NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I’ ve written about the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven over the years but not since 2019, months before Yale closed its great museums to the public for nearly two years. Yale, presumably flush with the best scientists and doctors on the planet, embraced the Covid mass hysteria, hallucination, and hypnosis like a geek in love’s first bloom. Its masters imposed a masking, curfew, vaccine, and inferior online-learning regime on young, healthy men and women who, they had to have known, were Covid’s least likely targets. Distinguished epidemiologists teaching at Yale’s own medical school said that a fear machine, not reason or science, propelled the Covid mania.

Yale’s daily newsletter, which I read, barely has enough space for anything but the triple hoaxes that obsess Ivy League schools: America is racist, Covid will kill us all unless, of course, global warming doesn’t incinerate us first. It’s tragic to see a great university sink under the weight of false values.

As Covid loomed, Yale’s president and deans, with willful, medieval ignorance, closed the school to the public, and that includes its dozen or so museums, among them its superb art gallery and the British Art Center. It was closed for nearly two years.

I grew up near New Haven and went to Yale so, since it opened in 1977, I’ve visited the BAC hundreds of times. It’s a wonderful, unique place. Losing it for so long was a crime against culture, and it flipped the bird to the townies. The BAC and Yale’s encyclopedic art gallery across the street double as museums for the students and for the half-million-or-so people who live in New Haven and nearby towns. The university kept them closed as long as it possibly could.

But why dwell on the past? Because the best and brightest are often as dumb and dim as a rock in a cave, or in an ivory tower — that’s why. It’s a persistently teachable moment. Yale is becoming a place of learning that never learns anything.

I got a press release last week telling me that the BAC, having escaped the Covid lockout cult about a year ago and returned to normal hours, was closing again — for a year — to replace the roof.

I rushed to New Haven over the weekend as if I were visiting a dear friend on his deathbed. Yes, I empathized. I had to replace the roof of the Addison Gallery years ago when I was the director there. The Addison’s building, like the BAC’s, is a work of art, and our artisanal glass roof didn’t collapse but was in extremis, “suddenly,” as obituaries say, and we closed the place for a year to install a new glass roof.

So I sympathize but nonetheless disagree. After nearly two years of lockout, and little more than a year after reopening, why close again so soon? The roof was last replaced in 1998, and the building’s skylights are original, I know. Why not keep the place open for a couple of years more? The roof’s not about to collapse. It seems churlish to open it only to close it soon after. Yale’s art gallery across the street is revered, but the BAC is loved.

The university got a big grant from the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative to replace the roof and skylights using technology that chases Yale’s whack-a-doodle net-zero-carbon scheme. I suspect it wants to use the grant money sooner rather than later. About 80 of the BAC’s best things will be on view at Yale’s university art gallery, so it’s not the end of the world.

I love so many things at the BAC, and love the totality of it, but rushed to visit the museum this weekend for another reason: The museum plans to reinterpret the collection during this closure. It has a new director who seems immoderately engaged with Anglo-African subjects, especially with slavery and oppression. I dread what will happen.

It was a joy to see the place after so long. Yale’s art gallery, which opened in 1953, is Louis Kahn’s first museum building. The BAC is his last. The two bookend the pinnacle of Modernist architecture, but the BAC — airy and serene — is perfect. Welcoming visitors is a soaring, honey-oak-paneled entrance courtyard with a travertine floor. Another courtyard on the second floor displays double-hung full-length portraits, landscapes, and wild-animal pictures. This space welcomes people to the BAC’s research library and print room but also serves as a country-house-style gallery and a space for receptions.

The BAC isn’t big. The top of the four floors has high ceilings with skylights. That’s the permanent-collection galleries. The walls are covered with beige cloth. Big windows look out to Chapel Street, one of the city’s main drags, and to the campus. There’s some artificial light, but most of the light is natural. If a visitor comes often enough, he’ll notice that the BAC’s great paintings by Turner, Constable, Van Dyke, George Stubbs, Reynolds, and every other heavy hitter look a little different based on the light that nature happens to deliver on a given day.

I’ve known every BAC director well except Courtney Martin, the new director, whom I’ve met once. Jules Prown, the first director, and the director who worked with Kahn, was my dissertation adviser. Martin got her Ph.D. at Yale — her dissertation adviser chaired the search committee that hired her — and came to the BAC without much museum experience. I was very skeptical since she’d never worked at a museum with a permanent collection and had been a curator for a very short time.

Her dissertation was on contemporary black British artists. That’s her comfort zone, and it’s reflected in the programming. The British Empire was a huge place, though. The U.K. has lots of good black artists but also good artists descending from a hundred places aside from what were once colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. I’m happy to see the BAC do contemporary-art shows and buy the work of living artists. Over the years, it hasn’t been known for this and should be.

The BAC has been closed most of the time that Martin has been director, so it’s hard to judge her rule. She made a very positive impression on me when I met her and heard her speak. Having been a director of a museum limited to the art of one nation — mine was American-only — I know how important a balanced program is. My hunch, looking at the BAC’s programs, is that the initiatives that Martin controls tend to concern race. The big, new exhibition on view when I visited doesn’t, but it’s the pet project of the chief curator.

