Getty Says ‘Hands Off My Bronze,’ but the Court Sides with Grabby Italians

In other news, an art fair turns voting-law expert and an art vandal heads to the clink.

O nce a month or so, I cover the latest news from the glass hive that’s the art world. Here are some of the ripest stories.

“Non cedere . . . non darglielo.”

Don’t back down . . . and don’t give it back. That’s my advice, Italian-style, to the Getty, which is facing calls from the European Court of Human Rights to return its priceless ancient Greek bronze sculpture to the Italians. The tussle has been unfolding for years, with the Italians claiming that Victorious Youth, made between 300 and 100 b.c., was found in Italian waters off the coast of Fano on the Adriatic Sea in 1964, smuggled out of Italy, and illegally sold to the Getty in 1977. Greek bronzes are rarer than white truffles, rarer than a bottle of Venissa wine, rarer than an honest Italian politician. Almost all went to the smelter. Victorious Youth, having been plundered from the Greeks, went down with a Roman ship before the birth of Jesus.

I’ve written about the Getty antiquities scandal, one of the two biggest scandals I’ve seen in museums in my lifetime. The other was the protracted case of lockdown leisure and lockdown love that museum senior staffs experienced during the Covid catastrophe. For months, often many, many months, museums kept the public out while staffs collected fat paychecks for doing little, essentially robbing charitable dollars. On the Getty antiquities scandal, the museum eventually fessed up, returned lots of objects, lost a bundle of money, and became a beacon light of transparency.

Victorious Youth, also called the Getty Bronze, is different. Fishermen found it off the coast, in deep water. Everyone involved in its discovery is either dead or, being Italian, unreliable. The Getty bought it nearly 50 years ago. There’s no evidence it came from close-to-the-shore Italian waters.

I don’t understand why the case is taking its “lunga passeggiata” through the EU courts rather than American courts, or why the case is in the hands of the Court of Human Rights, considering that the contested subject is bronze, and I don’t mean tanned. An American defendant, and the world’s richest museum at that, isn’t going to get a fair shake in the EU. It’s a tarantella-and-grappa court, loose as well as very political. If the Italians want it so badly, they can go to a U.S. federal court.

The Getty can appeal to a court called the Grand Chamber, the name alone suggesting its rules and standards are things of Old World mystery and Old World whims.

In Italy, the Getty’s bronze is known as The Athlete of Fano, and Fano, in the Marche region, is, coincidentally, where my Italian mother’s family still lives. If you follow Florence due east on a map, you’ll hit Fano, where the ancient Via Flaminia from Rome hit the Adriatic before turning north to Rimini. The Italians say they’ll display Victorious Youth in Fano in a new museum built for it. I’m happy to be Farnese but, to my friends at the Getty, “mai arrendersi,” which means don’t give up the bronze, to channel your inner Commodore Perry.

The Frieze Art Fair, running until May 5 at The Shed in Manhattan, tempts me to give the international conglomerate what would be a fourth or fifth look. Forever open-minded as I am, I’ve nonetheless left past iterations of Frieze in New York and in London muttering, “I’ve never seen such flotsam and jetsam in my life.” And high-priced flotsam and jetsam.

And while I like rich people who haven’t lost their bearings, I loathe Champagne socialists, who are often hypocrites and, insofar as art is concerned, chasers after fads. Frieze started only in 2011, so I hope it changes as it matures, but I’m skeptical.

I get Frieze’s press briefings and wonder, curious as I am, why it’s leading a charge against, of all things, the bugaboo it calls voter suppression. Yes, it’s an art fair. And, yes, it’s leading an initiative called Plan Your Vote, the brainchild of Christine Messineo, who now runs Frieze in the U.S. I would define “voter suppression” as “having nothing to do with art,” but Plan Your Vote defines it as comprising “various legal and illegal efforts — such as imposing strict ID laws, cutting voting times, restricting registration, and purging voter rolls — to prevent eligible citizens” — among them the dead, foreigners, pets, action comic figures, and phantoms — “from exercising their right to vote.” We’re told that “these tactics disproportionately affect people of color and those from low-income backgrounds.” This, Messineo and Plan Your Vote tell us, is a rampant, evil movement.

All of this is a lie. I am surely the only national art critic who was once a registrar of voters, alas for Frieze’s enablers of voter fraud. These vote-integrity laws ensure honest, clean elections and timely vote counts.

