He could be prickly and sometimes difficult to deal with. But Milton Esterow, who died Oct. 3 at 97, taught me most of what I know about applying the hard-hitting techniques of investigative reporting to artworld controversies.

Here’s what I wrote about him in April 2014, when he sold his prized publication, ARTnews magazine, to Skate Capital Corp., described in the official announcement of the transaction as “a private art and media industry investment vehicle of Sergey Skaterschikov“:

Milton was passionate about art journalism. As a former arts writer at the NY Times, he demanded solid journalistic principles and practices from his writers. During my time as associate editor there in the ’70s, I winced every time he wrote “Who says?” in the margin of my manuscripts. In investigative pieces, every expression of opinion or attempt at analysis had to be backed up with solid evidence or corroborated by experts in the field.

But writers who adhered to his standards got his strong, unflagging support in taking on the artworld establishment. For this reason, he inspired loyalty in those who learned how not to trigger his temper. When I told him I was leaving to write a book and have my first baby, he unexpectedly gave me a parting bonus, in appreciation for my contributions.

He could also be counted on to apply for journalism awards [which helped to enhance the reputation of not only his magazine, but also of his writers]. My work won two during my short stint there: a Society of the Silurians Award for Investigative Reporting and a George Polk Memorial Award for Cultural Reporting. During his four decades at the helm, the magazine won 45 awards for reporting, analysis, criticism, and design.

He also credited me in his Nov. 1, 2002 compilation of reminiscences—Reflections on Three Decades at the Helm of ARTnews.

An excerpt:

In 1978 ARTnews received an award for investigative reporting from the Society of the Silurians, the organization of veteran editors and reporters. It was the first time such an honor had been bestowed on an art magazine. Among the articles cited were “The Art Bills: Pluses and Minuses” by Albert Elsen. He wrote that the flurry of recent proposed legislation included three enlightened bills—on moral rights, arts financing, and estate taxation—and a resale-royalties bill that was “suicidal.” Also cited was “The Care and Feeding of Donors,” part of a two-part article by Lee Rosenbaum [emphasis added] that raised questions about museum officials giving donors all sorts of special favors.

Perhaps most importantly, one of my articles helped ARTnews to win a 1980 George Polk Memorial Award in Cultural Reporting for “investigative reporting in the art world.”

But enough about me. In Milt’s above-linked NY Times obit, written by Jeré Longman (who seems to write mostly about dead luminaries in sports, not the arts), we learned that “a draft of his [Esterow’s] final article, about the restitution of art stolen during the Holocaust—written as always on Mr. Esterow’s 1950 Royal typewriter…—was submitted before he died and remains scheduled for publication in the near future.”

Leave it to Milton to score a posthumous byline!

I’ve been unpardonably remiss about this (having been uncharacteristically off-blog for two months). But I must belatedly add my voice to the encomiums heaped upon the late Leonard Lauder, who died on June 14, which was both Flag Day and the day before Father’s Day—a fitting time to celebrate the the legacy of an extraordinary museum patron who helped the Whitney Museum acquire Three Flags, Jasper Johns‘ magnum opus, and later served as the museum’s chairman emeritus, for whom its Renzo Piano–designed building in NYC’s downtown Meatpacking District was named.

In a NY Times interview with veteran art-market reporter Carol Vogel, Lauder had declared that his quest for coveted artworks “keeps me alive. I don’t want to stop.” Six months after that article was published, he was gone at age 92.

The Whitney’s 2016 announcement of the naming of its new downtown building had credited Lauder with helping the museum to “acquire 948 works of art, 760 of which he gifted personally; an additional 188 were brought in with the assistance of acquisition committees and other generous collectors. His 2002 donation of 125 works transformed the collection with iconic works by Abstract Expressionist, Pop, and Minimalist artists. These gifts have included major works by artists such as Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol [in alphabetical order]. Mr. Lauder’s vision and largesse has helped the Whitney become the preeminent museum of modern and contemporary American art.”

Lauder was much more than a mere museum patron. For both the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan Museum, he was a patron saint.

At the Met, he bestowed what then director Tom Campbell called (with no hyperbole) “a truly transformational gift”—the pledge by of 78 works, including 33 by Picasso, 17 by Braque, 14 by Gris, and 14 by Léger. The gift was to be accompanied by the establishment of a new Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, bankrolled with a $22-million endowment, contributed by Lauder and other Met trustees and patrons.

