The ongoing saga of the Mapplethorpe exhibition that has already caused a fire storm in Congress and set in motion an official inquiry into the workings of the National Endowment for the Arts, which helped to finance the show, continues to illuminate a good deal more about the current art scene than the organizers of the event could ever have intended to bring to our attention. Among much else, it has something to tell us about the decline in taste and intelligence that is now an accepted feature in museums that once took pride in setting high aesthetic standards for the communities they serve.
The particular art museum we have in mind, in this case, is the venerable Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, which is said to be the oldest institution of its kind in America. It is, or at least it once was, a jewel of a museum. It boasts of splendid collections in the fine arts and the decorative arts, and under several of its former directors—most notably A. Everett Austin, Jr., in the Thirties, and Charles C. Cunningham and James Elliott in more recent decades—it came to occupy an important place in the art life of the nation.
But since 1976, when Mr. Elliott left to become the director of the University Art Museum at the University of California in Berkeley, the Atheneum has clearly fallen on parlous times. It had virtually become a dropout as far as the national art scene was concerned, and today it appears to be mired in the worst muddle of its history.
Nearly two years ago the Atheneum acquired a new director, Patrick McCaughey, who arrived from Australia with no higher goal, apparently, than to win for the museum the kind of sensational publicity it had always shunned in the past. Even this dubious goal proved to be elusive, however, until the Mapplethorpe exhibition landed on the Atheneum’s doorstep. This was exactly the publicity opportunity Mr. McCaughey had been looking for, and he was clearly de termined to make the most of it. “Bingo!” he exclaimed in an interview in The New York Times on the eve of the show’s opening in Hartford. “This will put us absolutely in the national spotlight.”
Well, it hasn’t done any such thing. The Mapplethorpe show has inevitably caused a stir in Hartford, as any event at the very center of such a controversy would. But beyond that, neither the show itself nor Mr. McCaughey’s “Bingo!” interview, which appeared only in the Connecticut section of the Times, has done much to enhance the museum’s reputation. What it has done, however, is raise questions about Mr. McCaughey’s judgment in artistic matters, and thus about his competence as the director of a serious art museum.
The key passage in the Times interview was the following:
Of Mr. Mapplethorpe, Mr. McCaughey said: “He’s an important artist for his ennoblement of the human figure. At first he was seen as a wayward artist from the fringe homosexual community, but he moved toward reviving classical images. His male nudes bear comparison with those of Michaelangelo, Rodin or Picasso.”
The Times’s interviewer was too discreet, perhaps, to press Mr. McCaughey for a clarification of this matter of “ennoblement,” for the pictures under dispute in the Mapplethorpe exhibition are, as all the world now knows, devoted to images of sadomasochistic sexual acts—in other words, sexual torture. Nor was Mr. McCaughey asked to enlarge upon his preposterous references to Michaelangelo, Rodin, and Picasso. Mr. McCaughey was simply allowed to press on with yet another outlandish comparison.
When asked if this is an appraisal from hindsight [the Times story continued], Mr. McCaughey said that it was easier to assess a closed career but that the photographer was an artist of the [same] sort as Van Gogh, one who starts outside and moves inside.
So now, at least in the vicinity of Hartford, Connecticut, Robert Mapplethorpe has been elevated to the ranks of Michelangelo, Rodin, Picasso, and Van Gogh. Does anyone really believe this? Does Mr. McCaughey really believe this? We frankly doubt it. But this is what happens when a passion for the limelight overtakes every other consideration in the affairs of an art museum. Mr. McCaughey’s facile compar isons are also, of course, the mark of a provincial mind, which is not at all what the Atheneum is most in need of at the present time. Hartford’s real distinction in the Mapplethorpe affair has been to add an intellectual scandal to all the other misfortunes that have followed in the wake of this ill-conceived exhibition.
