End of the Year, End of an Era for Four Directors

The Whitney, Guggenheim, Harvard’s Fogg, and L.A.’s Hammer will get new leaders.

F or the past few weeks, I’ve written about 2023’s anniversaries — births and deaths of great artists, the openings of distinguished museums, and a president’s murder. This year, lots of very good museum directors said they’ll retire, ending eras. I’ve picked four to profile. I’m in Christmas and New Year’s mode, but this story isn’t to be read in the spirit of “out with the old, in with the new.” The season is a time to reflect.

I won’t say that Adam Weinberg is retiring as director of the Whitney since he’s younger than I. He’s resting on his laurels, earned in acts of fortitude, charm, and heroism. I did one renovation and expansion — at the Addison Gallery and still lovely and practical — and was part of another at the Clark that’s nice-looking but impractical. Weinberg, my predecessor as Addison director, conceived and built for the Whitney an entirely new building — 55 galleries and all that goes with them — in a slummy neighborhood well south of its Upper East Side home. Call it a juggling act, a triumph in diplomacy, a vision gone right, or sheer chutzpah. He was the essential person.

The Whitney was a dysfunctional place for years. It was Museum Mile’s poor stepchild. It’s for American art — itself derided as often as it’s revered — and it wasn’t even on Fifth Avenue. Egotistical donors, kvetchy neighbors, and a mixed bag of directors made its needed expansion a minefield and also a perennial dead duck. As big Manhattan museums go, it was poor. A whiny, surly staff is to be expected in New York, and that’s what the Whitney had, as well as one or two embezzlers.

Weinberg came to the Addison from the Whitney, where he was a curator, so he knew the culture. Once back at the Whitney, and empowered, he cleansed the staff — as much as anyone could — of bad attitudes. He won’t tolerate psychos and meanies who work for him. The till is now sacrosanct.

The Whitney’s new home isn’t an egotistical building. It’s all about the art and the visitors. Weinberg assembled both team and plan, raised the money, got it finished, and developed a distinguished exhibition program. I’ve loved some of the Whitney’s shows and panned some, but they’re always challenging, and one always learns something from them.

Weinberg is a mensch, but to run a New York museum, and to build as he did, the director needs to be steely and, sometimes, a little bit mean. Mostly, he did what he needed to do. In 2019, though, the Whitney staff rebelled over the business dealings of trustee Warren Kanders. One of his company had sold tear gas to the Israeli army and — crime-of-crimes — Kanders is a Republican. He was also a $10 million donor.

I wish Weinberg had responded to the staff à la Henry VIII — chop, chop — not à la Mr. Rogers. Kanders quit the board. I don’t doubt that antisemitism fueled the Kanders fury. Given what’s happened since October 7, we can see that the assault on this generous, cultured man was the tip of the antisemitic spear.

Weinberg’s biennial shows have been a mixed bag. He’s a New Yorker, and they’ve been too focused on New York artists. Still, I’ve enjoyed them all. When he selected experienced curators, they’ve been fantastic. Younger curators, often Manhattan yahoos, don’t know enough about the country and live by received wisdom.

My biggest regret this year is writing that Weinberg’s hand-picked successor, the Whitney’s chief curator, Scott Rothkopf, was a cipher. He’s not, and I’m sorry I wrote it. Writers love words, but I liked the punch of this one too much. At the time, every museum in the country was wailing about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and there goes the Whitney, picking an insider and middle-aged gringo, without even a search.

This was hypocritical, I believed, but I didn’t consider that the Whitney’s DEI war was muted compared with, say, the Guggenheim’s or MoMA’s or those at dozens of other museums in the country. Workers probably view Weinberg as fair and attentive, though the Whitney staff still unionized. No one can fault his accomplishments. Or Rothkopf’s.

Years ago, an insider hire would routinely have been viewed as an acceptable option. Now, trustees want new blood. Many covet a vanity rush in hiring “the first woman” or “first African American” or “first bipolar trans Druid.” Many of these hires are duds-in-the-making. Rothkopf knows the Whitney. That people seem happy is a credit to Weinberg’s rule. He’s one of the greats.

