Saying Goodbye to Julia Alexander

Memories of an art-world star and cherished friend 

D eath is part of life, and the older I get, the more often the Pale Horseman takes those I love and cherish, family and close friends. Hardened as I might be, and contrary to what Saint Paul tells us, death, it still stings, the dying, I think, and, I know, the living. On May 4, we lost Julia Alexander, the longtime director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, a curator at the Yale Center for British Art, a distinguished leader in the museum world, and a much beloved friend for 35 years.

Julia died at 57, suddenly, of heart failure and at the peak of her career, with her 21-year-old twins soon to be launched but still needing a good mother. She’d just started a new job as president of the Kress Foundation, which supports European art projects from antiquity to the early 19th century. My husband, Steven, and I went to Baltimore for the memorial service on May 29. It was gentle and comforting and mysterious and glorious as Episcopal funerals tend to be and, as Julia would have wanted, a celebration of her life. That was Julia, a warming ray of sunshine. When I die, I want wailing women, strong men weeping, baying dogs, and targeted bolts of lightning, developed from the last version of my Black List. AI surely can coordinate that. If there’s no lightning, drone-launched missiles will do.

I won’t deserve any of it, but Julia did. She left family and friends bereft, and she left cheated by death of the last half of her career and her children’s bright future.

I met Julia, a star in the making, when we were graduate students at Yale. Then, in the early ’90s, and the day she died, Julia was tall, just hitting six feet, blonde, beautiful, smart, fun, a fluent French speaker, and blessed with a divinely inspired gift for friendship. We clicked over coffee and chatter about French fashion, men’s and women’s, when she leaned toward me with a look, both clandestine and silky, that I often saw in my political days from reporters about to pump me for intelligence. “Brian, so,” she plunked on the table, “do you like boys or girls?”

Among graduate students, especially art historians, classicists, and students at the School of Architecture, that was essential social information. And, for those not in the know, “boys” in gay-speak means men, nothing illegal. This was 1990. Revelations were risky. I said, “Well, men, if I had a choice . . . otherwise, I’d pass.” There, our friendship was born. I didn’t know whether she was flirting with me or not. Julia was a flirt, but she also valued honesty and kindled it. She was curious about people. I’m naturally reserved, but then I was close to tight. Julia helped me feel free.

At Yale, Julia was not liked by all, but who among us, who’s any good, is universally liked? Julia’s father, David Alexander, was the longtime president of Pomona College. Julia grew up on campus, in the president’s house. In the academic world, envy is the ugly constant. And in the early ’90s, dumpy, pasty, misshapen-headed women-in-black rose in numbers in the art history world, and in volume, too, pushing Derrida and Foucault and feminist new-wave mumbo jumbo. Julia was a beauty, and that’s worth repeating, and they, bad luck of the generic draw, weren’t. And Julia’s dissertation, like mine, was about old art. Julia wrote about royal-mistress portraits in the court of Charles II.

Until Julia’s research, made into a book and an exhibition, King Henry VIII and the six wives he wedded got headlines. Elizabeth I squelched the Armada. Charles I lost his head. James I had a gay old time but a discreet one. Insofar as anyone knew much about the British Renaissance and Baroque portraits, it was about art from their reigns. Charles II was His Lustiness, though, and the Restoration was so louche and so open about it that portraits of royal mistresses Nell Gwyn, Louise de Kérouaille, Barbara Villiers, and Moll Davis abounded, with plenty of décolletage and come-hither looks to boot.

Julia’s dissertation was about royal concubinage but, ultimately, was feminist art history. She was still a target among some of our colleagues. It troubled her. I suggested she do as Noël Coward advised and rise above it, which she did. We laughed a lot, mostly saying supercilious things about people we didn’t like. Painted Ladies, the book and exhibition based on her dissertation, was a hit when it went to the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Julia credited me, at least in part, for her marriage to John Marciari, another Yale classmate. John was a good six inches shorter than Julia. In photographs of the three of us, he looks like our child. I told her height was a superficiality and, by the by, she needed to “expand her horizons,” a bromide she often used with her children to get them to try new things. She and John split three years ago, which upset Julia a great deal. I was a groomsman at their wedding. I’m her daughter’s godfather. My husband is her son’s godfather. Friendship — old-fashioned, “you count your friends on one hand” friendship — doesn’t stop at two people. Julia’s parents became close friends, as did her brother and Julia’s sister and her family.

Julia was a daddy’s girl, and Daddy David was among the half dozen or so men I admire the most. He was a modern Johnson, erudite, a Greek and Hebrew language scholar, a Presbyterian minister as a young man, a builder, a doer, a supreme fundraiser, curious about people, a master of the off-color quip. David grew up in little Princeton, the Kentucky one, not the Black and Orange, Go Tigers one. For 30 years, he was the head of the American branch of the Rhodes Trust, so he sent hundreds of our best and brightest to Oxford. He was a Rhodes scholar, starting at Oxford in 1954.

Catharine, Julia’s mother, is a proper Southern lady, 90 years old and living in Claremont in California, a mile or so from the Pomona campus. She’s mostly unaware these days, which, given Julia’s death, is a blessing. I will always love David and Catharine.

