Curtains for Lincoln Center

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2024

Curtains for Lincoln Center

On the falsification of Lincoln Center’s history.

During the high dudgeon of the Black Lives Matter movement, New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts joined the chorus of handwringers with a particular twist. “In our 60+ year history, we have not done nearly enough. It is part of our job now to help change the status quo,” read the center’s “Message on Our Commitment to Change.” Lincoln Center’s multiple concert venues may have been shuttered by the pandemic. Its institutional constituents, which include the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Ballet, were facing the prospect of millions of dollars in losses. Yet as its first priority, the center determined to dedicate itself to

Telling the story of Lincoln Center from our beginning, in its truth. The displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families that took place prior to the construction of our campus is abhorrent. We may never know its full impact on those dispossessed of the land on which Lincoln Center sits. But only by acknowledging this history can we begin to confront the racism from which our institution has benefited.

With the blood-and-soil essentialism of today’s identity politics, the commitment to “confront[ing] the racism from which our institution has benefited” and “telling the story of Lincoln Center from our beginning, in its truth” fell in line with the new progressive rhetoric of land acknowledgments, colonialist dispossession, and supposedly unearthed legacies of systemic oppression. The diagnosis also presented an opportunity for Lincoln Center’s younger leadership, remote-working members of a new generation of the managerial class, to treat their organization’s “abhorrent” injustices against “Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families” with their own patent mixture of tinctures, elixirs, and balms. How much of this “truth” is in fact true was beside the point. By design, their cure would be worse than the disease.

For the racial pathologists, in the case of Lincoln Center this sickness was malignant, metastasizing, and neglected for far too long: the center’s four-block complex owed its existence not just to Peter Minuit’s alleged swindling of Mannahatta for sixty guilders back in 1626, but also to the supposed destruction of a vibrant black community known as San Juan Hill some three centuries on. This culturally vital neighborhood of residences, businesses, and theaters, where Thelonious Monk lived and James P. Johnson developed the Charleston, was targeted in the 1950s by no less than Robert Moses for one of his largest projects of urban renewal. Such “slum clearance,” scattering seven thousand families and eight hundred businesses, paved over those “Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families,” as the leadership of Lincoln Center now represents its origin story, with white travertine and white culture.

Coming clean with these supposed injustices, Lincoln Center focused its post-pandemic programming not on Mozart or Stravinsky as it once might have done, but on turning its land acknowledgment into a multistage extravaganza. In 2022, commissioned by Lincoln Center in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, the organization plastered a 68-by-150-foot mural called San Juan Heal at the corner of Broadway and Sixty-fifth Street across the northern façade of David Geffen Hall—formerly known as Avery Fisher Hall and, originally, Philharmonic Hall. Here the artist Nina Chanel Abney mixed symbols referencing ragtime and jazz alongside such phrases as “homage,” “honor,” and “urban renewal?”

Nina Chanel Abney, San Juan Heal, 2022, Latex ink & vinyl mounted on glass, David Geffen Hall, New York.

Geffen Hall’s inaugural opening night with its resident orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, then featured a new “immersive multimedia work” called San Juan Hill: A New York Story. Created by Etienne Charles, this piece brought together, according to its billing, “music, visuals, and original first-person accounts of the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and the indigenous and immigrant communities that populated the land in and around where Lincoln Center resides.”

To make the story more explicit, Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic arranged for a graffiti crew known as the ex vandals to paint a mural for the center’s Amsterdam Avenue façade. Conceived by a musician and tagger known as “Wicked Gary” Fritz, the work presented the black historical figures of San Juan Hill on the left, a depiction of the modern Lincoln Center plaza on the right, and a wrecking ball crashing through the middle. “This was a thriving Black community that they took out to bring in Lincoln Center,” Fritz explained to Ebony magazine at the unveiling.

A year later, Lincoln Center launched an online “hub” on its institutional website, called “Legacies of San Juan Hill” and dedicated to “interrogating our role in this history.” Here we can read of the “old, long disgraced story, the one in which benevolent city fathers swept in to rescue the city from slums and blight.” San Juan Hill “may have been run down, a source of hardship and deprivation, but the cure was worse than the curse,” continues one article. “Clearance and rebuilding scattered neighbors, broke apart fragile social networks, uprooted working class communities, destroyed jobs, targeted people of color for removal, and deepened racial segregation.”

Lincoln Center’s latter-day struggle sessions have played into a new media environment in which race-based narratives are an editorial imperative. “Before Lincoln Center, San Juan Hill Was a Vibrant Black Community,” went one headline in The New York Times. “A vibrant neighborhood known as San Juan Hill, which was home to many low-income Black and Latino residents, was razed to make way for the center’s construction,” went another article. Whatever the historical reality or the artistic merits of the San Juan Hill initiative, Lincoln Center banked its post-pandemic recovery on a narrative of its own abhorrence, developing programming and even a new campus plan around its “original sin” of race-based displacement. The one problem with such self-abnegation is that Lincoln Center’s historical record turns out to be far less loathsome than what its leadership represented, and even exculpatory of the crimes to which they now confess.

