Walking into the nsu Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale is like setting foot in a more serious time. “Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s to 1983)” displays a one-knockout-after-another selection of work, and the aggregation of creative achievement is magnificent. No doubt the period of high modernism in America saw its share of folly and shenanigans. But aesthetic matters were at stake, as opposed to all the other matters now competing for artists’ attention, and the paintings of the era show it.
As reported by Julia Friedman in these pages in April, Amada Cruz, the director and newly self-appointed chief curator of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, as well as an exemplar of the underqualification and sheer nastiness of our progressive-bureaucratic overclass, canceled a sixty-two-loan exhibition with three months’ notice that would have served as an homage to the vision and taste of Michael Fried (see “Cruz control” in The New Criterion of April 2024). The exhibition was to be a reimagining and expansion of his seminal “Three American Painters” show at the Fogg in 1965. Cruz suggested fatuously to the museum’s erstwhile chief curator that she offer the exhibition to a university gallery that better suited it than the sbmaand its “diverse audiences.” Even the art historian Christa Noel Robbins, whose exposure of some trifling dirt on Fried dating from almost sixty years ago arguably caused all this, was appalled at Cruz’s cowardice. Not that Robbins had much of a leg to stand