Louvre Director Quits, British Museum Gets a Tudor Bauble, and No Rainbow Flags for Stonewall

And is the National Park Service ginning up furors to embarrass Trump?

F ebruary’s art headlines, or at least the juicy ones, seem to split between the Old and New Worlds. Let’s start in Paris, at the Louvre, where a honcho’s head rolled via the metaphorical guillotine. The Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, resigned on Tuesday. Des Cars was the Louvre’s first woman director, appointed by President Macron in 2021. I like her and worked with her on a couple of exhibitions in the early aughts when she was a curator at the Musée d’Orsay. She became the Orsay’s director and headed planning for the curatorial vision of Louvre Abu Dhabi, but Paris’s Louvre, the jewel in the French art crown, is by far a vaster operation.

Des Cars’s downfall began with a crown, a stolen crown, alas, among the €88 million ($102 million) in French royal jewels swiped in October by an amateur gang in broad daylight. The theft, an international story, exposed critical faults in the museum’s security infrastructure and protocols. For one, the security cameras weren’t working. Most of these faults were well known inside the Louvre, as was a mountain of deferred maintenance museum-wide. There was a general plan to address the campus’s sad condition, but des Cars wasn’t getting traction.

A rushed €800 million ($943 million) project, Macron-promulgated after the theft, was thought by the staff — and by me — to focus too much on public amenities, including a new gallery for the Mona Lisa, a glitzy new entrance, reception spaces, and gallery renovations in place of a thorough behind-the-scenes overhaul of pipes, to wage war on leaks, plus a much-needed redo of wires, storage, technology, and security. Rolling staff strikes that pushed the building’s needs rather than public amenities closed the museum a dozen times in the past few months.

And two weeks ago, police revealed they’d discovered a massive €10 million ($11 million) theft of group-tour proceeds by a Chinese ring, facilitated by staff who took kickbacks. The Louvre said that fraud at a museum of the Louvre’s size and complexity was “inevitable,” hardly a comfort. Des Cars was under fire as a DEI appointee. She had directed the Orsay for only a short time before heading to the Louvre. Soon after she went to the Louvre, she appointed a new security director with no experience in high-asset protection. It was part of what critics called a feminization of the museum. That’s happening in America, too.

Yes, that grinding sound was the sharpening of the axe. Off with des Cars’s head. A few days ago, Jack Lang, the director of Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe, the French center promoting Arab art, culture, and history, quit. “Epstein,” with whom he had long-standing close ties, says it all.

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Who says wielding a metal detector doesn’t pay? In 2019, Charlie Clarke heard pregnant pings while trawling a field in Warwickshire in the U.K. After some light digging, he found a 24-carat gold heart-shaped pendant that featured, on one side, a Tudor rose — Henry VIII’s emblem — and a pomegranate bush, which was the emblem of his wife Katherine of Aragon. The other side had the initials H and K. The pendant was embossed in red enamel, and both sides had French words that mean “always yours.” Clarke also found the ornate chain attached to the pendant by a fist-shaped clasp. In style and manufacture it’s from the 1510s. It’s thought to have been worn at a high-end royal bash, lost and we don’t know how. Though small, at a bit over 2 inches, it’s solid gold and made to impress.

Amateur finds in the U.K. happen often enough to be regulated. The British Museum has been trying to raise the money — £3.5 million ($4.8 million) — to buy it at an appraised market value. On Valentine’s Day, the museum said it had hit its target. The money’s split between Clarke, who found it, and the landowner. Many rounds were bought at the local pub, I hear. The money came from small donations, big foundation gifts, and a grant from the government. The English aren’t philanthropic; the Victorian impulse to be charitable was nearly obliterated by socialism, but that’s changing. The pendant is now on view at the British Museum. I love happy endings. This is the closest we’ll get to one insofar as Henry and Katherine are concerned.

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The British Museum was in the news, too, over Palestine. No, not another symposium where academics yatter and yabber and yammer about genocide and “river to the sea,” or say, deadpan, “we hate Zionists, not Jews.”  Instead, the museum has been in a serious curatorial discussion about what “Palestine” means. The BM owns tens of thousands of ancient objects and displays hundreds that they’ve labeled as coming from Palestine.

The BM conceded a couple of weeks ago that what some call Palestine, the real estate covered by the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine in 1922, has, in fact, been called many things over thousands of years, among them Canaan, Israel, Judah, Judea, and Samaria. Using “Palestine” to source an object is both inaccurate and very political. Palestine, of course, has never been sovereign. Jews lived there for many centuries longer than the Arabs who today call themselves Palestinians, in a bid to grab a new, terrorist-infused country by claiming historical continuity. The best museum methodology, the BM admits, is to source an antiquity using whatever name the region was called when the object was made there. Since “Palestine” and “Palestinian” as we know them today are 1960s political inventions, nothing older than, say, Arafat’s keffiyeh can accurately be called a Palestinian artifact. We’ll see whether the BM stays true to history. There’s a backlash already brewing.

