A Fabled Museum, with a Terrific New Director, Goes Up, Not Down

Andover's Addison gets a course correction after its previous comatose leadership.

G ratitude’s in short supply, whining kooks in sorry, grating abundance. This isn’t an embarrassment of riches but an embarrassment of stupid. The climate of our 4-billion-year-old planet, which some people actually think they can change, COVID, and what’s called anti-racism, which is plain old lucrative racism, are among the fake religions rooted in apocalypse mania. I’m in the chill phase of my dotage. I’m grateful for many things, large and small. Today and Saturday, I’ll write about the ones that are most timely.

I take special note of the appointment of Allison Kemmerer as director of the Addison Gallery of American Art. It’s a distinguished art museum owned by Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and specializing in American art from 18th-century furniture, silver, and paintings to today. Its collection of Homers, Eakinses, Hoppers, and many others rivals that of our biggest museums. I was the director for ten years, so was keen to hear the news, though I’ve been gone for a while now.

Allison is one of the best curators I’ve known. She has worked at the Addison for 30 years and has built a splendid photography collection. Thirty years is a long time, and it’s easy to become insular in a little museum on the edge of northern New England, flush with money, and at an elite boarding school. She’s done great exhibitions, though, and is a good contemporary-art scholar. She knows the Andover zeitgeist.

Allison has been the acting director for over a year. She’s already scheduled two promising shows, one on American artists in Paris in the 1940s and ’50s and another on the very good Alison Elizabeth Taylor, whose work I praised when I reviewed the Armory Show a few weeks ago.

In-house hires of longtime curators don’t often make good directors. All of us get stuck in our comfort zones. I’m happy to say Allison’s comfort zone is consistent excellence. On another front, a director oversees curatorial quality, but, mostly, it’s a communications, marketing, networking, and fundraising job. As a curator and a director, I was shocked by how many curators failed to do things as basic as returning phone calls.

When I went to the Addison a year ago, I saw the museum’s Philip Guston 1969 painting Corridor, which depicts Ku Klux Klansmen. My visit came at the height of yet another elite, boutique hysteria. The National Gallery had just postponed a Guston retrospective over the artist’s Ku Klux Klan pictures, many of which were to be in the show and catalogue. The museum said it needed two years to redo the entire enterprise so as not to give offense. I know this is the federal government, but two years!

With characteristic clarity, speed, and aplomb, the Addison, under Allison’s leadership, hung its Guston with a couple of paragraphs of context and quotes from Guston’s daughter and from scholars. It ended with a question: “What do you think?” That’s it, and that’s all it needed to do. Andover and the Addison promote independent thought, not fear, panic, and forced compliance to party lines.

The Addison, owning and showing only American art, has never pushed PC poison or bullied its audience with shams and sophistries. It doesn’t display bad art whose only reason to exist is to diss the country, its history, and its values. My successor, alas, tried this a few years ago only because she had nothing else to offer.

Andover is the only private high school in the country with a first-class museum, so knowing what to do with it has never come automatically as it would at a college or university. Such places often have great art museums. For Andover, the Addison’s a cherished talking point adding luster to a school as old as America. It has immense sentimental appeal to alumni. That said, as long as my budget was balanced, students left the gallery unmolested, and I didn’t hit anyone with my car, I had unfettered leeway to do whatever I wanted or, as the flip side of that coin, to do very little.

On my successor, now gone, I’m not by nature bitchy, but I write about museums, my loyalty is to my readers, and the dynamics and outcomes of director searches are a natural interest. She was a flop, putting what was a vibrant place in a coma. She was an odd choice in that her academic specialty is Gustave Caillebotte, but I thought that, since she knew French art, American art wouldn’t seem extraterrestrial, as would, say, the study of Neolithic cave ciphers. She interviews well. She had good credentials. She went to Exeter and Harvard with Phillips Academy’s head of school at the time.

