In the Glass Hive of Art News: Dark Clouds at the Met, Boston’s MFA

New directors, federal arts money keeps flowing, and a young lion finds a new home.

L ots of juicy art news in the new year, so let’s peek into the glass hive. I’ve written off and on about the drive to unionize museum staffs. Two weeks ago, unions grabbed the pot of gold at the end of the phony-baloney rainbow when the Metropolitan Museum of Art staff voted 542–172 to join the United Auto Workers. Counterintuitive, I know, but the UAW has a portfolio of bargaining units that includes boutique left-wing, white-collar culture workers such as the curators, conservators, librarians, archivists, designers, marketeers, visitor-services coordinators, and fundraisers at the Met. Along with bread-and-butter issues, these workers can be mobilized to wail over false values like open borders, which suppress working-class wages, the climate change hoax, Black Lives Matter, Celebrate Your Abortion, Me Too, No Kings, From the River to the Sea, any or all while wearing “pussy hats,” which, ladies and real wannabe ladies, don’t flatter. So, a juicy, fresh plum is now added to the UAW stash. Honk your horns. The Met is among the world’s great museums, if not the greatest.

I’m fine with unions in museums, say, for guards, janitors, food workers, and mechanics, jobs where the work is more or less fungible, but creative workers aren’t in the one-size-fits-all business. Most of the workers in this new bargaining union have discerning judgment and more autonomy than an assembly-line worker. A wall-to-wall union — a bargaining unit covering a broad swath of departments — also marginalizes curators, who, and I’m biased, having been one, are the top creatives. A wall-to-wall union empowers young — and naïve — workers who also aren’t scholars and aren’t likely to have a long-term commitment to the Met. There’s simply more of them.

Alas, the fat was in the fire. Nearly every museum in New York as well as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago has swallowed the Kool-Aid. “Protecting our jobs,” “respect,” “making our collective voices heard” are among the reasons that Met unionistas gave, pausing between stanzas of “Look for the Union Label.”

The Met’s brass desperately wanted to avoid this, seeing a broad-based union as one more mouth — a big mouth — to feed. So, I think, did old Met hands — the ones with common sense — who know what they’ll lose. Mid-level staffers can’t go to the director with their special pleas. They’ll have to go to their apparatchik shop steward. Met honchos understand, as probably most everyone does, that unions protect the lowest common denominator. Its many intellectually flaccid shows aside, the Met is a seriously intellectual, high-achieving place.

And unions certainly don’t prevent layoffs. Last week, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston announced that it was laying off 33 workers, 6.3 percent of its staff, and eliminating 23 vacant jobs, so the staff is cut by around 10 percent. That’s hefty. In 2020, the MFA lost about a hundred workers through layoffs and early retirements. The museum predicts a $13 million deficit for this fiscal year’s $93 million budget, a whopper of a hole. The curator of photography was laid off. So was the museum archivist. The job cuts will cover only half the deficit. One-shot money will likely cover the rest, but there’s always next year’s hole. Some of the cut curatorial jobs are endowed positions, so I’m not sure the positions can be eliminated.

The MFA also reports that its visitorship for last year was about 200,000 less than in 2019, the last full year before the Covid mass hysteria, hypnosis, and vacation from reality. Nationwide, the American Alliance of Museums tells us, museum attendance is down. Numbers vary widely, but, overall, American museums still haven’t returned to the level of their 2019 visitorship. Tourism, especially from foreigners, is down, but after months of lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, lots of regulars made new habits. This hits admissions, gift shops, events, and restaurant income. After so much inflation since 2021, labor’s more expensive, as are utilities and art shipping, a big factor in the cost of special exhibitions.

I like the MFA, a distinguished place with many good curators, so I’m sorry to hear this bad news. The new director, Pierre Terjanian, is only seven months in the job and seems capable. He was the curator of arms and armor at the Met for years, but is this call for a helmet, cuirass, gauntlets, and greaves a surprise? No. Matthew Teitelbaum, the longtime and DEI-obsessed director, retired last summer. He was bound to leave a mess, which, of course, the trustees had to know was on the horizon. Shame on them for sticking Teitelbaum’s successor with the dirty work.