Julia became the director of the Walters in 2013. The Walters’s job was going to be a challenge for many reasons. Its collection is both vast and eclectic, with Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities, medieval illuminated manuscripts and ivory sculpture, Renaissance paintings and bronzes, jewelry through the ages, 19th-century paintings, American and European, Islamic art, and ceramics through the ages. It’s a mini-Met. Julia’s predecessor, Gary Vikan, whom I like, was the director for nearly 20 years. Succeeding a long-term incumbent? That’s often a curse, since, among the staff, expectations and priorities are set in cement.

And the Walters, though a nonprofit, is financially supported by the City of Baltimore and on city land. The mayor and city council president, Maryland’s governor, and the Baltimore County Executive are trustees, along with a selection of Baltimore’s great and good. The Walters is like a little city, with eclectic leadership and an eclectic collection and an eclectic campus, with three buildings smack by Mount Vernon Square. Julia made it all work. People wanted to be with her, in part because she was free and fun but also because she was a very responsible person. She thought the best of people. I told her I thought the mayor of Baltimore, Catherine Pugh, was a crook, which she proved to be, and what a crook. She wrote a children’s book and then pressured city agencies to buy it by the bundles. Julia had to work with her, and did.

I reviewed a couple of Julia’s exhibitions over the years. I loved Majolica Mania, an inspired, risky, robust show with 350 vibrant, shiny examples of the pottery that helps define Victorian taste. It was inspired because majolica is so overlooked in our parlous times, when people fear color and joy. It was risky given the Victorian knack for industry and empire — both out of style among those who atone and chatter simultaneously. Risky, too, because it was so gloriously plump, with not only hundreds of objects but dozens of shapes, a Victorian parlor, a miniature conservatory for jardinières and garden seats, and a master class on the art of the table setting.

The Walters’s exhibition on Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Glasgow style, like the majolica project, was a first in America. These topics had never gotten such comprehensive attention. And, bless her, her exhibition program was balanced. Physical and spiritual health in medieval times; Léon Bonvin’s tranquil, lambent watercolors; the ceramicist Roberto Lugo; and Fabergé and Russian craft — all got shows that intrigued and illuminated. Her renovation of the Hackerman House, the 1850 Greek Revival palace owned by the Walters, has to be her triumph.

I visited the Walters late in the afternoon on the day of her funeral. The museum was empty. I was sad, and missed the baying dogs, but I was in Julia’s world. She’d touched and knew every object. She seemed to have just left, with a swoosh of a silk scarf, very French. The place looked great. I wrote a few months ago that her successor, not an art historian but a workforce consultant, was a bad choice. Silly me, I think art-museum directors should be art historians. Julia differed. She said the new director was the perfect choice. We’ll see.

The Walters, in race-addled Baltimore, sank into the slough of recrimination and mayhem around the time Julia became the director — the Freddie Gray riot was in 2015 — and sank into the pit again in 2020. I was impressed by how anchored in art and art history her exhibitions were, given what must have been pressure to go race pimp, as the Baltimore Museum of Art did. In the middle of her reign, the fake Covid plague closed the museum world, and the Walters closed with it. Working with the trustees, she kept everyone on the payroll — for months. Most inevitably played the biggest goof-off game in the history of philanthropy.

Julia took good care of them. She was collegial, generous, and valued fairness. I’m older, and a man, and come from the tradition of benevolent though despotic museum directors, so I would have not been as nice. Ingrates, the Walters’s staff returned the favor by forming an AFSCME union, claiming they deserved government-employee status given the Walters’s link with the city and the county. That’s the ultimate gravy train, short of a trust fund or lotto win. I thought they were greedy and surly, but those were, and are, the times. Union organizers at the Walters called Julia a racist, which hurt her very much. Julia and I met for drinks at the Century Association a few weeks before she died. She told me she had spent most of her time when she was a museum director on HR issues.

Julia was the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the top high-culture trade association whose members direct the best art museums in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. She’d just finished her two-year term. When she was elected as AAMD’s head honcho, I told her it was a fool’s errand — I’m direct — since AAMD might have been useful in my era as a museum director, but for the last ten years it had focused on leadership training, marketing, and the dread DEI. Why waste your time?

Being, by nature, a deeply responsible person, Julia felt she could make a positive impact, and she did. She steadied AAMD, scandal-ridden after years of useless, feckless lockdowns and a push to sell art for operating expenses, and made it a positive force.

Julia’s son, Jack, graduated from Montana State University a few days after her memorial service. He likes the great outdoors and plans to stay in Bozeman and become a master carpenter. Goodness, a young person doing something useful!

Her daughter, Beatrice, called Bede, is graduating from Northeastern University next year. When Bede was 13, she was hit by juvenile arthritis. I didn’t know much about it, but, at its worst, and she had a terrible case of it, it’s not far removed from polio. Julia led the recovery charge but, along the way, felt in her heart and soul every ache Bede felt. Bede, like her mother, is tough and smart. I’d trust her with my life. She has a nice young man, a high school sweetheart, whom I like a lot.

There’s no rationale for Julia’s death aside from God’s inscrutable will, which barely helps. For Steven and me, it’s meant reflecting on who means the most to us. Julia was a museum leader nonpareil, but I think of her, free and breezy, making me smile and wanting to laugh. I miss her so much.