Crystal Bridges Pimps Politics, Things Go Toxic at the Smithsonian, and Fresh Rembrandts Sell

Art news for June and July pushes racial politics in museums, but newly discovered Rembrandt portraits of a plumber and his wife rule.

I haven’t written a piece about art news in a few weeks. Summer it may be, but the glass hive is abuzz even when thermostats sizzle.

The other day I read about a new, nebulous initiative called Remuseum. It’s a nonprofit within a nonprofit, here Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville in Arkansas. It aims to revolutionize museums through new models in financial sustainability, public engagement, and governance. Reading the tea leaves for meaning led me nowhere. Nor did parsing animal innards.

Instead, I followed the money. David Booth, a billionaire from Austin, is funding a chunk of it. He’s from Kansas and went to the University of Chicago, both pluses, and he lives in Texas, though in Austin. He collects blue-chip art, mostly from Pop Art to now.

The Ford Foundation’s a funder, too. Danger, Will Robinson. The Ford Foundation peddles race grievance for a living. Crystal Bridges? I’m neutral. It’s a work in progress that seems to teeter at the edge of a PC abyss, given the big corporate bucks funding it. The head of Remuseum is Stephen Reily, whom I don’t know and who was the director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. He’s not an art historian but a civic leader in Louisville and an entrepreneur who made a fortune in branding.

I gather that Remuseum promotes a museum model according to which less money goes to buying and preserving objects and more goes to “serving the public.” At the Speed, Reily and his curators did a pop-up exhibition on Breonna Taylor, a local woman killed in a terrible, tangled shoot-out between her boyfriend, a drug dealer, and Louisville police. Reily and, I imagine, Remuseum are committed to relevance rather than to collecting, scholarship, and preservation. This sounds like art abuse to me.

Reily’s show on Taylor’s death — Promise, Witness, Remembrance — sounds awful. I admire his team’s efficiency since it happened four months after the shooting, but many of the facts weren’t known. Reily, a curator he hired from Crystal Bridges, and Taylor’s family didn’t seem to care, combining to fashion a polemical, opportunistic, lachrymose exhibition. It’s not art history and really has little to do with art. The art’s a prop. Crystal Bridges loaned a lot of it, and most of it was crap.

If that’s what Remuseum’s hawking, I’d pass.

Remuseum seems to envision a move away from new building projects, which often boost donor egos. This is a good move. Alas, a new direction toward current events will plunk museums in the land of politics. That’s what “serving the public” has come to mean. It means pushing false stories such as climate change, police brutality, race hate, and the alphabet-and-pronoun cult, all rackets, by the way.

There’s no financial crisis in the museum industry. In claiming one, Remuseum quotes, of all people, Daniel Weiss, the outgoing CEO of the Met, a museum that sits on a $4 billion endowment. The Met’s always crying poor, but it sits on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by more millionaires per square foot than Ye Olde Arlington, my hometown in Vermont, has beavers, wild turkeys, and cows. And if the Met’s feeling broke, it’s because it does too many exhibitions. Almost all art museums balance their budgets every year.

What could possibly go wrong? Remuseum sounds like an adventure for rich, bored people and institutions. If museums and foundations want to do something useful, they can develop ways to remediate the learning and social disasters imperiling poor and working-class children because of Covid lockdowns. How can looking at art help?

I never note the slips, gaffes, and fumbles of my colleagues in the art press, avuncular as I might be. I’m far from perfect. Since I’m in the opinion business, I naturally respect the right of my fellow scribblers to be wrong. That said, the appointment of the next curator of African art at the New Orleans Museum of Art caused a stir last week, and a dafter one is hard to imagine.

You see, Amanda Maples, the new curator, is a white woman. “Art Museum Decried for Hiring White Woman,” one headline read. “New Orleans Museum of Art Faces Public Outcry for Hiring White Curator of African Art,” another said, and that’s a newspaper respectable enough to hire me to write for it from time to time.

The problem is relatability. “She can’t relate to the black and African community,” a woman wrote on Instagram, of all places. Since when do journalists forage on Instagram for reputable sources? Since now, I guess.

And the “community” isn’t average people. It’s the political people, who are often grifters and showboaters.

This is all so petty and rote. Maples is a star curator and scholar. She has a Ph.D. in African art and comes from the North Carolina Museum of Art following curatorial jobs at Yale, Stanford, and the Smithsonian. She knows her art history and knows the objects in the New Orleans Museum’s superb collection. She’s a curator, which means she cares for art and interprets it. She’s neither a hand-holder nor a community activist. Her many piercings suggest to me she’s tuned to diversity of all stripes.

