A Catfight in a Snake Pit in Philly’s Art Museum

While crazies quarrel in the City of Brotherly Love, Boston’s MFA does a superb Winslow Homer show . . . What does it all have to do with Canadians?

M y story today is a twofer, not a two-part story but a revelation — the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ sublime, transporting exhibition of all its Winslow Homer watercolors — and a parable drawn from the Philadelphia Art Museum’s blunt-ax firing of its director amid a cascade of public, tumescent “she said, she said” charges.

First, Philadelphia. There’s a shortage of sisterly love along the banks of the Schuylkill River. The players in this extraordinary drama are Sasha Suda, defenestrated for theft as director, as well as Leslie Anne Miller, the board chairwoman who hired her and then wanted to fire her, and Ellen Caplan, the current board chairwoman who pulled the trigger. Reading the court filings, and hearing from my spies at the front, I have to say that everyone looks bad. Rocky Balboa, whose bronze sculpture adorns the base of the museum’s famous flight of stairs, is aghast. He wants to run in the other direction.

Suda was fired by email on November 4 after a three-year reign. She’s Canadian, a red flag, and had been director of the National Gallery of Canada for only three years before. At age 41, she was plucked from the obscurity called the Canadian art world to run Philadelphia’s top museum.

Suda had gone to Princeton and then to Williams for her master’s degree in art history. I remember her fondly as a student. She’s a talented art historian. She got her Ph.D. from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Made director of Canada’s National Gallery in 2019, she ruled for three controversial years, reorganizing the staff and focusing on decolonization narratives, the fakest of all fake things.

Suda was fired, according to the museum’s response to her wrongful-dismissal lawsuit, for theft. She gave herself, the trustees say, a 3 percent cost-of-living raise in contravention of her contract, which set her compensation at $720,000 a year with no cost-of-living adjustment unless explicitly approved by the board. My first bone of contention and chagrin is her $720,000 starting salary, a lot of moolah for the head of what is, after all, a charity. There was, I gather, a painful negotiation over salary before Suda took the job. She’d been making a fraction of that, around $200,000, in debased Canadian dollars, to rule Canada’s National Gallery.

I knew very little about Suda’s time at the Philadelphia museum. I’d written about the staff’s strike in 2022, a three-week-long caterwaul that coincided with Suda’s arrival as director. In October, I read about the museum’s rebranding, a $250,000 consultant dream leaving the museum with a new logo and a new name, going from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or PMA, to the Philadelphia Art Museum, or PhAM — which could also be the more pungent PhART. Why, why, why spend money on this? Years ago, the Clark, when I was a curator there, spent tens of thousands on a new logo. Weeks after its adoption, a white powder of which no one had heard — anthrax — hit the headlines. Our logo looked like its chemical symbol. I’m a big believer in leaving well enough alone. Suda was in hot water with her board, which claims it didn’t approve the new name and was in a state of flatulence about it.

Suda’s lawsuit, available online, is in Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas. Given the jurisdiction, it reads in everyday language. She pulls no punches, southpaw-Rocky-style. She presents herself as the underdog, the scrappy heroine, though a bit of a schoolmarm — a change director, willing to break a cycle of “drama, infighting, and dysfunction” that paralyzed the museum. “A small, corrupt faction of the board,” organized and led by Miller, who hired her, thwarted her, she says. She tried at one point to negotiate an exit, but she wanted two years’ pay — $1.4 million — while the board was willing to give her only $370,000, six months’ pay. She disses her predecessor, Timothy Rub, who “left no lasting impact” and tolerated sexual harassment by his staff favorites. She fails to note the museum’s massive expansion under his watch, for which he raised millions. Suda tried to fix a years-old milieu of “harassment, mistreatment, and toxic leadership” that had destroyed morale, but she’d been told by trustees to look forward, not backward.

