The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 1961 she invited the Spanish expatriate cellist Pablo Casals to perform for a private evening at the White House. For the first time since he had left Fascist Spain for Puerto Rico, Casals consented to play for an audience. For this special event the Kennedys invited the cream of American cultural society, including the MFA’s director and his wife, for a black-tie dinner before the concert. Hardly a detail of this legendary evening was lost on Rathbone. He noted the flowers, the dinner service, the choice of wine, the fish mousse and the filet de bœuf, the First Lady’s evening dress (“a green chartreuse column of silk”), and the decoration of every room they passed through. When Pablo Casals performed after dinner in the East Room, he savored every note: “a glittering company all around absorbing great sonorous music from a great artist, I was conscious of my privilege every moment.”⁸

      A few months later, the French minister of culture, André Malraux, sent the Mona Lisa to Washington to honor the Kennedys’ embrace of the arts in America. The most famous picture in the world hung in the National Gallery for three weeks, attracting some five hundred thousand visitors before traveling to the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, where an estimated one million lined up to pay homage. With typical can-do spirit, Rathbone asked the French Ministry if they could extend the loan to the MFA, not only because it was one of the three most important museums in America but also because Boston, with its vast college student population, was in many ways, he asserted, “the intellectual capital of the United States.”⁹ The Mona Lisa did not travel to Boston, but it was typical of Rathbone’s tireless efforts to draw national attention to his institution.

      But with the abrupt end to the Kennedy years, Washington’s spirit of support for the arts withered. That bright shining moment was but a brief promise and in retrospect shone all the brighter for it. The country entered a period of mourning, not only for the president but also for its shattered identity. At the same time, there perhaps was never a time to equal the 1960s in its ravenous appetite for change. Every kind of belief or value system was up for review; nothing was standing on solid ground. While this was a time of idealism and liberalism, when a postwar prosperity was supposed to be within everyone’s grasp, it was also a time of accelerated forward movement without a clear sense of consequences or of what might be lost in the transition to a new age.

      Commercial movies such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Pawnbroker, and Blow-Up were reaching unprecedented levels of explicit sex and violence, bursting through the boundaries of acceptability like a runaway car chase. At the same time, horrendous images of the war in Vietnam came home to everyone with a TV set, increasingly in “living color” – which only added to the confusion of what was right and what was real, which black-and-white film had somehow made clearer – stirring up even more anger at the administration and confusion about America’s role in Southeast Asia. In the face of LBJ’s vision of The Great Society, and with the success of his considerable legislation to further that end, frustration and anger were nevertheless widespread, unmitigated by a new and seemingly un quenchable sense of entitlement. Violent crime was on the rise, a fact that many attributed to racial tension and the conditions of poverty in the cities. In Boston, the 1960s was a decade of enormous growth in terms of its black population, which nearly doubled, while many of the Jewish communities left Roxbury and Jamaica Plain for the wealthier neighborhoods of Newton and Brookline, and the working-class Irish of Charlestown and South Boston now competed with African Americans for jobs and resources in the decreasing domain for small industry. Ethnic neighborhoods drew their battle lines and lived in precarious hostility.

      The city Rathbone served as a museum director was giving way to upheavals of every kind. With the rise in violent crime, he feared for the Museum’s safety, given its proximity to the poor neighborhoods of Roxbury. City politicians struggled with a growing population of the needy, while the well-to-do fled to the suburbs. New interest groups – blacks, women, local artists – began to make themselves felt in the cultural scene and were not shy about making their demands widely known.

      There were changes in the physical landscape as well. An ongoing building boom surged recklessly over town and country, devastating old neighborhoods and historic monuments. The 1960s was a time of rampant new building projects, thanks to a zealous and often misguided group of second-generation modernist architects, and also the destruction of sacred monuments of American culture, many an architectural treasure, old neighborhood, and park landscape. In 1960 the historic West End of Boston was demolished, the old neighborhood replaced by anonymous high-rise apartment buildings with billboard signs advertising “If you lived here, you’d be home now” to the drivers of gas-guzzling American cars stuck in rush hour traffic on their way home to the northern suburbs. It took charismatic cultural leaders to stem the tide where they could. Jackie Kennedy’s preservationist mission and high standards of taste left their indelible impression. Lady Bird Johnson followed with a campaign to limit the spread of billboard advertising that was spoiling the view from the highways. In the same way that these women served a key role in Washington in the way of enlightened restoration programs, Rathbone took on the struggle in Boston.

      America’s increasing dependence on the automobile had made the development of the interstate highway system under Eisenhower a priority since the 1950s. In the early 1960s the plan for the construction of the so-called Inner Belt in Boston threatened to cut an eight-lane superhighway through working-class neighborhoods of Cambridge, Somerville, and Jamaica Plain and through the heart of Boston, including the parkland along the Fens just across from the Museum. City politicians perceived the Inner Belt as a way of bringing life and commerce to their dying inner city, but underestimated the devastating effect it would have on the city itself as a livable option. As the Inner Belt plans were gradually revealed to the public, a storm of angry protests from local residents followed. By 1965 these had reached their peak. As director of the MFA, Rathbone was a key spokesman for the opposition, addressing business and civic leaders at meetings, and leading the loudest and angriest interest groups at the public hearings in Boston. The highway’s presence would isolate the Museum, he argued, and sever its connection with the city’s thousands of university students. One proposed route would take over the Museum’s parking lot, another its museum school. First its construction, and later its constant activity, might also endanger the Museum’s collections. A study group, including seismologists, worked for months on the possible effects of the highway on the Museum’s structure and contents. Most of all, stated Rathbone at one such hearing, it would ruin the fabric of the city and everything that was unique about Boston, turning it “into a precinct of no more distinction than downtown Tulsa or Wichita.” The whole idea, he argued, was an unmitigated disaster, a product of “bulldozer psychology.”¹⁰ After a ten-year struggle lasting through the 1960s, the opposition won their case in one of the first successful grassroots preservation campaigns in America, but not without a titanic effort.

      In a similar spirit of misguided urban improvement favoring the car, the city of Cambridge made plans to widen Memorial Drive along the Charles River, which would mean destroying the stately avenue of sycamore trees that had been there as long as anyone could remember. Civic-minded Cantabrigians raised an organized protest, with Isabella Halsted, secretary of the MFA Ladies Committee and a resident of Memorial Drive, among its most ardent participants. Known as “the Battle of the Sycamores,” it waged on until the plan was defeated and the sycamores left standing. This was an early and therefore significant victory in the ongoing battle between city residents and politicians for the highway, and it bolstered the Inner Belt opposition.

      As much as these issues were an unwanted distraction from his day job, Rathbone was a cultural figurehead in Boston, if not in all of New England, and there was no getting out of it. His journal of the mid-1960s is rife with complaints about the calls on his time and the distractions from the Museum. It dampened his spirits and drained his energy, but he rose to the challenge, for it was in his nature to be wary of any enterprise that threatened to destroy the heart of an old city. Truth and Beauty were on trial, and it was up to a museum director to set them right. “Inner Belt, BRA,¹¹ Fund-raising problems give me sleepless nights,”¹² Rathbone admitted in his journal on October 19, 1965.

      Rathbone СКАЧАТЬ