I was happily surprised when Martha Tedeschi was appointed director of the Fogg, which is what everyone calls Harvard’s trio of art museums. Tedeschi, you see, didn’t go to Harvard. She missed the glory of being one step shy of the ascension of Jesus, to sit by the side of God, as most Harvard alums believe a Harvard diploma really means.

When I first met her, Tedeschi was the curator of prints at the Art Institute of Chicago. A kind, generous, can-do person, she then ran the curatorial department at the Art Institute before succeeding Tom Lentz at the Fogg. He fumbled over a pricy, long renovation and what’s rumored to have been personal peccadillos.

Staying closed for five years for a construction project understandably made for uneasy, pissed workers. Tedeschi soothed the roiled waters. She addressed a budget crunch linked to the renovated building’s increased maintenance costs. During the Covid mass hysteria and hypnosis, the Fogg shut longer than almost every museum in the country, but that’s on Harvard, not her.

Funny how so many Harvard brainiacs fell for so much fake science, though Yale and Williams, where I went to school, get no prizes for common sense either. Williams, in rural Massachusetts, actually was worse. In reality, the Leaky Lab Bug barely hit the boonies.

During Tedeschi’s years, the Fogg has done beautiful exhibitions. And I went from happily surprised to stunned when she made the Fogg free to the public. Nothing made Harvard’s contempt for townies clearer than the Fogg’s $20-a-head admission tab. Tedeschi made free admission a priority, sold it to Harvard, and raised the money to endow it. For that alone, she’s my director of the year.

Funny, too, that Harvard’s best isn’t a Harvard alum. A lot of mediocrities get Harvard degrees and work there. Knowing the lingo counts. Tedeschi is leaving in June. May the Harvard president, race pimp, and phony Claudine Gay be gone long before her, dispatched Henry VIII–style. Tedeschi will leave covered in glory.

I remember visiting the Hammer in the early ’90s when it was called the Armand Hammer Museum and, though a choice collection, felt like a tomb. Hammer’s own tomb is across Wilshire Boulevard in a tiny cemetery where Marilyn Monroe, Billy Wilder, Burt Lancaster, and many other luminaries are buried. If a modern-day Dante hoped to access Hell for a visit, Hammer’s tomb might be what GPS calls “the fastest possible route.” Such were his earthly deprecations.

Annie Philbin is retiring as the director of the museum, now called the Hammer, after 25 years. She saw opportunity in this pokey place, and opportunity in Los Angeles, then, at least culturally, a white-bread — brand Sunbeam — town. “The Hammer” has, to say the least, a hard-hitting sound to it. That’s what she delivered. She transformed it into a contemporary art hot spot. She set the stage for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Broad. Her rising tide helps even Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, always there but always flailing.

Philbin came from the Drawing Center, then a tiny, serious place in Manhattan whose audience consisted of artists and connoisseurs. I’ve visited her Made in L.A. biennial three times. Los Angeles art has its own flavor, and she has bottled it. She’s made it a must-see event. Her renovation and expansion within the walls of the old Occidental Petroleum headquarters is without ego. It’s all about the art.

Like Tedeschi, Philbin also abolished admission fees. I know many of her big donors. They’re into quality, not glitz. She built the donor base from scratch, raising $90 million to renovate the building at a time when LACMA’s $750 million capital campaign had to have sucked the air from local philanthropists. I wish the Hammer would do more with the things the founder collected before he went to the Hot Place. The museum owns a blockbuster Rembrandt and Sargent’s portrait of Dr. Pozzi, probably every woman’s fantasy doctor.

Philbin is ending her reign next year with an exhibition she’s curating on climate justice. It’s hard to believe that she’s working on something so dumb. She’s brilliant, though, so I hope her last word as director will mine some nuggets from a false value.

I admire Richard Armstrong, who’s retiring as director of the Guggenheim. He took two of my exhibitions, which both went to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Coming of Age, the Addison’s treasures show, was Italy’s most visited summer exhibition in 2008. Yes, the summer before the days of crash-and-burn, Sturm und Drang, Yes We Can, and cash for clunkers. If not for Armstrong, our Mark Tobey retrospective would have been canceled. No one else wanted it. Tobey’s work is exquisite and quiet. We live in a megaphone era.

