Isabella Stewart Gardner: Why it is time to explore her modernist dimension

The serene new visitor's center and entrance pavilion at the Gardner Museum is a great credit to Renzo Piano, superb architecture that brilliantly sets off the jewel of a museum Isabella Stewart Gardner designed a century and more ago. Those who didn't see the need for Piano's addition, involving as it did some small sacrifices of picturesque aspects of the Gardner complex, would have condemned the museum to decline and decay. Those who never lost faith in the need for the new design---especially the museums board and director-- are to be hugely commended. They have insured that Isabella Gardner's vision will be protected and sustained.

One hopes too that this bold approach to the Gardner legacy will extend as well to scholarship about the founder herself, who is still so widely misunderstood. Above all Gardner's role as a quiet but persistent champion of Modernism in Boston should be explored further. For example. It is a scandal that the 100th anniversary of the Boston Armory Show in Copley Square in 1913 is -- so far as I know -- to pass without any commemoration. Too quickly dismissed by those few who have studied it, in fact, the decision of the Copley Society to disdain a larger available hall in Boston so as to concentrate in a smaller hall only the most radical avant-garde European art --Picasso and Duchamp and Matisse and Kandinsky and Brancusi -- leaving out the much less striking American work, meant that the Boston Armory Show was a far more concentrated and bold experience of the new Modernism than either the New York or the Chicago shows that preceded it.

>> READ MORE: Renzo Piano's new wing pays tribute to the Gardner Museum's magic by Greg Cook <<

Nor was the Boston show without influence, especially at a time when Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital were centers of pioneering Freudianism in America. This is a lively subject with respect to the modernist muse! Poet e e cummings also saw the Boston show, which much influenced his work. Similarly some of the most important purchases were made at the Boston show.

Why do I stress this show?

How few people know that Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose Matisse was the first to enter an American museum, may well have had something to do with the Museum of Fine Arts' very early "corridor show" of that artist.

How few realize that Gardner was also one of the sponsoring vice-presidents of the pioneering Armory Show!

Piano's exquisite addition breathes new life and energy into Gardner's museum. The world of scholarship should follow suit and reevaluate the full scale of gardner's engagement with the transformative modernists.

Historian Douglass Shand-Tucci is the author of The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner, among other works. His blog is backbayhistorical.org.