Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum Is the University at Its Best

Two stellar new exhibitions, plus a ‘mind-boggling deal’ to salvage what’s failed at Crimson.

It had been more than a year since I’d been to the Fogg, Harvard’s main art museum, so, with Harvard in the news, and with me in Boston, I visited on Wednesday. President Trump predicted last week that a “mind-bogglingly historic” deal with Harvard was in the works in which, I hope, our oldest university would renounce and reform its illegal, race-based admissions and hiring systems and squelch a gross bout of campus antisemitism.

Color me not only skeptical but incredulous. Harvard is too hubristic, too fat and prosperous, too insular, too aloof, and too dogmatic to admit that it’s erred and to change its ways, except in the most performative, transitory way. More on the MBD — Mind-Boggling Deal — later but, first and foremost, I saw two subtly splendid exhibitions at the Fogg. At rotten-to-the-core Harvard, the Fogg is still the best of the best.

I didn’t plan to see Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking since I’d seen so many Munch shows over the past few years, and they’ve often left me not Arctic Circle cold but more numb to his core virtues than I should be. I had come to see The Solomon Collection: Dürer to Degas and Beyond, displaying a bequest to the Fogg from a donor I knew well. But as soon as I saw different versions of Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), big Munch woodcuts, glowing in a row against a grayed, teal wall, I knew I had to stop and look and look and look.

Munch (1863–1944) is famous for The Scream, Madonna, and The Kiss — paintings that ooze anxiety — and his portraits, but his prints are the stuff of genius and revolution. On only one level, Technically Speaking is a process show. It focuses on Munch’s manufacture of woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs. Munch premiered the composition of Two Human Beings as a painting displayed in 1892 in a much-criticized show of his work. He then etched a version in 1894, followed by woodcut versions starting in 1899. He liked the theme of two people, likely lovers, together but emotionally apart.

For the woodcuts, Munch started with a block of wood, using a fretsaw, among other tools, to carve the image but specifically to carve the block into parts so that each part could be inked separately. He manipulated gaps between the pieces of wood to become part of the design. When he inked the block and printed it, the gaps made contours. As in many of his projects, he made woodcuts of Two Human Beings over decades, experimenting along the way. As the block he carved in the 1890s chipped, he used the dings as part of the look. Versions are crisp and dark or light and shadowy, depending on how he inked the block. He hand-colored other versions, a touch here and there.

Munch made mezzotints and lithographs, too, and gravitated among them, woodcuts, etchings, and paintings, sometimes of the same image. Some, like Angst, Madonna, Vampire, The Kiss, and Mystical Shore, are trademark Munch so the exhibition feels like a mini-retrospective. Interpretation is clear, a feat given Munch’s complicated technique. Munch’s etched plates and woodblocks are in the exhibition, too. A takeaway primer on printmaking is smart and handy. And the show is a sensual feast. Nearly all the Munchs in Technically Speaking came from Philip and Lynn Straus, longtime Harvard donors who collected the artist’s work in breadth and depth over 40 years, knowing that, one day, it would all go to the Fogg. Philip Straus was a Harvard alumnus, and Harvard men in particular are fanatically loyal.

Arthur Solomon was an alum and a Harvard professor. He and his wife, Marny, were more wide-ranging than the Strauses, collecting art that spanned six centuries. Dürer to Degas and Beyond displays about 135 works they collected, just received as a bequest after Marny’s death in 2020. Both exhibitions salute donors, and that’s good. Both are lessons in the joy of collecting, too. The Fogg hopes students learn that collecting to the beat of your own drummer is fine. The Solomons’ collecting was intensely personal and, over the years, evolved from Old Masters to very good contemporary art by Boston artists.

Technically Speaking is a straight Munch show, but the art in Dürer to Degas shares the spotlight with the Solomons. The exhibition chronicles their collecting through their story and photographs but also through their associations with dealers, scholars, and critics from whom they learned so much. Their marriage was the second for both. Each collected art before they married in 1972. Afterwards, they collected together.

I walked first into a gallery that explores catholicity of taste and a fixation on quality on Arthur’s part during his years of collecting before he married Marny. There’s a Hopper watercolor and Burchfield watercolor side by side, both from 1931, both of architecture — bedraggled old houses that look animated by spirits from beyond. There are drawings by Degas and Cézanne, color lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir, and Daumier’s Two Lawyers. On the opposite wall are portraits by Chassériau, Courbet, and Géricault. Géricault’s Olivier Bro, from around 1819, is fierce. The portrait shows the five-year-old son of a cavalry officer knighted by Napoleon. The boy wields a sword, with his dog playing the part of a horse. Between the two walls are sculptures by Degas, Carpeaux, Henry Moore, and Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

An odd group? Not really. Arthur, a young chemistry student at Harvard, audited art history classes and learned about Modernism. He bought art, mostly French, as he explored Modernism’s roots. Through his Harvard connections, he bought Henry Moore’s work. Lehmbruck was certainly modern but an outlier. It’s the only work of German modern art that he bought. Opportunity, how much spare cash he had at a given moment, and how he construed the development of modern art — his narrative — all played a role.

Before they married, Marny collected art on her own, too. A group of prints by French artists show a taste for the macabre — Alphonse Legros’s The Black Cat, from 1861, depicts the aftermath of a murder — and for richly inked, velvety black etchings like Félix Braquemond’s Upper Part of the Barn Door, from 1865. Dead birds are nailed on an old barn door. It’s ghastly but riveting. Marny had superb but very specific taste in Old Master prints. She loved the Three Godless Masters — Dürer’s students Hans Sebald Beham, Barthel Beham, and Georg Pencz — Dürer himself, Tiepolo, and Goya. Jacques Honervogt’s Flowers in an Ornamented Bronze Vase, from sometime in the 17th century, is a very inky, black etching but mysterious and vibrant.

