On a recent afternoon, union members stood outside the Museum of Fine Arts calling on management to boost wages. Visitors wandered through the museum’s critically acclaimed van Gogh exhibition. The erstwhile Benin Kingdom Gallery, abruptly emptied after a donor retracted his gift, seemed forlorn, as workers prepared to renovate a separate suite of galleries for the museum’s modern collection.
Amid the bustle, Matthew Teitelbaum, the museum’s even-keeled director who will step down at the end of the month, nibbled at a corn muffin as he dissected the kaleidoscopic jumble of issues he’s had to navigate during the tumultuous decade he’s led New England’s premier art museum.
“I’ve said museums should be part of the street and part of everyday life,” Teitelbaum, 69, said while seated beneath a shade tree in the museum’s Calderwood Courtyard. “Well, Matthew: You better live with the consequences of that. We’re in it. … We’re not exactly at a moment of calm in America.”
While previous generations of museum leaders were prized for their connoisseurship, sway with donors, and ability to build big, Teitelbaum has presided over the MFA as museums across the country have become arenas of cultural struggle — the battle over which stories we tell about ourselves, and, critically, who gets to tell them.
As director, Teitelbaum has had to carve a sinuous path through today’s fractured cultural landscape, balancing the desires of wealthy donors, the needs of the broader community, and the demands of activists — all while caring for a world-class collection of some 500,000 objects. He sought early to create a welcoming culture, diversifying the museum’s collections, its staff, and audiences. He introduced a variety of initiatives to make the museum more accessible to specific demographic groups, while also cultivating traditional donors and seeking to acquire works by underrepresented artists. The result is a museum that is considerably more community-oriented than when he arrived in 2015, but also one that has acquired several important collections in the past decade and renovated or recovered 26 galleries, with more on the way.
But these successes were at times overtaken by upheaval and controversy. The MFA faced alarming allegations of racism in 2019. It suffered severe economic turmoil after it closed during the pandemic, an excruciating chapter that resulted in layoffs, lingering staff dissatisfaction, and a successful union drive. Meanwhile, the museum’s collections have faced increased scrutiny as emboldened foreign governments and individuals file restitution claims for disputed artworks. Hackers have partially crippled its website, social justice activists have called on the MFA to address problematic artworks, and the museum faces stiff competition for a new generation of donors.
On balance, though, the MFA looks good roughly 10 years after Teitelbaum succeeded longtime director Malcolm Rogers. The museum just closed a show devoted to overlooked Boston artist John Wilson. Its endowment has grown to some $738 million, and annual visitor numbers recently topped 1 million for the first time since the pandemic. Still, Teitelbaum’s successor, Pierre Terjanian, will face significant hurdles: The MFA is still open a cost-saving six days a week, total staffing remains significantly lower compared to pre-COVID levels, and this fiscal year the museum presented just 20 exhibitions, down from 26 before the pandemic.
“Running a museum is an extremely complicated endeavor, one where you’re frequently balancing competing rights, as opposed to right and wrong,” said Jill Medvedow, former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. “Matthew Teitelbaum has really tried to lead from both his head and his heart. That is admirable and it is honest.”
Teitelbaum notched a major win in 2017, when he secured a sprawling gift of Dutch and Flemish paintings that instantly transformed the museum’s Netherlandish collection into one of the country’s finest. He orchestrated a major gift of Chinese paintings and calligraphy the following year as well as the acquisition of a vast trove of important photographs.
“It’s all joined together by the spirit of the different ways to understand these works of art,” said Teitelbaum, who has also sought to establish definitive collections of Boston artists Hyman Bloom and Wilson. “If we do it well, you can come in here and get really challenged to think about our place in the world at this moment.”
But Teitelbaum, who specializes in modern and contemporary art, also had some important misses. The museum, often criticized for its scant modern and contemporary holdings, could have benefited tremendously from longtime trustee Lois Torf, who’d built a renowned collection of modern prints. Torf, who died in 2020, gave more than 100 works to the museum, but many of her most prized works ended up at auction.
“I can’t actually fully understand what happened there,“ said Teitelbaum, who recently secured a $25 million gift to enhance the museum’s modern art program.
