Looking Back on a Year of Looking at Art

From Alabama to Venice and points in between

T his is my 92nd story for National Review in 2022. I wrote twice a week, with a miss here and there owing to far-and-wide travels, covering exhibitions at 52 museums, seven art fairs, and a dozen or so straight news stories. I profiled ten museums, most of which I’d never visited. Art museums in Tennessee, Alabama, Maine, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, Venice, London, and Paris were each subjects of a close look at their histories, collections, donors, and directions.

The Met, the Whitney Biennial, and the Biennale in Venice got more than one look. The Met is the world’s greatest museum. Its exhibitions get the best loans because of its prestige and clout, and its curators are very good. The art in The Tudors and Crosscurrents, a big Winslow Homer exhibition, was extraordinary. Intellectually, alas, Crosscurrents was a sham and The Tudors obese. The Met is in an odd state. I see most of its exhibitions. Many feel and look like they’re done by committees, rambling or with too many dead ends, and painfully, awkwardly PC.

The Biennale and the Whitney show signify the times so deserve special attention. The curators of Quiet as It’s Kept — the abstruse title of the Whitney show — were two measured, mature scholars who knew how to take a broad, deep look at American art. Past Whitney Biennials tended to be organized by young curators who, though willing to travel the country, returned as blinkered by Manhattan conventionality as when they left. One of this year’s curators, David Breslin, is now in charge of contemporary art at the Met. Good for him, and good for the Met. He’s a great curator and a diplomat.

I wrote four pieces about the Morozov exhibition of Post-Impressionist art at the Vuitton Museum in Paris. That was both sumptuous and historic. The trove of paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, among others, collected by a pair of rich Moscow brothers before 1917, had never left Russia.

About a quarter of my stories concern American art after 1970. This is coincidental, since I don’t believe in quotas of any kind, but seems right. I cover lots of different art, but the art of our time and country reflects who we are now.

I like reviewing art that’s not Western since I learn so much while having to push myself to do it. I loved writing about the Throckmorton Gallery’s exhibition of old Chinese jade sculptures and the British Museum’s exhibition on the art of ancient Peru.

In 2023, I promise to do more. I know I’m writing about the Met’s exhibition on Mayan gods in January and the Rubin Museum in New York, which specializes in the art of the Himalaya countries. It’s not so much a comfort-zone issue for me as a time-to-research one, so I can feel I’m writing something intelligent.

Not that they’re exotic, but I got to see some very good art in Tennessee and Alabama. The Parthenon in Nashville is not to be missed. It’s a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens, including sculptures presented as scholars believed they were in the fifth century b.c.  Birmingham has a distinguished museum, while Huntsville’s civic museum is newer. Both are welcoming places.

I wrote a dozen pieces about museums in Washington, since I was there for a few weeks working on a biography of the art dealer Allan Stone. Our nation’s capital has first-rate museums, but until this year I just didn’t get there often. From April through November, I visited Washington for weeklong research trips and reveled in its stellar museums and collections.

On my last trip — in mid November — I was pleased to see the lights on in federal office buildings, and at 9:00 in the morning. Aside from museums at Ivy League universities and big-city public schools, no place embraced the work-from-home ethos longer and with more delight than federal departments in Washington. Getting dressed to be presentable for work, commuting, and then staying in an office from 9 to 5 . . . what a drag for the lucky-ducky, tenured, direct-deposit class.

Washington is a very strange place. On my way to the Archives of American Art every day, I walked past the Government Accountability Office on H Street. Through the spring, summer, and early fall it was deader than dead. The guards in front told me signs of life were few since the Covid mass hypnosis began in March 2020.

The GAO, which, according to its façade messaging, promotes integrity, accountability, and reliability, is Congress’s chief audit agency. Just before one of my Washington trips, I wrote a story about Mount Auburn Cemetery, its landscape architecture and memorial sculpture. Mount Auburn was buoyantly burlesque compared to this joint. In November, though, at least as a pedestrian walking past the building, I saw signs of life at GAO, lights on in the morning and hustle and bustle. The guards were directing traffic into the parking garage.

There’s only so much government inefficiency and self-dealing to be found from a home office in Bethesda, even when wearing Batman jammies. I’m happy to see these very good people back in the office.

I loved writing about Ford’s Theatre, which I visited in April. It had just opened — the day I was there — after a two-year Covid vacation from reality. Exhibitions on Sargent and Spain and Whistler’s Woman in White, both at the National Gallery, were very good. I’ll never forget two delicious moments. A wall in the Whistler show, painted a perfect yellow, displayed his three Symphony in White paintings, and together they’re lucid, cool, and elegant, nutrients from the gods. A group of Sargent’s Spanish genre pictures from around 1912 was sensual in a different way. His paint texture is like frosting on a cake and his color is richer. One group is subtle ecstasy, the other’s splashy. The National Gallery has the sure touch the Met seems to have lost.

I wrote three pieces on the National Portrait Gallery, a place I like a lot. I love historical American portraits and think the NPG’s building, which it shares with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is the finest example of historic preservation I’ve ever seen, at least in a museum setting. The building, once the grand U.S. Patent Office, started as one of Washington’s signature buildings, along with the White House and the Capitol. Long ago replaced by a modern building, it languished until its glorious resurrection a few years ago.

