Banned in Boston

The Gardner Museum drops an inconvenient book

by Dan Kennedy

TIFF 2: Shand-Tucci courts the art of scandal.

Just a week after Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam wrote about an "exquisite little tiff" involving historian/writer Douglass Shand-Tucci and the St. Botolph Club, Shand-Tucci is at the center of yet another literary controversy. It seems that his 1997 book, The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (HarperCollins), has been banned from the in-house store at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Shand-Tucci says he learned of the ban from a lawyer friend who visited the store last Saturday and asked for the book, only to be told that it was no longer available. I did a little investigative footwork myself on Tuesday, asking a polite clerk if I could purchase a copy. She replied that though the museum store had carried The Art of Scandal at one time, it has since been dropped because "there's a lot of innuendo that can't be substantiated" and "it's not a positive reflection on her" -- Gardner, that is. The clerk did add, helpfully, that I could find the book at the nearby Museum of Fine Arts.

"For a major cultural institution to ban a work like this is very bad," Shand-Tucci says, pronouncing himself "shocked" and "amazed."

The Art of Scandal received long, enthusiastic reviews in both the New York Times Book Review (which also chose it as one of its "Notable Books of 1998") and the New Republic. Nevertheless, museum officials may have concluded that Shand-Tucci's subject matter -- including Gardner's role as a patron and friend of Boston's gay subculture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- was a bit risqué for the tourists who wander in looking for pretty paintings.

At least that's my guess. Museum officials themselves did not respond to requests for comment.

The incident Beam reported had similar gay overtones. On January 24, Shand-Tucci is scheduled to deliver a lecture in Lincoln titled "The St. Botolph Club Goes to Trinity Church, or John Singer Sargent Has a Date with Phillips Brooks: Gay and Lesbian Boston 1890." He told Beam he'd received a letter from the St. Botolph -- of which he is a member -- asking him to make it clear that the club was not a sponsor (in fact, the talk is sponsored by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities).

Thanks to the embarrassment created by Beam's column, Shand-Tucci reports, the St. Botolph Club backed down. He's hoping something similar will happen with the Gardner Museum. Asked whether he plans to take any sort of action against the museum, he replied, "I don't think we're at that stage yet." His goal, he says, is to get the museum to admit it made "a big mistake."

Shand-Tucci's lecture on Boston's gay and lesbian culture of the 19th century takes place January 24 at 6 p.m. at the Codman Carriage House in Lincoln. Seating is by reservation only; tickets are $12, $10 for SPNEA members. For reservations, call (781) 259-8843.