Belinda Rathbone, the youngest of three children of the late Perry Townsend Rathbone, a former director of the St. Louis Art Museum, placed her father under a magnifying glass that brought into view a revelatory picture of a man and a profession that is at once impartial and exulting.
From her research in St. Louis, Boston and elsewhere, she produced a valuable patriarchal biography -- “The Boston Raphael”: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change and a Daughter’s Search for the Truth.” The book provides a chiseled representation of a character who became not only one of the most famous museum directors in the country, if not the world, but also the occupant of the hot seat in one of 20th century American art’s most tangled scandals.
“In general,” Belinda Rathbone said in an email, “I was interested in breaking through the family myth of the Boston Raphael, or how the story was recounted around the family dinner table. I always felt there had to be other sides to the story that we weren’t getting.
“My father was on a pedestal in our family, and I always enjoyed him most when he was off the pedestal and treating me more like an equal, which he was also quite capable of doing. The book was a way of leveling with him, understanding him and his motivations - not as his daughter, but as his biographer.
Belinda Rathbone is an art historian and the author of other books that are at once luminous and bittersweet. “Walker Evans” is her biography of the brilliant, eccentric and enormously influential photographer, who collaborated with writer James Agee to bring to life a 20th century classic, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”
Another is “The Guynd,” is a memoir of her conflicted life in a falling apart mansion at Arborath, Scotland, and the simultaneous falling apart of her marriage to John Ouchterlony, the change-averse 26th laird of a bizarre and treasure-laden estate called The Guynd.
The work of Perry Rathbone
Belinda’s father arrived in St. Louis in 1940. He was 29 years old, and was the youngest director of a major American art museum at the time and, in a crowded field, probably the most savvy and ambitious. He quickly became a public figure in St. Louis, a celebrity in fact, and was sought after socially and admired and celebrated by St. Louisans who began to stream into Forest Park and up to the museum.
Belinda Rathbone will sign and read from her book from 4-5:30 p.m. Jan. 24 at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid.
He was a showman, a high visibility fellow who loved having a good time, loved meeting and talking to people, everyone from the guard in Sculpture Hall to socialites at the St. Louis Country Club. He was a champ at mobilizing influential men and women for the good of his institution and for St. Louis. His daughter recalls someone saying that Barnum was not the only step-right-up guy with P.T. as his first two initials.
Perry Rathbone was reared in New York City and in New Rochelle, N.Y., and in contrast to the backgrounds of many of his museum directing peers, he went to public schools rather than to a private day school or a New England boarding school.
When it was time for college, however, he headed to Harvard. He studied art history as an undergraduate and in graduate school took Professor Paul Sachs’s legendary and formative Museum Work and Museum Problems course, universally called the “museum course.” Having this course on his resume gave him a distinct advantage in the museum world. Sachs and the museum course elevated museum directing from sinecure or managerial position to profession, almost a priesthood, a career one trained for, which commanded a special reverence for art. Attendance in it elevated the scholar as well.
Perry Rathbone had other applicable qualities. He was charming, personable, approachable, collaborative, tall and movie-star handsome. There was all that, plus an endowment of ineffable gifts, namely courage and charisma.
He had his work cut out for him at the city art museum, which in 1940 was snoozing and snoring on Art Hill. Rathbone set about applying energy and imagination to it, making stunning acquisitions, re-installing the collections and bringing great exhibitions to it. It became the cultural center and soul of the city.
Among those acquisitions are the “Drunken Satyr” attributed to the 16th century artist Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli, a student of Michelangelo, one of the most extraordinary examples of Italian renaissance sculpture anywhere.
Then there is the agitated and explosive “Cockfight” by the American 20th century artist David Smith (1945), a work exhibiting shapes and suggesting movement that would continue as presences in Smith’s abstract work as it went forward, revealing also Smith’s debt to Julio González, “the master of the torch.”
Besides bringing new and challenging works of art to St. Louis, in 1947 Rathbone helped to import a living modern master to St. Louis to teach here – the German expressionist Max Beckmann. Later, Rathbone organized Beckmann’s first American retrospective. Like Rathbone, Beckmann and his wife, Quappi, were lionized by the public and St. Louis society.
After World War II, and service in the U.S. Navy, Rathbone scored one of his greatest successes, to bring an old masters’ exhibition called “Masterpieces from the Berlin Museums” to Art Hill, about 200 works of art stolen from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the National-Galerie in Berlin. These paintings were recovered from a salt mine at Merkers in Thuringia by Gen. George Patton’s advancing U.S. Army and its Monuments Men in 1945.
