Plus, in the news, two new museum directors and an art slasher who overly likes her sausages
Last week, days before his death, Pope Francis venerated the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852–1926), putting him closer to sainthood. Gaudí is best known as the designer of Sagrada Família, the fantastic, unique, and nearly finished church in Barcelona. He’s now deemed heroic in adhering to the Seven Virtues — faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
Though skeptical of saints as intercessors, I do believe in miracles. I wouldn’t pray to one to win the Lotto. I’d go straight to Jesus for the magic numbers. I also like seeing artists in the headlines. They’re a good lot. And saints such as Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, and John the Baptist are to be studied and revered. The next step for Gaudí, called God’s Architect in his lifetime and a genuinely pious man, is beatification. This means that Vatican vetters have ascribed one miracle to him. If a second miracle is found, and if in all other respects he continues to prove godly, Gaudí is up for sainthood. It’s the pope’s decision. In my Methodist opinion, Sagrada Família, melding Art Nouveau, Gothic Revival, and tutti-frutti color, is a miracle of greater magnitude than curing someone’s gout. Fra Angelico (1395–1455) was beatified in 1982, in part, Pope John Paul II said, for the serene beauty of his paintings depicting Mary, Jesus’s mother.
Gaudí was an ardent vegan. Finding one in Spain is a miracle in itself, though I don’t think this counts, miracle-wise.
Many great artists would flunk not one or two or three but six of the seven Virtues, leaving only fortitude as the quality they generally possess in heroic proportions. Who am I to judge, though? Sagrada Família is set to be done next year, 144 years after construction started. That it’s such an exotic, wild, gorgeous church, flamboyantly Catholic, is a miracle. That it’s going to be finished, after wars, depressions, Gaudí’s sudden death after being hit by a tram, the anarchist destruction of his models and plans in 1936, and the near collapse of Spanish religiosity, well, that’s a miracle, too. I hope he gets his wings, though they’ll have to come from the next pope. He’s a wonderful artist.
Just being a starving artist won’t win you a halo. In 2023, influence peddler and has-been painter Hunter Biden sued Garrett Ziegler for making a searchable database of the 128,000 emails found on the laptop that everyone in our ruling class told us in 2020 was a made-in-Moscow fake but that was indeed North Star real. Sounds like a useful project, entertaining for a bit, but quickly a bore. In March, Biden filed a motion in a California federal district court claiming that he was too poor to pay legal expenses contesting Ziegler’s many motions to dismiss.
“Since late 2023 and through today, my income has decreased significantly,” Biden said in a statement to the court in March. “In the 2 or 3 years prior to December 2023, I sold 27 pieces of fart” — oops, typo on my part, I meant art — “for an average price of $54,481.48, but since then I’ve sold only one piece of art for $36,000.” And his memoir isn’t selling well. “Given the positive feedback and reviews of my artwork and memoir, I was expecting to get paid speaking engagements and appearances, but that has not happened.”
Dozens of Biden’s paintings were destroyed in the Pacific Palisades fire. I heard that his collectors were rushing his art to the blaze, in convoys, hoping their insurance would reimburse them for their stealth political contributions. Only kidding — though how do I know?
A good artist moves easily from medium to medium. Biden should try building models of Sagrada Família using his leftover crack pipes. Add St. Basil’s in Moscow to the mix — tip of the hat to his old Kremlin paymasters. Now, that’s hope in heroic proportions.
New museum directors are in the air, and they speak French. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston will get a new boss, and the sooner he starts, the better. Appointed two weeks ago, Pierre Terjanian has been the chief of curatorial affairs and conservation at the MFA for the past year, coming from a long run at the Met as the curator of its arms and armor collection. I don’t know him, but a deep knowledge of arms and armor would seem to be useful in these parlous times. It’s an esoteric subject, too, mastery of which shows discipline and focus. He’s French, from very beautiful Strasbourg, but he’s been working at American museums as a curator since the late 1990s.
