In Raleigh, a Tormented King Saul and Other Treasures

A great curator works wonders at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

L ast week, keeping my pledge to write about art between the two coasts, I swung not cowboy-but road-trip-style from Houston to Dallas, Fort Worth, Tulsa, and Bentonville in Arkansas. In the next few weeks, I’ll write about some new museum architecture, Rothko, Miro, Twombly, Homer, Remington, Nefertiti, Native American art, and the thrilling, inspirational Crystal Bridges Museum. My hors d’oeuvre was Saturday’s story about the Berruguete exhibition at the Meadows Museum in Dallas. The show is an essential prequel to Spanish aesthetics from El Greco to Ribera.

I have one more story about my North Carolina tour in late October, during which I spent an afternoon at the very nice North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (NCMA). It’s a rare bird in that the museum is owned and run by the North Carolina state government. It’s not unique. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is the property of the Commonwealth. San Francisco has a superb city-owned museum system, and, blessedly, it’s not run by nuts. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is indeed owned by the county government.

Different systems of governance make for different trajectories, and that helps our museum system stay fresh and inventive. The museum in Raleigh has a fine collection and admirable history driven by devoted, visionary volunteers, smart leadership, and public officials with taste and aspirations far above the brutish norm for such people.

It’s a good time, since it’s related to my Raleigh visit, to write about what curators do and what makes for a great curator. I visited Raleigh a few weeks before John Coffey retired as the curator of American art there after a 32-year run. John was the chief curator, off and on, too. Curators of that longevity, acumen, sensitivity, and grit make history. They build collections with their personal touch. Since the North Carolina Museum of Art is not an old institution, growing from a small to far-reaching place in years rather than centuries, John’s influence was strong. This story presents him as an example of old-fashioned curatorial expertise and heft.

I’ve always loved the North Carolina Museum of Art. Its scale is human-sized, so it’s not intimidating, and the collection has many special and surprising things. The museum never took one of my shows, but I never dwell on the past.

I’m not in love with the museum’s building, though, which opened in 2010. It’s a rambling, single-story building with lots of passages of glass and a shell of pale, matte aluminum panels. It was designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, which did the sublime, minimalist Glenstone Museum in Maryland. At the Raleigh museum, the aluminum panels reflect the clouds and landscape, which is nice. The museum, from a distance, seems like a vast commercial shed.

It’s an inside-outside building, allowing views from the interior of the meadows, trees, and gardens. The grounds are park-like, with impressive outdoor sculpture and room for concerts. It’s a more informal, updated version of the City Beautiful’s park-museum concept found in St. Louis, New Orleans, and Indianapolis. I like a single grand entrance for a museum, but the NCMA has multiple entrances. This gives more choice to the visitor but also encourages people to enjoy art and the landscape.

The interior is all white, all the time, and that’s a bad idea. The museum’s laudable Old Master collection and old American painting are poorly served. They want saturated-color walls and don’t like seeming as dead as they do. The galleries are lit naturally, filtered by louvers on the roof. The ceilings are deeply coffered and have a Space Age look I liked. White walls aside, I found the interior airy and comfortable.

The museum’s history shows that leadership matters. Like many museums in the South and West, NCMA started in the 1920s as an art association with an initial bequest of art, a mission to elevate cultural standards, and a vague charge from the legislature to form a museum serving the poor, mostly agricultural but forward-looking state.

Aspiration and promise can abound, though, but without catalysts and money, dreams are just fancies. Four actors were critical. Robert Lee Humber, born in Greenville in 1898, was a local boy made good, a Rhodes Scholar, business magnate, international lawyer, and connoisseur who, after the war, negotiated a challenge gift from Samuel Kress, the New York philanthropist, for $1 million in Old Master art for a permanent state museum if the legislature matched the money. Humber’s vision for social improvement was polymorphic, from good things like a museum to the entirely dodgy and, indeed, terrifying World Federation he advocated to achieve lasting peace through a single global government or, bluntly, a United Nations with poisoned fangs and grabby paws.

