The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

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СКАЧАТЬ rich enough to rent their own private digs along the so-called Gold Coast of Mount Auburn Street and who formerly would have been relegated to rented rooms in working-class neighborhoods far from the center of the campus.

      Dunster House, the farthest east of the newly completed neo-Georgian houses along the Charles River, would be Perry’s home and community for his final two years at Harvard. With his roommate Collis “Cog” Hardenbergh, an aspiring architect from Minneapolis, Perry enjoyed a comfortable suite with a fireplace and three windows overlooking the river, altogether a pleasant retreat for study and a decent place to entertain their girlfriends (in those days of Prohibition, this usually meant bathtub gin) before a football game. Together Cog and Perry bought a brand-new sofa; mother made curtains, and a few other pieces came from home, including a blue-and-white tea set. Perry began his art collection with a Japanese print, for which he paid six dollars.

      Meals were served in the Dunster House dining hall, where students ordered from a menu and were waited on by maids in black-and-white uniforms. No Harvard man in those days would have thought of going to a meal without a coat and tie. Nor would he have gone anywhere in public without a hat. At last Perry found himself in the kind of company he had been yearning to keep for many years. “Ever since a young child,” his father wrote, “[Perry] has gradually developed a discriminating taste as to the selection of his companions.” He admitted that his younger son’s discriminating taste was “at times almost too much so, for among certain classes he is not considered a good mixer.”⁹ Now among his Harvard classmates, Perry was in his element. And while during his high school years he had shown little interest in the opposite sex, the young women of Wellesley and Radcliffe Colleges were a breed apart from the small-town girls of New Rochelle.

      Perry was right in anticipating that the fine arts courses at Harvard were exceptionally good, and they were only getting better. The new Fogg Museum had recently been completed on Quincy Street in 1927, and “it still had this delicious odor of fresh wax on its floors,” Perry recalled years later. Genuine objects of antiquity were replacing the reproductions of classical statuary that had filled the old Fogg, and a gift of seventeenth-century Jacobean furnishings established the Naumberg period room on the second floor. Picture collections, including Italian art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a group of nineteenth-century European paintings given by Annie Swan Coburn, were also growing. Forbes’s efforts to make the building itself of the highest quality were not lost on young Rathbone, who recalled years later his first impressions of the new Fogg building: “You could see that it was beautifully designed, beautifully built, and with a great care for the materials.”¹⁰

      In his freshman year Perry took a survey course taught by Chandler Post, which provided the art historical framework he would rely on for the rest of his life. “[Post] was a model art historian,” Perry recalled, “with a marvelously organized mind.”¹¹ Post memorized his lectures and delivered them with splendid clarity. His course was well complemented by another kind of survey taught by Arthur Pope, who provided a more experimental approach to art history in the language of drawing and painting. Pope addressed the broad spectrum of visual expression across the centuries – from Indian miniatures to Greek vase painting to the revolutionary style of Giotto – providing a sense and framework for aesthetics that lifted art and its appreciation out of the purely chronological format Post supplied.

      While his classmates schooled at Groton or Middlesex might have visited the great museums and monuments of Europe, Perry had never traveled beyond the mid-Atlantic states. As much as he enjoyed Post’s classes, he found himself woefully out of his depth, earning a C- in his first term. His art history courses were not the only ones Perry found challenging. German A was a bugbear, Geometry I was even worse, and Botany was a disaster. His first report came in with three Cs and two Es. Perry was put on probation and would be asked to leave if his grades didn’t improve by the end of his freshman year. His worried mother assured Dean Hindmarsh that her son was “worth educating,”¹² confidently adding that by another year, when he got into his stride, he would do worthwhile work.

      As his mother promised, Perry did get into his stride, eventually raising his grade level to a B average when he began to major in fine arts in his final two years. Art history courses with Charles Kuhn, George Harold Edgell, Langdon Warner, and Helmut von Erffa were complemented by a studio art class with Martin Mower, “an old-fashioned small-time painter who was a friend of Mrs. Jack Gardner,” as Perry later remembered him, and “a real aesthete.”¹³ In those days, the art history courses included drawing as a way of training the eye and memorizing the details, especially in the study of architecture and objects, and at these exercises he excelled.

      The Fogg collection was not the only one available to the art history majors at Harvard. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts – housing one of the greatest collections in America – was just across the river, and students were encouraged to go there. The history of Asian art was just beginning to be taught at Harvard (Norton had not considered it worthy of serious study in his day), and the Asiatic collections at the MFA were world-renowned. But unlike the Metropolitan Museum, which he had enjoyed so much as a boy, Perry found the Boston museum somewhat forbidding. No one on the curatorial staff came forward to welcome the Harvard students, and certainly not the director, Edward Jackson Holmes (a direct descendant of Oliver Wendell Holmes), who was regarded as a remote and intimidating figure. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, Fenway Court, was just a stone’s throw from the MFA and had a far more welcoming and fascinating atmosphere. Mrs. Gardner had been a personal friend of most of the Harvard fine arts faculty, and her museum, with its world-class collection of European paintings and its dazzling Venetian garden courtyard, was for the art-minded student “an absolute wonderland.”¹⁴

      There were other outlets for Perry’s art interests in his undergraduate years. His talent for drawing or, as he put it, “my modest ability with a pen,”¹⁵ won him membership to the Lampoon. This unique club of undergraduates produced a humor magazine four or five times a year, and because wit and talent were more desirable commodities in this context than a listing in the Social Register, membership in the Lampoon was within his reach, while exclusive final clubs such as the Porcellian (sometimes called “the Piggy Bank,” referring to the exceptional wealth of its members) were not. But the Lampoon had perhaps more interesting distinctions to its credit in the long run. For a start it was housed in the most eccentric building in Cambridge – a flatiron mock-Flemish fortress at the division of Mount Auburn and Bow streets. Only members were allowed within its fabled interior, which was furnished with antiques donated by wealthy patrons, including Isabella Stewart Gardner, and finished in dark paneled walls, its vestibule inlaid with no fewer than 7,000 Delft tiles. Members enjoyed dinner there once a week in the trapezoidal Great Hall, lit from above by sixteenth-century Spanish chandeliers while gargoyle-like creatures supported lamps along the walls. Thus the Lampoon provided another inspiring interior in which to bask, as well as another social outlet, albeit, as Perry put it, “in a clubby sort of way.”¹⁶

      In his junior year Perry also became involved with another kind of club – the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. This was an experimental art gallery started by Lincoln Kirstein, Eddie Warburg, and John Walker, all seniors when Perry was a freshman. In 1928, with the support of both Forbes and Sachs, this adventurous trio claimed a couple of rooms on the second floor of the Harvard Coop in the heart of Harvard Square in order “to exhibit to the public works of living contemporary art whose qualities are still frankly debatable.”¹⁷ From the point of view of Sachs and Forbes, this undergraduate enterprise let them off the hook when it came to the untested art of the early twentieth century. They could be supportive in both spirit and funding, along with other members of the board, while maintaining their own high standards at the Fogg. Membership in the Society cost a student from Harvard or Radcliffe two dollars a year. For this they were introduced to modern art by the likes of Léger, Miró, Braque, and Picasso, whose qualities, in just a few years, would be hardly debatable at all. The Society even staged a piece of what we would now call performance art, inviting Alexander Calder to construct his circus of wire figures on the spot and then make them perform. СКАЧАТЬ