The Boston Raphael

September 15, 2014
In this fascinating book about a watershed moment in the culture of America’s art museums, Rathbone (Walker Evans) considers her father Perry Rathbone’s directorship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). A connoisseur and showman who believed that “art is for everyone,” Rathbone’s influence as director was felt distinctly in the MFA from 1955 until 1972, when he was forced by the museum’s board of trustees to resign. That decision was triggered by the controversy surrounding a tiny oil painting of a small girl, believed to be an unknown Raphael. For the occasion of MFA’s centennial in 1970, Rathbone covertly purchased the painting for $600,000 from a shady dealer in Genoa. Eluding Italy’s artistic patrimony law, the painting was smuggled into the U.S. Set against the backdrop of this intrigue are Rathbone’s descriptions of life at MFA in the postwar years. She chronicles the celebration of its centennial, from the exhibitions that were installed to the infighting among staff and the attempts to woo collectors. Her father represents the old breed of museum directors, arbiters who behaved as “public servants” rather than “CEOs of a considerable corporate enterprise.” Her book sheds light on museology of the present as well as of the past. Agent: Ike Williams, Kneerim, Williams & Bloom.

November 1, 2014
In February 1970, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts celebrated its centennial with the unveiling of a major acquisition, a newly discovered portrait by Raphael. The painting was to be a little pinch of the Renaissance for the city, symbolizing the MFA's success on the international stage, and the influence of its longtime director, Perry Rathbone. Within a year, the painting would be wrested from the walls of the museum by customs officials and returned to Italy, its attribution overturned and Rathbone discredited. His daughter, Belinda Rathbone, takes a journalistic approach to her father's story and this little-known art-world controversy, charting the influences of money, prestige, and nationalism on the notorious acquisition. While the details of secret meetings, foreign art sleuths, and glamorous patrons are fascinating, this chronicle ultimately tells the larger story of a museum questioning its role in an era of change, poised between classic and contemporary collection practices. Rathbone brings to the forefront the MFA's struggles with audience engagement, provenance research, and the cultural repatriation of objects, issues that remain pressing in museums today.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)