The three Guggenheim museums do great exhibitions, aside from my own. They’re both intellectually serious and tourist meccas.

The Guggenheim has lots of moving parts, including the New York flagship museum, museums in Venice and in Bilbao, and the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, a snakebit idea in a snake pit of a place. It has yet to open. Yes, the UAE is awash with black gold. Yes, the Guggenheim can use the money. Yes, the Emirates are up-and-coming and a happening place. But, really, the Guggenheim is a high-brow cultural institution. Abu Dhabi’s specialty is despotism. Why get in bed with a place like that? Armstrong believed that Abu Dhabi would evolve, and it has, so he might be right and I might be wrong.

Armstrong and the Guggenheim were unfairly targeted by still more race pimps during the Black Lives Matter tantrum and mass hallucination. If angry, entitled, mostly young staffers didn’t like working there, they ought to have quit and found jobs someplace else. It’s a shame to see a director like Armstrong ending a brilliant career pelted with garbage.

He’s the closest to a Renaissance Man of any museum director I know. He’s from Kansas City, one of my favorite cities. America’s heart and soul is in many places, among them my own rural Vermont, but for grounding and balance, it’s hard to beat Kansas City. Armstrong lived in Dijon in France, another place I love, in Paris, wrote and curated a bunch, and directed the Carnegie Institute before succeeding Tom Krens as director at the Guggenheim in 2008. He’s worldly and the voice of experience and perspective.

Mariet Westermann will be the new Guggenheim director. When I was a curator at the Clark, I worked with her. Her academic specialty is Jan Steen, the Dutch Old Master genre painter. The Guggenheim’s mostly contemporary, with dollops of Modernism now and then. Westermann has never run a contemporary-art program, so that’s an immediate mismatch. She ran part of the Mellon Foundation, which gives money away rather than begging for it. She also ran the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU’s art-history graduate program and research center, and, still with NYU, the university’s Abu Dhabi campus.

Not to belabor the point, but why does NYU have a UAE campus? The answer is money, money, money. NYU also has a big antisemitism problem. The victim-versus-oppressor ideology is as malignant and rooted there as it is at Harvard, Penn, and Columbia. Westermann has been at NYU for 20 years. Is it possible to unlearn a culture? People in Spain, Italy, and certainly in Abu Dhabi care very little about seeing the world as a great struggle between oppressors and victims. It actually offends them. Its values are abhorrent and false.

Westermann is good at maneuvering in a large organization. At the Guggenheim, though, she gets the “buck stops here” sign on her desk. She’ll also be the face — and the brains — of an institution that serves the public. The Guggenheim in Bilbao had 1.3 million visitors last year. The Guggenheim in New York had a million. Even the little Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice had 381,000. Westermann has never run a public cultural institution. Aside from a year at the Clark — in its research department – she has never worked in one. I’m not sure how she’ll do.

On the Fogg, I hope that Harvard, which can’t be more corrupt or inbred than it is now, hires someone from a solid Midwestern museum or even someone from Texas. Fresh blood from the real world can only help the university climb out of the muck.

On a bright but wistful note, Rembrandt’s small Adoration of the Kings from the late 1620s sold at Sotheby’s on December 6 for about $13.8 million. Christie’s, in what has to be the embarrassment of 2021, attributed the painting to the “circle of Rembrandt” and offered it at auction for about $10,000 to $16,000. It sold for nearly $1 million. Titters went through the crowd at that auction, since some thought it was by Rembrandt, painted when he was around 21. The lucky buyer sent it to Sotheby’s for a top-down technical evaluation and a close look at the scholarship, which Christie’s never did.

The picture hadn’t been seen in 75 years. At one point, it was thought to be by Rembrandt. The last scholar who wrote about it said it wasn’t based solely on a black-and-white photograph.  I don’t know what the problem at Christie’s was. Too many people who should know better probably do their research on the internet.

December 6 was my birthday. It and the auction came and went. No Go Fund Me page. There’s December 21, my wedding anniversary, and Christmas. I’m losing hope. Sad, sad, sad. Still, Adoration of the Kings is a wonderful little thing.