Sane Boston

Boston's Brahmins have firm opinions. On no subject are their opinions firmer than on Modern Art. In recent years Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has admitted a fine van Gogh, a good Cezanne, a very expensive Gauguin. But as late as 1926 F. W. Coburn, art critic of the Boston Herald, still denounced modernism in the tones of a Cotton Mather. To Pundit Coburn, Cezanne was a poor painter whose good dinners caused his friends to "whoop it up for him and get his pictures admitted to places where they wouldn't otherwise have been received"; van Gogh was "a crazy galoot who cut off his own ear to spite a woman"; Gauguin was a failure who ran off to the South Seas because he couldn't make the grade, who painted distorted pictures over which "the shapely natives had every reason to bring libel suits." "At their worst," said Mr. Coburn firmly, "[their paintings] resembled the crude elemental expressions which nitwits affix to sidewalks, barn doors and elsewhere--especially elsewhere." To him Boston was "a community which today possesses the best school of painting in existence anywhere."

Last month, when Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art's traveling Picasso show set up its tents at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, it called down a rage of flaming letters in the Boston papers. Feature writers had a field day with the bewildered comments of curious spectators; editors published pictures of small boys giggling and smirking at Picasso's goofier canvases.

Loudest, firmest protester was Boston's eight-month-old Society for Sanity in Art (youngest branch of Chicago's famed organization of similar name), which found an opportunity for its maiden crusade. Last week, from the black-upholstered fastness of her Victorian apartment, the Society's old-maid president, Margaret Fitzhugh Browne, said: "[The Picasso show] is an exhibition of crazy stuff. People who went to the show flocked to join the Society for Sanity in Art." She affirmed the Society's answer to Picasso's challenge: a rival exhibition demonstrating sane art, to be held in Vose Galleries. Examination of the Society for Sanity in Art's catalogue disclosed one disconcerting fact: all the sane artists represented in its show were dead.

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