THE SPECTATOR (WORLD EDITION), May 25, 2026

Declarations of Independence in Venice

The message behind the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

All art is propaganda,” wrote George Orwell, “but not all propaganda is art.” Upon this subtle distinction rests the success or failure of whatever art we see at the Venice Biennale. 

The Most Serene Republic’s exercise in art-world Olympics is propaganda by design. A garden of national pavilions – small buildings in various styles as you might find in a zoological park – presents exhibitions that compete with one another for a “Golden Lion for Best National Participation.” Here, in the murky parkland of the Giardini in the city’s eastern Castello district, nationalist and anti-nationalist passions mix with art-market imbroglio into a sordid spectacle. Just how bad will it be this year? To discover the answer is why we keep coming back.   

The 61st iteration of this Italian job, which opens May 9 and runs through November 22, is already shaping up to be a casino totale – which we might translate as “hot mess.” On April 30, days before the opening, the five-person jury behind the Golden Lion prize, led by Solange Farkas, a Brazilian curator of no repute, announced their resignation. The cause? They had previously declared that they would not consider the pavilion of any country whose leaders were being investigated by the International Criminal Court. Such a denunciation would include Putin’s Russia. But of course their real target was the Israel pavilion and its artist, Belu-Simion Fainaru. 

Having not seen them, I cannot comment on Fainaru’s drip sculptures. Rose of Nothingness, the name of his Venice installation, reportedly consists of a commercial irrigator that pours water on the pavilion floor. What we can already say is that the work has inadvertently revealed, like much else in globalized culture, the art world’s tender embrace of anti-Semitism. For the intifadists, even the river to the puddle must be free.  

It tells us something about our state of affairs that the most high-profile contretemps at this year’s Biennale does not involve Donald Trump. Nevertheless, this has not prevented the New York Times and its bigly art reporter Zachary Small from going after the American presentation. “With Trump Novices, Can the US Win the ‘Art Olympics?’” asks a headline of April 19. “After the State Department overhauled the process for choosing an artist for the Venice Biennale,” continues the subhead, “it gave control to a woman who previously owned a pet food store.”

When it comes to Venice’s dog-and-pony show, there’s something to be said for recruiting talent from the pet-care market. Reading down, we learn that this year’s US commissioner, Jenni Parido (fresh “from selling venison nuggets and dried sardines,” sneers the Times), has tapped Jeffrey Uslip (“criticized for being racially insensitive”), who has selected the sculptor Alma Allen (“an under-the-radar American sculptor based in Mexico.”)

From what I can tell of Allen’s contributions, his abstract sculptures are inoffensive. For the Times, this is certainly part of the problem. Another issue is that the US commission “never approached traditional funders… including the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.” Shock horror. The expected boxes have not been checked. 

The US pavilion is historically where our Department of State and its establishment underwriters expect unchallenged hegemony. How this happened says much about American consolidation of cultural power. An American presence in Venice began in 1922, when Walter Leighton Clark organized a cooperative of artists known as the Grand Central Art Galleries to purchase land for an exhibition hall. The great Beaux-arts firm of Delano and Aldrich donated their services for the design of the Palladian-style building that still stands today. 

After World War Two, New York’s Museum of Modern Art purchased the pavilion in 1954 and began mounting exhibitions of American abstraction that were secretly underwritten by the Rockefeller brothers and the CIA. When such soft-power financing was exposed in the 1960s, the pavilion fell under the purview of the United States Information Agency. The Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961 is the public mechanism that has enabled the government to demonstrate American cultural interests, developments and achievements overseas.

In 1986, MoMA sold the building to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and its Venice-based Peggy Guggenheim Collection. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the closing of USIA, control of the pavilion finally went to the Department of State, where it remains today.

There is much to be said for the role the US pavilion played in the Cold War, pitting the freedom of abstract expressionism against the diktats of Soviet realism. As early as 1950, MoMA’s Alfred Barr was bringing over John Marin, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, along with other artists of the New York School. In 1964, Robert Rauschenberg won the Gran Premio through a stunning American PR campaign and last-minute amphibious assault, ferrying his large paintings by speedboat to the Giardini (documented in the 2024 film Taking Venice).

Since its takeover by the Department of State, rather than a pro-American message, the US pavilion has increasingly promoted a self-effacing aesthetic. Awash in the mandates of DEI, the presentations have at times become downright anti-American. In 2011, during the early years of the Obama administration, I observed an exhibition by the Puerto Rican duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla that featured American athletes running on the treads of an overturned tank. In one room, a replica of the Statue of Freedom from the Capitol dome was tipped on its side. In another, a pipe organ spat out money from an ATM machine. And so on with the anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-religious dross.

Such a presentation would have made an old Soviet curator blush. According to Lisa Freiman, the organizer at the time, “I chose Allora and Calzadilla because they problematize, or put into question, the notion of American identity at a moment when immigration issues are very important and who is allowed to be a US citizen and who is not allowed to be a US citizen are big debates with the American people.” 

Such “art” was not an anomaly. It was the voice of the state. According to Freiman, the State Department’s “decision to select Allora and Calzadilla was unanimous… it was well-timed with Hillary Clinton in the State Department and Barack Obama in the White House.” Maxwell Anderson, then director of the Indianapolis Museum, the commissioning institution, added “everybody in Foggy Bottom down the line to the secretary herself” supported the work. Or as David Mees, then US cultural attaché in Rome, went on to explain: “It’s very important also to cultivate that softer image – what the Obama administration has called ‘smart power.’”

Just what was “smart” about these displays of “power?” In part the debasements of recent years were meant to appeal to the international mindset. See, went the message to those sipping their Aperols at Harry’s Bar, we hate America, too. 

But the message was also directed at us back home. No longer there to reflect American freedoms, the propaganda of the Biennale evolved to demonstrate the power of our own unaccountable bureaucracy. They were in charge. They despised us. And there was nothing we could do about it. The nature and quality of the art presented in Venice by our Department of State might have varied over recent administrations, but social justice and race-essentialism were constant themes, “taking over” (often quite literally) the Palladian-style pavilion. 

Consider Simone Leigh, the 2022 selection. Lee Satterfield, then assistant secretary of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, heralded Leigh for her “historic achievement as the first Black woman to represent the United States.” Leigh described her work as paying “homage to a long history of Black femme collectivity, community and care.”

Her interventions in Venice included covering the classical pavilion in thatch to resemble a West African palace – meant to remind us of the (racist, of course) 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. Inside, Leigh presented a sculpture based on “Mammy’s Last Garment,” a 19th-century Jamaican postcard featuring “stereotypes created by the burgeoning Anglophone Caribbean tourism industry,” according to the commissioning institution ICA/Boston. Another room presented sculptures “that send up essentialist ideas of the Black femme body.” The race obsession was total. Naturally, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations provided extra support for the run.

With traditional American values overturned through symbolic acts of desecration, the riotous atmosphere of these aesthetic takeovers came to reflect the real riots that engulfed American cities – stoked by the same racialized psy-ops of supposedly warranted self-hatred. It is the loss of one of their propaganda outlets that our managerial elites now lament and will do anything to restore.

Every presentation at the Biennale is designed to send a message. Today, the Trump era is defined, in part, by its own cold war – one pitting a populist insurgency against a uniparty elite. In choosing Parido, Uslip and Allen – outsiders all – the administration has sent a Sicilian message to the Venetian lagoon: the Deep State swims with the coda di rospo. On the eve of the US semi- quincentennial, the American pavilion has declared its own independence.

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2026

Play land

On “Noguchi’s New York” at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation & Garden Museum.

What is New York’s greatest unrealized work of art? An argument can be made for Riverside Playground. This sprawling sculptural landscape, designed for what today remains an unremarkable hillside in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, between 101st and 105th Streets, would have occupied an indeterminate zone between art and recreation. An assembly of ramps, steps, sandpits, covered rooms, and climbing mounds, sloping from the curving heights of Riverside Drive down to the promenade, it would not have been your typical artwork or sculpture park. Nor would it have been another playground of swings and seesaws. Instead, this landscape of brick, concrete, asphalt, grass, and water was designed to pose more questions than answers. It might have seemed archaeological, temple-like, as though it were a subterranean stratum discovered below the urban surface. Its Upper West Side neighbors in their classic sixes did not know what to make of it.

Developed over four years in the early 1960s in a partnership between the architect Louis Kahn and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, this contoured, contested ground very nearly broke ground before going broke itself. The project was officially titled the Adele Rosenwald Levy Memorial Playground, named after a founder of the Citizens Committee for Children and daughter of the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Supporters donated $600,000 to the city in her honor for what was then a $1.1 million project. The outgoing mayor, Robert F. Wagner, even signed the initial construction contracts. Then the incoming mayor, John Lindsay, killed the playground with the help of his new parks commissioner, Thomas Hoving. While citing escalating construction costs, the savvy “Republican Kennedy” was fulfilling a pledge made to voters who opposed the plan. They feared it would attract teenagers from the housing projects to the east.

Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) thought of sculpture in a way that was often out of step with his times but that can now seem more in line with our own. “Noguchi’s New York,” an exhibition currently on view at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, argues that the artist saw little distinction between object and landscape and favored what we might now call the immersive experience.1 Through his interactive work, he blurred the lines between sculpture and spectator. The environment created its own sculptural shape—in particular, for him, the forms and figures of New York. “I’m really a New Yorker,” he once said. “Not Japanese, not a citizen of the world, just a New Yorker who goes wandering around like many New Yorkers.” Such wandering meant that Noguchi was as comfortable casting portrait busts of Buckminster Fuller as he was designing stage sets for Martha Graham or carving a sunken garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza. All of these projects are now among the fifty-some works and proposals on display at the museum overseeing his legacy.

Noguchi was nearly a native-born New Yorker himself. His American mother, Leonie Gilmour, was a committed bohemian educated at New York’s progressive Ethical Culture School (then named the Workingman’s School) and later at Bryn Mawr College and the Sorbonne. She met Isamu’s father, Yone, when the Japanese poet was living on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. He took out a classified ad looking for editorial help. She answered it. Following a brief affair, Yone returned to Japan. Leonie pursued him west, giving birth to Isamu in Los Angeles. Two years later, she moved to Japan with her young son, finding intermittent work as a teacher, editor, and translator. Yone had named their toddler Isamu, meaning “courage,” but by then he had taken a Japanese wife and was largely absent from the future sculptor’s upbringing. During her Japanese sojourn, Leonie also gave birth to a daughter, Ailes Gilmour. This time the father was an unknown Japanese man. Nevertheless, there must have been something about that Gilmour girl. A pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement, Ailes became a founding member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, where her half brother later created Graham’s most celebrated set designs.

In 1917, Leonie sent Isamu back to the United States—on his own—to continue his schooling. The unaccompanied minor rolled into a work-camp school in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. At the time known as Sam Gilmour, Noguchi was taken under the wing of the school’s founder, Edward Rumely. Their relationship continued after the school shut down over Rumely’s pro-German sentiment. Through a grant from Rumely, Noguchi then continued east, eventually arriving at Columbia University to study medicine.

Noguchi’s sudden upward trajectory was a remarkable reversal of fortune for a drifting, interracial child born out of wedlock, but Leonie was outraged at her son’s preprofessional turn. She encouraged him to study sculpture. Noguchi enrolled in night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on East Tenth Street, where he studied bronze casting. Eventually he dropped out of Columbia and interned with Gutzon Borglum, who said he would never amount to anything as an artist. (Noguchi soon eclipsed this sculptor of Mount Rushmore.) In 1927, a grant took Noguchi to Paris, where he apprenticed with Constantin Brancusi and learned the art of stone crafting. As an artist later known for his Eastern influences, Noguchi was almost exclusively Western trained.

Curated by the Noguchi Museum’s Kate Wiener, the exhibition picks up as Noguchi first returns stateside in 1929. Here an early selection of portrait busts from the 1930s might seem to be an odd choice to introduce a show about the sculptor’s New York. But in fact they help underscore the social quotient in much of his work. Noguchi’s art was not meant to be inert. It was designed to engage its observers. “If sculpture is the rock,” he once wrote, “it is also the space between rocks and between the rock and a man, and the communication and contemplation between.” (Hayden Herrera’s excellent 2015 biography of Noguchi is appropriately titled Listening to Stone.)

From an early age, Noguchi surrounded himself with artists, mentors, patrons, and paramours. He could be part Horatio Alger and part Rudolph Valentino. One story has him jumping out of Frida Kahlo’s bed and scurrying up a tree and over a rooftop to escape Diego Rivera.

Noguchi thrived in New York’s urban tableau. Where they could not appear in person, he crafted the people around him as portrait busts. Working out of his MacDougal Street studio in Greenwich Village, Noguchi in rapid succession sculpted busts of the art dealer J. B. Neumann (1932, Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum), the dancer Michio Ito (1926, Noguchi Foundation), the journalist Clare Boothe Luce (1933, on loan from the Henry Luce Foundation), the art critic Murdock Pemberton (1931, Noguchi Foundation), the muralist José Clemente Orozco (1931, Noguchi Foundation), and the futurist Buckminster Fuller (1929, cast ca. 1965, Sharp Museum, Southern Illinois University Carbondale).

What is most remarkable in all this is Noguchi’s startling range of materials and finishes. As was reflected later in his easy movement between metal and stone, or representation and abstraction, or lampshades and playground design, Noguchi was not beholden to any particular medium or manner. Instead he found expression in the materials themselves. His bust of the comely Luce appears in classical marble; the clotted Neumann is in mottled plaster; meanwhile, the resplendent Fuller—Noguchi called him a “messiah of ideas”—radiates in polished chrome.

“Noguchi’s New York” then takes us through the artist’s many city commissions. A display about his 1930–40 stainless-steel reliefs of heroic journalists, crafted for the entrance of the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center, leads on to more than one gallery of his unrealized or destroyed installations: ceiling designs for the Time & Life Building and 666 Fifth Avenue, sculpture gardens for Lever House and the Museum of Modern Art, and playgrounds for the United Nations Headquarters and the Bronx Zoo. Here the city planner Robert Moses plays the role of the exhibition’s bogeyman, but, as we have seen with Riverside Playground, Moses was not Noguchi’s only antagonist.

Noguchi could shift scales with ease. A plan for a contoured landscape might do double duty as a bronze wall relief. Stage-set collages could inspire the forms of freestanding aluminum sculpture. A slate statue of a bird might reappear as a plexiglass chess piece. The museum matches these works with the blueprints, letters, photographs, and articles that surrounded each commission. Here the innovative playground designs come forward the most. Could there be some psychological reading of Noguchi, abandoned by his father, designing play spaces within sight of his father’s old Riverside Drive address? To envision these designs better, the museum commissioned new hand-drawn animated films, directed by Nicolas Ménard and Jack Cunningham, that feature children swinging and sliding on play equipment. (I would have liked to have seen these playful videos up front, rather than buried at the back of the exhibition, and more features in general for the museum’s younger visitors.)

There is much to be said for reviving some of Noguchi’s unexecuted urban proposals, particularly Riverside Playground. After all, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, which Louis Kahn designed for the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River in the early 1970s, was only built five decades later, opening in 2012.

Even if Noguchi’s playgrounds are never realized, his influence has nevertheless set the standard for successful public design, though it is largely unacknowledged. After all, just a few years after thwarting his plans in Riverside Park, John Lindsay and Thomas Hoving promoted their own open-ended play space—featuring ziggurats, tunnels, and water courses—for Central Park’s Adventure Playground. That innovative precinct on West Sixty-seventh Street, underwritten by the Estée Lauder Foundation, was designed in 1966 by Richard Dattner, but it might as well have been a smaller, toddler-sized version of Noguchi’s Riverside Playground.

Half a century on, the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation funded Little Island, on tulip-shaped piers above the Hudson River. For this artificial landscape of undulating hills and surprise assembly spots, Heatherwick Studio closely followed Noguchi’s urban sensibility.

Two years ago, after the institution banned employees from wearing keffiyehs and other political paraphernalia, Palestinian agitators attempted to disrupt the Noguchi Museum. Activists defaced the walls. Staff members resigned. The museum refused to back down. It is noteworthy that Noguchi in life worked with the state of Israel. Between 1960 and 1965, he created his first realized earthwork for the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum.

Through its permanent collection, with its indoor and outdoor spaces and parts in between, the Noguchi Museum continues to be an uncompromising memorial to the artist. One of his rock-garden sculptures contains the artist’s ashes. The sale of Noguchi’s Akari lanterns, which still generates millions of dollars annually, helps keep the lights on for the small institution. This museum Noguchi opened across the street from his studio in 1985 remains an oasis of calm in a bustling corner of Long Island City—a living testament to Noguchi’s New York.

1. “Noguchi’s New York” opened at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Queens, New York, on February 4 and remains on view through September 13, 2026. 

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2026

Escape artist

On “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” at the Jewish Museum, New York.

The Nazis wasted no time in denouncing the artist Paul Klee (1879–1940). On February 1, 1933, less than a month after Hilter’s ascendance, the periodical Die Rote Erde (The Red Earth) published a hit piece on the Düsseldorf Academy and its fifty-three-year-old instructor:

Then the great Klee makes his entrance, already famous as a teacher at the Bauhaus. . . . He tells everybody he has pedigree Arabian blood in his veins, but is actually a typical Galician Jew. He paints in a crazier and crazier way, he bluffs and baffles, his students goggle and gape, a new, unheard-of art makes its appearance in the Rhineland.

Born in Switzerland to a German father and Swiss mother, both musicians, Klee was not Jewish, Galician or otherwise. It made no difference. Within the year, Klee lost his academic post. The Gestapo raided his apartment in Dessau and seized six baskets of papers. Finally Klee was forced to relocate to Bern, the city of his birth. He lived out his final decade in Swiss exile.

Elusive, idiosyncratic, and wide-ranging, Klee’s work today might seem decorative and anodyne. Clement Greenberg was right to observe in 1957 that “almost everybody, whether aware or not, was learning from Klee.” The artist’s inventive and experimental mode, occupying a liminal space between depiction and description, became part of the post-war visual vocabulary. You can see his influence in artists from Jackson Pollock to Keith Haring.

The Nazis well understood his subversive encoding. Klee connected his art to child-like design, primitive symbolism, and parodic marginalia. He advocated for the sort of free-form line the Nazis looked to flatten. Identifying himself with the social outcast—at times the Harlequin, at others the Jew—Klee faced down the scourge of anti-Semitism by association. Occasionally he even made this association explicit. He deployed symbols such as the Star of David in his compositions. More than a decade before his persecution by the Nazis, as the artist went up for a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart, in October 1919, the press denounced him as “Paul Zion Klee.”

This history helps explain why the Swiss German artist now appears in “Other Possible Worlds,” a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum of a hundred works that focuses on Klee’s final decade.1 “He was not Jewish,” writes Mason Klein, the museum’s senior curator emeritus and the organizer of this exhibition, “but he might as well have been, given his particular denunciation by the National Socialists in 1933 in Germany.”

At the center of this presentation, and an impetus for the exhibition, is a selection of drawings from a rarely seen cycle of some two hundred works that Klee produced in 1933—a furious assembly created in response to what he called the “Nazi Socialist revolution.” Lost for decades, the works on paper were only rediscovered in 1984 by the Klee cataloguer Jürgen Glaesemer at Bern’s Paul Klee Foundation. In 2003, the art historian Pamela Kort presented them for the first time through four exhibitions in Germany and Switzerland.

Composed in wild scribbles of pencil and chalk, these drawings are expressive and explicit. In title and substance they take dead aim at the false verities of the Nazi regime: “He” a Dictator Too! (Auch “ER” Dictator!) features a man pointing down at an exclamation point; Child Murder (Kindermord), an attack on a domestic scene; Crawling Man (Kriechender), a quivering figure on all fours; Accusation in the Street (Anklage auf der Straße), a man directing a crowd’s attention; and Violence (Gewalt), a laughing stick-figure who shoots scribbles into a screaming, crouching victim.

The drawings, here on loan from the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, are different from the reserved and finely wrought designs we might expect from an artist who otherwise spun his compositions like intricate spiderwebs. Klee showed the series over dinner in the summer of 1933 to the sculptor Alexander Zschokke and the art historian Walter Kaesbach, both Düsseldorf colleagues, and Zschokke later recalled he thought the cycle missed its mark:

The start of the cycle was a drawing with a few pencil strokes, not very straight, that looked like a child’s drawing, helpless. I must confess that this beginning . . . had a somewhat comic effect and appeared not to remotely match the seriousness of the situation in which the artist found himself.