There was, Suda says, a bait-and-switch culture at the board level. She was told that she’d serve as CEO and COO, but almost immediately after she was hired, the board created a separate COO position, hiring an insider for the job. She was barred from negotiations with the museum’s newly formed union, which had gone on strike a few days before she started. Miller, she says, constantly disparaged her, calling her time at the National Gallery “finishing school,” rewriting job descriptions at will, and telling her Philadelphia high-society friends that Suda was “untrustworthy, incompetent, a snake, and immature.” Miller is a Philadelphia political powerhouse and lawyer who, it seems, wants to import the city’s model of full-diaper governance to the nonprofits on whose boards she serves.

When Miller retired as board chairwoman, her replacement, Ellen Caplan, proved to be no better, a neurotic micromanager, but, we learn, Suda persisted. She said she raised money, quelled labor strife, and implemented the museum’s quota system requiring 40 percent of the staff and 35 percent of suppliers to be from “diverse” backgrounds.

Aren’t quotas illegal? Maybe not in Canada, but we’re in the great U.S. of A.

Suda was a terrible pick for the Philadelphia job, and that’s on Miller and Miller’s board. PhAM or PhART or PAM or the good old PMA, whatever you call it, is, simply because it’s a big-city museum, a very political place. She was too young and inexperienced. Many boards want this, especially after a long reign like Rub’s. He comes from the same tradition as I do. That’s the benevolent though despotic museum director. Once the patriarch’s gone, boards are often drawn to ingénues so they can claw back the power they’d lost under the old king, who along the way had probably added a few sycophants to the board.

I’d never hire a Canadian from the earnest, dull, culture elite of the turbo-woke set. During her time at the National Gallery, Suda cried every day about Indigeneity, decolonizing the museum, and the Indigenous children in unmarked Canadian graves, which, we later learned, don’t exist in the real world but are a fairy tale. I’d never hire, not for all the maple taffy in Montreal, a director whose priorities are, according to Suda’s lawsuit, “reconciliation justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility,” providing “safety and holding spaces for these conversations.” Has this dame ever seen a Rocky movie?

On and on it goes. Suda claims that Caplan hired a law firm to launch a sham, secret investigation of her pay raise; the firm recommended a just-cause firing. In the museum’s response to Suda’s lawsuit, it claims Suda was told by the board that she wouldn’t get the same cost-of-living increases that the rest of the museum staff received; but, either through a glitch or Suda’s active connivance, she got the increases anyway and failed to report them to the board. Hence, the charge of theft. The board demands that the court send the mess to arbitration rather than a trial on the facts. They want a settlement, as does Suda, who’s using a public trial as a club to get a better deal.

PAM’s new director is Daniel Weiss, a former college president and higher education bureaucrat who happened to be lurking in the museum’s halls as a consultant hired by the trustees to advise them on governance. What a rotten deal. Weiss’s contract as director runs until 2028, but he seems to be the director, not the acting director, and it’s open-ended, so it can be renewed. The board, having fired Suda, in effect hired Weiss as the new director without a proper search. Weiss is 68. Aren’t there fresh young faces out there, or middle-aged faces, or even AARP-ineligible faces?

“It wasn’t my life plan” to “take over as director,” Weiss told the New York Times in November. Maybe not his life plan, but I intuit a two-year plan whose clock started running the minute the board hired him and he sensed that Suda’s days might be numbered. The Metropolitan Museum of Art board had hired Weiss as its president and chief executive in 2015 to help Tom Campbell, the overwhelmed director, balance the Met’s budget. The board had lured him from the presidency of Haverford College, where, after only two years as president, he was flailing. Before too long, in 2017, Campbell was out the door at the Met, Weiss, it seemed, having slipped a stiletto between his ribs, and who-but-Weiss was in charge of the whole kit and caboodle. Weiss eventually retired after an awful performance during which he pushed the Met’s trustees to adopt an admission charge, kept the museum closed far longer than needed during the Covid mass hysteria, and led the white supremacy charge during the George Floyd mass hallucination. I’ve never met Weiss, but he looks like Dr. Fauci, a physical plight he can’t help, I know, but Weiss, like Fauci, is a high-end bureaucrat creeper.

