A Catfight in a Snake Pit in Philly’s Art Museum

My story today is a twofer, not a two-part story but a revelation — the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ sublime, transporting exhibition of all its Winslow Homer watercolors — and a parable drawn from the Philadelphia Art Museum’s blunt-ax firing of its director amid a cascade of public, tumescent “she said, she said” charges.

First, Philadelphia. There’s a shortage of sisterly love along the banks of the Schuylkill River. The players in this extraordinary drama are Sasha Suda, defenestrated for theft as director, as well as Leslie Anne Miller, the board chairwoman who hired her and then wanted to fire her, and Ellen Caplan, the current board chairwoman who pulled the trigger. Reading the court filings, and hearing from my spies at the front, I have to say that everyone looks bad. Rocky Balboa, whose bronze sculpture adorns the base of the museum’s famous flight of stairs, is aghast. He wants to run in the other direction.