The director's hallmarks? British collaborations and celebrity obsession
It's been 10 years since Malcolm Rogers, then the 45-year-old deputy director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, was passed over for the top job at the museum, after 20 years of essentially auditioning for that post.
He was gravely disappointed, and so were many of his supporters, who had come to like the affable, smiling man who was a familiar figure at the auction houses an easy walk from the NPG in Trafalgar Square, a man keen on hunting down images of 500 years' worth of his country's notables.
There was a fuss in Britain's arts and media circles. But Rogers, who hadn't the pedigree of the man who got the job -- Charles Saumarez Smith, who has since advanced to the directorship of the NPG's more important neighbor, the National Gallery -- was definitely out.
Rogers applied for the several US art museum directorships then vacant. The definition of "art museum director" had changed drastically in the preceding decade or two, in both Europe and America. These posts used to go to a senior curator, a scholar. Increasingly, they went to people with MBAs who could mount blockbusters, keep their institutions in the news, and, above all, raise money.
Looking at the lists of the exhibitions mounted and the acquisitions made during Rogers's 10-year tenure as director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, two things stand out.
One is simply that he's British. In his decade as director, there have been an unusual number of exhibitions done in collaboration with London museums, including the Royal Academy and the Tate. The MFA even holds press conferences in London. And the architect for the proposed renovation and expansion of the Boston museum, Norman Foster, is a Brit.
In the Queen's Honors List this March, Rogers was named a Commander, Order of the British Empire, cited for his services to the arts both in Britain and the United States.
Even Freud probably couldn't figure out if Rogers's promotion of British art and architecture on this side of the Atlantic is sweet revenge, or merely working with the colleagues and institutions he knows best.
The other factor is an obsession with celebrities. The National Portrait Gallery is charged with collecting images of famous Britons. The paintings, photographs, and works in other media don't have to be top-quality as art; it's the subjects that matter most. During a London interview just before coming to Boston in 1994, Rogers looked around the NPG and remarked, "There are quite a few weak paintings here. If the only portrait of an important person is a poor painting, we go after it anyway. It will be quite a change for me to be in a fine arts museum." Rogers's academic background explains that lack of focus on connoisseurship. His two degrees from Oxford University are in English language and literature, not art history, though he has become a recognized authority on portraiture from the 16th through 18th centuries.
There's a clear connection between Rogers's experience at the NPG and the unusually high number of celebrity-driven shows at the MFA during his decade here, starting with the 1996 flamboyant solo turn by Herb Ritts, a celebrity photographing other celebrities in a show paid for by celebrity fashion designer Donna Karan. It was a package deal, and the museum's public was the poorer for it. A fashion photography exhibition with work by many artists would have put Ritts in context and had some visual and intellectual meat. As it was, Ritts was pablum. There have been great shows during the Rogers reign. The Gaugin and Rembrandt shows of this past season are perfect examples. You couldn't ask for more excellent exhibitions anywhere in the world. But there have also been some that seem the result of not wanting to spend the time or money to do right by the subject. The Ritts show and others including the 2000 "Crowning Glories: Two Centuries of Tiaras" are cases in point. "Tiaras," too, would have benefited by being set in a larger context. So would the MFA's blockbuster nominee for next year, "Speed, Style and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection." Surely there are other collections of spiffy autos out there; their inclusion could have broadened discussion of the subject rather than merely adding to the value of one celebrity collector's holdings.
On the other hand, the "Dangerous Curves" exhibition of guitars, which threatened to be another celebrity show, with instruments owned by famous rock stars, turned out to be a thorough, and thoroughly engaging, history. It had appeal on all levels, and it gave well-deserved exposure to the museum's neglected musical instrument collections.
As for acquisitions during the Rogers years, they range from extraordinary to downright weird. Some make you wonder if the money wouldn't have been better spent on some of the gaps in the collection, modern and contemporary art, for starters.