When Black Lives Matter becomes a marketing strategy, facts offer little impediment to “truth.” In the case of Lincoln Center, this new battle of San Juan Hill has ultimately been a story of conflation, exaggeration, and wishful thinking. The history of Lincoln Center and the neighborhood that came before it both deserve genuine appreciation, observed beyond the hothouse of race-based managerialism.

There indeed was a time when San Juan Hill—an area roughly defined as Manhattan’s far West Sixties, backed up against the New York Central Railroad’s sprawling Sixtieth Street Yard along the Hudson River—was a nexus of black New York. The bohemian energy that enlivened this neighborhood’s small theaters and nightclubs also attracted artists to the Lincoln Arcade, a loft building and theater at Sixty-Fifth Street and Broadway where the Juilliard School now stands. Robert Henri, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, and Marcel Duchamp all passed through its studios. For nine months in 1908–09, the playwright Eugene O’Neill even lived there in George Bellows’s basement studio, basing his 1914 play Butter and Bread on the experience. To its credit, articles on Lincoln Center’s “Legacies of San Juan Hill” web hub explore this history in greater detail.

An image from San Juan Hill prior to Lincoln Center’s development. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

But the cultural height of San Juan Hill came and went soon after the turn of the century. Manhattan’s own Great Migration saw black New Yorkers moving north from Greenwich Village through this West Side neighborhood on the way to Harlem. The “old law” tenements that filled out San Juan Hill’s narrow lots were made illegal after the city’s new code provisions of 1901 mandated greater setbacks for air and light—one explanation for why many black New Yorkers chose to move out of these overcrowded blocks. The advent of single-room-occupancy residences (after city housing law changed in 1939 to allow sros) and the conversion of several tenements into illegal business spaces further diminished the neighborhood’s housing stock. Garages, repair shops, gas stations, and utilities were intermixed into these blocks as extensions of the automobile row that still runs along Eleventh Avenue. Finally, centered among Irish, Italian, Polish, and other ethnic enclaves, the neighborhood became besieged with gang violence. The nickname of San Juan Hill, applied to an area that was officially known as Lincoln Square and Columbus Hill, may have been a reference to the black veterans who settled there after the Spanish–American War. Just as likely, the name came out of the ethnic warfare that famously inspired the musical West Side Story (which was filmed at the northern end of San Juan Hill just before demolition).

By the time New York turned its attention to redeveloping this section of the West Side, Robert Moses was not the only one who saw its deteriorating conditions and future potential. A decade before Lincoln Center ever took shape, the historical black center of San Juan Hill was leveled under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to build Amsterdam Houses, an integrated housing project to the west of what is now Lincoln Center that opened in 1947, originally for veterans of the Second World War.

Proposed location of the Lincoln Square Project. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

By the 1950s, thanks to the Federal Housing Act of 1949, cities across the country were using and often abusing eminent domain to tap into federal funds for slum clearance. The Lincoln Square Renewal Project of 1955 is remarkable not for what it cleared—seventeen decrepit blocks between Sixtieth and Seventieth Streets—but for what was created in its place: not another urban highway as was cut through many other municipalities, but rather a Manhattan campus for Fordham University, a new headquarters for the American Red Cross, four thousand units of middle-income housing, and a campus for multiple performing arts organizations of world renown.

For an evenhanded account of its creation and endurance, Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center, by Joseph W. Polisi, the former longtime president of the Juilliard School, ably updates Edgar B. Young’s Lincoln Center: The Building of an Institution of 1980.1

A preliminary design for the opera house at Lincoln Center, by Wallace K. Harrison, 1955. Photo courtesy of Columbia University.

“A persistent problem with the Center’s legacy is manifested in the ‘original sin’ it committed in the 1950s of displacing thousands of families living in the Lincoln Square neighborhood,” Polisi begins. “As with most retrospective historical scenarios, evaluating through a revisionist lens the decisions made at the birth of the Center may be a pointless exercise.”

At the time of demolition, the New York City Planning Commission determined that the neighborhood of Lincoln Square had become “clearly substandard and unsanitary . . . a blighting and depressing influence on surrounding sections contributing to gradual deterioration of the Upper West Side.” “Maintenance of buildings was neglected, building code violations were numerous, and fire hazards were great,” notes Young. “By 1955, the entire area was in an advanced state of decay” and “one of the city’s worst slums.”

Substandard living conditions identified by the slum clearance committee. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

New York City had identified the neighborhood of San Juan Hill for demolition and redevelopment long before the concept for a performing-arts center took hold. The idea for Lincoln Center only emerged after several of the city’s performing arts institutions found themselves in need of updated venues at the same time. The Metropolitan Opera had long ago outgrown its original home at Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway, an opulent Gilded Age venue but one with a limited back of house. Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle were both considered as sites for relocation before Robert Moses approached the opera for his renewed Lincoln Square.

At the same time, the private owners of Carnegie Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society, at Fifty-Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, had plans to tear down their storied venue and replace it with a high-rise office tower. The Philharmonic was sent scrambling after the landlords informed the orchestra its lease would not be renewed after its expiration in 1959. Finally, the New York City Ballet, part of City Center along with New York City Opera on West Fifty-fifth Street, was on the lookout for larger venues in order to stage George Balanchine’s ambitious ensemble works.

