Art in 2024: Dogs, Dinosaurs, Madonnas, and More

Lotusland, the botanical garden, stars as the art of the year, all 37 acres of it.

I ’ve written a lot about Christmas as a time for reminiscence so, in my last piece for 2024, I’ll look at art I’ve seen this year that’s moved me the most. Memories of Lotusland, the botanical garden in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, warm me on cold, icy, snowy, gray Vermont days, but man does not live on sun, chic, succulents, and bromeliads alone. I’d never written about a botanical garden before, and beyond Lotusland’s lush, sculpted landscape are serious scholarship and conservation. It preserves hundreds of rare, often unique plants. We mortals can’t beat God’s aesthetics, either.

I called it “an unforgettable experience,” and at only 37 acres, it’s a gem of many colors and gardens of all types. Its founder and patron, Ganna Walska, was a self-made woman and should be the subject of a Hollywood movie. She was a hothouse flower with a vision and with grit. Lotusland’s probably the only animal, mineral, and vegetable in Montecito that isn’t rich. It’s a not-for-profit, has good governance, a new master plan, and a capital campaign underway. I love Santa Barbara. I’d move there in a minute, but don’t have the wiles to marry a dumb, rich duke or know the lyrics to “I’m Just Wild about Harry,” both verses and all the refrain.

There’s no concrete in Lotusland, and Brutalism, the much-derided architectural style, is not the Santa Barbara way to go. Still, my tastes are catholic. I’m up for quality wherever I find it. The National Building Museum’s “Capital Brutalism” is both an introduction to this broad, influential, hard-to-love style and a deep look at its prevalence in Washington, D.C. It’s a trick to do a show about architecture since the art’s never in the galleries, but the building museum, itself a work of art, pulls it off through photographs, concrete samples, and a focus on half a dozen buildings nearby that most visitors will know.

Some of the buildings, like the FBI’s headquarters, are hateful, and not only on the aesthetic front, but the Swamp’s Metro celebrates Brutalism’s Art Deco heritage as well as suggests the style’s best moments might have been subterranean. It’s a ’60s and ’70s style, reflects the eras, and, praise the Lord, are historical. Brutalist style’s had such a long run in D.C. because concrete’s inexpensive and bureaucrats there tend to have bad taste. Best to stick with Classicism. Tried and true, and it promotes patriotic thoughts.

And speaking of Classicism, my top ten list of art-to-see shrunk by one when I visited Paestum, the ruins of the ancient Greek city near Naples. I wrote about my visit in October in one of four pieces about the glories of Naples’s ancient and Baroque art. Paestum’s three temples from the Sixth century b.c. are the best preserved and the earliest examples of the fully realized Doric style. Austere, stately, and robust, the Doric order goes hand in hand, or column by column, with our ideal civic order. I wrote about the temples but mostly about the archeological site, which is a museum, park, ruins of the rest of Paestum, and a scholarly enterprise. The Paestum site, like Pompeii and hundreds of other ancient sites, is supervised by the Italian government. Among them, it’s the leader in using drones and ground-penetrating radar to coax long-buried treasures to reveal themselves.

Yale’s Peabody Museum is, at 166 years, old. Paestum’s older at 3,000. Yale’s brontosaurus skeleton takes the fern, cycad, and snake grass cake at 150 million years young, refreshed as it is after Yale renovated its natural history museum. Growing up near New Haven, I loved the Peabody for its fossils, stuffed animals, rock collection, and Native American artifacts. Long having the look and feel of a tomb, the Peabody reopened this past spring massively reinterpreted and expanded and its dinosaur bones restored to, Madonna-like, strike a pose.

Designed by Centerbrook, a Connecticut architectural firm, the new Peabody is as scholarly as ever but, in gallery after gallery, aims at a broad audience. For sentimental reasons alone, I was impressed, though appalled to learn its Native American holdings will stay in vaults because of changes in federal law making it much easier for tribes to demand their restitution based on the flimsiest evidence. I suspect, I wrote, that many Native artifacts repatriated since the early ’90s have been sold by tribes on the black market. Scholars and, of course, the press haven’t studied this because they don’t want to know. It’s another example of sacrificing learning and preservation to woke politics, which sickens everything it touches.

Is it true dogs have more fun? I think so since they’re happy when running, swimming, eating, chasing what instinct propels them to chase, and being with their master. We humans, far fussier, dwell on the wide range of our defects and the defects of others. We lack the pliability and will to do much about them except moan and wail. I don’t often write about dealer shows since I write a lot about art fairs, but “Alert the Pupperazzi,” a story about a show at Timothy Taylor’s gallery in New York, makes me smile, as does, of course, its 40 or so paintings of dogs.

Real joy — not fake Kamala joy — as well as fidelity, decorum, charm, and courage abound in depictions of dogs by about 25 artists, each with a different style. I saw it in July when I wanted nothing heavy. The curators, all young gallery staffers, showed a natural talent for variety, pacing, and scale. Nothing was discordant. Unlike in real life, all the dogs on view played well together.

Bookending 2024 were two exhibitions powered by beautiful art, some rarely seen, and superb, traditional art history, which means deep research and devotion to objects. “Sargent and Fashion,” the Museum of Fine Arts Boston exhibition I reviewed in January, studied John Singer Sargent’s portraits via the clothes his subjects wore.