Here’s my copy of the 381-page catalogue from 2014, published in conjunction with the Met’s inaugural show of Lauder’s benefactions:

With contributions from major modern-art scholars, the catalogue had two editors: Emily Braun, Lauder’s longtime personal curator…

…and Rebecca Rabinow, then the Met’s Leonard Lauder Curator of modern art and curator in charge of the Met’s Leonard Lauder Research Center for Modern Art:

I may have been the first journalist to learn (in an oblique way) about Lauder’s intention to give the Met his Cubist trove. In my CultureGrrl putdown of what I called, “The Met’s So-So Picasso Show”—a lackluster 2010 agglomeration of the museum’s Picasso holdings, I had mentioned that the Met’s trove “can’t hold a candle to what can be seen in the permanent-collection galleries of a certain modern art museum situated a mile downtown.” At the press preview for the Met’s misfire, Tom Campbell, the museum’s then director, had asked me what I thought of that show.

Here’s part of what I wrote in my CultureGrrl post about that conversation:

When Campbell greeted me at the press preview, I mentioned the near-dearth of great Analytic Cubist paintings. “You’re right,” he agreed. “We’re working on it. See us in 15 years’ time.”

At first, I was dumbfounded. Then I thought of the one collector who probably possessed a collection that could make things right:

“LEONARD LAUDER!” I exclaimed.

Tom’s stony silence when I suggested who could make up for the Met’s gaping Picasso deficit told me all that I needed to know: I had likely guessed right.

Below is where you need to go to see the offspring that resulted from that long courtship:

I recently made pilgrimage to those galleries, directly after attending a recent preview of the Met’s newly installed Michael Rockefeller Wing.

Below are just a few highlights from the Lauder trove (photos by Lee Rosenbaum):

Reflecting the enormity of Lauder’s contributions, the Met published in the NY Times‘ classified obituaries what was perhaps the most effusive post-mortem tribute to a museum patron that I’ve ever seen.

An excerpt:

His landmark contribution of the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection–comprising iconic works by Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Gris–instantly established the Museum as a world leader in the study and presentation of early 20th-century art. At the same time, his generosity established the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, which continues to foster a vibrant, ever-growing community for both emerging and veteran scholars in the field.

His extraordinary generosity, insight, and unwavering commitment to art and its capacity to inspire and educate have left an indelible mark on this institution and on all of us privileged to know him.

Rest in Peace, Leonard!
May your memory be a blessing.

UPDATE: Mary Anne Carter, whom I identified (in this post, below) as Senior Advisor to the National Endowment for the Arts, has since been nominated by President Trump to resume her previous position as NEA’s chairman (as reported by Zachary Small of the NY Times.).

Where’s Elon Musk, the DOGE watchdog, when we really need some “Government Efficiency?

There’s nothing efficient about the proposed creation of a “National Garden of American Heroes: Statues.” We already have at least two of those—one in my native Bronx…

…the other at Arlington National Cemetary. President Trump’s January 29, 2025 Presidential Executive Order 13978—“Celebrating America’s Birthday”—calls for the creation of “a public space where Americans can gather to learn about and honor American heroes.” Scores of luminaries have been proposed for inclusion—from political stars (George Washington) to movie stars (Charlton Heston) to sports stars (Cy Young). No Mickey Mantle? The funding limit per statue would be $200,000.

But why do we need to shell out megabucks to reinvent the wheel? If Donnie (whom I interviewed for the NY Times when we were neophytes—back in 1974) desperately craves to be included among such luminaries, it would be more cost-effective to let him have him his own brass bust, modeled on this new coin, now available from the US Mint in two sizes: 1 5/16″ ($20); 3″ ($160):

The reverse bears a motto that echoes words from Trump’s victory speech after the 2016 Presidential Election:

But back to the current moment, when Mary Anne Carter is Senior Advisor to the National Endowment for the Arts. Although she may not remember me, we go back a long way, including to her tenure as NEA Chairman (from June 2018 to Jan. 2021). As listed on Carter’s LinkedIn page, she was NEA’s Senior Deputy Chairman and Acting Chairman for more than two years before she became chairman. On her watch, NEA “saw budget increases for 4 straight years.”

If only she could stay on that upbeat trajectory:

I have interviewed Carter for my prior analyses of government support of the arts, and I’ve repeatedly argued for the importance of such support, notably here: The “Leveraging Effect”: Why Small Grants from the Endangered NEA & NEH Matter. It’s dispiriting that some important players have never gotten that message.

At the May 1 public meeting of NEA’s advisory body, the National Council on the Arts, Carter said this:

Clearly there’s a lot going on in Washington. I’m sure people have several questions about that. Obviously there’s going to be change. Change is scary. But change also lets you reimagine. Going down the road, the agency may be smaller. We may be leaner. But I believe we’re going to be okay. This is going to be a time for the agency, for the Council, for staff, and for the outside organizations and those who care to rethink and reimagine how we can best serve the America public.

