Greetings from Santa Barbara. It’s paradise. I know, in ye olde Vermont, where I live, it’s mud season and it was ghastly when I left. And we’re getting a bonus snowfall of 20 inches this weekend. Here it’s balmy and exotic, but you’d think I’d never seen a flower before, or a ray of sunshine. I’d visited only once, and for a day, about 20 years ago. This round, in two packed days, I did in-depth visits to two of this lovely city’s museums, toured the unforgettable Lotusland, a unique botanical garden, saw the studio of the wonderful sculptor Alex Rasmussen, who works in aluminum, and went to a National Review Institute donor event.I’m a fellow at the Institute, which is a nonprofit, so donors support my work. It was a very fun evening and consistent with my lifelong view that right-of-center people are happy, worldly, curious people while left-of-center people, earnest to be sure, are — with exceptions, to be sure — blinkered, tight, and holier-than-thou. I think you need to believe in the imperfectibility of humankind to have a sense of humor.
More on all of these subjects later, but today I’m focusing on the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. I’d never been, so I was able to see new treasures, among them two stellar paintings by Monet and unexpected and precious Hudson River School paintings. The place also has a new director, Amada Cruz, who was the director of the Seattle Art Museum. Of course, while I tend to travel light, I’ve had a long career in art museums and do bring a bit of baggage with me even to museums I’ve not visited. It’s a small world with a basic hierarchy of museums that are consequential and those that aren’t.
I abhor this hierarchy since I’m not a snob. Still, I’m curious about why the Santa Barbara Museum isn’t better regarded, or why it isn’t regarded at all. It’s got a lovely building that was once the main post office. Santa Barbara is a very rich city that feels like a small town, which means it’s intimate, comfortable, and friendly, and this ought to be reflected in the museum. The museum collection is good, though you wouldn’t know it from an initial visit. It attracts robust donors and has a fine board. There’s always a chance the museum doesn’t want to be a player, or better known. Until the idiot Prince Harry and the Duchess of Phony Baloney moved there, I’d never heard of Montecito. Now, I’m a simple country soul, and a New Englander. That said, Montecito seems fine with being a secret.
My point is that the Santa Barbara Museum, located in a mudless place, seems stuck in metaphorical mud. It’s a puzzlement, as the King of Siam said. It enriches my story but doesn’t help that the museum is enmeshed in an embarrassing, self-made kerfuffle over a canceled show, a fired curator, and a pointless crusade over diversity and inclusion.
The museum opened in 1941, spurred by Santa Barbara’s growing wealth and population of newcomers from the Northeast and Midwest who wanted culture to augment perfect weather and Pacific breezes. Today, it’s got 27,000 objects.
It’s not entirely encyclopedic, but it covers lots of bases and 4,000 years of creativity, with a photography collection of substance though barely detectable in the museum, good Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese art, Greek and Roman antiquities, and very good French and American paintings.
The entrance courtyard art is arranged in a modified Salon style that doesn’t quite work. I’ve done lots of Salon style installations. They’re fun to do. The old French salons displayed paintings from the ceiling nearly to the floor packed together with little wall space between them. In emphasizing abundance and calculated dissonance, they generate a frisson and make for an overall impression rather than promoting close, individual looking.
Here, there’s too much dissonance. There’s a gloomy, weak Zurbarán, a decent, didactic picture of Hagar and Ishmael by Salvator Rosa, and early Italian Renaissance paintings hanging with portraits by Thomas Sully, Thomas Lawrence, George Romney, and William Merritt Chase, a mediocre Winslow Homer panting, and landscapes by Emil Carlsen and George Inness. It’s more than a pudding without a theme. It looks less calculated and more random, even anarchic. It put me not in a questioning state of mind but a skeptical one, which is where a museum doesn’t want me.
Serenity and Revolution is a permanent-collection show looking at “how artists negotiated the extraordinary changes and tragedies of the early 20th century,” including mass deaths in World War I, depressions galore, colonized people breaking free, and Communist and fascist despotisms. Observing the obvious, I find this a topic of oceanic size and consequent incoherence, as the show’s title seems to forecast. Still, the art’s good. Wifredo Lam’s Casting of the Spell, from 1947, is wonderful, but it’s best seen as a dreamy, scary Surrealist painting that has little to do with the woes of colonialism. Gunther Gerzso’s 1940 drawing of Trotsky’s dead head is compelling, as is Käthe Kollwitz’s Mourners, from 1920. There’s a Charles Sheeler still life, a Matisse drawing, and Picasso’s Woman with a Pitcher, from 1919.”