A few years ago, I saw his majestic Met exhibition on the life of Maximilian I, interpreted through his armor and art patronage. Maximilian (1459–1519) was the Holy Roman emperor and either the king or the duke of a dozen other parcels in a much divided, quarrelsome Europe. Terjanian took a vast topic — Maximilian I — and parsed it coherently through art. He’s a historian whose education also focused on management and French law. I don’t hold any of that against him. The MFA’s a mess and needs a steady presence, especially one adroit with a lance and a longbow.
I barely know Matthew Teitelbaum, the MFA’s director for the past ten years, though I visit his great museum whenever I can. It’s had a lost decade. Staff turmoil and an obsession with race, gender, the climate, reckonings, and inclusivity, lots of it generated by Teitelbaum, leave the place in a sour mood and without much of an art history plot. A Canadian, he came to Boston after years as director of the Art Gallery of Ontario. I have nothing against Canadians, but when it comes to woke mantra, they both practice and believe.
Under Teitelbaum, the MFA is reinterpreting its splendid American art collection to, as he says, “create a space for many voices to share their experience and understanding of the origin story of our country’s founding.” All in time for America 250. I dread what they’re going to do. “Many voices” means the Boo Hoo Brigade. Paul Revere, get off your horse. Representative Ayanna Pressley, the Squad’s baldest member, here’s your soapbox.
Teitelbaum is set to leave on August 1st, three long months from now. Terjanian’s already there. The trustees should accelerate the timetable, and Terjanian should give the new “space for many voices” an imperial bludgeon, unless they’re willing to give the voices of half a dozen NR writers a few objects each.
The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan is getting a new director, too, and he’s another insider. Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s longtime chief curator of its massive prints and drawings department, succeeds Glenn Lowry, the museum’s director for the past 30 years. Cherix is Swiss, but he’s been at MoMA since 2007. He specializes in the art of the 1960s and ’70s, but, given his leadership job, probably has catholic interests. The artists whose exhibitions he’s curated over the years — Ed Ruscha, Betye Saar, Adrian Piper, Marcel Broodthaers, and the odious Yoko Ono — don’t appeal to me. They’re good artists, but I like saftig art, and theirs is bloodless. So limited a range of artists is a red flag — they don’t rouse the spirit — but we’ll see.
I admire Lowry for his smarts, eloquence, durability, and grace under pressure. That said, it’s very difficult for a new director to follow a longtime incumbent. Habits and expectations are set not only among the staff but among trustees, donors, artists, and art critics. Even needed change becomes difficult. “We’ve always done it this way” staffers bleat between sobs. So, Cherix, himself a longtimer, is a good choice. MoMA is already a functional, effective place. It doesn’t need a revolution.
In a case of Hamas-loving vandalism last year at Cambridge — not at Harvard, a rich topic in itself, but Cambridge University in the U.K. — a Hamasnik slashed a very good portrait of Arthur James Balfour on display at Trinity College. The Balfour Declaration, a 1917 letter written by the then–foreign secretary to the head of the British Zionist movement, promised a homeland for Jews in what was then known as Palestine in the Ottoman Empire. Bad. Philip de László, a high-society portraitist known as the best among Sargent’s successors, painted the portrait of Balfour. The slashing was filmed by the Palestinian Action Group and released with a statement spouting the usual hooey.
A year later, the university police and the local police claim they still can’t find the perp and have more or less stopped trying. Glance at the photo, bobbies. How many young women with pigtails and tattoos have access to Trinity College? Not a good look, by the way. And how many have an obvious fondness for sticky toffee pudding, judging from those love handles? The police even have the video!
This doesn’t take the wits of Miss Marple, and it’s not like they’re looking for Jack the Ripper. Obviously, the police don’t want to know, but, politics aside, this is art vandalism. Do we need to send Nancy Drew over there to — may I say “once again” — bail the Brits from a right pickle?