At the Jewish Museum, with a selection of work extending as far back as 1903, “Other Possible Worlds” reveals how, in the 1933 cycle, Klee was revisiting his graphic origins in illustration and satire. A selection of etchings from his series Inventions (Inventionen), of 1903 and 1905, here on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, hints at his admiration for the caricatures of William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier. Virgin in the Tree (Jungfrau im Baum) presents an aging female nude sprawled out across dead branches. The Hero with the Wing (Der Held mit dem Flügel) features a figure with broken wings and heavy feet rooted in the earth. Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank (Zwei Männer, Einander in Höherer Stellung Vermutend, Begegnen Sich) depicts Wilhelm II and Franz Joseph groveling down to one another. An example from another series, this one an illustration from 1911 for a chapter of Candide, dispenses with the modeled, sculptural effects of these early prints in favor of a simpler, more scribbled style later echoed in the 1933 cycle. “Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will,” Klee once said, “but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God.”

Other Possible Worlds” lays out a wide sampling of Klee’s circuitous output. At times it feels too wide. The exhibition attempts to be both a focused display and a retrospective survey and never quite delivers enough of either. A through line is not always apparent in the offerings. The exhibition also gives short shrift to Klee’s many formal innovations as it pursues his symbolic meanings. Klee’s creative processes of monoprinting and oil transfers, for example, freed his line from the artist’s controlling hand as he avoided a grand manner in favor of rhythmic ramblings. Coming from a musical background, Klee created visual sonorities that could be contrapuntal—semiautonomous points and counterpoints. One abstract watercolor here, from 1922, is titled Overture (Ouvertüre) (1922, collection of Alexander Berggruen). By never quite connecting the dots, Klee took a “line for a walk,” as he famously called his compositional style.

There are, nevertheless, some peripatetic highlights here. One is Chosen Boy (Auserwählter Knabe) (1918, anonymous loan, courtesy of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum), of a child surrounded by a halo of dreamlike geometrical forms. In its selection, the Jewish Museum has also sought out works with explicit Jewish references. Harlequin on the Bridge (Arlequin auf der Brücke) (1920, Museum Berggruen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin) is a symbolic self-portrait in which the artist-figure straddles a river beneath a Jewish star.

Angelus Novus (1920), on loan from the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, is a mothlike apparition that has taken flight through its afterlife as something of a cultural icon. Purchased by Walter Benjamin in 1921, the work inspired the German Jewish philosopher of the Frankfurt School to call it the “Angel of History.” In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of 1940, Benjamin writes of this figure,

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Months after writing these lines, Benjamin was himself caught in the whirlwind. As he attempted to flee over the Pyrenees from Vichy France to Spain, he committed suicide after his arrest at Port Bo. Before his failed escape, Benjamin entrusted this drawing to Georges Bataille by hiding it in Paris’s Bibliothèque nationale, where Bataille was employed. When he was able to retrieve it, Bataille passed it to Theodor W. Adorno, who sent it on to Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem per Benjamin’s wishes.

As a postscript to these fraught iterations, the arrival of this work in New York for the current exhibition was delayed by Iran’s bombardment of Israel. At the time of the exhibition opening, the work could not travel to the airport for transport, at least to the satisfaction of its insurers. So it has been represented here at first by facsimile. What was meant to be the highlight loan of this exhibition took on additional meaning for the Jewish Museum and its director James S. Snyder—who, from 1997 through 2018, was the head of the Israel Museum.

Klee’s art aligned him at times with Dadaism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Still, he was not an obvious adherent to any one group. “The Munich expressionists laid claim to him, the Zürich Dadaists hailed him, and to the French surrealists, he was a kindred spirit,” writes Klein.

In 1921, Klee joined the Bauhaus as an instructor. He taught there for ten years, following the school through its 1925 move from Weimar to Dessau. During his demonstration lectures, it is said he painted with his left hand while writing with his right. That same decade his art toured the United States along with work by Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky as part of Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). As moma’s Alfred Barr noted in 1930: “Nothing is so astonishing to the student of Klee as his infinite variety.”

By the early 1930s, Klee had left his Bauhaus post, was facing down Nazis, and had begun to show the degenerative effects of fatal scleroderma. In his work, his gossamer line became thicker and murkier. His output intensified and his symbolism became more explicit as he painted through the catastrophe. Mask: Red Jew (Maske Roter Jude) and Your Ancestor? (Dein Ayn?), both 1933 works on paper from private collections, leave little doubt as to the state of affairs. Revolution of the Viaduct (Revolution des Viadukts) (1937, Hamburger Kunsthalle), the painting that appears on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, turns Nazi marches into jackbooted abstractions. Meanwhile Struck from the List (Von der Liste Gestrichen) (1933, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern), with a black X slashed across a face, becomes his latest self-portrait as Klee dedicated himself to “serve Beauty by drawing her enemies.”

Still, he found time to take flight. A series of angels, from 1939 and 1940, make up the final series in the exhibition—here, transformed into the avenging angels of war.

1. “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” opened at the Jewish Museum, New York, on March 20 and remains on view through July 26, 2026. 

THE NEW CRITERION, April 2026

X-ray visionary

On “Egon Schiele: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff,” at the Neue Galerie.

The portraits of Egon Schiele (1890–1918) really get under the skin. “Skinned hares” is how Schiele’s model Liliana Amon (1892–1966), in fact, described his figures in her autobiographical roman à clef, Barrières, some two decades after the artist’s untimely death. “That can’t be! These people have no skin,” the book declares, concluding, “Egon saw the world in a special way; he saw it, so to speak, under the skin, and painted in green, blue, and red.”

Just how the Austrian artist went from painting reserved landscapes at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, where he had been accepted in 1906 at the age of sixteen, to the flayed figures of his final decade is now the focus of a small but convincing exhibition at the Neue Galerie.1 Amon is the catalyst for the story. Living with the young artist, pregnant with another man’s child, she connects through Schiele with an obstetrician who takes her on as a charity case. That doctor is Erwin von Graff, a surgeon and gynecologist twelve years older than Schiele and the focus of the exhibition. A champion of the promising artist, Graff becomes a subject for a now well-known portrait and a conduit for an unsparing new line of subject matter for Schiele. With forty works from 1910 to 1918 centered around the Graff portrait, a sizable oil on canvas that lends its name to the title of this exhibition, these results are now gathered together in a one-room gallery off the second-floor permanent collection. The show has been organized by Renée Price and Janis Staggs, the museum director and curatorial director, respectively, of the Neue Galerie.

The Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff (1910), listed as coming from a private collection as well as being part of the Neue’s “extended” collection, makes frequent house calls to Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. We last saw it in “Living Landscapes,” the Schiele exhibition I reviewed in these pages a year ago (see “Schiele’s living dead,” January 2025). The portrait has appeared some half dozen times on the walls of the Neue Galerie since Ronald S. Lauder opened his museum for German and Austrian art in 2001. Its image is unsettling, even confounding, but recent research into Schiele as well as the life of Dr. Graff now paints a newly penetrating picture of the arresting work, the output that surrounded it, and the figure it portrays. This show is a “portrait” in more ways than one.

The painting first presents to us as an affliction of unknown origin. The gaunt doctor stands straight, staring back at us, in front of what we might take to be a wall of glazed white hospital tile. The atmosphere is clinical and blinding. The light of the painting washes out his short-sleeve surgical shirt and vest and nearly everything else surrounding him in white. Against the glare, what we see is Graff’s dark, exposed flesh—his thin face, piercing eyes, furrowed brow, and bony hands holding up his mottled right arm as though to keep it sanitary before examination. His fingernails appear to fall from his skin. A bandage is wrapped around the end of his right ring finger.

What are we to make of this skin? The blistered arms and cut finger? Is this a trustworthy doctor? Is this even sanitary? Writing about the painting in the 1970s, the Schiele scholar Alessandra Comini suggested the Graff appears as the “shrunken-headed cadaver in a state of rigor mortis,” his bandage a “grim joke.”

Graff seems burned, even irradiated. New research suggests that he was. Graff is now known to have experimented with the then-new technology of the X-ray at a time before the effects of its long-term use were well understood. Exposed to high doses of radiation, like other doctors and scientists of his time, he developed radiodermatitis. The effects of this skin condition can be closely matched to the scorched appearance in his portrait.

Now at the Neue, two studies for the portrait appear alongside the final painting, both here from private collections—one a trio of head studies in profile in charcoal on paper, the other closer in composition to the painting in pencil, charcoal, and wash on paper. Both studies are more academic and far less expressionistic than the final work. In the doctor’s burnt limbs, we can then say that Schiele grasped his future. Moving beyond the sentiment of the Jugendstil and his role model Gustav Klimt, with his luxuriant emphasis on surfaces, Schiele looked instead to the subcutaneous depths of modern life.

From here on out, this exhibition argues, Schiele’s portraits would be peeled raw. Through the clinical window provided by Graff, Schiele found a new direction for his own artistic experiments. “Schiele really came into his own as an artist in 1910, the year he completed the portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff,” says Price, who views the painting as “one of the most important works in the extended collection of the museum.” She continues: “This is where Schiele really becomes Schiele.”

As Schiele became Schiele, Graff became a key patron and protector. It was a connection that continued through the day of the artist’s death eight years later. Graff, to start, saw Amon through to a healthy birth. He also arranged for her child’s adoption while convincing her to move out of the artist’s studio. As Schiele gave his portrait to the doctor as an expression of his gratitude, their relationship extended beyond the indigent young mother. Through a special arrangement, Graff also provided Schiele with access to other expectant mothers and newborn infants within his clinical orbit—subjects that make up most of the remaining works in this exhibition.

We can only speculate as to the exact nature of how Schiele encountered these figures and gained their acceptance as models, often in radically exposed and vulnerable positions. Neither Graff nor Schiele ever detailed the circumstances of their collaboration. Perhaps Schiele followed Graff on his rounds or took up a position in his operating theater. The results were not the remote clinical perspective we find in, say, Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic. Instead, we encounter models who appear close-up, cropped, and intimately engaged with the artist.

We know Schiele composed with swift intensity. Over his brief ten-year career, he created an astonishing three hundred paintings and three thousand works on paper. A few dashed lines of his models in pencil, crayon, or charcoal on paper could be filled in later with watercolor. For his unsparing observations, he drew on whatever inexpensive media was at his disposal. Crumpled brown paper appears in several works. He further cropped his figures in harsh and unsparing perspectives, exposing them in a new light. Confronted by naked and contorted bodies, Schiele employed his own penetrating vision.

His Newborn Baby of 1910, in gouache, watercolor, and black crayon on paper, here from an anonymous lender, serves as an example of Schiele’s new perspective on the human form. The baby twists on his back to the point where his head is out of the frame of the composition. Close examination of the paper reveals how subsequent owners attempted to fold and matte the work so that it would appear more centered. The Neue exhibition suggests that Schiele intended the work to be off-center. Seated Male Nude with Extended Arm, a watercolor, gouache, and black crayon on paper from the Neue Galerie collection, is similarly disjointed, with its twisted right arm, bent head, and brown skin that appears to tear away from the spine. So too is Pregnant Woman (1910), from an anonymous lender, with her green face and belly disconnected from her hands and feet.

The results of Schiele’s renderings are unsettling and often off-putting. Our initial reaction can be to tie the hospital gown and quickly shut the door. In all, some twelve drawings of pregnant women can be ascribed to the Graff clinic, along with Schiele’s portraits of newborns, sick women, and stillbirths.

Today these can seem sensationalist, exploitative—and probable evidence of a hipaa violation. In his time, Schiele connected his vision to the contorted forms of the Northern Gothic and its symbols of life, death, and renewal. In his penetrating stare, the flesh of a man, the bark of a tree, and the rooftops of a town might all call for mortification.

In the irradiated figure of Graff, Schiele also saw a modern figure for his own salvation. The catalogue for this exhibition, written by Elisabeth Dutz, the chief curator of the graphic-art collection at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, makes a deep study of Graff and documents his long career in Austria and the United States. An auxiliary doctor at Vienna’s Second University Women’s Hospital at the time of his first acquaintance with Schiele, Graff became an accomplished gynecologist and surgeon. He was also a cellist, a handball player, and someone who could prepare an “exquisite Italian risotto,” according to Dutz. He spent time teaching at the University of Iowa and maintained an office on New York’s Park Avenue. A comprehensive list of his publications and lectures from 1901 through 1939 give some indications of his fields of expertise, concluding with papers on the “Etiology of Prolapse,” “Bilateral Uretreovaginal Fistula: Successful Implantation of Both Ureters into the Bladder Seven and Eleven Months Following Total Hysterectomy,” and “Tubal Sterilization by the Madlener Technique.”

Despite these professional accomplishments, it was Graff’s visionary relationship with Schiele that today most defines him for us—a fact that Graff himself seems to have recognized as he collected the artist’s work, brought him into the trust of his patients, and attended to Schiele’s own life and death.

One of the final objects in this exhibition is Schiele’s death mask. A victim of the flu pandemic of 1918, the artist died three days after watching his sick and pregnant wife pass away. One of his last acts was to draw his fevered wife on her deathbed. Days later, just hours before Schiele’s own demise, Graff paid the artist a house call, most likely to administer a palliative dose of morphine. Schiele’s final vision was of the doctor who first inspired him eight years before.

1. “Egon Schiele: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff” opened at the Neue Galerie, New York, on February 12 and remains on view through May 4, 2026. 

THE NEW CRITERION, MARCH 2026

Winter Journey

On The Winter Show, Sotheby’s “Masters Week,” Master Drawings New York & Viollet-le-Duc

You can correlate your barometer to The Winter Show. Whenever this annual antiques, art, and design fair appears for its weeklong run at the Park Avenue Armory, be assured a snowstorm is in the forecast. Its seventy-first season was no different.1 Fortunately, this storied fair still offers up some warmth for the cold spell.

Over the past few years, I have lamented the dilution of what had been known from 1955 until yesterday as the Winter Antiques Show (see my “Brown in town” in The New Criterion of March 2024). Founded by the folk-art dealers John Bihler and Henry Coger as a fundraiser for the East Side House Settlement, the fair has gradually moved away from what was once a focused exposition of American art and antiques to become more modern and international. The end result can now seem like a watered-down presentation of high-end curios, knickknacks, and anything-goes. As I noted two years ago, much like grandma’s cherished credenza, the word “antique” was even kicked to the snowbound curb and dropped from the fair’s title.

The organizers behind this deaccession are not entirely to blame. The market for Americana has been a central victim of our cultural amnesia and ritualistic self-loathing. For the afflicted, nothing must be quite so triggering as the chimes of grandpa’s grandfather clock. The best we might hope for in the younger set is that they toss some old gimcrack into their modern and contemporary mix.

Such was the notion behind this year’s “private study of an imaginary young collector.” The “immersive installation” (really, just another booth) curated by the art advisor Patrick Monahan presented a mash-up of works from twelve dealers that blended “objects across time periods and cultures—from Classical antiquities to contemporary ceramics.” Another such initiative was a display of “The American Chair: 250 Years of Form.” With eighteen chairs stacked in two three-by-three grids, from Shaker to Saarinen, the organizers were desperate to proclaim that diversity is our bench.

Fifty years ago, at the time of the U.S. bicentennial, interest in American art and antiques reached a high point. The same should be expected this year. Fortunately, at least some of the exhibitors at The Winter Show read the semiquincentennial memo. Elie Nadelman and Paul Manship, two exuberant American sculptors from the first half of the twentieth century, were front and center at Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts. Mixed in among Nadelman’s photographs and drawings, his Two Circus Women (ca. 1928–29), collected from the artist’s Riverdale estate, might have been familiar to balletgoers. The smooth, white-chocolate figures in papier-mâché and plaster, fused as though melted together in a giant pocket, served as a model for one of the two monumental enlargements made posthumously in Carrara marble to decorate the promenade of Lincoln Center’s New York State (David H. Koch) Theater. Meanwhile, Manship’s dynamic bronze Actaeon (transformed by Diana into a stag and pursued by his own hounds) and Manship’s storks and herons from the 1920s and ’30s remind us of the mythic range of this great sculptor beyond his Rockefeller Center Prometheus.

Elsewhere a stoic bust of George Washington by the studio of Jean-Antoine Houdon watched over the Old Masters at Robert Simon Fine Art. There were several Americana Easter eggs decorating the displays at Hirschl & Adler. A smart presentation of “American Game Boards c. 1890–1940” revealed the modernist sensibilities behind checkers and parcheesi. Debra Force Fine Art featured Richmond Barthé’s dynamic figure Inner Music (ca. 1956) next to Milton Avery’s limpid watercolor portrait Artist by the Sea (1945). Jeffrey Tillou Antiques presented Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington’s Yawning Tiger (cast ca. 1917) alongside Murdoc Indian dolls from Northeastern California (ca. 1860–75). Meanwhile, portraits by Robert Henri adorned more than one booth; Henri’s Celestine (1920) at Avery Galleries was a highlight.

With an extra-long run—a notorious marathon for exhibitors—The Winter Show straddles the timing of the American-art auctions and the Old Master sales. This year, Sotheby’s brought its “Masters Week” auctions from York Avenue to Madison and its new headquarters at the old Whitney.

Last fall, for its inaugural sales at the venue, I was among the cast of thousands that flocked to the opening of Sotheby’s Breuer showroom. With lines wrapping around to Park Avenue, the new location certainly succeeded in bringing the auction season to the city’s broader consciousness. As a showcase venue with significantly less square footage than Sotheby’s former factory floors on York Avenue, however, the opening display also revealed the squeeze of the new site.

“For things to remain the same, everything must change,” wrote Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his 1958 novel The Leopard. The same goes for today’s art market. With offices now offsite, Sotheby’s staff can no longer float between desk and showroom. Gallery walls must be torn out overnight to create the auction floor. Due to space constraints, minor works up for auction might be demoted to display at the York Avenue offices—a scarlet letter for sales that art advisors now try to preclude in their contracts. And even with these many contingencies, Sotheby’s Breuer still felt overstuffed. Ample room might have been cleared out for the top-line Lauder sales, but lesser works were packed floor to ceiling in a warren of tight passageways amid the building’s increasingly cramped upper floors.

With expectations diminished, however, I was surprised how well the 2026 “Masters Week” went off at the Breuer last month.2 The auction house must have learned a lesson or two from the fall. Works on paper, which I expected to be relegated to the Breuer attic, appeared lower down in prime real estate. Smaller works were still arranged salon-style but now in intelligent groupings, which helped to demonstrate how collections hang together. The presentation overall lived up to the promise of bringing the auction house from bedpan alley to a block from Museum Mile. Here is a new venue with ready access to significant work in constant rotation on free display—and free, moreover, of the turgid mandates of the museum world. It can even be yours, if the price is right.

Sotheby’s pegged this “Masters Week” to a few showstoppers: Antonello da Messina’s lachrymose double-sided Ecce Homo; Saint Jerome in Penitence (ca. 1460–65); a remarkably modern-looking Mummy Portrait of a Man from Roman Egypt (ca. late first century A.D.); Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s expressive Head of a Bearded Man (ca. 1770); and Rembrandt’s Young Lion Resting (ca. 1638–42), a small work on paper billed as “the most important drawing by the artist to appear at auction in half a century.” That final work came from the Leiden Collection, which Karen Wilkin covered in these pages in December. The collector Thomas S. Kaplan had put the piece up for auction to benefit Panthera, his nonprofit dedicated to the conservation of wild cats (with an auction-house estimate of fifteen to twenty million dollars).

There was much here to catch the eye beyond the headline sales in the few days it was all on view. An arrangement of elegant female figures had us in a game of cherchez la femme, in particular John William Godward’s stunning profile portrait Cleonice (1913). Jean-Léon Gérôme’s haunting and tender Madeleine Juliette Gérôme avec ses Poupées (ca. 1883), sun-kissed interiors by the Danish painter Peter Ilsted, and several satisfying Corots rounded out the auction of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art. A selection of charming works by lesser-known lights to be sold online revealed the deep bench of nineteenth-century European painters that few museums would now choose to exhibit but which deserve renewed attention. For its auctions of “Master Painting and Sculpture from Four Millennia,” Sotheby’s featured several alluring standouts, such as its seventeenth-century Portrait of Barbara Urslerin van Beck—a Lombard School depiction of Europe’s most famous “bearded lady.” An auction of works on paper from the collection of the late Diane A. Nixon proved how a dedicated collector could still amass a significant collection of master drawings over just the past few decades.

