Not quite yet a ruin was Memorial Hall, the grand old Victorian Gothic memorial to Harvard’s own Civil War Union dead. The imposing cathedral-shaped building had lost the top of its clock tower in a 1954 fire. Its soaring spire had been reduced to a squared-off stump, and ten years later Harvard showed no signs of interest in restoring it. Across the river the prosaic Prudential Tower rose fifty-two stories out of its element, the first skyscraper to challenge the coherent skyline of Boston’s Victorian Back Bay. Soon the little streets of downtown Boston would give way to a host of tall office buildings towering over the historic old State House and the Old South Meeting House. And so the mania for modernism and change raged through the decade, inexorably changing the face of old Boston.
In his youth Rathbone had championed modernism, but by the mid-1960s he no longer necessarily embraced the latest contemporary art. While he admired the abstract expressionists with some reservation, he now looked downright warily upon the emerging pop artists who were overtaking them – Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and especially Andy Warhol. He dutifully kept abreast of the art magazines of the day, such as Art in America and Artforum, but felt impatience with the obfuscation of art critics. He resented an approach that seemed to relegate connoisseurship to a lower position on the scale. Was theory overtaking the direct appreciation of the physical object? Was the new intellectualism doing its best to mystify rather than clarify? Was the new art drowning out the sacred values of beauty, craft, and technical innovation? Perhaps most of all, he saw his role as a champion of modern art being usurped and no longer urgent. The world had caught up with him – in fact, it was streaking past – and that particular adventure was no longer quite fresh.
Rathbone continued to be his socially adventurous self, eager for new experiences and new contacts, excited by the liberalism of the younger generation. The sexual revolution found him perhaps somewhat regretful that he had not been a youth in such a frankly liberated age while at the same time concerned for his teenage daughters’ virtue. Harvard still required a coat and tie in the dining halls, but soon these rules would give way to the pressures of antibourgeois proletarianism. Now it seemed that educated young men dressed like workmen in jeans and T-shirts, young women exposed more skin with every passing year, and instead of dancing to the steps of the fox-trot or the waltz, young people improvised and gyrated to the beat and twang of ear-splitting electric guitars. Yet while he bemoaned the demise of ballroom dancing, he leapt into the fray with a room full of the younger generation doing the Mashed Potato and the Twist, ever ready to experiment, to taste and engage in the curiosities of his time.
Alert to every nuance of a shifting culture, Rathbone was equivocal about the waning of the class system, which to him simply meant a lessening of certain standards. Without such standards, what would become of the beautiful traditions of his youth? Along with the class system seemed to go table manners, dress codes, and the English language. Returning from a big coming-out party in the mid-1960s, he lamented, “Somehow these debutante parties lack the glamour, the beauty, the ‘occasion’ that they certainly possessed when I was a youth. I suppose the basic reason is that their social meaning is dwindling.”17 It was not only the class system that was weakening but also the subordinate role of women in society. A revolution was brewing, its first signs in how a young woman of the next generation dressed. She wore a bikini on the beach and not much more on the street. Hemlines were on the rise; so were tight leather boots up to the knee and hot pants. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, sparked the beginning of the women’s movement and coincided with the introduction and growing popularity of the oral contraceptive, which opened the way to women’s sexual freedom. And who would have believed that to the next generation “coming out” in society would mean declaring yourself a homosexual rather than the carefully programmed activities of the debutante, the well-bred girl whose well-off parents were officially announcing her eligibility to be married? Was it imaginable that the word “elite” was on its way from being a word of status to something to be reviled, and soon to become a degrading -ism?
At the time Rathbone’s personality split along the lines of his dual instincts – equally strong – between his conservative and adventurous selves, between his love of tradition and his need for the vibrancy of the new and the experimental. His mind was still open, but the issues had changed color. He was at midlife, a point when many a modernist favoring change meets the inner preservationist. The older generation was dying off, passing on the mantle of responsibility and tradition. Now his mind reached as far backward in his memory as it did forward into the unknown. His mother died in 1960, and the death of Rettles’s aunt, Mary Peckitt, a grand dame of Washington, D.C., came soon afterward. She left a welcome trust fund, a house packed to the rafters with Renaissance Revival furniture, and an empty space in the family topography that signaled the end of an era.
Now in his midfifties, Rathbone had three children who were in their awkward teens. Peter, the eldest, not appearing to be ready for college after graduating from Brooks School, had enlisted in the army, signing on for an additional year with an assignment in Europe18 in a tactical move to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Peter, once pictured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at age six as the “youngest collector” with his little Calder stabile of a giraffe, groomed from an early age to appreciate the finer things in life, was home for the holidays from basic training in Fort Dix with his head shaven, soon to be stationed in Germany for three years, an army private with a safe but soul-crushing office job.
They say that siblings are like leaves on a branch, with each leaf turning the opposite direction from the last to better catch the light. Eliza had laid claim to the front seat of our father’s tutelage. She would be graduating from the ultratraditional Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, with a class that might with some accuracy be called the last of the debutantes. As his third child and second daughter, I escaped a certain degree of scrutiny and grooming for the role my sister inherited. It seemed less effort was made to direct me, or was it that I was less inclined to take direction, or both? A year later I would attend an educational experiment called Simon’s Rock in the Berkshires as a member of its first graduating class. My sister and I were only two years apart, but the changes taking place in those years meant that we almost belonged to different generations. She had a coming-out party; two years later I could see no point in doing the same.
The magic years were over. No one believed in Santa Claus anymore. Life had marched on at its steady pace, and then suddenly, it seemed to have gone by in a flash. “This was perhaps our last Christmas with all three children,” my father noted in his diary in 1965, although as a parent of three teenagers, he was also gratified to have maintained their respect and affection in the era of the so-called generation gap. “That they like us and our company and that of our friends means everything.”19
The years of his generation’s ascendancy had peaked. From now on it would be a struggle to stay one step ahead of the trends. And still, there was so much work to do. His former battle cry, “Art is for everyone,” was no longer new. What had become of the young man famous for ushering in change? For the first time in his life Rathbone felt that he might be behind the curve instead of in his customary place: ahead of it.
Having kept a journal faithfully since the early 1950s, in 1966 his writing trailed off, with hardly an entry between January and September. Confronting the blank pages on September 30, 1966, he wrote, “Months of neglect stare me in the face. The ever increasing pressure of life puts writing a journal almost beyond endurance.”20
The Making of a Museum Director
IN 1921 HARVARD INTRODUCED a yearlong graduate course led by Professor Paul Sachs called Museum Work and Museum Problems. Better known as simply “the Museum Course,” it has since become legendary, the first and by far the most influential of its kind in America.
The idea for the museum course came to Sachs in consultation with the secretary of the Metropolitan Museum, Henry Watson Kent, a high-flying innovator who routinely transcended his nominally administrative role. Kent perceived the urgent need to educate a new generation of museum professionals. Art museums in America were growing rapidly, and new museums were opening all over the map. Searching for a younger generation