MFA to sell 8 paintings for 1 big fat gay Caillebotte

Gustave Caillebotte's Man at His Bath (1884)

News broke today that the MFA will de-accession some eight works (including a Monet, Degas, and Gauguin) to purchase Man at His Bath, by Gustave Caillebotte (at left), for a price of around $17 million.

I suppose the purchase will be controversial (the Monet that's being sold is a nice one, although the MFA has another much like it) - partly, I think, because the Caillebotte is still a slightly shocking image: a rudely vigorous male plunked down into what's structured as a Degas-style reverie.  Actually, I'll go a little further - the image is shocking because it's so gay.  It presents male nakedness as a precise equivalent to the softcore tease at the heart of a zillion French domestic scenes (and so slyly destabilizes the hetero-centrist context of a good chunk of Impressionism).  The guy is practically rough trade, his butt is center stage, and Caillebotte even teases us with the silhouette of his scrotum.  It's all gayer than Cher's mascara, but at the same time it's as masculine as a Bruins game - a combination that, frankly, the straight population struggles with much more than it does with queeny types like Michele Bachmann's husband.

So, as I'm sure you have guessed, I think it's pretty cool that the MFA is purchasing it, and to my mind the price is justified (if such prices are ever justified, that is).  The museum already has a half-dozen sun-splashed Monets, after all, but Man at His Bath is nearly unique in the Impressionist catalog, and it's of high sociological interest as well.

Was he gay?  Obviously.

For gay men have long thought of Caillebotte (at right, a self-portrait) as the "gay Impressionist" - many straight art connoisseurs might quibble with that "gay" appellation, because of course we have no definitive proof of which way the life-long bachelor swung (if he swung at all); but frankly I'd quibble more with the "Impressionist" part of "gay Impressionist;"  I know Caillebotte initially was shown with Monet and the gang, but to me he floats in some sphere of his own, between Monet, Degas - and photography (his signature view is a panorama in which perspective falls away vertiginously).  But as for being gay - yeah, he always seemed delicately alienated to me in a way that the rest of the Impressionists aren't, and which always read to me as queer.  And it's nice to see a queer edge make itself known at the MFA - at least implicitly - after decades and decades of quiet suppression. So here's to our $17 million piece of rough trade!  It's a lot to pay, but he's worth it.

So - how bad is the Dale Chihuly show?

Chihuly's Ikebana Boat: shouldn't some Oompa-Loompas be rowing this thing?

Recently something very strange occurred in the pages of the Boston Globe. Its star art critic, Sebastian Smee, whose glittering paeans to things everybody can agree on had just won him a Pulitzer Prize, did something he'd never done before.

He dared not to like a great big fat crowd-pleaser.

Smee's target was Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass, the MFA's current blockbuster devoted to the output - I won't call it an oeuvre - of Dale Chihuly, certainly the most successful glass artist in the country. Actually, Chihuly is more like his own industry; teams of glassblowers and engineers produce his work for him and install it all over the globe (sadly, the artist lost the vision in one eye in a car accident years ago, forever complicating his ability to personally produce his work).

Chihuly's installations can be enormous, and are best known for making a forceful case for glass in the public square, where stone and steel used to rule the roost.  And they're always popular (I think this is the third major exhibition of his stuff in New England in the past few years), partly because they're remarkably consistent - indeed so predictable that Chihuly now probably counts as a brand.

All this popularity and "innovation" does offer the MFA half an excuse for taking Chihuly seriously, I suppose; the problem is that the style which has won him his international acclaim has varied in only one dimension over the years - it's gotten bigger and brighter. That's the extent of its "development." Small, early "Chihulies" are like bubbles of deeply saturated color bursting before your eyes; later ones are more like megaton technicolor explosions that just won't quit (at left). The idea of a "retrospective" is slightly absurd.