We can only hope. For now, here’s the full video of the brief National Council meeting:

Call it entrumpy—a “gradual decline into disorder” (riffing on “entropy”), attributable to the unpredictability of our unprecedented President.

Exploiting his “new” (more accurately: “renewed”) position on the White House bully-pulpit, Donald Trump has impelled U.S. museum heads to change their acronymic imperatives from DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) to DWI—Directing While Intoxicated (by MAGA vapors). It’s astonishing (not to mention dispiriting) to see even Darren Walker, the Ford Foundation’s former president-turned-National Gallery president, betray his own stated beliefs by ending diversity programs at his current institution in the face of Trump’s chipping away at the previously bedrock principals of DEI (now undermined and redefined by Trump as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs”).

What’s immoral (if not illegal) is the decimation of the institutions and programs that have been sustained by infusions of federal support, long before such democratic (with a small “d”) objectives were reduced to facile initials and politicized slogans.

I completely agree with the conservatives’ viewpoint that another “E” word—Excellence—should be of the highest importance in hiring candidates for government-funded positions. But under the Trump Administration, political and personal connections appear to trump substantive qualifications.

It bears remembering that art museums did not roll over and play dead the first time that Trump brought his uncultured sensibility to the Oval Office. During his first term, the National Gallery, Washington, began transforming itself into a DEI powerhouse under the directorship of its current head, Kaywin Feldman.

Here’s what an NGA spokesperson had proudly told me about that transformation:

• The leadership team has gone from 0% BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] to 60% BIPOC, and is also 60% female. 
• ·       Elected Trustee leadership has gone from 0% BIPOC to 40% BIPOC.  
• ·       The percent of BIPOC staff in higher-grade-level positions (GS 9 and above) has increased by 5% from 25% to 30%.  
• ·       Between our new Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging department and existing Equal Employment Opportunity office we have three full time staff devoted to advancing diversity, equity, access, and inclusion in our work. 
• ·       We have a new division devoted to visitor experience and evaluation that centers the importance of the visitor in our work. 
• ·       In addition to appointing a renowned scholar of Latinx art as Chief Curatorial and Conservation Officer in 2021, we have added two curatorial positions to better represent the United States of America: a specialist in African American and Afro-Diasporic Art and a specialist in Latinx Art. 
• ·       We have hosted a series of six seminars to engage our curatorial staff with leading voices in the field on topics such as expanding collections, new narratives, curating indigeneity, colonial Latin American art, and feminist perspectives in the museum. 

Why have art museum heads and other cultural leaders self-censored from forceful outspokenness to restrained acquiescence? Has Trump’s aggressive rhetoric cowed them into cowardice? Sadly, the operative imperative now seems to be: “Don’t bite the hand that might (or might not) feed you.”

Does no one in the artworld have the guts (and donor support) to stand up to assaults by the commander-in-chief?

Getty is complying with the current evacuation order and is closed with only emergency staff on site. There is no damage to the property. We’ll continue to provide additional updates. [See below.]

In response to my queries, the museum’s spokesperson did confirm that “Getty,” in the statement above, refers to the Getty Center, where the museum is located. (Previous concerns in this fast-moving story focused on the fires near the Getty Villa, where antiquities are displayed.)

In an article headlined: Palisades Fire Could Test Getty Center’s Efforts to Protect Its Art Collection, Matt Stevens of the NY Times reported that the museum “is now squarely in the mandatory evacuation zone as the Palisades fire’s footprint has grown.”

Stevens added that “the museum has also described itself as “the safest place for art during a fire,” as detailed in “a 2019 article [on] the anti-fire engineering of the Getty Center.” (Actually, the article was from 2017, not 2019, and the “safest place” quote came from the always helpful Ron Hartwig, then vice president of communications for the J. Paul Getty Trust, who always patiently answered my annoying queries, back in the day.)

We can only hope that the Getty passes the “test of its efforts to protect its art collection” (in the words of today’s headline). The last thing I want to do is say, I told you so, back when I covered the 1998 opening of the Richard Meier-designed Getty Center, and pointed out, in my lead paragraph, its vulnerability to earthquake, soil erosion and, yes, fire.

But wait! This just hit my inbox from Katherine Fleming, President and CEO of the Getty Trust:

It was a watchful but fortunately uneventful night up here at the Getty Center. We’ve been told to anticipate stronger winds later in the day and are closely monitoring the situation. Our galleries are safe and protected [emphasis added]. Aside from a few hot spots, the Villa remains stable.  

