STALIN AND MAN AT YALE:

Now the task of dismantling Yale’s famous art history survey course has fallen to a scholar I respect, Tim Barringer. British-born, Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and has been a leading curator at the Metropolitan Museum. He even mounted the Met’s exceptional 2018 exhibition on Thomas Cole.

Following a 2017 mandate to ‘decolonize’ Yale’s Department of English, Barringer is giving over the keys of Yale’s famous art survey course to the identity vandals. According to the Yale Daily News, instead of one class that will tell the story of art from ‘Renaissance to the Present’, new courses will, Barringer says, be devised to consider art in relation to a five-step history lesson, ‘questions of gender, class and race’, with further discussion of art’s ‘involvement with Western capitalism’. Of course, ‘climate change’ will also be a ‘key theme’.

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Russia, after all, was once a leading promoter of modern painting. Then the Bolsheviks came along to make sure their Picassos suffered the same fate as their Romanovs. Yet the murder of art is rarely immediate. The death occurs over time. In the early years of the Russian Revolution, the painting collections owned by the industrialists Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov were first ‘nationalized’. You could still see them, now in those new proletarian museums, but they were mainly on display for the purposes of public derision by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate.

Then Stalin came along. He declared that this art was too ‘politically harmful and is contributing to the spread, in Soviet art, of hostile, bourgeois, formalist opinions’. Want to see the Matisse? Sorry, comrade, now you were out of luck. Modern art was deemed to be ‘composed mainly of ideologically inadequate, anti-working class, formalist works of Western bourgeois art devoid of any progressive, civilizing value for Soviet visitors’. The paintings all went to the vaults of the State Hermitage Pushkin Museums, not to be seen again for decades. In their place went up a three-year ‘Exhibition of Gifts to Comrade Stalin From the Peoples of the USSR and Foreign Countries’. A thousand busts of Stalin replaced the great modernist works. Expect a thousand busts of Comrade Thunberg at Yale.

Of course, this is far from Yale’s first dalliance with socialist art, as this blog post recapping Yale alumnus Tom Wolfe’s 1981 book From Bauhaus to Our House notes:

In America, the Bauhaus concept of “starting from zero” didn’t make sense, because America hadn’t been reduced to rubble after World War I. Plus, the war had turned the nation into a bustling superpower and America didn’t have a toppled monarchy of which to be resentful.

Things might have progressed in the U.S. without any modern influences, except two things happened. A pamphlet came out called ”The International Style,” which claimed that modern style (which was so bland that architects from around the world could collaborate on projects) was the hip, new thing. And World War II started. The Nazis considered Bauhaus a front for communism, and labeled it “degenerate art” that was completely un-German. Thus, Gropius and many of his comrades fled to the U.S. and were welcomed at universities with open arms.

The university architecture departments became the American version of the art compounds in Europe. Harvard and Yale were infused with the mission of Bauhaus and its variations. Gropius was made head of the school of architecture at Harvard. The New Bauhaus was founded (which later became the Chicago Institute of Design). Any existing faculty who disagreed with the modern design movement were no match for the zeal of their students—who saw themselves more as political revolutionaries than students.

A school like Yale drew in the most artistic high school students from the country. As Wolfe says, it attracted teenagers so talented at sculpture they could carve a pillow from marble that could fool you into wanting to bury your head in it. But after WWII, when America’s best talent arrived, they were placed under the tutelage of Josef Albers, who made his students create art out of Color-aid paper as if they were preschoolers.

The modern “International Style” of architecture became so associated with the school, that the glass-and-steel box that comprises so many modern office and apartment buildings began to be called simply “the Yale box.”

Speaking of which, don’t get Wolfe started on modernist architect Louis Kahn’s 1953 Yale Art Gallery addition.