Proposed boundary map of the Lincoln Center Project. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

As representatives for what would become Lincoln Center’s first three constituent organizations came together under the leadership of John D. Rockefeller III, the concept of a major new performing-arts center took shape and grew. The Juilliard School, then at West 122nd Street, and the special music collection of the New York Public Library, then located in the library’s main branch, were soon brought in as essential components for music education and research. Constituents for theater, film, chamber music, bel canto opera, jazz, and dance education eventually coalesced into the nearly dozen organizations that make up today’s Lincoln Center campus.

Under the Federal Housing Act of 1949, cities could draw on federal funds to purchase deteriorating neighborhoods through eminent domain and then sell the land for redevelopment at a discount. The difference between the purchase price and the sale price was known as the “land write-down,” for which the federal government financed two-thirds of the difference and, in the case of New York, the city and state split the remaining costs.

The groundbreaking ceremony for Lincoln Center Plaza, 1959. Photo: LIFE Photo Collection.

It is true that controversy surrounded the Lincoln Square Renewal Project at the time of demolition, but not for the creation of Lincoln Center. Instead, preservationists feared the loss of the Philharmonic would expedite the destruction of Carnegie Hall. Only at the last moment, even as its resident orchestra moved out, was the venue remarkably saved as a world-class home for visiting artists thanks to the violinist Isaac Stern, who convinced the city to purchase it. Legal challenges to the Lincoln Square plan primarily focused on the separation of church and state as it applied to the proposed campus of Fordham University, a Jesuit school, slated for the parcel to the south of Lincoln Center. The Supreme Court eventually dismissed this challenge to eminent domain in 1958.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts came together to function as the umbrella organization for its constituents as well as their benevolent landlord. The new nonprofit also became responsible for the demolition and redevelopment of its then-three-and-a-half-block campus. As the center took ownership of 188 existing buildings with 1,647 occupied units and 383 commercial tenants, it aided in the relocation of its residents and businesses. Many of those moved out of their office spaces were not dispossessed family-run operations but rather federal agencies housed in one of Lincoln Square’s modern buildings, at 70 Columbus Avenue, roughly on the site of what became the New York State Theater, now known as the David H. Koch Theater. Built as the twelve-story headquarters for the Uppercu Cadillac Corporation in 1927, by the 1950s this loft building was owned by Joseph P. Kennedy, who rented its floors to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Atomic Energy Commission. Given this family connection, it should come as little surprise that the city paid a premium for its appraisal and demolition.

Census on minority populations conducted New York Slum Clearance Committee. Photo: Preliminary Report on the Lincoln Square Project, 1956.

While the city lavished funds on the Kennedy clan, Lincoln Center kept close tabs on the residents it helped relocate through the redevelopment plan. Most of them remained in Manhattan, with nine hundred families staying on the Upper West Side. A study of the first 742 relocated revealed that they moved into larger quarters, all with up-to-date sanitary conditions. Most notably, for all of the “abhorrent” claims of the “displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families,” the census conducted by the Slum Clearance Committee of those relocated to create Lincoln Center revealed a population that was, in fact, overwhelmingly white: 75 percent of those displaced were white, 24.5 percent were Puerto Rican, and just 0.5 percent black. As it turns out, Lincoln Center’s latest racialized tort has been nothing more than a false confession.

Regardless of its ethnic breakdown, the redevelopment of a decrepit San Juan Hill into Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts indeed proved to be the “unparalleled cultural opportunity” that the New York City Planning Commission first envisioned, one that illustrates the bold, high-minded actions of the post-war city at its best. The site’s master plan, under the architect Wallace K. Harrison, took inspiration from Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.

It is true that, in the extensive use of travertine marble, which is porous and absorbs water, Lincoln Center’s stone facings have fared far worse under New York’s freeze–thaw cycles than they would under the Italian sun. The center’s International Style architecture—designed by Harrison (the Metropolitan Opera House), Philip Johnson (the New York State Theater), Max Abramovitz (Philharmonic Hall), Eero Saarinen (the Vivian Beaumont Theater), Gordon Bunshaft (the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts), and Pietro Belluschi (the Juilliard School and Alice Tully Hall)—has also aged poorly, set off from the city streets in an austere, windswept design.

Lincoln Center Plaza under construction, 1964. Photo: Bob Serating Photo © Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

“Lincoln Center is a triumph of city planning,” wrote Myron Magnet in the Fall 2000 issue of City Journal, dedicated to reimagining the arts campus. “But as architecture, oh dear. The Center was deplorable, as critics recognized from the start.” A campus refresh by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, completed in 2010, did much to lighten the imposing complex along Sixty-fifth Street and extend Alice Tully Hall up to the angled street line of Broadway, but the bandshell at Damrosch Park, on the southwest corner of the campus, has never succeeded, just as the sides of Johnson’s State Theater remain an unarticulated travertine mass.

The center’s performance venues have faced their own challenges. The Metropolitan Opera House has too many seats but too little lobby space. The New York State Theater, renovated and renamed the David H. Koch Theater, may be well turned out for ballet but remains flat-footed for singers or orchestra, in part accounting for the fall of New York City Opera, which shared the space with City Ballet. Finally, Philharmonic Hall has been such an acoustical failure that it has been redone (and renamed) multiple times. Its latest iteration, as David Geffen Hall, solved many of the sonic challenges but destroyed the elegance of its public spaces, sourcing garish upholstery more in line with a bus terminal and slathering its surfaces with theatrical lighting, all in the name of presenting a more “inclusive” atmosphere.