With many attractions, it’s appealing to consider what most strikes your own fancy. As for me, I would have been happy to walk away with Pietro Paoletti’s seven shadow boxes of plaster casts. These early nineteenth-century travel souvenirs preserved the sights of the Grand Tour in cameo relief from the days before picture postcards and the iPhone selfie.

Timed to the winter auctions—“Masters Week” at Sotheby’s, along with the pendant “Classic Week” at Christie’s—Master Drawings New York comes each year as a highlight of highlights.3 Rather than taking over a single venue, this decentralized fair presents thirty-six dealers partnering together in a weeklong presentation spread across New York’s specialized Upper East Side galleries. Over the last decade, this loose confederation has transformed into a must-see destination for curators as well as a singular access point into the Old Masters for scholars and collectors. It can also turn the marathon of this cultural season into a decathlon event. You hurdle over snowbanks, wind-sprint up townhouse stairs, and elbow out your favorite curator for your own close-up look at what is on view. To see it all might not be impossible but is still unlikely unless you have freed up the full week of the run. Better to print out the street map of exhibitors and pick a few you know well along with a selection of the less familiar.

This year at London-based Guy Peppiatt Fine Art, on view at Arader Galleries, the selection of cartoons by Edward Lear were particularly enjoyable. So too Edward Burra’s Dancing Party. At Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., Bernardo Castello’s drawing, Genoese Arriving in Jerusalem, warmed my irredentist heart. Paris-based Marty de Cambiaire Galerie, on view at Gerald Peters Gallery, featured the red-chalk Portrait of an Italian Girl, now confirmed to be an early drawing by Edgar Degas.

At Rome-based Miriam di Penta Fine Arts, on view at Robert Simon Fine Art, Leonor Fini’s expressive pen-and-ink portraits were hard to beat. Meanwhile, across the floor at Robert Simon, I was again delighted to see Anthony Baus’s contemporary drawing Manhattan Arch quietly added in the mix, a new master among the old.

London’s Abbott & Holder, on view at Kate Oh Gallery, featured two special collections among its selection of British works on paper. The first was the study collection of the late David Bindman, a professor of art history at University College London. The second: devastating sketches of the Dachau mortuary, crematorium, and gas chamber, recorded just a day after its American liberation in 1945, by Brian Stonehouse, a British artist and Nacht und Nebel prisoner who had been held at the death camp.

Last year at this time, with a show of European master drawings on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum, we saw how Masters Week serves to inspire serious exhibitions farther afield (see my “Good on paper” in The New Criterion of March 2025). This year, the great collateral benefit is “Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds” at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.4

If Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) had only overseen the mid-nineteenth-century restoration of Paris’s Notre-Dame, we would say Dayenu. If he had only renovated and reconstructed Vézelay Abbey, the Basilica of Saint Denis, Sainte-Chapelle, Château de Roquetaillade, and the medieval city of Carcassonne—Dayenu! But Viollet-le-Duc was also an astonishing illustrator, right up there with the greats of his age. The hundred and fifty works on paper, here mostly on loan from the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, a department of the French Ministry of Culture, will be revelatory even to those who know Viollet-le-Duc well.

Spearheaded by the cocurators Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani, this first major U.S. exhibition of the French architect, artist, and master planner brings together his remarkable studies of Notre-Dame to prove just how much of the Gothic structure reflects his nineteenth-century interventions—now mostly restored after the devastating 2019 fire. The exhibition also collects his many mountain landscapes and imaginative historical reconstructions.

Following the upheavals of the French Revolution, Viollet-le-Duc set his life’s mission to make France beautiful again. In his valoration of the medieval, he saw the true face of the French soul. It is regrettable that this exhibition feels the need at moments to speculate on the “deep structures” of “climate and race.” A thinly argued section on his racial preferences feels like another poststructural prosecution of greatness. His views on universal suffrage or the gold standard, or whatever, may not accord with our contemporary sensibilities either. C’est la vie. At least his accomplishments on paper speak for themselves, not to mention his singular legacies in brick and stone.

1. The Winter Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from January 23 through February 1, 2026. 

2. “Masters Week” was on view at Sotheby’s, New York, from January 30 through February 4, 2026. 

3. Master Drawings New York was on view on the Upper East Side from January 30 through February 7, 2026. 

4. “Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds” opened at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York, on January 28 and remains on view through May 24, 2026. 

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2026

The spirit of ’76

On “Declaring the Revolution: America’s Printed Path to Independence,” at the New-York Historical Society.

The nation’s semiquincentennial will provide many opportunities to revisit America’s founding. A small but enthralling show now at the New-York Historical Society deserves to be a foundational first stop. “Declaring the Revolution: America’s Printed Path to Independence” draws on the extraordinary collection of the philanthropist David M. Rubenstein.1 It tells the story of American independence through sixty documents that forged national resolve in a concise and compelling presentation. Curated by Mazy Boroujerdi, with detailed labels and a well-conceived arrangement of material, the one-room exhibition lays out the path to war and reveals the long road to American independence through the primary documents that took us there step by step. (A side note: now doing business as merely “The New York Historical,” the 222-year-old society is one of several institutions sadly struck with brand aphasia.)

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. So too must we refresh our understanding of these revolutionary materials. Take the Declaration of Independence. A well-recognized copy serves as the center of the historical society’s display. It may come as some surprise that the edition we most associate with this primary object of civic veneration was not created on July 4 or even in 1776 but in 1823, as this example attests.

The original Declaration, drafted by Thomas Jefferson with additions from a committee of the Second Continental Congress that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, was composed in manuscript. Their language built on the brief statement of the Lee Resolution, approved on July 2, 1776, which resolved that the colonies were “free and independent States.” July 2 might just as well be America’s independence day, but it was the July 4 adoption of the full and finely wrought Declaration that gives us our anniversary date.

On July 5, the congress rushed this manuscript to the nearby print shop of John Dunlap to produce between a hundred and two hundred broadsides for distribution across the colonies and soon around the world. Four days later, after receiving a copy by mail from John Hancock, George Washington had one of these broadsides read aloud to his brigades assembled on the commons in lower Manhattan. Following this 6 p.m. announcement, a mob tore down the statue of George III in Bowling Green, an action Washington lamented for its riotous “want of order” (the statue’s lead was recast into musket balls for the Patriot cause).

Dunlap’s poster-sized broadsides are the earliest extant records of the Declaration. The original manuscript was lost during typesetting. On August 2, the Continental Congress memorialized its adoption by commissioning an engrossed, or handwritten and enlarged, version on vellum, most likely from the pen of Timothy Matlack. This is the edition that famously received John Hancock’s John Hancock, along with the signatures of the other delegates present. Since the New York Provincial Congress officially adopted the Declaration only in the interim on July 9, the opening lines were updated from a “declaration by the representation of the United States of America in general congress,” as the broadside reads, to “the unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America.”

The engrossed Declaration is the one now on display in a titanium case filled with argon gas at the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. Yet it too most likely is not the edition we most closely associate with this document. That’s because, even less than fifty years after its creation, the condition of the engrossed Declaration had already deteriorated. In 1820, John Quincy Adams, then the secretary of state, commissioned a set of two hundred official copies of the engrossed Declaration from the Washington engraver William J. Stone. Working with the document for three years, through a system of mirrors and tracing, and perhaps the lifting of some ink from the original document, Stone created a copperplate negative of the engrossed Declaration, including its fifty-six signatures. As with the original, he printed these facsimiles on vellum.

The Stone facsimile, a faithful print of the engrossed Declaration with wording that was once again legible, was distributed to federal and state repositories and the living members of the founding generation. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, James Monroe, James Madison, and the Marquis de Lafayette each received two copies.

Today fewer than fifty known copies remain of Stone’s 1823 printing. Yet this is the version now most regularly reproduced since it reads closer to the original Declaration than the faded document bathed in inert gas in Washington. David M. Rubinstein, the cofounder of the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm, has collected the few Stone facsimiles in private hands and dedicated them to public display alongside his collection of other key American documents. We may never be closer to the Declaration than with his copy now on loan and available for detailed examination.

“Declaring the Revolution” makes a compelling case for the cause of American independence as a continuation of English rights and liberties. As represented by the other documents on display, the Declaration comes at the fulcrum of a two-decade-long conflict as history’s least revolutionary document of revolution. “Prudence,” it reads, “indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” Beyond its idealistic opening, the Declaration is mainly a legalistic enumeration of grievances, of a “long train of abuses and usurpations” with “repeated injuries” leading to a reluctant resolution grounded in law and custom. The great irony of American independence, and its greatest salvation, was its conservative assertion of English rights against an un-English monarch:

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

At the historical society, flanking the Stone facsimile to the left, is an edition of the Declaration of arguably even greater rarity and import. This is the version printed by the Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 6. It was the Declaration’s first truly public appearance, typeset from the broadside of a day before and available for “only two Coppers.” (Rubenstein purchased his copy at auction in 2013 for $632,500, the highest price then paid for a historical newspaper.) Immediately to the right of the Stone facsimile, the inclusion of a 1773 Slave Petition for Freedom feels forced. The document nevertheless serves to reveal the emancipatory impulse already in circulation at the time of revolution. “The divine spirit of freedom, seems to fire every human breast on this continent,” it asserts. The state of Massachusetts, where this petition was issued, abolished slavery seven years later.

In a center vitrine, in line of sight with the Declaration, are the documents and books that informed its ideals. Included here are copies of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, in an American printing from 1773. First published in 1689, this treatise arguing for the natural rights of “life, liberty and property” gained renewed attention in the revolutionary era. So too did Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, here in a copy from 1651, laying the case for the social contract between government and the governed.

Fronting this display is Magna Carta, represented by an eighteenth-century engraved facsimile of the 1215 document preserved at the British Library. (It is noteworthy that the only thirteenth-century version of this document in the United States is currently at the National Archives Museum—there on long-term loan from David M. Rubenstein).

As with the liberal arguments that surrounded Magna Carta and later the issuance of the English Bill of Rights, here in a 1689 first edition, the colonists saw their cause as grounded in English law. Their struggle for redress, at first, came about as forms of isolated resistance and then as a united colonial civil war. At the historical society, this story begins to the left with a copy of the 1765 Stamp Act. The much-maligned taxation scheme, designed to underwrite the British military presence along the colonies’ extensive frontiers following the French and Indian War, was met with compelling counterarguments from several American voices. Benjamin Franklin’s testimony against it in the House of Commons in 1766 is here represented in a printed account of his four-hour-long examination. “No, never” would the colonists pay the duty “unless compelled by force of arms,” he declared. While that act was repealed, new British taxes led to civic disturbances culminating in the Boston Massacre of 1770, made all the more bloody in the colonial mind by Paul Revere’s contemporaneous engraving. As Massachusetts became a center of colonial insurgency to British military occupation, the first shot of Lexington and Concord in 1775, “heard round the world” (in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous phase of 1837), brought the conflict into open rebellion.

A hallway wall, just around the corner from the main gallery and easy to miss, includes documents related to the prosecution of the Revolutionary War divided between its northern and southern theaters. The path to American independence was paved by more than just the writings of history’s most motivated lawyers. It involved nearly a decade of armed conflict and more losses than wins for the American side. These displays lay out the accounts, records, and maps of the campaigns while also revealing the rising international interest in American independence. Traité d’Amitié et de Commerce, Conclu entre le Roi et les États-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale, reads a vital 1778 treaty of French support for the revolution. Le Général Washington Ne Quid Detrimenti capiat Res publica is the title of a French print from circa 1780.

“Declaring the Revolution” reveals the indomitable spirit of ’76 that buoyed the Patriot cause to force the surrender of Charles Cornwallis, the commander of British southern forces, at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, and brought about the Definitive Treaty between Great Britain, and the United States of America, Signed at Paris, the 3rd Day of September 1783. The astonishing victory continues to inspire the spirit of liberty and recalls the debt of sacrifice made in the name of freedom.

1. “Declaring the Revolution: America’s Printed Path to Independence” opened at the New-York Historical Society on November 14, 2025, and remains on view through April 12, 2026. ↩

Pure Sketch

On “Renoir Drawings,” at the Morgan Library & Museum.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so the adman sayeth. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) would beg to differ. The Impressionists were not the spontaneous image-makers they were made out to be. Sold to the public on the immediacy of painting directly from nature, these actualistes still held on to their studies and models to arrive at their finished work. Renoir was arguably the least impressionistic among them. A trained draftsman, he returned to drawing later in life to flesh out his most synthetic compositions. His efforts on paper reveal much of this artistic process. As he created increasingly layered iterations, these drawings came to serve as captivating works in their own right.

“Renoir Drawings,” now on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, is therefore something of an anti-blockbuster blockbuster.1 Even with its marquee name, the exhibition mostly avoids top-line works and Renoir’s core Impressionist years of the 1870s. Instead, the show digs down, at times way down, into Renoir’s paper record to draw up a newly intimate portrait of the artist across a fifty-year span. With detailed drawings packed into two galleries, the exhibition requires close attention, as displays on paper generally do. Works are small, behind glass, and in lower light (at times, also obstructed by glare). But the rewards of this significant show can leave us with a fresh impression of the Impressionist we thought we knew so well.

To get a sense of the importance that the Morgan, with its dual focus on literature and art on paper, has placed on this exhibition, look no further than its curator, Colin B. Bailey. Working with his research associate Sarah Lees, Bailey has done double duty here as the organizer of the exhibition while serving as the institution’s Katharine J. Rayner Director—the first time, in his decade-long tenure, that he has overseen his own show. “As a director of a museum,” he explained at the preview, “it is unusual, and perhaps not always very wise, to embark on a large exhibition, and we have spent seven years working on it.” In other words, as the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Renoir’s works on paper in more than a century, this is an ambitious and expensive undertaking.

We are its beneficiaries, as its results combine significant loans with a thoroughly mined archive of works on paper. The exhibition presents one hundred drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and paintings from sixty-two lenders, with a plurality of loans from Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, where a version of the exhibition will be on view this spring.

Beyond his sketchbooks, Renoir composed some eight hundred independent works on paper. While other artists may settle on preferred subjects and formulas, Renoir employed his drawing widely, composing portraiture, mythological imagery, landscapes, still lifes, and scenes of modern life. Along the way, he worked through an adventurous range of graphic media: pencil, black chalk, red chalk (also called sanguine), white chalk, Conté crayon, charcoal, pen and ink, watercolor, gouache, and pastels, as well as printmaking with etching and lithography. All of the resulting works are fugitive and fragile, susceptible to light and movement. This makes their public exhibition here all the more rare.

A word should also be said for the accompanying exhibition catalogue, which features essays by Bailey, Lees, Flavie Durand-Ruel Mouraux and Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel (scholar-descendants of the Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel), and Anne Distel and Paul Perrin of the Musée d’Orsay. Published by DelMonico Books and printed in Trento, Italy, on uncoated Munken paper stock, each page feels like its own work on paper, with astonishing image fidelity. Those many other museums now outsourcing their catalogues to China, please take note.

While this exhibition has been seven years in the making, its initial inspiration took shape some two decades ago. That was when Bailey saw Study for The Great Bathers (ca. 1886–87 and 1908), a large work in red and white chalk on wove paper lined to canvas, while paying a visit to the home of Drue Heinz. A specialist in eighteenth-century French art and an authority on Renoir, Bailey saw Heinz’s drawing for what it was: a preparatory work related to Renoir’s masterpiece in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but one he had never encountered before.

The surprise reveal suggested how much of Renoir’s art beyond his famous paintings (he made some four thousand canvases) was still out there to be discovered. “Renoir’s works on paper form a considerable part of his oeuvre,” Bailey writes in the lead essay of the exhibition catalogue, but

as a corpus they remain somewhat uncharted, and occasionally treacherous, territory. Accuracy in dating and the correct identification of media are often lacking; a comprehensive and well-documented review of his development as a draftsman over six decades has yet to be written.

In life, Drue Heinz was not only a significant collector but also an important patron of the arts. Among her many philanthropies, she was the founding supporter of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. After her death in 2018, her estate offered the Morgan a work from her collection. Bailey requested her Bathers and set about creating this exhibition around the acquisition in her honor. While not a comprehensive catalogue raisonné, the result does much to advance Bailey’s own call for a “well-documented review of [Renoir’s] development as a draftsman.”

Renoir showed graphic talent from an early age. He drew until the end of his life. According to his son Jean, he “never let a day go by without sketching something.” Following his eldest brother, Pierre-Henri, who was an engraver of medals and gems, Renoir found early work in Paris as a designer, decorator, and draftsman for blinds, emblems, and commercial decor. He also apprenticed to be a painter on porcelain for Sèvres. As he moved on to training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he pursued the traditional course of drafting and figuration and received a copyist permit for the Louvre.

The earliest works in “Renoir Drawings” are those from the early 1860s, with rather arid chalk-and-graphite studies on paper of paintings and sculptures. As he turned to Impressionism in the 1870s, his portrait pastels become a highlight. Here his tender 1879 Portrait of a Young Girl (Elisabeth Maître), on loan from the Albertina Museum, Vienna, is a standout. So too Boating Couple (1880–81), on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Milliner (ca. 1879), from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition becomes most illuminating as it gathers studies and versions of the same compositions together. Renoir’s Dance in the Country (1883), one of the significant oil-on-canvas loans from the Musée d’Orsay, is accompanied by a suite of paper studies and related prints on loan from other venues. The same for Motherhood (1885), another oil on loan from the Musée d’Orsay.

A turning point for the artist, and this exhibition, is The Great Bathers (ca. 1886–87). A suite of seven studies, including the Heinz bequest, is centered around the oil on canvas from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (which is only able to travel due to a change in its loan agreement in 2020). Here his drawings are canvas sized, as though he designed to transfer them as one-to-one components, like Renaissance cartoons, to his finished work. The final composition conveys this sense of multipart assembly, with its nude female figures seemingly detached from one another and unreal. Such unreality was no doubt purposeful, as Renoir moved away from the contemporary in favor of an idealized, friezelike antique.

“Around 1883,” the artist recounted to the painter Ambroise Vollard, “I had come to the end of Impressionism, and realized that I knew neither how to paint nor to draw.” Instead he traveled to Italy and took to Raphael. In what is called his rappel à l’ordre, he abandoned being a painter of modern life to focus on the classical nude. The subject matter brought him back to his student days of the 1860s, but now informed by a new Impressionist sensibility for luminosity and color. As he explained to his dealer Durand-Ruel in the fall of 1888, “I have returned . . . to the old style of painting, soft and light. Like Fragonard, but less good.”

Renoir pursued the classical nude into the early decades of the twentieth century. One of the final works here is his Study for “The Judgment of Paris” (ca. 1908) from the Phillips Collection. The related oil, in the Hiroshima Museum of Art, did not travel, but a patinated plaster relief of the composition that Renoir composed with the sculptor Richard Guino is here from the Musée d’Orsay. These final works represent how Renoir carried on even after he became too infirm from arthritis to hold soft media such as pastel and charcoal. (An early film in the museum’s introductory hall shows him at work in old age.)

Throughout his life, friends and critics alike remarked on Renoir’s drafting skills. An early critic for La Liberté called his drawing “neither frigid nor fixed; it is alive, animated, and intelligent. It has infinite delicacy and subtlety.” The decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans compared Renoir to Chardin and said his portraits were even more “captivating, individual, and incisive.” In her journal, the close friend and fellow artist Berthe Morisot called Renoir a “draftsman of the first order” on a studio visit in January 1886, after seeing a suite of drawings in red and white chalk around his Motherhood composition:

He showed me a whole series done from the same model with about the same movement. . . . it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting, to the public, which generally imagines that the Impressionists work in a very casual way.

Across Renoir’s span of four thousand paintings, did he make a bad one? He certainly did. Some of his late-career nudes, such as the bumper crop now in Philadelphia’s Barnes Collection, have long been criticized as overdetermined and fleshy. Judging from the selection now at the Morgan, however, the same does not hold true for his drawings. Provisional drafting may have taken Renoir’s paintings away from the precepts of Impressionism. Ranging across multiple styles and media, his drawings meanwhile remained open, experimental—even, we might say, impressionistic.

1. “Renoir Drawings” opened at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, on October 17, 2025, and remains on view through February 8, 2026. A version of the exhibition will also be seen at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (March 17–July 5, 2026). ↩

Range Rovers

Why New Yorkers from all walks of life can put a gun on their holiday wish list

All I want for Christmas is a snub-nosed .38. Some .38 Special ammunition would be nice too. This holiday season, we should all be thinking of our firearms wish list.

