A Great Oprah Portrait and Protests in Stained Glass

Plus, let’s put Harvard into receivership.

H arvard is a hundred different things and places, prominent, alas, among them is its deeply unattractive antisemitic streak. But if Israel is Little Satan, America is Satan Central. So believes Claudine Gay, a race hire, mediocrity, and phony who plays the victim. So believe the Trot faculty and Trot-in-three-wheelers students. I’m glad Gay’s done. Harvard and its ways looked ridiculous.

Yet they’re from Harvard, so they’ve got authority. Harvard has money, history, and visibility. Many of the students will have real power. These conditions are why, no matter how bad they get, we can’t give up on our great colleges and universities.

The first problem with Gay and Harvard was the 34 student organizations who endorsed the rape and murders of innocent men, women, and children on October 7. That’s a lot of students. Gay endorsed this as free speech, a hoot since Harvard, during her reign as the dean, seemed to enjoy crushing free speech. Most of Gay’s work over the years happened behind closed doors. After October 7, everything happened on stage.

Sound and billboard trucks trolled antisemitic Harvard students who celebrated the deaths of more than a thousand innocent civilians. That was a nice touch, I thought, and good performance art. It was multimedia, guerrilla art, a happening, a stiletto on nearly every front, and an exposé. Students in those 34 groups weren’t amused. “Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind,” is the operational Old Testament line.

Last week, the Harvard Corporation — the university’s trustees — thanked Gay for her “pursuit of academic excellence.” That’s turbo chutzpah. She swiped chunks of her scholarly work from others, but that doesn’t shock me. So much of academia is about conformity these days. Gay has been canned as president but showered on the way out with compliments and bromides from the trustees, who wanted her to go but wouldn’t say it. Plus, she’ll remain as a tenured prof and retain her annual salary of nearly a million. The whole performance can only be called hapless. These are the world’s movers and shakers?

Here’s an idea. Harvard is a creature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The attorney general has the power — but, alas, never in a million years, the inclination — to put the school under remedial care, with a new board. Harvard’s trustees hired a “misstep-maker” as president. The Supreme Court just ruled that its admissions system is illegal, a ruling Harvard is planning to defy. It’s infected with hatred of Jews. The average grade is A, which means it has no standards. Just imposing on faculty a bell curve in grading every course would be immense intellectual hygiene. The staff-to-faculty ratio has soared over the past few years, and that’s bad bloat. Staff don’t teach. They coddle, and they take.

I know, it’ll never happen in left-wing Massachusetts, but AGs elsewhere have immense power to cleanse Augean stables among nonprofits. DEI and affirmative action are going to have to be blasted from our elite schools. Most of these schools have good, even great, art museums. Who wants them to get into the act?

Would Oprah Winfrey be up for a stint as Harvard’s president? That idea popped into my head while I admired the new, very good full-length portrait of Winfrey newly displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. It has just gone on view and is a major commission for the NPG, which I’ve panned many times but like. I like the Winfrey portrait a lot, too.

Only kidding about Winfrey taking over Harvard. Still, she’s someone to whom Harvard students and faculty can look for inspiration. Though the child of poverty in Mississippi and Milwaukee, she has an honorary Harvard degree, after all. No, I thought, she’s too smart, too intuitive, and she’s no mediocrity. She’s all about merit.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen her interview show, but she’s so famous and so engaging that probably everyone in America feels they know her. And she’s a media mogul. Few among Harvard’s elite have a life story that would make Dickens envious and horrified at the same time. He couldn’t have invented the range of trials Winfrey endured as a child and teenager. And she rose above them through grit and brains, good mentorship here and there, and without rancor.

When I was in Connecticut political life, her close friend Gayle King was the lead news anchor at Hartford’s CBS affiliate. King is smart, too, and earnest without being dull. She was one of the nicest people I knew in Connecticut media, which orbits its politics. I understand why they’re lifelong friends.

Shawn Michael Warren (b. 1987) painted the Winfrey portrait in the American Realist tradition of George Healy, Eastman Johnson, Cecilia Beaux, and Eakins. He’s of his time, though, and likes lush color. Winfrey is wearing a purple taffeta gown, a nod to The Color Purple, the Steven Spielberg movie from 1985, based on Alice Walker’s novel, that made Winfrey a star. She’s holding an olive branch and standing in her garden planted with twelve oak trees she sees as metaphors for Jesus’s Twelve Apostles.

I was startled to see Winfrey’s portrait only a couple of days after I wrote about the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s Fashioned by Sargent, an exhibition about Sargent’s close partnership with his Gilded Age sitters. Together, Sargent and his sitters selected clothes that made even Victorian blacks and browns dazzle. Sargent loved color, satin, and silk, too, and favored crisp, rustling taffeta. Did Warren paint a swagger portrait of Winfrey? The mogul has a spring in her step and a sparking smile that Sargent would never have given a subject except for his Wertheimer sitters, who, as rich Jewish women, were less bound by standards of comportment. We live in an era where people have better teeth. Big smiles rather than gravitas lift us up. That’s fine.

To me, thinking of Sargent makes the Winfrey portrait seem old-fashioned, but that’s good and winning. Sargent’s high-style portraiture was out of style by the 1930s, displaced by the Depression, photography, his genre’s exhaustion after hundreds of years, the new sleek and minimalist décor, and cultural informality. It makes me happy to see its reappearance in Warren’s attractive, compelling work. It’s good to see the NPG go for quality, too. At 75-by-50 inches, it must have been pricey, but the NPG raised the money.