Philharmonic Hall, 1963. Photo: Lincoln Center for Performing Art.

The synergies that might have been expected from the close contact of many arts organizations have also, just as often, led to internecine conflict. The profligate Metropolitan Opera helped bully City Opera out of existence and has long set itself apart from its neighbors while antagonizing its own audience with aggressive contemporary stagings. Before this latest renovation, the New York Philharmonic even explored a return to Carnegie Hall and the abandonment of Lincoln Center entirely. Most significantly, the umbrella organization of Lincoln Center has more than once been at cross-purposes with its constituents, promoting its own messaging and programs that can be in competition with the presenting organizations.

In their storied histories, the center’s famous constituents have nevertheless sustained and championed the performing arts while also truly revitalizing their surrounding community, including what remained of San Juan Hill. It is noteworthy that the childhood home of Thelonious Monk, in the Phipps Houses on West Sixty-third Street, was spared by the development of both Amsterdam Houses and Lincoln Center and survives to this day. The famous jazz pianist performed numerous times at Lincoln Center, beginning just a year after it opened, recording a live album at Philharmonic Hall in 1963. Late in life, Monk moved into an apartment in Lincoln Towers, in one of the high-rises built as part of the redevelopment plan. Due to these affinities, Monk liked to call his neighborhood not San Juan Hill or Lincoln Square or even the Upper West Side but simply “Lincoln Center.” Similarly, after Nina Simone started performing regularly at Lincoln Center in the late 1960s, she moved into another of the new apartment towers, in the same building as the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton—and also where I grew up. Finally, Jazz at Lincoln Center, a constituent organization founded in part by Wynton Marsalis in 1987 and located in the Time Warner Center since 2004, has done more to sustain the musical culture of San Juan Hill than any facile “commitment to change.”

Lincoln Center Plaza, 1965. Photo: Suzanna Faulkner Stevens.

Under the leadership of Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s young British-born president and chief executive from 2019 until this year, Lincoln Center has merely updated its antagonism toward its constituents for the woke age. In 2021 Timms brought on Shanta Thake, a concert programmer from the Public Theater downtown, as the center’s chief artistic officer. Thake, whose full name is Shannon Shanta Thake-Kriegsman, may be of Indian-German descent, but she plays the race card as her ace in the hole. As their first order of business, Timms and Thake canceled “Mostly Mozart,” the center’s long-running summer festival. Thake pledged to “really confront our past head-on as we move into the future” by “opening this up and really saying that this is music that belongs to everyone”—implying, of course, that Mozart does not belong to everyone.

In the place of Mozart, the new administrators installed a ten-foot-wide disco ball above the plaza fountain and two hundred flamingo lawn ornaments. They also hired rappers, pop groups, and an LGBTQ mariachi band for their new summer performance series. “I’m more in the world of the downtown aesthetic of edgy, in your face, heavily transgressive stuff that comes from an emotional place,” Thake explained of her taste to The New York Times. “I’ve seen people dressed as chickens, covered in baby oil, dancing to the latest pop song.”

In 2023, it was announced that Louis Langrée, the summer festival’s director for twenty-one years, would be replaced by the thirty-year-old conductor Jonathon Heyward. “The next chapter for the orchestra doubles down on these successes and aims to further Shanta Thake’s broader artistic vision in service to all of New York City,” read the press announcement, “continuing to break down traditional artistic silos.” Plans for the coming summer include a “symphony of choice” concert, with audience members “curating” the program by popular vote, and an exhibition about depression tied to the mental health of Robert Schumann.

The Oasis Dance Floor, 2023. Photo: Lincoln Center for Performing Arts.

Lincoln Center now finds itself at a moment when the Metropolitan Opera, which under Peter Gelb has pushed progressive programming, continues to withdraw emergency funds from its endowment to cover sagging ticket sales and exorbitant operating losses—$40 million this year, $30 million last year. At the same time, Timms has pledged to open up the Lincoln Center campus architecturally to the tenants of Amsterdam Houses, to the west across Amsterdam Avenue, as a top priority. Just how much these residents will help fill out the opera’s dismal numbers remains to be seen, but it is noteworthy that the center’s existing staircase to Damrosch Park, from Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-third Street, has remained locked through his tenure.

At the groundbreaking for Lincoln Center on May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took a shovel to the campus’s future plaza and praised the center’s “stimulating approach to one of the nation’s pressing problems: urban blight.”

Here will occur a true interchange of the fruits of national cultures. From this will develop a growth that will spread to the corners of the earth, bringing with it the kind of human message that only individuals—not governments—can transmit. Here will develop a mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world.

The triumph of Lincoln Center has been to champion the best of our cultural patrimony. Over half a century, the project has fulfilled its promise by bringing the highest standards of classical music, ballet, opera, theater, film, and jazz to four city blocks in order to promote a “true interchange of the fruits of national cultures.” This has been the full legacy of San Juan Hill, now topped by an astonishingly ambitious and farsighted cultural achievement.