The legislature acted, appropriating $1 million, after John Kerr, a state representative and arts booster, pleaded on the floor of the House for money. “Man cannot live by bread alone,” he told what he conceded was a hostile but, it seems, persuadable audience. The Kress art propelled the museum not quite to prominence, though the Old Masters he gave are meaty, but to a state of living, breathing reality.

The final leg in the founding enterprise was Wilhelm Valentiner, hired in 1955 as the nascent museum’s first director. Valentiner is revered in old-time American museum circles because he helped bring European standards to an inchoate, loosey-goosey New World. In 1907, at 27, he moved from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, once a royal collection, to the Met in New York, as the curator of its decorative-arts collection. Museum-wise, America wasn’t the most civilized place in the world. On many fronts, Valentiner taught rich donors how to behave, like “once you give art, you can’t borrow it back.”

He fought in the German army during World War I but returned to the U.S. to direct the Detroit Institute of Arts. Valentiner persuaded Edsel Ford to fund the 27-panel mural by Diego Rivera celebrating American industry, done for the museum’s atrium and Rivera’s best work. He later directed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Valentiner was a scholar, to be sure, but he was also a smooth operator and had an accent that conveyed taste, both of which nudged the dolts, arrivistes, moguls, and genuine art lovers in Detroit, L.A., and, at the end of his career, in 1955, Raleigh to do the right thing by culture. Valentiner was also a museum entrepreneur and liked building institutions. Having dealt with stuffy Prussians, car plutocrats, and the L.A. ilk, he enjoyed the gentler spirit of the South.

Valentiner died in 1958 and liked his time in Raleigh enough to leave a chunk of his own collection to the museum. Ernst Kirchner’s Panama Dancers, from around 1910, is a Valentiner picture. He collected German avant-garde art of his young manhood. It’s a fun painting, representative of German Expressionism but also idiosyncratic. The dancers weren’t just doing any old dance. They were part of a visiting American dance group doing a new, honky-tonk American dance.

The museum’s collection is encyclopedic, covering 5,000 years. Antiquities and African and Oceanic are of teaching quality — nothing great — and there’s a mummy coffin, which kids like. Paintings are its calling card. Pieter Aertsen’s big Meat Stall, from 1551, is spectacular and, arguably, the earliest still-life painting of food and, certainly, a Mannerist gem of dizzying abundance.

The usual Baroque suspects are there, from Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Party scenes such as The Worship of the Golden Calf, by Jan Steen, and The Triumph of Venice, by Pompeo Batoni, both dazzling, have enough bare bosoms to please frat-house pols. The Peruzzi Altarpiece is there. From around 1310, it’s one of the few intact Giotto altarpiece. There’s a big, misty, mauve Monet from 1897.

There’s a “one of everything” philosophy I see so the collection hits lots of disparate targets. North Carolina’s ruling class is more Cavalier than Puritan. There’s an impressive collection of British portraiture assembled by a local whose ancestors fought with Charles I, and that’s as Cavalier as it comes. At the peak of the genre is Copley’s Sir William Pepperrell and Family from 1778. It’s an English-period Copley. We still count Copley as an American, though he left Boston with his Loyalist family and never came back. It’s a feast of expensive fabric, poised aristocrats, gamboling children, and a background of velvet drapes and the Pepperrell manse.

It’s the anchor of the American collection, which brings us to John Coffey. I write about museums and exhibitions, but most of what we see in a museum — what and how art is presented — is the work and philosophy of the curator.

What does a curator do? A Latin verb, curare, meaning “to cure,” evolved into the noun “curator,” or guardian, used in the 14th century to denote the director of an insane asylum. But by the 17th century, “curator” described the custodian of a collection. Curators are among those who care for art collections, with registrars keeping records and supervising art’s storage, insurance, and travel while curators deal with scholarship, interpretation, and condition.

