Ancient wisdom

The MFA celebrates 100 years of bringing Egyptian art to town

By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 10/17/2003

The Scottish nobleman Robert Hay, an intrepid traveler, led two early 19th-century expeditions to Egypt. He formed a massive collection of ancient Egyptian art, and upon his death in 1863, his son put it up for sale. The British Museum bought part of it, but the larger share went to Samuel Alds Way, a Bostonian. In 1872, Way's son and heir presented some 4,000 Egyptian antiquities to the then 2-year-old Museum of Fine Arts.

Thirty years later, the trustees of the MFA "looked at this stuff and decided they didn't know anything about it," says Rita Freed. Hence the founding of the MFA's Egyptian department, which Freed heads, and which celebrates its centennial this year. It was the first such department in any art museum in the Americas. Within decades it had amassed one of the top 10 Egyptian collections anywhere in the world -- Cairo included.

Freed was the radiant hostess of last week's gala celebration of the centennial, held in a gallery dominated by the huge sandstone Koptos Gateway, built in the second century BC on the orders of Ptolemy VIII, a member of the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt beginning in 331 BC. Inside the gate are a pair of gorgeous silk banners designed for the occasion by contemporary artist Nancy Spero.

There is much to celebrate. Shortly before his death last year, the great Boston arts patron Stanford Calderwood gave the department a $4 million challenge grant, the largest such grant in MFA history. Once the money is matched, an $8 million endowment for Egyptian acquisitions will be created.

Nabil Fahmy, Egypt's ambassador to the United States, was at the gala. "A hundred years is an achievement. And it's hard work," he said, lauding the MFA for "not just showing the collection; they research it, too."

Praise like this is worth a tomb filled with gold to a non-Egyptian museum with a huge Egyptian collection. Think of the strain between Egypt and the British Museum, which has steadfastly refused to give back the Sphinx's beard, which, severed from its head, is a mere lump of stone.

"Egypt doesn't want anything returned that left legally," Fahmy says. "And we see only legal things here," he adds, gazing at the MFA's holdings. Freed later said that far from asking for anything back, the ambassador had offered to help get the word out about the Calderwood challenge.

Egyptian epoch

The man most responsible for the meteoric rise of Boston's Egyptian collections was George Andrew Reisner, who headed excavations jointly sponsored by the MFA and Harvard University, based in Giza, in a spot dubbed "Harvard Camp."

During his 40 years as head "camper," Reisner returned to Boston exactly four times; during one Boston trip an assistant accidentally discovered the tomb of Queen Hetepheres, mother of the king who built the Great Pyramid. The MFA recently opened its elaborately refurbished Hetepheres Gallery, filled with such treasures as a dress made of several thousand faience beads and a stone mastaba, or tomb entrance, with carved images including one of recalcitrant taxpayers supplicating before the king, who was, in effect, the IRS.

Boston's good relations with Egypt date back to the early 20th-century contracts the Harvard-MFA expedition signed with the Cairo government, stipulating that in exchange for scientific research of the sites, the MFA would receive half of what it found -- but only after Egypt chose its half. Reisner -- who loved his adopted homeland so much that he's buried in a Cairo cemetery -- generated further goodwill when he presented all the excavated items from the tomb of Queen Hetepheres to the Cairo Museum. He could well afford such a gracious gesture: In 1920 alone, he had shipped 100 tons of objects back to Boston.

On the other hand, in 1927, when Reisner first opened the queen's sealed sarcophagus before an array of international dignitaries, he found nothing there. Turning to his audience, the unflappable archeologist said, "Gentlemen, I regret Queen Hetepheres is not receiving." To this day, no one has discovered what happened to her mummified body.

Most of the artifacts in the MFA's Hetepheres Gallery are from the queen's era, not her actual tomb, or they're reproductions, which is why the furniture seems in awfully good shape for pieces that spent 4,400 years underground. They didn't. Reisner found the gold legs, handles, and ornaments from the furniture; the wooden parts had long since turned to dust. The MFA dispatched a Boston cabinetmaker, Joseph Gerte, to Cairo to examine the gold remains. Based on his extremely detailed drawings of the gold pieces, Gerte re-created the slanted bed Hetepheres was supposed to use in the afterlife, along with her thronelike chair and the litter on which she would be carried.

Not all the works in the Hetepheres Gallery are related to royalty, and not all of them are in the stylized, remote mode we associate with Egyptian antiquities. There are animated figures rolling out dough or making bread; the baker holds up one hand to shield her face from the fire. A child is endearingly depicted with finger in mouth. Each of the four statues of Tjetety, a granary official, is quite distinct: His expressions range from informal to imperious. Freed and her staff have grouped the four together to show that, contrary to common belief, Egyptian artists did have individual styles.

The centennial is a chance to indulge in Egyptomania -- the phenomenon responsible for an obelisk in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery, films on subjects including the mummy's curse, and the Elizabeth Peters series of mystery books based on a fictitious Victorian archeologist, Amelia Peabody. "Peters" is actually Barbara Mertz, an Egyptologist who visits the MFA for a lecture and book-signing on Oct. 24.

The centennial has also generated gifts of masterpieces including a carved grayish-white quartzite "Head of a Female Sphinx" from New York collectors Jack Josephson and Magda Saleh, longtime friends of Freed's department, which probably has the most loyal and enthusiastic group of supporters of any in the MFA. (Those faience beads were sitting in a box until a volunteer, Sheila Shear, reassembled them.)

In the past two years, Freed's volunteers have logged 5,500 hours, many of them in cataloging some 50,000 objects that arrived from Cairo in cardboard boxes and were stuck on shelves in the MFA's "Phantom of the Opera"-worthy basement, their contents never completely recorded. Silverfish chomping on the cardboard were an extra incentive to assess what was inside: among other things, items from the classical department that were reported as missing in 1919.

Freed hopes for finds in her own area as well. A New York collector who wrote her a $10,000 check for the centennial owns an important seated male statue that, during its travels, lost its feet. "We're on the lookout for them down in the basement," the curator says.

Upstairs, Spero's silk banners, on view indefinitely, are in vivid hues, as Egyptian sculpture originally was. They're adorned with figures in acrobatic poses and a text of ancient hymns to Isis. "I separated the earth from the heavens," part of it reads. Both the arch and the banners wafting in the gallery's air currents are homages to the mother goddess.

The banners weren't doing all the wafting at the centennial celebration. A mysterious figure swathed in white and wearing a veil floated through the space, parting the throng of partygoers as if they were the Red Sea. A hymn to Isis sounded as she made her way gracefully through the gallery, and disappeared.

"What you've just witnessed," said Freed, is "Isis's return to her temple for the first time in 1,500 years." In Egyptian terms, that's not long at all. As for a centennial, it's just a beginning.