Plus, in the news, London’s National Gallery gets an addition, a classic wallpaper artist wins a prize, and ups and downs at the Independent 20th Century Art Fair.

A few summer loose ends and some news, and greetings from Fort Worth. I love Texas. Every couple of years I find a big, fat, wicked rat in the art world’s garden of earthly delights and chase it with my rhetorical broomstick until it’s fled, dead, or recast into something right and proper. The Smithsonian is this fall’s fat rat. Since 2022, I’ve been in Washington off and on, working on my Allan Stone biography at the Archives of American Art, where Stone’s gallery files were donated. So I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly at the 21-museum blob.

The Smithsonian is in a Swamp bubble, so — too often — it pimps the divisive shtick that we’re either victims or oppressors, abusing its great art and reducing it to a handy prop, mostly for race politics. With a new sheriff in town this past January 20, the White House noticed and called it. Letters have gone back and forth. The Trump people have placed the Smithsonian — whose collection and buildings belong to the government, whose staff are federal employees, and most of whose money comes from you and me and our Chinese Communist Party lenders — under enhanced supervision. Lonnie Bunch, head of the Smithsonian, lunched with President Trump last week. It was all nicey-nice — Bunch is a schmoozer — and, I suspect, there were lots of sweetly murmured promises to change.

Later, and circularly, Bunch wrote to Trump that “our own review of content to ensure our programming is nonpartisan and factual is ongoing, and it is consistent with our authority over our programming and content.” Bar-wise, how low can you go? We know the Smithsonian is nonpartisan. It doesn’t explicitly endorse candidates. The hate group Southern Poverty Law Center is also “nonpartisan.” So is Code Pink, whose latest podcast, I see, is Feminists Resisting Fascism, and the nutty Climate Emergency Fund, which cries about the weather. “Factual” means the Smithsonian gets its dates right and nothing more.

The problem is its dogmatic curators, some of whom practice bad art history, hijacking their museum for ranty, dumb shows like The Shape of Power. Or — and here’s something factual — the Cooper Hewitt, which is the Smithsonian’s one New York museum, selling in its shop both Angela Davis T-shirts and the 1619 Project, the Smithsonian’s fact-impaired, poison-pen collaboration with the New York Times, for which Bunch should have been fired. The Cooper Hewitt goes all Gaza gooey and claims that the Lenape natives are “the original and rightful stewards” of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Ladies who lunch at the Cos Club, prepare to be squaws — braids, grinding maize, tanning elk hide with your teeth. A nightmare fantasy, I know, but is that what we want the Smithsonian to promote?

“Clean up your act” ought to be at the top of the Smithsonian’s to-do list. It’s a straightforward task and a modest White House demand. It lives off the taxpayers, so it’s not a free spirit. Less axe-grinding, less dogma, fewer politics. What’s so hard about that? This is a curatorial and directorial failure, but it’s Bunch’s problem, given whom he’s appointed as directors of the museums he supervises. Curators live in their own bubble. Many secretly want to be community organizers, but, alas, that doesn’t pay and it’s grubby work. It’s up to the museum directors to do quality control when exhibitions or acquisitions go off the rails. With vacancies at the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian’s American art museum, it’s up to Bunch, but he seems so woke that he can’t bring himself to act in a meaningful way.

On a bright note, Andrew Raftery, an artist and art professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, won the prestigious Abbey Mural Prize for his handmade, site-specific wallpaper now permanently installed at the Redwood Library in Newport, R.I. Andrew’s a printmaker who has mastered technically exacting practices from the 17th and 18th centuries. For the Redwood Library, he hand-carved his designs into individual wooden blocks, did endless test printings, and printed the final wallpaper using distemper inks. His design draws from the rusticated exterior of the library building, beech leaves, an open book, block-and-shell motifs from old Newport furniture, and a keyhole, since we’re in the library to unlock knowledge.

De-skilling and mass production are givens today, so it’s a salve to see artists like Raftery doing the hard, elegant art, and to see places like the Redwood sponsoring it. The Redwood is a subscription library, established in 1747, and an athenaeum, which means it’s not only a library but a research center, a collection of rarities, and a cultural center. It does high-end art exhibitions, too. Thomas Eakins’s Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (A May Morning in the Park), from 1879, is on view now in a small show about coaches made in Newport. I wrote about the library’s exhibition of the grandest silver sailboat racing trophies a few years ago.

I skipped the massive contemporary art Armory Show, not, and this is confusing, at an armory but at the Javits Center. It’s meant to evoke the norms-shattering 1913 Armory Show at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue and 26th Street in Manhattan.

I’ve reviewed it the past few years, but it gets worse every year and seems now colorful and odd. With 230 dealers, it’s a slog that I bypassed in favor of the Independent 20th Century Art Fair at the Battery Maritime Building. Sweet sea breezes.