Still, Chihuly takes himself seriously enough; he gives his stuff the kind of classy monikers that the management at the Bellagio (where he runs a gallery) might give to their latest high-end eatery (Chiostro di Sant'Apollonia and Mille Fiori are samples). And he's prone to classifying his works into formal groups, like "Reeds" and "Boats" and "Chandeliers." But basically everything he does, from his candyland landscapes to his giant umbrella drinks (at top), is a happy, splashy blast of vulgarity, and that's that.

And this was Sebastian Smee's mistake - pointing, oh-so-delicately but undeniably, to the Bellagio-level taste of the whole show. Eek! Globe readers don't like that kind of thing; after all, isn't it the Herald that's supposed to be down-market?  And doesn't Smee remember what happened to Louise Kennedy when she described the self-consciously vulgar Huntington show Pirates! as, in fact, self-consciously vulgar?

I guess not.

Still, something tells me Smee will survive the outraged letters I've been reading in the Globe regarding his review. And Chihuly of course can survive any review, anywhere; he'd only be bothered by criticism if he were, in fact, attempting something like art, which he's not. Come to think of it, there really isn't a single aesthetic idea in evidence in his entire show. (Even when this artist calms down for something more "elegant," as in his "Reeds" series, he hangs onto his signature sense of inner vacuum.)

That emptiness is a bit interesting in and of itself - it's quite unusual, really. Master craftsmen generally edge toward art as their skill deepens; their formal concerns begin to coalesce into metaphors in and of themselves; they discover what their work means. But this hasn't happened with Chihuly - indeed, his one stab at connecting with an actual aesthetic (in an odd display of forms based on Native-American motifs) comes off as a weird little detour from the main event.

No, Chihuly isn't an "artist;" he's more like the head of a management team engineering a designer drug targeting your visual pleasure center. He only wants to give you a head rush; the whole show is like a giant tab of lysergic acid. Of course, LSD can be fun in small doses (don't ask me how I know that), and the pleasure center does deliver, well, pleasure - just ask the kids romping through the show, wondering aloud if you can lick the sculptures (really, the docents for this exhibit should have been Oompa-Loompas). You might get a lingering case of retina-burn at Through the Looking Glass, but that's probably the extent of its mental impact - or danger.

Still, I admit that you can't dismiss Chihuly completely, because in the right context, he can truly charm - or better yet, make you laugh; indeed, his gonzo, take-no-prisoners visual giddiness not only throws a goofy kick into all kinds of formal spaces, but seems to draw a kind of virtual content from them.  I know it sounds funny, but while his sculptures utterly fail as statements, they operate quite well as ripostes. In fact they're probably best described as visual raspberries.

If you doubt me, just go up the stairs from the current show and take in his delightful Lime Green Icicle Tower, (at left) which is standing like a luminous spire in the MFA's severe new Shapiro Courtyard.  It's everything the courtyard isn't: a whimsically organic folly (it looks like some mutant anemone in an outsized aquarium), shooting like a firework all the way to the top of a space that in its expensive serenity could pass for a mausoleum.  Indeed, the impossible height of the piece almost operates as a kind of joke; it activates the whole space as a punch line, sweetly skewering the pretentiousness of its own presentation.  You can almost hear it whispering: Oh, come off it, everybody.

Likewise, if you're inclined to think that Ikebana Boat (at top) is some kind of atrocity, just look what happens when you float its twin past the rigid restraint of Chatsworth (at right): suddenly you've got a party.  When I browsed through images of Chihuly's public installations on the web, I saw something like the same effect over and over - just about everything his team comes up with plays as jazzy fun in a public context.  It's only when you isolate it against a hushed, black backdrop, that the work suddenly seems pushy and empty.  So Chihuly doesn't produce art, he produces carnival floats - but are carnival floats such a bad thing?  He may not belong in a museum.  But that doesn't mean I feel like raining on his parade.

The opening everybody's NOT talking about . . .