The proliferation of exhibitions drawn from the Oppression Olympics douses not only spirits but also visitor numbers and donations, at the MFA and at museums all over the country. My beef with Teitelbaum, whom I’ve met a few times, starts with his part in fabricating a drama about racism in 2019. A black teacher and her easily swayed black students accused the MFA guards of racist comments during their visit to the museum. Teitelbaum, possibly because he’s Canadian and from Canada’s culture elite, believed the worst, fanned the flames, and threw the guards under the bus. His rule went downhill since that moment. Nobody liked him, but no one on the board had the guts to can him and search for a new director.

With 2026 only a month old, new museum leaders abound. I can’t say I’m berserk with awe and delight. Lisa Funderburke is the new director of the Newark Museum. She comes from the Artists Community Alliance, an “international service agency for artist residencies, which operates remotely.” How does this qualify her to run the Newark Museum, a mess but still a wonderful, historic, complex museum? Though not an art historian, she studied science — her museum bio doesn’t tell us what kind — at Howard University. This doesn’t sound promising, but I’ll be happy to be surprised. Kristen Shepherd will be the new president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, America’s first art school cum art museum, founded in 1805 by Charles Willson Peale. Its all-American collection is fantastic, as is its magnificent Romanesque Revival home in the center of Philadelphia. Shepherd is a museum consultant — some are actually very good — and was the director of the St. Petersburg Museum of Art two directors ago. At least she’s an art historian.

Esther Bell, the chief curator at the Clark Art Institute, will be the Clark’s new director. She was one of my Williams students many moons ago. I wish her well. She’ll inherit a museum in good shape after a bit of a financial fiasco but still with a spotty exhibition program that she, as chief curator, devised and implemented. In my era, the Clark was among the top-flight museums, run by a definite old boys’ club. With her reign, it’ll be nearly an all-women staff, as at many American museums now. Much as the old boys’ clubs were defective in their own special ways, the sisterhoods are bound to be defective, too. Denise Sobel has been the board of trustees chairwoman since 2022. Her big philanthropic issues are DEI — racial quotas and race explain everything — and abortion. We can only hope for the best.

I’ve written many critical stories about the Clark, so they may think that I have a grudge against them, but I don’t and hardly could, as I’ve been visiting since the 1960s, went to Williams College, and happily worked at the Clark as a curator. Alas for them, I treat everyone the same and happen to visit the Clark a lot since it’s near my house and an important museum. What I would call its many “women’s shows” haven’t been bad but earnest, dull, and weak. Her Guillaume Lethière exhibition, done with the Clark’s current director, Olivier Meslay, was good, but Lethière, a French royal-court painter, was in the Clark mix mostly because he was half-black. He’s otherwise formulaic. My advice to Bell is to make the place her own, go big, and don’t follow convention.

Philadelphia is in the news on another front. The City of Philadelphia is suing the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service (NPS) over a bit of museum interpretation. Last week, the NPS removed didactic wall panels from the site of the house where George Washington and John Adams lived during their presidencies when Philadelphia was the capital. The extensive wall panels took a deep dive into Washington’s slaveholding. Nine of the servants in the first presidential mansion were slaves brought from Mount Vernon. The NPS removed the panels in compliance with a Trump executive order aimed at “restoring truth and sanity” to the American history that’s presented at the Smithsonian and national parks and monuments.

The president’s house, a rental, was torn down a long time ago, so what we have is a partly built floor plan. I read the wall text. Among my many pet bugaboos is the tiresome, trite bullhorn-blowing over Washington’s slaves. Yes, he used slave labor. Most of the Mount Vernon slaves belonged to Martha, held in trust for her children from her first marriage. He freed those he owned when he died. Soon afterward, Martha freed the poor souls she controlled. This is a part of their story. Given Washington’s gigantic role in the country’s establishment and wobbly early days, it’s a small part.

City Hall is saying that the NPS gave it veto power over the design of graphics on the site in exchange for title to the property. I have news for City Hall. The train’s left the station. Can’t they find better ways to allocate their lawyers’ time, like tracking illegal alien criminals in the city?

One day, one day, the waddling, gouty, roly-poly federal budget will need to be whacked, but not now. “Lord, make me good but not yet,” pray our masters by the pig trough each night. This time last year, DOGE rolled through the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, firing staff and rescinding grants. Strong men wept and dogs bayed. The end of federal support for culture, we thought, was nigh. Zeus had his thunderbolts, Cronus his adamantine sickle to castrate Uranus, and Herakles his superhuman bare hands to strangle lions, but no such tools has Congress, which seems on track to approve new NEA, NEH, and IMLS budgets for next year, with nary a slice. The House approved their budgets, 397–28, the Senate 82–15, for a minibus appropriation bill.