I think people should vote on one day — Election Day — unless they’re too sick to haul themselves to the polls or are out of town. Grown-ups plan to get to work every day, feed their kids and take them to school, and go to doctor’s appointments. Surely they can plan to vote and don’t need a window of many weeks to do it. Voting is a privilege and duty, but it’s also a ceremony of citizenship that ought to occur on a single day. I need to show a government-issued photo ID to get into an office building in New York, board a plane, or check into a hotel. It isn’t too much to ask to show an ID to register to vote.

I can elaborate on picking apart all of Plan Your Vote’s and Frieze’s lies and fantasies, but why is an art fair making this a priority, and why is Frieze partnering with Vote.org, a left-wing shill awash with dark money? Because Frieze is corporate and markets privilege, fashion, and excess, not connoisseurship, quality, and heritage. It’s about money. This distinguishes Frieze from TEFAF, the Winter Show, the print dealers’ association fair, and the little, lovely American Art Fair, among others, which is why I usually write about them and not Frieze. Frieze’s stunt reminds me of all the big businesses and museums that genuflected to Black Lives Matter because that was in vogue, knowing nothing about its race-baiting agenda.

I never write about politics but if an arts organization, including a museum, strays from art into political advocacy or campaigning, that’s fair game for critique by stiletto or bludgeon. “Democracy’s under siege” is among our ruling cabal’s dog whistles. It’s a fake issue and a fad statement. Messineo comes from the world of fashion. I don’t know her, but I gather that she has many good qualities, among them high energy and a partiality for dirty martinis. I suggest she ditch politics and focus on art.

The Mona Lisa will probably get a new home. Laurence des Cars, the Louvre’s new director, has suggested moving the crowd-pleaser from the gallery it now shares with such heavy hitters as Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana to a yet-to-be-built, single picture gallery near the Louvre’s subterranean entrance hall below the glass pyramid. The change would be part of a $540 million set of renovations and improvements that’s still more abstract than concrete.

I’ve seen Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic, infinitely famous portrait many times, mostly as a peek into its gallery at the Louvre to see how packed it is with tourists. When I was in Paris in February, the space didn’t evoke an open sardine tin, but it was still impossible to absorb the picture, likely the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (1479–1542), the wife of an affluent but neither aristocratic nor moving-and-shaking Florentine silk maker and merchant. Leonardo painted it around 1505, never delivered it, and might have fiddled with it over the years. After he died in 1519, the portrait landed in the court of his friend and patron, the French king, Francis I.

Mona Lisa was displayed at the Louvre from its earliest days as an art museum and wasn’t particularly lionized. It wasn’t a tourist attraction, either, until it was stolen in 1911. The theft was an international culture story that coincided with the advent of good newspaper and magazine photography. Though 400 years old at that point, the smile for the ages was launched.

It’s a lovely portrait suggesting intelligence and sensuality. The Wedding Feast at Cana, though, is majestic. Steps away, in a quiet, spacious gallery with comfortable seating, are Lorenzo Lotto’s tiny Christ Carrying the Cross, from 1526, Titian’s Entombment of Christ, from 1520, and two little Raphaels from around 1505, one showing St. George and another St. Michael slaying dragons that would scare the makers of the Lord of the Rings movies. I’d rather spend time with these and other wonderful Italian things than make new friends among a dense pack of camera-clicking, video-filming Japanese tourists. That said, I look at Mona Lisa’s current gallery as an access point from which discerning visitors, disgusted by the crowd, will explore and discover elsewhere. If you put her far from the other Italian things, visitors might never see them.

In 2023, the Louvre had 8.9 million visitors, with 80 percent of them, or a humongous 20,000 a day, visiting Mona Lisa. The museum, in a very un-French move, routinely does visitor-satisfaction surveys. These tell it that Mona Lisa is a destination but one more like Jesus’s slog to Golgotha than the contemplative passage visitors want and expect. The new gallery will probably involve a people mover. Whatever the Louvre does, I hope that the gallery has Fort Knox–style security. In 2022, a climate kook disguised as an old woman in a wheelchair pelted Mona Lisa with tiramisu. This past January, a pair of eco-nuts plastered it with soup. The picture is behind bullet-proof and, I presume, food-proof glass and wasn’t damaged.

On a brighten-the-day note, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., sentenced Joanna Smith, the climate full-mooner and vandal, to 60 days in the slammer for attacking Degas’s wax sculpture of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen on April 27, 2023, at the National Gallery. Smith and Timothy Martin, also obsessed with fake climate science, smeared black and red paint on the vitrine in which the delicate sculpture was displayed. I tried to borrow it in the late ’90s for an exhibition on Degas at the Clark and learned it was valued — then — at $20 million. It’s the original for the iconic bronze sculptures Degas made from it after it was displayed in the sixth Impressionist salon in 1881.