Move to Boston Museum of Fine Arts
In St. Louis, almost 13,000 visitors a day came to see it, setting an all-time attendance record. Nothing so dusted with golden achievement and grace and promise could continue forever here; museum directors have a way of coming and going, and so did Rathbone. When the Boston Museum of Fine Arts summoned in 1955, the Rathbones – Perry and his wife Rettles and their three children, Eliza, Belinda and Peter, departed for a job in Boston and a house in Cambridge.
Rathbone’s incandescent arc readjusted its track over the MFA’s home on Huntington Avenue in Boston and a second Rathbone agitated renewal began. His experiences in St. Louis, combined with his mantle of talent and wisdom and moxie, would serve him well in Boston, for he encountered there an even greater lassitude than St. Louis’s. In Boston, he set about generating art-centered energy at the MFA, and he succeeded in applying his established patterns of reinstallations, acquisitions, funds raising, building expansion, exhibition mounting and publicity churning with apparent great delight and widespread success.
There was a notable exception -- a disaster of an exhibition that involved live eels and barking dogs, called “The Elements,” a show intended to gin up interest in contemporary art. Although it ranks as a major bollocks, Rathbone was given high marks in avant garde quarters for trying, and for pledging allegiance to contemporary culture.
There was another disaster, a cataclysm actually. So serious was it that this situation led to the heartbreaking and unnecessary conclusion to Rathbone’s tenure at the MFA and to his career in the museum business.
The scene was a familiar one. A previously “hidden” work of art from an old aristocratic family suddenly emerges and eventually a museum jumps from the lake and fastens onto this bait. In this case in 1969, the lure was a painting supposedly by Raffaello Sanzia da Urbino (1483-1520).
It was examined and authenticated by only one man, the Raphael scholar John Shearman, who provided a provenance. The subject of the small 8 ½ by 10 ½ inch picture was determined to be Eleanora Gonzaga, daughter of Isabella d’Este, Duchess of Mantua. The price paid was $600,000, a figure that today sounds like pocket change.
It’s interesting that in 1969, Rathbone fell for Raphael. In 1940 Rathbone regarded Raphael’s work as I do: that compared to the revelatory art of Raphael’s contemporaries such as Leonardo for example, or Giorgione, Raphael’s was sentimental verging on treacly.
And so, goaded by an mid-century uptick of interest in the status of Raphael, if not the quality of his work, and seeing an opportunity to buy a hitherto unknown but quite appealing brand-name picture that should generate a lot of publicity and traffic for the MFA, Rathbone and his confederates went for little Eleanora Gonzaga.
As Belinda Rathbone demonstrates lucidly, the picture actually was acquired properly, if brought into the country improperly. Hanns Swarzenski, the respected curator of decorative arts and sculpture at the MFA and Perry Rathbone’s friend and confidant, brought the picture in and, by skipping an important step in his passage through customs, he handed both the public and Rathbone’s enemies on the MFA’s board a perception of smuggling.
Swarzenski failed to declare the picture when he brought it into the U.S. Had he declared it properly to customs officials, the cataclysm more than likely would have been stalled or reduced to the level of disastrous mistake, and the public excoriation and professional execution of Perry Rathbone simply would not have happened.
Later on, adding insult to injury, the painting was said in the judgment of Harvard professor Sydney Freedberg to be from the hand of Sinobaldo Ibi, an obscure painter from the ancient Umbrian mountainside town of Gubbio. Today, the picture remains in storage in the Uffizi.
But Rathbone was indomitable; there was life after museum-directing. He wrote an amazing letter for the file at the MFA that clears his name and defogged the entire Gonzaga affair from beginning to end. For a while after his departure from the museum, he rested but soon he gathered his considerable resources and in 1972 went to work in New York for Christie’s USA. In 2000, after a long illness, he died.
Museum directors such as Perry Rathbone are few and far between. Those who exist are the intellectual and practical progeny of Paul Sachs and Harvard, men and women who understand how to run a complex operation like a museum but recognize that the primary and noble business of art museum directors – who are, after all, the principal custodians of the greatest examples of human industry – is to attend to the art.
What emerged in the telling of her father’s story, Belinda Rathbone said, “was a cultural history of the American art museum in the twentieth century. Also, my book provides more than one cautionary tale – how a museum director can get caught in a web of conflicting pressures, and how a board of trustees can go astray in times of change and upheaval.
“I don’t know of any other recent book that has plied those sensitive waters in quite the same way.”
Enlightened, intellectually and physically energetic museum directors are neither timid nor reticent, and often bring a genuine sense of pleasure and fun to their work and the galleries.
While the times may have pushed them toward learning Excel, they transcend those pressures, deal with them and recognize the financial side of the business, while necessary, is not their first obligation.
As Perry Rathbone showed us, and as his daughter reminds us, excellence is what matters, and is the true pursuit, along with the elevation and protection of the shapes, forms and images artists give to Truth.
