Museum of Fine Arts

On April 14, 2020 Alan Shestack passed away at 81. From 1987 to 1993 he was director of the Museum of Fine Arts. He was notable as a mediator and problem solver. As director he presided over 26 departments with an uneven distribution of resources and power. This interview took place not long after he arrived at the museum.

At 83 the reowned portrait photographer, Elsa Dorfman, passed away at home in the People's Republic of Cambridge. As a young women she worked for Grove Press in New York. There she met many writers including Allen Ginsberg who became a lifelong subject and friend. I included her in exhibitions and wrote about her for Art News.

In 1983 the Museum of FIne Art organized a traveling exhibition A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting: 1760-1910. It toured the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Grand Palais in Paris, as well as being shown at the MFA. Artists and members of Boston's African American community protested that the exhibition did not include artists of color. In this 1984 interview former MFA director, Jan Fontein, discussed negotiatons to include the 19th century artist Henry Osawa Tanner. We also covered gaps in 20th century European and American art.

Because of the Raphael Incident, Perry T. Rathbone. was forced out as director of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1970. The board president, George Seybolt, who ousted Rathbone, then passed over acting director, Classical curator, Cornelius Vermeule, to unilaterally appoint a dark horse candidate, Merrill Rueppel. That ended with a curatorial coup from which Asiatic curator, Jan Fontein, emerged as acting director in 1975. He calmed troubled waters and acccomplished much through 1987. From April 1983, this is the first of two transcribed interviews.

There were incidents of racism when a school group visited the Museum of Fine Arts on May 16, 2019. Attorney General Maura Healey has negotiated an agreement between the Museum of Fine Arts and Boston’s Helen Y. David Leadership Academy. The settlment comes with an apology as well as a commitment of $500,000 to address issues of racism

To mark the beginning of another month in this surreal and uncertain time, Gallery NAGA will present the third solo exhibition of glowing, ephemeral paintings by Nicole Chesney and luscious, Irish landscapes on paper by Rick Fox.

The status of the Italian poet, essayist and gallerist, Mario Diacono, is legendary. To be with his wife Claudette, a native of Lynn, Mass, he moved to Boston and opened a gallery in 1985. He was renowned for showing a single work for which he wrote scholarly essays. Then relatively affordable he made few Boston sales of the now renowned artists he exhibited. The Museum of Fine Arts bought a Ross Bleckner painting and appropriation by Sherrie Levine. Most of the work was acquired by the Italian collector Achille Maramotti. Today Diacono is a curator for Collezione Maramotti.

From 1987 to 1993 Alan Shestack was director of the Museum of Fine Arts. He followed Jan Fontein who was director from 1975 to 1987.

Shortly after the exhibition Words & Images Allan Rohan Crite 1910 – 2007 opened the private St. Botolph Club was closed because of the pandemic. There is however a link to a video that provides a virtual tour of the exhibition. Crite is regarded as a leading Boston artist of his generation. He was a graduate of the Museum School. The Museum of Fine Arts is remiss in not planning a major exhibition of this remarkable and widely influential artist.

A native of Toronto, Matthew Teitelbaum, departed Boston in 1993 to take a curatorial position at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In this interview he was acting director of the Institute of Contemporary Art. Then 37, it provides insights of his curatorial vision and process. He went on to be director of the AGO. In 2015 he returned to Boston as director of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Gallery NAGA, with a lease from Church of the Covenant, was organized as a cooperative in 1977. In 1982 Arthur Dion was hired as director and soon became sole owner. With a commitment to painting and studio furniture it prevails on what was formerly Boston's gallery row. Now director emeritus Dion stepped away from daily management. As part of compiling an oral history of contemporary art in Boston, Dion shared insights of his remarkable career.

In 1968 the Institute of Contemporary Art was evicted from Newbury Street. Bag and baggage it was mothballed in its failed former home on Soldier's Field Road. Connected to new Mayor Kevin White and Deputy Mayor, Katky Kane, they gave Andrew C. Hyde a long shot at turning things around. The relaunch largely entailed embracing an emerging generation of artists which formed the Studio Coalition in 1969 and Boston Visual Artists Union in 1970.