Smith also got hit with 24 months of parole, restitution, and 150 hours of community service, ten of which must be spent removing graffiti from public settings. She’s barred from Washington and from museums everywhere for two years.

May she spend her 60 days in a cell with a George Washington University student chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” all night or, worse, a Harvard student reminding her between chants that he, she, or they went to Harvard. Smith copped a plea. Her fellow art mauler, Martin, wouldn’t take a plea deal and is going to trial. He said he was “tired of not being heard” after blocking traffic on the D.C. Beltway in the name of the weather. He has a manifesto, too. Good for the National Gallery for pressing charges. Little Dancer wasn’t damaged but, one day, a work of art is going to be seriously damaged — or someone seriously hurt — by loony-toons oblivious to Earth’s age — 4 billion years old — and the infinite number of times the climate has changed. It’s the pinnacle of hubris and naïveté to believe we puny humans can move a thing we barely understand.

Last week I wrote about Mark Rothko, the retrospective at the Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Too big and too noisy, the exhibition demolished the tranquil atmosphere essentially needed to absorb Rothko’s work as he wished. The ideal setting for a Rothko is the small chapel in Houston for which he painted a wall-to-wall suite of 14 dark, enigmatic, surreal pictures in the late 1960s. The Rothko Chapel, commissioned by Houston collectors John and Dominique de Menil, opened in 1971.

Last week, the chapel broke ground for a $42 million archives and administration center, a meditation garden, housing for guest speakers, a space for programs, and a tree-shaded plaza. It’s the second phase of a renovation and expansion project. A $30 million infrastructure renovation and construction of a new visitor center was completed in 2021.

The chapel and its board embrace a “social justice” mission. As a chapel, it’s a religious place, too, though ecumenical and amorphous. It positions itself as a sacred space. I admire the Menils, who were brilliant collectors and philanthropists and whose museum a short walk from the chapel is perfect.

It’s so easy for a place like the chapel with a social-justice mission to become a captive of left-wing politics, which aim primarily at amassing power, with people as props serving that greater cause. I’m baffled by why they’re called progressives. In any event, the Menils were rich socialists in the French tradition, so it would makes sense for the chapel to become a pulpit for their ideals. But when Houston has so many problems, $72 million is a boatload of money — all from charity — to spend. Philanthropy today ought to aim at ameliorating the profound, sinister damage to young people caused by the Covid mass hysteria, hypnosis, and hallucination. I’m all for infrastructure work on the chapel, a temple of art, but a lecture hall, offices for staff, and a meditation garden seem like frills.

People come and go, with notable transitions happening since my last news story. Julia Marciari-Alexander, the longtime and accomplished director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, is going to the Kress Foundation as its president. I like the Kress Foundation, which was established in 1929 in New York City to advance the study, conservation, and enjoyment of European art from antiquity to the early 19th century.

Samuel Kress built a chain of five-and-ten-cent stores and also assembled an Old Master collection of quality and renown, famous mostly through Kress’s magisterial gift of art to the National Gallery and the foundation’s transformative gift of groups of paintings to museums all over the United States. For many of these museums, Kress pictures are the foundation of their collection.

Love of these paintings by the locals stimulated collection-building and philanthropy. It’s a case of giving done right — giving with impact that lasts. So much of the work that other foundations do is not only junk, it’s philosophically dubious. Places such as the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation give to causes that would chagrin and mortify their founders. Vanity and fads are motivating their boards and staffs. Kress’s legally binding mission, by contrast, is narrow.

It’s hard to pollute ancient Greek and Roman art, for instance, with “land acknowledgments” or tears over slavery, colonialism, and, as in the case of Frieze, democracy under siege. People will laugh.

Alexander is a measured, informed leader who’ll stick to the foundation’s traditional mission. At the Walters, she was an excellent director, stewarded good scholarship, and did a first-class renovation. During Covid lockdowns, she kept all her staff employed, for which the ingrates repaid her and her board by unionizing.

The Kress board is very good. It’s not a rich foundation, unlike billion-dollar beasts who need a haircut à la mode of Henry VIII, who barbered the monasteries to a state of indigence that Saint Francis of Assisi would have admired. Still, the Kress does immense good with the money it has.

Next week I’ll write about contemporary art in Santa Barbara and the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, established with the art and memorabilia collection of cowboy singer, philanthropist, and TV star Gene Autry, so saddle up.