A Red King, a Hacked Auction House, and Museum Pickpockets in Orlando

And how antisemitic is the staff at Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum? More than a little, it seems.

K ing Charles III, on the throne since 2022, has gotten a new portrait, what looks like a red-hot mess by Jonathan Yeo (b. 1970). At six by eight feet, it’s a statement picture. I’m certain it holds the wall. I haven’t seen it in person, so I can’t write too much about it. Its massive scale and abundance of reds need to be experienced in the rib-roast-raw flesh.

Yeo’s portrait, panned as it has been, reminds me of another grand, formal portrait, not of a king but of Winston Churchill. Both Churchill and his wife, Clementine, hated Graham Sutherland’s portrait of the prime minister, commissioned in 1954 by members of both Houses of Parliament and presented to him in a ceremony on his 80th birthday. Churchill said it made him look like “a drunk picked up on the Strand.” The portrait made it to Chartwell, his Kent home. Like the two princes in the Tower, it was never seen again. It’s believed to have been burned by the hired help at Mrs. Churchill’s suggestion.

Most of us aren’t used to seeing portraits this big without, say, a horse in them along with a human, and red isn’t a go-to portrait color. There’s Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi at Home or Eakins’s An Actress or Monsignor James P. Turner or, here and there, a Bronzino Medici portrait. Red is the color linked to passion, excitement, and danger. “You’ve got him,” said Queen Camilla at the unveiling. Her experience of Charles over 50 years is different from ours, to be sure. Red is an ecclesiastical color as well, so popes and cardinals wear it. It’s also a military color.

Yeo’s portrait needs to be seen to be liked or pelted with yellow tomatoes since red ones won’t show. The Drapers’ Company, one of London’s great medieval liveries, commissioned the portrait of Charles. Yeo knows exactly where his picture will be displayed, so that must be considered too.

In posing, Charles wore his Welsh Guard regimental uniform, which is very red. Yeo decided to subdue the red uniform and the king’s many shiny medals by suffusing the entire portrait with red. This emphasizes the one un-reddened passage: Charles’s face. Those of us who, like me, have followed Charles’s career since his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969 would not have picked red as his signature color. Yellow mixed with green and blue would suggest equivocation and a haut bourgeois softness, better suited to describe him.

Charles suggested the inclusion of a butterfly over his right shoulder. I’d normally hate it because it’s so contrived and fussy. It’s said to represent his love of nature and his transformation from prince to king. If the theme is transition, that butterfly needs a walker, given how long Charles waited to be king. And the color of waiting is a brown-yellow.

Yeo is a high-society London portraitist. Notoriously, he made a collage portrait of President George W. Bush in 2007 using clippings from straight porn. Talk about unorthodox materials. Bits of erogenous zones, male and female, form the craggy Bush face. Yeo was hired to paint what I’d call a proper portrait of Bush, but the powers that be — probably from the in-process presidential library — rescinded. “Always be nice to artists” is the moral of the story.

The portrait of Charles is on view at the art dealer Philip Mould Gallery until June 15 before moving to Drapers’ Hall.

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Over the years I’ve written a few stories about the Orlando Museum of Art’s cataclysmic, suicidal exhibition pushing a newly discovered stash of paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat that turned out to be fake. Even this deluge has a silver lining. The corpus of art by the scrawler artist has grown no further.

This minor museum is a gift that keeps on giving. The scandal involved FBI raids, the director’s ouster, lawsuits, and a collapse in donor support. The interim leadership and the trustees, much reconfigured by resignations, now want to raid a recent $1.8 million bequest from the estate of Margaret Young that was specifically targeted for new acquisitions. They want to defile the donor’s intent so they can cover a sinkhole-size deficit. And Florida’s attorney general, Ashley Moody, seems to be fine with it — she wrote a letter supporting the museum’s bid to modify restrictions on the bequest. I’d never heard of Moody. Her letter is an assault on Florida’s stellar reputation for good governance. Did she skip the trusts-and-estates class in law school?

The money grab is now in the hands of the Orange County Circuit Court. Of course, the donor’s intent is clear. If the museum is running a deficit, and it says it is, and it’s about 25 percent of its operating budget, then it should truncate operations to meet its income. At its barest and boniest, a museum needs only one staffer, the registrar, who is the keeper of records. A museum builds from there, needing a building manager and bookkeeper. If the board wants to raid endowments created by little old ladies, then it’s negligent. Moody needs to remove and replace, not aid and abet.

It sounds like the museum, in living within its means, will need to take a nap — a break from public visibility — and retool. The casting director in charge of Fred Astaire’s first MGM audition wrote, “Can’t act, can’t sing, a little bald, can dance a little.” Americans love second chances and second looks. My advice is to lie low, drop the lawsuits, and not raid money you’ll want to spend later. Oh, and when you’re ready for close-ups again, don’t do a Basquiat show.

