The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone
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Название: The Boston Raphael
Автор: Belinda Rathbone
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781567925401
isbn:
Besides, these same board members were all busy supporting a full range of other beloved nonprofits. Boston had more than its share, and each commanded a loyal following. There was Harvard and MIT, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the brand-new Museum of Science, headed by the aggressive Bradford Washburn. There were hospitals and schools. “Owing to the great number of nonprofit institutions,” lamented Rathbone, “the competition is keener [in Boston] per capita than anywhere else in the country.”27 While competition outside the walls of the MFA was rife, the spirit inside was tepid. Not since its inception had there been any kind of fund-raising effort, and among the general population, as well as the inner circles, “there was no habit of giving to the MFA.”28
The Changing Face of the Board
IN THE 1960S Rathbone actively sought to change the complexion of the Museum’s aging board of trustees, to bring in younger members “whose minds were open, and who already had different ideas of what a museum might be.”1 Among the young trustees of an old Boston tribe was Lewis Cabot, who joined the board in 1966. A keen collector of modern art as well as a recent graduate of Harvard Business School, Cabot, who was a youthful twenty-eight at the time of his election to the board, later somewhat facetiously commented that his election was part of an effort “to bring the average age down from senility.”2 In seeking out younger individuals of wealth with a passion for art, Rathbone knew better than to confine himself to old Boston society. He introduced Landon Clay, a collector of pre-Columbian art from Savannah; John Goelet, a collector of Asian and Islamic art from New York; and Jeptha Wade, whose grandfather was a well-known collector in Cleveland. Also noteworthy were the growing number of women on the board, with Helen Bernat, a collector of Asiatic art and also one of the first Jewish members, joining in 1966, and contemporary art collector Susan Morse Hilles in 1968, not to mention the steady representation of the Ladies Committee by its standing chairwoman. Thus new blood began to trickle in – an emerging generation of trustees with a different kind of attitude.
Rathbone also managed to persuade the trustees to make a landmark decision he had been promoting for some time. This was to open up their efforts to raise money to the business sector and to institute corporate memberships. “No individuals such as those who built this place are going to pull us out of the fiscal problem we have,”3 Rathbone told an interviewer in 1967. A promising alternative, which was gaining some credibility at that time, was for the corporate wealth of the country to “step into the breach.”4,5 While before it was considered inappropriate for a cultural institution to accept money from a business (and plenty of corporate executives felt the same way), the time had come to actively engage Boston’s business community, to reach out to “more entrepreneurial people who had larger sums of money to play with,” said Lewis Cabot, “and who were – dare I say it – anxious to make a social position of their lives.”6 Rathbone would be the first to admit that pure devotion to art was not the only motive of the corporate sponsor, that to have one’s name attached to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was “a passport to higher things or better circles. It’s quite a feather in one’s cap.”7 While this remained an embarrassment to some members of the board, the resolution passed.
Rettles and Perry Rathbone, Charlotte and Ralph Lowell, receiving line, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1960s.
Among the first corporate members to respond to this initiative was the local canned-food enterprise, the William Underwood Company, with a gift of $500 in 1965, which in the context of the times seemed promising. Underwood was doing very well with its signature product Underwood Deviled Ham and had accelerated into takeover mode, expanding its base that year with the acquisition of Burnham & Morrill of Portland, Maine, best known for its B&M baked beans (and incidentally a traditional, if somewhat disparaged, staple of the Boston diet). Underwood’s CEO, a tall, imposing man named George Seybolt, was acquainted with MFA trustee William Appleton Coolidge, who had solicited his help in raising money for the Episcopal diocese. Coolidge made the introductions while Seybolt did the heavy lifting, and they managed to reach their goal of $5 million. Bill Coolidge (not to be confused with his distant cousin, John Coolidge, of the Fogg), a one time senior partner with the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray and a venture capitalist, was generally considered the richest man on the board, and in his quiet, patrician way, he was a force. “When Bill Coolidge had something to say,” recalled trustee Jack Gardner, “everybody listened.”8 At the start of the centennial fund drive in 1965, Bill Coolidge recommended Seybolt as the kind of business mind they needed to enlist and consult. An aggressive fund-raiser with a high profile in the Chamber of Commerce and a lively interest in American antiques, Seybolt, as Rathbone later summarized, “seemed to be the man.”9
Even though Seybolt was an altogether different kind of person from any other member of the genteel museum community – a high school graduate of the Valley Forge Military Academy among the overwhelmingly Harvard-educated board – once he began offering his services pro bono, it was but a short step to his becoming a trustee. Rathbone vividly recalled the meeting to which Seybolt was invited as a special guest to offer his advice on fund-raising tactics ahead. Seybolt looked around the table, meeting the eyes of everyone assembled, and said meaningfully, “This is a job for a trustee, isn’t it?”10 And in short order, he was elected in February 1966.
At first Rathbone was relieved to have Seybolt on the board to help him focus the trustees’ attention on the Museum’s financial needs and shoulder the burden of fund-raising. If more established members of the board were unwilling to lead the charge, what could he do? If Seybolt wasn’t exactly the image of old Boston, he was the image, perhaps, of the new Boston. Rathbone had understood from the moment he arrived there that the mold had to be broken, and here it was breaking in a new way. Seybolt was ready and willing. More than that, he was aggressive, he was ambitious, and it was clear that he had his eye on the bottom line, and that was what mattered now.
Seybolt immediately perceived flaws in the system. For one thing, the board meetings were too short, and too few – President Ralph Lowell saw no reasonable call for more than three or four meetings a year and took pride in the fact that they usually concluded within two hours. For another, the board did not seem to be presented with any real problems to solve. Lowell would review the director’s report about an hour before the meeting, and then they would all sit down around the table to listen and discuss it. “Everything at that point was very polite, deferential,” remembered Cabot, “a steward without being a visionary was the way the trustee saw his role.”11 These were the quiet, responsible guardians of a public trust, stewards of a great ship, but they were not her captain. When faced with a proposal of any kind, Ralph Lowell “just smiled and signed, smiled and signed.”12
“What they got was canned food,” Seybolt complained with an interesting choice of metaphor, “all prepared, even chewed and regurgitated – they got this pat stuff.” As he observed the proceedings at one meeting after another, Seybolt quickly concluded that he himself was “the only one there that was really living in the world as it was.”13
Around the Museum, staff and trustees alike noticed that Seybolt’s ideas were strikingly corporate, his manners were alternately intimidating and overfamiliar, and it was clear he had an agenda. Some perceived СКАЧАТЬ