Boston Museum Centennial

until April

IN 1877 Edgar Degas painted a picture of two women in long green dresses looking at a painting in a museum. They tile their heads in scrutiny of the art; one holds an open guide book. Degas sketched them in irregular fuzzy strokes, as though he saw them pause for a moment before they moved on. Standing in front of this painting you become aware that you are repeating the event Degas has described-as though he had directed you to act it out. And you almost expect to find a camera behind you, ready to place you and the painting in a frame and compose a new picture for another viewer.

Degas-assuming that this work would indeed hang in a museum-gives an uneanny sense of the necessity of the viewer for the work of art. He aims his painting directly at future viewers. This painting is now in the centennial exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Many of the pieces in this show, taken from different ears and countries, indicate that they had no premonition of being placed in a museum: a Chinese vase, a Gothic Madonna, chairs designed for Napoleon, each made to glorify some person or cause, and not addressed to the museum viewer.

But all these works, unrelated in history or conception, have been placed together and destined for a common future-housed in an American museum. Degas' work suggests the endless process of exchange between viewer and work of art, in which these pieces will all participate. The title of the exhibition -Centennial Acquisitions: Art Treasures for Tomorrow -states with assurance the future continuity of the experience of looking at art.

By gathering works of the highest quality from civilizations separated by centuries and continents the Museum destroys the sense of chronological time. They seem to have been created outside of any time sequence, created by single minds confronted with a mass of material. Each piece, whether it be by Paul Klee or by an artist from the Roman Empire, when mixed with this group abandons its specific place and date in history. Exhibited together as examples of the world's art all artists are placed on the same footing. Though few of the artists speak the same language, or comprehend each other's style, their works as a group assume a common excellence of design and idea.

Chance played an important part in deciding which works should come to Boston. The collection is made up of gifts from private collectors and purchases by the Museum. The scarcity of great works of art on the market and economic considerations limits a museum's effort to add to its collection.

The Boston Museum's new group does not present a full picture of the most important styles; rather it snatches moments of beauty from the history of art.

THE SCATTERED selection of works in the exhibition does not show direct interrelationships. The large passage from the severe portraits of Colonial America to the abstract color of Hans Hoffman is not illuminated. Yet similar sensibilities toward art appear at unpredictable times. The oldest piece in the show, a Cycladic idol from an Aegean island in the third millennium, B. C., a work of majestic simplicity, resembles the work of Brancusi, a contemporary sculptor, who unfortunately is not in the exhibition.

The Museum has broken the exhibition into general categories of style-Ancient, Asiatic, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque, 19th century. American, and 20th century. The arrangement of each room creates a rhythm in which the pieces of a given cra are set. The pace is slow. Each work stands apart from the others with its own particular lighting. Dramatic lighting isolating ancient works in dark rooms enhances their quiet presence.

Raphael's portrait of a young girl emanates a motionless dignity similar to that of the ancient works-it can fill the space at the top of the stairs where it stands alone. With harmonious colors and minute detail the Renaissance master describes the girl's individuality.

The pace slowly accelerates in rooms where paintings are brightly lit, and hung side by side. The monumental ornate Baroque paintings and tapestries have no need for any additional atmosphere. A contemporary work of art would look equally ridiculous if it were off-set by a dramatic spotlight in a darkened room, placed in a display that has no connection to the environment of today.

The 20th century art crowds together in one room, divided by a small ramp and some partitions. The closeness of paintings and sculptures and the directions that the viewer must walk in order to see all the things make a burst of movement. In this confusion, the largest. simplest canvas dominates, a work by Morris Louis with streams of Acrylic color poured down each side and an area of gaping white in the middle. The eye must leap among the different rhythms in the room-from the fragility of Giacometti figure to the heavy rounded bronze body by Maillol. Among the modern things, a few seem as rare as the ancient discoveries. One tiny, unusual Picasso, done before his Cubist work, shows women crossing a square. He suggests the forms of the figures bending forward against the wind by smudges of charcoal. If they turned around, you would see women like those in Greece dressed only in black.

The rapid motion in this room gives a sense of the works that have been produced from cultures closest to ours in both time and space. Particularly, the most recent works of the New York School represented here by Morris Louis and David Smith proclaim the nearness of the greatest works of art produced in the '60's. In the eloquent monumental treatment of the media and their honesty they stand equally beside artists long established as great.

This exhibition makes us realize that our society of a thousand ugly adjectives has been able to give visions.