Billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post laid off some thirty percent of its employees on Wednesday, according to sources quoted in the New York Times, slashing the paper’s sports, local news, and international coverage. More than 300 of the approximately 800 journalists in the newsroom were reportedly let go.
Among the casualties was Pulitzer Prize for Criticism honoree Sebastian Smee, who was on staff since 2018.
“I had eight wonderful years at the Post, which paid for me to travel to great museums around the country and even internationally, so I’ll always be grateful,” said Smee in a message to ARTnews. “Especially to Marty Baron who brought me from the Boston Globe, having earlier brought me to Boston from Australia. There is nothing of which I am prouder than having worked under his great leadership for a big part of my career. My heart goes out to all my colleagues who have lost their jobs. I hope people will support the superb journalists and other staffers who remain. They do incredible work every day.“
Remaining on staff, according to ARTnews’s sources, is another Pulitzer Prize winner, art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott. Hyperallergic also reports that Kennicott will remain on staff. The Post’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation.
Post employees and supporters from the Washington-Baltimore News Guild rallied in freezing temperatures outside the paper’s offices on Thursday, protesting the cuts. One sign was scrawled with the paper’s slogan since 2017, “Democracy dies in darkness,” appended with the words, “Bezos is the dark.”
Smee won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011, when he was on staff at the Boston Globe, where he worked from 2008 to 2016. The committee praised his “vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation.” (He had also been a finalist for the award in 2009.) Among the articles that cinched the honor for him were commentary on subjects ranging from contemporary British artist Cornelia Parker and Abstract Expressionist master Willem de Kooning to 18th-century Spanish still life painter Luis Meléndez and an exhibition of artifacts from China’s Forbidden City.
His final review for the Post, “A great American artist who urges us all to hush down,” is devoted to a traveling Martin Puryear retrospective. “Coming upon a sculpture by Martin Puryear can be like greeting a cowled monk standing sentry at the gates of a mountain monastery,” writes Smee. “You can try using your words. But chances are nothing will come back. You’re best off finding some other way to build rapport.”
Before the Globe, he had been national art critic for The Australian, had worked at the Daily Telegraph, and contributed to a range of publications including the Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, and the Art Newspaper.
Smee has also authored four books: Side by Side: Picasso v Matisse (2002); Lucian Freud (2007); The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breathroughs in Modern Art (2016); and Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism (2024). He also co-authored, with Anita Hill and Cornelia Butler, Mark Bradford (2018). In the New York Times, author Christopher Benfrey praised Paris in Ruins, calling it “deeply researched and suavely written.”
He has shown himself to be unafraid of a little controversy, weighing in in favor of Impressionist lightning rod Pierre-Auguste Renoir after meta-activist Max Geller organized his popular anti-Renoir protests outside museums, which Smee dubbed “sophomoric.” Geller challenged him to a duel on Boston Common.
The paper is imposing the cuts just days after the wide release of the universally panned documentary Melania (“Director Brett Ratner is no Leni Riefenstahl,” writes Vanity Fair), produced by Bezos’s Amazon MGM Studios, which inked a $40 million deal with the Trumps to secure the rights and shelled out some $35 million to market it. The deal was announced just days after Amazon leader Jeff Bezos dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Bezos is currently the world’s fourth-richest person, with a net worth of $234.9 billion at time of writing, according to Forbes.