Winfrey’s portrait is the star in a group of recent acquisitions. None has the presence of hers. There’s a laminated hydrocal bust of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Hydrocal is gypsum cement. The sculpture is most unappealing. Joan Roth’s photograph of Rabbi Sally Priesand, from 2022, is dynamic. She’s the first woman rabbi with a portrait in the NPG. Overall, the recent acquisition show is small — about 20 objects — and took four curators to assemble it. It’s not buoyant — aside from Winfrey’s and Priesand’s portraits — and feels like the work of a committee.

I visited the National Cathedral in Washington to see two new stained-glass windows designed by Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), a very good painter famous for large-scale allegorical scenes of everyday black life in America. I love writing about stained glass. The windows premiered this past September 23. They’re called the Now and Forever Windows. Passages are made in bold, geometric panels of glass. They both show figures, though none has a face. Each figure holds a protest sign and is marching in a rally. One reads no two times and no foul play, one reads not, then there’s fairness and another no foul play.

They replace two windows depicting passages from the lives of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Daughters of the Confederacy donated those windows, which were installed in 1953.

The cathedral removed them in 2017. “The windows became barriers to making people feel very welcomed here,” the cathedral’s dean said. I can see why. The Lee and Jackson windows depict them as military leaders in the war to free slaves. The Lee window depicts him on horseback during the Battle of Chancellorsville, where Jackson died. The battle was a Confederate victory and tens of thousands died.

Looking at photographs of the Lee and Jackson windows, and being a good Methodist, I can’t imagine them stimulating a desire to pray or even a few random thoughts about Jesus. They were, then, meant as church decoration.

The cathedral’s new windows by Marshall are secular and, odd to say, generic. “No,” “not,” “fairness,” and “no foul play” respecting what, exactly? Fairness is in the eye of the begrudged, and people are begrudged for lots of reasons, bad and good. After the six-plus months of race riots inspired by Black Lives Matter in 2020, the windows don’t evoke peaceful protest or reconciliation, either. At least no one’s wearing a pink pussy hat.

They seem piety-lite, but so is the Episcopal church, which isn’t a venue I associate with protest. I’m likelier to think of incense, the Perpendicular Gothic, and Prosecco after services.

I’ve never visited the National Cathedral, though I’ve watched services there. It opened for business in 1912 as America’s mix of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It’s lovely and also immense. It’s Gothic Revival, with flying buttresses, pointed arches, gargoyles, vaulted ceilings, and 200 stained-glass windows. When the church was built and until the 1970s, Americans, regardless of religious beliefs, viewed the United States as a Christian country where civic and Old Testament and New Testament values mixed and supported each other.

The stained-glass-window program reflects this. Biblical figures often appear, but so do the Battles of Midway and Iwo Jima, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the signers of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, Lewis and Clark, William Penn, and the space program. The earliest windows are chromatically muted, as most old English cathedrals are. Later windows — French-inspired — are vibrantly red, yellow, green, and, of course, blue.

A lovely window highlights artists such as Rembrandt, Giotto, and Fra Angelico, dedicated to Andrew Mellon, the founder of the National Gallery, and his son, Paul Mellon.

I looked at lots of the windows. For glass that’s so pigmented, the subjects are very white indeed.  I’m not sure, though, that portraying black America in terms of protest is the way to go.

I’m wondering also whether the Mellon Foundation is delirious with joy about the windows, finding them vague. Elizabeth Alexander, a poet and the president of the foundation, has written a poem that’s to be sculpted in the stone below the windows. This might be intended to focus them more. Alexander’s poem, which she recited at the dedication, is lovely. So was the dedication service, judging from the program.

The new windows were the first works of art — monuments — I’d seen that were supported by the Mellon Foundation as part of a $500 million Mellon initiative. The aim of the project is to work on the local level in America to replace old monuments found to be offensive today. I wrote about the plan in 2020 in the spirit of skepticism, natural curiosity, and open-mindedness, a combination I apply to most things.

I’ll look at other Mellon-funded monuments on my travels. The foundation initially committed $250 million to what it calls its Monuments Project. Since 2017, Mellon has upped it to $500 million. That’s a lot of dough. It displaces gifts to arts organizations that, to me, are needier and worthier. Hiring a big-name artist whose work gets millions also stinks of vanity, as good an artist as Marshall is. Mellon is chasing headlines that tout its virtue. Possible, the Ford Foundation and Steven Spielberg also contributed to the windows project.

Mellon’s unusually well suited to develop programs using art and art museums to remediate the damage to childhood education caused by unions and governments via the Covid-era school lockdowns. Locked out of classrooms, sometimes for two years, poor and working-class children mightily suffered, and they continue to suffer today. Yes, not sexy, but, yes, Mellon has the money and smarts to do something useful.

I think obliterating history is wrong. Before Christmas, I wrote about the Army’s destruction of the Reconciliation monument, the centerpiece of Arlington National Cemetery’s Confederate section. As American sculpture goes, the monument, dedicated in 1914, is very good. Only the touchiest can claim to be offended. A mammy holds a baby as his Confederate father goes to war? Don’t cry me a river. Its decoration is too layered and complex.

The Lee and Jackson windows are modest and formulaic and, subject-wise, don’t belong in a religious space. Just because they’re art doesn’t mean the cathedral has to leave them there forever. Good art offers enigma, poetry, beauty, romance, and inspiration. In a church, it bridges our outer and inner selves. I’m not claiming that the Marshall windows do the trick, but I know the Lee and Jackson windows didn’t.