by SARA EVANS
Maybe it’s sort of juvenile to have a favorite painting, but on a recent visit to the New American Wing at the Musuem of Fine Arts in Boston, I came to the realization that I do: I love John Singer Sargent’s large and mysterious canvas, “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” Maybe it’s because I, too, come from a family of four daughters, but Sargent’s 1882 painting of four lovely Victorian sisters, dressed in crisp white pinafores, gets my vote. Unlike conventional family portraits through the ages, the girls are arranged at separate angles and are scattered through the space, seemingly unaware of one another. It’s a visually beautiful, psychologically complex family portrait, open to endless comparisons and analyses.
The new wing, which was opened in the fall of 2010 is a bright and spacious set of hyper-modern glass cubes, designed by the international architects Foster + Partners, led by Sir Norman Foster. The space is at once soaring, welcoming and uncrowded. The galleries are spacious, sequential and focused. The wing showcases over 5000 pieces of art and decorative arts. Linked to the main MFA building by an elegant atrium, the addition seamlessly links the old and the new, the traditional museum, which was originally opened in 1876, with the contemporary wing.
The American collection housed in the new wing is simply spectacular and organized in a cogent, intelligent and accessible way. It begins on the lower level with ancient Pre-Columbian art and artifacts from North, South and Meso-America. It includes a terrific collection of masks, burial vessels, jewelry, Olmec jades, South American colonial portraits and arts from native tribes from across North America. Several galleries focus on 17th century New England, filled with Pilgrim furniture and early portraits, fine early silver, ship models and colonial samplers. These objects, seen in Boston, give a strong regional introduction to the collection.
The first floor galleries highlight art from both 18th and early 19th century America, with a strong focus on New England. There is an entire room filled with portraits by John Singleton Copley, a large painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, silver by the finest craftsmen of the time, important Newport Colonial and Federal furniture and charming examples of early folk art.
The second level of the wing is a treasure-trove of major 19th and early 20th-century art. Visitors are greeted not only by Sargent’s “Daughters” but by the actual, six-foot tall Japanese vases pictured in the painting, vases that crossed the Atlantic with the family numerous times as they commuted between Boston and Paris. There is a wealth of Sargent portraits, a gallery filled with prints and drawings, including a lovely group of Mary Cassatts, a gallery of paintings by Americans traveling abroad, such as Cole, Inness and Bierstadt, a gallery filled with Homers and Eakins and another with gorgeous works by Fitz Henry Lane and Martin Heade, There are beautiful examples of Gothic Revival, Aesthetic Movement and Arts and Crafts furniture, decorative arts and folk art.
Level 3 explores 20th Century art through the 1980’s, a king’s ransom of O’Keeffe’s, works by a broad spectrum of Abstract Expressionists, sculptures, photographs, and wonderful examples of the applied and decorative arts of the period.
Spend a day at the New American Wing; don’t rush it. The arrangement of the galleries, their inherent cogency and the extensiveness of the collection enable us to look and think anew about who we are, and how our art and aesthetics have evolved.
Just a few months ago, another beloved Boston museum opened a new and starkly contemporary addition. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has a new wing designed by Renzo Piano, whose ability to blend old and new museum buildings is becoming legendary. Mrs. Gardner (1840-1924) was an enormously wealthy and passionate collector of all the arts. She built her museum, called Fenway Court, which opened in 1903, and filled it with her idiosyncratic collection of art and objects. Her main advisor was none other than Bernard Berenson. She was a social dynamo, a woman who took staid Boston by storm. (Henry James observed, “She isn’t a woman—she’s a locomotive….”).
With new and reconfigured museums proliferating throughout Boston, the Gardner had become a dark and fusty backwater, with few visitors and little interest. The Trustees faced a daunting task, how to bring a hidebound and essentially Victorian institution into the 21st century. Renzo Piano, the Genovese Pritzker winner, was clearly the architect the project demanded. His creation of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and his reconfiguring of the Art Institute in Chicago and were in line with the Trustees’ ideas of how to modernize the Gardner, while being true to Mrs. Gardner’s wishes.
The original building is a fairly nondescript yellow brick affair from the outside. Inside, it is
a glorious, Italianate palazzo, built around a beautiful interior garden. Today, the garden, with its sculptures and fountains, is replanted with orchids, ferns and palms and seasonal plantings nine times a year. It was Mrs. Gardner’s museum—and she made the rules. No wall boards, nothing can be moved from it’s anointed place. No additions. No subtractions. No photography. No pens. But the collection—oh, this collection! It takes the notion of eclectic to new heights. Books, manuscripts, textiles, furniture. Paintings from the earliest Renaissance to a contemporary portrait of Mrs. Gardner, inspired by Sargent’s Madame X. There are goodies from India, China, Japan, Egypt, Persia. There are paintings by Whistler, Titain, Botticelli, Raphael and Michelangelo, Manet, Degas, and Rembrandt and countless others.
Because of the rules set by Mrs. Gardner, the new wing, which is designed to bring the Gardner into the 21st century, has a unique mission. It boasts a state-of-the-art concert and lecture hall, a beautiful restaurant, a shop, research facilities and a spacious gallery to showcase the work of contemporary artists in residence. It is a soaring and elegant 70,000 square foot space, one which adds immeasurably not only to the Boston art scene, but to the international one as well. Once a quirky backwater, the Gardner, with its Renzo Piano addition, now takes its place as a world-class museum, drawing a steady and serious stream of visitors from around the globe.
The MFA has a special relationship with the Lenox Hotel. Located in the center of town, the Lenox is located in the heart of the city, on Boylston Street, a block from the beautiful shops and restaurants on Newbury Street. When it was opened in 1900, it was the tallest building in the city. On the National Register of Historic Buildings, the Lenox is inviting and comfortable, offering contemporary amenities along with traditional comfort. It’s the perfect perch for visiting this most civilized of American cities.

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