The MFA, with Its Best-in-America Collections, Needs the Best Leadership

The Boston museum has always been a treasure for anyone who enters its doors, and it should focus on what makes that so.

I had two lovely visits to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston last week. I’d planned to write about both its new Dutch and Flemish galleries and its new Greek and Roman galleries but spent all my time among the ancients. I’ll look more closely at the Dutch and Flemish galleries next time. I expect them to be opulent and incisive. The MFA got two big gifts of Dutch and Flemish art in the last few years. It always had good things, but now the collection befits the most lavish of Dutch still lifes.

One gift is the superb collection of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, which I saw at the Peabody Essex Museum a few years ago. “Wow, this is fantastic,” I said over and over. The other is from Matt and Susan Weatherbie. I’ve seen the art in their home in Boston a couple of times. It’s exquisite. On my last visit, they’d just gotten a Rubens oil sketch of the Coronation of the Virgin. Years later, I still think of it the way our dog thinks of food, though he’s not as particular as I, and the Rubens is sublime. It’s a sketch so not precisely finished, but in Rubens’s hand it’s a vision of Heaven. Now it’s at the MFA.

These two gifts were coups for the MFA. So, too, is its Behrakis Wing, where I saw the museum’s Greek and Roman art. The MFA started collecting antiquities in the late 19th century. The early bird catches the finest pots and the best of Zeus. The galleries, which I reviewed on Thursday, work on many levels, but insofar as education goes, they’re the best primer on the birth of Western civilization. The seeds of democracy, individualism, freedom, and reason are Greek and Roman. I had a classical high-school education so was immersed in both the gods and Greek and Roman writers. Today, well, kids learn more about Angela Davis than Athena and Aphrodite. Where’s Heracles when you need him? He’s a problem-solver, adept as he is in cleaning up knee-deep bullsh**. The MFA is doing more than its fair share of heavy lifting in keeping the classics relevant.

The MFA looked great. Its 150th-anniversary year in 2020 was one of the endless casualties of the Covid mass hypnosis and the government’s titanic malfeasance. Even in the face of the hysteria over Omicron, which for most is considerably less risky than a day on set with Alec Baldwin, the museum has its footing. It’s open. There were lots of people there, even high-school and college classes.

Everyone’s masked, of course, like the Chorus in a Greek play. People looked happy, masks notwithstanding. But unlike the masks in Greek theater, which mostly had exaggerated expressions, helping to define the mood, universal masking today undermines individuality. Masks augment a climate of fear and vulnerability.

The Peabody Essex Museum, in nearby Salem, Mass., is using Covid to stay shut to the public. It’s been closed for nearly a month. A friend who works there told me it’s a slow time at the museum, opening for so few people is a money loser, and closing in the face of the Omicron panic “shows public-spiritedness.” Funny how throwing the public out is meant to convey concern for the public.

Having directed the Addison Gallery in Andover, about 25 miles northwest of Boston, and since the elite-museum world is a tiny one, I have many little MFA birds still tweeting by my library window in Vermont. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the seer Asbolus read omens from the flight and song of birds. I can read the newspaper and museum annual reports, too.

I’ve written about the new MFA staff union. In November 2020, the staff voted 133–14 to join the United Auto Workers. This was the peak of culture-worker fever. The MFA, which relies on admissions, event, restaurant, and shop income more than most, made extensive layoffs after the Covid lockdown. The George Floyd murder and months of urban riots — I mean, mostly peaceful protests — soured many moods but mostly those of young, lefty museum professionals. The union drive at the MFA, though, seemed to emerge from sludge unique to the MFA. I’ve wondered why.

I don’t know Matthew Teitelbaum, the director of the MFA since 2015. He came to the museum after more than 20 years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, including ten years as the director. He was a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in the early ’90s. Teitelbaum followed Malcolm Rogers, who’d been director of the MFA for 21 years. Succeeding a long-standing director is always a challenge. Staff habits coalesce around a director’s likes and dislikes after so many years.