Brown in Town

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2024

Brown in Town

On the Winter Show, Master Drawings New York, “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction,” “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of the Grolier Club” & “Masters Week.”

In late January, The Winter Antiques Show returned to the Park Avenue Armory. Correction: make that “The Winter Show.”1 Five years ago, as this venerable exposition fell under new management on its sixty-fifth anniversary year, the word “antiques” was struck from its title. Like that brown furniture in your grandmother’s attic now scented with camphor and racism, the past has lost its market value to the present. Against the mystery cult of the new, who dares to appear antique?

And so, much of The Winter Show in recent years has felt like Terminal D Duty Free. Aisles of bangles, baubles, and beads make the presentation an ahistorical muddle. Maybe this is the point. How better to get “younger collectors interested in material culture at large,” in the words of expo leadership, at the Young Collectors Night DJ party? Fortunately, it has not all been out with the old and in with the new for what remains arguably America’s most important antiques fair. Now seventy years old, The Winter Show’s ten-day assembly of dealers should be seen as an heirloom event—one dedicated to benefiting the East Side House Settlement, now in the South Bronx, as it has since the fair’s founding in the 1950s.

John Vanderlyn Jr., Santa Claus, 1845, Oil on canvas, Jeffrey Tillou Antiques, New York.

Beyond the gewgaws, this year’s Winter Show presented a welcome homage to its own past. Mixed in among the booths of some seventy dealers, an exhibition titled “Focus: Americana,” curated by Alexandra Kirtley of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, brought together pieces from several of the show’s historical exhibitors, some of whom still participate, and others who left long ago. Taken together, this fascinating assembly spoke to the importance of The Winter Show in raising the profile of American antiques over its seven-decade run and made the case for their value today.

Highlights here were many, including a tall case clock by Major Timothy Chandler, circa 1810, along with a fire screen “with framed theorem still life,” circa 1830, both on view from David A. Schorsch–Eileen M. Smiles Fine Americana. Olde Hope offered up a pine overmantel panel with a vernacular painting of a white house from New York or New England circa 1820–40. Levy Galleries brought a Hepplewhite mirror with an original floral finial and an eglomise-gilded panel of a farm landscape, made in New York circa 1795. Jeffrey Tillou Antiques presented a portrait of Santa Claus “painted in 1845 by John Vanderlyn for the cabin on the river steamer Santa Claus—owned by Ezra Fitch,” according to a label on its verso. Allan Katz Americana brought a whirligig of a New York Seventy-ninth Infantry Regiment Highlander in tartan parade attire, the only known such carving in existence, from circa 1860–80. Meanwhile Kelly Kinzle Antiques presented “Richard Andrus, His Horn Made at Roxbury October 5th 1775,” a decorated powder horn attributed to the Simsbury Carver. Also from Kinzle was a miniature wall clock of mahogany and painted glass signed by David Brown, circa 1820, and a harvest face-jug by Charles Decker—an expressionist example of Tennessee’s Keystone Potter circa 1875. Altogether, the presentation of “Focus: Americana” revealed the wonder and strangeness of American craft, with pieces that rose to the level of fine art while retaining their folk traditions.

Simsbury Carver, Richard Andrus, His Horn Made at Roxbury October 5th 1775, 1775, Horn, Killy Kinzle Antiques, New Oxford, Pennsylvania.

With fewer collectors deeply invested in historical periods and styles, the hope today is that buyers will at least view such antiques as stand-alone works that can be mixed into more contemporary, Instagrammable settings. As with “Focus: Americana,” it was reassuring to see two current dealers dedicated to colonial, British, and American antiques flanking the show’s entrance. On one side, Cove Landing presented a George I “Mulberry Wood’’ bureau cabinet, circa 1725, with a mottled veneer that would put an abstract expressionist to shame. Meanwhile, across the entry hallway, Levy Galleries displayed a Chippendale tall case clock, circa 1770, next to a Federal eagle-inlaid tall case clock, circa 1800. Inside the booth, a Federal table attributed to the workshop of Thomas Seymour, circa 1805–12, spoke to the increasing interest in furniture designed for “lady’s work.”

Hirschl & Adler Galleries brought its own worktable “in the Sheraton Taste,” circa 1810, attributed to Thomas Seymour, with a similarly suspended fabric workbag for yarn and linen. This piece was paired with a burled-elm pier table with tole columns, circa 1815–19, along with paintings and watercolors by Thomas Cole and Edward Hopper. Nearby, Daniel Crouch Rare Books displayed John Mitchell’s fascinating Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, published in 1755, along with other cartographic curios, including the Adrian Naftalin collection of maps of the—checks notes—Jewish Holy Land.

Pierre Bonnard, L’Escalier, ca. 1932, Oil & gouache on paper, Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York.

Rounding out these attractions was a pair of George III reverse-glass cabinets featuring Grand Tour vignettes, circa 1780, attributed to Ince and Mayhew, from Hyde Park Antiques; a sixteenth-century bowl with a painting of John the Baptist by Pontormo at Robert Simon Fine Art; a stag hunt by John Wootton and other sporting scenes at Red Fox Fine Art; fifteenth-century books at Les Enluminures; a circa 1932 oil-and-gouache of a pet dog by Pierre Bonnard at Jill Newhouse Gallery; and artifacts by Northwest Coast Indians at Tambaran Gallery. Such a collection of historical objects is almost enough to make you forget our present circumstances.