We continue to be acutely aware of our Getty neighbors and hope for their safety, and that of the whole region. We will keep you updated on the evolving situation.

Those of us who care about the Getty Museum and Villa have been haunted by the horrifying videos of wildfires raging close to the Villa, a re-creation of a Roman country home, which houses the museum’s Greek and Roman antiquities:

The Villa is currently hosting an exhibition of Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece (to Mar. 3), but it’s closed (through Jan.13), due to the Franklin Fire in Malibu.

To calm our fears for the art, the buildings and, especially, the people, the Getty posted on its website Jan. 8 this Updated Statement from Getty President and CEO Katherine E. Fleming Regarding Palisades Fire:

While trees and vegetation on the property have burned, Getty structures have been unaffected, and thankfully, both staff and the collections are safe….On Tuesday morning, the Villa was swiftly closed to non-emergency staff and, in any case, was closed to the public on Tuesdays. Fortunately, Getty had made extensive efforts to clear brush from the surrounding area as part of its fire mitigation efforts throughout the year. Additional fire prevention measures in place at the Villa include water storage on-site. Irrigation was immediately deployed in parts of the grounds Tuesday morning. Museum galleries and library archives were sealed off from smoke by state-of-the-art air handling systems. The double-walled construction of the galleries also provides significant protection for the collections.

All well and good. But the reports and videos we’ve been seeing make it appear that the surrounding area is engulfed by smoke and flames. And from what I’ve seen online at this writing, things are not yet improving.

The Getty and I go back a long way: I covered the 1998 opening of the Richard Meier-designed Getty Center in a seven-page appraisal for Art in America magazine (“View from the Getty,” May 1998, for which I can find no active link). This may sound self-serving, but you be the judge of whether my first paragraph anticipates the problems to come:

Sounds like a design for disaster: construct a major art complex on a hilltop vulnerable to earthquake, soil erosion and fire. Pick an architect known for an austere modernist style, then insist that he change it. Price the project (in a 1983 letter to the architect) at $75-100 million, then announce after 14 years that it actually cost a cool billion—a budget overrun of a size that the project’s officials had repeatedly and publicly insisted could never occur.

Let’s not ever talk about the dangers of installing masterpieces on a fault line. (Nevertheless, let’s learn a little about the Getty’s use of Hidden Seismic Retrofitting.)

Here’s what was then said about fire risk (from another passage in my 1998 article):

The fire risk of this particular hilltop was well known from the conflagration that had jumped the neighboring freeway in 1961. “You could still see the charred remains,” Meier told Art in America [aka: Lee Rosenbaum] at the time of the Getty opening. “Because of this, we have used all fire-retardant plant material. The fire will not spread because the plant material is not combustible,” he asserted. Somewhat less confident, [Stephen] Rountree [then director of operations] acknowledged that the new plantings were “less volatile than what was here,” but he added that “every summer we will clear out the underbrush,” to diminish the risk.

They formerly used live, munching goats to help “clear our the underbrush.” But a Getty spokesperson, in response to my recent query, wrote: “The goats are no longer working for us! We stopped using them in the early 2010s.”

Watching the videos of the infernal inferno nearby, we can only hope that what is now being done by men and machines to defend the Getty will prove equal to the task.

I’m probably not the only one who did a doubletake upon seeing this alarming red alert atop the J. Paul Getty Trust’s webpage for its press releases:

This “Advisory” raised the scary specter of masterpieces going up in flames. Then I remembered that the Getty Museum, located in Brentwood, where the particularly fire-vulnerable pictures are housed, is distinct from the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, home to the museum’s Greek and Roman antiquities. More importantly though, a Getty spokesperson, who fired off a prompt reply to my panicked inquiry, assured me that “the Villa’s collection and the site are safe and not affected by the fire. The [Getty] Center is not affected and is open to staff and the public.” [PHEW!]

As I’ve previously written (here and here), the Getty has had a few close calls with smoke and fire. (Let’s not even talk about the possibility of earthquakes on a site that sits on a fault line.)

CultureGrrl readers with long memories and a strong sense of humor may wonder if the Getty is still employing goats to prevent fires—engaging their services “to nibble away the flammable brush around its 110-acre hillside campus in Brentwood,” as I wrote here, in all seriousness. I couldn’t resist asking if these quadrupeds were still prowling the grounds and mowing the lawn.

“The goats are no longer working for us!” the Getty’s spokesperson informed me in her emailed reply. “We stopped using them in the early 2010s.”