I wrote a few months ago that with mass staff layoffs and resignations, the old mechanisms for evaluating grant applications no longer exist, so these three agencies are more or less slush funds. “Whatever looks good,” my spies tell me, is the guiding light. There are worse criteria. A climate change project has a snowball’s chance in hell. DEI? When pigs fly. The American Revolution gets the gold ring. Che, Fidel, and Alger Hiss get the gong. The three agencies spend $700 million. A chunk of it’s going to state arts and humanities councils to be sprinkled here and there. Money has been smuggled to President Trump’s amorphous Garden of Heroes sculpture project. Grants are actually happening.

On January 15, the NEH sent $75.1 million out the door. Grants related to America’s 250th are big, with Pepperdine University getting $1 million for a lecture series on our foreign policy since 1776; $142,000 to the Louisiana Museum Foundation for a show about the role of Louisiana, then a Spanish colony, in the American Revolution, a fascinating subject; and $50,000 to pay for programs about Kentucky in the American Revolution. The Battle of Blue Licks near the Ohio line was, I know, brutal. Presidential papers for John Adams, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin van Buren will be closer to publication. There’s something to be said for supporting seminal projects like these, on primary sources, in the works for years, and getting them finished. There’s money for books about Isocrates, Winckelmann, Hegel, the Whiskey Rebellion, Kierkegaard, and Trotsky. Civics programs at Ohio State University and the Universities of North and South Carolina get big bucks. It’s heady, unusual stuff. Oliver Twist said, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

IMLS is spending millions on Freedom Trucks, which are mobile museums traveling to small towns to teach people about the Declaration of Independence. It’s giving money for Holocaust and antisemitism education. A mandatory class on antisemitism for all freshmen at the hundred richest colleges and universities in the country would be even better. IMLS can pay for the curriculum development. Hike the new endowment tax by a point, and “un dos iz es,” which even I know is “and there you go” in Yiddish. Hike the tax another point for a mandatory class on the evils of communism while you’re at it.

In December, the NEA gave grants for “arts projects honoring the National Garden of Heroes,” which doesn’t yet exist, but the NEA intends the grants for works focusing on figures in American culture who will be recognized with sculptures once the thing’s done. We’ll get a new orchestral work about Martin Luther King presented by the Montgomery Symphony in Alabama; a performance of Emily — No Prisoner Be at UC Berkeley, about Emily Dickinson; a musical about Sam Houston at the Texas Autism Academy; an exhibition about Norman Rockwell at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, a museum I love; and documentaries about Booker T. Washington and Cass Gilbert. A comic book about Harriet Tubman is in the works, too. Most of the grants are small — $25,000 — so they aren’t going to move needles.

These are all very nice, but they’re ephemeral. I can’t say they’re weighty, either. And nearly all are described as the “Chair’s extraordinary action award,” which means the grant requests weren’t plumbed as they would have been under normal NEA rules. Most of the NEA staff is gone. But over 30 emergencies? Was it venomous-snake-bite season in the Swamp?

A marquee movie star touts a marquee Rembrandt. (Video courtesy of Sotheby’s)

Sotheby’s sold a drawing of a young lion by Rembrandt at its February 4 Masterworks on Paper from Five Centuries sale. It’s tiny — 4 1/2 by 5 7/8 inches — but it hits us with a retina-searing jolt of energy. It’s called Young Lion Resting, done by Rembrandt (1606–1669) with black chalk, gray wash, and white highlights in the late 1630s or early ’40s. Exotic animals were to be seen in Amsterdam in traveling fairs close Rembrandt’s house. He did six drawings of lions. This is certainly the best, and certainly the only Rembrandt drawing marketed by Jeremy Irons, who ably presents it in a Sotheby’s video. The drawing belongs to Thomas and Daphne Kaplan; it’s from their collection of Dutch art, called the Leiden Collection. They’re selling it to benefit Panthera, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of 40 species of wild cats, including lions, leopards, panthers, jaguars, cheetahs, and tigers. It was the top lot in a small sale of 41 drawings and was the first to go. At a $10 million to $15 million estimate, it went for $17.9 million.