The Winter Show serves as a pendant to New York’s annual auctions for historical art and antiques, which take place the following week. Squeezed between the two is Master Drawings New York, an initiative that brings national and international galleries to the Upper East Side, where they partner with local venues for wall space.2 Now in its eighteenth season, this year Master Drawings New York came under the leadership of Christopher Bishop, a New York gallerist with an eye for misattributed work. Employing a similar sense of connoisseurship to this undervalued gathering of galleries and collectors, Bishop introduced a new level of organization and scholarship to the endeavor that presented a welcome abundance of work in seemingly every available corner of the neighborhood—with only a few days to see it all.

Lorenzo Balidessera Tiepolo, A Young Man Wearing a Studio Cap, Resting His Head on His Left Hand, ca. 1755, Black & red chalk, Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., New York.

Clustered in galleries around the Metropolitan Museum and continuing down to Sixty-fourth Street, twenty-six exhibitors mounted these special exhibitions of works on paper from the fifteenth century to the present. Highlights this year included, at Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., a portrait of the young Henry William Mathew by John Flaxman, dynamic studies by Il Guercino, drawings by Boucher and Corot, and an unpublished drawing by Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo. Abbott and Holder brought over forty-eight British works on paper from its London-based showroom, including a capriccio landscape by Robert Adam, a visionary bedroom sketch by William Blake, and a delicate J. M. W. Turner watercolor once owned by John Ruskin—along with a handsome printed catalogue. Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings presented orientalist portraits by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Leopold Carl Müller alongside an exhibition of portraits and seascapes by the Spanish master Joaquín Sorolla. Meanwhile David Nolan Gallery, in collaboration with Donald Ellis, presented “Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900,” an exhibition of seventy-five sketches by Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota artists from the nineteenth century.

The book trade remains a welcome gateway to the cultures of the past, with much of it accessible to a range of readers and collectors. Judging by the crowds at recent New York book fairs, the hard copy has become only more attractive in our digital world for its tactile pleasures and literary delights, while providing the ultimate backup to our evanescent bits and bytes. As collecting institutions have become radicalized by identity politics (see “A library by the book,” my essay in The New Criterion of December 2022), personal libraries are more essential than ever before.

Cover, spine & back cover of The Whole Book of Psalmes, 1643. Photo: Nicole Neenan / Grolier Club.

Last September, the upstart Empire State Rare Book and Print Fair set up shop for the first time inside St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. The show was a welcome competitor to the more established (and woker) International Antiquarian Book Fair, put on every April by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. An extra pleasure of its ecclesiastical venue was hearing Paolo Bordignon, St. Bart’s organist and choirmaster, perform on the fair’s opening night.

This season, just up the street, the Grolier Club, America’s oldest society of bibliophiles, founded in 1884, continued its run of significant public programs with two must-see exhibitions on view at once. “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction,” installed in the second floor gallery, was a page-turner.3 With more than ninety books from the Grolier member Jeffrey Johnson’s collection of early detective novels, the exhibition featured standouts ranging from the first American edition of Memoirs of Vidocq (1834), to the first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (1892), to Agatha Christie’s first novel (1920). Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Anna Katherine Green were among the list of accomplices in a thrilling show that was criminal to miss. Especially appreciated was Johnson’s own testimony, provided in wall labels, of his discoveries as a collector.

A gallery view of “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction” at the Grolier Club, New York. Photo courtesy of the Grolier Club.

Meanwhile, on view through April in the club’s main exhibition hall, “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020,” reveals the Grolier’s advancement of bookbinding as both collecting interest and craft.4 Thanks to the creation of the society’s own bindery in the late nineteenth century, for example, club members no longer had to send their rare books off to France for treatment. Drawing on the society’s holdings, the exhibition pairs the club’s own work with a hundred examples of rare bindings, starting with a circa 1473 brass-and-pigskin volume of The Jewish Wars by Josephus and Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, through a jeweled miniature Whole Booke of Psalmes (1673), on up to a gilded freehand design by Ulrich Widmann from 2019. Most rewarding are those bindings that speak to the contents within, for example, Ernest Lefébure’s Embroidery and Lace of 1888, with boards covered in green ribbed silk embroidered in delicate floral patterns.

To cap off the antiques season, in late January Sotheby’s filled out its multiple floors on York Avenue with its “Masters Week” sales.5 These days, works by, or of, non-whites and non-men are the hot commodities. Institutional buyers must pursue “diversity” or risk dei ire. That explains the run-up in prices for the saccharine paintings of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who has been achieving records at auction for her work as a female Old Master (Old Mistress?). At the same time, institutions must be seen delivering up their permanent collections to the deaccessioning of the vanities. In the latest Sotheby’s sales, the Metropolitan Museum offered paintings from its “permanent” collection by George Romney, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Henry Raeburn, and Johann Liss. With proceeds meant to “benefit the acquisition fund,” we might assume those returns will not be used to purchase more Romneys, Reynoldses, and Gainsboroughs.

