparently the famous one - or else somebody'd screwed up. In which case I wanted to know because it's just not good to give up on something like this until you get a definitive answer. Or until somebody sticks his foot in his mouth - which is a lot more satisfying, of course, but not always productive.
I got back with the guy at the portrait gallery and told him that the periwigged fellow was, I'm sure, a very worthy personage, but he was not the George Jean Nathan I was talking about. I was talking about somebody who'd left a paper trail more recently; among aging actors and playwrights, he might be cordially disliked today. (This was the early 1990's.)
I should point out that I left all of this information in a message. I will admit having a little fun with it.
Well, nobody ever got back with me. That would suggest a couple of things: that the man knew he'd made a boo-boo about the earlier Nathan, who possibly wasn't Nathan at all but some other guy in a periwig he'd gotten mixed up with Nathan. The other thing it would suggest is an appalling ignorance of 20th-century cultural history. I'm inclined not to know, partly because I've got the picture and still need to get rid of it; and mostly because I hate to think that a great cultural institution like the National Portrait Gallery is run by historical illiterates - which would make it a sort of Daily Double in our nation's life.
If anybody's interested in this portrait, he or she can contact me. I'm surprised I've still got it - for
all sorts of reasons.
Author: Brett Busang | 0 Comments
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