While his classmates schooled at Groton or Middlesex might have visited the great museums and monuments of Europe, Perry had never traveled beyond the mid-Atlantic states. As much as he enjoyed Post’s classes, he found himself woefully out of his depth, earning a C- in his first term. His art history courses were not the only ones Perry found challenging. German A was a bugbear, Geometry I was even worse, and Botany was a disaster. His first report came in with three Cs and two Es. Perry was put on probation and would be asked to leave if his grades didn’t improve by the end of his freshman year. His worried mother assured Dean Hindmarsh that her son was “worth educating,”12 confidently adding that by another year, when he got into his stride, he would do worthwhile work.
As his mother promised, Perry did get into his stride, eventually raising his grade level to a B average when he began to major in fine arts in his final two years. Art history courses with Charles Kuhn, George Harold Edgell, Langdon Warner, and Helmut von Erffa were complemented by a studio art class with Martin Mower, “an old-fashioned small-time painter who was a friend of Mrs. Jack Gardner,” as Perry later remembered him, and “a real aesthete.”13 In those days, the art history courses included drawing as a way of training the eye and memorizing the details, especially in the study of architecture and objects, and at these exercises he excelled.
The Fogg collection was not the only one available to the art history majors at Harvard. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts – housing one of the greatest collections in America – was just across the river, and students were encouraged to go there. The history of Asian art was just beginning to be taught at Harvard (Norton had not considered it worthy of serious study in his day), and the Asiatic collections at the MFA were world-renowned. But unlike the Metropolitan Museum, which he had enjoyed so much as a boy, Perry found the Boston museum somewhat forbidding. No one on the curatorial staff came forward to welcome the Harvard students, and certainly not the director, Edward Jackson Holmes (a direct descendant of Oliver Wendell Holmes), who was regarded as a remote and intimidating figure. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, Fenway Court, was just a stone’s throw from the MFA and had a far more welcoming and fascinating atmosphere. Mrs. Gardner had been a personal friend of most of the Harvard fine arts faculty, and her museum, with its world-class collection of European paintings and its dazzling Venetian garden courtyard, was for the art-minded student “an absolute wonderland.”14
There were other outlets for Perry’s art interests in his undergraduate years. His talent for drawing or, as he put it, “my modest ability with a pen,”15 won him membership to the Lampoon. This unique club of undergraduates produced a humor magazine four or five times a year, and because wit and talent were more desirable commodities in this context than a listing in the Social Register, membership in the Lampoon was within his reach, while exclusive final clubs such as the Porcellian (sometimes called “the Piggy Bank,” referring to the exceptional wealth of its members) were not. But the Lampoon had perhaps more interesting distinctions to its credit in the long run. For a start it was housed in the most eccentric building in Cambridge – a flatiron mock-Flemish fortress at the division of Mount Auburn and Bow streets. Only members were allowed within its fabled interior, which was furnished with antiques donated by wealthy patrons, including Isabella Stewart Gardner, and finished in dark paneled walls, its vestibule inlaid with no fewer than 7,000 Delft tiles. Members enjoyed dinner there once a week in the trapezoidal Great Hall, lit from above by sixteenth-century Spanish chandeliers while gargoyle-like creatures supported lamps along the walls. Thus the Lampoon provided another inspiring interior in which to bask, as well as another social outlet, albeit, as Perry put it, “in a clubby sort of way.”16
In his junior year Perry also became involved with another kind of club – the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. This was an experimental art gallery started by Lincoln Kirstein, Eddie Warburg, and John Walker, all seniors when Perry was a freshman. In 1928, with the support of both Forbes and Sachs, this adventurous trio claimed a couple of rooms on the second floor of the Harvard Coop in the heart of Harvard Square in order “to exhibit to the public works of living contemporary art whose qualities are still frankly debatable.”17 From the point of view of Sachs and Forbes, this undergraduate enterprise let them off the hook when it came to the untested art of the early twentieth century. They could be supportive in both spirit and funding, along with other members of the board, while maintaining their own high standards at the Fogg. Membership in the Society cost a student from Harvard or Radcliffe two dollars a year. For this they were introduced to modern art by the likes of Léger, Miró, Braque, and Picasso, whose qualities, in just a few years, would be hardly debatable at all. The Society even staged a piece of what we would now call performance art, inviting Alexander Calder to construct his circus of wire figures on the spot and then make them perform. It was a daring and audacious enterprise, true to the spirit of the times. Soon afterward, in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art opened in New York, with both Kirstein and Warburg deeply involved in its formation.
By the time Rathbone joined the staff of the Society, Kirstein and the rest had graduated and left Cambridge. They passed the leadership to fine arts major Otto Wittman, who in turn urged Rathbone and Robert Evans, an English major, to become codirectors, maintaining the original triumvirate form to the organizations. Already it had attracted a loyal group of followers, including several New York collectors and dealers willing to lend work for exhibitions. During Rathbone’s tenure the society organized an exhibition of surrealist art – the latest “group movement” – which included works by Dalí, Ernst, Picasso, and Miró. They also organized shows of contemporary American artists, including recent works by Charles Sheeler, Mark Tobey, and Stuart Davis, stressing that these Americans showed an independence from European influences. Venturing into the politically charged, they exhibited a series of prints by Ben Shahn on the controversial Sacco-Vanzetti trial. The show inspired various groups to call for the expulsion of the undergraduates responsible for it and required President Lowell to compose a public statement in their defense, making the whole event something of a sensation. At peak times the Society’s visitors numbered more than one hundred a day, and by 1933 it had become a vibrant part of the cultural life of Greater Boston.
When he graduated in 1933, Rathbone already had his eye on Paul Sachs’s highly recommended museum course. Various ideas he had once entertained – of becoming a writer, a set designer, or a landscape architect – had by now faded. Ever since taking his course in French painting in his sophomore year, he had warmed to the idea of studying further with Sachs, for whom he felt a special affection. While Sachs treated undergraduates with a certain formality, his graduate students enjoyed a more intimate relationship. Although his lectures could be somewhat pedantic – he read them aloud from a script – he was known to be at his best in the more relaxed format of the seminar.
Paul Sachs hardly looked the part of a museum man. In contrast to the rather rumpled figure of Edward Forbes, Sachs dressed like a banker, as Rathbone observed with interest, in stiff collars and dark suits. He was abnormally short – about five foot two – and when he was seated on a high Renaissance chair, his feet didn’t quite touch the floor. He had very dark, bushy eyebrows and piercing eyes, which appeared even larger behind his thick spectacles. He had a rich voice and a “very pleasant New York accent,”18 and best of all, it seemed to Rathbone, a warm heart. Everyone who took Sachs’s museum course also came to know Mrs. Sachs, whom Rathbone remembered as “rather broad in the beam, with an old-fashioned sort of chignon hairdo and a smile that stretched all the way from ear to ear.”19 Meta Sachs took a real interest in her husband’s students, and she also had the wit and confidence it took to poke fun at her husband when he acted a bit pompous.
As his students grew in number – Perry Rathbone entered the largest class to date of twenty-eight in the fall of 1933 – Sachs maintained the informality of the course’s fledgling years. On Monday afternoons he held seminars at his own home, an old federal mansion called Shady Hill just a short walk from Harvard Yard and the Fogg. Appropriately enough this was the former home of Charles Eliot Norton, the figurehead and first professor of Harvard’s art history department.