It's all been very hush-hush till now, but if all goes well, the lower level restrooms at the Museum of Fine Arts will be, well, "flush" with art by Boston artists right about now.

With a wicked nod to desperate precedent - a famous "show" of contemporary art in the MFA men's room in 1971 (at left) - local artists will be sneaking in to install their own work in the spiffy latrines below the new atrium courtyard in "Flush with the Walls," a "renegade" show which opens - well, right about now, 7 pm on June 15, precisely forty years after that first exhibit. How long the show will last is anybody's guess.  But hopefully its brevity won't reduce its influence - after all, the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art is scheduled to open in September; who knows what local artists may find themselves still hanging at the MFA, only in a more public location?  For those of you who can't make it this evening, I've been told the exhibition will also include "a fully illustrated historical commemorative catalogue, subtitled Bathroom Reading."  Too funny.

[Update: Well, as I guessed, the show didn't last too long!  Provocateur/crypto-anarchist/art-nerd sweetheart Greg Cook had only just concluded his welcoming remarks to the assembled crowd (of maybe two dozen people, squeezed into the corridor to the bathrooms outside the Chihuly show) when security descended, ostensibly to clear the hallway.

A reasonable excuse, but in a matter of moments the MFA's minions had invaded the bathrooms and begun to tear the art down from the walls - and none too carefully, either.  I protested; sure, the crowd had to go, but couldn't the art stay up?  (The artists had thoughtfully NOT posted anything in the stalls, as they had in 1971; the art was confined to the sink counters and vestibule, for the protection of everyone's privacy!)  The guards just gave me that look that reads "Don't make me be a jerk, okay?," and when another gallery-goer tried to video the dismantling of the exhibit, he was told to put his phone away, because "It's a federal offense to take photographs in a restroom, sir."  Oh, dear, Dorothy, I suppose we can't go against the law, can we!  So the exhibit was down in a matter of moments, and the crowd unhappily, but still genially, disbursed.

The art I caught a glimpse of was poignant in its simplicity - a sketch of the Mona Lisa on a paper towel was typical.  (I didn't notice any artists' names on the pieces.)  The show exuded a crunchy - or maybe crusty - idealism that defiantly refused to die despite the determination of the MFA marketing juggernaut to ignore it.  Meanwhile, the museum-goers who pushed their way through the proceedings looked confused but seriously miffed, in the manner of Disney patrons who find a Greenpeace protest is ruining their visit to the Magic Kingdom.  Or was that impression due to the Willy-Wonka-esque fantasia of the Dale Chihuly show next door?  Oh, well - who knows.  Somebody bring on Veruca Salt!]

The MFA's new wing

Photos by Chuck Choi

I got my first peek into the new MFA American wing (at left) this morning – along with all the bigwigs – so of course I’m dying to tell you all about it.

Ok - first, the bad news: the “architecture” itself, though always elegant, and realized with superb technical élan, is in the end undistinguished. The sun-drenched café courtyard (above), the clean lines, the impeccably tailored finishes – we’ve seen all this glass and granite and travertine marble before. Of course it works; it’s lovely. It just doesn’t surprise.

But this is perhaps tied to what counts as the better news: schematically, the new wing does “make sense.” It grows organically out of the original plan, with a clear intent to honor the vision of Guy Lowell (the original architect), and his sense of proportion and decoration. On the whole, this is a far subtler response to the existing building than I.M. Pei’s boxy arcade of the early 80’s – and architect Foster + Partners makes the connection explicit, by using the exterior façade of the old building as the interior face of the Shapiro Courtyard.

This is only one of many nice, sensitive touches. But the great news is that the galleries themselves are often fantastic, better than you dreamt they could be - in particular the floors devoted to the Revolutionary period and the nineteenth century are sheer heaven. The spaces have been decorated in rich, deep colors, with striking carpets and wallpapers, and Malcolm Rogers’s feel for combining decorative with fine art pays off in spades with several rooms that superbly conjure their periods as a whole, and thus serve as striking “extended” frames for the art on the walls. Several paintings – such as “The Peaceable Kingdom” – benefit enormously from this kind of setting (and yes, those wonderful vases are back on either side of “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,” above).

