Triumphs and Tin Ears at Princeton’s New Art Museum

A look at the permanent collection in its brand-new galleries

L ast week, I introduced the new Princeton Art Museum building, which opened on October 31 after five years of construction and at least 30 years of searching and equivocation over the right spot, scale, and look. I looked mostly at its architecture but also at its Take a Closer Look exhibition of a soupçon from its wonderful collection. Today, I’ll look at the handsome, design-savvy new galleries and how the curators use them. I spent lots of time in the permanent-collection galleries, which means I gravitated first to American art, my specialty.

The showstopper in the museum’s distinguished American historical collection is Charles Willson Peale’s George Washington at the Battle of Princeton, from 1784. It depicts a full-length, larger-than-life Washington — tall, ruddy, and in command — whose army in 1777, days after crossing the Delaware, upset the British. Declaration of Independence aside — words, words, words — could the Patriots actually win in the field? The answer? Yes, we can.

I’m not a cheerleader, but it’s America’s 250th birthday, so accentuating the positive matters. I read the wall text covering the Peale and two sculptures, the trio meant to be absorbed as a group. Peale’s painting is in the middle. Washington thought the theme was important enough for him to pose for it. Benjamin Rush’s black plaster bust of Washington from around 1817 is displayed to the left of the portrait. Thomas Jefferson once owned it. The label reminds us that he was “a major enslaver” like Washington. Jefferson, to boot, “had a particularly troubling relationship to slavery owing to his intimate relations with a woman he enslaved,” we’re told, meaning Sally Hemings. Cue the swells of The Guiding Light’s Wurlitzer organ. Who knew that men played power games in pursuit of a regular shag?

To the right of Peale’s portrait is a polished mirrored bust of Washington called Town Destroyer, by Mohawk artist Alan Michelson, from 2018. The title refers to Washington’s take-no-prisoners approach to the Iroquois Confederacy, most of whose tribes supported the English. We’re to see ourselves, and our guilt and complicity, in the reflective surface. Guilt and complicity? I smell blood libel, decreed from Princeton’s lofty pulpit.

Washington’s handling of Native tribes was a complicated thing, as were tribal relationships with Loyalists and Patriots. I wrote about Michelson’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He’s a good sculptor. But, as thematics go, he’s a shtick artist with a simplistic, very biased point of view. Why not? His buyers — museums like Princeton — don’t want nuance. They want scalps, oppressor scalps, and reckonings and righteous virtue. Michelson’s got to make a living. So Jefferson is Simon Legree, and poor old George is Attila the Hun.

This might not be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly lame, peripheral, threadbare, and disingenuous. We know a Jefferson man had a fling with Hemings — DNA doesn’t lie — but Albemarle County, Monticello’s home, was thick with horny Jeffersons. And Jefferson merely owned the Washington bust. He didn’t use it as a love drug. As for Town Destroyer, war is hell, nice guys finish last, “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” and the Iroquois sided with the British.

Facts or factoids, are these what Washington’s portrait ought to mean to museum visitors? What does slavery have to do with the Battle of Princeton? A wall panel about the intricacies of the battle, during which, by the by, the museum’s first building and early collection were torched, would be more relevant, especially for those of us born in Connecticut — we were taught Nathan Hale forged a mighty nation — or those of us who live in Vermont — no, that would be the Green Mountain Boys.

The American art galleries are called Re/Visions of America and informed by “vibrant social movements focused on racial, gender, and environmental justice,” and DEI. Near the three Washingtons is a sculpture of Andrew Jackson — the Trail of Tears — and the bizarre juxtaposition of an elegant, monumental curly-maple sofa-and-chair set from the 1830s against Renee Cox’s The Signing, from 2022. That’s an 84-inch-wide photograph by the Jamaica-born Cox in which she reenacts Howard Chandler Christy’s Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, a 20-by-30-foot painting from 1940. Christy’s picture was commissioned by Congress to recognize the 150th anniversary of its signing.

Christy’s painting is the mother of all clunkers and a weird Rococo Revival opus in which everyone looks like a drag queen. Cox used friends and family as models, dressing them in Halloween-infused parodies. Together, the photograph and the sofa set are fun and fey, but the furniture, which is American Biedermeier and gorgeous, seems like a prop, a straight man, for a joke that doesn’t land.

In Princeton’s American galleries, any artist and subject connected to slavery takes a hit. And what do Albert Bierstadt and the Japanese internment of World War II have to do with each other? In a Jeopardy grand slam, the answer would be “nothing, nada, zilch,” but the museum has concocted a question — and connection — that convolutes. Hint. It has something to do with toxic chemicals.

On and on it goes. The curators and director probably conceived the American galleries in a state of profound frustration. The museum closed in early 2020, so years of pious finger-wagging and justice-avenging came and went, lost, with no chance to snare the art and the galleries in service of drug pusher, addict, and felon — oops, I mean gentle giant — George Floyd as well as the Pussy Hats, weather nuts, and the race-explains-everything crowd.

Nothing’s forever, though, and I hope that in a short period of time, some of the interpretation and the art will get a rigorous tweak. The American historic collection — art before, say, 1920 — is very good. It’s typical for an academic art museum, with one of almost everything, a masterpiece here and there, but mostly pictures offering teachable moments. The museum’s Innesses are lovely. An English-period Copley, his 1782 portrait of Elkanah Watson, is creamy and alive. A precious South American mountain picture by Frederic Church is a late — 1872 — oil sketch, not a blockbuster, but effective. A beautiful Luminist work — Fitz Henry Lane’s Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor, from 1860 — packs a subtle punch, and trompe l’oeil paintings are on view. To its huge credit, the museum bought a full-length Thomas Eakins priest portrait, The Right Reverend James F. Loughlin, painted in 1902. It was among a group of Eakins portraits of Philadelphia priests that a seminary sold a few years ago. The Trail of the Shod Horse, a Remington nocturne, is from 1907 and fabulous.

