Museum of Fine Arts

In 1919 Walter Gropius retrofitted the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts into what he dubbed Bauhaus. In its centennial year there are global celebrations through media coverage, publications and exhibitions. It has been reported that there are 600 shows in Germany. We have been reading and visiting work on view at the Museum of Fine Arts and some 200 objects from the 50,000 donated through Gropius and others to Harvard University. He joined the Graduate School of Design as its director in 1937.

Since the 1960s and Perry T. Rathbone I have interviewed every director of the Museum of Fine Arts. Sitting recently with Matthew Teitelbaum was refreshingly different. We were renewing a relationship that started in 1989 when he was a curator for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1993 he returned home to become senior curator at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. He became director there before coming to the MFA in 2015 as its eleventh director. While in the thick of staff changes and policy strategies he invites us to evaluate progress over the next five years.

In 2017 San Fransicso celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. By 1968 the torch of the counterculture, with a radical twist, was passed to Boston. Cops and feds cracked heads when hippies and radicals protested in Boston and Cambridge. Just as in 1776, there were shots heard round the world. There has been no such celebration in Boston. In feisty increments there is ever increased interest and attention to a forgotten era. You can see it at The Verb Hotel, in the new film WBCN; The American Revolution, and books like Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.

With the passing of Arthur Polonsky (June 6, 1925 - April 4, 2019) the last link to the greatest generation of Boston artists has been broken. They are known and somewhat misrepresented as The Boston Expressionists.

Founded shortly after World War I in Germany, the Bauhaus was the most famous and influential avant-garde art and design school in the 20th Century. Its artists, architects, designers craftpersons and students generated a creative, all-encompassing conversation about the nature of architecture, art and design in the modern era. Over the course of its relatively short, 14-year history, Bauhaus was at first located at Weimar, then Dessau, and finally Berlin (closed by order of Nazi Party, 1932). Outside of Germany, Harvard University became the center for all things Bauhaus

Brian Coleman has published several successful books on hip-hop. The latest of which is a picture book “Buy Me Boston: Local Ads and Flyers, 1960s – 1980s, Volume 1.” It is compiled from thousands of scans of pages of vintage publications.

In flagrant violation of the will of Isabella Stewart Gardner the museum's greatest masterpiece Titian's "The Rape of Europa" has been cleaned for the first time and is about to be loaned for up to two years. She stipulated that “[I]f [the trustees] shall at any time change the general disposition or arrangement of any articles which shall have been placed in the first, second and third stories of said Museum at my death,” then the entire collection, the museum building and property would be given to Harvard University to be sold.

Although it is the first full biography of Bauhaus master, Josef Albers, it has been worth the wait. Charles Darwent has writen a meticulous, insightful, absorbing and masterful book. Best know for the 2,300 surving works from "Homage to the Square" he is regarded as among the foremost abstract artists and teachers of the 20th century.

With 154 Years of Serendipity the artists Roger Kizik and Clara Wainwright celebrate their creaitive friendship with an exhibition at Kayafas Gallery in Boston's SOWA district. John Walsh, Director Emeritus of the J. Paul Getty writes about the pairing of Wainwright & Kizik.

In 1978, at Boston's Atlantic Gallery, Jay Jaroslav displayed large, photo realist facsimiles of appropriated birth certificates. The certificates of infants roughly the artist's age had died within a week of birth. He used them to obtain social security, passports and driver's licenses to create 31 purloined identities. The current exhibition at Trident Gallery, his first solo in three decades, further explores documents and process as conceptual art.

Over the past two years, Jane Hudson has been exploring the relationship of color and form, reflecting on the work of early Modernists, e.g, Kandinsky, Miro and Sonia Delaunay. The medium is gouache wherewith one may explore the washes of watercolor as well as the opacity of denser media (acrylic, oil). This versatility allows for the layering of color within active geometric forms.

Cuckoo's Call, is an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Wayne Hopkins and Cathy Wysocki that reflects on the sea of humanity, ever restlessly heaving up and down. It opens at the Eclipse Mill Gallery in North Adams on August 3 and runs through September 3.

Until recently the Museum of Fine Arts has neglected artists of Jewish heritage known as The Boston Expressionists. There were a handful of works that were burried in storage. Major works by Hyman Bloom and Karl Zerbe were included in a gift from Saundra B. Lane and William H. Lane. The museum is planning a major exhibition and catalogue for Bloom. It is likely that there will be other projects and publications. There are no current plans for showing or collecting works by Zerbe and Jack Levine.