I would have stuck with the theme of treasures from the permanent collection and ditched revolution, slaughter-in-the-trenches, and tyranny-run-amok. It’s hard enough to get people in Santa Barbara out of the gorgeous weather and away from pretty streets and into a museum. Let’s not depress them.
Three big, sumptuous Monet paintings — Charing Cross Bridge, from 1899, Waterloo Bridge, from 1900, and Villas in Bordighera, from 1884 — are a feast and would have made for a timely, dramatic permanent-collection show of Impressionist paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, and drawings. The museum doesn’t want to mix media, but it has enough first-rate things to present an extravaganza in honor of the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist salon in Paris in 1874. Instead, it sticks with hits like the Monets, a recent gift of a big Corot, and a nice Pissarro in paintings galleries with a weak Matisse, and German Expressionist things that seem like sore thumbs.
The museum owns lovely American things, among them a suite of small landscapes by Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Gifford, Ralph Albert Blakelock, John Frederick Kensett, Worthington Whittredge, and others as well as Perseus at Night, by Sargent, Steaming Streets, by Bellows, and a decent 1943 Western landscape by Georgia O’Keeffe. The landscapes looked good, but an American gallery with mixed media and walls painted in a saturated 19th-century color would be riveting. The O’Keeffe, Sargent, and Bellows aren’t even on view.
I liked True Story Index, a mid-career survey of Janna Ireland, a photographer I didn’t know. The exhibition is a two-museum installation shared with the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. Ireland is a black artist, and I know the museum is on a diversity drive, which isn’t in itself a defective idea. True Story Index is too big, though, and I only saw the part of it at the art museum. Ireland has done half a dozen portfolios, each very different. A focused exhibition of one or two would have been fine. Her work isn’t strong enough or original enough to carry so big a survey exhibition.
Two primo galleries off the courtyard were entirely empty. An 80-by-60-inch painting by Vian Sora, an artist I also didn’t know, is the lone occupant of another gallery. It’s a bold, good-looking thing, but why is it there? Sora is an Iraqi-American woman, and the museum acquired the painting last year, so it might be a signal of the museum’s new interest in women artists. It’s marooned in the gallery. The museum’s press person told me the spaces were “under construction in preparation for an upcoming exhibition,” which didn’t make sense to me since there was no construction in sight and they were simply two empty galleries with glaringly white walls.
Maybe I visited the museum at a very off moment, which happens and only means I’m looking forward to visiting it again. It’s got a brand-new director who recently fired the longtime chief curator and made herself the chief curator, so things are clearly in flux. Let’s hope they’re not in flux in extremis. In my first and only visit, I can only write that I think I understand why it might be unloved by the community. Like many California art museums, it felt like the inside of a refrigerator.
Amada Cruz, the new director, is not a leader without controversy. I can’t control the things that pop into my head, but “wrecking ball” and “Santa Barbara’s new director” are not misaligned. I wrote about her last year after I visited the Phoenix Art Museum, where she’d been director before her time in Seattle. I was at the museum for the day attending the Institute for Museum and Library Services board. I’m a board member and, having never been to the museum, spent my time during breaks in the galleries. I do tend to chat with guards, docents, and anyone else who seems chat-worthy. Her tenure is not remembered as halcyon days.
Cruz follows Larry Feinberg, who was the director of the Santa Barbara Museum for 15 years until his retirement, and possibly he’d been ready for retirement for a while. The museum has had many directors, and that might make for a directionless, brandless feel. Cruz was controversial in Phoenix for not only upsetting the apple cart but positively nuking it. There was a mass exodus of staff during her few years there as well as a sacking of volunteers, which takes chutzpah and is impolitic where the volunteers are donors. I can understand why Cruz left Seattle. There was a homeless encampment on the museum’s front steps. A bitchy, bleeding-heart staff was fine with this. Cruz correctly wasn’t.
The defenestration of Eik Kahng, the longtime chief curator at Santa Barbara, whom I don’t know, came following Cruz’s cancellation of Three American Painters: Then and Now, an exhibition organized by the museum. It seemed to be a major show reimaging an iconic 1965 exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard curated by the then-trendy and radical art historian and critic Michael Fried and interpreting the work of Frank Stella, Jules Olitski, and Kenneth Noland. Loans of some 60 works of art had been secured and four catalogue essays completed. Needless to say, a substantial amount of work and museum money had gone into the project.