And I have to say the lighting is simply incomparable – the Luminist room alone is lit more beautifully than I think any museum space I’ve ever encountered; the glare that afflicts so many paintings in so many settings seems to have been simply eliminated (and the subtlety of the illumination allows the display of a few delicacies, like watercolors by Sargent and Homer, that we’ve rarely seen before). I’ve questioned whether the MFA actually had a collection to fill the galleries it was building, but in at least these two periods the answer is a definite “yes.” Where we before we got a taste of Copley, Stuart and Sully, now we get a smorgasbord – and most of the unfamiliar works are surprisingly tasty, while the ones that aren’t, still have value in their historicity. And while of course the new galleries offer a warm re-introduction to old friends like Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam, they’re also stuffed with surprises, such as a bust of Thomas Jefferson by (wait for it) Houdon – I didn’t know the museum owned such a gem! Nor did I know that Edward Steichen once painted, or that the Museum owned chairs by Frank Lloyd Wright – these two floors sometimes feel like a treasure hunt.

Alas, on the modern and contemporary floor, one does bump one’s head against the limits of the collection. For more than half a century, the MFA did not collect well, and there’s no easy way to paper over that gap. (This is why I dreamt for a while that the museum might acquire much of the Rose collection – but silly me! We’re all much better with that stuff being in storage at Brandeis while this stuff is on the walls at the MFA!) There are, of course, some worthy works of art here, but some of the best pieces on display turn out to be loans (like a remarkable Rothko I hadn’t seen before). Which makes one wonder – if the works from the big names on tap are comparatively weak, why isn’t the MFA showcasing more regional art instead? Of course back in the Revolutionary day, “regional” and “American” art largely overlapped – but as the modern era dawned, the MFA seems to have dropped regional art from its collection and focused on also-rans from New York and elsewhere. With the opening of this grand new wing, let’s hope that begins to change.

But for now, congratulations to Malcolm Rogers and the entire MFA are in order, for a job spectacularly well done.

Designing women

Arnold Scaasi (at left, in his heyday) isn't, I think, a man known for keeping his opinions to himself.

"Women should always wear bright colors," the fashion sage announced from his throne at the press opening of his new show at the MFA. "They say to me,  'No, I can't wear that, that's not my color!'  But what does that mean? If that's not your color, change your lipstick!" Scaasi quipped, to widespread laughter.

"Yes, just change your lipstick . . . " he repeated softly to himself, then suddenly froze.  "Like that thing you're wearing," he sniffed, pointing an accusing finger at a hapless curator (who was wearing an earth-toned sweater over black).  "What is that? What is that color - brown?  Is that brown???  Why are you wearing that?  It does nothing for you!"

"Oh, Mr. Scaasi!" she laughed in a slight panic, before managing a bemused roll of her eyes.

"It does nothing for you, NOTHING!  I'm serious, don't wear it, it looks terrible," he insisted, then scanned the rest of the room with a gimlet eye.  Everyone held their breath; you could tell he didn't like what he saw.  "You there, you," he shouted to an attractive young woman busily taking notes.  "Who are you writing all that for?"

"Stuff," she answered.

"Stuff . . ?" he repeated.

"Stuff Magazine," she replied.  "I'm the editor.  And I love my outfit!" she announced to the room, perhaps pre-emptively.

Scaasi didn't, you could tell, but he let it slide, preferring to move on to other victims (he cast one contemptuous look at me, but my polo shirt didn't even rate a put-down).

"Mr. Scaasi, I have a question!" another sweet young thing cried.

"Yes?" he purred, happy to hold court.