The recently published book Astral Weeks, by Ryan Walsh, has brought national attention to the counter culture of Boston/ Cambridge in 1968. This extensive interview with Harper Barnes, former editor of the Cambridge Phoenix and columnist for The Real Paper, covers developments in the early 1970s. It was a fertile era that launched careers of numerous arts critics and political commentators. After a stint in Boston, eventually, he returned to the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch and the city where he continues to reside.

Pittsfield used to have a small, charming, eclectic regional museum. As of today that's no longer true.

A Berkshire Fine Arts contributor, the renowned arts critic, David Bonetti, was found dead in his Brookline, Mass. apartment while listening to classical music. His writing career started with Art New England and the Boston Phoenix. He joined the San Francisco Chronicle and then St. Louis Post Dispatch. After that he retired writing the occasional feature on the fine arts. In his final years he wrote on opera for this site. He was widely regarded as one of the best critics of his generation.

A compromise is a deal that neither side is happy with. Other than a few hard fought concessions the Berkshire Museum will now gut the museum and its collection in pursuit of its vulgarian, populist New Vision. It's tarnished leadership, including director, Van Shields and board president, Elizabeth McGraw, will have a tough job earning back the trust and support of a community which they so adroitly alienated.

When an opportunity to celebrate USCO’s pioneering work came along, I just had to curate it. This acknowledgement of our cultural past, still clearly resonates in our 21st Century present.

The walled city of Carcassonne, the heritage site Albi with its Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, the Basque cities of Auch and Bayonne, and the Atlantic coastal cities of Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz are treasures that make this region of France unique for the visitor.

A decision on an appeal by Attorney General of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to halt the sale of 40 key works of art at Sothebys on behalf of the Berkshire Museum will be decided by the end of January. Van Shields, now on medical leave as director of the museum, and board president, Elizabeth "Buzz" McGraw, announced their $60 million plans for a New Vision in July. What started as a local story has morphed into national and global coverage. The outcome of this unethical attempt at deaccessioning by a pariah museum may have a game changing impact on the mandate of all American museums' commitment to preserve and conserve collections for future generations.

Since the 1980s, the artist Rafael Mahdavi has been a colleague and friend. For many years, in addition to painting, photography and sculpture, he has been writing. Recently, he published a second book Villa Dolores a memoir of childhood and adolescence with another volume, already written to follow. He is also revisiting, editing and preparing for publication several novels. This memoir is relatively brief, just 173 pages, but compact , polished, explosively evocative and poetic. I took my time reading brief chapters of two or three pages. Each was a distilled and detailed anecdote, some horrific in nature, that flowed like an intimate conversation.

During our visit to the Cape Cod Museum of Art we viewed several special exhibitions: Salvatore Del Deo: A Storied History, extended through October 28, Discovering Cape Cod’s Museum Treasures, through November 26, and Judith Shahn Selections: A Tribute to Thomas Linxweiler through November 12. We met with Dr. Edith Tonelli who has been director for the past four years. She provided an overview of the museum and plans moving forward. We also learned why the museum and adjacent Cape Playhouse prove to have been uniquely moving experiences.

From 9 AM to noon there was an ordely and peaceful demonstration in front of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. Pickets came and went with between 40 and 80 individuals linuing the sidewalk at any given time. Most passing cars honked their support. There was a media presence. While museum director, Van Shields, remained hunkered down in the bunker, board president Elizabeth "Buzz" Hayes McGraw delivered her boilplate message to a TV crew from Albany.

When Laurie Norton Moffett, director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, in a Berkshire Eagle op-ed piece asked the Berkshire Museum to "pause" in its plan to sell 40 works the story broke as national news. In daily coverage since then the pro and con has rocked back and forth. I seemed like game over when Joe Thompson, director of MASS MoCA, endorsed the sale and radical plans urging readers to "get real." Then lawyers waded in questioning that the works may or may not be "unrestricted." The controversy went into extra innings when the Rockwell family, in an Eagle letter, stated that the artist never intended for his works to be sold as a last ditch bailout for the poorly managed and curatorially aenemic museum.

Works by Stephen Hannock are in global museum collections. His Oxbow painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be included in a survey of Hudson River artist Thomas Cole. Hannock's mate Sting will also be involved in the project. When he created paintings for his friend's hometown of Newscastle the studies were shown at the Berkshire Museum. He gave one of the studies to the museum to honor philanthropist Nancy Fitzgerald. The fact of that work and the entire fine arts collection of the museum is unknown. We talked at length with the Berkshire based global artist about the impact of the museum's strategy to sell its fine arts collection with a radical makeover as an interactive educational museum for history and science.