SOME MORE HERRING WISDOM

HERRING AND HOCKEY:  ITS ALL ABOUT SCHMALTZ

Source: http://www.thehockeynews.com/blog/report-blackhawks-top-prospect-schmaltz-leaves-ncaa-signs-entry-level-deal/

Report: Blackhawks’ top prospect Schmaltz leaves NCAA, signs entry-level deal

By: Jared Clinton on June 19, 2016

Filed under: Chicago Blackhawks, NCAA, NHL

Nick Schmaltz (Elsa/Getty Images)

The key to a successful off-season for Chicago GM Stan Bowman is finding cheap, effective talent to keep the Blackhawks as competitive as they have been over the past several seasons in the Central Division. And it seems Bowman has started his summer by bringing in one of the Blackhawks’ top prospects.

The Chicago Tribune’s Chris Hine reported Sunday that 20-year-old center Nick Schmaltz has inked a three-year, entry-level contract with the Blackhawks, choosing to forego a third season at University of North Dakota and instead join the pro ranks. In THN’s Future Watch 2016, a panel of scouts ranked Schmaltz as Chicago’s best prospect, and 26th-best in the league, and his performance in the NCAA makes it clear why.

This past season, Schmaltz appeared in 37 games for the UND Fighting Hawks, scoring 11 goals and 46 points. He was a key part of UND’s top line, alongside Drake Caggiula and Brock Boeser, and Schmaltz scored one goal and four points in four games during UND’s Frozen Four national title victory. That’s not to mention his two-goal, eight-point World Junior Championship performance for Team USA.

Schmaltz joining the NHL ranks — and he’s certain to fight for a spot on the Blackhawks in training camp — would be the perfect way for Chicago to replace Teuvo Teravainen. The 21-year-old up-and-comer was packaged with Bryan Bickell, and Bickell’s $4-million contract, in order for Bowman to get cap relief.

As Hine points out, the physical similarities are there between Schmaltz and Teravainen, but they also share similar on-ice qualities. Both are reliable two-way players who can play either down the middle or on the wing, and both Schmaltz and Teravainen are talented playmakers. Of course, there is one major difference: Teravainen has a Stanley Cup, has seen 25 games of playoff actoin and has spent the past two campaigns with the Blackhawks. That’s invaluable, but Schmaltz’s opportunity to get some experience of his own is on the horizon.

If Schmaltz is signed, the Blackhawks would have nine forwards under contract. That doesn’t include restricted free agents Dennis Rasmussen and Andrew Shaw, both of whom are appear likely to be brought back.

Where exactly Schmaltz fits into the lineup is hard to say, but his versatility would prove useful. As a center, he could run up the middle of the third line, but he’d also be a potential fit as a winger on any of the top three units. There’s been a hole on the Blackhawks’ top line since the departure of Brandon Saad to the Columbus Blue Jackets, and Schmaltz may just be a fit alongside Jonathan Toews and Marian Hossa. That would be quite the duo for Schmaltz to begin his NHL career with.

AND NOW FOR A LITTLE HERRING ART

Source: The Wall Street Journal

N.C. Wyeth’s Deeper Aspirations

The great illustrator N.C. Wyeth was also a fine artist touched by modernism

‘Herring!’ (c. 1935), by N.C. Wyeth. PHOTO: COLLECTION OF PHYLLIS AND JAMIE WYETH

By 

TERRY TEACHOUT

July 27, 2016 6:18 p.m. ET

Rockland, Maine

I can’t remember the last time I heard a screenwriter, a mystery novelist or a show-tune composer express regret for having embraced so “lowly” a calling. Nowadays, popular artists know that what they do is valuable in its own right. It hardly seems possible that when Aaron Copland went to Hollywood in 1939 to score Lewis Milestone’s film version of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” many of his fellow highbrows were sure that he was finished as a classical composer. Today, they’d ask him for a letter of recommendation.

I thought of Copland’s film scores when I went to see “N.C. Wyeth: Painter,” an exhibition on display through Dec. 31 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. Wyeth, who died in 1945, was the father of Andrew Wyeth,perhaps the most famous and beloved American painter of the 20th century. In his lifetime, though, N.C. was equally famous—though not as a maker of what we stubbornly continue to call “fine art.” He was, rather, the most highly paid commercial illustrator of his day. While Wyeth is now mainly known for having illustrated such children’s classics as “Robinson Crusoe,” “Treasure Island” and “The Yearling,” his work also appeared on the covers of mass-circulation magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, and in ads for Cream of Wheat and Lucky Strike cigarettes. In those days, the mass reproduction of photographs was an imperfect science. An artist who knew how to make bold, appealing illustrations was always in demand, and nobody did it better than Wyeth. When he painted a cowboy on a bronco, you could hear the spurs jingling.

But Wyeth believed that he was squandering his great gifts. Unable to regard illustration as anything more than “the art of journalism, to be rendered in the manner of painting,” he dreamed of being praised as “a painter who has shaken the dust of the illustrator from his heels!!” So he spent his spare time working on landscapes, portraits and studies of life in coastal Maine, where he spent his summers. He saw these paintings, which bear such homely titles as “The Harbor Herring Gut” and “Fisherman’s Family,” as “the beginning of more important self-expression,” and they were intended not for magazines but galleries—and, eventually, museums. By the end of his life, he had accumulated several hundred of them, and 15, mostly dating from the late ’20s and ’30s, are on view at the Farnsworth.

Art critics and historians haven’t had much to say about Wyeth’s “serious” work. David Michaelis, author of “N.C. Wyeth,” an excellent 1998 biography which argues that his illustrations deserve to be taken very seriously indeed—a point of view now generally accepted by scholars—wrote off Wyeth’s “independent” paintings in a single curt sentence: “He deliberately intended these paintings to be taken as statements of his most personal feelings, yet he left out or deflated the very pictorial elements that made his canvases most his own.”

N.C. Wyeth. PHOTO: COURTESY OF FARNSWORTH ART MUSEUM

To visit the Farnsworth, however, is to realize that Mr. Michaelis got it almost exactly wrong. These burgeoningly vital, at times near-primitive paintings, whose bold swashes of magenta and turquoise recall the Fauvism ofAndré Derain and Henri Matisse, make Andrew look prim. Even more to the point, they appear to have been strongly influenced by such early American modern painters as Marsden Hartleyand Maurice Prendergast, whose names go unmentioned in Mr. Michaelis’s book. It amazed me to learn that an artist best remembered for his nostalgic magazine covers seems to have known so much about the art of his time—and was eager to incorporate it into his own work. It’s as if Norman Rockwell had decided to take up color-field painting in his old age.

The more I think about Wyeth, the more I find myself thinking not only of Copland, but of Bert Lahr’s celebrated performance as Estragon in the 1956 Broadway premiere ofSamuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the most influential avant-garde play of the 20th century. Who knew that the Cowardly Lion of “The Wizard of Oz” had such immortal longings in him—or that the well-paid illustrator who painted steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat was also capable of turning out excitingly modern canvases?

I hope that an expanded version of this show will travel to other museums, not least because it offers so timely a reminder of the value of artistic ambition. Yes, N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations are marvelous in their own right. I wish he’d known how good they were. But he was old-fashioned enough to believe that he had an obligation to aim higher, and because he did, we have “The Harbor Herring Gut.” Like Bert Lahr, he thought there was more in him than mere popularity—and he was right.

Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings,” a column about the arts, every other Thursday. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com