No more goats? Baa-a-ah, humbug!. That said (or bleated), GOAT has recently taken on a new meaning, which arguably does have relevance to the current Getty—“Greatest Of All Time.”

For now, Getty-goers in search of goats may have to content themselves with this (if and when the ram-bunctious terracotta goes on view):

But seriously: I have always worried that it’s only a matter of time before calamity befalls this priceless, precarious collection. Happily, there have thus far been no reports of injuries, let alone scorched masterpieces, during the current crisis. But thousands of people have reportedly been evacuated.

Stay safe, everyone!

When Philippe de Montebello announced his intention to retire after three decades as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the museum’s curators (spurred by Helen Evans, then the Met’s Byzantine art curator) took upon themselves the task of mounting a tribute exhibition honoring their admired leader—“The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions”:

The invitation to the Met’s October 2008 press preview (which I attended) for the PdM Years consisted entirely of images of the eclectic masterworks acquired on Philippe’s watch:

Like de Montebello, Glenn Lowry, who last month announced (via Robin Pogrebin of the NY Times) his impending retirement from the directorship of the Museum of Modern Art, will have served in his post for three decades. Here’s his grim, confrontational official photo, recently distributed to the press:

I much prefer remembering him this way:

Unlike de Montebello, who enjoyed the praise and respect of his curators, Lowry was often at odds with his underlings. He controversially enforced a 65-and-out mandatory retirement policy to put out-to-pasture one of MoMA’s “most consistently brilliant curators” (as I had described the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture in my Elderfield Too Elderly? post):

As I had suspected might happen, Glenn exempted himself from the 65-and-out rule: Now 70, he plans to leave in September 2025. He was undeniably a gifted manager of employees and wooer of donors, as you can read in his MoMA bio that touts his achievements in upping the museum’s size, endowment and visitation.

BUT…there are lots of “buts”:

Lowry’s acceptance (through a private foundation, enigmatically named: “New York Fine Arts Support Trust”) of millions of dollars in secret supplements to his MoMA compensation from individual collector/trustees (without approval from the full board) struck me (and others) as “not just unorthodox, but potentially unethical,” as I wrote here. What’s more, he undermined several bedrock principles of museum stewardship—particularly the ethical guidelines regarding deaccessions, which were more widely honored in the breach during the pandemic. In deploring MoMA’s disposals, Eric Gibson, the Wall Street Journal‘s Arts in Review editor, quoted me at length 10 years ago, in his piece titled, “MoMA: A Museum That Has Lost Its Way”:

In a May 2004 article (my link, not his), cultural journalist and blogger Lee Rosenbaum reported in the [Wall Street] Journal that MoMA had sold nine paintings from the permanent collection at that year’s spring auctions for a total of $25.65 million. But this was, she wrote, “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“In the past five years MoMA has sold 12 other works from its painting and sculpture collection and hundreds more from other departments,” she continued. “What makes MoMA’s sales unusual is the quality and financial value of its offerings, which include major works by two of modernism’s defining masters, Picasso and Braque.”

One of the biggest of these was the 2003 sale of Picasso’s “Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro” (1909), a proto-Cubist landscape from one of the most important phases of the artist’s career. In pre-Taniguchi days it could often be seen hanging with “The Reservoir, Horta,” a closely related work painted during the same “campaign.” When asked about this sale by Ms. Rosenbaum, “Mr. Lowry observed that there would be ‘nothing wrong’ with having both pictures, ‘if we were a Picasso museum.'”

This was a foolish thing to say.

Here’s the Picasso sold by MoMA, which had been bequeathed to the museum by Nelson Rockefeller:

When interviewed by me, eminent Picasso scholar John Richardson had decried this as “one of the most appalling bits of deaccessioning. I’m still shuddering and shaking.” The Art Newspaper reported that it was acquired by “the German dealer Heinz Berggruen through Acquavella Galleries, New York.”

In another controversial move, Lowry was a party to the evisceration of the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), when MoMA took over AFAM’s former headquarters (adjacent to MoMA), knocked down its Tod Williams/Billie Tsien-designed building, and used that land as the site of MoMA’s 1,050-foot-high Jean Nouvel-designed skyscraper. The MoMA Monster (as I had dubbed it) was downsized from its originally planned 1,250-foot height, keeping it shorter than the city’s iconic, 1,250-foot-tall Empire State Building. As I wrote here: “MoMA bought the flagship building of the financially strapped AFAM for $31.2 million in 2011, in a deal that I criticized at the time because AFAM never sought other potential buyers to determine whether it could have gotten a better deal than what MoMA had offered.”