Fried is linguistically diverse, or agile, and, no, I don’t mean he speaks eight languages or that, like Pete Buttigieg, he taught himself Norwegian because he wanted to be a Viking. I sat next to Fried at a dinner party once. He has the pottiest mouth in the long history of potties.
Cruz said she canceled the exhibition as part of her effort “to be more inclusive and more reflective of Santa Barbara’s diverse community.” Deploying passive, not-my-fingerprints language, she added, “It was determined that it fell short from a diversity perspective.”
There are many ways to look at this. First, Three Painters was an esoteric exhibition in 1965 and esoteric-on-steroids today. There are so many earnest and dull new exhibitions that recycling old but intellectually or aesthetically distinguished exhibitions isn’t a bad idea. Why not revive the offbeat but rigorous and jolting shows of the past rather than present us with pious, pop, new claptrap?
But Three Painters was narrow, remote, and fringe, and not Bonnie and Clyde fringe but humming-yogi fringe. Its reprise is for a college museum like Oberlin’s or the Fowler at UCLA, which does art and anthropology.
If I were offered it as director of the Addison, I wouldn’t have taken it. My primary audience was high-school students. Three Painters wouldn’t have been over their heads — they were Andover kids — but no one would have cared. Frank Stella was an Andover alumnus from the class of 1954, but we’re in 2024. No one on campus today knows Michael Fried from Michael the Archangel, except the latter is the one who doesn’t swear like a sailor.
Santa Barbara is a different story. It’s not an academic art museum, which means it doesn’t cater to students and faculty. It’s a civic museum. Its exhibitions have to be intellectually sound, but its main mission is to bridge the gap between art history and the public’s understanding and appreciation of art. Three Painters wasn’t right for the museum. Since the exhibition was at the Fogg in 1967, obviously it’s for the Fogg to reprise it. In a way, it’s an exhibition about the Fogg.
Why would anyone exit the sunny, balmy outdoors to see Three Painters? There are heliophobes even in Santa Barbara, I know, about as many as trans Korean War amputees. Feinberg shouldn’t have agreed to it.
That said, the institution made commitments to outside authors, Yale University Press, artists, and lenders. Cruz is stuck with them and was wrong to jettison them. “Falling short from a diversity perspective” is not only a bad reason. It’s the worst possible reason. I inherited Adam Weinberg’s exhibition schedule when he left the Addison to become the director of the Whitney. I didn’t like some of his shows, not because of my personal taste but because I thought they were wrong for my priority audiences. Still, the institution had made a commitment, and I honored it. That’s what a good director does. I raised the money to do these exhibitions, tweaked them here and there, and, to be honest, grew fond of some of them.
I’m so sick of directors not only parading diversity-and-inclusion but forcing on art a false political narrative. The public doesn’t have a race-driven or gender-driven or gay-driven agenda when seeking the very best in art. I believe in a broad-based exhibition program driven by different media, timeframes, themes, and styles. I don’t believe in putting artists or the public in boxes. That makes for mediocrity. I hope Cruz learns from her mistake, which seems entirely self-aggrandizing. She didn’t need to start her time at Santa Barbara by tossing a stink bomb. The bad publicity doesn’t do the museum any good.
That said, I enjoyed my visit and want to see how the place evolves. Santa Barbara now has many very affluent art collectors who, over time and through their philanthropy, will make the museum better and better. There’s nothing wrong with being a work in progress as long as the direction is onward and upward. Cruz needs to file the wrecking under old business. Santa Barbara’s a nice town filled with companionable people. They don’t like bad publicity surrounding their art museum and don’t like ideological construction sites.
I’d love to see the museum’s summer exhibition on the art collection of Lord Paul and Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree, the late husband-and-wife team who had a very good eye for art and gave millions to Santa Barbara nonprofits. I knew Leslie, who wasn’t British like her industrialist husband but American and from the Hudson River Valley. She made an impression via her red hair, pumpkin-size diamonds, wit, curiosity, and smarts.
Cruz has an opportunity to sharpen the museum’s brand through a new, more vibrant look and a celebration of a collection that’s mostly unknown to people. The museum’s collection — if one labors through the clumsy database to see it, as I did — is full of character. Cruz needs to tap its richness, present it to the public, augment it through quality acquisitions, and get off the phony diversity kick.