“It is a necessary commitment [to newer art] that has to be evident to every visitor,” he added. “If we don’t achieve that, we will always be seen as somewhat incomplete.”
Teitelbaum’s first big leadership challenge came in 2019, when a group of Black and Latino students on a field trip alleged racist treatment by MFA workers and visitors. The accusations made international headlines, as the MFA, long cast as a stronghold of Brahmin snobbery, stood accused of something far worse.
Some museum supporters urged Teitelbaum to push back against the allegations. Activists clamored for reform, and the attorney general’s office, then under Maura Healey, launched an investigation.
It was a defining, lonely moment for Teitelbaum, who sought to validate the students’ experiences, while also holding that MFA staff did nothing wrong.
“My position very early on was that both can be true,” said Teitelbaum. “That’s where I went quickly.”
But some longtime supporters, as well as staff, felt the mild-mannered director rolled over too easily.
“The museum took a black eye that some people felt was unjustified,” said one donor who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely. “It was with good intentions, but he lost some support.”
It was an education for the Canadian-born Teitelbaum, an artist’s son who’d previously run the Art Gallery of Ontario.
“I had not experienced the hardness around positions that was expressed so quickly,” he said. “Sometimes it felt like: How will we get through this?”
The museum eventually entered a memorandum of understanding with the AG’s office, agreeing to establish a $500,000 fund to support reconciliation efforts. (The MFA has since completed its MOU commitments.)
Teitelbaum also launched a host of efforts geared at democratizing the museum, including a robust paid internship program, community forums about upcoming exhibitions, and two new positions dedicated to community engagement and belonging and inclusion.
Questions of racial sensitivity tested him anew in the fall of 2020, when the MFA, along with three other prominent museums, announced they would postpone a jointly organized career survey of Philip Guston that included his cartoon-like depictions of the Ku Klux Klan. Their reason: The museums needed time to reconsider the show given the racial tumult that followed George Floyd’s murder.
The decision was met with howling derision in the art world, where the postponement was described as patronizing, a sheepish example of safe-space overreach.
When the exhibition finally opened at the MFA in May 2022, it drew positive reviews, despite its inclusion of trigger warnings and a detour so viewers could avoid the Klan paintings. The museums’ actions prompted one critic to write: The “whole thing smells of bad faith — of art institutions not so much making amends as covering their badly exposed rear ends.”
Three years later, that criticism has largely faded, and Teitelbaum is often praised for his sustained effort to open the MFA to new audiences.
“He’s really grounded us in the city, and brought people in who had not really had a presence in the museum,” said honorary trustee Lisbeth Tarlow. “It’s not a bricks-and-mortar kind of flashy accomplishment, but it’s every bit and more so in terms of an impact on the museum.”
But perhaps the most consequential events of Teitelbaum’s tenure came during the pandemic, when the MFA closed for roughly eight months.
With earned revenue at a standstill, Teitelbaum presided over a painful round of layoffs, which in turn prompted staff, energized in part by the resurgent social justice movement, to join a nationwide effort to unionize. The MFA, like many museums, is still recovering from the fallout.
“Who has led a public institution in your lifetime where revenues stopped in a 24-hour period?,” asked Teitelbaum. “The catastrophic shock of that is deeper for cultural institutions than many of us imagine, and we’re still working through it.”
Even so, Teitelbaum asserted, he’s leaving the MFA with “a lot of momentum.”
“I feel good about the direction,” he said. He added that he plans to split his time between Boston and Toronto, though he remains uncertain about his next act.
“I’m not running away from the issues,” said Teitelbaum. “On the contrary, my challenge is: How do I stay in them without a structure around me?”
But those questions would have to wait. For now, he was content to amble through some of the museum’s newly renovated galleries.
En route, Teitelbaum stopped off in a stairwell, where he made an unprompted offer to photograph a young visitor. As he regaled her at length with tales of the museum’s founding, the outgoing director never once let on his role in shaping the institution.
“Evolution, not revolution,” was how he’d repeatedly described his stewardship earlier in the day.
Now, as Teitelbaum wandered the galleries in his waning days as director, he was facing a bit of both.
Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com.