AFAM moved its headquarters to a smaller, less distinctive building across town, which was formerly that museum’s satellite facility. Prior to Lowry’s directorship, MoMA had been a prime mover in the development of the César Pelli-designed mixed-use “Museum Tower” (1983), which included space for MoMA’s expansion on its lower floors and luxury condominiums (including an apartment that the museum purchased in 2004, where Lowry lived rent-free, as reported in 2007 by the NY Times).

As it happened, I walked by AFAM’s current site on Sept. 15, on my way to a memorable NY Philharmonic concert that was conducted by the indomitable Michael Tilson Thomas:

But back to AFAM: Below is what that beleaguered (but still open) museum looked like when I walked by on Sept. 15. It was largely hidden behind scaffolding from a large, unrelated construction project that began in July.

But back again to Lowry and his strained relationships with some of his curators: According to “I Remember MoMA” by Calvin Tomkins (in the Sept. 25, 2006 New Yorker), the late, great Kirk Varnedoe, then MoMA’s head of painting and sculpture, “felt he was no longer being allowed to do the job that [William] Rubin [my link, not Tomkins’] had passed on to him.”

Tomkins wrote:

The chance to present the collection in more depth, to tell the synoptic story of modern art with great complexity and variety than the old galleries had allowed, was tremendously important to him [Varnedoe], but now he was being told that Glenn Lowry wanted a final say on the rehanging.

One curator who left MoMA during Lowry’s tenure, Robert Storr, former senior paintings and sculpture curator, alleged in a 2014 interview with Randy Kennedy, then of the NY Times, that Lowry “simply does not understand modern and contemporary art and is rivalrous with the people who do.”

In an interview with Gareth Harris, published last May in The Art Newspaper, Storr decried “the resistance some of my initiatives met with”:

After all, my job was to bring first-rate art to the attention of the general public and I was thwarted numerous times because of the formal or content-driven squeamishness of patrons who served as the gatekeepers….I can understand how patrons squirm at being told or shown how they’ve been remiss or blind or biased. But, as the arbiters of a public trust they should rise above their personal discomfort and so acknowledge that they’ve gotten the message.

That said, Lowry inarguably excelled in expanding the museum’s square footage, more than doubling the size of MoMA’s galleries. But I doubt that Glenn will be venerated upon his retirement as Philippe was—accorded his own bronze likeness at the entrance to his museum’s galleries, where he greeted visitors for several years after his retirement in 2008:

As I stated in my January 2008 commentary for New York Public Radio (WNYC) on de Montebello’s retirement:

He had tremendous credibility and respect of the trustees, the staff, the City of New York. He’s someone who radiates integrity and a devotion to excellence, and I think he was able to communicate that to the people who needed to support his initiatives….He won the respect and love of his curators.

By contrast, I think the colleagues with whom Lowry felt most compatible were not the art experts but the major collectors and megabucks donors whom he expertly persuaded to part with their assets—both artistic and financial.

There has already been much speculation about who will succeed Glenn, with Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, getting a lot of buzz. What remains to be seen is whether the Ford Foundation’s just announced $10-million grant to endow her Studio Museum position (reported by Pogrebin of the Times but not yet announced on the museum’s website, as far as I can determine) will induce Golden to stay or prompt her to leave, knowing that a desirable replacement could be enticed by the munificent support.

Surprisingly, I’ve seen no suggestion that a worthy successor could be someone well acquainted with MoMA and its staff—Connie Butler, a former MoMA curator who went on to become chief curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and is now director of MoMA PS1.

She’d be my pick:

That said, journalists (including me) are notoriously unreliable predictors of who will clinch the top spots at art museums. Time (and the whims of museum trustees) will tell. Also yet to be determined is Darren Walker’s next move: The Ford Foundation announced in July that its president had “shared his plans to step down from the foundation by the end of 2025,” ending a 12-year tenure.

When this brief press release about the Brooklyn Museum’s “transformative reinstallation of the American Art galleries” hit my inbox two weeks ago, my surprised reaction was: Haven’t we been there and done that, relatively recently? Going beyond that cryptic announcement is this more comprehensive description of the content and concepts of the new presentation.

As may be remembered by CultureGrrl devotees and Wall Street Journal readers (not to mention Brooklyn Museum aficionados), I came down hard on the museum’s 2016 “sweeping overhaul of the encyclopedic museum’s distinguished permanent collection of American art in a mere seven months,” as I described that rushed undertaking in my above-linked WSJ review from Sept. 20, 2016.

To my mind, the result was a misfire, as reflected in the editor’s subhead for my putdown:

The quick turnaround of the latest comprehensive re-do suggests that today’s Brooklyn curators may have found some merit in my critique of the previous rehang of the museum’s Luce Center for American Art.