I’d suggest a fiduciary Stanley Steamer, the deepest of deep cleans. First, the contaminated Miller, still on PAM’s board, and Caplan need to quit. They’ve brought disrepute on the museum and bungled it into a messy, expensive lawsuit. If half of what Suda claims is true, they need to be escorted from the building in butterfly nets. Any and all trustees tarred by this fiasco need to quit, too. Second, Weiss, who’s better than nothing as an interim, can run the place for a year. That’s one year. During that one — and, count ’em, that’s one year, twelve months — the museum can look for a proper director who’s not a geezer, or a failed college president, or an academic bureaucrat. Third, Suda needs to go back to Canada.

As I kicker, the museum’s former HR and diversity director, Latasha Harling, was arrested for theft after charging $58,885.98 in personal expenses on her museum credit card. The museum grounds, those lofty few acres, might well be the most crime-ridden spot in town.

What does this have to do with the MFA’s majestic, moving Homer watercolor exhibition? The venerable Boston museum just ended its tortured, ten-year rule by director Matthew Teitelbaum, another Canadian, a longtime director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, who, like Suda, brought with him the pretentious, plodding yen for woke fairy tales. Nothing delighted him more than a racial episode, fact or fiction, and many of the exhibitions during his rule were stuffed with “critical race” crap. It’s Boston, I know, and they’re drunk on the Kool-Aid. But, even among the MFA staff, Teitelbaum was much disliked for being, on the one hand, preachy and, on the other, insecure and drawn to sycophants. Everything was painfully parsed by race, gender, and indigenous identity.

Pierre Terjanian is the MFA’s new director, as of July 1 this year. Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor is his first MFA blockbuster, and I suspect he was involved in conceiving and planning the show since he was the MFA’s chief curator before he succeeded Teitelbaum. I don’t know him. He’s French, from lovely Strasbourg, and he came to the MFA from the Met, where he was the arms and armor curator. There’s no room for fluff in an arms and armor department, and certainly atonements and reckonings are seen as silly, the stuff of “woulda, coulda, shoulda,” and that battle ax came in handy since safe spaces were few and far between.

Of Light and Air displays for the first time since the 1970s of all the MFA’s Homer watercolors, nearly 50 of them, done by Homer (1836–1909) from his first stabs at the loose, spontaneous, abstract medium in 1873 to nearly the end of his life. The MFA is displaying its Homer paintings, drawings, and illustrations, too, since they’re all part of the puzzle that’s Homer.

Homer believed he would be judged a great artist not by his oil paintings or his Harper’s illustrations that made him famous in the 1860s but by his watercolors. “You will see,” he said, “in the future, I will live by my watercolors,” not financially but reputationally. He did about 700. Nearly all are top-notch, and a bit less than one in ten are on view at the MFA. Watercolors are light-sensitive, so they’re rarely displayed. The MFA started collecting Homer’s watercolors in 1899, when it bought Leaping Trout, from 1889. It’s among the watercolors that introduces the show. A pair of iridescent trout, ridiculously rainbow-colored, jump to catch a bug lunch. There’s a breeze overturning lilies. The fish shimmer, their markings blue circles and red dots, wet and intense. Homer did lots of jumping-trout pictures. He’s into fish not for catching, eating, but for their chromatic qualities, as they’re jumping and snatching a bug. He loved split-second scenes.

I’ll write a blow-by-blow story about the Homer show, but I’ll say a few things for now.

To the credit of the museum, Terjanian, and the curators, it’s a classic connoisseurship show. Tears about imperialism, patriarchy, racism, Me Too, white privilege, capitalism, slavery, Gaza, or the price of eggs — all are verboten. When I visited the MFA this past Sunday, the galleries were packed with people hungry for art, not for props for whatever garbage the New York Times happens to be wheedling us to believe. I hope this means a promising future for the new leadership.

Of Light and Air displays watercolors of children, a favorite art theme in the early 1870s. Children are about many things, but one of them is immediacy. There’s Homer and the sea, Homer and weather, Homer sunsets and sunrises, Homer’s fishing pictures, and games of stealth and immediacy. The MFA purchased many of its watercolors directly from Homer’s dealers so they were immediately treated as precious, light-sensitive things. The Blue Boat, from 1892, also displayed in the show’s introductory gallery, is as brilliant and fresh as the day Homer did it. It’s a glorious show deserving multiple visits.