Something else was different. Behind the counter one could buy a black hat with the following written in gold cursive: “Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach.” And there were also packs of breath mints emblazoned with a bloody Trump rising up after being shot, as well as other packs of mints with Trump’s face and the text: “Make your breath great again.”
“Aren’t they fantastic?” said the cashier.
Ahead of the Norton Museum’s gala on Saturday night, John and Amy Phelan gave a tour of their collection in Palm Beach on Friday afternoon for select gala-goers, led by Lindsay Taylor, the director of the Phelan Collection. The house, on the southern part of the island and a five-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago, has Jeff Koons’s painting Saddle in the kitchen, a Willem de Kooning over the fireplace, and a massive Lawrence Weiner installed on the entrance to a freestanding discotheque they built on the property. (That’s gotta be a first for a prospective secretary of the Navy.)
It was only the start of a full-on art tour of shows throughout town. Sure, many of the snowbird outposts of major NY galleries have closed up shop in recent years—adieu to the locations of White Cube, Lehmann Maupin, Pace, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, and others—but Beth Rudin DeWoody still has the Bunker Artspace, and it’s still one of the most incredible places to see art in South Florida, or anywhere. Every year she and her staff stage up to a dozen shows across two massive floors of a West Palm warehouse, featuring hundreds of works of art—all culled exclusively from her 10,000-piece-strong personal collection.
She’s such a voracious collector that the frequent New Yorker cartoonist Guy Richards Smit submitted a drawing in 2023 in which a gallerist is showing her team a strategy slideshow on a projector, with the PowerPoint “summing up the gallery’s entire business plan in one easy-to-remember phrase…‘BETH RUDIN DEWOODY.’” The original is now on view at the Bunker, along with shows dedicated to snakes, paintings from the ’60s, and surveillance.
Also in West Palm Beach is a pop-up by Paula Cooper Gallery—the Chelsea mainstay that had a space on Worth Avenue from 2020 to 2023—that runs through the high season. Down the street, Sarah Gavlak moved her gallery into a new space off-island after years of showing at the Royal Poinciana Plaza, while Acquavella, the gallery run by the eponymous, Palm Beach–dwelling family, still has its space in an open-air shopping mall.
The most crucial art concern in the Palm Beach vicinity is unquestionably the Norton, which has gone from local curio to established art powerhouse in less than a decade. In 2018, Citadel CEO and mega-collector Ken Griffin announced that he would make a $16 million donation to the museum, the largest single gift in its history, to be used for, among other things, the construction of the space designed by Lord Norman Foster. Then in 2022, he moved his hedge fund, Citadel, from Chicago, where he’d feuded with Illinois governor JB Pritzker, to South Florida—and, as we revealed in this column in 2022, yanked his collection off the walls of the Art Institute, instead installing the works at the Norton.
Walking through the museum this weekend, I found that nearly all of the masterpieces in Griffin’s collection—de Kooning’s Interchange, an untitled Robert Ryman, Mark Rothko’s No. 2 (Blue, Red and Green) (Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue), and Jackson Pollock’s Number 17A—were in a space that abutted the contemporary galleries, still listed as belonging to a “private collection.” A room away, there was a massive Cy Twombly painting, Untitled (Camino Real), that was shown by Larry Gagosian as part of an exhibition of Twombly’s last paintings, staged at his Beverly Hills gallery in April 2012. The work belonged to financier Donald Marron, and when the collector died in 2019, the