Rogers, whom I know and admire a great deal, came from the autocratic-director tradition, the prevailing form of government in museums in my day. Today, museums are all about belonging and inclusion and equity. Younger curators don’t hesitate to make their feelings known. Zeus wouldn’t approve. The old lightning-bolt trick no longer brings dissent to a smoldering halt.

The staff might hate the director, but in the old days, its own era of the gods, the director ruled absolutely. Still, I don’t know of any other museum director who’s more disliked than Teitelbaum. Early in his epoch, I heard many beefs like “he edits my labels,” and little infuriates a curator more than a director who edits jargoned, inane, arcane, preachy, or four-figure-word labels. Of course, that’s the director’s prerogative, since communication and visitor experience is his domain exclusively. Curators often have a tin ear or rigid indifference when it comes to both.

Over time, though, I saw a trickle and then a torrent of staff exits. Very senior curators such as Ronni Baer, Thomas Michie, Rita Freed, Chris Newth, Michelle Finamore, and Darcy Kuronen. Katie Getchell, the longtime deputy director, left. The conservation and education departments have seen a mass exodus. Late last year, Mark Kerwin, the chief financial officer, and Tom Carey, the director of facilities, announced they’re leaving. Both have been there for years.

I think Teitelbaum seems to want to stack departments with young people who have, and this goes with the territory, no institutional memory. I’m all for donning festive wear — red, of course, and bells on my best tap shoes — for going-away parties for ancient battle-axes, crustaceans, and cranks. That said, losing so many senior people ought to raise eyebrows. Something’s wrong. A 133–14 vote to unionize shows hot anti-management anger. Whether it’s layoffs, high-profile exits, a clique culture at the top, or more than the usual directorial micromanagement, I’m not sure. I’ve heard all of the above.

Teitelbaum is a contemporary-art specialist. How the MFA collects contemporary art, and whether it collects it at all, has always been a fraught topic. Living artists are now a big priority. This isn’t a bad idea. It’s obvious, walking through the American wing of the MFA, as I’ve done many times, that the work of living artists hadn’t animated the place since the days when John Singer Sargent painted the MFA’s Rotunda wall murals. The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is also in Boston, however, and Boston isn’t much of a hotspot for private contemporary-art collections. Private collections and gifts from them will always power the MFA’s acquisitions. These collections just aren’t there. The best are in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. In terms of contemporary-art exhibitions, I don’t think the MFA will ever compete with the ICA.

The Greek and Roman galleries had been slated for renovation and new interpretation for 20 years. The head of the department, Christine Kondoleon, is a force of nature. No amount of new direction would deter her. And her project had mega donors. So, too, did the Dutch and Flemish galleries. Are these end-of-an-era projects? Meanwhile, the museum has the finest public collection of Japanese art outside Japan — this collection and others aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Will it be all contemporary art, all the time, going forward? In Boston, this isn’t exactly a dead end but close to it. It’s playing to the MFA’s weaknesses, not its strengths.

The MFA has had one high-profile racial incident recently. In 2019, a teacher from Boston’s Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy led a group of her students through the MFA. All were black or brown. She claimed her students were targeted by guards for excessive scrutiny and were subjected to racial slurs. I don’t know who said or did what, but the MFA’s leadership seemed to throw the guards under the bus. An uproar developed over a period of days as new and honed slights emerged. It seemed very badly handled.

The MFA has an aggressive new chief of learning and community engagement, Makeeba McCreary, who, with the director, believes the museum has a racist history and is, she says, “the most closed place to black and brown people in Boston, the most challenging to de-fossilize.” The mantra of the museum’s strategic plan is to make the MFA a museum that’s not only “in” Boston but “of” Boston.