A year ago, I never thought I would be one of those rare New Yorkers to navigate the city’s byzantine gun laws. Nor did I quite anticipate the peace of mind that comes with firearms ownership.

But I did it, earning my own license to carry a concealed pistol. I now practice weekly at the range just down the block from my office with my own registered revolver. You can do it, too.

Sure, we’ve heard the stories of onerous regulations, invasive questioning and endless delays. Compared with much of the country, the application process remains a burden. But I am here to tell you it is no longer impossible. As I found, it can even be a rewarding experience. And if you want that Centennial-style hammerless Airweight in your stocking, you first need a license to carry it. 

My story began when I inherited an old service revolver from my father, Carl. A New York-based architect, one who had worked on designs for the World Trade Center and JFK Airport, he had taken to firearms when I was a teenager in the 1990s. He enjoyed the sport and comradery of the range, which he said reminded him of his time in Army basic training. He also saw it as a means for some father-son bonding and a reconnection with our Italian roots. 

I well remember the day he first took me to John Jovino Gun Shop. The storied retailer shuttered after 109 years during the 2020 lockdowns, but at the time, the store in Little Italy was thriving as it sported an oversized pistol hanging from its sign. Dad had me pick out my own bolt-action .22 rifle. He then slipped next door to resupply his homemade winemaking operation, another Italian pastime. At an upscale range near Wall Street, now long defunct, he shot his pistol while I practiced my aim with the small, rimfire rifle. All the while, a five-gallon glass carboy of red wine fermented in our highrise West Side apartment. 

Decades later, when the time came to transfer his gun, a blued .357 Magnum manufactured by Smith & Wesson in the 1960s, I paid my first of many visits to the Westside Rifle and Pistol Range. Operating out of a basement space on West 20th Street since 1964, the range is an enduring lifeline for city gun owners. Here you can take training classes, join its shooting club, use its services as a federal firearms-licensed dealer (known as FFL) or simply try out one of its .22 rifles (no license required). 

I have done it all. But first, I sat down with Westside’s owner, Darren Leung. “I am amazed we survived,” he said of his holdout range in the heart of Gotham. “But by the good grace of God and some great members, we’re still here.”

Leung went on to explain the consequences of the landmark 2022 Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen and what it meant for gun licensing in the city.

He also noted the uptick in interest in personal firearms following the 2020 riots, the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the all-too-routine evidence that you cannot always rely on others to protect you and your loved ones. “Better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it,” said Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Russian founder of the Jewish Defense Organization and famous Zionist. That might well be the motto here too.

Back in my father’s day, most city gun owners could only expect to receive what was known as a premise permit. That meant you could take your firearm, unloaded in a locked container, to and from the range, and that was it. The Bruen decision changed that.

Before Bruen, New York required its firearms applicants to show what it called “proper cause” to receive an unrestricted license. This effectively meant only diamond dealers and cash couriers could obtain anything beyond a premise permit. In 2022, the Supreme Court thought otherwise.

“We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas, delivering the scathing opinion of the court in Bruen. 

“That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.”

With the high court ruling that the “Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” tens of thousands of new firearms applications flooded in.

Leung suggested to me that the premise permit would likely be phased out. New Yorkers should now apply for concealed carry. The NYPD licensing division handles all applications through its website. The system is an improvement over the old paper forms and the need for exact postal money orders hand-delivered to One Police Plaza. I should also add that the NYPD licensing officers who reached out to me as my application was in process were all friendly and professional.

Nevertheless, the online application has many, many steps, and it is best approached in stages. The biggest hurdle of the application process is the 18-hour training class. But here what might have been a challenge proved to be a highlight.

Each month, Westside offers sessions compacted into a single intensive weekend course. The spaces fill, so sign up early. Two dozen of us met in the cluttered Westside classroom. We sat on broken-down school desks with patriotic flags lining the walls.

The diversity of students there was a reflection of town. I sat next to the son of a police officer. Behind me was a young woman in a designer coat. Next to her, a man was speaking English as a second language. Some were longtime gun owners upgrading from premise permits. Others had never touched a firearm until the day we gathered. 

Our instructor was Glenn Herman, a wry, wiry native of Greenwich Village dressed head to toe in black (his website is appropriately titled newyorkcityguns.com). As he sprinkled in stories of his bar mitzvah, over two days we learned about the history of rifling, the relative advantages between revolvers and semi-automatics, the uses of hollow-point rounds versus full metal jacket, different holster options, sight pictures, misfires, hangfires, squib loads, the isosceles over the Weaver stance and the fundamentals of firearm safety (always point it in a safe direction, always assume it is loaded and always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire). 

Herman ended the first day by showing us the Glock he keeps in his black fanny pack. “I’m getting older and don’t care what I look like,” he explained.

10

For day two, things got heavier, as we reviewed the true challenges of New York’s gun laws and the legal implications of concealed carry. In response to Bruen, the Legislature imposed a host of new restrictions under its so-called sensitive-place law. These regulations state that you cannot bring a licensed firearm, loaded or unloaded, through much of town, including parks, public transport, restaurants and the “Times Square Exclusion Zone.” Haven’t you seen the signs?

Such restrictions will almost certainly be challenged on constitutional grounds, as they effectively nullify the protections of Bruen. Nevertheless, until then, law-abiding New Yorkers must remain cognizant of the many new impositions. Of course, we should not assume the same cognizance of New York’s criminal class.

Before we finished the weekend course with a paper test and a live-fire drill with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic, Herman went over the ethical challenges that come with concealed carry.

“The city will be different for you when you have a loaded firearm,” he explained. “You must train your mind first to be nonviolent. Cultivate a mindset where your instincts are good and deadly force is used only after all other options have been exhausted, where you have nowhere left to escape, and life is on the line.”

Herman guided us to further study with such gun gurus as Massad Ayoob. His online tutorials on the many nuances of firearms literacy, from grip and stance to legal implications and how to talk to law enforcement, are all must-see.

With the testing done and paperwork submitted, I received my appointment for police fingerprinting.

A few months later, my temporary approval came in, which meant I could finalize the process of getting my dad’s revolver on my license.

In many states, you can simply walk into a gun shop and walk out with a pistol. You can also inherit a firearm like anything else.

Not so in New York. Each firearm must pass through a dealer and be registered to your license before it can be released.

You can also only register one firearm every 90 days. Again, Westside shepherded this process along for me and held onto my pistol until it was cleared.

But I got it, and my concealed-carry license arrived in the mail.

The approval meant I could join the Westside range and shoot whenever I liked.

The old basement range, which has changed little since a scene from “Taxi Driver” was filmed there half a century ago, welcomes all with its donuts and coffee and bonhomie. 

I am no great marksman, but I can see incremental improvements in my weekly practice.

Lining up a gun with a target is easy. Keeping it on target as you pull the trigger and handle its recoil, and doing this consistently, is the challenge.

I think of my father firing that same gun. The smell of the gunpowder takes me back to those teenage years with him on the range.

Still, I wouldn’t mind trying out a smaller pistol.

My Magnum is too large and heavy for pocket carry.

A smaller five-shooter might be in order. Or maybe I should go for a Colt 1911.

Most shooters have moved away from wheel guns altogether in favor of plastic semi-automatic 9-millimeters, such as the Glock.

In any case, it’s nice to have options on your holiday wish list. I’m sure Jabotinsky would agree.

THE NEW CRITERION, December 2025

America Beautiful

On President Trump’s architectural agenda.

Take a walk by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as I recently did, and you might be surprised to find the White House still there as you remember it. You should be forgiven for assuming otherwise, considering the images that have recently played out of wrecking crews tearing away at walls and windows and the commentary that has surrounded this undertaking. “AIA Condemns Demolition of the White House East Wing and Calls for Transparency in Public Architecture,” read a statement by the American Institute of Architects. “Donald Trump’s East Wing demolition trashes First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s queer legacy,” declared The Advocate. “‘Dictator-for-life vibes’: our architecture critic on Trump’s bulletproof ballroom bling,” blared The Guardian. “Why did he pick an architect whose speciality is Catholic churches?” the subhead asked.

A better question, beyond the hyperbole, bad-faith arguments, and elitist bigotry, is how successful the president’s many cultural and architectural projects will actually be. With more initiatives revealed by the day, the answer looks to place Trump among our greatest builder-presidents, in line with Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. As Americans embrace his classical, representational, and traditional undertakings, the only real destruction is the loss of the establishment’s cultural hegemony.

The new White House State Ballroom, to be constructed over the former East Wing, is the latest case in point. Trump’s critics may denounce the two-term president as a “king” for the fact they did not vote for him. Far from a royal palace, however, his plans reveal a democratic executive with the popular intelligence of a lifetime in real estate. With funding secured by private donations made through the Trust for the National Mall, rather than by taxpayer revenue (a fact his critics bemoan), Trump has set out to leave a lasting legacy on the White House grounds free of charge.

During Trump’s first term, in a project overseen by the First Lady, the residential architect Steven W. Spandle updated the White House tennis pavilion. That initiative, which replaced Barack Obama’s basketball court and changing-room trailer, faced its own host of critics. Yet the result proved to be a sensitive new addition that restored the elegance of a sport first introduced to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt.

The ballroom likewise updates the East Wing in a similar idiom for a new and much-needed function. Its lead architect is James McCrery II, a seasoned practitioner who began as a modernist working for Peter Eisenman but rededicated his life to classicism under the mentorship of Allan Greenberg. A restrained, classical exterior that borrows from the White House’s existing colonnades, fanlights, cornices, and buff stonework will open onto a more exuberant interior of Corinthian columns and coffered ceilings. Until now, large White House receptions have been relegated to unsightly tents on the South Lawn. With a deferential design that works to conceal its massing, the ballroom will finally provide a secure indoor venue for essential functions such as state dinners while maintaining the East Wing’s existing functions. “Take a breath, folks,” read an editorial in The Wall Street Journal on “Trump’s Big, Beautiful Ballroom.” “There really is a case for a larger hall at the White House for holding big state dinners and other events.” With a capacity approaching a thousand guests (numbers have varied), the venue will also make the president’s home, and the president himself, more accessible to more Americans than before. In a democratic society, such openness might be considered a good thing.

As with any reuse, the project starts with demolition. Here few will admit that the East Wing is not the historical White House at all. It is a side structure, of relatively recent vintage, set apart and built over the presidential bunker. Until now, if we even knew it existed, most of us probably needed a map to find it on the executive grounds. The wing is located about as close to the Treasury Department as to the historical White House. Standing at the White House fence on Pennsylvania Avenue, you realize how distant the site truly is.

Such an architectural update does not represent a tear in the essential fabric of our democratic republic, or even so much as a historical snag. For over a century, the nerve center of the White House has been the West Wing, not the East Wing. First designed by McKim, Mead & White under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, the West Wing allowed the executive staff to work outside of the White House’s second-floor living quarters for the first time. William Howard Taft added the Oval Office to the West Wing soon after. The East Wing has been far less significant to the history of the White House, serving as a coatroom, a reception hall, and most recently as the offices of the First Lady.

Regardless of any section’s particular significance, however, the White House has been updated by every president, at times more directly than by its current occupant. Critics complained about Jefferson’s additions, too, but presidents have wide latitude in overseeing changes at the White House and even a duty to keep the executive mansion updated and vital. The White House outbuildings have evolved even more over time, with greenhouses, swimming pools, bowling alleys, and movie theaters coming and going, and far more grandiose plans than Trump’s ballroom put forward over the years. In “Unbuilt White Houses of the Nineteenth Century,” William Bushong details these proposals for the White House Historical Association. Under the presidency of Harry Truman, the White House was even gutted, with bulldozers rolling through the empty shell of the historical structure. Just imagine the outcry if Trump had sent bulldozers through the Lincoln Bedroom.

We should not be surprised by the political capital that Trump, a president who grew up working with the built environment, is now spending on cultural projects or his understanding of the transformative power of architecture and art. Through his career in real estate, we knew he exhibited a New York toughness and early on learned the power of the wrecking ball in getting things done. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he made his mark through the brash development of Midtown’s Grand Hyatt New York and his Trump Tower on Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. Both involved the construction of glass towers through the partial or full demolition of historical structures, both as it happens designed by Warren & Wetmore: the Hotel Commodore in Grand Central’s Terminal City and the flagship store of Bonwit Teller.

We might rightly criticize the loss of architectural history replaced by smoked windows and bronze cladding, but Trump demonstrated what it took to build successful projects in what at the time appeared to be a moribund city. His understanding of style has also evolved since then into a more nuanced appreciation of classicism and historical preservation. Following his purchase of Mar-a-Lago in 1985, he restored Marjorie Merriweather Post’s derelict Palm Beach residence designed by Marion Sims Wyeth and Joseph Urban to its original splendor, first as a private home, then as a club property, and finally as his own weekend White House—fulfilling a wish of Post’s that it be used as a presidential property.

At the heart of President Trump’s appeal has been the promise of restoration: the “again” of “Make America Great Again.” What began as a return to American values is now compounded by his own return to power after a Herculean campaign and the prospect of the U.S. semiquincentennial in 2026—the upcoming jubilee that was just about ignored throughout the Biden interregnum.

In the summer of 2020, near the end of his first term, Trump also witnessed what was nothing less than an attempted revolution to overturn the American order. Genuine insurrectionists intermingled with criminals and permissive gatekeepers to target not just statues of American heroes and history but also the classical plinths and pillars representing our national foundations. In “A classical illness,” appearing in these pages in September 2020, I noted how “the association of classical forms with an illegitimate order has long been a central tenet of anti-liberal ideology.”

Trump is ever mindful of the history of radicalism and the capacity of classicism to reflect a return to order. In his second term, this embrace has been unabashed, with a classical eclecticism that is gilded, colorful, and light-filled rather than mere academic historicism. He has promoted shovel-ready projects with a hard deadline of July 4, 2026, the date of the national jubilee. Informed by advocates for classicism such as Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society, the president has also pushed new design guidance, in particular the classical mandate behind the executive order “Making Federal Architecture Great Again”—put forward in the final days of his first term, overruled by Biden as one of his first acts in office, and now recodified. The order overturns sixty years of Olympian modernism enforced as house style that has seen increasingly oppressive results, from the recent borg-like Orrin G. Hatch United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City to the dysplastic polyp of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago—which in its metastasis has usurped historic Olmsted parkland, a fact first criticized in these pages by John Vinci (see “The Obama Library double parks,” December 2016).

Trump’s executive order has far-reaching consequences and is now being extended to infrastructure projects and other sectors under federal purview. Now is the time for Trump to turn his White House wrecking crew on the other eyesores of the federal district’s Brutalist era, from the FBI Headquarters, to the Department of Education, to the Postal Service Headquarters. Taken to its conclusion, his executive order has the potential to restore Washington as a classical city. It also nudges cities such as New York closer than ever to restoring their own classical inheritance. Thanks to its many tireless advocates, we might even see the reconstruction of McKim, Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station (the original track layout and even some stairwells conveniently remain in place following its 1963 demolition).

Through it all, critics will continue to smear America’s classical heritage. In an astonishing display of racial bigotry, the Smithsonian’s own National Museum of African American History and Culture has labeled the “primacy of Western (Greek, Roman) and Judeo-Christian tradition” as one of the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.” In The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman ties classical architecture to “images of antebellum America” and “authoritarian regimes of the past.” One wonders what such critics would have said if a leftist mob had taken their blowtorches and spray cans to the East Wing. Just this past October, The New York Times saw fit to hail an exhibition in Los Angeles of sculptures made from the desecrated parts of historical statues, taken down in such riots, as “the year’s boldest show.”

Trump’s righteous response has been to redouble his own classical initiatives in the face of elitist opprobrium. In part this has meant commissioning new classical projects. Not long after the classical advocate Catesby Leigh made the case in The American Mind for the construction of a triumphal arch in Washington, timed to commemorate the semiquincentennial, Trump could be seen with the model of an “Independence Arch” sited on an empty roundabout across the Arlington Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial. Borrowing from Roman, French, and American precedent, such an arch would extend to Washington the examples set in New York around the turn of the last century by McKim, Mead & White’s Washington Arch in Washington Square Park (originally a temporary wooden structure), Charles R. Lamb’s temporary Dewey Arch by Madison Square, and John Hemenway Duncan’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.

Another example of Trump’s classical retort has been his forthcoming National Garden of American Heroes. This initiative picks up from where such institutions as the original Hall of Fame for Great Americans, at New York University’s former Bronx campus, left off (see my “Hall of flame,” November 2017). By commissioning new statues of Americans “chosen for embodying the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love,” as its executive order spells out, the National Garden aims to “reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism.” Addressing the riots of the years prior, the language of the garden’s executive order is explicit in its response:

Across this Nation, belief in the greatness and goodness of America has come under attack in recent months and years by a dangerous anti-American extremism that seeks to dismantle our country’s history, institutions, and very identity. The heroes of 1776 have been desecrated, with statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin vandalized and toppled. The dead who gave their lives to end slavery and save the Union during the Civil War have been dishonored, with monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Hans Christian Heg, and the courageous 54th Regiment left damaged and disfigured. The brave warriors who saved freedom from Nazi fascism have been disgraced with a memorial to World War II veterans defaced with the hammer and sickle of Soviet communism.

Last summer, I served as a peer reviewer for the applications that came in response to this program’s open call. What they revealed was a deep bench of realistic artists working without fanfare in traditional stone and bronze. Emboldened by the American story, able to craft “lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations,” as mandated by the 2020 executive order, they appear set to invigorate the nation’s foundries and ateliers as never before. The best applicants were those who rose above mere representation to seek out the heroic idealism of their chosen subjects through astonishing craftsmanship and attention to material and finish. The challenge will be to complete these ambitious commissions by July 4, 2026, and have them installed in the National Garden’s to-be-determined location.

In line with the National Garden have been Trump’s efforts to restore those statues attacked in the riots of the last decade. Grants have already gone out to piece together the shattered fragments of monuments to Christopher Columbus. Here we can hope that Trump will push his restoratory agenda to maximal effect. No statue should be canceled by the rioters’ veto or those institutions and municipalities that fell under their sway.

A primary goal should be the restoration of Theodore Roosevelt’s equestrian statue to the New York State memorial dedicated to the twenty-sixth president, in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Sculpted by James Earle Fraser after Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleioni, the sculpture was integral to John Russell Pope’s design for his Roosevelt Rotunda as it looked out from the triumphal arch framing the museum’s entryway. The heroic statue was racially inclusive, pairing Roosevelt with personifications of Africa and the Americas standing “for Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races,” as Fraser explained. A 2018 memorial commission had even determined the monument should stay. Nevertheless, in 2020 the city under Bill de Blasio along with the museum director Ellen Futter decreed the statue to be a “hurtful” symbol of “systemic racism,” and so it went. A counteroffensive now fashioned in the manner of Trump’s review of American universities could finally bring such municipalities and institutions to heel until the return of this cultural patrimony, along with the funds to pay for the statues’ upkeep and protection.

Over a hundred years ago, a movement called City Beautiful undertook a wave of architectural and urban reform. American municipalities, in particular the nation’s capital under Daniel Burnham, reached new heights of enlightened public planning through the studied application of Beaux-Arts and classical design. On the eve of the U.S. semiquincentennial, after half a century of radical deformation, an America Beautiful movement now appears ready to reinvigorate this classical inheritance with monumental fanfare and a president built for such restoration.

The Case Against Buckley

A review of “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America,“ by Sam Tanenhaus

Less than a mile separates the Catholic cemetery of Saint Bernard, the burial site of William F. Buckley Jr., off Sharon Valley Road, from the heights of the old Sharon Burial Ground. Yet the distance could not be more pronounced. The geography of this northwest corner of Connecticut explains much of the social and spiritual counter-insurgency that defined this father of modern American conservatism. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, the long-awaited biography by Sam Tanenhaus, does compelling work here in Sharon, in its early chapters describing Buckley’s large Catholic family engaged in its own forms of guerrilla warfare against the town’s Protestant establishment.

Despite the appearances of old wealth, the Buckleys were upstart outsiders. The patriarch William Frank Buckley Sr. (Will, as opposed to his namesake Bill) was the son of a Texas sheriff who gambled big on foreign oil exploration. After losing their homestead in Mexico to a leftist insurrection, the Buckleys decamped to New York, where Bill was born, and then to Sharon’s Taconic highlands by way of Paris and London.