“Scholarship” and “interpretation” have widened and deepened in meaning. Once they meant connoisseurship and recounting the history of individual objects. They still mean that, but today curators also organize exhibitions (usually contextualizing art in a permanent collection) as well as whatever shows a museum decides to do.

When I was a curator, I never asked anyone for money. I was involved in stewardship — schmoozing and helping trustees buy art for their own collections — and other types of soft-core development. I worked for rich museums, though. Now, curators ask for money and develop their own fundraising base, at least in big museums. They usually work with collectors, advising them on what art to buy in the expectation that some of it will come to the museum one day.

Curators have more and more become one of the public faces of a museum. They’re expected to give tours and lectures. A good curator has to be a good teacher. This has always been the ideal, though many curators chose museum work because they hated teaching. But what is the point of scholarly knowledge without the capacity to communicate it?

In a proper world organized on the principles of Yankee distance, which is the world where I’m happiest, we count our friends on one hand. John Coffey is a long-standing colleague I see once every few years, so I can write about him objectively. He came to the museum in Raleigh in 1988 after a few years as curator at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, in Maine. Then, the museum world was smaller and quieter, when the care and connoisseurship functions a curator always served were by far the biggest parts of the job. It was in the 1990s that curatorial life changed.

John has seen it all. He’s a Raleigh cultural celebrity during a time of immense change there. He has seen the American art market’s boom and bust. He’s been through a building project, though it doesn’t look like the architect and the director who did it consulted the curators. I admire his judgment and endurance. Thirty-two years, to me, is a slog. I’d never do it — I get itchy after ten years. Over that time, he built a distinguished and distinctive collection.

In John’s early days, the American art collection at the Raleigh museum was narrow, with good Hudson River pictures, a Hiram Powers bust of John Calhoun, an exquisite, early-Cole romantic landscape, the Copley, and nice colonial and Federal-period portraits. John made it a wonderful collection that’s a joy to visit. There’s no substitute for good taste and smart shopping in alignment. Every museum needs that kind of shopaholic.

John put his stamp on the collection before too long, as every good, smart, ambitious curator does. He’d just spent time in Maine and knew the arts scene there, and he chose an artist with Maine connections to make a big splash. I’m not a big fan of Alex Katz, who shuttles between New York and Maine. Like David Hockney, he’s cool and smooth and untroubling. His work for the past 20 years is a retread of his peak in the 1960s and 1970s.

Six Women, from 1975, is Katz at his peak. It’s 20 feet wide and shows six Manhattan women, so a la mode that they don’t even need to move, much less use props, to show they’re worthy of big-screen treatment. It was a transformative purchase in size but also in making the statement that American art and a curator with vision had arrived.

John is a model curator because he did what curators should do: He focused on acquisitions. That’s the most rewarding and honorable thing a curator or director can do. A building is shelter, and exhibitions come and go, but at the heart of a great museum is its permanent collection. For the Raleigh museum, which was only a generation old when John started, collection-building was essential.

Raleigh has some very discriminating and rich collectors now that the city and state have grown so much, and John has advised them well. These and other collectors have bought things going directly to the museum and things they’ve promised. I saw gifts such as George Bellows’s Dock Builders, from 1916, a painting that signaled a big change in his palette, Eakins’s 1904 portrait of William Hallowell, not a matinee idol, but Eakins makes his plain face majestic, with a big Edwardian mustache that looks like modern sculpture. William Harnett’s 1885 untitled still life is small, but it’s a symphony of eeriness.

In his position, as a curator in a museum that didn’t have a lot of acquisition money, he had to be a spotter, open to opportunity as well as sharp-eyed for the things that have lasting power. He bought Jacob Lawrence’s In the Garden, from 1950. It’s a painter’s painting and goes beyond Lawrence’s usual subject matter to show what a brilliant landscapist he was. The museum’s core collection, heavy on Kress pictures and American Old Masters, needed a modern jolt. Over time, John bought work by Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jennifer Bartlett, David Salle, and Gerhard Richter (not an American but John was handling contemporary art, too).