There’s architectural variety in the best part of the permanent-collection galleries and throughout the museum. Most everyone is susceptible to a variant of Stendahl syndrome, spotted in the 19th century and seen in victims who were overcome by spending too much time in Italian museums looking at religious art, sometimes after a big lunch and a surfeit of wine. It’s museum fatigue. To fight it, galleries vary in size, going from big to small and back, and not in a repetitive way. There’s no formula for interpretation or arrangement. American curators went slavery, slavery, slavery. The antiquities curators at Princeton went for density. How professors use the collection to teach is another factor in curatorial decisions. The variety at Princeton is great.

The building is made of nine pavilions. There are small cross-collection galleries bridging pavilions. The tomb top of a Spanish knight from about 1500 and Christian Boltanski’s Altar to the Chases High School, from 1987–88, connect two pavilions in a space devoted to memorials. The effigy came from a Spanish church. The knight has gone to the Lord. Chases High School was a Jewish school in Vienna. Boltanski’s wall sculpture uses class photos of 1931 graduates, lamps, and rusty biscuit tins, all dimly lit, to create an altarpiece to these young people on the eve of the Holocaust, all soon to be culled in the prime of life. “Religion gives us an answer and art, my art, asks questions,” Boltanski said. Good art has to be enigmatic.

Here and there I found what the museum calls a lens room, a small, one-off gallery with a big oval window looking out to trees and with a central work of art. I found one with a ceiling painting by Jane Irish (b. 1955). Her Cosmos Beyond Atrocity, from 2024, is Rococo Revival and very pretty. Irish is a very good painter who hobbled herself over her years as court painter for anti-war groups such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The room is lined with sinuous built-in seating in Vermont oak, and it’s the perfect canoodle room, but you have to accentuate the cosmos and eliminate the atrocity.

The antiquities galleries and Mesoamerican galleries are gorgeous and packed, but visitors find their favorite things and keep coming back. I loved two South Italian Amazon terra-cotta figures from about 300 b.c., their fuchsia skirts furling. One of the figures wields a non-missing axe — they decorated perfume bottles, putting warrior women in the right frame of mind for a night on the town. The new museum’s so inviting, with the art so beautifully arranged, that people want to come back. That’s the goal.

I visited Princeton and the museum for a research trip when I was a graduate student at Yale in the early ’90s. I’d never been there. In those days, the Yale campus was a dump, decaying and rat-infested. Only the British Art Center and the Yale University Art Gallery had loos with hot water, paper towels, and toilets that flushed. All had at least one, but finding two was iffy.

At Princeton, everything was perfect, venerable but refreshed, every blade of grass pampered. At Yale, the surly, unionized maintenance crews would come alive, as in Brigadoon, a few days before graduation, make the campus pretty, and then go back to planning the next strike. Princeton — the school and students — were thought to be snooty. Princetonians won’t tell you they’re alums after 30 seconds. That’s Harvard. Princeton people assume the aura is sufficient. Princeton was, after all, the Ivy of choice for the Southern Cavalier class.

The town’s pretty but also very rich from high-paid faculty and administrators and from tech and pharmaceutical wealth. Alumni move to Princeton to retire. Old Yalies aren’t bidding up real estate in New Haven. Living in rural Vermont, I’m not up on boutique anything, but Princeton has got ’em, from Alo for luxury activewear, to Zoe, where you can buy luxury inner wear designed by Toteme, Posse, and Cara Cara. Cockpit USA isn’t a gay bar, though it sells high-end military wear. Princeton is a lovely place, and there’s nothing wrong with affluence. And unlike in New Haven, a walk on Nassau Street isn’t life-threatening.

The strongest part of the museum’s collection is antiquities, in part because of Princeton’s partnership with the Syrian government in the 1930s in excavating ancient Antioch. Through what’s called a partage agreement, German, American, and British universities got a share of the haul. Princeton’s mosaic floors from Antioch are worth a visit in themselves. Its European art isn’t a disappointment, either. It’s idiosyncratic and limited to what the museum got from the alumni. There’s a splashy Monet and lots of teachable Impressionists. Van Dyck’s Mocking of Christ, from the late 1620s, is there. The art’s good and presented with panache. With a nice, new building, more will come.

For years, Christ Before Pontius Pilate was the museum’s most famous painting. It checked all the Old Master boxes, starting with authorship — thought to be a rare Hieronymus Bosch in America — and then narrative and presence. Though left unsaid, it abounded in antisemitic cliches. How many hook-nosed Jews against Jesus, max, can you fit in a 1520s panel painting? Looking at Christ Before Pontius Pilate, I’d say a baker’s half dozen, at least. It was a gift from Allan Marquand, the museum’s director, who displayed it in the Marquand dining room and whose wife said it ruined her appetite. The label references its Gothic look, acknowledges the “distorted facial features of Christ’s persecutors,” and notes that Mrs. Marquand thought it gruesome.

My friends, this picture, from the 1520s and German, points nonstop, cattle-car-class, to Dachau. After so much crying about American slavery, with October 7 a very recent atrocity, and Princeton’s history of antisemitism, you’d think a deeper dive would have made sense. If you’re going to make artists and subjects targets in an endless Inquisition over, say, slavery, you can’t confine it to the United States, which expended 300,000 Union dead to extinguish it. You have to apply it across the board, to the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, Indigenous peoples, Europeans, of course, and see how fast gotcha fever turns boring. My advice is to tone it down. Princeton’s in celebration mode and should be. It’s got a beautiful new museum building that will draw gifts of art and money. There’s no need for nails-on-chalkboard moments.