My stories on the NPG caused me no great joy, as much as I like visiting. It’s a work in progress, when it should be — like the American art museum whose building it shares, the Renwick Gallery, and every other Smithsonian museum — a triumph of scholarship and taste. The NPG hangs a lot of crappy art interpreted with bourgeois PC taste.

I visited just before Thanksgiving to see its exhibition Portrait of a Nation: 2022 Honoree Portraits. It’s the display of new portraits commissioned by the NPG of “extraordinary people who have made exceptional and transformative contributions to the United States and its people.” I wrote about its selection a few months ago, but the portraits themselves didn’t go on view until November 10.

I’d never heard of José Andrés, a Washington-based chef and humanitarian, or Ava DuVernay, who’s in the movie business. Simple country soul that I am, I could only have told you Clive Davis was in the music business and Marian Wright Edelman was a Washington-based children’s lobbyist and Hillary Clinton’s best bud. Serena and Venus Williams are tennis stars.

Not an inspired selection. Where’s the military hero? The inventor? The peacemaker? Where’s Elon Musk? This past summer I spent a morning with Joan Claybrook, on a boat off Mount Desert Island in Maine. Her herculean work on auto safety continues to save countless lives. I’d ditch Edelman for her. Give Dolly Parton a splashy portrait. Everyone likes and respects her. Or Thomas Sowell? Or Bill Barr?

And then there’s the portrait of Dr. Fauci. Fauci isn’t Jonas Salk. He’s neither a genius nor an expert in any medical field. He’s a lifer government bureaucrat, which in itself doesn’t disqualify since, in my opinion, public service can still be a calling from which great things come. In spite of gluttonous corruption in Washington, many U.S. diplomats, scientists, FBI agents, spies, engineers, and, of course, military men and women do brave, smart, selfless work.

And they don’t blow their own horn over it with Fauci’s energy and self-love. Like most run-of-the-mill bureaucrats, his top priorities over 50 — fifty — years were covering his keester and helping his buddies. Then Covid came and Dr. Mediocrity turned Mini-Mussolini. Through his guidance — and with his documented work to crush dissent — every cultural institution in America closed for months, some for nearly two years, for nothing. Fifty million children, mostly poor and working class, were tossed from school into inferior online education for nothing.

Time unravels and exposes what deceit and incompetence contrive. Fauci has already delivered 156 “I can’t remembers” and “who knows” under oath, and that’s in one deposition in a lawsuit over suppression of debate among doctors.

Fauci seems to have smothered views from scientists from Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and a hundred other esteemed places that conflicted with his own, entirely political and self-serving ones. The Twitter Files are revelatory here. Fauci also did his fevered best to kill the public’s understanding of Covid’s origin in the Wuhan lab leak. That his agency gave money to a lab run by the Chinese military doing research prohibited in the U.S. as too hazardous should in itself put the brakes on honors.

It says plenty about the curators and director of the National Portrait Gallery that they’d award Fauci with a prestigious portrait, and none of it’s good. It says they’re both hasty and blinkered. Half the country despises Fauci. While I’m a man of strong opinions, I understand that half the country can’t be entirely wrong.

Why not wait until more’s said and done about Fauci’s part in the Covid catastrophe and cover-ups? What’s the hurry? Fauci’s already the highest-paid federal employee, making $480,000 a year in base salary, far more than the president. He’s getting a $350,000-a-year pension.

The people who selected him ought to have known that après lui, le déluge. Aren’t they historians? Plenty of dirt’s bound to cascade as Covid’s movers and shakers get a close look. The D.C. mindset is fixed on doing absolutely everything it can to justify the lockdowns and $5 trillion in debt. It’s a big country, though, with too many intellectual beehives for the truth to be hidden forever.

Fauci’s become a millionaire from serving the public. Putting aside how unnatural this is, he’s gotten enough. I suspect his great wealth acquired from government employment makes him a subject for adulation on the part of the NPG staff who selected him. He’s a role model. They want to get rich, too.

The Fauci portrait, putting aside the subject, is, as a work of art, very good. Hugo Crosthwaite (b. 1971) created a five-minute stop-motion drawing animation. He made dozens of drawings, mostly black-and-white, depicting two passages in Fauci’s career: the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and the Covid crisis. Fauci is shown as demonized and adored during both. The drawings are sequenced with split-second breaks so it’s not a smooth visual experience like a Disney animation. The images wobble so we get a you-are-there sense of spontaneity. It’s different and smart. The video’s on view as well as a group of Crosthwaite’s drawings.

The only stomach-turning moment depicts Fauci, with a saintly look, set against Covid vaccine vials decorated with happy-face emojis. And with this I’ll never write about Fauci again.

As is often the case, many of the high points of the year, for me, were offbeat, and off the beaten track. I loved the Sue Miller seascape exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum in Maine. It was a one-gallery show of her ethereal though bracing seascapes and boat pictures. I spent half a day, in perfect September weather, at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. Landscape architecture is art, and Mount Auburn is the first cemetery in America designed as a vast garden.

An exhibition on Whistler, Sargent, and Venetian glass was graceful and dapper. I saw it at Mystic Seaport, but the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum organized it. A Frans Hals show at the Wallace Collection put his Laughing Cavalier in the context of his other portraits of Dutch dandies and burghers. Then there was the Luigi Lucioni retrospective at Shelburne Museum, near Burlington in Vermont. His portraits and still lifes are Art Deco meets Bellini meets William Harnett meets Vermont. That’s offbeat.