It isn’t unusual for curators to have multiple charges. I did American art but, later, decorative arts when I was a curator. A good curator needs to be flexible and intellectually omnivorous, or at least to be able to see quality in many things. Museums, like art-history departments, suffer from the tyranny of specialty. The savvy generalist is disappearing, leaving us with scholars who know their narrow specialties and have no interest beyond these.

One of the glories of museums in the provinces is the surprising, high-quality hauls of offbeat art collected by quirky but passionate locals. NCMA, for example, has a great collection of Judaica. It’s one of only two museums in America with a gallery dedicated to Jewish ceremonial art. It opened in 1983, under the leadership of Abram Kanof who retired to Raleigh in the late 1960s. Kanof was a trustee and adjunct curator of Judaica at the museum for many years. Jewish ritual is ancient. Kanof knew that ritual means a lot to Jews today, but many don’t understand the connection of art to ritual. He aimed to change that. The gallery not only displays ceremonial art but also demystifies it.

It’s a stirring space. I’m a serious Methodist and understand that Christianity’s launchpad is the Old Testament. I love seeing the museum’s embrace of Kanof and his art. Many curators would have blown him off. I’ve worked with lots of curators who think whatever they don’t know can’t possibly be important. They are to be pelted with the trendy garbage art that they seem to like. The Raleigh museum’s culture was such that its curators and director saw quality and made a place for it.

In the 1990s, John took over the gallery as the Judaica collection’s curator. He saw it as another education, since his field is American art. He showed his bona fides as a great curator in this simple fact: Quality attracts a great curator, who notices it and is smitten by it. And nobody else in the museum could do it. He has added to the collection, too, raising the money to buy an over-the-top repoussé, gilded, engraved, and punched German Rococo Torah shield from 1749.

John continued to buy in the American field with savvy, prescience, and very little money. Louis Mignot — the only Hudson River landscapist from the South — was mostly lost to art history until John bought a splashy Mignot view of Ecuador mountains and did the survey show that rediscovered him. Resuscitating the reputation of a great, long-dead artist is almost as big a thrill as, say, finding an unknown Homer watercolor under a bed, which I once did (not my bed, alas).

I saw John’s Mignot show at the National Academy of Design in the late 1990s. It’s still one of my favorite shows — the perfect amalgam of discovery, connoisseurship, and pure pleasure. There aren’t many exhibitions I saw 20 years ago that I still care to remember. I also remember a show John did on the fluid, vibrant Isles of Shoals paintings that Childe Hassam did in the 1890s and 1900s, inspired by three paintings in the North Carolina collection of Jim and Ann Goodnight, pledged to the museum. John advised them as they built one of the country’s most distinguished collections of pre-1945 American painting.

These are all rock-solid acquisitions, not necessarily electrifying but timelessly good. No “the collection has to look like America” schlock. Amid all the hubris — the sickening moral superiority — of big swaths of America today, I don’t see our time as particularly creative. I see lots of sycophancy, clichés, and petulant, gratuitous grievance. “Look like the best of America” narrows things nicely.

We are faddish these days and fear making judgments about quality. Someone might feel offended, or their “sense of belonging” might be diminished. I don’t know what John thinks about the big Kehinde Wiley portrait the museum bought, but I suspect he finds it colorful, certainly pricey, but neither inventive nor incisive. It’s like a Tiffany lamp, a glittery, basically one-note thing produced in many numbers with tweaks here and there. Wiley’s pretentious, fussy backgrounds are painted imitations of stained glass.

Under John’s leadership, the museum acquired the best sculpture. He’s a generalist, focused on American art but not wedded only to paintings. American sculpture is very good, enlivens a gallery, and the best is not as expensive as the best paintings. Paintings are more decorative, take less space, and tend to be created by iconic names. That’s a lowbrow standard for pricing, but there we have it.

