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:
Classical Galleries before renovation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1960s.
How could it be otherwise? As a public servant, a museum director is fair game, inevitably the object of criticism for the museum’s shortcomings as much as the object of praise for its success. A new generation of museum directors continues to redefine the profession – to confront the latest demands of the public, improve on the physical plant, expand public programs, refine connoisseurship, conserve and build the collections, all the while and ever in search of a path to financial stability. Today’s museum directors face many of the same challenges as those of the past, but no matter what, as Paul Sachs warned his museum studies students at Harvard, their work will be written in sand. Other castles have been built where my father’s once stood, and other people have claimed responsibility for the innovations he stood for, as if for the first time, but in retrospect only in a new way, on a new scale, for a new age. In understanding the story that follows, it is essential to consider its many ramifications within the context of its times.
New Classical Galleries reinstallation, 1967.
Meanwhile, among the dwindling fellowship that remembers it at all, mystery, rumor, and misunderstanding still surround the story of the Boston Raphael, as well as a crust of inevitability that was only formed in hindsight. Our visit to the Uffizi was the first step backward into a matrix of circumstances that paved the way to this landmark series of events. If it was the story my father least wanted to be remembered for, it was also the one he most wanted fully told.
This is not the book my father would have written, though his words have been a constant guide in the writing of my own. If he were still with us, I would have perhaps gained further insight into the workings of his mind at that time and access to a few pertinent facts that still remain mysterious. At the same time, it would have been impossible to attain the degree of objectivity necessary to tell the story in its many facets. I embarked on my research with some trepidation, not knowing what I would find, and in the face of my siblings’ grave concerns about the enterprise. From their point of view (and that of many other friends), the less remembered – much less written – about this unfortunate incident, the better. But since returning to live in Boston, I was perhaps more aware than they how inaccurately it was recalled and how generally misunderstood it was in the first place. There was nothing that mattered more to my father than historical accuracy in fact and context, and there was nothing that bothered him more than uninformed and casually drawn conclusions.
In my research into primary and secondary sources, I have sought to understand the circumstances surrounding the story of the Raphael with an open mind. While some mysteries remain, I have not knowingly left anything significant out of the story. I have sat with the enemy and absorbed the shock of learning that there were other ways of looking at the same events and the same personalities than the ones I was raised to believe. At the same time, I have carefully weighed each personal account for its degree of truth against accounts of the same events – both conflicting and corroborating – and endeavored to size up each witness for his or her inclinations and sympathies. Even in my father’s absence I have had to fight the natural reflex to defend him from criticism. For all my striving for objectivity, there is no escaping that I have come to this work with a point of view about the politics of the art world, and one that was clearly honed by the subject himself. But in reliving those years we lived together, as both biographer and witness, I have come to understand them as if for the first time. My point of view by now comes with a background of evidence, and now I understand in all its fullness what before I had simply taken on faith.
Crowd in line for The Age of Rembrandt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 22–March 5, 1967.
Crowds at The Age of Rembrandt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 22–March 5, 1967.
The story of the Boston Raphael is inseparable from another story. No small part of this event was the political turmoil brewing within the institution itself in the late 1960s – a museum in the flux of change, in the throes of ideological conflict, as its size, its scale of operations, and the value of its collections reached a tipping point, the point at which the modern art museum was becoming the postmodern art museum. The philosophical questions of that bygone era are still urgently with us today, even as the landscape has vastly changed. The conventions of exporting works of art, the methods of research and authentication, the ways that museums are managed and the priorities that have recently overtaken them – all three of these issues turned a decisive corner during and in the immediate aftermath of the Raphael affair, just as they played out as elements in its outcome.
“How well did you know him?” a former member of the MFA’s Ladies Committee asked me not long ago. The question took me aback. Did she mean that no one could know a father who was always on the job? Did she mean that she knew him better than I did? Had she forgotten for a moment whom she was talking to? Or was it a provocative question, the one I was constantly asking myself as I reviewed the archives of his life, seeking to understand him differently, objectively, while also knowing him, as a close witness to those troubled times, and as only a daughter can?
1965
IN 1965 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was enjoying a revival that was long overdue. During the previous decade attendance figures had tripled; membership had multiplied six times; publications had grown from a trickle of drab little booklets into a steady flow of tempting full-color catalogs, calendars, and postcards; and fifty exhibition galleries had been completely renovated, their treasures brought to life in the glow of new lighting and fresh installations. Collaborating with the local educational station WGBH, the MFA was the first museum in America to be wired for television, hosting on-site programs for both adults and children several times a week, and thereby expanding its public outreach exponentially. Not least, the collections had grown by hundreds of artworks, bringing new strength to every department, including the promise earlier that year of the entire collection of eighteenth-century French art belonging to the late Forsyth Wickes. On the evening of December 10, 1965, the Museum’s volunteer Ladies Committee staged a surprise tenth anniversary party for the man who was responsible for instigating these dramatic developments: director Perry T. Rathbone.
In an elaborate ruse in which his wife, Rettles, was a key conspirator, Rathbone arrived in his black tie and dinner jacket at the Huntington Avenue entrance, where he was greeted by a throng of two hundred friends. Amid a chorus of congratulations he was led up the grand staircase – red-carpeted for the occasion – to shake hands with beaming well-wishers every step of the way. He was genuinely flabbergasted. “I, the unsuspecting victim,” he wrote in his journal that week, “was led to the ‘slaughter’ by Rettles, who turned out to be the most subtle actress of them all in this colossal conspiracy.”1 Rettles, shy and demure, was every bit the woman behind her man, following him up the stairs, smiling and embracing the guests, radiant in her newest Bonwit Teller evening dress.
Perry and Rettles Rathbone greeting guests at party honoring PTR’s 10th anniversary as director, December 1965.
At the top of the stairs Ralph Lowell, the MFA’s president of the board, crowned Rathbone with a laurel wreath. There followed general cocktail hubbub in the rotunda and then a dinner dance in the spacious Tapestry Hall just beyond. It was well known that the director had lately been taken by СКАЧАТЬ