It was one of the ironies of the George W. Bush presidency that a supposedly unlettered president should appoint to the federal government’s cultural endowments two chairmen who were the most accomplished men ever to hold their respective positions. To the National Endowment for the Arts, Bush appointed the gifted poet and essayist Dana Gioia. To oversee the National Endowment for the Humanities, he appointed Bruce Cole, an equally distinguished scholar of Renaissance art and comparative literature. Bruce, who was a good friend to this magazine and many of its writers and editors, died unexpectedly last week at the age of 79.
The NEH is constantly imperiled by the remorseless pull of O’Sullivan’s law, first articulated by the great journalist John O’Sullivan: Any institution that is not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing over time. Bruce knew what he was getting into. He knew, too, the conservative case against federal funding of cultural projects; he might have even agreed with it. But he reasoned that if the endowments are to exist—and after more than 50 years and five Republican administrations, they show no sign of going away—they should be subject to countervailing pressure against O’Sullivan’s law, away from scholarly and political enthusiasms and toward an appreciation for the great patrimony of Western art and literature. And if that pressure can come from the top, all the better. He did a lot of good at NEH, with programs that were notable for their straightforward, non-ideological evangelization of American history and art.
No one questioned his bona fides. His magnum opus, The Renaissance Artist at Work, was comprehensive of its subject, ranging from the brush techniques of the period to the kind of political intrigues an artist might encounter in a world of warring city-states. It went through multiple editions and became indispensable to students and scholars alike. Art of the Western World, cowritten with Adelheid Gealt in 1989, was the basis for a nine-part series on PBS. He was festooned with awards and fellowships and honorary doctorates from institutions around the world.
Tussles with layers of civil servants—some well-meaning, others not so much—never wore him down or dampened his good cheer. After Bush’s two terms Bruce stayed in harness as a freelance scourge, pointing out the absurdities of our great museums and art galleries and lamenting their failures of nerve. His writing appeared frequently in the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion, and, we note proudly, THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Late in life he even took to activism. He served on the board of the National Civic Art Society and accepted an appointment by President Obama to the board of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. There he served as the voice of reason and taste against Frank Gehry’s silly design.
In person, Bruce dressed—always elegantly—in the tweedy manner of the bygone professoriate. He was courtly, soft-spoken, and quietly witty. His laugh rumbled from great wellsprings of merriment that allowed him to look into the yawning abyss of modern American culture and not lose heart. We can think of no better exemplar in scholarship, government, or friendship.