My mouth went agape when I saw William Wetmore Story’s monumental Saul Under the Influence of the Evil Spirit, his marble masterpiece from 1865 and long lost until John found it at a private school in England. Story was one of the stars of the American art colony in Rome. There, artists such as Horacio Greenough and Harriet Hosmer joined Story in chiseling in the footsteps of Canova and catering to a taste, mostly in America and England, for marble sculpture of figures from the Bible and mythology.

The sculpture was a sensation when it was first shown at a Dublin exposition — Pope Pius IX paid for it to travel — but it disappeared into a private collection owned by an English baronet and displayed at his country house in Gloucestershire. The house eventually became a school, and Saul became a fixture.

Who was Saul? He was the first king of Israel, anointed by the prophet Samuel and charged with leading the disparate tribes into a single national identity. Saul was a conqueror king, and conqueror kings don’t make omelets without breaking eggs. God understands this, even promotes it, like the time He ordered Saul to kill the entire Amalekite population after defeating its army. Saul refused — didn’t feel like it — and God punished him for his insubordination by infecting him with an evil spirit. Saul turned erratic, callous, vengeful, and brooding.

Kings sometimes go crazy. Presidents, too, I see.

Saul’s courtiers, hoping to break the spell, summoned a young shepherd, a virtuoso on the lyre, to soothe the king. The shepherd was David. Saul’s torment dissolved. Story doesn’t depict the recovered Saul but the possessed Saul, his eyes bleak and crazed, one hand stroking his beard, the other fondling his sword. It’s a gloomy Shakespearean moment.

Wanted in Washington: soothing lyre players . . .

Years ago, the English school decided it wanted to sell the sculpture. John heard it was on the market. He tried to find the money. He couldn’t. The school soon got cold feet — Saul was, after all, an icon of the place. It decided to keep him, all two tons of him, his adamantine, angry gleam a continuing caution to boys tempted to do wrong.

The story has a happy ending. Years passed. A New York sculpture dealer called John to tell him Saul was for sale again. The price was still high, and money still lacking. At a lunch before a trustee meeting, John reported his heartache to a board member. To be thwarted once is bad enough, but twice?

The trustee listened, asked the price, neither screamed nor guffawed over the seven figures, and said quietly, “I’ll buy it for the museum.”

That’s kismet. It’s generosity coming from a donor who is obviously committed. It’s perseverance, too. It’s longevity’s payoff. It’s the credibility that a good curator accrues. It’s the triumph of the best curatorial taste. Saul is a counterintuitive buy in these twisted times. He’s very white, very Jewish, and very biblical. He’s not triggered by a microaggression, nonbinary, bulimic, stressed-out, burnt out, screen-crazed, or frazzled about climate change. He’s cursed by God. That’s serious, heavy stuff, and Saul is a serious, heavy work of art. He takes an enormous amount of space. Since it look half a dozen art handlers and a lift to put him in place, he’s not going anywhere.

I think it’s the smartest, most thrilling acquisition I’ve seen a museum make in years.

The bit of awkwardness in the museum comes from its governance. It’s owned and operated by the North Carolina state government, but I think people beyond Raleigh think of it as the “Raleigh museum” and not theirs. In the 1950s, the state had no good museums, so this was it. Now, there are fine places such as the Mint in Charlotte, the Reynolda House in Winston-Salem, the Nasher at Duke, the Asheville museum, and the UNC academic museum, plus the Ava Gardner Museum, not an art museum but so well done that many art curators should visit it. How the “Raleigh museum” keeps support from the legislature and administration will be a trick.

Valerie Hillings is the new director. She was a curator at the Guggenheim in New York and was in charge of its new, in-the-works Abu Dhabi branch. She went to Duke and has a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. I saw her photorealism show, which I loved, and her show on crazy, nihilist German art from the 1960s, which left me unconvinced of its merit and totally convinced that I didn’t like it. I don’t know her, but if she could navigate the Guggenheim, a neurotic but distinguished museum, and omni-phobic Emirate types, she’s up for anything. She’ll bring new ideas to a place with a sure foundation. Raleigh is a great town, and the museum is rightly loved.