LITMIR.BIZ

      Crowds at The Age of Rembrandt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 22–March 5, 1967.

      The story of the Boston Raphael is inseparable from another story. No small part of this event was the political turmoil brewing within the institution itself in the late 1960s – a museum in the flux of change, in the throes of ideological conflict, as its size, its scale of operations, and the value of its collections reached a tipping point, the point at which the modern art museum was becoming the postmodern art museum. The philosophical questions of that bygone era are still urgently with us today, even as the landscape has vastly changed. The conventions of exporting works of art, the methods of research and authentication, the ways that museums are managed and the priorities that have recently overtaken them – all three of these issues turned a decisive corner during and in the immediate aftermath of the Raphael affair, just as they played out as elements in its outcome.

      “How well did you know him?” a former member of the MFA’s Ladies Committee asked me not long ago. The question took me aback. Did she mean that no one could know a father who was always on the job? Did she mean that she knew him better than I did? Had she forgotten for a moment whom she was talking to? Or was it a provocative question, the one I was constantly asking myself as I reviewed the archives of his life, seeking to understand him differently, objectively, while also knowing him, as a close witness to those troubled times, and as only a daughter can?

1965

      IN 1965 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was enjoying a revival that was long overdue. During the previous decade attendance figures had tripled; membership had multiplied six times; publications had grown from a trickle of drab little booklets into a steady flow of tempting full-color catalogs, calendars, and postcards; and fifty exhibition galleries had been completely renovated, their treasures brought to life in the glow of new lighting and fresh installations. Collaborating with the local educational station WGBH, the MFA was the first museum in America to be wired for television, hosting on-site programs for both adults and children several times a week, and thereby expanding its public outreach exponentially. Not least, the collections had grown by hundreds of artworks, bringing new strength to every department, including the promise earlier that year of the entire collection of eighteenth-century French art belonging to the late Forsyth Wickes. On the evening of December 10, 1965, the Museum’s volunteer Ladies Committee staged a surprise tenth anniversary party for the man who was responsible for instigating these dramatic developments: director Perry T. Rathbone.

      In an elaborate ruse in which his wife, Rettles, was a key conspirator, Rathbone arrived in his black tie and dinner jacket at the Huntington Avenue entrance, where he was greeted by a throng of two hundred friends. Amid a chorus of congratulations he was led up the grand staircase – red-carpeted for the occasion – to shake hands with beaming well-wishers every step of the way. He was genuinely flabbergasted. “I, the unsuspecting victim,” he wrote in his journal that week, “was led to the ‘slaughter’ by Rettles, who turned out to be the most subtle actress of them all in this colossal conspiracy.”¹ Rettles, shy and demure, was every bit the woman behind her man, following him up the stairs, smiling and embracing the guests, radiant in her newest Bonwit Teller evening dress.