Arthur’s collecting showed a didactic, storytelling streak. He was, after all, a professor. Marny liked offbeat subjects and was attuned to ink’s potential for lusciousness. Once the couple married, they focused mostly on contemporary abstract art. The Solomons called it “an awakening.” Marriage can do that. Ken Moffett, a Harvard alum and the first contemporary-art curator at Boston’s MFA, didn’t advise them, since they were free spirits, but he inspired them and pointed here and there in a direction he felt they might like to go. Jules Olitski, David Smith, and Jack Bush became favorites, as did young Boston artists such as Marjorie Minkin.

Arthur Solomon died in 2002, Phil Straus in 2004. I didn’t know them but knew their wives — Marny and Lynn, though good liberals, were uneasy, to say the least, about Harvard’s drift toward a weird mix of anarchy, dogma, and pompous triviality.

Now, July 4 is near, and a feuding Town and Gown are taking time off. I’m always operational, though, and will suggest some basic components of a truly Mind-Boggling Deal. Harvard, first of all, doesn’t exist on another planet. It shouldn’t be free to be whatever it wants. It’s an American university that, through direct and indirect grants and tax expenditures, has lived off the public’s dime since 1636. Trump — and the public — rightly demand accountability.

First, let’s not go all IDF and call it decapitation but hey, hey, ho, ho, Penny Pritzker’s gotta go. She’s the Hyatt billionaire, Obama secretary of crony capitalism, and sister of America’s fattest and — aside from California’s Napa Valley wine soaker — worst governor. And she chairs the Harvard board. She’s part of the problem. She needs to resign as part of the MBD. Let’s enlist Bill Ackman as the new head honcho.

The 13-member Harvard Corporation is the school’s board of trustees. How to give Ackman — or whoever replaces Pritzker — the backing that a new leader will need? A few other heads have to roll. I suggest making it simple: Dump all the lawyers. There are five Harvard JDs on the board, including Pritzker. Doesn’t Harvard have a general counsel? And the board doesn’t need two retired college professors. One will do. For replacements, let’s look for construction czars, factory owners, Texans and Floridians, venture capitalists, and Republicans who aren’t squishes. People who know how to make things that last.

Harvard’s admissions system is illegal. So sayeth the Supreme Court, yet elite colleges and universities won’t dismantle aggressive, race-driven admissions unless forced by exacting government scrutiny and, now and again, serious bunker busting.

My MBD puts Harvard in a state of federal oversight similar to Justice Department control of elections in the Jim Crow South. In admissions, race can’t be part of the equation. Bobbies needn’t be present at every admissions decision, but if the numbers are out of whack, Harvard will have some splainin’ to do, under oath. And Harvard’s longtime director of admissions, William Fitzsimmons, and his core team need to go. The admissions system they spent decades crafting is illegal.

“People will die” is as hackneyed as “they’ll throw Grandma off a cliff.” I’m sure Harvard does good, though pricy, science research, most of the time, funded by a federal government not known for quality control. After Martin Kulldorf was hounded from the Harvard faculty for challenging Covid dogma, I wonder how good some of it is. Harvard’s left-brainers look with derision at Bolshie humanities, law, public health, psychology, and divinity faculty and students — flaccid, emotional thinkers that they tend to be. Left-brainers aren’t, as a rule, political. They’re paying the price, though, when the Feds yank Harvard’s billions in science grants, all so Maya Angelou scholars can go Gaza, practice their goose steps, and trash standards through woke bunk.

I don’t want to see their research dismantled. I want to see them rise up, take aim at Harvard’s dark side, and slap the lefty loons silly. Trump can goad and prod, but real change at Harvard has to come from Harvard people. In the meantime, no federal money. Foundations these days are loaded. Harvard’s got lots of billionaire alumni. Researchers can go to them and beg.

Capping foreign enrollment at 10 percent will work wonders by changing the tone. About 30 percent of Harvard’s students are foreigners, which means that we American taxpayers are subsidizing deluxe schooling for lots of scions of CCP kingpins and Arab sheiks but also bringing to campus people whose civic culture is nothing like ours. Antisemitism is rampant in Europe, de rigueur in the Muslim world, and, for China’s young people, Jews are an abstraction. Out of a billion people in China, it’s believed that fewer than 2,000 are observant Jews.

Everyone knows that America’s elite schools grab foreigners more for the tuition money than to get the best and the brightest. Cutting their numbers to a reasonable 10 percent would open doors for American students with American values.

And let’s back the bell curve, starting with Harvard. Nearly all letter grades at Harvard now begin with A, which means teachers have left the hard work of quality control in the dust. Gentlemanly Cs used to be a good enough grade, B an average grade, and A reserved for distinguished work. Now, students have gotten lazy, as have professors, and since we taxpayers are subsidizing the place, we can demand an accounting of achievement.

In the realm of surgical strikes, I’d suggest terminating — not reforming since bad behavior will creep back into the picture — the divinity school’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, two hubs of campus antisemitism. The Harvard Law Review needs to be restructured. It seemed to have an illegal quota system for articles and even for footnotes in articles. This restructuring should be overseen by a committee of hard asses from the Federalist Society. Ibrahim Bharmal’s $65,000 Harvard Law School fellowship — which pays him to work at, of all places, the hate group Council on Islamic-American Relations — needs to be pulled. He’s the Law Review goon who copped a plea for assaulting a Jewish student on campus.

“Trust but verify,” as Ronnie said. My dictionary says that “the Devil’s in the details” is “an ancient proverb” coined by who knows who. Both sayings are true, as is my own observation that Crimson is a madrassa, with plenty of mullahs and mullahs-in-training. For an MBD to work, Trump’s people have to be exacting and relentless.