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I’ve never heard of half a museum staff’s walking off their jobs because they didn’t like the labels in an exhibition that their museum was doing, but every day is a full moon now. I never heard of Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum, either. Aggrieved staffers there think Israel’s the Little Satan and America’s the Big Satan, but perish the thought that they’re antisemitic.

The Wing Luke Museum is a small art and history museum catering to Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Hawaiians. It’s collaborating with the Black Heritage Society of Washington State and the Washington State Jewish Historical Society on an exhibition called Confronting Hate Together — inspired by the Confronting Hate 1937–1952 exhibition at the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library in 2022. It seems like a vast range of feelings, issues, and constituencies to cover, much less accommodate, and I haven’t seen the exhibition. It looks like portable wall texts with illustrations but no objects. I’m sure the information’s sound.

Half the staff walked out the day Confronting Hate Together opened to the public. They’re not strikers. They’re work actioneers positioned on that well-worn intersection of hubris, ignorance, naïveté, and self-flattery. They exited to that new dance craze, the Virtue Strut. Memo to staff: The director and curator, not the museum teachers or the IT director or the assistant this-and-that, develop the intellectual and aesthetic programs.

They’ve got a manifesto, but doesn’t everyone? The protesters among the staff want the wall texts rewritten to reflect “Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab voices,” as if there’s not a discordant mixture of sound and fury already. What about the voices of Tenacious Trans, that male-to-female bikers’ league? They’re looking for a Rafah affinity group, and their contacts in Hamas keep pushing Gaza’s paraglider club for a partnership and demand to know when their next rally is scheduled.

Talk about trauma. They want their voices heard, too, but, goodness, no place at the table for them unless they go electric, even if electric hogs tend to blow up. And then there’s Two Spirits for Two States. And how could we think of erasing Settler Colonialists against Settler Colonialism, championing the illegals crossing our southern border by the millions. Seriously, the staff wants “to center voices that align with the museum’s mission and values within an anti-colonial, anti-white-supremacist framework.” Leave-takers don a virtual mask — all their communications are posted online, anonymously.

The staff can’t look worse, but they’re too dumb to see why. They’re protesting, after all, a show that condemns antisemitism and racism. The slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” doesn’t mean, they say, that they hate Jews. It merely means that Jews need to move. The exhibition “platforms colonialism and white supremacy,” so the dissenting staff closed the museum, which serves the public.

What to do? They’ve got the director by his laho paka, tightly secured by serrated, vibrating chopsticks. Ouch. He can’t fire them, though in the olden days when I was a curator pink slips would have poured from the skies. Confronting Hate Together is a bridge too far for staffers who think their hate is special and sacred. The director is blathering about careful listening, multiple truths, and inclusion, inclusion, inclusion. Of course, they should be fired. Otherwise, as old-timers retire and Millennials and Zoomers rule the zeitgeist, stunts like this will happen all the time.

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New York’s spring auction season ended last week, signaling the start of graduation and wedding season and then the summer-gala fundraiser season. In times as uncertain and tense as ours, I’m surprised that the major auction houses did so well. Not pop-the-Champagne-cork well but dodged-the-speeding-bullet well. Prices were lower than two or three years ago. It all seemed orderly, if tepid, with few fights to the death. A severe, surreal hack of Christie’s website dismantled online shopping. Briefly, paper ruled.

Christie’s wisely pulled Event, a very beautiful Brice Marden painting from around 2005 and estimated at $30 million to $50 million — the auction house’s priciest lot. Nobody knows who owns it, and it has never been exhibited. At the last moment, Christie’s pulled it. There was no buzz. Christie’s and the owner didn’t want the painting — or Marden — burned by not hitting a reserve. Christie’s reputation for taking care of its clients shows.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Poppy, from 1928, called “the biggest O’Keeffe poppy painting in private hands,” went for $14 million, excluding fees, on an estimate of $10 million to $15 million. Given Charles III’s portrait, red might be in. David Hockney’s A Lawn Being Sprinkled, from 1967, the Christie’s catalogue cover image when a printed catalogue was actually essential, went for $24.5 million, just below the $25 million–$35 million estimate.

At Sotheby’s, Leonora Carrington’s Distractions of Dagobert, from 1945, set a record for her, selling at $28.5 million, a nice $10 million over the high estimate. I’ve written about Carrington, the British Surrealist who lived in Mexico. In our surreal times, it’s no surprise that Surrealism is back in style.

Manet’s still lifes will always be in style. Painted toward the end of his life when he was mostly housebound, they’re fresh and what I call conversational in that they always have something new to add. His Vase of Roses and Lilacs isn’t big — 22 by 14 inches — but worth every penny of the $10.1 million, including fees, that the new owner paid. Give me this any day over Hockney’s lawn sprinklers.