Settling into an estate off South Main Street that he named Great Elm, Will and his wife Aloise just about reached the physical heights of town, but the working-class Irish who inhabited Sharon Valley remained their spiritual kin. In the eighteenth century, the valley’s Webatuck Creek powered the first Sharon mills. A century later, iron production came to the valley along with the laborers to work its kilns. When the Buckleys arrived in 1923, they “worshiped in pews alongside the descendants of Sharon’s working class,” as Tanenhaus writes, “who in earlier times had been drawn to the Northwest Corner by jobs in its iron industry.” 

Today the Buckleys are mostly gone from Great Elm. The estate was subdivided and sold over the years after Will’s death, along with his diminishing financial legacy. The family’s unassuming plot in the back of Saint Bernard is what remains of their eternal presence. Will and Aloise are depicted on a central memorial stone as the roots of an elm. Markers of their ten children, including the sister Mary Ann who died two days after birth, are the fallen leaves surrounding them. Only here do we find the flat headstone of William F. Buckley Jr and his wife, Patricia. Christopher Buckley, their satirist son and only child, still much alive, has already added his own marker to the assembly. His epitaph reads: “TOMB IT MAY CONCERN.”

Isolationist, Anglophobic, and anti-Progressive, Will and Aloise were the family’s conservative font. Aloise, from New Orleans, who maintained a winter home with Will in Camden, South Carolina, presented a confederate spirit. Will was a man who “worshiped three earthly things: learning, beauty, and his family,” as Buckley said of his father. He was also a Texas gambler, one who was burned in a game newly rigged by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and their class of managerial Protestant elite. Tutored by contrast in the contrapuntalism of Bach, raised as a family in semi-seclusion, several of his children became involved in conservative journalism and politics: Pricilla as managing editor of her brother’s National Review; James as United States senator on the New York Conservative Party line and federal judge; Patricia as a founder of the Catholic magazine Triumph and spouse to Brent Bozell, who was Bill’s Yale co-conspirator, co-author of the book McCarthy and his Enemies, and ghostwriter of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. 

Across his 1040 pages, Tanenhaus is exhaustive and exhausting as the many bodies in Buckley’s orbit get their due. The chapter on the creation of the 1960 Sharon Statement of conservative principles by a hundred Young Americans for Freedom members convened by Buckley for the weekend at Great Elm is especially compelling. The YAF member who collected the notes and typed them up through the night back in her room at the Hotchkiss Inn was Annette Courtemanche, a sophomore at Molloy University. Four years later, she became Mrs. Russell Kirk.    

Albert Jay Nock, Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Frank Meyer each exerted their own gravitational pull on Buckley’s trajectory as the conservative isolationism of America First gave way to Cold War anti-Communism. Founded in 1955, Buckley’s National Review meanwhile mentored a generation of younger writers, including no less than Arlene Croce, Joan Didion, John Leonard, Renata Adler, Garry Wills, Hugh Kenner, and Guy Davenport. An undergraduate Betty Friedan (née Goldstein) makes a cameo as the Buckley sisters’ protector at Smith. At the same time, a nineteen-year-old Sylvia Plath appears at Maureen Buckley’s debutante ball at Great Elm.  

Readers of this book may have differing opinions about where its narrative turns against its subject. In the endless section on civil rights, there are hints that Tanenhaus intends to burden Buckley in his missteps, distractions, and peccadilloes. At a certain point, Tanenhaus seems to turn his focus on everything Buckley should have done but didn’t, such as finishing an ambitious book project titled Revolt Against the Masses rather than attending to his many novels (I was his writing assistant for one of them), columns, and television appearances (and the yearly income he needed to maintain National Review). As he aligns himself with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Buckley, in Tanenhaus’s telling, falls short of his intellectual promise and softens in the trappings of power and prestige.    

There is ultimately less “life” here than a focus on the “Revolution That Changed America.” As the chapters roll on, Buckley appears increasingly inert, passive, and surprisingly silent—a reactive presence within unfolding events. A charitable interpretation would be to say that Tanenhaus rejects the “great man” theory of history, that we are merely the sum of historical forces applied to us. In elevating Buckley’s faults over his features, more likely than not, this book is designed to impugn the American conservative movement by diminishing the singular leader who created it. 

In any case, by the end, it becomes clear that Tanenhaus never really gets Buckley, no matter how many words he deploys to describe the revolution around him. The long delay in this book’s completion, some twenty-seven years in the making, is just one indication of a biographer who loses the thread of his subject and becomes increasingly indignant as he looks over the remaining stitches. 

From the geography of Sharon to the faculty at Yale, Buckley took on an entrenched progressive elite. His greatest achievement was to manifest an alternative American aristocracy, a counter-elite that took full form in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Buckley was a “Catholic aristocrat of the Spanish persuasion,” as a friend once said. He understood the spiritual dimension that informed America’s social and political dynamics. His famous quip about preferring to be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University was more a slam against the progressive Ivy League than a positive appraisal of the average Bostonian. At the time Buckley attended Yale, the school maintained admissions caps on Jewish and Catholic applicants in equal measure. So when Yale University sent its plenipotentiary, McGeorge Bundy, out to slam God and Man at Yale, Buckley’s 1951 broadside against the school’s progressive professoriate, Bundy centered his attack on Buckley’s Catholicism.

Buckley may have never finished Revolt Against the Masses, his answer to Ortega y Gasset. Instead, life itself, fully lived, became his revolt played out across a multitude of media. From restoring God to “man at Yale” to taking on Godless Communism, Buckley waged a holy war aimed at the highest levels of American society—and he largely won. Nevertheless, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America is a tome that proves the progressive elite still exists, and that not everyone has been won over by his revolution that changed America.

NEW YORK POST, October 26, 2025

Churchill’s Chutzpah

Royal biographer Andrew Morton sizes up the America-loving icon

Not just any biographer gets portrayed in a Netflix series. But Andrew Morton is no ordinary biographer.

Morton released “Diana: Her True Story” in 1992. The source of his blockbuster biography was the princess herself, a fact Morton only revealed after Diana’s death. The details of those melancholy interviews, recorded secretly on cassette tape, appeared in the fifth season of “The Crown.”

“In a funny kind of way, the actual buildup to the Diana book was more dramatic than they portrayed it,” Morton tells The Post. “We swept the room for bugs. There was a lot of counterintelligence work going on there.”

Morton is in New York for the launch of “Winston and the Windsors: How Churchill Shaped a Royal Dynasty,” his latest book on the royal family. As he marks the publication of his 25th biography, Morton is soft-spoken as he enters the grand library of the gilded-age clubhouse where he has just given a reading. It could be the memory of bugged rooms still stings.

“What a beautiful library. It’s almost as big as mine,” he says in his clipped Yorkshire English.

While “Winston and the Windsors” tracks the connection of Britain’s greatest prime minister to the lives of six monarchs, the conversation first turns to New York. Many fail to realize the English statesman was, in fact, half Brooklynite. Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, was born in Cobble Hill in 1854. A “dollar princess,” she married into the British aristocracy and conferred a certain New-York toughness in her America-loving son.

“He’s got the English bulldog and the New York chutzpah,” says Morton. “And unlike many of those who’ve been born in palaces and in high places, he was pushy, he was shovy. He used his elbows to get where he wanted. He didn’t wait for the glittering prizes to fall into his lap. He opened them up, opened the wrapping, and consumed them.”

If New York was part inspiration, the city almost once did him in as well. In December 1931, just up Fifth Avenue from where Morton now spoke, at 76th Street, Churchill was struck down by an unemployed motorist from Yonkers. Churchill had exited a taxi in the middle of the street and forgotten to notice the flow of American traffic.

“It was bad enough to make headlines around the world,” Morton notes, as Churchill was whisked away to Lenox Hill Hospital, saying on intake he was a friend of the king. “And for the king to ask his advisers to get him on the phone, in the days when transatlantic phone calls were tricky, it was a measure of his fame or infamy.”

Churchill at the time was a 57-year-old member of Parliament in need of money after the 1929 stock-market crash, and he made the best of a bad situation. “All the New York papers sent people along to try and interview him. A girl dressed up as a nurse. She was caught by a detective,” Morton recounts.

Instead of giving away the story, Churchill sold his accident to a British newspaper. “So he goes in, and he tries to waft away the nurses and the doctors because he’s on the phone, dictating 2,000 words or whatever on ‘my New York misadventure.’ For which he’s paid the princely sum of $2,500. Which enables him to go off to the Bahamas on holiday.”

The accident also provided Churchill with a doctor’s note for a “naturally indefinite” amount of alcohol to be consumed each day, “especially at mealtimes” — a not-so-sobering script to receive during American Prohibition.

Such New York chutzpah may be one reason Churchill gets admired more today in America than in Great Britain.

“Revisionist history,” Morton laments of the British reception. “Churchill is accused of all kinds of heinous crimes, which he had nothing to do with.” In America, however, “he was someone whom both sides of the aisle admired. When he spoke at Congress, he got standing ovations. People on both sides of the aisle believed him because he’d been right about the German expansionism of the 1930s just as when he gave his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1946. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Trump ordered the bust of Churchill as one of the first things back into the Oval Office.”

For Churchill, the transatlantic affection was mutual. “His big idea,” adds Morton, “was always follow America, always go with America. He believed that Britain’s future lay with America, and America’s future lay with Britain. Yes, and together they could do great things.”

“Winston and the Windsors” covers Churchill’s life across six monarchs, from his birth during Queen Victoria’s reign through Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI and, finally, Elizabeth II. “There’ve been lots of politicians and statesmen who have advised a single president or prime minister,” says Morton, but “there’s not been a politician or statesman who has advised a whole dynasty as Churchill did.” 

The frequent turnover tells us much about Churchill’s long 63 years of public service as well as something of the era’s royal disorder. Such turmoil came to a head in 1936 with the freshly minted Edward VIII’s abdication over his twice-divorced American lover and intended wife, Wallis Simpson.

Surprisingly, as someone who cared both for the monarchy and the new monarch, “Churchill felt that Mrs. Simpson was a good thing for Edward VIII,” says Morton. “Because as Prince of Wales, he was often drunk. He was late to events. His timekeeping was poor. He let people down. And Wallis emphasized the need for manners. She gave him calm, so that all these ticks and things that he did, he became calmer.”

Churchill spent much political capital defending Edward, whose intended marriage stirred up a constitutional crisis. “He’s concerned that politicians can tell the monarch who he can or can’t marry. And that’s overstepping the bounds of the constitution,” Morton says of Churchill’s view of the critics.

“He speaks in Parliament again, and he’s howled down for asking for more time,” Morton explains of Churchill’s defense of the beleaguered royal. A confidant tells Churchill, “In three minutes or five minutes, you’ve done more damage to yourself and the monarchy than anybody could have.”

“So Churchill is a lonely, forlorn figure. But when it comes to the actual days of the abdication, he speaks in the House of Parliament very convincingly, and some people are moved to tears.” 

“Edward gave up his throne and the greatest empire we’ve all ever seen,” Morton says. “He was in love with her.”

Churchill stayed loyal to Edward and Wallis, says Morton, even as the royal family swept them aside and the former king drew close to Hitler and his Nazi ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop.

“It was a great relief to everybody when he finally left because he was in the pocket of Hitler and Ribbentrop,” says Morton, adding, “Ribbentrop was alleged to have had an affair with Wallis.”

And yet even when this started to come out, Churchill didn’t turn away.

“One of the things about Churchill is that he’s very, very loyal to his friends. He was loyal to the nth degree.”

As George VI replaced Edward VIII and Britain entered World War II, Churchill “did a signal service in making the monarchy seem relevant and sympathetic,” says Morton. “When Buckingham Palace was bombed, there’s a famous photograph of Churchill, George VI and the queen going through the rubble. He was the great showman. He got the press there to take pictures of them because he was talking to an audience of one, and that was Roosevelt.”

In its darkest hour, as the Nazis made final preparations for an invasion of the English homeland, Britain’s last hope was America. 

“They pulled out all the diamonds and rubies from the crown jewels, put them in a hatbox and hid them in the basement of Windsor Castle,” Morton says of the royals, persuaded by Churchill to stay put in England rather than flee to Canada. “The queen was learning to shoot and would shoot rats as target practice. Churchill didn’t expect to live more than three weeks.”

Churchill and the new king drew close through the war. “George VI proved to be an admirable counselor and a silent drum” for the prime minister, says Morton. “The king would be let in on these secrets by Churchill, who was carrying this great burden with him. And George VI helped carry that burden.”

When George VI died in 1952 at the age of 56, Churchill became a surrogate parent to Elizabeth II as she ascended the throne at just 25 years old. “He was a father figure, not just to her but to the family,” says Morton.

Asked how Churchill might have viewed this biographer’s other famous princess, “He would have been enamored with Diana,” Morton replies. “What senior statesman, and I include Henry Kissinger and others, wasn’t enamored by Diana?”

Thinking about what happened just up the street nearly a century ago, what would the world be like if Churchill hadn’t survived that car crash?

“We might all be wearing brownshirts,” Morton says of the fascist garb, shifting in his seat. “Churchill was blessed with good luck. He took part in the last-ever cavalry charge. He was lucky to escape injury in the Boer War. He was fortunate not to be pulverized by shells in the First World War when he went back to the trenches after the disaster of the Dardanelles. A series of fortunate events saved him.”

“But it is also fortunate for us,” Morton concludes. “Absolutely fortunate.”

Kingdom Come

On “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” at the Frick Collection.

Among the many miracles to come from Jerusalem, “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” now on view at the Frick Collection, is the latest revelation.1 The wonders of the works on display, with some sixty-eight individual pieces, are only outshone by the tales of their survival and the connections these treasures maintain to that singular place.

Since its rediscovery in the fourth century A.D., the location of Jesus’s tomb—the Holy Sepulcher—has been the most important pilgrimage site in Christendom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at a time when European monarchs could not visit the Holy Land, then under Ottoman rule, the courts of Europe sent treasures to the church built over the tomb for use in rituals and veneration. “To the Holy Sepulcher” represents the first pilgrimage of these objects stateside. The exhibition is the result of an unprecedented loan from the Custody of the Holy Land, the Franciscan division charged since A.D. 1309 with protecting the Roman Catholic treasures in Jerusalem and beyond. The American tour anticipates the opening of the Terra Sancta Museum, a Franciscan facility now under construction at the Monastery of Saint Saviour, by Jerusalem’s New Gate, designed to safeguard and display these objects back home.

The astonishing history of these treasures is made all the more remarkable by their appearance in New York. As the Holy Land comes to Fifth Avenue, we must thank Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s deputy director and chief curator. He organized this exhibition after first learning about the Terra Sancta Museum a few years ago, with the help of Jacques Charles-Gaffiot and Benoît Constensoux of the Terra Sancta Museum’s scientific committee. The exhibition marks this young curator’s final effort at the Frick before his departure for the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, where he is the incoming director. For a scholar so invested in both the fine and decorative arts of Europe, “To the Holy Sepulcher,” we might say, is a fitting swan song of Salomon.

The exhibition leads off with the one item here actually created in the Holy Land: a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher itself, crafted in the eighteenth century. Be sure not to miss it just outside the gallery entrance; on the day I visited, it was not easy to double back. Carved in Bethlehem of local olive and pistachio wood, mother-of-pearl from the shells of the Red Sea, and camel bone, the dollhouse-like assembly was created to be a gift for Europeans from the Franciscans—a memento from rather than for the Holy Sepulcher. The jeweled model reminds us of all this footprint contains and how this church has come down to us through time.

Look up this church in the index of Jerusalem, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s recent history of the city, and the subcategories give some indication of the site’s vicissitudes:

Church of the Holy Sepulchre: and Arab conquests . . . construction by Empress Helena . . . and Crusades . . . daily rituals . . . and Descent of the Holy Fire . . . destruction by fire . . . Fatimid destruction . . . latrines . . . and Mongol raids . . . and Napoleonic invasion . . . Persian destruction . . . and religious conflict . . . and Tartar conquest . . . and Turkish conquests . . .

The layout of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is far different from the grand vision of the Vatican or what one might expect from this axis mundi of Christianity (there is, in fact, a spot in the church marking the very axis point). A concatenation of surprisingly small Romanesque buildings, all of which were built, burned, and reconstructed over various periods, the church has been a site of veneration, speculation, and contention for two millennia—and is made all the more wondrous in its strangeness. No two of the extant floor plans of this church look exactly alike. It is easy to get turned around among its domes and passages, its priests and pilgrims. Make a left turn at the Chapel of Adam, where the blood of Christ ran through Adam’s skull; go past the Stone of Unction, where the body of Christ was cleaned before burial and which pilgrims now rub down with oil; and you might come across a wall of medieval graffiti carved to collect its holy dust.

Today the church is located within the Old City, a short walk from the Temple Mount through narrow, winding streets of Jerusalem stone, and is little changed from that eighteenth-century model. In the time of Jesus, the tomb was part of a sloped cemetery that existed just outside the city walls. Following Titus’s destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Hadrian recast the city as Aelia Capitolina in A.D. 130. Even by then, the tomb had become a site of veneration for the earliest Christians. Hoping to redirect their attention to the Roman gods, Hadrian walled off the tomb, flattened the site, and constructed a temple to Venus in its stead. Nevertheless, the memory of the location endured. Two centuries on, as Rome accepted Christianity with the Edict of Milan, Helena of Constantinople—mother to Emperor Constantine, and Saint Helena to Christians—traveled to Jerusalem and reopened the tomb in 326; her son dedicated the new church on its site in 335. In a nearby well, Helena also discovered pieces of what she believed to be the True Cross. The site of the Crucifixion, known as Calvary Hill or Golgotha, is just 150 feet from the tomb and was soon incorporated in the church grounds.

Regarding the tomb’s history, Evelyn Waugh wrote in his introduction to Helena, his historical novel of 1950, that

if we do accept its authenticity we must, I think, allow an element of the miraculous in its discovery and identification. We do know that most of the relics of the True Cross now venerated in various places have a clear descent from the relic venerated in the first half of the fourth century. It used to be believed by the vulgar that there were enough pieces of this “true cross” to build a battleship.

Much as Waugh encountered them, today the tomb, Calvary Hill, and Helena’s well—in addition to archaeological evidence of Hadrian’s Temple of Venus—are all connected under one roof within the warren of buildings that comprise the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Making this real estate even more complex—and explaining its general appearance of deferred maintenance—the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Syrian, and Ethiopian churches all share in the church’s administration under an arrangement reached in 1757, in the days of the sultan, known as the Status Quo.

“To the Holy Sepulcher” is made up of a selection of precious objects used by the Latin church in its annual rituals around the site and in other places under its protection in the Holy Land. Only recently have these objects been, like the tomb itself in Helena’s day, brought to the light—in this case, after the Cuban Italian scholar Alvar González-Palacios began researching them in the 1980s and exposing them to the greater museum world (his fascinating story gets its due in the exhibition’s lavish catalogue, which also features updated photographs of these freshly cleaned treasures).

Before then, as the Franciscan custodians tell it, these treasures were hidden in plain sight—brought out for special ceremonies but otherwise squirreled away in closets and storerooms, miraculously safe from looting, vandalism, and whatever authority was ruling Jerusalem at any given time. In fact, the greatest threat to such treasures has come from intrachurch rivalry. A sanctuary lamp (ca. 1758–59) of gold and gilt silver attributed to Johann Caspar Kriedemann, showing reliefs of episodes from the life of Christ, was most likely created from the gold of earlier Latin treasure that had been destroyed by the Greek clergy in an attack on the eve of Palm Sunday in 1757. The same goes for the pair of torchères from 1762, remade in Venice by the workshop known as al San Lorenzo Giustinian from the 1,304 ounces of silver recovered by the Franciscans from those destroyed and stolen treasures.

Nevertheless, despite the challenges faced by the church and city, the many treasures in Franciscan custody at the Holy Sepulcher have fared far better than their counterparts in Europe. “To the Holy Sepulcher” contains examples of European metalwork that are otherwise no longer extant—melted down long ago for their raw materials. The sections of the exhibition are therefore divided by region of origin, denoting the French, Iberian, and Germanic sources of these gifts given by European monarchs to Franciscan emissaries for delivery to and use in the Holy Land.

