At Boston’s MFA: “Turner’s Modern World”

Turner’s Modern World, an exhibit at the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, through July 10, 2022.

“Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming on),” 1840, by J.M.W. Turner. (MFA Boston)

By Robert Israel

When I viewed the Turner exhibit at the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts earlier this week I thought about the artwork of Lucien Freud.

It is not by accident that I mention Turner and Freud in the same breath. Both painters hailed from the UK, although Turner, (1775-1851), was a native Britisher, while Freud, (1922-2011), emigrated from Austria, the scion of the famous Freud dynasty who escaped with his family just as Hitler tightened his murderous garrote around the necks of Jews. While Turner predated Freud, both painters captured, in dramatic depictions of oil on canvas, the combustible world we live in.

The similarities between the two painters don’t end there: both painters were known for opprobrious behaviors, specifically toward women. Although Turner didn’t paint prurient canvasses of the female nude like Freud, many readers will remember Turner’s abusive behavior toward women depicted in Mr. Turner, a much-heralded 2014 biographical film of the painter by director Mike Leigh.

But Lucien Freud was in the forefront of my mind for another reason: the last time I attended a press viewing at the MFA was to see Freud’s self-portraits two years before, just ahead of the pandemic. During the ensuing two year hiatus, the MFA was closed, staff members were dismissed or furloughed, some staff were asked to stay on with pay cuts; this was followed by a brief re-opening and then closure again when the Omicron virus surged. The granite gray and imposing MFA has always seemed uninviting; it resembles a mausoleum; during the pandemic, it literally became a tomb.

So just strolling down the familiar corridors in the newly awakened MFA during the Turner press preview – to see my neighbors and fellow scribblers gather in the Gund gallery to listen while curators described Turner’s magnificent creations — was reason enough to celebrate. The staff might have considered passing out party hats. And Turner’s work did not disappoint: it is grand, bold and inspiring. The MFA exhibit showcases the painter’s adventurous – and visionary — use of color in numerous large and small canvasses. I soon banished Lucien Freud to the back of my memory where he belonged.

The exhibit puts Turner in context with the times he lived in, during the pre- and post-Industrial Revolution, when all things seemed possible. It was a time when the British Romantic poets – Byron, Wordsworth, and others – celebrated the achievements of mankind and the glory of nature in their long, rambling verse that paved the way for American poet Walt Whitman who wrote odes to personal liberty and to democracy.

It was also a time of war, of slavery, of social reform. Museum goers are invited to view over 100 works of art and to stroll through galleries that show Turner’s pastoral landscapes and seascapes.

Near the end of his long and productive life, Turner experimented with color and his sketchbooks reveal a restless mind and spirit always engaged in exploration. One sketchbook is remarkable for its minimalist use of lines that depict ships at sea facing sea spray and sea foam, waves lapping their bows. A simple, seemingly haphazard scrawl of charcoal pencil lines on a vellum sketchbook page suggest a summer squall. There are also numerous watercolors, and this, one senses, is a medium Turner wanted to explore further: it allowed him to achieve a blurring, swirling mélange of color.

There is more, of course, specifically in Turner’s turbulent painting of a ship disgorging slaves at sea while an indifferent sun breaks through the clouds just as another storm approaches. Observe this painting close and then step a few paces back to gauge the skill Turner applied to creating it. It shows triumph and tragedy and is one of Matthew Teitelbaum’s — he’s the MFA’s director — favorite paintings. “This painting shows both terror and beauty co-existing,” Teitelbaum observed. “It reminds me of how life is, that we are always negotiating between fear and grace.” To Matthew’s point, I would add this observation, penned by Albert Camus: “I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.”

To view the Turner exhibit at Boston’s MFA is to embark on a wondrous, often menacing voyage.

Ukrainian Exodus: Then and Now

A Ukrainian Jewess, circa 1905, at Ellis Island, the same year my grandparents, Max and Anna Schecter, arrived there. (Lewis Hine photo)

By Robert Israel

At the close of his one-act play “An Illiad,” a modern interpretation of Homer’s narrative poem, the actor/playwright Denis O’Hare recounted a catalog of wars humankind has engaged in since the dawn of recorded history. Viewed live at the Paramount Theater in Boston several years ago, it was an astonishing — and exhausting — tour de force; O’Hare admonished us to heed our endless legacy of global destruction, soldering it into our collective consciousness.

If he were to perform the play again, O’Hare would no doubt have to add today’s deadly and unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine by Russia to his monologue.

The message is this: Wars morph into other wars; each new war is more deadly than the conflict that preceded it.

**

My grandparents fled a different war in Kyiv (Kiev) a century ago. It is worth reexamining that long ago history: my late grandparents shared a similar fate of the almost 3 million Ukrainians in 2022 who escaped the city under such duress that they had no time to mourn relatives they left behind in the smoldering ruins.

Max Schecter (1886-1956), my maternal grandfather, considered himself Russian. He was conscripted into the Tsar’s army. He fought against the Bolsheviks. A photograph in my office shows him posing in a starched white uniform and a cap, cradling a French horn, a proud member of the Tzar’s marching band. He married my grandmother, Anna Stein (1894-1965), in an Orthodox synagogue in Kyiv. But the political tides – and widespread outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence — turned against the newlyweds. They escaped to Poland and made their way to France where they booked passage to Liverpool. In England, they were quarantined (the virus of the day was conjunctivitis, and it spread throughout the immigrant population). They arrived at Ellis Island in New York months later, speaking only Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. They settled in Providence. Max joined a construction crew and built the tenement where I was later born and raised, on Gordon Avenue, in the city’s industrial south end. Anna worked as a seamstress in a textile mill; she took in “homework,” stitching hemlines onto ladies’ garments, using her foot-powered Singer sewing machine.