The MFA makes hundreds of acquisitions each year, but the ones the museum deems most important are highlighted in its annual reports. Decorative arts and portraiture have been particularly prominent in the last decade. On the cover of the 1999 report is a cistern and fountain made in London in 1707-08 by the silversmith David Willaume. The cover object the following year was a 19th-century cabinet by the Herter Brothers, prominent American furniture makers. An elaborate 19th-century French inkstand graced the 2001 report cover.
A painting of a Polish noblewoman by Franz-Xavier Winterhalter, portraitist to several European courts, was a highly touted 1998 acquisition. And last year the museum acquired Sargent's "Charles Stewart, Sixth Marquess of Londonderry, Carrying the Great Sword of State at the Coronation of King Edward VII, August 1902, and Mr. W. C. Beaumont, His Page on that Occasion." The Winterhalter is a slick society portrait. The Sargent is ridiculous; visitors giggle at the sight of that phallic sword. The rationale for acquiring the painting is that the MFA lacked a full-length male portrait by Sargent, but surely its many other Sargents suffice for a single institution.
Portraiture and decorative arts are certainly legitimate fields to collect. But a director's personal taste should not determine what a public institution should acquire. That's the job of the curators. Rogers, in his departmental restructuring, his hiring and firing, has assembled his own curatorial team. Some appointments are impressive. He hired Christraud Geary away from the Smithsonian to become the MFA's first curator of African art. He could have hired a junior person to shepherd the small but growing African collections. Instead he chose Geary, a high-powered, highly respected scholar with clout.
The curators are loyal to him. But judging by the shows they put on and the acquisitions they make, they're not always the best scholars in their fields. In some cases, what they can do has been limited by time, money and space, to an extent beyond the museum-world norm.
The cover image on last year's annual report was a painting of a wrapped package by Chilean-born artist Claudio Bravo. It was one of the better works in a collection formed by two New York physicians, Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell, which the MFA accepted in toto -- with the understanding that it would accession certain objects and sell off the rest, an odd arrangement. The Blake/Purnell collection brought to the MFA its first work by surrealist Rene Magritte, a fact the museum trumpeted. But it turned out to be a small drawing -- hardly a major piece that a major museum would usually be boasting about.
While the report for 2004 isn't out yet, the highlighted objects have been chosen, and No. 1 on the list is a quartzite Egyptian "Head of a Nobleman," from around 1878-1841 B.C. Its brooding and expressive features make it a masterpiece. It was the partial gift of New York collectors Magda Saleh and Jack A. Josephson, benefactors of the MFA's Egyptian department and fans of its curator, Rita Freed, who not only presides over one of the half-dozen greatest collections of Egyptian art outside Egypt, but manages to cultivate collectors and keep the MFA's oldest art relevant to a contemporary public. Hence the celebration of the Egyptian department's centennial this year with banners commissioned from artist Nancy Spero.
By far the most ambitious project of the Rogers decade is the much-needed renovation and expansion of the museum. The secrecy around it, though, is troubling. Rogers has, in public-relations terms, made the museum more "accessible" by reopening the Huntington Avenue entrance and engineering school visits so children no longer arrive in the basement.
But, far more importantly, Foster and Partners was chosen without public discussion, or a short list, or models of different ideas by different architects. There has been a lack of information about the progress of the design as well, which is centered on a "crystal spine" that will thread through the museum. In preliminary plans, it looks like a glassed-in shopping mall. While the glass will have light-control systems meant to ensure that the natural light entering the new east wing from the spine will be of an appropriate level for whatever is being displayed in the galleries -- low lighting for works on paper, for example -- the crystal corridor itself looks like only bronze or marble sculpture could survive the light there.
Foster's design for the Great Court of the British Museum should give Bostonians pause. Despite the elegance of the restored historic library at its core, it, too, is essentially a shopping center. The only art that can survive the glass-roofed environment is sculpture, and the few stone sculptures on view seem to have been chosen to blend with the stone on the walls. With that, and all the retail clutter, you barely see them.
While there are models of the Foster design in the MFA's west-wing lobby, the public is being told rather than asked about them. Delegates from the MFA have met with neighborhood groups to make sure they won't be an obstacle to the project. But the public at large is being asked to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a project in which it has no say. 