It is, after all, the continuous liturgical function of these ritual objects that has defined their design and sustained them. “Their survival over the centuries is a direct result of their continued use,” says Salomon. As the outgoing director of the cultural heritage office at the Custody of the Holy Land, Friar Stéphane Milovitch explained at the Frick opening, “If the Ottomans knew we had all these kinds of things, they would have liked to take it. So during many centuries we use and we hide—but we used.”

To understand such metalwork and textile, it helps to envision it carried, elevated, illuminated, and worn. At the opening, I met one friar looking at the subtle wear on a section of fleurs-de-lys on a crozier (1654–55) created by Nicolas Dolin. He wanted to see just where the bishops grasped this imposing pastoral staff of gilt silver, glass, and semi-precious stones, made in Paris and given to the Franciscans by Louis XIV.

A special alchemy takes place when such treasures of sculptural relief, created from metal and stone, are held in the lamplit liturgies of the church. Objects such as Dolin’s chalice and paten (1661–63) and Jean Hubé’s ciborium (1668–69) are so finely detailed, with minuscule images from the life of Christ alongside symbols of the holy ancestors of the French kings, that these messages are more intended to be felt than seen. While European monarchs could not travel to Jerusalem in person, their presence was conveyed to the holy altars through the symbolism preserved in these finely wrought materials.

To encounter such objects in a museum setting is therefore a trade-off. Salomon has done what he can to reproduce an altarlike feel in some of these displays, with vested mannequins arranged among the treasures. Nevertheless, we experience them as never intended, not in candlelit glimpses but in close-up stares. Ornate objects such as a solid-gold Neapolitan monstrance of 1746, Antonio de Laurentiis’s throne of Eucharistic exposition of 1754, and a Neapolitan crucifix of gold and lapis lazuli of 1756 are just about too much to take in under the light of the Frick’s spare new special-exhibition space. The same goes for Robert Landry’s reliquary of the true cross (1628–29), containing at its center a fragment of Helena’s fourth-century find.

As an exhibition of holy objects, “To the Holy Sepulcher” ultimately tells us little about the liturgical role of these materials back in Jerusalem. As a display of European metalwork and textile design, however, the show connects us to relics of the European past as never before. This connection is not lost on the Franciscan custodians of these works, who rightly see American institutions such as the Frick as upholding the legacy of Christian Europe even in a post-Christian, post-European age. Today, these treasures speak to the resurrection of Western culture as much as the Resurrection from that Jerusalem tomb. In either context, they represent singular objects of faith.

1. “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum” opened at the Frick Collection, New York, on October 2, 2025, and remains on view through January 5, 2026. The exhibition will also be seen at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (March 15–June 28, 2026. 

Mock stars

The famous forgers who fooled everyone — even the experts

In the words of Cole Porter, “Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?” Art Fraud: 50 Fakes That Fooled the Art World,” the new book by Susie Hodge, will leave you wondering whether any work of art is the real McCoy. “Art fraud is rife,” Hodge begins. “Many experts believe that as much as 50 per cent of all art on the market today is forgery.”

If the 50% statistic sounds phony, you don’t know the half of it. “Art Fraud” casts a gimlet eye on the most famous forgery cases to reveal the truth behind the art world’s worst-kept secret. From the greatest experts on down to the most naïve online bidders, just about anyone can, and will at some point, be duped by the mock.

Of course, artists have always traced out the styles and techniques of others. The ancient Romans made such a business of copying Greek sculptures that scholars still cannot chisel out the source of one discus thrower from the next. Even the greatest artists played the copy game. In the Renaissance, Michelangelo passed off one of his cupids as a Roman original. Canova painted a fake self-portrait by Giorgione. And so on.

“Good artists copy; great artists steal,” said Pablo Picasso, an artist well known for taking up other artists’ innovations as his own (bonjour, Georges Braque).

The Louvre has a longstanding tradition of artists who come to copy the works on the museum’s walls. Manet even met Degas when he was copying a Velázquez painting. But there’s a difference between just duplicating a work of art and passing it off as someone else’s. At the Louvre, a copy must be stamped and cannot be created in the same size as the original. The strict French regulation tells us much about the slippery slope between copy and fraud and the latter’s temptations.

“Art Fraud” offers quick sketches of the range of famous fakers who went that extra step and succeeded in passing off their art as someone else’s, at least for a time. (Of course, it’s very possible the best of them have never been caught.) “Art Fraud” considers their various techniques and motivations — and frankly will leave you with a newfound respect for the fraudulent arts.

Often, it’s not just about the money. Ego plays a role as forgers pass off their own work as the creation of a master, whether old or modern. Sometimes forgers want to expose the art market and disrupt the way works are collected and esteemed, creating forgeries in the process that are designed to be exposed. And sometimes the forger is just another victim, paid a pittance by unscrupulous dealers to create fakes under false pretense, not even aware their creations are being used to defraud.

The Italian sculptor Alceo Dossena (1878-1937) was one such sad case. A student of the Old Masters, in the early 20th century he demonstrated an uncanny ability to carve sculptures in the Gothic and Renaissance style and artificially age them in a way that could fool even the top experts of his time. Two Roman dealers, Alfredo Fasoli and Romano Palesi, ordered up plenty from Dossena, convincing him he was creating work for an American church that had requested new statuary that looked old and weathered.

Carving in the styles of Simone Martini, Giovanni Pisano, Donatello, Michelangelo and Giambologna, Dossena artificially aged his creations in baths of urine. He scraped them, baked them and darkened their finishes to add 500 years of wear to order. Fasoli and Palesi paid Dossena a fraction of the millions they took in as his misattributed work made its way into the collections of Helen Clay Frick, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. Only when new X-ray technology was applied to his sculpture, revealing modern nails, did the ruse begin to come to light.

In another era, Dossena might have been hailed as an esteemed artist in his own right. “We had witnessed the reincarnation of a Renaissance master and an Attic sculptor,” said the German art historian Hans Cürlis once the deception was discovered. Alfred Frankfurter, the editor of Art News, wrote of the “quality of sincerity in Dossena, the almost incredible ability of the man to have worked without affectation and without malevolence in the spirit of the dead past and its masters.” Dossena was cleared of any crime and continued to sculpt, but few wanted his work once the world learned the artist behind it was not an Old Master but just old Alceo Dossena.

The Dutch painter Henricus “Han” van Meegeren (1889-1947) had no such illusions. The most famous faker of all, he tossed off dozens of Vermeers and other works purportedly from the Dutch Golden Age and made the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars. At one time the Dutch art expert Abraham Bredius praised the work, declaring, “It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration — just as it left the painter’s studio. And what a picture!”

As van Meegeren sourced old canvases and ground his own pigments, his work convinced even the dreaded Nazi Hermann Göring, who traded away genuine looted art for a van Meegeren fake. Only after the war, when van Meegeren faced the death penalty for despoiling Dutch heritage during Nazi occupation, did he admit to his deception. Painting a fake Vermeer in front of an audience, he proved the only loser in his deception was the dead Reichsmarschall.

Through van Meegeren’s use of modern Bakelite plastic to harden his paints, subsequent false canvases continue to turn up, most recently at London’s Courtauld Institute in 2011. The case of the American forger Mark Landis (b. 1955) is particularly compelling. Never interested in money, he created fake pictures and fake personas to enjoy the attention that would be lavished on him as a museum donor. Drawing works in a matter of hours with materials purchased at Walmart, he stated, “I felt an impulse to give away pictures. I’d watched so much TV and learned about philanthropists — wealthy people who gave to others — so I gave a picture away, and I was treated with so much respect and deference and friendship. Those are things I had never experienced before. I really liked it, and I got addicted to it.”

To pass off a fake, forgers need not only period materials and a convincing style but also a plausible backstory or what the art world calls provenance. The British painter John Myatt (b. 1945) at one time advertised himself as a copyist for hire. His materials were far from historical — emulsion paint and K-Y jelly. Nevertheless, his accomplice John Drewe created convincing backstories by adding fake documents to artist archives and replacing pages in art catalogues, creating historical records for work that in fact never existed.

The most recent headline case of art fraud, involving the loss of tens of millions of dollars and shuttering of New York’s oldest art gallery, now reads like a copy of Alceo Dossena. The art dealer Glafira Rosales claimed to have discovered a trove of modern masterpieces. Her source was a mysterious “Mr. X Junior,” whose father, she said, had secretly collected the work through a gay liaison.

The reality was far more prosaic: Pei-Shen Qian, an immigrant living in Queens, unknowingly painted the abstractions in a garage to order. Like that modern nail in Dossena’s statue, an ahistorical pigment was the nail in the coffin.

Art frauds can be easy to spot in retrospect but are far more challenging in the moment. Nowadays, few would say a van Meegeren is anything but a van Meegeren. The stories in “Art Fraud” reveal how people believe what others believe. We accept labels and defer to experts. This is especially the case when there’s little to gain from exposing the lie aside from knowing the truth.

Today, as we look to a future of generative artificial intelligence and “deep fakes,” the only real certainty is the unreliability of anything we may see. Copy that.

Inside the Cult of Equinox

Fueled by a mysterious marketing campaign, the gym now has more than 100 outposts

Scratch the surface of Silver Age Rome and what do you find? Most likely, a tight subterranean vault built as a meeting room for the followers of Mithras. This Persian mystery cult was everywhere in the early Anni Domini, coming to prominence between the decline of Hellenism and the rise of Christianity, filling that gap between the gods of Olympus and the God of Moses. The cult’s dark temples, the Mithraea, squeezed devotees into opposing benches designed to make them uncomfortable, all while in communion with their fellow initiates. Today, sociologists might call a Mithraeum a “third place.” Here was the kind of space where Roman men who had become disillusioned with Jupiter Stator could go between work and home to be purified together in a shower of bull’s blood.

The modern gym is one of our own ubiquitous third places, but only the urban fitness chain known as Equinox has positioned itself as an upscale mystery cult. “COMMIT TO SOMETHING,” beckons the gnostic advertising campaign of this self-described “high-performance lifestyle leader.” When presented with the accompanying outsize images obstructing the gym’s windows, we might well wonder: commit to what?

Launched in 1991, the gym now has more than 100 outposts spread across New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Houston and Washington, DC, as well as London, Toronto and Vancouver. The Equinox campaign started by the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy in 2016, diverged notably from the standard gym appeal of “improving lives through fitness” or “member-friendly memberships that won’t break the bank,” as the bargain-basement New York Sports Club might say. First shot by Steven Klein – whom the New Yorker described as creating “fashion photography with a pistol and a pulse” for his images that “teetered between the seductive and the sadistic” – the Equinox campaign was far from mens sana in corpore sano. It wasn’t even about going to the gym at all.

Instead, we saw a model etching a tattoo over what remained of her preemptive double mastectomy. “Scars aren’t ugly,” she said in the video component. “Scars are really just beautiful badges reminding you what you chose to go against; not just the size of your opponent but the size of your commitment.” Other materials presented a young man with a paralyzing stutter. “Your commitment tells your story better than you ever could,” he eked out. In another, three deaf cheerleaders signed in unison. In another, a model cut her hands practicing the harp as blood ran down her instrument. In another, a naked man received a haircut and manicure-pedicure as a small mirror covered his pudendum. In another, a woman breastfed two babies at her table at a restaurant. In yet another, a shirtless man was soon covered in bees.

At the time, Equinox promoted its campaign as an “intimate, provocative and deeply moving exploration of personal identity” that “confronts current cultural issues and asserts that commitment has the power to define who we are in the deepest sense.”

This year, Equinox updated the approach with a shoot by the British fashion photographer Charlotte Wales that extended these themes: a model licks a leather boot; a woman lies on a bed of nails as a robotic arm sticks her with a hypodermic needle; another model (this time transsexual) walks side by side with an AI version of their likeness covered in metallic parts. “Commitment is obsessed,” reads Equinox’s latest ad copy. “It’s now. It’s relentless. Always one step ahead. Abandon half-measures. Surrender to your urges. Sacrifice for obsession. Commitment isn’t a choice. It’s an awakening. Let desire drive you. Commit to something.”

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here? To hammer home the infernal message, Equinox throws extra shade on those who make that naive New Year’s resolution to get in shape. “If you waited for the ball to drop, you dropped the ball,” advises the gym. “On January 1, we blocked new membership sign-ups. Because commitment doesn’t start when the calendar resets. It’s for those who are all in. Not when the ball drops, the clock strikes, or the calendar flips – but always.”

So what if you can’t commit to the gym, the message goes. You should really be committed to an intensive-care unit. Or a mental asylum. Or you should receive a felony charge. But in truth, the “something” to which one mainly commits at Equinox is a mid-four-figure annual fee.

The real mystery of Equinox is what you get for the expense. In June, New York attorney general Letitia James won a $600,000 judgment against the company by arguing that its contractual agreements were too hard to break. The award of a mere $250 to each of the plaintiffs – which equaled less than a month of dues, to say nothing of the initiation fee – left members less than impressed. “Tish gets ripped!” ran the New York Post headline. “New Yorkers not impressed with AG Letitia James’s crackdown on gyms.”

Equinox positions its membership as fast-track admission to the cosmopolitan faith. At the root of such modern urbanism, of course, is masochism. High taxes, crowded subways and filthy streets appeal to the broken-window theory in reverse: that our souls will only get better if our city lives get worse. Professional sadists such as New York’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani therefore thrive in the same way as that Equinox spin instructor who comes around to crank up your bike’s resistance. It’s all about abnegating the flesh and globalizing the intifada to a techno beat. In one early Equinox advertisement, a screaming, shirtless woman holds up her fist in front of a classical building surrounded by a night-time security detail. Just what she is protesting does not matter so much as the appearance of her consequence-free LARPing. (She is portrayed by the fitness model Bianca Van Damme, daughter of the “muscles from Brussels” Jean-Claude Van Damme.)

Equinox members may not be true basement-dwelling “Brooklynites for Gaza,” but they are content to go along with the latest thing as long as the towels are stocked and the steam room stays open. We all signed up to be in this Paul Verhoeven-movie of a place, and that’s life in the big city.

“A manic attempt to make the posthuman sexy,” is how one agnostic member explained it to me. “I have the distressing sense that I am beholding another stripe – or, heaven forbid, chevron – on the ghastly and vexillologically metastasizing ‘progress flag.’ The clientele strikes me as being finance and finance-adjacent bros plus gay men for whom human growth hormone, rather than Ozempic, is still the lifestyle supplement of choice. As for the women, I’d have no idea. I don’t notice.”

Not noticing is a big part of the Equinox culture. Members don’t converse. Most employ monastic silence as they move from station to station, carrying their water bottles and iPhones upon which a small dog must be featured on the lock screen. No grunts. Little sweat. The chilled eucalyptus towels see to that. After reports a decade ago of problems in the steam room, the facility posted signs of a “zero-tolerance policy regarding inappropriate, sexual or lewd behavior. Our staff is on notice.” The closest most come to catching a sexually transmitted disease at today’s Equinox is when a form of athlete’s foot requires an oral course of fungicide (I now wear shower shoes).

And yet, past the many cult symbols that line its entry, Equinox tends to be well-maintained and almost always uncrowded. Bottles of four different soaps and lotions line each shower stall: a shampoo and conditioner of rose, pepper and sage; a facial cleanser of aloe, geranium and rose; a body cleanser of chamomile, bergamot and rose. Additional bottles of face and body cream are available in the locker rooms. So too are Q-Tips, deodorant, mouthwash, razors, even a container of black hair ties to maintain one’s man bun. The only recent controversy here occurred a year ago, when Equinox switched out its Kiehl’s line of products for Grown Alchemist, a brand that can also be purchased at (gasp) Target.

My Equinox membership grants me access to all the spin classes and boxing sessions my heart desires. There is a mobile media library showing the proper use of every exercise machine – something I found particularly useful as I recovered from a suite of orthopedic setbacks. With my level of membership, I can visit the Flatiron location across from my office, the Upper West Side location next to my apartment, the Columbus Circle location with the saltwater pool and just about every other location save for the nirvana that is the new Equinox Hudson Yards, which would cost me another $50 a month. Perhaps one day I too will join this “most spacious, thoughtful, and connected Equinox ever… the purest expression of high-performance living yet. The 60,000-square-foot luxury destination spans two floors and includes a 15,000-square-foot pool and sundeck.”

Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been spotted in his Make America Healthy Again jeans and hiking boots, lifting at Equinox. At some point we all reach that moment in life when we realize our aging frames must be committed to a daily routine of physical therapy.

By spending more than $300 a month with a company that advertises personal destruction, many urban professionals may feel they have purchased some progressive blessing on their self-care. For others such as myself, Equinox is simply a very nice gym.

Preference for the primitive

On the newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What to make of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, dedicated to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and ancient America? Astonishing, frightening, and baffling are three words that come to mind—and that’s more a reflection of the curatorial and architectural decisions that have been made here than of the tribal art on display.

Some 1,800 works from five different continents are newly jumbled together across 40,000 square feet in the rebooted galleries, which reopened on May 31 after a four-year closure and $70 million redo. New “diagonal trajector[ies]” have been “designed to foreground ancestral connections and Indigenous temporalities,” according to the Met’s opening announcement. “[N]ew perspectives on Indigenous concepts of the natural world as well as nuanced perceptions of gender roles” have been “newly framed by Indigenous perspectives.” Meanwhile, new cacophonies of “wall text and digital narratives placed throughout the galleries elevate Indigenous voices, foregrounding the latest developments in interdisciplinary scholarship.” Good luck just keeping track of what region a work is from or even what continent you think you are looking at. Devised by the appropriately named WHY Architecture, in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle and the Met’s design department, these galleries have been positioned to keep you guessing.

The cultural muddle, now arranged in a labyrinth of gleaming white walls and glass screens, is made all the more confusing in a blinding resplendence, illuminated by reglazed windows onto Central Park, that is visually appealing but programmatically suspect. Aztec, Asmat, Asante: sightlines bleed from one culture into the next. Under the curation of Alisa LaGamma (African art), Joanne Pillsbury (ancient Americas), and Maia Nuku (Oceania), what were once separate sections dedicated to distinct regions are now demarcated with barely a line on the floor.

This new open-plan design has been proposed to “suggest the unique spatial and relational dynamics of Oceania: horizon lines, the arching dome of the sky, and islands tethered in a vast ocean.” Elsewhere, it’s meant to take “inspiration from ancient American architectural traditions.” Along the ceiling, there are now “horizontal baffles that suggest ribbing to pay homage to one of Africa’s most celebrated structures: the Great Mosque of Jenne in Mali.” Such tossed-off, facile references are the window dressing of an Apple Store aesthetic selling Global South 2.0, with often brutal cultures that were oceans apart from one another—cultures that might as soon have killed, sacrificed, and devoured each other if they could.

With some exceptions, many of these works have been on display at the Met since this wing first opened in 1982. What’s different now are the hundreds of wall labels that surround them, justify them, and defend their continued display. Such justification is not for nothing. Across the park, at the American Museum of Natural History, entire galleries are being boarded up and turned into halls of shame. Generations of schoolchildren may wonder why the AMNH’s models of Eastern Woodland longhouses are suddenly treated as entartete Kunst. As the American Museum of Natural History “embraces new regulations,” reads one explanation plastered onto a hastily erected plywood screen, “these Halls displayed artifacts that may be objects of cultural significance, and the Museum does not have consent to display them.” If a museum can no longer display “objects of cultural significance,” one should wonder what remains beyond the gift shop.

Free of the baggage of consensual anthropology, the Metropolitan has faced the opposite conundrum: how to add ethnographic context to its otherwise disconnected displays, often collected merely for their aesthetic attributes (especially as they relate to modern Western art). The resulting pronouncements in the renovated wing make a number of contortions to please contemporary sensibilities, even promoting the violence informing the hall’s artistic expression. Just consider the wall label titled “Generating Vitality in the Asmat World”:

Unlike women who can support life within their own bodies, Asmat men wishing to capture nature’s generative capacities once did so through the act of headhunting. This practice—an important aspect of male ritual prestige before its prohibition in the twentieth century by Dutch colonial authorities—involved pursuing a rival and taking his life. Since the human head contains the most concentrated source of vitality, its capture (and the preservation of the skull in particular) catalyzed future cycles of growth and rebirth for humans, ancestors, and the natural world.

Like the sweetmeats of a carved-up head, there is much to extract from such a statement. In short, before the prohibition of cannibalism in New Guinea by colonial authorities and the arrival of Catholic missionaries, for peoples such as the Asmat, the depth of their creative expression was a direct testament to the ferocity of their bloodlust. Headhunting may indeed have been an “important aspect of male ritual prestige,” but one is left wondering if the victims of the Asmat regret the Dutch arrival in the East Indies. Try justifying anti-colonialism to a shrunken head.

