The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

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СКАЧАТЬ Modern Art opened in New York, with both Kirstein and Warburg deeply involved in its formation.

      By the time Rathbone joined the staff of the Society, Kirstein and the rest had graduated and left Cambridge. They passed the leadership to fine arts major Otto Wittman, who in turn urged Rathbone and Robert Evans, an English major, to become codirectors, maintaining the original triumvirate form to the organizations. Already it had attracted a loyal group of followers, including several New York collectors and dealers willing to lend work for exhibitions. During Rathbone’s tenure the society organized an exhibition of surrealist art – the latest “group movement” – which included works by Dalí, Ernst, Picasso, and Miró. They also organized shows of contemporary American artists, including recent works by Charles Sheeler, Mark Tobey, and Stuart Davis, stressing that these Americans showed an independence from European influences. Venturing into the politically charged, they exhibited a series of prints by Ben Shahn on the controversial Sacco-Vanzetti trial. The show inspired various groups to call for the expulsion of the undergraduates responsible for it and required President Lowell to compose a public statement in their defense, making the whole event something of a sensation. At peak times the Society’s visitors numbered more than one hundred a day, and by 1933 it had become a vibrant part of the cultural life of Greater Boston.

      When he graduated in 1933, Rathbone already had his eye on Paul Sachs’s highly recommended museum course. Various ideas he had once entertained – of becoming a writer, a set designer, or a landscape architect – had by now faded. Ever since taking his course in French painting in his sophomore year, he had warmed to the idea of studying further with Sachs, for whom he felt a special affection. While Sachs treated undergraduates with a certain formality, his graduate students enjoyed a more intimate relationship. Although his lectures could be somewhat pedantic – he read them aloud from a script – he was known to be at his best in the more relaxed format of the seminar.

      Paul Sachs hardly looked the part of a museum man. In contrast to the rather rumpled figure of Edward Forbes, Sachs dressed like a banker, as Rathbone observed with interest, in stiff collars and dark suits. He was abnormally short – about five foot two – and when he was seated on a high Renaissance chair, his feet didn’t quite touch the floor. He had very dark, bushy eyebrows and piercing eyes, which appeared even larger behind his thick spectacles. He had a rich voice and a “very pleasant New York accent,”¹⁸ and best of all, it seemed to Rathbone, a warm heart. Everyone who took Sachs’s museum course also came to know Mrs. Sachs, whom Rathbone remembered as “rather broad in the beam, with an old-fashioned sort of chignon hairdo and a smile that stretched all the way from ear to ear.”¹⁹ Meta Sachs took a real interest in her husband’s students, and she also had the wit and confidence it took to poke fun at her husband when he acted a bit pompous.

      As his students grew in number – Perry Rathbone entered the largest class to date of twenty-eight in the fall of 1933 – Sachs maintained the informality of the course’s fledgling years. On Monday afternoons he held seminars at his own home, an old federal mansion called Shady Hill just a short walk from Harvard Yard and the Fogg. Appropriately enough this was the former home of Charles Eliot Norton, the figurehead and first professor of Harvard’s art history department. In the library, which ran the length of the house in the back, Sachs arranged his books as well as various artifacts and drawers full of prints and drawings. He invited his students to appraise his private collection, identify objects, and hold them in their hands. His notion was that the student should get to feel, literally, at home with art. “There you would sit,” remembered Agnes Mongan, another museum course graduate, “with some incredibly rare object in your own two hands, looking at it closely . . . a small bronze Assyrian animal, a Persian miniature . . . a Trecento ivory . . . a small Khmer bronze head.”²⁰

      While he encouraged them to develop expertise in one particular area, Sachs declared, “Every self-respecting museum man must have a bowing acquaintance with the whole field of Fine Arts.”²¹ He taught his students to be curious about everything they saw and to develop an eye for the authentic. One exercise was to identify within four minutes which of a selection of objects on the table – a piece of brocade, a bronze object, a Buddha, a handle, a pestle – was actually made within the last fifty years. He asked them to select an object and make a case for its acquisition to an imaginary board of trustees. He trained them to develop their visual memories by asking them to list all the pictures on the second-floor galleries of the Fogg in the order of their appearance, adding to this their provenance, condition, and aesthetic value.

      Sachs’s students also needed to understand what went into the running of a museum from inside out and from top to bottom. He asked them to make architectural renderings of the Fogg’s floor plans to better understand the particular logic of a museum building. He taught them how to catalogue collections, organize exhibitions, and write press releases. He assigned research papers on a variety of topics and added to this bibliographies, class presentations, and gallery talks. He taught them to compare collections from all over the world, to have a working knowledge of what was where. One assignment was to list every single French painting in America. It was “a hothouse treatment,”²² remembered Rathbone, one that made the students realize at once how little they had learned of the real world as Harvard undergraduates.

      A museum is as good as its staff, Sachs used to say, and he meant this to apply to every level of its management. Perry observed that Sachs considered “some of our number rather too privileged,”²³ and that it wouldn’t hurt them to get a taste of the less glamorous side of museum work. Sachs introduced them to janitorial duties, stressing the importance of keeping “a tidy ship.”²⁴ Students were asked to take turns arriving early in the morning with the maintenance staff and then follow the superintendent around, dusting the cabinets and sweeping the floors.

      Sachs also insisted that students be closely acquainted with artistic techniques. To that end Edward Forbes conducted a laboratory course in Methods and Processes of Italian Painting, more familiarly known as “egg and plaster.” Forbes taught them how to paint in egg tempera and how to prepare a gesso panel, how to handle the esoteric materials and how to use the tools of the old masters such as the wolf’s tooth. He introduced them to the technique of gilding, of painting on parchment, and the methods of fresco – both fresh and secco – using the walls of his classroom at the Fogg Museum as their practice ground.

      They visited and reported on neighboring museums such as the Worcester Art Museum and the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. And during the Christmas and spring breaks Sachs led his students on field trips to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington to meet dealers, collectors, and museum curators, including some of his former students who by now were well and highly placed.

      Edward Forbes’s Methods and Processes of Painting class, 1933–1934. LEFT TO RIGHT: James S. Plaut, Perry T. Rathbone, Henry P. McIlhenny, Katrina Van Hook, Elizabeth Dow, Charles C. Cunningham, Professor Edward W. Forbes, Mr. Depinna, John Murray.

      They visited the collection of the Widener family at Lynnewood Hall outside Philadelphia, where the entire class of twenty-eight was given lunch and waited on by footmen in livery. They were served tea at Grenville Winthrop’s townhouse in New York City, where they viewed his unrivaled collection of nineteenth-century French paintings and sixth-century Chinese sculptures and jades. Sachs assured his students that the collector would be more than happy to tell them how he came upon this jade or that picture. “Look around,” Sachs would say. “Ask any questions you like.”²⁵ They were welcomed at Abby Rockefeller’s townhouse on West Fifty-Fourth Street, the first home of the Museum of Modern Art. They called on Joseph Duveen, the premier dealer in old master pictures, at his stone palace at the corner of Fifty-Sixth and Fifth. Duveen would appear in his morning coat, surrounded by his faithful assistants. “The great Lord Duveen would crack a few jokes and show us a few treasures,”²⁶ remembered Rathbone, and he could easily see the magic this dealer worked on his СКАЧАТЬ