January 11, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY

Page 7

EDUCATION: Cornelia Reynolds

Museum Caught 'In Flagrante Delicto'

Under a program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, children are

trained to "appreciate" vulgar modern abstract art and the Renaissance is
ignored.

Art museums, like museums of science and industry, ought to play an

important role in the education of both children and adults. One of the
advantages that big-city children have is the easy accessibility of such
museums. But what is frequently conveyed by today's museums is totally
opposite to the humanist tradition of progress expressed by the greatest
works that are housed in them.

New York's art museums, recently revisited by an international Humanist

Academy delegation, are a striking case in point. The Museum of Modern
Art, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, was founded as a hotbed
of Nazi sympathizers whose pederastic curators only stopped publicly
drooling over Hitler's brown-shirts when the British oligarchy decided to
dump King Edward VIII in 1938. From the outset in 1929, "MOMA" was
wielded as a dictatorial tool to destroy what remained of at least, a certain
reverence for the Neoplatonic current of painting, even after the ability of
artists to produce works in the tradition had long since ceased.
Today, however, the same philosophy of nihilism and counterculture that
reigns at the MOMA also dominates the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
During a brief sojourn as a research assistant in the Department of European
Paintingsconsidered at that time still the crowning glory of the museum's
collectionsthis writer had the opportunity to witness, over a decade ago,
the earlier stages of the process of degeneration of the Met. Visitors can
now find the "pop art'' of a Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollack's "abstract expressionist" paint drippings, and an elevator interior from Rockefeller center in
galleries adjoining those which house (among other things) one of the
world's finest collections of Rembrandt paintings!
The conclusion that the unwary visitor is supposed to draw is that all of
these "objects" represent the same thingculture, or more properly, CULTure. In 1969, when this writer worked at the Met, celebrations of the
museum's 100th anniversary began with a series of exhibitions. The first
show featured New York painting of the three previous decades, with the
explicit goal of setting these vulgar exercises in "pure feeling" up as worthy
of being housed in the same institutions with European Neoplatonic art of
the Renaissance period.
Henry Geldzahler, now commissioner of Cultural Affairs for New York's
Koch administration and an outspoken Gay Rights activist, organized that
exhibition (he was at the time curator of American painting at the Met). It is
not accidental that the flagrant transformation of the Metropolitan Museum
took place under the tenure of then-Director Thomas P.F. Hoving, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees, C. Douglas Dillon. Dillon is the individual
who launched and oversaw, from 1962, the Institute for World Order, the
New York-based outfit linked to Lord Bertrand Russell which is the mother
institution of every environmentalist-terrorist gang in the United States
today.

Would Jan Van Eyck, or Giotto, or Rembrandteach of them a leading

scientific thinkerhave endorsed the anti-technology environmentalists
whom Dillon has sponsored over the last two decades? Of course not. Nor
could any individual who viewed the masterpieces, owned by the Met, in an
arrangement reflecting the historical development of the painter's art come
away with less than a powerful sense of creative mentation as the motorforce of history.
Therefore, under Dillon and Hoving, everything was done to subvert the real
meaning of these treasures. The coup de grace was delivered with the recent
opening, after a decade of construction, of the Sackler wing housing the
"Temple of Dendur," an Egyptian Temple of Isis from the most decadent
period of Egyptian civilization. This fabulously costly project glorifying the
synthetic mother-cult that was used to bring about the Dark Age under the
genocidal Roman Empire, embodies everything the great European artists
and their political allies sought to defeat by creating the Golden Renaissance.
The Metropolitan Museum's problems go deeper than the Hoving-Dillon
legacy of death. From the outset the collections have been organized
according to the New York merchant bankers who owned themnot
principally according to the geniuses who created them. Throw out the Isiscult garbage, ancient and "modern," and reorganize the great art housed in
the Met by scientific historical principles, and this institution could become
a mediating force for the new Renaissance we must initiate now.
This column was contributed by Associate Editor Nora Hamerman.