This wasn’t a case of a search ending with an appointment and gasps of “what were they thinking?” The search committee interviewed only women, so it seemed that was a priority, but I don’t know. This might have been a coincidence. The only red flags were never completing her dissertation, which is instructive but not dispositive, and knowing little about American art. I wasn’t, of course, sitting there in interviews and can’t remember who else applied. Andover isn’t the kind of place that dissects its failures.

I left the Addison in great financial shape, with a solid exhibition program, robust attendance, and all infrastructure needs addressed. It was sad to see it wither. It’s a precious place. On the campus of a private school 25 miles from Boston, which, by Boston standards, is far, and with a tiny budget, it needs assiduous and clever promotion to stay front-of-mind. The director is the public face of the museum, and that means dealing with the public and, by the way, liking it. Andover, I’m sorry to say, flubbed its part as an observant parent. No one asked, “What’s happening?”

She isn’t stupid. Rather, she was clueless and didn’t want to learn. Volunteers, donors, and visitors went elsewhere. Her exhibition program was a snooze. She lingered for five listless years.

I did my duty in staying away from the museum for a year and saying nothing negative about her for a year. That’s the unwritten museum standard, but it lasts for one year only. She’s at the Detroit Institute of Art now, not as the director but as the manager of exhibition budgets, the registrars, and a range of bureaucratic functions. I’m sure she’s a success there.

I don’t get to the Addison often. It’s a three-hour drive from my home and, as a colleague once observed, is emphatically not a suburb of Boston. At best, it’s an exurb, and I rarely go to Boston anyway. When I was at the Addison last year, the day it reopened after the COVID closure, I was proud and pleased for three reasons. First, the museum looked fantastic. It’s a Charles Platt building from 1931, small but perfect. Second, its easy, measured take on Guston, calm as others had cows, was a treat. Andover is a mega-pressure place but it’s a high school. You can’t go crazy over everything.

Third, Andover students are among the smartest kids in the world, but they’re almost all under 18 and must be thought about as children. Faculty are very much in loco parentis. In view of this, I was happy to see that the Addison was one of the first academic art museums to reopen to the public. Almost all museums serving colleges and universities in New England stayed shut to the public for as long as they possibly could and long after their cavalier indifference to their audience reached the realm of scandal. Museums at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Williams were among those who fell in love with lockdown, “working from home,” and those fat direct-deposit paychecks. They even limited museum access to their own students as stingily as the Red bosses rationed six ounces of bread each week to Russians suffering through the siege of Leningrad.

Almost all the elite college and university museums had the “Keep Out” sign nailed on the front door until this fall. Some reopened briefly and then shut the first time someone sneezed and then through Delta, Delta Plus, and Lambda, hoping to stay shut until Greek, Chinese, Bengali, Hittite, and birch-bark glyph alphabets were exhausted. Yes, the general museum-going public is germy, but such is humanity, especially high-school students. The public should fear them! Seriously, though, there’s not been a single documented case of COVID transmission in a museum in America. The school actually looked closely enough at real science and knew early that COVID almost universally strikes the very sick and very old, not healthy children.

The school’s been bitten but not consumed by the equity, inclusion, and diversity fraud. Its standards are high. Students and faculty are unbelievably busy with classes, homework, clubs, practice, and sports, so there’s not much time for preening or fake pieties. Teenagers, especially canny ones, spot phonies, so Black Lives Matter cant hasn’t seemed to go far. There’s a big contingent of foreign and Asian American kids at Andover. Bourgeois white liberal guilt, decolonizing everything, and virtue parades have fewer constituencies. The Addison’s temperament reflects all of this, though it’s always been a place for substance, not fads.

The Addison, unlike almost all its peers, takes seriously its obligation to serve the public. Henry Stimson, who ran the military during World War II, went to Andover and chaired its board. Eight Medal of Honor winners went there. Paul Revere made the school seal. It’s not for wimps.

I’m grateful to have worked at the Addison and to have met so many erudite and engaging alumni and students. I’m delighted that Allison is in charge. It has no place to go but up.