Both rhetorical flourishes, I know. One is completely untrue. Before Covid lockdowns trashed public-school art programs, the MFA hosted tens of thousands of Boston children every year. Its docents are the best in the country. I don’t think calling one of the great museums in America a fossil is helpful, especially when the finger pointer works there in a senior position! Where are all of these fossils? The collection? The curators? The donors? The visitors from Brookline, Malden, Melrose, and Lynn?

Statements like these are political grandstanding. The new chief of learning and community engagement came from a top position in Boston’s Superintendent of Schools’ office. She was the chief of staff, which means the head hack. She’s never worked in a museum. The last thing the MFA needs is someone from Boston’s slimy political world calling the shots there. Putting museum education, which is teaching and learning, and “community engagement,” which is mostly political, in the same department is a bad idea. The museum is also building a big, new, expensive equity, inclusion, and belonging bureaucracy. This takes money away from art programs. It also tends to put race at the center of conversations where it’s not relevant.

The other is a false value. The MFA, as a civic museum, serves as its primary audience Boston and the dozens of cities and towns surrounding it. This has always been the case. I’m all for making the MFA a welcoming place for everyone, but it is what it is. It’s an art museum. Its collection is what it is. Usually, the best art was commissioned or acquired by the very rich and privileged. Often, and this is close to a universal truth, their wealth and privilege came at the expense of others. If that becomes the story, then the art becomes a prop.

The museum’s façade is what it is. If some people find it intimidating, they need to get over it, walk up the half dozen steps, and enjoy what’s inside, which is the zenith of human creativity.

I looked at the MFA’s board of trustees. I don’t know everyone but, insofar as Boston is concerned, I do tend to know who’s collecting and who’s really rich. Cathy Minehan is the chair of the board. She was the dean of the management school at Simmons College and was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Her husband was a Goldman Sachs partner. She’s not an art collector. She’s also on lots of other boards, so her attentions are diffused. Past MFA board chairs, and I’ve known most of them, saw their MFA work as their principal philanthropic activity. Most were passionate, important collectors.

Edward Greene is the president of the MFA board. He’s not a collector, either. He’s a global human-resources consultant. He said he’ll put racism at the MFA at the top of his agenda. Coming from an HR background, he’ll likely push for race-based hiring, promotion, and evaluation. I’m not sure this is a good way to go. Greene seems like a single-agenda trustee. These are to be avoided. Museum trustees ought to have focused interests, such as art they collect. That’s useful since it means they have expertise, know the curators, and give art or help buy art. Trustees, though, essentially need a holistic view. The MFA has lots of moving parts, and trustees need to attend to all of them. Single-issue trustees usually are blinkered trustees. They think their issue is the only one that’s important.

Together with Teitelbaum and McCreary, this doesn’t seem like a team focused on art.

This might surprise people, but the MFA is not a rich museum. Its endowment is a bit under $600 million. Sounds like a lot, but it’s not. The Met’s got $4 billion in the bank. Boston’s always had tremendous wealth, but, philanthropically, the spirit’s stingy. Much of the MFA’s endowment is restricted. This limits the board’s flexibility in moving money around. When the Covid crisis started, forcing the museum to close, the trustees and Teitelbaum did what they needed to do to keep the museum’s finances in order.

I don’t see how it could have avoided layoffs. The museum can’t — and shouldn’t — pay people for doing nothing. It’s run with charitable dollars. It preserved health-insurance benefits for those who lost their jobs, which few private-sector employers ever do. Teitelbaum took a 30 percent pay cut. The Met’s leadership wails over money as piercingly as the best of banshees — Irish mythology, I know — but it’s rich as Croesus.

Now, the MFA will have to deal with a new union. The culture section of the United Auto Workers is more concerned with politics and social-justice warfare than with bread-and-butter issues. Now more than ever, the board needs trustees advocating strongly on behalf of the curators and the departments with best-in-America collections so that they don’t become afterthoughts or, worse, targets for those engaged in grievances and reckonings.