Bill Fagaly, whom I knew and liked, was the African-art curator at the museum for 50 years. He built the collection. At Yale, Bob Thompson revolutionized the study of African art in America. Both were very white, and both were inspirational. And Africa’s got hundreds of art traditions. Skin color doesn’t give a curator an open, inquisitive mind, a feel for objects, depth, and the power to teach. Art critics and reporters need to file segregation strategies under “dumb ideas.”

Have these people lost the capacity to think? Was this even a real news story? It seems like fake news. Maples will do a great job. Get off her back, whiners.

Hiring rows are in the news in Washington, too. In March, the Smithsonian hired Nancy Yao as the founding director of its American Women’s History Museum — a new, bad idea lavishly funded by Congress. History’s history, and hundreds of museums across the country have been discovering and promoting the stories of women whose accomplishments were forgotten or discounted or swiped.

The Smithsonian, which runs the gamut from American art and archives to a zoo, doesn’t need more diffusion. Washington doesn’t need more museums. It’s a blinkered, self-absorbed, unnatural place. Its women’s-history museum will celebrate left-wing women whose work took them to Washington.

And, by the by, don’t we have more than two genders now, more than the planets in the solar system, more than Heinz has types of tomatoes?

Yao was hired and, last week, before she even started, fired. It seems that Yao, as director of the Museum of Chinese in America, might have swapped grant money from Mayor de Blasio for what critics call “her lack of opposition” to a new jail in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Who cares? It’s New York! A co-chairman of the museum’s board, a Chinatown landlord, forced a beloved local dim sum restaurant to close. What’s that got to do with the price of wontons? Yao’s not her board chairman’s keeper. Then there’s that old standard in the repertoire of damnation.

Yao created a toxic work environment, some say. Play the Jaws music, please.

Doesn’t this seem like idle conjecture, goosed by hype, powered by hot air, and driven by malice? A round of “Stand By Your Yao” would be nice. Why cave so easily? Why throw a $375 million museum project into turmoil? It has to find a new director now.

I hear Dylan Mulvaney’s looking for work.

When Yao was appointed, I had one question. How and why did her museum’s art and artifact storage facility in Chinatown burn down in 2020, destroying most of its collection? If there’s ever a cause for concern, it’s when a collection goes up in flames, not when staffers duke it out in a brawl. Who’s responsible for basic security, at least in a small museum? When I was a director, I didn’t patrol the galleries with a badge and a whistle, but I was very involved in ensuring that the place, art, staff, and visitors were safe and secure.

On a bright and happy note, last week Christie’s in London sold the only Rembrandt portraits still in private hands. The portraits are a pair, signed and dated 1635, so they’re early Rembrandts and were unknown to scholars and never seen in public. At 8 by 6.5 inches, they’re tiny. They depict Jan Willemsz van der Pluym, a plumber, and his wife, Jaapgen Carels, both from Leiden. Their son married Rembrandt’s cousin.

The pictures have been in a private British family collection since 1824, when, coincidentally, Christie’s sold them. By the mid 1640s, the van der Pluyms were both dead, but the portraits descended in their family until 1759. Before Christie’s sold them in 1824, they were owned by a Polish count, a French baron, and then an English baron. Van der Pluym was a plumber who got around. When the current owners decided to sell, and at Christie’s, they and the auction house sent the pair to the Rijksmuseum.

No place has more experience with Rembrandt’s art. Its conservation lab is the best in the world when it comes to Dutch art. Science and impeccable provenance proved what’s hard to imagine. They were indeed by Rembrandt.

Rembrandt’s early portraits are crisp, clear, and documentary. In the 1650s into the 1660s, his portraits are moodier, more freely painted, and gauzy.

The pair was offered on July 6 at Christie’s Old Master sale at an estimate of $6.2 million to $10 million. They sold for $14.3 million, which includes the buyer’s premium.

Who bought them? We don’t know. It’s not the Getty, which already has six Rembrandts, among them two early portraits, one a small self-portrait. In 2015, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum together bought two life-size, full-length portraits of a young, married couple from 1634 for $174 million. Neither’s in the market for more Rembrandts, having already been beggared.

I love stories like this. There’s a lot of good art out in our big world, tucked away for decades or centuries. It’s a thrill for a curator, scholar, dealer, or auction-house specialist to find it. May the new owners cherish the portraits, and may they be consoled by them when drains are clogged.

Next week I’ll write about Wheatland, James Buchanan’s elegant home in Lancaster and the great Joan Brown retrospective at the Carnegie Art Museum in Pittsburgh.