The radical relativism of the ethno-aesthetics on display in the Met’s confounding galleries is the capstone to a long-range project, one that has less to do with prehistoric third-world cultures and more with the obsessions of modern Western taste. Beyond the story of the family of man, these particular galleries are ultimately about the family of Rockefeller.

“Primitive” is a word that has been so thoroughly expunged from any mention in this wing that its absence belies a lingering presence. That’s part of the untold story here, scrubbed from the countless wall labels and disclosures of “provenance”: there would be no Met wing dedicated to the arts of Africa, ancient America, and Oceania without the Rockefellers’ primitivist passions and the tragic intergenerational dynamics that came as a consequence of their zeal.

“The more you prefer the primitive,” wrote the art historian E. H. Gombrich, “the less you can become primitive.” In the modern world, simplicity, subjectivity, even crudity can appeal to sophisticated taste as elite culture looks for deeper truths beneath the polish of refinement. The Rockefellers have certainly taken this view to heart. Over successive generations, the family has shown a distinct preference for the primitive in their cultural philanthropy, from their support for American folk art to the primitivist turn of international modernism. Abby Aldrich Rockfeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., helped establish both Colonial Williamsburg and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1957, her son, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, founded the Museum of Primitive Art in a townhouse on the same block as MOMA as well as their former city residence. Headed up by the wide-ranging art historian Robert Goldwater, inspired by modernism’s primitivist influences and Paris’s Musée du Trocadéro, the Museum of Primitive Art as its name implied sought to elevate the traditional sculpture and textiles of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania from artifact to the level of high art.

Beginning in the 1960s, through the intermediation of René d’Harnoncourt, then the director of MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller began transferring these primitive works to the Metropolitan. He not only seeded a collection where none existed but also underwrote the construction of the wing to house it. Even today, some one-third of the works in the Met’s primitive collection passed through Rockefeller hands, including many of its most notable pieces, such as a Dogon blacksmith’s Priest with Raised Arms (1300s–1600s), the Eyema byeri (reliquary guardian figure) (1800s–early 1900s) of an Okak-Fang artist, and the Gwandansu figure (1400s–1600s) by a Bamana numuw (blacksmith). Since the term “primitive” has now become outmoded and even deeply regretted, the Met’s wall labels and provenancial literature identify all of these works as merely having passed through “MPA,” never once explaining that the acronym is short for Museum of Primitive Art.

This is but one of the many sleights of hand in the renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—originally known as the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Wing. Far more significant is the disappearance (then and now) of Michael Clark Rockefeller, Nelson’s son, for whom the wing is named. A “memorial” would suggest a death, but the Met has whitewashed the tragedy of his involvement in these galleries, now merely stating that he was

greatly inspired by the cultures and art of the Pacific and pursued new avenues of inquiry into artistic practice during his travels there. Among the wing’s signature works are the striking Asmat sculptures he researched and collected in southwest New Guinea.

What gets left unsaid is that Michael, a year out of college, disappeared while collecting those very sculptures—trading sachets of tobacco for totemic bis poles, adorned with references to shrunken heads, that now dominate the wing named in his honor. As an added tragedy, Michael may have become the victim of the same cannibalistic culture he was intent on discovering and collecting. Departing from the official Harvard-Peabody Expedition that first brought him to study the Ndani people in the Baliem Valley in the Central Highlands of Western New Guinea in early 1961, he pursued the works of the Asmat in a two-man mission, floating along the coast of New Guinea aboard a catamaran jury-rigged from two canoes. On November 18 of that year, his catamaran capsized in the swift crosscurrents of the mouth of the Eilanden, or Betsj, River. He gathered together a knife and compass and tethered up the boat’s gas tanks as a personal flotation device, determined to make for shore. He was last seen swimming away by his crewmate, the Dutch anthropologist René Wassing, who held onto the wreckage and was recovered the following day, along with Michael’s journals.

Published six years later, the journals speak of Michael’s harrowing infatuation with these cannibals. Facing the specter of his parents’ impending divorce, wishing to please his father, then the governor of New York, by contributing to his Museum of Primitive Art, Michael pursued the Asmat at his own peril. As he wrote in his journal:

What we saw were some imposing remnants of a marvelous past. I suppose not so marvelous from a Christian point of view, for the Asmats were a ferocious headhunting people constantly engaged in inter-village war and raids of varying degrees of deadliness. However, the sculpture that has been and (in some areas) is being produced by Asmat artists is unquestionably some of the greatest to come from a primitive culture . . . .

And equally as remarkable as the art is the fact that the culture which produces it is still intact; some remote areas are still headhunting; and only five years ago almost the whole area was headhunting.

Afinal Rockefeller in this tragedy is Mary Rockefeller Morgan, Michael’s fraternal twin sister. Now eighty-seven years old, she has been a vocal donor to the renovation. Her brother is now absent from the public side of the wing that bears his name—and most likely that’s the point. With new sightlines that connect Nelson’s Priest with Raised Arms with Michael’s bis poles beyond, this wing feels like a private family shrine as never before. While publicly drawing us into its purely expressive wonders, this primitive collection has a private side that tells a very different story.

Fool Britannia

On “Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” & the newly reopened Yale Center for British Art.

When the Yale Center for British Art first dropped anchor in 1977 on the far side of New Haven’s Chapel Street, the cultural ocean-liner arrived as one of the last great vessels from the golden age of American museum-making. The center was the product of an unprecedented 1966 gift to Yale by Paul Mellon. A philanthropist, Anglophile, and member of the class of 1929, he gathered together the largest single collection of British art outside of the United Kingdom and gave it to the public trust. Paul Mellon came to the arts of Great Britain as the son of the American industrialist Andrew W. Mellon, who served as ambassador to the Court of St. James, and an English mother, Nora McMullen. Paul Mellon assembled and donated his collection much as his father had done in founding the National Gallery of Art some three decades earlier in Washington, D.C. Like his father, he funded the construction of a building to house his bequests and an endowment to maintain them—ensuring his museum would be free and open to the public in perpetuity, as well as quasi-independent of the university and its other attendant interests.

Tapping the architect Louis I. Kahn to design a sister ship to his Yale University Art Gallery building of 1953, berthed just across Chapel Street, the YCBA came to occupy one of the finest museum buildings of the last half century. Kahn, who died three years before its completion, commanded an alchemic sense for elevating mass. His integration of concrete and steel, white oak and Belgian linen, set his building afloat, while his attention to natural light, channeled through a grid of 224 skylights, illuminated Mellon’s collection in an energizing glow.

Today Mellon’s bequest still makes up 80 percent of the holdings of the Yale Center for British Art—now comprising some 2,000 paintings, 250 sculptures, 20,000 drawings and watercolors, 35,000 prints, 3,000 photographs, and 35,000 rare books and manuscripts, with a particularly notable selection of British art from the 1720s to the 1850s. Recently the center has been rightly attending to the physical plant that houses these treasures through a series of meticulous renovations. In “Conserving Kahn,” the architect George Knight, whose firm has overseen this two-decade-long project, wrote about its challenges for the December 2016 issue of The New Criterion. Textile finishes and artificial lighting, skylight domes and electrical systems have all required special attention to keep Kahn’s building shipshape and Bristol fashion. Now completing its second multiyear closure in under twenty years, the center has again reopened with a reinstallation of its collection and new special exhibitions, including collection shows focused on its holdings of J. M. W. Turner and George Romney.

Mellon’s farsighted beneficence has more than ensured the financial seaworthiness of his institution, now more than a quarter century after his death at age ninety-one in 1999. The institution boasts an annual operating budget of nearly $40 million, mostly sourced from its endowment, which is more than enough to attend to its collection with money to spare for its fastidious upkeep—$16 million for the latest round, to the envy of Yale’s other, relatively poorer cultural redoubts.

Despite its financial buoyancy, or perhaps even because of the independent resources that have kept it afloat like a cork, the Yale Center for British Art has recently seemed adrift. Years of leadership churn with a listless affinity for the England of Gainsborough and Reynolds, Constable and Stubbs has taken its toll. Rather than right the ship, the Yale Center for British Art is now steaming away from the safe harbor of its founding with only increasing contempt for its permanent collection.

In 2020 the YCBA removed its very first acquisition, a portrait of Elihu Yale, from public view in an elaborate ceremony of contemporary cancellation. Attributed to John Verelst (ca. 1675–1734), the painting had been a gift to Yale from Andrew Cavendish, the eleventh Duke of Devonshire, in honor of Mellon’s British initiative. Formerly known as Elihu Yale; William Cavendish, the second Duke of Devonshire; Lord James Cavendish; Mr. Tunstal; and an Enslaved Servant, the work was denounced by the “Elihu Yale Portrait Research Team,” formed by the center’s then-director, for its depiction of its unnamed servant. The team called the painting a “stark reminder of Britain’s entrenchment in the transatlantic slave trade.” The painting was publicly stripped of its historical title and subsequently “referred to here by its accession number, B1970.1.” In place of B1970.1, the YCBA then erected a reinterpreted work by Titus Kaphar called Enough About You (2016), which reimagined the painting with a golden frame around the servant figure and the rest of the canvas as a crumpled lump.

Other paintings in Mellon’s collection met a similar fate of interrogation, denunciation, and public shaming. The YCBA’s latest rehanging, called “In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art,” further strips collection highlights from the main galleries and replaces them with interventions selected for their political identities rather than primarily aesthetic interest. A large 2017 sculpture by the British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, for example, whose work “uses citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation,” according to the artist’s website, now greets visitors to the permanent collection. Next up in October will be a survey of the British Guyanese artist Hew Locke, a sculptor who works, according to the center, in the “postcolonial baroque.” Meanwhile, paintings such as John Martin’s The Deluge (1834) have been relegated to the Long Gallery, a room that now functions as open storage with two hundred works hung floor to ceiling, their identities only available on a forty-page printout.

Martina Droth, a YCBA curator and its new director as of January, has continued the center’s intersectional inquest by moving on from race to extend the identitarian trinity to class and gender, all now with a celebrity flourish. At the center of these efforts is Droth’s promotion of a self-styled champion of working-class women, and in particular herself—the artist Tracey Emin.

“Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” is the title of the Yale Center for British Art’s flagship reopening exhibition.1 “I loved you until the morning” is likewise how one might feel after visiting today’s Yale Center for British Art. The interventions begin in the building’s Entrance Court. Here the center has commissioned a mirrored neon installation based on Emin’s scribbled handwriting featuring the title of her show. What was once a dappled introduction to the treasures within, with a view to the rooftop skylights and the gallery floors opening onto a lightwell, is now “good for selfies,” as Droth explained at the opening preview. The twenty-four-hour-a-day electric banner, here a quasi–work of art, also does an end run around the building’s prohibition on signage. This is Louis I. Kahn’s Cunard Queen of a museum rebranded as a Carnival fun-ship cruise.

The carnivalesque atmosphere continues through Emin’s special exhibition, a besotted assembly of nineteen paintings along with sculpture and works on paper spread across the museum’s second-floor gallery. Touring these sketchy compositions of splattered reds and female undercarriage, we can learn how one canvas, I Said No (ca. 2005–15), confronts the artist’s teenage rape. Emin’s stoma, tube, and urostomy bag, a consequence of her bladder-cancer surgery of 2020, get referenced through a dashed-off line and bloody square in And It Was Love (2023). One work reflects an act of cunnilingus by Emin’s ex-boyfriend. In another there is an abortion table. Still another is titled I Wanted You to F*ck the Inside of My Mind (2018). And so on.

A faux-naif in creative matters, especially her own promotion, Emin has been riding a wave of notoriety since the heady days of the Young British Artists in the 1990s. Trained as a painter—one who did, in fact, produce Bonnard-like portraits in her student years—she soon focused on the marketing of her own overexposure to command headlines if not critical acclaim. “It wasn’t like I wanted a career in painting. I wanted to be an artist,” she explains of her turn to shock.

Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), a tent embroidered with the names of her supposed bedmates, entered the collection of Charles Saatchi and toured with the infamous “Sensation” show. My Bed, the 1998 installation that turned the unmade into a Readymade, recreated her slatternly sleeping arrangements as an installation of dirty sheets, condoms, underwear, contraceptives, alcohol bottles, cigarettes, and pills. This “big, giant, seminal piece of work,” as she aptly called it, was exhibited at the Tate but almost incinerated as a biohazard by customs officials when first touring Japan.

Emin returned to painting in 2007, first to represent Britain in an underwhelming display at the Venice Biennale and later as a primary mode of production. Whether working in acrylic or video, embroidery or published writing, Emin has long seemed incapable, or at least unwilling, to make art about anything but herself. For thirty years her body of work has been her body as public defilement—prurient advertisements that could be collected and exchanged in a multitude of media. In her catalogue essay, Martina Droth argues that

Critics, many of them in the popular press, have routinely—and willfully—mistaken her work for unmediated autobiography, accusing her of narcissism, a desire to shock, and an obsession with publicity and fame.

Routinely willfully mistaken? Emin’s self-obsessed oeuvre suggests little otherwise.

Emin’s elective abortion of 1990, for example, has become a recurring talking point. Her elevation of the abortion in her public persona—in one case painting publicly while naked to “exorcise” the episode, in another recording a video of her peregrinations to the abortion clinic—has kept her in the British eye and, she claims, helped to make her career. “I wasn’t going to go all the way through the Royal College of Art,” she says, “get this amazing education, learn to paint, and then be a single mother.” In her catalogue essay, Droth cheers the results:

The prospect of single motherhood, social housing, and poverty . . . led her to seek an abortion. . . . In the mid-1990s Emin began to recognize her pregnancy and abortion as experiences inextricably bound to her self-understanding as an artist. . . . [P]regnancy stood for the end of Emin’s art, and abortion came to mean its survival. . . . [T]he history of painting is a history that includes Emin at all only because she chose not to become a single mother.

For all of the museum world’s cross examination of its collections, it is curious how some mythologies still go unchallenged, such as the role of galleries and collectors in Emin’s commercial self-abasement. Even as the museum consulted with “consent educators” and the gender-studies department to “develop the content warning and programming around the show,” according to the Yale Alumni Magazine, the Yale Center for British Art displays little self-awareness of its own complicity in what is essentially a marketing scheme, now laundered with Ivy League detergent.

Born in Croydon in 1963, Emin today controls an operation that supports studios in London and on the Côte d’Azur along with a thirty-thousand-square-foot painting factory in her coastal hometown of working-class Margate. Her art production has long outpaced her institutional acceptance. The YCBA may believe it has made a bold contemporary statement in mounting Emin’s first American museum show. Yet Emin is the greater beneficiary as her work receives the imprimatur she has long lacked. American audiences have always shown far less interest than English ones in her class-and-gender provocations. A famous British artist who has never quite captured the American consciousness—much like a pop band that cannot crack the U.S. airwaves—she now receives a prized stateside foothold. “It’s important, and it’s good for me, my first museum show in America, to be associated with such a strong educational platform,” Emin frankly states in an interview at the center. “Whatever they might have thought about me previously, they will have to rethink again, ’cause I’ve been invited here.”

It could be argued that Emin’s British notoriety alone now warrants a turn at the Yale Center for British Art. There are those who may find interest in her paintings, even if her celebrity presence does more to distract from her own aesthetic merits and that of the other artists on display than enhance them. With a poem by Emin included in a YCBA publication of Turner’s last sketchbook, efforts to align her work with Turner and their connection to Margate are tenuous at best and merely distort our understanding of a painter of two centuries previous.

Ultimately, it is the proximity of this contemporary artist and her commercial operation to the administration of an academic museum that is most alarming. We are informed that “I Loved You Until the Morning” has been “curated by Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, with Tracey Emin and her creative director, Harry Weller.” The involvement of Emin’s galleries—White Cube, Xavier Hufkens, and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill—goes on to receive its own mention in the exhibition catalogue.

There was a time when ceding institutional autonomy to an artist and her handlers, no matter the style, would have been an actionable offense. Clearly, times have changed. Droth treats Emin with all the professional neutrality of a celebrity crush. “Emin has been an active and generous partner in shaping the exhibition,” she boasts, “lending paintings that are precious to her.” Introducing Emin for a conversation at the center, Droth maintains that, “We are here to celebrate a truly amazing artist.” Calling her “one of the leading artistic voices of our time,” Droth in her catalogue essay concludes that Emin “has rewritten that script and put ‘Mad Tracey from Margate,’ as she has described herself, into art’s ‘f*cking epicenter.’”

Emin plays the fool. Meanwhile, the Yale Center for British Art has simply been played.

1. “Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” opened at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, on March 29 and remains on view through August 10, 2025. ↩

In the New York Times, I offered my view of the president's recent actions at the National Portrait Gallery.

Beyond Grosz

On “Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity,” at the Neue Galerie, New York.

The end of the First World War shocked the arts, nowhere more so than in Germany. Empire was out. Democracy was in. A thin veil of liberalism shrouded the darker forces of defeatism, instability, and resentment. As architects and designers smoothed over the rough edges, artists focused on the sheen of this new society to identify its rips and tears.

A critic at the time called this confounding and ultimately tragic movement the Neue Sachlichkeit, for the “new objectivity” that looked to salvage Germany with sober realism and brutal honesty. Just what was newly objective about this cultural moment that swept through the Weimar Republic in the interwar years between 1918 and 1933 is now the subject of a broad survey at New York’s Neue Galerie—one that takes into account not only the era’s painting but also its sculpture, architecture, photography, film, and design.1

“Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity” has been curated at Neue Galerie by Olaf Peters, a professor at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, who last organized the Neue’s “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915–1925,” which I reviewed in this space in January 2024. The timing of the exhibition pays tribute to another historian and curator, Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, who helped coin the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” and organized a historic survey of representative paintings a century ago at the Kunst­halle Mannheim.

Germany’s new objectivity, which might better be understood as a new frankness, reflected a larger, international turn away from what were seen as the excesses of abstraction and expressionism in favor of a renewed commitment to representation. In his “Introduction to ‘New Objectivity’” of 1925, Hartlaub wrote of artists “disillusioned, sobered, often resigned to the point of cynicism having nearly given up on themselves after a moment of unbounded, nearly apocalyptic hope,” ones who “in the midst of the catastrophe have begun to ponder what is most immediate, certain, and durable: truth and craft.”

As presented by Peters, this spirit of objectivity extended beyond the satirical eye of such painters as George Grosz and Otto Dix, the focus of Hartlaub’s original show, to the clean lines of the Bauhaus, which was founded in Weimar in 1919, and to the crisp focus of modern photography and design. “The catastrophe of the war demanded a pitiless and undaunted eye,” Peters writes in the exhibition’s extensive catalogue, an eye that he argues took on a wider range of vision than initially understood. “Neue Sachlichkeit was an artistic movement that seized an entire country.”

An opening room here called “Playground and Object” leads to Oskar Schlemmer’s iconic 1932 Bauhaus Stairway (Museum of Modern Art). This smooth painting of faceless female figures ascending a stripped-down staircase suggests the levitational mobility of this new era, at least as taken step by step. The work is supplemented by a 1929 Schlemmer painting of five nudes and a 1923 lithograph for a Bauhaus exhibition by Fritz Schleifer, both from private collections, all of which reduce the particulars of human expression to robotic forms.

“Playground and Object” suggests the breadth of the new objective style. A suite of unflinching photographs by August Sander, of family, neighbors, and children, is mixed with snapshots and collages by Josef Albers, Aenne Biermann, Kurt Schwitters, and Rudolf Kramer. A remarkable 1930 documentary-like film called People on Sunday by Robert Siodmak, cowritten by none other than Billy Wilder, here presented on a video monitor, deserves a seat for its seventy-three-minute window onto the so-called new man and woman of Weimar.

There is much to take in through this opening presentation, including a vitrine of modern conveniences such as a spread of Bauhaus tableware by Marianne Brandt as well as clinical photographs by Hans Finsler, photographic studies of garbage by Rudolf Kramer, and a curious selection of paintings of children with their colorful toys by Otto Dix, Heribert Fischer-Geising, Wilhelm Heckrott, Hilde Rakebrand, and Wilhelm Lachnit. Taken as a whole, the selection suggests a peacetime dividend merely supporting an artificial normalcy, one in which dolls, mannequins, children, and pets all wear the same mask.