When we spoke in 2000 the arts leader Ted Landsmark was director of the Boston Architectural College. He was on leave as chair of the board of the Institute of Contemporary Art but still serving on the board of the MFA. It was a time of transition and change. The ICA was constructing a new building on the waterfront. Its director, Jill Medvedow, was competing for funding with MFA director, Malcolm Rogers. Landsmark argued that they should be working together

The documentary filmmaker, David Sutherland, describes his approach as making portraits. The issues derive from the persona of his subjects which range from farmers, to teenagers coming of age in Appalachia, a battered Native American mother, to the artists Jack Levine and Paul Camus. In the past 20 years he has created 21 hours of film for long form documentaries featured on Frontline for PBS. His three-part series “The Farmer’s Wife” was a PBS hit with 18 million viewers.

Separately at Jewish Settlement houses Jack Levine and Hyman Bloom studied drawing with Harold Zimmerman. In 1929, when Levine was 14, they were instructed at the Fogg Art Museum by Harvard professor, Denman Ross. By the late 1930s, with Karl Zerbe, they gained national attention as Boston Expressionists. After a lapse of decades, through February, Bloom is featured in "Hyman Bloom Matters of Life and Death." The MFA has never given Levine the time of day. In 1986, while making a film with David and Nancy Sutherland, I interviewed Levine.

The Museum of Fine Arts last featured Boston Expressionist Hyman Bloom in a 1959 group show. The current exhibition Hyman Bloom Matters of Life and Death, curated by Erica E. Hirshler, attempts to make up for that lapse. The focus on cadaver paintings and drawings is bold and spectacular. The work is ghastly with haunting beauty. On a national level it is among the year's best museum exhibitions.

An exhibition of Vietnam protest paintings by Arnold Trachtman was censored and closed by the admninistration of Harvard University. We remounted it at the Institute of Contemporary Art then on Soldier's Field Road. That formed a professional and personal relationship. He was a part of a niche of major Boston artists that existed out of the mainstream, Yesterday he passed away in Cambridge at 89.

During a recent visit to the Museum of Fine Arts a school group was inappropriately treated in a blatantly racist manner. That has caught the museum, and its director Matthew Teitelbaum, in the cross hairs of media whiplash. There is a shameful legacy of racism and anti Semitism at the MFA. It will take decades to make appropriate changes.

During graduate study at Boston University photographer Carl Chiarenza was a professor, mentor and friend. We spoke at length about how JFK and the Vietnam War nudged him into studying art history. At Harvard he was the first American to write a dissertation on photography. It was a biography and critical study of then living American icon Aaron Siskind. Now retired from the University of Rochester he continues to create new work.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary since his death the Clark Art Institute has organized a scholarly exhibition Renoir: the Body, the Senses. At his best few 19th century masters can match his charm and popular appeal. His greatest works were included in the 1985-1986 blockbuster exhibition Renoir, which was shown in London and Paris before it came to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It broke MFA records with 500,000 plus visitors. The Clark show by comparison is small and uneven.

In a relatively short time Real Eyes Gallery. located in the heart of Adams in the Berkshires. is notable for programming museum level exhibtions. Marjorie Minkin: The Shape of Light sets the bar high. Gallerist Bill Reilly has been able to work with artists from an expanding and ever more remarkable community of artists. How long can MASS MoCA ignore phenomenal work being created in its own back yard?

A leading scholar of American Art, Patricia Hills curated major exhibitions for the Whitney Museum including "John Singer Sargent."Her books and catalogues range from Eastman Johnson, to Alice Neel and Jacob Lawrence. At Boston University she trained a generation of scholars and curators. As a Marxist she has been particularly involved in social justice projects.

During a recent road trip we visited museums in Montreal, Ottowa and Toronto. We noted different strategies to intergate First Nations artists into special exhibitions and permanent collection galleries. A third of the exhibition space of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto features First Nations artists. With an unfavorable comparison only a handful of American museums have a commitment to feature Native American art and culture.

The special exhibition "Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience" by the First Nations artist Kent Monkman is a game changer. With ferocious wit the artist deconstructs horrific aspects of Canadian history through a series of narrative, social realist paintings. We viewed the work at the McCord Museum in Montreal where the traveling exhibition closed on May 5.

The special exhibition “Toulouse Lautrec and the Stars of Paris” is a collaboration of the Museum of Fine Arts and The Boston Public Library. Their great combined depth in prints and posters is supplemented with loans from other museums. In addition to his signature graphic works the exhibition is expanded with paintings, photographs, and sculptures by other impressionist and post impressionist artists.