Gustav Bauernfeind, The Western Wall, ca. 1890, Oil on canvas, Private collection.

Nevertheless, it may be good to get such art into the hands of collectors who will value it, and it is a pleasure to see these works as they go up for sale. In the February 1 auction titled “Master Paintings & Sculpture Part I,” The Western Wall (ca. 1890), a painting by Gustav Bauernfeind, bore detailed witness to the historical importance of that holy site. Equally interesting was a charming Swabian School altarpiece of Saint Ursula, circa 1480–90, which at one time passed through the hands of the Monuments Men, who restituted the work from the clutches of Hermann Göring. In “Master Paintings Part II,” a Veronese oil of the creation of Eve, circa 1570–80, sold off by the Art Institute of Chicago after nearly a century in its collection, could have been yours for the price of New York’s worst studio apartment. In the February 2 sale of “Old Master and British Works on Paper,” a sketchbook drawing of a bridge near Epsom by John Constable, circa 1806, was estimated at $5–8,000 but ended up selling for much more. Meanwhile, the sale of “Master Sculpture & Works of Art” remained particularly undervalued, with fourteenth-century ecclesiastical French sculpture going for four digits.

In fact, it is worth noting that the highest jump of Masters Week was the sale of six gym shoes once worn by Michael Jordan. As that suite of sneakers sold for eight million dollars, no Old Master can hope to be like Mike.

1.   The Winter Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from January 19 through January 28, 2024.

2.   Master Drawings New York was on view from January 27 through February 3, 2024.

3.   “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction” was on view at the Grolier Club, New York, from November 30, 2023, through February 10, 2024.

4.   “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020” opened at the Grolier Club, New York, on January 17 and remains on view through April 13, 2024.

5.   “Masters Week” was on view at Sotheby’s, New York, from January 26 through February 3, 2024.

The Prophet of Imprudence

THE UNIVERSITY BOOKMAN

The Prophet of Imprudence.

A review of “The Politics of Prudence,” by Russell Kirk, Introduction by Michael P. Federici; Regnery Gateway, 314 pages, $19.99.

The early 1990s appeared to many in America as a moment of conservative ascendancy. Forty years had passed since Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, in 1953, a book that was originally titled The Conservative Rout. Now it was the progressives who were the ones seemingly being routed. Conservative pundits, publications, and foundations were pushing conservative policy in the onetime liberal redoubts of Washington and New York. Ronald Reagan had won an unprecedented forty-nine states to secure his reelection in 1984; his triumphant presidency paved the way for the election of his vice-president George H. W. Bush in 1992 and another four years of Republican administration. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher had reflected the spread of the conservative mind abroad. Meanwhile, and most astonishingly, the onetime colossus of the Soviet Union had lost its grip on Europe and had been vanquished—its ideological boot lifted from all but a few of the world’s backwaters and faculty lounges.

And yet, the thinker who had put the conservative mind in motion was not declaring victory. In 1993, a year before his death, Kirk published The Politics of Prudence. The collection of eighteen of his lectures given over five years—seventeen delivered at The Heritage Foundation, one at Hillsdale College—was more than a restatement of the moral imagination. It was also a conservative remonstrance to the movement that claimed its mantle. Thirty years on, Gateway Editions has now published a new edition of this collection that seems nothing if not prophetic. As the conservative mind is again on the defensive in America, or at the very least in a state of mental confusion, The Politics of Prudence suggests that no less than the imprudence of conservatives is much to blame for the latest rout. Thirty years ago, few conservatives wanted to hear such a message. Today it calls out as a testament to what went wrong and a corrective for what’s to come.

Conservatism, Kirk argued, is a “disposition of character rather than a collection of reified, abstract political doctrines,” as Michael P. Federici explains in this edition’s new introduction. “It is the rejection of ideology rather than the exercise of it.” The conservative mind, like the book The Conservative Mind, Federici continues, begins with Edmund Burke and the Burkean “opposition to the French Revolution and the rise of radical and revolutionary ideological movements that centralize power as a means to escape the limits of the human condition.”

In his opening chapter, Kirk lays into what he calls the “errors of ideology.” Quoting the American historian H. Stuart Hughes, Kirk writes, conservatism must be the “negation of ideology,” since “all ideologies work mischief.” An ideological false faith in “mystical Progress, with a Roman P” only leads to a “dubious Terrestrial Paradise…. that always, in reality, has turned out to be an Earthly Hell.” This “cult of progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old,” sends us on a “march toward Utopia,” where the “ideologue is merciless.” In the place of true faith, “Ideology provides sham religion and sham philosophy.” 

Absent such an ideology, the conservative must rely on prudence, one that is “judicious, cautious, sagacious,” Kirk explains. “Plato, and later, Burke, instruct us that in the statesman, prudence is the first of the virtues.” Since “‘conservatism’ possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata,” the prudential conservative instead looks to “custom, convention, continuity.” Disciplined in a “state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order,” the conservative understands “variety,” “imperfectability,” and “voluntary community.” A close link exists between “freedom and property,” and power is best retrained and decentralized in the pursuit of genuinely “prudent change.” It was just such “old restraints upon power,” Kirk reminds us, that the “French and Russian revolutionaries abolished,” and which progressives still pursue.   