Figure and Space,” the title of the following room, brings together compressed landscapes with scenes of more direct social commentary. George Grosz’s Eclipse of the Sun (1926, Heckscher Museum of Art) is a well-known example of the latter. A bombastic assembly of military, industrial, and bureaucratic figures conspire around a donkey with blinders on, all the while stepping on a child caged below their feet. The symbol of a dollar sign flashes across the horizon. A top-hatted industrialist loaded down with munitions whispers in the ear of a uniformed figure resembling Paul von Hindenburg.

As he turned against the expressive surface treatments of modernism, Grosz’s satirical extremes mixed acidic criticism with traditional paint handling. Writing in 1931, Grosz likened the precision of his work to that of Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch: “Do not fear looking back to your ancestors. . . . Why then the usual pilgrimage to the philistine French Mecca? Why not return to our ancestors and set forth a German tradition?”

Georg Scholz’s Of Things to Come (1922, Neue Galerie) may be more restrained than Grosz’s work but no less direct. Three frowning men survey open ground in front of a backdrop of factories. Their cigars, cigarettes, and pipes join the smoking stacks behind them. Similarly, the three frog-faced figures in Franz M. Jansen’s Masks (1925, lvr-Landesmuseum, Bonn) might suggest Weimar’s croaking relationship between military and business or between man and woman.

Remove such figures and we come to the pendant side to representation in the Neue Sachlichkeit. Educated at the Bauhaus, where he studied with Lyonel Feininger, Carl Grossberg produced deadpan reflections of town and industry. Marktbreit (Marktbreit am Main, Bavaria) (1931) is an assembly of red roofs. Jacquard Weaving Mill (1934) captures textile machines mid-production. Both of these paintings and the five other works by Grossberg, all on loan from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, find compositional order in the chaos of their busy depictions, here stripped of people and arranged in deep perspective.

Writing in 1926, the art historian Justus Bier, who later became the director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, took note of Grossberg’s

factories, machine halls, monstrosities of dynamos, rolling mills, furnaces, hammers—presented without false enthusiasm, full of a hard and mental sobriety of observation that can wrest clarity, coherence, distinctness of function from the heap, the chaos of forms.

Similar examples are Volker Böhringer’s High Pressure Steam (1923, Merrill C. Berman Collection) and Karl Hanusch’s Airport Observation Tower (1927, Städtische Sammlungen Freital). Architectural materials such as a brick wall, a wooden post, and a metal tread plate appear to be stamped right into the surfaces of the compositions. Compared to these works, two relatively benign still-lifes by Eberhard Viegener, of bananas, jugs, and cacti from 1927 and 1928, might seem out of place, but they reveal the echoes of Henri Rousseau in much of this new objectivity.

A large gallery called “Character and Representation” then presents the portraiture and artists we most associate with the Neue Sachlichkeit. Dr. Mayer-Hermann (1926, Museum of Modern Art), by Otto Dix, faces the entryway and suggests that we too are here for our exam. Dix rendered Mayer-Hermann, a prominent physician of the ear, nose, and throat, as a rotund guru, heavier than he was in life. A head mirror and metallic instruments all reflect the examination room around him—even as we, the viewer, appear to be absent in the reflection. The painting is joined by Dix’s equally unflattering Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Fritz Glaser (1921, private collection), in which Glaser’s gray skin, inflated abdomen, and swollen hands suggest necrosis. Even more revealing is Dix’s Half-Nude (1926, private collection), in which a woman attempts to conceal her nakedness by crossing her arms.

While revolutionary in presentation, Dix looked to the traditions of the past for his painting style. “In recent years, one catchphrase has motivated the present generation of creative artists. It urges them to ‘Find new forms of expression!’” he wrote in 1927.

I very much doubt, however, whether such a thing is possible. Anyone who looks at the paintings of the Old Masters, or immerses himself in the study of their works, will surely agree with me. . . . For me, the object is primary and determines the form.

Closely aligned with the Neue Sachlichkeit, Max Beckmann is represented here by only one work, The Old Actress (1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art). A critic of expressionism and Fauvism, Beckmann railed against the “feeble and overly aesthetic” interests of “so-called new painting” for “its failure to distinguish between the idea of a wallpaper or poster and that of a ‘picture.’ ” For his Portrait of John Förste, Man with Glass Eye (1926, private collection), George Grosz departed from histrionics while still focusing on the wounded and strange. Meanwhile, in Two Girls (1928, private collection), Christian Schad employed the precision of Northern Renaissance portraiture for meretricious ends. Mixed in among these highlights are portraits by Karl Hubbuch, Hans Grundig, Gerd Arntz, Rudolf Schlichter, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Kurt Querner, and others who were part of the broader movement.

Reviewing Scholz in 1923, the historian Hans Curjel wrote how

unrelenting war is declared against all complacency, all stubbornness, all heartfelt, philistine sentimentality, all jampacked sexuality, all capitalist rawness, all patriotic stupidity, and they will be fought with brutal openness.

A selection of drawings and prints by Hanna Nagel, Scholz, and Schad deserves an extra look for the draftsmanship that went into such polemics. Further examples of works on paper by Alexander Kanoldt, Ernst Thoms, Schlemmer, Schad, Grosz, and Dix continue in a side gallery. Here they are paired with a range of portrait busts, from Paul Berger’s realistic Eugen Hoffmann (1925, Albertinum) and Hoffmann’s Otto Dix (ca. 1925, Kunstsammlungen Zwickau) to Rudolf Belling’s deco-robotic Sculpture 23 (1923, cast 1960s, Neue Galerie) and Schlemmer’s stylized Grotesque (1964, Neue Galerie). The exhibition concludes in a hallway with posters by Willi Baumeister, Max and Binia Bill, Hans Leistikow, and Karl Peter Röhl, along with portrait photography by Suse Byk and Yva on loan from Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—fashionable pictures that are highlights of the show.

The range of styles and materials in this exhibition suggests a revisionist take on the Neue Sachlichkeit that may indeed be more representative of that broader movement. Nevertheless, the presentation—tied to Hartlaub’s 1925 painting exhibition and engaged with his taxonomies of “verism” and “classicism”—can come across as overdetermined, aimed at an academic rather than museum audience.

The historian Alfred Neumeyer regarded “Neue Sachlichkeit” as a “promotional word” and a “fictive name for a style.” Like a handful of other observers of this new objectivity, he was eventually able to immigrate to the United States, but not everyone in this exhibition was as fortunate. In 1930s Germany, the permanence of the “new objectivity” proved to be far too fictive. There may be lingering uncertainty over just what was the Neue Sachlichkeit. Still, it is impossible not to see in each work here a ticking alarm clock set to 1933.

1. “Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity” opened at Neue Galerie, New York, on February 20 and remains on view through May 26, 2025. ↩

Moonraker

On “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

For those of us who prefer our art soft-baked, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) can seem irredeemably hard-boiled. This painter of crucified peaks and mystified valleys, of gnarled trees and ruined churches, all underlit in a raking gloam, looked out to the infinite and wanted to perceive even more.

Pairing pictorial ambition with technical restraint, Friedrich filled his canvases with an emptiness that made him the paragon of German Romanticism—and the bane of critics from his time to our own. “It is true presumption,” wrote his contemporary Friedrich von Ramdohr, “when landscape painting wants to slink into the church and creep up on the altars.” Nearly two centuries on, Hilton Kramer called the artist a “second-rate talent” whose claim to first-rate status is nothing less than a “libel on the art of the great Romantic painters.”

Supersized, vacuous, and unabashedly over-the-top, Friedrich’s paintings no doubt planted the seeds for an invasive spiritualism in art. Turning to the “unknowable hereafter,” he proclaimed, he aimed for that “darkness of the future! Which is only ever sacred intuition, to be seen and recognized only in belief.” From German nationalism to National Socialism to radical environmentalism, his compositions became the ready vessels for a brimful of bad ideas. At the least, it is safe to say, a little bit of Friedrich goes a very long way.

For this reason, in the United States, Friedrich up until now has been the beneficiary of his own limited exposure. The first Friedrich oil to enter an American museum came only in 1984, when the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth acquired the diminutive Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds (ca. 1835). Since then, fewer than a half dozen other U.S. institutions have acquired works by the artist, whose paintings are largely concentrated in German collections.

At the same time, loan exhibitions of his major oils, mostly held in the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, have been notably circumscribed. The first large stateside Friedrich exhibition took place in 1990 with “The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the U.S.S.R.” In 2001, after its acquisition of Two Men Contemplating the Moon (ca. 1825–30), the Metropolitan organized what was only the second Friedrich show in America, with just seven of his paintings and two drawings.

So “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature,” the exhibition with over seventy-five of his works now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tied to the 250th anniversary of his birth and a blockbuster year of shows in Germany, is not only a major event.1 Drawing from the three significant holdings of Friedrich’s art in Germany and over thirty other lenders, it is also the first true retrospective of his work in the United States. But is this all too much Friedrich for his (and our) own good?

Organized by Alison Hokanson, a curator in the Metropolitan’s Department of European Paintings, and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, an assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, “The Soul of Nature” makes every effort to bring Romanticism’s high striver back down to sea level. A winding path through a selection of mostly smaller works, arranged in the Met’s most compressed special-exhibition hall, here painted in muted tones, forces us into close proximity with Friedrich’s art while metering out his greatest hits. As a few cut-out walls offer glimpses of the larger paintings that follow, the slow approach keeps the presentation gratefully scaled down and anti-monumental.

No doubt informed by Seidenstein’s specialization in works on paper, the exhibition also begins and ends with Friedrich’s drawings and prints. This intelligent framing encourages us to focus on Friedrich as draftsman first and ideas-man second. The approach rightly illuminates the formal innovations that Friedrich brought to his canvases after first working them out on paper. There can be no argument that Friedrich was an astonishing illustrator. His drawings remain among his most accomplished works and certainly his most compelling. As presented here, the virtuosity that Friedrich displayed on paper might just be his greatest achievement.

We can already see these accomplishments in his self-portrait of 1800 (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen)—an assured, penetrating work of black chalk on wove paper. Selections of his plant and tree studies from June 1799, on loan from the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, reveal an artist using pencil, ink, and particularly wash to render an assembly of leaves to remarkable visual effect. Testing out his washes on the edges of the paper, Friedrich could already deploy layers of shading to create a deep dimensionality.

These exacting studies and close observations led to his first major breakthrough: View of Arkona with Rising Moon (1805–6, Albertina Museum, Vienna). This large work on paper, two feet high and over three feet wide, one of a series of iterations of the composition, employs several pictorial strategies that Friedrich revisited throughout his career. Drawing upon his studies of the island of Rügen in 1801, looking north and east from Vitt Beach towards Cape Arkona and the Baltic Sea, Friedrich lights his scene as though from behind the frame. A rising moon on the horizon fluoresces the ocean mist and rippling waves. At the same time, an imposing foreground of rocks, hulls, masts, fences, and walls—partially obscuring our more distant view and nearly rendered in silhouette—is seemingly cast into an ever greater obscurity.

With our footing uncertain, Friedrich pulls us into the feeling of the image, deliberately making our perspective unstable. He knows how raking light can dazzle and disorient more than it reveals, with the glowing horizon merely blinding us to the nearby shadows. Like most observers, my first response to this image of studied obscurantism, of tiny details and near illegibility, was to blink.

View of Arkona with Rising Moon was a sensation when first exhibited in Dresden in 1806. In 1822, it entered the possession of Prince Albert Casimir of Saxony, through which it formed part of the founding collection of the Albertina. The work’s greatest mystery is the question of just how an artist could have created an image of such precision. One answer was the traditional education in draftsmanship that Friedrich received in Greifswald and Copenhagen. The other was the adoption of new media—for example, sepia wash used on smooth wove paper as opposed to bister (from burned wood) on textured laid paper—that had been introduced to Dresden by the academician Jakob Crescentius Seydelmann.

In her catalogue essay, Seidenstein expands on the importance of sepia wash to Friedrich’s developing tonalities. The pigment was only recently developed into a shelf-stable medium in Italy (sepia from seppia, the Italian word for cuttlefish, from which the ink is derived). Applied in layers of slow-drying glazes, sepia gave Friedrich a means of nuanced illumination that at the same time concealed the hand of the artist almost entirely from view.

In his studied and detailed unfolding of landscape—placing the viewer in an uncertain foreground, obscuring the background, and effacing the reference points of middle ground—Friedrich locates us in places where we would never otherwise go and that he would not necessarily visit himself. Most of his finished landscapes in fact were confections. He painted the peaks of the Watzmann, as in the assured canvas of 1824–25 from the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, but he never traveled south to see the actual alpine summit.

Friedrich was not shy in using animistic anthropomorphism and religious imagery together for their sentimental effects. Nor did he refrain from squeezing every moonrise and sunset of their last lumen. As developed by the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Friedrich’s sense for Naturphilosophie, for a “world soul,” turned every tree into a figure and every branch into a grasping hand. His interest in landscape was also nationalistic. Often depicting himself in traditional (and for a time illicit) German garb, he aimed to capture “our German sun, moon, and stars, our rocks, trees, and vegetation, our plains, seas, and rivers.” Surveying their abundance at the Metropolitan, as Friedrich turned from drawing to painting after 1807, I would have been fine if some of these suns, moons, and stars had remained in Germany. The same goes for Friedrich’s series of hilltop crucifixes, all illuminated in a sunset glow, to which we can only ascribe another German notion, that of pure kitsch.

There are nevertheless several highlights here, some of them on view in the United States for the first time. Monk by the Sea (1808–10, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) is one such example. A small, solitary figure looks out at the empty, wine-dark sea. The open, unmoored atmosphere of this large work is its most notable feature, ever more so after studies of its underpainting reveal that Friedrich removed several ships from view, untying us from any anchoring in its middle ground. It is just a shame that the condition of this work is now marred by several brown streaks down its surface, perhaps due to the discoloration of Friedrich’s use of smalt—a semi-transparent blue pigment made from crushed glass that extended to canvas those nuanced glazing practices he first developed in sepia, but one that is notoriously unstable.

Other attractions here are works that stand apart in subject matter from the rest, in particular the domestic Woman at the Window (1822, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). A selection of works by Johan Christian Dahl, Carl Gustav Carus, and August Heinrich—all contemporary to Friedrich and drawn mostly from the Met’s collection—helps to place the subject’s pictorial achievements in his time. So too does Caspar David Friedrich in His Studio (1811, Hamburger Kunsthalle), a portrait by Georg Friedrich Kersting that shows the supreme draftsman balancing his hand on a mahl stick next to his triangles and T-squares. It is regrettable that Friedrich’s magisterial Sea of Ice of 1823–24 has not traveled here from Hamburger Kunsthalle, but the tiny Rocky Reef off the Seacoast (ca. 1824, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe) conveys some of that same Fortress of Solitude crystallization.

The big get of this exhibition is without a doubt Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1817), here on loan for the first time from Hamburger Kunsthalle. This work, now an icon of Western painting, illustrates the cover of the exhibition catalogue, not to mention dorm-room posters the world over. The image of a solitary windswept climber, surmounting a craggy peak and surveying the misty mountains below, deploys all of Friedrich’s tropes, in particular that of the Rückenfigur, or back figure, depicted in a vertiginous silhouette. Like many ubiquitous images, the painting is smaller in person than you might expect. The foreground and background also interact in more subtle ways than you can observe in reproduction, with the symmetry of fog and ridgeline coming together at the center of the floating figure like two wings.

Friedrich’s reputation waned shortly after he painted this image, as taste for his speculative school of landscape, based in Dresden, moved on to the more clinical eye of the Düsseldorf Academy. As his health deteriorated, he turned again to paper and the precise sepia washes that first made his career. In its inchoate abstraction, tempered only by tiny tufts of grass, Cave in the Harz (ca. 1837) is a gravitational tour de force. The same must be said of Dolmen near Gützkow (ca. 1837), also from the Royal Danish Collection. In this neolithic burial site, of boulders pressing on stone, Friedrich envisions a prehistoric cemetery. The desolate hilltop also anticipates the death, just three years later, of this most modern of German artists.

1. “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on February 8 and remains on view through May 11, 2025. 

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, April 14, 2025

Jack Whitten: The Messenger’ Review: A Creator’s Odyssey at MoMA

The American artist moved from the segregated South to the New York art world and beyond as he forged unique processes of painting and sculpting, the textured, totemic results of which are now on view in a staggering retrospective.

Can a painting also be a sculpture? Find out in “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” the retrospective of the American abstractionist on view through Aug. 2 at the Museum of Modern Art. Following the survey of Jack Whitten’s free-standing work at the Met Breuer in 2018, we now get the full picture of this innovative and resonant artist, one who found freedom in the movement across fixed definitions.

The circuitous journey of Whitten (1939-2018) from segregated Bessemer, Ala., to the top floor of MoMA—by way of the Tuskegee Institute, Cooper Union, Manhattan’s 10th Street, SoHo and Tribeca, and the Greek island of Crete—was as epic as his compositions. The blood and sweat of his personal odyssey infused his methods and materials. At a time when black American artists might have been expected to address the subject of race through direct representation, Whitten abstracted his identity into layered works, both physically and metaphorically, of totemic power.

Organized by Michelle Kuo, MoMA’s chief curator at large and publisher, and assisted by Helena Klevorn, Dana Liljegren, Eana Kim, David Sledge and Kiko Aebi, the show features over 175 paintings, sculptures (mainly the former), works on paper and studio ephemera.

Across his production, Whitten investigated the tension between the geometric structures of Piet Mondrian and the freewheeling gestures of Jackson Pollock. Along the way, he devised processes to remove the personal touch from his creations, opting to make his canvases as one might assemble sculpture.

“The Messenger (For Art Blakey)” (1990) inspired the title of this sprawling exhibition. Along with “Homecoming: For Miles” (1992), it serves as an introductory statement at the show’s entrance. Seen from afar, both works resemble starry constellations. Upon approach, drips of white paint on black ground come into focus. Come closer still and the true intricacy of Whitten’s process reveals itself. 

Beyond mere expressionistic drippings, these compositions are intricate mosaics of handmade tesserae—acrylic chips that Whitten poured, painted, dried, cut and arranged on the surface of each canvas. The result evokes Georges Seurat, Byzantine iconography, even digital imaging.

The exhibition then follows Whitten chronologically for roughly half a century. A suite of early black-and-white compositions, including “Head IV Lynching” (1964), echoes the photographic record of race-based terror. Resembling ghostly faces caught in a flash bulb, these abstractions were produced by pressing white acrylic through a dark fabric mesh.

Nearby, “Homage to Malcolm” (1965) is the first of his assemblages on display. In a piece of American elm that he carved, smoothed, feathered and burned, Whitten embedded nails, chains, keys, pliers, and a toilet handle, which he then coated in black paint and metallic dust. The horizontal object combines the Congolese power figures known as Nkisi N’kondi with the simplified forms of Constantin Brâncuși.

In the 1970s, Whitten constructed tools to “develop” his paintings by scraping them with giant squeegees and combs. He laid his canvases on the studio floor, applied layers of acrylic paint, and pulled his homemade rakes across them in one quick motion. Inspired by photography and xerography, works such as “Mirsinaki Blue” (1974) might call to mind the blurred abstractions of Gerhard Richter, but Whitten created his compositions years before the German arrived at his own squeegee technique.

When Whitten turned to textured scrapers, including the use of a saw blade, the lines left by these tools produced mesmerizing effects. In a suite of works named after the Greek alphabet, inspired by summers in Crete with his wife Mary Staikos, flickers emanate from the lines of visual static.

By the 1980s, his work tipped into bas-relief, as in “Bessemer Dreamer” (1986), in which built-up circles resemble textured flooring. “Black Monolith I (A Tribute to James Baldwin)” (1988) might seem like a mix of street detritus—metal tread plates adhered to the paint surface. But in fact, Whitten molded these forms in acrylic before applying his casts to canvas.

In the 1990s, Whitten distilled such casts into handmade tiles, as in the two opening works. As he developed this mosaic process, his compositions reached their most ambitious. After Whitten witnessed the World Trade Center attack, over the next five years he made “9.11.01” (2006). At 10 by 20 feet, this composition of a black pyramid on a brick-like ground became his personal wailing wall to the victims of Sept. 11.

Whitten blurred the lines between painting and sculpture in a way that speaks to that larger foment of artists of his generation, those who remained faithful to abstraction when taste otherwise moved on to Pop. As he scraped, combed and recast the history of form, the great sincerity of his work is what ultimately shines through.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger

Museum of Modern Art, through Aug. 2