This week, United States Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick showed off to social media his newest purchase: a top-shelf tequila bottle. But a different object in the picture caught the eye—and ire—and of some in the art world: a painting that appears to be by Rashid Johnson, an artist whose work is currently being surveyed by the Guggenheim Museum.
Johnson, an art star represented by Hauser & Wirth, began the series at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, adapting the frenzied visual vernacular of his long-running “Anxious Men” paintings. Working with an oil stick on a cotton rag, he made an abstract agitation of thick red strokes to represent the fear and simmering dread that defined a 2020 indoors.
The series has performed solidly at auction, with works leaving the block in the $1 million–$2 million range. A spread of institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Morgan Library, own works from the series.
Critics were swift to note the irony of Lutnick, a former businessman appointed by President Donald Trump, owning an “Anxious Red” piece, given the administration’s antagonistic relationship to public health services. “This is sad, don’t sell art to people like this,” wrote one social media user.
In 2020, works from the series from the “Anxious Red” series were sold in an online charity auction by Hauser & Wirth, with 10 percent of the proceeds from each sale donated to the Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization—the same organization that Trump officially withdrew the United States from on his first day in office, as he had attempted in his first term. As outlined by a 2025 John Hopkins analysis, the withdrawal promised profound consequences for the organization, which monitors and responds to health issues with worldwide implications, and this necessitates international cooperation. The US was the largest contributor to the WHO (12 percent–15 percent in 2022–23), funding that has since been halted, as the WHO’s United States personnel is recalled.
The withdrawal is a one-year process taking place over 2025, a year that has already seen an uptick in cases of Covid-19 in the US.
The administration has made budget cuts a priority, scaling back arts and cultural initiatives and public health programs: the 2026 presidential budget has proposed a nearly 40 percent cut of the budgets for the CDC and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The CDC has shed nearly one quarter of its workforce since Trump took office, with some 3,000 employees leaving either from terminations or voluntarily, even as some officials have been reinstated under unclear circumstances.
ARTnews has reached out to a representative for Lutnick for comment.
