Keffiyeh Kerfuffle in Queens, DEI Comeuppance in Connecticut

And more: London’s National Portrait Gallery turns climate crazy, while the Brooklyn Museum turns just plain crazy.

I t’s time for my end-of-month, in-the-news roundup. Art’s on the move, and so are people, some to new jobs, some to the barricades, and at least one to what I hope is a festive party after a court win she very much deserved.

I’ve written many times about the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., one of America’s most distinguished museums with, alas, what also has to be America’s worst board of trustees. Self-important, cheap, and bourgeois in the worst way, this crew has lost good directors, bungled opportunities, and embraced pipe dreams over and over in the nearly 50 years I’ve followed the place. Since the 2020 Black Lives Matter mostly peaceful riots and arson fest, the board, almost all from Hartford’s hoity-toity suburbs, went from champagne pink to thermo-woke. In response, I’ve dished the radioactive dirt.

Last year, I wrote about a federal claim for illegal retaliation filed by Kate Riotte, an Atheneum staffer fired for asking questions about the museum’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative. Questions like “What is systemic racism?” and “Why is equity essential to the growth of the Wadsworth Atheneum?” Possibly Riotte intuited that DEI means stealth quotas, lowered standards, and the Peter principle run amok.

Riotte, who ran the curatorial department, didn’t screech into a megaphone or parade in a KKK hood in front of the museum. She asked these questions in a quest for information and enlightenment both in one-to-one emails and at a meeting of a DEI committee “of which she was a member.” She was fired after six unblemished years of employment, told that her questions were political, confrontational, and offensive. She sued. The Center for Individual Rights, a public-interest law firm in Washington, represented her.

I learned this week that Riotte’s case was settled. The Atheneum was forced to pay big bucks for lost wages, past and future, damage to Riotte’s reputation, and other compensatory losses. At the Atheneum’s insistence, the dollar amount is secret. I asked the museum whether the settlement was paid from insurance proceeds or out of the museum’s pocket but got no response. This probably means the museum had to cough up the cash, using money it got from its donors as charitable gifts.

The trustees, mean-spirited and smug, who pushed the Atheneum’s prolonged resistance to a settlement should quit. The staffers who pushed for this brave, honest, thoughtful woman to be fired should walk the plank, too. Conveniently, the Connecticut River’s mere steps from the museum’s back door.

This case is the museum world’s version of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College. Will the Atheneum’s trustees learn anything? Naaah. Connecticut’s the Land of Steady Habits, I know, but at the Atheneum, the needle’s stuck in the groove of the same vapid, imperious tune. Still, the museum has had a notably big turnover in trustees over the last year or so. “Hope springs eternal,” as Pope wrote, and, like him, I believe even so wretched a lot as the Atheneum board can strive to be better.

Kudos to Riotte and the Center for Individual Rights for defending free speech in the workplace.

I’m close to a free-speech absolutist, but free speech and free expression are different, and free speech in the workplace has reasonable limits. Speaking of KKK hoods, a couple of weeks ago two gallery attendants at the Noguchi Museum in Queens came to work wearing keffiyehs in solidarity with Hamas-run, Jew-hating Gaza. With admirable speed, the top brass updated the museum’s dress code. “To maintain a neutral and professional environment, employees are prohibited from wearing clothes and accessories that display political messages, slogans, and symbols.” Straightforward enough. “This includes ideological movements,” it adds.

In the last two weeks, staff protests have included two staff walkouts, a petition condemning the dress code signed by 50 of the museum’s 70 employees, and a new group called Noguchi Museum Rights. It’s got an Instagram page. The policy, I’ve read, is “distinctly anti-Palestinian.” It assaults the legacy of Isamu Noguchi, the sculptor “who himself faced voluntary internment as a Japanese-American” during World War II and “directly addressed political themes, including crimes against humanity.” One of the keffiyeh-clad staffers is black, which, of course, makes the dress code racist.

The director closed the museum for a long weekend in hopes of cooler heads.

Where to begin? It seems very basic indeed that a paid employee’s time, comportment, and activities during the workday are the employer’s concern. The keffiyeh has gone from a sun guard to a symbol of antisemitic hate, terror, and violence. Visitors assume, reasonably, that everything they read on the gallery walls, the art they see, and whatever the staff does have the museum’s endorsement. Gallery attendants, who, I assume, supplement the guards, are front and center and the face of the museum. “It’s not all about you” is a message the Hamashole loony tunes can’t and won’t get.

Stay tuned. The first anniversary of October 7 is around the corner.

One of my favorite museums, the National Portrait Gallery in London, announced its new director the other day. What a barmy choice she is, barmy and bizarre. Victoria Siddall will succeed Nicholas Cullinan, who directed this supreme flower of British history and portraiture over nine years and through a much-admired renovation. He’s now the director of the British Museum.

That Siddall is a woman is a much-touted first for the NPG, but what she’s not is an art historian, or any kind of historian. She got her BA from Bristol University majoring in English literature and philosophy. When I taught art history, English majors were the worst students I had, guilty of squishy thinking and inept writing. Suffice to say she doesn’t have a deep knowledge of art.

