Flop Season at the Fogg at Harvard

The fun and frolicking ’50s — was it all a fraud? And more on the Gardner’s excellent show on the book of Esther.

I t’s been about a year since my last visit to Boston, so I ventured east last week, when I had a free day, to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Fogg at Harvard, and the Museum of Fine Arts over two days. Three great museums, and there are so many others. I knew the Gardner would do a top-notch exhibition based on the Old Testament’s book of Esther, and it did, with three scintillating Rembrandts. I’ll save the MFA visit for another story. I haven’t heard from all of my spies about the new director’s first year.

My favorite discovery was, at the Fogg, John Singer Sargent’s kidney-shaped palette found in his London studio in 1925, after his death. I’m not too drawn to an artist’s relics, but this one is different. Sargent was a saftig painter, meaning his surfaces are tactile and as dense and juicy as a filet mignon. He was a slasher in applying paint, piling his brush with oil paint in natural and synthetic pigments and going to town. Evidence-wise, his palette, with long-dried, cake-frosting-layers of paint, looks not only like sculpture. It’s a smoking gun.

Harvard, at least for its first 386 years, couldn’t have cared less about the public, while the public in Cambridge hosted it tax-free. For years the Fogg charged a hefty admission fee even though it gets — or got, ha, ha — billions from federal taxpayers. In 2023, and this astonished me, Harvard made its art museums free to all. The Devil in them must have taken a day off. Seriously, it’s a great thing, since the Fogg is a treasure. Its new director, Sarah Ganz Blythe, seems promising.

More on the Fogg in a bit, but on Thursday I wrote about The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt, the new exhibition at the Gardner. I loved it, so much so that I composed an art critic’s Seven Commandments, based on what the Gardner did so well in presenting a complex topic and leaving us enriched. These range from the obvious, Thou shalt not bore — obvious but elusive to so many curators — to the esoteric. Thou shalt decorate well, for instance, might seem superficial and the stuff of insiders, but it’s not. Good curators always have a bit of a decorator in them and use the arrangement of art, wall colors, different media, and smart graphics to attract people and to complement the gallery’s themes and the shows on view.

I’m impressed with the curatorial talent for telling a story as layered as Esther’s. Gardner worked and thought hard to make it all look natural. I’m delighted to see a museum tackle a religious story so well and comfortably. Many museums see such fare as one big, hot potato.

“Seven commandments, that’s a lot,” you might think, but God had ten and I’m deferential. No one’s ever called me bossy. Alright, I did pause and decide to skip adding my eighth — Thou shalt use outside voices sparingly — but only because Thursday’s piece was already long. The Gardner gathered a panel that includes a rabbi, a Harvard professor, and a young woman called a Jewish nerd who’s an artist and storyteller and less of a nerd than I am, and by a mile. The panel also had a “gender studies” scholar from Brandeis and an Episcopal minister. In an eleven-minute film, they talked about Esther’s meaning today. The video runs in the small introductory gallery. There’s one small bench, and not many viewers stood to watch the thing since the space is too tight.

Oh, I haven’t said anything about my ninth commandment: Thou shalt leave things for an art critic to complain about. I have to put food on the table, too, and please, God, don’t smite me. The video is a conversation starter about many topics, among them the not-terribly-engaging question of who might be today’s parallel to Esther. The panelists get bogged down with names like Kamala Harris, Ivanka Trump, and Sarah Palin. Why, I don’t know. The Episcopal minister — of course, it would come from her — raises Esther’s status as an immigrant. But was she? She was an outsider, we know, but she ascended through the harem system and became an insider, the queen. Then there’s the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, its program to fight antisemitism. Professor Gender Blather hates it and sees it as a front for cutting off university cash cows.

One panelist — the nerd — spoke about the role of chance in Esther’s story, how Esther found herself in a place to stop a genocide after, of all things, winning a beauty pageant, becoming a queen, and playing a middling hand as an outsider, an innocent, and a woman who outfoxed Haman, a practiced schemer. This is Boston, so wokeism is in the air, which means that the panelists approach Esther’s story in terms of women and powerlessness, which in their view are invariably intertwined. But Esther has power. She just has to use it differently. The king’s cast of court eunuchs has power, too. The Bible is filled with stories of women who have power, many good women, many bad. So is history. So is fiction.

I see The Book of Esther as a woman’s story and — to a very limited extent — a story of power. It’s more of a universal story about integrity, courage, and resolve. I thought about why God isn’t much of a player in Esther’s story. He’s hardly there at all. Jewish endurance is a theme — how and why, aside from will, Jews have survived. Sometimes we’re left to our own wits. My father had a saw about politics: “One day a peacock, the next a feather duster.” Once an outsider, then a high-stepper and the queen, Esther found her head on the block along with all the other Jews. Sometimes luck — or chance — looms large, and good old-fashioned human agency often does, too. I would have made these universal issues rather than warmed-over feminism the focus of a longer video, longer because the panelists were so erudite.