Delivered late in life, The Politics of Prudence in part serves as a welcome restatement of The Conservative Mind of forty years prior and something of a summary of Kirk’s life work. We are reminded of The American Republic by Orestes Brownson, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, and I’ll Take my Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition. Marcus Aurelius, Ambrose of Milan (“it has not pleased God that man should be saved through logic”), and G.K. Chesteron’s elevation of the “democracy of the dead” all make welcome appearances. T. S. Eliot, the subject of the final chapter in The Conservative Mind and a friend of Kirk’s, also returns here with the wisdom of his Notes towards the Definition of Culture: “one thing to ascertain is the limits of the plannable.” Further chapters reacquaint us with the German economist Wilhelm Röpke (“the age of immaturity, of restless experiment, of youth, has in our time become the object of the most preposterous overestimation”) and the British social critic Malcolm Muggeridge (“the enthronement of the gospel of progress necessarily required the final discrediting of the gospel of Christ”).

As the book continues, just like the lectures these chapters are based upon, what becomes apparent is that such reminders and restatements are also rebukes, intended not for progressive ideologues but for a self-professed conservative audience. In these later chapters, Kirk takes aim at what he sees as an emergent and dangerous conservative ideology, one based in populism, libertarianism, and neoconservatism. In the chapter “Popular Conservatism,” for example, Kirk shows little patience for the wisdom of the masses: “a Populist, whose basic conviction is that the cure for democracy is more democracy, conserves nothing.” 

Libertarianism gets an ever greater drubbing in the following chapter on “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians.” “They might oppose centralized power, but they are also doctrinaires, contemptuous of our inheritance from our ancestors,” Kirk writes, as well as being a “crowd of political fanatics who ‘license they mean, when they cry liberty.’” Theirs is an “ideology of universal selfishness—at a time when the country needs more than ever before men and women who stand ready to subordinate their private interests, if need be, to the defense of the Permanent Things.” Through its shortcomings, Kirk concludes, “libertarianism, properly understood, is as alien to real American conservatives as is communism.”

Beyond these tart assessments, it is Kirk’s subsequent chapter on “The Neoconservative: An Endangered Species” that remains the book’s most heated and controversial. Questioning the power at one point of a “Zionist minority,” Kirk goes on to state that “not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” At the time of its delivery, the historian Midge Decter labeled this remark a “bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives.” In hindsight, the quip was at best ill-chosen, as it isolated Kirk’s voice to the margins of the conservative conversation at the time while distracting from what we would now call his broader paleoconservative critique of neoconservative overreach, all coming at a time when it might have mattered most. 

As Kirk was that rare conservative opponent of the first Gulf War (“A war in Kuwait? A war for an oil-can”), we can only imagine what he might have said of the second. With the election of George W. Bush and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the consequences of NAFTA, the housing meltdown, and the hollowing out of the American middle classes, in the years after his death, many of the concerns that Kirk expressed over neoconservatism have only come into higher relief. 

It wasn’t “Zionism” or allegiance to “Tel Aviv” that proved the neoconservative undoing but rather an unquestioning faith for many in “fanciful democratic globalism” and “democratic capitalism,” as Kirk goes on to write, which he calls a “bit of neoconservative cant.” This “New World Order,” Kirk warns, would lead to an “inhumane economy—bent upon maximum productive efficiency, but heedless of personal order and public order.” Such a concern with the “gross national product and with ‘global wealth’” blinded such conservatives, Kirk argues, to the “swelling growth of a dismal urban proletariat, and the decay of the moral order.” 

“You and I are in the death of the Marxist ideology,” Kirk concludes. As the Soviet Leviathan came to an end, he believed it must not be replaced with some American-made Colossus coming out of the “puerile infatuation of the neoconservatives with ‘a new ideology’ or an ‘American ideology.’”  “Soviet hegemony ought not to be succeeded by American hegemony,” he writes. “Mr. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ may make the United States detested—beginning with the Arab peoples—more than even the Soviet empire was…. Increasingly, the states of Europe and the Levant may suspect that in rejecting Russian domination, they exchanged King Log for King Stork.” At the fall of the Evil Empire, Kirk feared most a rising imprudence in its conservative American vanquishers. “America soon is going to wipe out everything else; and in the dazzling delirious joy of that consummation, forgetting to ask what will happen afterward.” 

In one of the book’s final chapters, “Prospects for the Proletariat,” Kirk takes stock of the consequences of the New World Order in the fate of Detroit. The city was once the “arsenal of democracy.” Now it was falling into abandonment and decay. Could we see here the true result of unquestioning “democratic capitalism”: the uprooting of labor, the slicing up of the city’s fabric through public housing and Federal highway bills? An entire book might be written on Kirk’s critique of the automobile, which he called the “mechanical Jacobin.” Would America’s Rust Belt be any better today without a quarter century of adventurism abroad and “free minds and free markets” at home? Conservatives, Kirk warns, must not fall prey to a “latter-day Utilitarianism.” Free of ideology, conservatives should instead nurture a nation’s culture and the “complex of convictions, folkways, habits, arts, crafts, economic methods, laws, morals, political structures, and all the ways of living in community that have developed over the centuries.” Anything less, we might say, would be imprudent.