Some of Sargent’s women brought racks of Paris gowns to their sittings but Sargent invariably had his own ideas based on his sense of the sitter as part of an overall design and arrangement of color, textures, and shapes. Sargent loved luxe costumes and could go frilly or slinky or, in the case of “Madam X,” steamy. Victorian and Edwardian men were more of a challenge since basic black was their cultural color, but in his portrait of Dr. Pozzi, the dreamboat gynecologist in a red dressing gown, we see a micro-genre like no other. Boston Brahmins throw nothing away, so the MFA was able to find and display dresses some of his subjects wore. The catalogue was first rate.

I wrote a two-part story only two or three weeks ago about “Siena: The Rise of Painting,” the Met’s exhibition about Sienese art from around 1300 to the Black Death right before 1350, a time when late Gothic and early Renaissance styles in Tuscany overlapped. The Sargent fashion show was new scholarship, but I’d seen most of the Sargents before. Many are from American, London, or Paris museums, and some, like “Dr. Pozzi,” are at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum but have traveled a lot. For the Siena exhibition, the Met got objects like Pietro Lorenzetti’s “Tarlati Polyptych,” which hasn’t left the church for which it was commissioned in 700 years. The art of Gothic Siena is an acquired taste since it’s religious, and the gold backgrounds and abstract figures of its paintings are anti-modern. Still, the Met got us in the groove. In terms of loans and in unifying painting, good work, sculpture, and ivories into one narrative, this was an extraordinarily difficult show.

I didn’t think I’d write something like “Aristocratic Decor, before Heads Rolled” when I visited the new Hôtel de La Marine in Paris. It’s a recently opened museum of deluxe French interior decoration in the era of Louis XVI located in what was the design center supported by the king in the 1780s to show the ultimate in good taste. The complex is, in part, the apartment of his chief designer, its furnishings reassembled and its spaces restored to appear as they were before the 1793 deluge.

I imagined I’d write a piece about Paris taste with a focus on furniture, wallpaper, and bric-a-brac but learned a few hours after my visit about Picpus, the small cemetery in what, during the Reign of Terror, was a Paris exurb. There, a few yards from what was then Paris’s busiest guillotine, is the mass grave for hundreds who fell afoul of Jacobin psychopaths. Most were royal sympathizers, and many were from the class who would have drawn decorating tips from what they’d seen in Louis’s time at the Hotel de la Marine. The cemetery’s walled, deserted, and a green field, now in the heart of urban Paris. There’s a plaque and a freestanding archway leading to the mass grave as if to suggest an imaginary church. A few steps from the mass grave is a small, proper cemetery started a few years later with graves and memorials for aristocrats — related to those guillotined — who’d been lucky to die in bed.

General Lafayette’s buried there. His wife’s mother, sister, and grandmother, all nobility, were guillotined near Picpus. I’m not sure how legally binding this is, but the Lafayette graves are considered by the French to be American soil. The Picpus experience shocks and sobers. I thought of an old saw from my political days. “One day a peacock, the next day a feather duster.” Picpus also shows us how connected the American and French Revolutions are, as opposites and as templates, and how much French help meant to us in dumping British rule.

For cultural atrocities, all roads seem to end at the Terra Foundation in Chicago, about which I wrote a few weeks ago. This rich, boutique foundation, always a bit of an oddball place, has gone woke-on-speed and supported the worst exhibitions I saw last year. The Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Met, among others, have reimagined their very good American collections through the lenses of race, colonialism, and Trot economics, all with big Terra bucks. Its hundreds of millions come from Dan Terra, the Reaganaut who’s whirling and twirling in his grave from chagrin.

We know Terra, Mellon, and the Ford Foundation, captured by faddists, don’t know nothin’ ’bout history, but have they no respect for their dead donors? Caps on staff salaries and endowments for the biggest foundations might rouse them from their delusions, or at least limit the damage they do.

I didn’t write about my visit to the Tate’s grand paintings galleries, redone from a slavery perspective, since I’d written about the museum’s more focused look at its Rex Whistler murals. These once adorned the Tate’s fancy restaurant and do indeed have a racially mossy passage here and there. The Tate’s Gainsboroughs, Sargents, and Pre-Raphaelites are still on view, and still look splendid, but there’s a new interpretation strategy surrounding the British slave trade, displacement, exploitation, and other chattering-class manias.

Critics have already taken the birch to a redo that’s whiny, yes, and apish and trite. No one dies, though, and it’s not forever. I have to say that Sargent’s Graham Robertson and Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, set against lilac walls and in a gallery concerning “fluid notions of personal identity,” made me wonder whether the Tate was about to suggest the two were drag queens.

I went to the Tate after visiting the new Chelsea Pensioners Museum at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. It explores the history of retired Army pensioners spending their dotage in a group home designed mostly by Christopher Wren. Chelsea wasn’t always a ritzy London address, and the pensioners come from all backgrounds and all parts of the U.K. I spoke to a few of them. They’re a doughty breed, and a patriotic one.

I’m broad minded and think outside the box. Good, I say to the Tate, do your woke rehash but enlist Chelsea Pensioners as gallery guards. They were, after all, once active-duty soldiers. They’re nearby, so a Tate van can pick them up and take them home. They’ve got snappy uniforms. All they’ll want is lunch. Visitors, especially inquisitive young ones, can ply them with questions on the empire, the Blitz, and true-blue British values. Before long, all in the galleries will be thinking St. Crispin’s Day thoughts.

After four bad years starting in 2020, 2024 ended on a high note. The Covid mass hysteria, the catastrophic retreat from Kabul, hoax after hoax, “sharp as a tack,” 10 million illegal immigrants, inflation, lawfare, DEI, Hunter’s laptop, and cat cookouts in Ohio are in the rearview mirror. I’m looking forward to more art and more writing about art in 2025! Happy New Year to all my readers.