That said, the place looks fantastic. The permanent collection is displayed chronologically, starting with Tudor portraits, with their frank, direct faces and dazzling costumes so detailed that we seem to see every stitch. The BAC is so loved that moving, say, a favorite portrait from one place to another is cause for grumbling if not swoons. A portrait of a woman by Robert Peake the Elder from around 1600 wasn’t in the Tudor room. It always makes me smile. She looks like a sly minx who’s got dirt on someone. I found her in the BAC’s Long Gallery, which runs most of the length of the museum and evokes spaces in a British royal palace while also being a place for open storage. The Turners were in their usual place. George Stubbs’s Zebra, from 1763, which has to be the BAC’s icon, had moved, but only a few feet. Constable’s cloud studies are small but brilliant, fresh, and modern-looking.

Counting rare books and manuscripts, the collection has close to 100,000 objects. The building and core collection were the vision and gifts of Paul Mellon, a Yale alumnus who’s got to be the university’s biggest and quietest donor. Mellon (1907–1999) was Andrew Mellon’s son and one of the 20th century’s great collectors and philanthropists. He described himself as a lifelong amateur: an amateur horseman, poet, connoisseur, farmer, and scholar. He added, though, that the Latin root of “amateur” is “amor,” or to love. The BAC is a serious place for scholars but holds the public’s affection because it’s such a comfortable, welcoming place and the collection is sublime. It’s where an art lover — another kind of amateur — can feel like an aristocrat.

I spent a big part of my visit in the BAC’s bracing, exceptionally good Bill Brandt/Henry Moore exhibition. Brandt (1904–1983) was a British photographer I didn’t know. Moore (1898–1986) was, of course, the British Modernist sculptor whose undulating, bulbous figures, mostly of women, are well known. The two didn’t exactly collaborate but knew each other well and worked on parallel tracks.

The exhibition begins with the Blitz. Every faithful, longtime viewer of Masterpiece Theater or Amazon’s Brit Box understands that, sooner or later, a series in which the Blitz figures will grab our attention. I’m watching Foyle’s War now. I don’t especially love it and don’t know whether I’ll march through it, but in every episode, the Germans bomb some poor bloke’s house. Both Brandt and Moore became famous for depicting, for the Ministry of Information, Blitz damage, blacked-out London streets, and life in air-raid shelters.

Brandt’s photographs are especially potent. There’s no heroism or romance. His black-and-white scenes are dismal. In Liverpool Street Extension, from 1940, dozens sleep crammed in an underground station, arms akimbo and blankets creating arbitrary pools of dark and light. The tube gives the scene an ordered, geometric, and modern unity. Another photograph from 1940 shows a man sleeping in an empty, open tomb in a church crypt.

These were published in magazines, sometimes with humor. Next to Church Crypt in London, where a tomb becomes a bed, is a Brandt photograph of a table tomb effigy in Canterbury Cathedral. “I know,” the caption reads, “I’ve been here 400 years already!” Next to the man sleeping in a stone coffin is his alarm clock and a teacup on a lace doily. 

Moore does chalk, pencil, and watercolor drawings. He depicts figures in orderly rows that seem to go on forever. Faces are anonymous. Thick lines of white chalk make the figures look like skeletons. Brandt’s and Moore’s work was often published side by side in magazines and newspapers.

In 1942, the Ministry of Information sent Moore to northern England to draw scenes of everyday life in coal-mining towns, especially workers in the pits. His drawings don’t depict masses of people but single figures or two or three figures — squatting miners wearing headlamps and digging. In 1937, Brandt did a series of photographs of miners and mining towns near Durham. Landscapes are dark and treeless, with soot everywhere. A miner eats his supper covered with soot, gingerly using knife and fork while his wife watches.

As a documentary photographer showing working-class people, Brandt conveys dirty labor and gritty lifestyles with a frankness missed by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in their work as photographers for the American Farm Security Administration. The American work is sometimes prim and sometimes a sanitized Hollywood view of poverty. Brandt’s lights and darks are extreme, making for a jarring contrast. His subjects aren’t desperate. Rather, they look like they’re from another planet.

By the time of the war, Moore was known as an Art Deco sculptor, but he hadn’t found his mature style. It wasn’t until after the war that both artists found new creative possibilities in Britain’s monoliths at Avebury and Stonehenge. After depicting events in the news and in gripping personal dramas, both men looked at ancient stone forms that transcended social, political, and economic turmoil of the kind that Britain experienced during the Depression, WWII, and the post-war aftermath. Moore found the signature style we know. Brandt became a photographer of sculptural, nearly abstract nudes, or close-ups of body parts — legs, feet, or ears — set in a wild natural setting like a stony beach.

I usually don’t like exhibitions comparing two artists, since often one of the two clearly outshines the other, or one seems derivative. The BAC show delivers two artists who don’t go mano a mano but develop together, each looking at the other’s work and each drawn to similar forms and subjects. It’s a very intelligent show.

Over nearly 50 years I’ve seen many BAC exhibitions, and I’ve never seen a bad one. The Brandt/Moore show is among the best. It has already traveled to the Hepworth Wakefield Museum and the Sainsbury Centre in the U.K. and was organized by the BAC together with these galleries. Memorable, too, were past BAC extravaganza exhibitions on Stanley Spencer, Howard Hodgkin, and Canaletto in Britain, though the show I cherish the most was from, I believe, the early ’80s. It was an exhibition on British tea-biscuit tins, often elaborately decorated. It was kitsch at its loveliest and taught me that good art can be found in the least likely places. The museum is planning a big exhibition, once it opens again, on Turner, on the occasion of his 250th birthday.

I saw Harold Macmillan speak at the BAC on its tenth anniversary. Its 50th anniversary is in 2027. If the place decides to invite a retired Tory PM as a guest speaker, it’ll have plenty of choice. I suspect that there will be a battalion of unemployed Tory big beasts at that point.