If you’re in Washington and want a break before election year madness begins, check out the Glenstone Museum. 

The Glenstone, about 20 miles outside of Washington in Potomac, Maryland, offers, as the brochure says, “a holistic experience of art, architecture, and landscape.” Founders Emily and Mitch Rales have taken 300 acres and added two gallery buildings and several outdoor sculptures. “The museum also wants to provide you with a relaxing environment fit for contemplation of its thought-provoking pieces of art,” the guide adds. “If you’re looking to be truly immersed in both mind and body during a museum-going experience, Glenstone is the perfect fit.”

The Glenstone offers a lovely campus and an amazing collection of modern art. The main exhibit includes pieces by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, and Barbara Kruger. They are part of an exhibit called “Iconoclasts,” which features artists “who have made some of the most radical contributions to art in the 20th century.” The names are iconic: Man Ray, Ming Smith, Henri Matisse, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston, and Eva Hesse. 

Many of these artists may have been considered radical in their day, but from the perspective of 2024, they’re now mainstream. Modern art, which was created roughly between 1890 and the Second World War, has been completely accepted by most Americans as a great accomplishment. Indeed, it is now conservatives such as the editors of the art journal New Criterion who are the strongest defenders of modernism. 

Modernism is quite different than postmodernism, which rose in the 1960s and is the kind of overly political, angry, pornographic, and childish art that sets out to offend. In his book The Triumph of Modernism, the great art critic Hilton Kramer argued that when modernism emerged in the 20th century, the more conservative middle class embraced it. Regular Americans liked Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Odd Nerdrum, and Alex Katz. Kramer, one critic observed, “insisted upon modernism as an essential component of bourgeois culture.”

Kramer had less patience for the artworks made after the 1960s, art which he saw in terms of decline or degeneration. Kramer was right. In 2016, it was revealed that the art collection of DNC officials Tony and John Podesta was bizarre and evil. The Podestas’ collection contained, as critic Michael J. Pearce described it, “weird genetically-mutated piggy-children sculptures and creepy photographs of men with children running away.” People were “shocked to learn that this pillar of the Democratic Party owned a sculpture of a decapitated naked woman whose pose closely resembled a photo of one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims. Another installation in [Podesta’s] home included hyper-real sculpted hybrid human and pig figures, including piglet children.”

Pearce, an artist and author of several books on art, as well as the founder of the Representational Art Conference, concludes: “Suddenly, a powerful perception of a sick relationship between left-wing politics, avant-garde art, and pedophilia was established by media outlets covering the story.” This stuff offended the mainstream and Democrats. “Intersectional Democratic Party members were horrified that the taste of Podesta — one of their elite leaders — could include such offensive things. Party leaders seeking the middle-class vote were appalled at the offense to bourgeois values. The sculpture of the beheaded woman clearly offended feminist factions,” Pearce added.

Pearce is also dismayed by how the Left has become so hostile to art: “Instead of supporting art, left-wing intersectional activists have become busy iconoclasts, calling for the destruction of a painting of Emmett Till, throwing paint at public sculptures of Columbus and civil war monuments, spray painting slogans onto the iconic Unconditional Surrender statue in Sarasota. There’s nothing particularly new or exciting about iconoclasm, but it is unusual that the political motivation of these activists is leftist, because supporting artistic freedom of speech has been the default position of the American Left since the Second World War.”

That’s no longer the case. It’s ironic that an exhibit at Glenstone is called “Iconoclasts” when the giants of modernism have been totally absorbed into mainstream American life. 

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One great recent exhibit at Glenstone featured the work of Ellsworth Kelly. During World War II, Kelly was part of the Ghost Army, or the 603rd, which was a deception unit. It was made up of 1,000 men who practiced visual, sonic, radio, and atmospheric deception for the purpose of confusing and thwarting the enemy. The Ghost Army used inflatable trucks, fake radio transmissions, and other deceptions to mislead Axis forces about the directions and location of Allied forces and hide military equipment and movements. 

Kelly was the kind of American artist we need more of in 2024.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.