As I wrote then:

The new installation is sabotaged by political polemics: It seems perversely fixated on what’s shameful in our country’s past. While it’s legitimate to raise uncomfortable issues, the relentlessness of the negative critique makes the installation sometimes seem less a celebration of American culture and achievements than a recitation of our nation’s faults.

Exemplifying this methodological illogic was fact that the 2016 reinstallation was “brought to fruition by assistant curator Connie Choi, a month before Brooklyn’s new full curator of American art, Kimberly Orcutt, arrived on the scene,” as I reported in my WSJ piece. There’s been yet another regime change, with Stephanie Sparling Williams as the current Curator of American Art and Kimberli Gant as curator of modern and contemporary art, as announced in the museum’s 2021 press release (no longer on the museum’s website but retrieved from my emails):

Sparling Williams stepped up to her current post from positions as associate curator at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA, and visiting lecturer in art history and African American studies at Mount Holyoke. Gant had been curator of modern and contemporary art at the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA.

The in-progress 5th-floor reinstallation (opening Oct. 4, in conjunction with the museum’s 200th Birthday Celebration) comports with the current “woke” sensibilities that inform many of the Brooklyn Museum’s presentations: “Black feminist and BIPOC perspectives act as through lines in this vast presentation of more than 400 works,” according to the museum’s announcement. “In each of eight galleries, you’ll find a thought-provoking framework inspired by the abundant contributions of historically marginalized cultural producers.” Curators and “NYC drag queens” both have roles to play here, as the announcement notes. “Paradigm-shifting interactions with millennia of art” are the new order of the day.

Below is the signature image of the reinstallation, as featured in the American art galleries’ new press release, titled: Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art:

Works by Waring (1887-1948) also appeared in the Metropolitan Museum’s recent Harlem Renaissance show, where (as I wrote here) I was “stopped in my tracks by the transfixing star power of this portrait’s regal subject”:

With all the staff turnover at the Brooklyn Museum under the directorship of Anne Pasternak (who assumed her post in 2015), I was very glad to see that at least one expert whom I’ve long admired, Nancy Rosoff, senior curator, Arts of the Americas, still remains.

I must also say that notwithstanding my reservations about some of the changes that Pasternak has brought about, I’ve admired much of what she has accomplished, and I deplore the attacks to which she has recently been subjected.

The last should go without saying. These days, regrettably, it needs to be said.

I did a doubletake when I saw the recent article about the return of a Schiele drawing (below) to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, “a Jewish art collector and Viennese cabaret performer who was killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust” (as described by Tom Mashberg in his July 26 report for the NY Times):

Back when I was a fledgling art journalist and Rita Reif was the NY Times’ ace art-market reporter, she had tried to interest me in exposing the expropriation of the Expressionist collection of Grünbaum, her husband’s uncle, who was a popular entertainer (as Rita told me and as Mashberg noted in his recent article, which described Fritz as “a Viennese cabaret performer”). She would have been gratified by this restitution (albeit belated) to the Grünbaum heirs.

This from the NY Times obit for Rita Reif, who died in 2023:

She made news herself in 1997, when she contested the ownership of “Dead City III,” a 1911 Schiele painting that she said had been stolen by the Nazis from Fritz Grünbaum, an uncle of her husband, Paul Reif, who died in 1978. At the time, the painting was on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the collection of Dr. Rudolf Leopold, an Austrian ophthalmologist who had acquired hundreds of artworks, for the MoMA exhibition Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection.

Another family had already questioned the ownership of a different work in that exhibition, “Portrait of Wally”; when she read about that challenge in late 1997, Ms. Reif told People magazine a few months later, she talked it over with other family members and “everybody agreed we had to do something.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2010 (also here and here) about the return of “Portrait of Wally” to the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray, the Austrian Jew from whom Egon Schiele‘s “Portrait of Wally” was wrongfully expropriated by the Nazis in 1939. That case involved intervention by a previous Manhattan DA, the late Robert Morgenthau, whose 11th-hour subpoena (subsequently quashed), temporarily prevented the painting’s being returned from an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art to its Austrian lender, Rudolf Leopold, buying time for prosecutors to put together a plausible legal case for restitution.

But back to the present: The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. orchestrated the recent return of Schiele’s “Seated Nude Woman” (at top) to Grünbaum’s family. It had been seized by the office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit in 2024. And yes, Assistant DA Matthew Bogdanos is again credited with leading the team that effectuated this restitution.