Max and Anna’s residence in a new land brought gains and losses. They raised three daughters, all of whom succeeded as first generation Americans, finding jobs and later raising families. But, during the Depression, the Schecter’s triple-decker was repossessed, forcing them to buy it a second time. Yes, they made it safely to America. They lived long enough to welcome a bumper crop of grandchildren. But they were broken people. They never repaired the pieces torn from them during their forced repatriation.

And then there’s this post mortem: During family gatherings, Max and Anna recounted the stories of relatives that escaped Russia but only traveled as far as Rădăuți, Romania before they ran out of money. There was a Jewish community there; they were given shelter. But it was the 1930s. A few years later, Max and Anna learned their relatives perished in a concentration camp.

**

The fate that awaits the almost 3 million souls that have left the Ukraine is unknown. Humanitarian efforts are underway, but a careful glance at the faces captured by photographer Rafal Milach in the New Yorker magazine in the March 21 issue speaks volumes: these men, women and children stare back at us to show us their utter grief and despair.

The story of Nastya Kvyatkovskaya, age 21, haunts me as I try to reconcile that which is irreconcilable: the maelstrom of destruction perpetrated by the Russian armed forces that continues to sweep hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into its deadly vortex.

When asked about her life, her dashed plans to open a clothing store in Kyiv, and her uncertain repatriation, Nastya told photographer Milach: “You have to act on your ideas the second that they come to your head. Because later, that’s it. Everything can change in one day.”

While I am heartened by the outpouring of help the refugees are receiving, the root cause of their upheaval has to be eradicated. It comes down to this, a single lesson I have learned from paying attention to human history: we must stop this deadly cycle of war. Loss is permanent. It leaves lasting scars. Whatever we gain never replaces what we have lost.

Remembering Rosemarie E. Sansone

Rosemarie E. Sansone, 1945-2022

By Robert Israel

Rosemarie E. Sansone died on February 22^nd after a battle with cancer. We worked together at Suffolk University in Boston in the public affairs office in the late 1990s. I remember her as a highly efficient champion of causes and institutions, who possessed a vibrant personality. She engaged in the tug-of-war between those in power and those seeking access to power, and she did so skillfully, never suffering fools. She could be disarming and gracious at the same time. That said, she was not one to be crossed. She had keen political instincts; she could hold her own with the best – and the worst — of them.

I joined Suffolk after leaving the editor’s job at The Jewish Advocate on School Street in downtown Boston, and I went to work one block away at One Beacon Street where Suffolk rented spacious digs on the 24^th floor overlooking the city. The Advocate had become untenable: the ever-demanding community was unsupportive, and during my tenure there, circulation waned. I had to manage a paper with literally no budget and found myself laboring to put the newspaper out each week, writing stories, editing wire copy, laying out pages, soliciting and taking ads. The paper ceased publishing two years ago, ending its 108 year history.

Rosemarie was the director of the Suffolk office; I served as assistant director. She had the windows overlooking Boston Common; I worked across the hall in a windowless L-shaped closet. I didn’t need more than a desk, a phone and a computer to get the word out about the ambitions the college was then making to expand its Beacon Hill footprint to include a new law school building and dormitories in the heart of the Downtown Crossing neighborhood.

Rose (I never called her Rosemarie) worked diligently at her job and she was tireless in her promoting the school, one of Boston’s most politically entrenched academies, albeit with more humble roots than its elite competitors Harvard, MIT and BU. Many of its graduates came from working class roots in Dorchester, Mattapan, South Boston, Roxbury and the North End, attended classes at night and, upon graduating, took jobs at law offices, or in various municipal departments in Massachusetts’ cities and towns. The students were by and large of Irish stock, although by the time I worked there, the school was expanding to diversify and recruit students from around the globe. It was at Suffolk that I met Margaret Collins Weitz, a (now retired) French professor; together we co-authored a grant that, once funded, enabled me to travel to France for a two-week reporting trip that was later published in the Boston Sunday Globe.

Rose left Suffolk and used her connections to become the director of the Downtown Crossing Partnership. From time to time we’d meet for lunch at her office on Washington Street. We lived near one another – she in Lexington, I in nearby Arlington – and we had dinner on a couple occasions, reminiscing about the “old boys network,” as she called it, a network she continued to battle in order to get even the most mundane tasks approved. But such is the way of Boston, an old New England city deeply entrenched in rewarding its favorite sons with privileges and access. That atmosphere is slowly changing. Mayor Michelle Wu is the first woman (in 2021) to be elected to the corner office; like Rose before her, she exhibits feistiness and drive and she will need both — along with verve, imagination, and an army of supporters — to bulldoze past those determined to create obstacles that pose barriers to change.

While I admired Rose’s feisty spirit, my métier is as a writer, and that calling has taken me on a far different path, away from the limelight of the political arenas she sought access to and acceptance (and sustenance) from. While I prefer to step back from that limelight in order to objectively report on it, she craved the heat, the back room jockeying, and taking on the often-combative personalities that thrive in those atmospheres. During her best moments, and there were many best moments throughout her life and career, she exhibited the traits of a pugilist, one who gets up after being knocked down and who re-enters the ring bruised but not defeated, ready to go at it again, to battle (and to ultimately win) against all odds.

No doubt Rose would be waging those battles today had she won her personal fight against cancer. The disease took a vibrant, passionate, and articulate woman too early.