The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Morgan, Widener, and Huntington. In Washington they were personally welcomed by the curators of the National Gallery and of Dumbarton Oaks, and the collectors Duncan and Marjorie Phillips. These were the kind of receptions Paul Sachs had come to expect – and his students to enjoy – from the extensive network he had developed over decades.

      A scholar may work in solitude, but a museum professional needs to be out working in the world, and Sachs never ceased to stress the importance of personal contacts. He shared his long list of leading art world figures with his students, including his careful instructions on how European nobility should be addressed, as in “My dear Contesse Beausillon” or “My dear Lord Crawford.” While it was easy to recognize the great collectors, Sachs also taught them to never condescend to the lesser known, never to “high-hat”²⁷ the amateur, for they might very well know more than you assume, and their resources and potential for support were inestimable.

      Likewise Sachs told his students to become familiar with their trustees and to visit them in their own homes. Equally important, it was essential to know how to entertain them. When an important out-of-town visitor came to Cambridge, Sachs hosted black-tie dinners at Shady Hill, inviting his students to these lavish affairs to show them both how to dress properly and how to create the right atmosphere for cultivating the rich. Last but not least, he encouraged them to become collectors themselves at whatever level they could afford. Rathbone’s classmate Henry McIlhenny, coming from a family of considerable means in Philadelphia, had already purchased a major still life by Chardin, which he hung over the fireplace in his suite at Dunster House. Rathbone’s budget could accommodate only the odd Japanese block print to be found in secondhand bookshops, but those thrilled him just as much. It was not until his senior year that he acquired his first oil painting – a primitive American portrait of a dark-haired gentleman dressed in black. For this stern Yankee – later attributed to Sheldon Peck and today valued at five thousand times what he bought it for in 1932 – he paid five dollars to a roadside antique dealer in upstate New York.

      Sachs embraced his students as if they were his own children. As in any family there were inevitably some children who were easier to manage than others. It was difficult for Sachs to assert his superiority over the three students who had started the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art – Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker – partly because they belonged to the same close-knit New York (and largely Jewish) society that Sachs did. Warburg considered Sachs “a humorless little cannonball of energy,”²⁸ Walker called him a “stocky, strutting little man,”²⁹ and Kirstein said he was “a small and nervous man, who hated being a Jew.”³⁰ Some considered Sachs a reverse snob and observed that he tended to favor students not as privileged as he was. This made for a naturally congenial relationship between Sachs and Perry Rathbone – who was neither privileged nor Jewish – that lasted well into Sachs’s retirement. “If he liked you, he would never desert you”³¹ was the impression he made on Rathbone, and this proved to be true, far beyond the course of his Harvard years. Sachs wrote letters of recommendation for Rathbone at the drop of a hat, letters that were the gold standard in the field. This opened many doors as he made his way west after Harvard in search of a professional life, landing his first job in the depths of the Depression at the Detroit Institute of Arts under its legendary director William Valentiner. When Rathbone eventually returned to Boston in 1955 to take over the MFA, Sachs was there to greet him and to counsel him.

      By World War II Sachs had trained hundreds of young men and women as museum professionals. He had, almost single-handedly, created a nationwide network of the ruling elite. This network would continue to work together for years to come, trading opinions and personnel, collaborating on loan exhibitions, and meeting annually at the American Association of Art Museum Directors, an invaluable sharing of experience and ideas, for which Rathbone served as president for two years. The museum course was the bedrock of Rathbone’s approach to museum problems and leadership as he set out into the real world, along with his museum course classmates James Plaut, Charles Cunningham, Henry McIlhenny, Thomas Howe, and Otto Wittmann. All would go on to play leading roles in the American museum world. Together these men would create a fraternity of professionals sharing the same high standards of museum management they learned from Sachs at Harvard. By the mid-1960s they had come of age, and so had their achievements.

      But Sachs could take Perry Rathbone only so far. Now he was about to enter the wilderness without a map. For it was not only the social and urban landscapes that were changing but the American museum as well. The problems Rathbone faced were in large part those of the monster he and his colleagues had helped to create – a much larger and more diverse audience, with much higher expectations, a public hungry for blockbuster exhibitions and ambitious building programs. By the 1960s these pressures had reached a new peak, and it was during this same restless period of change that Harvard’s Museum course was finally dissolved.

      

      Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Huntington Avenue façade, 1920.

The Centennial Looms

      IN THE MID-1960S the Boston Museum of Fine Arts approached its 100th birthday. Like many great cultural and educational institutions in America, the Museum was an offspring of the Gilded Age, an age of enormous wealth enjoyed by a very few that was the bedrock of its formation. In 1870 the Museum was conceived by a group of high-minded Boston Brahmins and incorporated as “a gallery for the collecting and exhibiting of paintings, statuary, and other objects of virtue and art.” Six years later its first dedicated building opened on Copley Square with its fledgling collections of paintings, plaster casts of classical statuary, and real Egyptian mummies. Well-to-do Bostonians were inspired to give generously to their new Museum, and the collection quadrupled over the next decade, leading to the concept of a new building site on the parkland of the Fens. Over the years it consistently surpassed the ambitious goals of its founding fathers, but by the 1960s it faced an ongoing financial struggle to maintain the high standards it had achieved. Therefore, it was essential to make the most of its forthcoming landmark year, to publicize and celebrate its greatness, and also to make known its pressing needs. Meanwhile, in New York, the Metropolitan Museum had a brand-new director, the youthful and dashing Thomas P. F. Hoving, and the Met was gearing up for its centennial celebrations the very same year.

      The rivalry between New York and Boston, and between the MFA and the Met in particular, was age-old. Born just two months apart, they were from quite different backgrounds, and each had strengths the other envied. The MFA, as historian Nathaniel Burt wrote, “inherited a collection, prestige, the backing of Boston’s Best and its best institutions, everything but public assistance and cash.” From the beginning, Boston, compared with New York, was “scholarly, intense, serious, but poor . . . a long thread of complaint weaves through the rivalry of the two sister institutions, the Met always jealous of Boston’s reputation, and Boston always jealous of the Met’s money.”¹ Boston’s collection of Japanese art was unrivaled anywhere in the world (including Japan), and those of ancient Egyptian and classical art second only to the Met’s, and in some areas even greater. But the Met had the noticeable edge in old master paintings, and in the eyes of the general public, that was what mattered.

      These comparisons were in high relief as their centennials approached, especially with Hoving and Rathbone at the helms, both known for their bold outreach and flair for publicity. While Rathbone was a seasoned museum director now in his midfifties, Hoving was twenty years his junior and in 1967 new to the directorship of the Met, immediately following a brief stint as parks commissioner under Mayor John Lindsay and, earlier in his career, a curatorial assistantship at the Cloisters, a medieval branch museum in Fort Tryon Park. Rorimer, another medievalist and Hoving’s immediate predecessor as director of the Met, had guided the Met for the previous eleven years. He was distinguished by his connoisseur’s eye for quality and his expert hand at installations. But he was socially insecure, secretive by nature, and remained aloof to most of his staff as well as the general public. “Rorimer had СКАЧАТЬ