"I'm doing graduate work in the impact of innovation on the new product development process," she began, "and I was wondering if you could give me any insights into what kind of innovative mindset you've applied to your new product development over the course of the growth of your business in the global marketplace?"

Scaasi's eyes were glazing over.  "New - product - what . . . ?"

"Your new product development process," she repeated brightly, adjusting her glasses. "In the globalized economy, we're all aware of how important innovation can be, moving forward.  You know, moving forward. In the global economy.  Could you - "

But the oracle was prepared to speak.  "I am for color," Scaasi announced in a softly imperious tone.  "I am for pretty things.  For what is flattering."  He paused for a moment, considering this, before beaming with a profound satisfaction.  "Yes.  That's what I'm for."

Arlene Francis said she wore "this old thing" to the market.

And that is what he was for; the evidence was all around us.  It would be hard to call Arnold Scaasi much of a revolutionary; he basically adopted his couture from the profile and drape of Adrian (of MGM fame).  But he was an Adrian for his own time, updating those Art Deco gowns into the jet-set lingo of the 50's and 60's; just as classical architecture was simplified into the façades of Lincoln Center,  so Scaasi stripped Adrian down into a flatter, but voluptuously cut, vision of "modernity."

The designer's fans like to chat up the depth of his relationships with his clients.  Given his interactions at the MFA, I wonder what those relationships were really like!  But he did have quite the customer list, from five First Ladies to the cream of New York and Hollywood society.  He may have had to reverse his Jewish surname, "Isaacs," into the Italianized "Scaasi" to get them, but once hooked, Scaasi's women remained loyal.  And thus, though he dabbled successfully in ready-to-wear, he never had to launch the kind of mass-market label that brought attention (and millions) to designers like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein (both Jewish, and from the Bronx, btw).

Still, like Adrian, Scaasi usually stuck to the designs he knew best, whoever was going to wear them; he liked tight bodices that flared out into billowing curtains of silk or tulle (as in the ensemble at right, for Arlene Francis).  He then added richly embroidered accessories, or an elegant jacket, which again was cut close to the shoulders, but opened out into a luxurious cascade.  The Scaasi woman was streamlined - and, to be honest, somewhat synthetic.

Because amusingly enough, Scaasi's choice of fabric wasn't always what we'd think of as luxe today - in some ensembles, silk and mink rub shoulders with a lot of plastic; there's a literal artificiality to much of his artifice.  But then in the 50's and 60's, such fabrics were brand-new, and had their own brief chic.  And when the material wasn't strikingly original, the ornamentation often was; some frocks at the MFA are embroidered with coral, or encrusted with a glittery something-or-other called "metallic matelasse" (like his famous "see-through" ensemble for Barbra Streisand, at left, which sparkled with foil).

Still, as a symbolic interpreter of social change - which is pretty much the only deeper interest fashion has - Scaasi hardly existed; his designs from the 80's don't look all that different from those of the 50's (they're just heavier).  Of course maybe that's his own kind of social comment - things don't change much at the top of the food chain! Or perhaps shifts in social roles don't seem to exist in Scaasi's world because he wasn't so much a commenter on society as a part of it.  And though he branched out into pantsuits, and seemed to want to conjure a sense of power for his women, Scaasi never strayed far from a little girl's vision of Parisian glamour; even Barbra's nudie bell-bottoms have a princess bow tied at the top, and polka dots and fairy feathers adorn many of his creations.

Of course the squarest iconography can be teased into dazzlingly "hip" configurations in the right hands, and Scaasi worked that kind of magic pretty often.  One of the best pieces in the MFA show is one of his simplest, although that simplicity reveals just how sure his touch could be.  When she saw the "little black dress" (above right) that Scaasi had designed for her, Natalie Wood squealed that it was "the sexiest dress in the world!"  And was she far wrong?  With its baby-doll bows scattered over a see-through sheath, this mini is a masterpiece of tease and taboo.  Looking at it you think, who cares what it means - and no wonder Scaasi had so many clients!