The Independent fair is four years old. With only 31 dealers and focusing on lesser-known 20th-century artists, it should be full of surprises, but I’ve found it predictable and flat. This year wasn’t too different. Weinstein Gallery showed the paintings of Leonor Fini (1907–1996). They’re good, but after so many Surrealism anniversary shows, she’s overcooked and too well known. Dan Basen (1939–1970), whose work filled Galerie Gmurzynska’s booth, committed suicide at 30 and wasn’t fully formed, so his work is inchoate. Jeremy Scholar, the British dealer, showed paintings by the loose group called the Highwaymen, black artists who, from the 1950s to the 1980s, sold neon Florida landscapes out of the trunks of their cars and from roadside stands, catering to tourists from the Snowbelt. They’re formulaic and interesting, but they don’t intrigue. Were the artists cracker white, the chattering class would call them tacky. Truth be told, they are tacky, in a good way. They’re nostalgic, with a nice touch of kitsch. That a London dealer is showing them amazed me.

There were also Australian, Lebanese, and Brazilian artists exhibited at the Independent. Picasso and Munch aren’t lesser known, but who cares when they’re shown at John Szoke’s booth? He specializes in the very best prints by both. He showed Picasso’s Salomé, from 1905, one of a tiny number of impressions before the plate was steel-faced and a bit diminished. The klatsch of psychos and sybarites, plus a severed head, made me think of Norma Desmond. “We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces,” indeed.

Near Salomé was L’Italienne, a 1955 lithograph by Picasso that I’d never seen. It depicts a young Italian woman from an 1820s painting, a reproduction of which Picasso had seen years before. He adapted it to look like Françoise Gilot, his mistress, from whom he would soon split. He intensified the woman with thick black contours, bigger eyes, and a direct stare; in the margins he added a flautist, a satyr, and his new mistress. Picasso and Gilot split in 1953. He didn’t dare make L’Italienne until two years later.

I’d never heard of Dusti Bongé or Ralph Iwamoto, two artists shown at Hollis Taggert’s booth. Bongé (1903–1993) lived and worked in Biloxi, Miss., and is a very good artist. She’s got a light touch — talk about sweet sea breezes — and a lovely sense of color. After living in New York, she moved back to Mississippi to raise her family but showed with the very savvy Betty Parsons in New York into the 1980s. Iwamoto (1927–2013) was a Hawaiian Minimalist but a Minimalist with a soul. His early work, like Bonge’s, is tropical and pagan.

Forum Gallery teased with a booth showing the work of Gregory Gillespie (1936–2000), the visionary no one knows. I’ll write about Forum’s bigger Gillespie show later this month. He’s our Walter Mitty artist, with a stiletto. He’s fierce.

London’s National Gallery announced on Tuesday that it’s expanding, nebulously so. The eminent collection of art from early Renaissance to pre-1945, nearly all paintings, is finishing its 200th anniversary and the renovation of its Sainsbury Wing. Now, with anchor gifts of £375 million ($508 million), it’s planning a new wing extending toward Leicester Square, to help it “bolster the relevance of both the National Gallery and the UK within a highly competitive global cultural landscape.” It’s partnering with the Tate, and for what end is a mystery.

I like the National Gallery, but much fiddling has been done with it over the past 20 years. “Bolster the relevance” and “highly competitive global cultural landscape” don’t seem to have much to do with art or scholarship or, really, serving the public but more to do with glam, headlines, and crowds. Why not leave the place alone? Big American museums, like our major universities, don’t feel they’re alive unless they’re doing massive fundraising drives and construction projects. It’s a treadmill that the National Gallery might be climbing. I’ll be in London later this year to see the gallery’s final anniversary shows and will report more.

Last week, the Milwaukee Art Museum hired Kim Sajet as its new director. She was just deposed for DEI mania as director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, a beacon light of mediocrity she led for twelve years. It seems that nothing succeeds, among the Milwaukee museum’s trustees, like failure, and woke failure at that. Weren’t there better, brighter candidates? Australian and Dutch, Sajet wasn’t in sync with American portraiture, which means American heritage. The trustees could have done worse but picked on the rebound.

Also last week, the Dallas Museum of Art hired Brian Ferriso as its new director. He and I started as museum directors around the same time, Brian at the Portland Art Museum — Oregon’s messy Portland, not Maine’s. He kept the museum out of Antifa’s missile range. He also led its nice expansion, so he’ll bring good experience to the Dallas museum’s fraught project. I’ve met him a few times, like him, know the Portland museum, and wonder what he’ll do. The museum needs help. The last director left in the middle of a capital campaign and a building project. They’re doing an Infinity Mirror Room of pumpkins, by Yayoi Kusama. As I said, how low can you go?