The DA’s press release quotes Timothy Reif, Rita’s son, announcing “the return of an 11th artwork to the family of Fritz Grünbaum”:

“The recovery of this important artwork—stolen from a prominent Jewish critic of Adolf Hitler—sends a message to the world that crime does not pay and that the law enforcement community in New York has not forgotten the dark lessons of World War II. District Attorney Bragg and his team led by Assistant District Attorney Bogdanos have not forgotten. Agent-In-Charge Arvelo of the Department of homeland Security and his exceptional team have not forgotten. The family of Fritz Grünbaum salutes each and all of you as shining examples of the best ideals of law enforcement.”

The piece is being returned from the estate of Gustav “Gus” Papanek. The Papanek’s were Austrian Jews who fled the Nazis in 1938 and purchased the artwork unaware it had been stolen from Mr. Grünbaum. The Papanek family fully cooperated with the Office’s investigation. The drawing was returned at a ceremony today with D.A. Bragg, Acting Deputy Special Agent in Charge O’Malley and members of both the Grünbaum and Papanek families….

In September 2023, the Office returned seven Schiele artworks from the Museum of Modern Art; The Ronald Lauder Collection; The Morgan Library; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Vally Sabarsky Trust in Manhattan.

As many CultureGrrl readers know, Lauder, MoMA’s honorary chairman, and the late dealer Serge Sabarsky, who was husband of the above-mentioned Vally Sabarsky, were co-founders of the Neue Galerie, a museum for German and Austrian Expressionism, in New York. Lauder is fond of describing Nazi-expropriated art as “the last prisoners of World War II.”

Also reported in the Times by Mashberg (along with Graham Bowley, his partner-in-investigation of restitutions) was the Manhattan DA’s attempt (as yet unrealized) to seize another Schiele—this from the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC):

In this case, the museum’s officials insist that their institution is the rightful owner. As reported by the Times, the AIC issued this statement:

We have done extensive research on the provenance history of this work and are confident in our lawful ownership of the piece….If we had this work unlawfully, we would return it, but that is not the case here.”

To which Megan Michienzi, the AIC’s Executive Director of Public Affairs, has now appended this:

Our response provides specific details of the extensive evidence, documentation, and research that specifically refutes the allegations made by the Manhattan District Attorney. The evidence clearly demonstrates this work was never looted and was legally acquired, and we will continue to advocate for our lawful ownership of this work.

As can be seen in its listing on the Art Institute’s Collection website (go here, scroll down and click on “PROVENANCE”), this watercolor has a complicated history of ownership:

Also complicated was the history of ownership in another recent Schiele case: His “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife,” 1917, was awarded to the heirs of Nazi victim Karl Mayländer, whose claim to the work, in the opinion of a New York State Supreme Court judge, was superior to the claims of other litigants, including Robert Owen Lehman Jr., whose foundation had long held it.

Yet another work being sought by the Manhattan DA—the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Draped Male Figure, c. 150 BCE–200 CE (Roman or possibly Greek Hellenistic)—had a long history of public exhibitions at numerous venues before it was acquired by the CMA in 1986. As I wrote here, the CMA had noted in a court filing that between 1968 and the date of CMA’s acquisition, had “been the subject of many national and international scholarly articles and studies.”

That case, as in the current dispute over the Schiele watercolor, is being considered by a court that is located at a far remove from the Manhattan DA’s usual territory. In Cleveland’s case, this geographical disparity was explained on the grounds that “the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000 and there is complete diversity of citizenship between the parties.” The Cleveland statue and the Chicago watercolor are listed on their respective museums’ websites as not currently on view. Watercolors (like the AIC’s Schiele) are commonly rotated off view for conservation reasons. In response to my query, William Griswold, the CMA’s director, said the bronze statue is off view because it is “subject to litigation with the District Attorney of New York; it has not been on view at the museum for some months.”

No interests are served by indefinitely enduring “the law’s delay” (to quote Hamlet’s soliloquy) as a rationale for sequestering a monumental masterwork that should be publicly seen, not concealed.

To conclude, I’ll self-servingly quote myself—from Truth in Booty: Coming—and Staying—Clean, my 2006 Wall Street Journal article parsing cultural-property controversies:

Objects properly imported into the U.S. before a specified date, and not “stolen” under universally accepted meanings of that word, should be able to remain here under the legal principle of “repose” (the concept that owners should not be indefinitely subject to stale claims). Otherwise, there is little to prevent attempts to empty our museums of everything that ever arrived under murky circumstances. The effective date of the U.S. Cultural Property Implementation Act, Apr. 12, 1983, is a logical cutoff.