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Now, onward to the New World. On January 23, the National Park Service closed an exhibition on George Washington’s slaveholding. It was displayed at the Philadelphia site on Independence Mall where the house in which Washington and John Adams lived once stood, when Philadelphia was the U.S. capital and they each served as president. The subject of the exhibition was the nine slaves serving Washington in Philadelphia while he was president. Probably no one objected to this topic — but, rather, to the presentation of slavery as the centerpiece of Washington’s life. It’s a subordinate feature in the life of the man known as the father of our country.

There weren’t any art and artifacts on display. There’s not even a building there. It’s a network of new brick walls following the footprint of the presidential home, called the Robert Morris House, built in 1767, turned into a hotel around 1800 when the Adamses moved to the White House, gutted in 1832, rebuilt with shops, and razed in the 1950s. The walled, open-air pavilion, completed in 2010, displayed 34 weatherproof panels about a topic that’s well known and that has been exhaustively trod. If 34 panels isn’t overkill, I’m a chopped-down cherry tree.

On February 16, a federal district court judge ordered the NPS to put the exhibition back, at least for now. It seems the NPS forgot about the 2006 agreement it made with the City of Philadelphia in which it got the site in return for, among other things, a commitment to consult with the city whenever meaningful changes were made in the interpretation of the site.

That’s a big oops, so big that it might be a case of the NPS’s malicious compliance with last year’s Trump order that compels the agency to ensure “accuracy, honesty, and alignment with national values” in park interpretation. “Malicious compliance” is an old bureaucratic stunt. It’s when you comply with a directive from policymakers but deliberately do it in the messiest, most extreme, most inflammatory way, undercutting the directive. Fun and games. The NPS should at least have had a plan for reinterpreting the space. Now, at the very end of February and with July 4 approaching, it’s a carbuncle on Independence Mall. How dumb can you get, or how sneaky? NPS gnomes had to know this would cause a race furor in Philadelphia, and it did. “Erasure” is the word of the day in the dark, deranged place called the Woke Mind. Everything gives offense.

Faster than a speeding ambulance, the bellyache bar and the City of Philadelphia went to court. The judge, Cynthia Rufe, compared removing the exhibition to the horrors in George Orwell’s 1984. Does the federal government, she asked, have “the power to dissemble and disassemble historic truth”? She answered her own question, as judges do when they’re making a speech and not applying the law: “It does not.”

This sounds as if she wants to rule on the theme and content of exhibitions. God help us if judges get into the business of vetting labels. The Interior Department has now taken the case to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

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If it’s not a war over slavery, it’s a war over flags. The NPS is also in the news about Stonewall, the handle for the 1969 riot in Greenwich Village at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, and the park near it. The riot is seen as the stimulant for the gay rights movement. These days, the bar’s still in business and still a gay hotspot, as well as part of a 7.7-acre National Monument designated by President Obama in 2016 — the NPS’s only gay and lesbian historic site. A visitor center opened last year.

The monument has collided with a new Trump executive order banning the promotion of “improper ideology” from federal sites and a new State Department rule permitting only the U.S. flag and the POW/MIA flag to fly at American embassies. Federal agencies, among them the Interior Department, have adopted this rule, too, which reflects the U.S. Flag Code. No Black Lives Matter flags, no rainbow Gay Pride flags, no awareness flags, no Don’t Tread on Me flags, no Proud to Be in Pocatello flags, no Satanic flags, and above all else no Confederate flags.

Over the past few days, down the Gay Pride flags went. It’s a tricky subject, especially since the feds don’t own the 7.7 acres on which the National Monument stands. The Stonewall Inn is privately owned. The City of New York owns the streets, sidewalks, and nearby Christopher Park. A nonprofit owns the visitor center, which displays the interpretation. The NPS operates the visitor center so it’s indeed spending tax dollars on the site. Private and city and state buildings on the periphery of the site are flying rainbow flags, as is their right.

Trickier, too, is the rainbow flag itself. There’s no official flag. The latest iteration of the flag, as far as I can tell, has stripes for transgender, gender-nonconforming, agender, asexual, and abrosexual people. The abrosexuals can change sexuality and gender by the year, month, day, or hour. Then there are the intersexual, who don’t have a stripe but a circle inside a triangle. They have an anatomical or chromosomal quirk such as Klinefelter syndrome, but they’re still perfect just the way they are. There’s genderflux; demiboy; drag-feather; pansexual; caelgender, where, I’ve learned, one’s gender focuses on space-related things; domgender, where a person has multiple genders but one dominates; omnigender; and gender witch, where you’re bewitched, bothered, and bewildered and don’t know which gender is yours. Some may not have already claimed a color stripe but, sooner or later, all will. It’s an aesthetic horror. It’ll also be a political and moral quagmire squelching the Stonewall riot and the memory of the rioters, even the lesbians, who had the cojones to resist.

I wonder whether this isn’t malicious compliance as well. The NPS had to know that lots of panties would get in a twist as the flag came down. The move is engineered as a gay slur.

Mayor Mamdani and Senator Schumer want to change the law so the rainbow flag is exempted from this muddle, but which rainbow flag? As far as I’m concerned, the only part of the Alphabet Mafia that concerns me, a gay man, is G for gay. I don’t have much in common with lesbians, and, beyond that, well, the sundry identities are planets far, far away. In that heart of hearts that Mamdani keeps patting, he wants to toss us all off the Flatiron Building.