The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

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 a passion for professional anonymity and secrecy,” wrote John McPhee. “He had an air of cloaked movements and quiet transactions, of indisclosable sources and whispered information – a necessity surely in the museum world, and something that Rorimer had refined beyond the wildest dreams of espionage.”² He was also not very collegial, and Rathbone had never warmed to him.

      In their choice of Hoving as Rorimer’s successor, the Met trustees sought to embrace a larger public, a museum more committed to education and outreach. The Rorimer years were ones of “consolidation and careful management,” according to museum historian Calvin Tomkins, but now it was time for a leader more inclined to innovation, someone more like Rorimer’s predecessor, Francis Henry Taylor, who had boldly moved the Met out of its postwar doldrums. “The pendulum had swung once again,” wrote Tomkins of Hoving’s appointment. “Youth and energy and fresh ideas were at a premium, and the soundest policy might well lie in the calculated risk.”³

      Hoving and Rathbone were both native New Yorkers, but from different parts of town. Hoving was born to privilege – his father was chairman of Tiffany & Co. – and young Tom grew up in a spacious apartment on Park Avenue, attended private schools, and summered in fashionable Edgartown. Rathbone was the penurious son of a wallpaper salesman from Washington Heights, attended public schools, and spent his summers at his grandmother’s house in the sleepy upstate village of Greene, New York. But while there were differences in their backgrounds, their personalities shared the essential traits of the modern museum director: a natural instinct to popularize and to publicize, and a readiness to perform for the crowd, the camera, and the microphone. “A foe of stuffiness,”⁴ as the press described Rathbone when he arrived in Boston in 1955, was a term that could equally have applied to the young Tom Hoving twelve years later. As historian Karl Meyer put it, Rathbone was “an older and tweedier version of Hoving.”5

      Rathbone was older, but tweedy would hardly describe the image he projected in his portrait by photographer Yousuf Karsh in 1966, which shows him as he typically presented himself – perfectly groomed and meticulously dressed, with a flair that walked the line between conservative and sporty, a casual, colorful elegance that is the museum man’s special turf. Six foot two and weighing in at an approximately maintained 180 pounds, he understood the language of clothes, the quality of materials, and how to strike a pose. Stylish as he was, Perry Rathbone did not give off an air of privilege as much as pride in his role in serving the public. Despite, or perhaps because of, his privileged upbringing, “Hoving didn’t have the class that Perry had, or the elegance,”⁶ according to the art dealer Warren Adelson, who knew them both.

      Hoving was something of a bad boy, capricious and unpredictable, a natural show-off. Rathbone strove to make people feel comfortable, while Hoving rather enjoyed making them squirm. Both Rathbone and Hoving had an appetite for challenge and a high tolerance for risk. But Rathbone was also a stickler for accuracy, while Hoving was perfectly comfortable with the occasional white lie or colorful embellishment of the truth. He brought to the director’s job a dash of the high-end salesman, with that hint of condescension, along with the savvy of a city politician. These were interesting ingredients, and perhaps just the ones needed to dodge the bullets that would certainly come flying before he was through with the Metropolitan Museum, and it with him. In retrospect, Hoving was perhaps better prepared than Rathbone for the changes that were then taking place in the museum world, and more adept at directing them to his advantage. As the directors lined up for their banner year, it was going to be an interesting dance to watch.

      In 1965 Rathbone began the monumental task before him, to “lay pipe” for 1970. A centennial, as some wise person told him as he