These tiny quibbles aside, I’ve got one more commandment. Yes, I guess I’m bossy indeed. Thou shalt leave people thinking. That’s what all the best art exhibitions do, and The Book of Esther is among the best I’ve seen this year.

* * *

I like the Fogg, the popular name for the Harvard Art Museums, long for HAM, which no one, understandably, calls it. This is a bit of a dud season for the Fogg — everyone’s entitled to one — since the main autumn attraction, On Location: Drawing the Outdoors, wasn’t open when I visited.

Still, I had high hopes for The Way We Never Were: American Professional Photographers Collection. The photographs, about 60 of them, are drawn from the 20,000 or so works from the archive of portraits, scenes of everyday suburban life and special events, and promotional images snapped all over the country from the late 1930s into the ’60s. Yearbook portraits, wedding photographs, shots of family holidays and sporting events, mostly in black-and-white and all making for what I thought would be a deep dive, especially into postwar suburbia, Baby Boomer parents, and the kids themselves, before so many turned surly, shouty, self-righteous, self-absorbed, and, now, either deceased or decrepit.

It’s not a big exhibition, and, of course, with 20,000 photographs of everyday American life over a scant 25 years, you can cherry-pick to make any point you want. It’s also the worst show I’ve ever seen at the Fogg. The curators have a Ph.D. in pious finger-wagging, but that’s the Harvard bubble. The years 1946, the first full year of the postwar era, until the Kennedy assassination in 1963 were bound to get a dressing-down.

It was “a period of deep cultural divisions and social policing.” Ladies, and I’m talking to the three women curators, so is each and every decade and era in American life. “Sunny images of suburban middle-class ease present only a partial picture of reality,” I read, “out of alignment with most experiences and perspectives.”

So these photographs are immediately reduced to props in a broad-brush story invented by the curators. The art, they say, obscures and denies “racial segregation, Cold War anxiety, strict gender roles, and political repression.” Didn’t anybody involved in The Way We Weren’t wear their thinking cap rather than a dunce cap? These are family Christmas photographs, scenes of prom dances, newborn babies, a Tupperware party, a bar mitzvah, a portrait of two pet poodles, among other photos of lives well lived, in a time when people took joy from life and didn’t bitch all the time, as they do these days at Harvard, about Trump, trans oppression, the new White House ballroom, and Gaza, Gaza, Gaza.

One photograph from the 1950s shows girls with Hula-Hoops. I’ll put aside the deep curatorial thinking like this: “Like many mid-century fads, it faded within two years.” Isn’t that always the case with fads? Cupcake shops, pet rocks, Beanie Babies, Segways, mullets, and Pete Buttigieg came and went. The climate-change hoax lasted much longer and wasted trillions. That’s a long-in-tooth fad, but fad it is.

Give me a Hula-Hoop any day of the week, despite, as the curators note, abdominal injuries from overuse. Rows of cribs with newly born babies, all white? “The period was shaped by the legacy of American eugenics,” I read, “including the forced sterilization of Black women and other marginalized groups.” Is this all they can say about 76 million new babies between 1946 and 1964? It’s the dumbest point I’ve seen at least this month. That alone anchored “experiences and perspectives” during the years covered by the show. Did the new director read these labels ahead of time? When I was a museum director, I read my curators’ labels and edited them. At first, it was as if I’d canceled Christmas, but before long they were writing clearly, economically, and about the art.

Ike takes a hit, and that’s extreme provocation. He was “slow to confront McCarthyism’s civil rights violations and offered only cautious support for Brown v. Board of Education.” This and so much else is curatorial malpractice. The curators should read Fred Greenstein’s The Hidden-Hand Presidency. Published in 1982, nearly 45 years ago, it defines Eisenhower’s leadership style as avuncular on the outside, but also plotting and crafty and stealthy. He gave McCarthy enough rope to hang himself. The curators are in way over their heads in treating the complex, fraught response to Brown. And they’re lazy about it, too. They didn’t even try to have any feeling for the era.

The exhibition is small, and the very good, fascinating art seems to cry, to clamor, to beseech for a bigger, deeper, more empathetic take. I’ll do it — I lived it — but Harvard’s got to pay me.

As I said, all museums do flop shows. Nonetheless, I always enjoy my visits. Sargent’s palette was a new discovery, but another new friend in the realm of Sargent is his 1916 painting Lake O’Hara. At 39 by 46 inches, it’s a hunk of a picture and a revelation. I know a lot about Sargent but didn’t know about his trip that year to the Rockies. He was in Boston to work on the city’s public-library murals and, for his summer vacation, he went west to Glacier National Park in Montana and then to the Canadian Rockies. Lake O’Hara is a dazzling turquoise, not a hot spring like the Giant Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone but a glacial lake. His foreground is driftwood, and his backdrop runs from red cliffs to bluer ones in the distance and then snow-covered mountains farther and higher.

It’s the first painting by a living artist ever purchased by the Fogg, and in 1916, when Harvard acquired it, the paint was barely dried. It’s one of many showstoppers at the Fogg, not well known enough and with an absolute trove.