Putting this aside, she’s never worked in a museum. She’s never stewarded a great collection. She’s never run an exhibition program. Her career has been at the Frieze Art Fair, where the art’s for sale. I don’t mind, as a general proposition, that a museum hires from the trade, but Frieze? That’s the flashy, faddish, mostly contemporary art fair catering to those who feel out of place at the very serious TEFAF in Maastricht or the Armory Show. I’ve been to Frieze fairs in London and New York. I almost never see good things except at Frieze Masters, the division of Frieze selling pre-1945 art in a buzzy way. Siddall was among the brains behind it, and good for her. Mostly, though, she was the main Frieze’s global director.

Putting even this aside, Siddall’s claim to fame is the climate, of all things. She’s an anti-oil, full-moon howler. She believes we mere mortals can upend a four-billion-year-old planet’s weather, based on a hundred years of data massaged by money-grubbers who fancy themselves scientists. She’s raised money for fake climate-science groups. She’s demanded that not-for-profits ban oil-company philanthropy.

Siddall’s a creature of a part of the art economy that runs on fads, and she’s clearly susceptible to fads of all kinds. What’s next? London’s a gender-fluid hothouse. Might we soon learn from the NPG that Henry VIII was really a Henrietta?

Now, she’ll be in charge of one of Britain’s great museums, making the climate, not art, not history, not heritage, her driver. Banks, Agassiz, Newton, Crick, and Wren, all scientists, all with portraits in the NPG, would laugh and cry. Siddall has been a trustee of the NPG for the last two or three years, so an insider’s game was played. She’s a professional marketeer and fundraiser. Cullinan and all the other NPG directors I’ve known were natural marketeers and fundraisers, but, first and foremost, they were scholars. I wish Siddall well, but she’s still a bad choice.

Art’s on the move, too. Last week, the Brooklyn Museum announced it was reinstalling and reinterpreting its splendid collection of American art as part of the museum’s 200th anniversary. Though constantly beleaguered by money problems and too often ignored by the Manhattan-fixed art press, it’s a national treasure. “Toward Joy” is the title of the new American galleries. The museum says it will be “transformative.” Cue the Jaws music, on what is soon to be the movie’s 50th anniversary. The galleries will “foreground Black feminist approaches to inclusive space-making and institutional critique and captivate audiences with fresh experiences.”

I’m less captivated and more nauseated. Will we hear Kamala’s cackle playing in the galleries? She is sure to feel at ease with what seems like a vapid, tokenized, grasping project. Still, it’s important to see. “Reinstallation” sounds like “moving things around,” which, on one level, it is. Reinstallation, especially of first-rate, distinguished, historic collections, aims at redefining the field, and Brooklyn’s American art is so good it means redefining the culture.

The Brooklyn Museum has redone its American wing at least twice before in the last 30 years or so — and both times the results were conceited, dank, and dumb. This one opens on October 4. Will it be an aesthetic and intellectual abomination? My mind’s open.

On Wednesday, the Huntington in San Marino, Calif., another favorite museum, announced the acquisition of a grand portrait of the Comte de Cromot and his two daughters-in-law, painted in 1787 by Antoine-François Callet (1741–1823), Louis XVI’s official portraitist. I’d never heard of Cromot — he was a superintendent of finances in the royal court — and, Americanist and simple country soul that I am, could only say of Callet that “his name rings a bell.” At 77 by 63 inches, the thing’s big.

It’s funky, too. How often does anyone want to share a portrait with his daughters-in-law? And for a geezer whose job was keeping the books straight, Cromot’s got dash and sparkle. He’s brat. The portrait-within-a-portrait depicts the Comte de Provence, Louis XVI’s brother and Cromot’s patron. Cromot was an amateur artist. The landscape on the easel is an authentic Cromot, pasted on the canvas by Callet.

It shouldn’t be easy to love but people will come to like it a lot. It’s a great addition to the Huntington and will share the museum’s walls with Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Reynolds’s Mrs. Siddons, and Lawrence’s Pinkie.

Newsy is the portrait’s donor. The Callet is the fourth splendor bought for the Huntington since 2021 by the Ahmanson Foundation. For years, the foundation, based in Los Angeles, supported the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Old Masters collection. It bought for LACMA Rembrandt’s The Raising of Lazarus, a Titian, a Bernini bust, Reni’s Bacchus and Ariadne, a kaleidoscopic Canaletto, and La Tour’s Magdalene with the Smoking Flame. Looking at the value of the art the foundation has given, it’s LACMA’s biggest donor.

And LACMA went and botched the relationship. Now, the Ahmanson Foundation’s sending love to the Huntington. The point of aggrievement is LACMA’s new campus, an $850 million project set to open next year. I’ve written about it off and on. LACMA has indeed marginalized its Old Masters philosophically and architecturally. It’s a bad move, but it comes from the top — from the director, Michael Govan, and the mega-rich trustees and donors, whose focus is living artists.

LACMA’s got a long, rich trail of infuriated — and lapsed — donors. Since the breakup, one not without rancor, the Ahmanson Foundation’s given the Huntington Portage Falls on the Genesee, by Thomas Cole, a $12 million extravaganza once owned by William Seward, he of the purchase of Alaska, and stunner portraits by Goya and Vigée Le Brun. Good for the Huntington, bad for LACMA. Massive museum building projects and rethinks always have collateral damage. This is one to ponder for the ages.