The Missing Masterpiece
Giovanni, Norman Thomas di
THE LATE Alvan T. Fuller, businessman and twice Governor of Massachusetts, collected paintings. It is told that in his lifetime Fuller was a very generous man. Earlier this year some fifty...
...Somehow, though, the disappointment was to be expected, and here is why...
...Their presence with the missing masterpiece in hand told a great deal about that public career of Fuller's, "marked . . . by his forcefulness and independence...
...Anyway it was disappointing—especially after the fine catalog and the tasteful modern posters pasted in every subway station...
...But," Felicani pointed out, holding up the death masks of his two friends, "we respectfully say that these two persons are also dead and they were murdered...
...Their faces—Sacco's long-nosed, smoothskinned and young...
...Also hanging were two stiff Canalettos and four large, coarsely executed Hubert Robert pastorals...
...But the bold subheadlines said nothing of Fuller's business, nothing of his collection of paintings...
...On the reverse side was the celebrated statement of Vanzetti's that begins, "If it had not been for this thing I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men...
...23, 1927...
...Above that, "Sacco and Vanzetti belong here...
...Sadly, flagrantly missing from among the collection was any indication of Alvan T. Fuller's greatest masterpiece, his own true handiwork: the execution in 1927 of the two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti...
...But they took their places at the edge of the street, where they were interviewed by newspapermen, tape-recorded for radio broadcast and filmed for TV...
...The subheads in both the Globe and Hsrald talked of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...But what was the anarchists' triumph—in Vanzetti's words, their "work for tolerance, for Justice, for man's understanding of man" —was the Governor's nemesis...
...the one Augustus John, plainly bad...
...But of course it was to be guessed beforehand that this masterpiece would not be represented there...
...What was Sacco's and Vanzetti's career was also Fuller's career...
...In all three [Fuller) won distinction: in business, in politics and, not least, in collecting art...
...Perhaps...
...The four picketers stood with their leaflets, their vision and their sense of justice to tell some who did not know and to remind others who had forgotten that Alvan T. Fuller's life was not quite the "useful and creative one" described in the museum catalog...
...And that was about it...
...Earlier this year some fifty of his best pictures hung in a memorial exhibit in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts...
...There was one Rembrandt, a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, a luminous Turner and several Romneys...
...When Fuller died in a moving picture theatre a year ago, the papers carried the news in full headlines...
...On one side of the leaflet was printed—startling white against a black background—the death masks of the two anarchists...
...One of them, Aldino Felicani, a Boston printer, anarchist and close friend of the two men, said to the papers, "We have been told this is in poor taste, since the exhibition honors Governor Fuller, who is dead...
...THE PERSPICACITY, the downright clairvoyance of those four who distributed the leaflets: they had guessed correctly that the masterpiece would be missing...
...The museum visitor may have read this about Fuller in the exhibit's catalog: It is rarely given to one man in a lifetime . . . to pursue three careers and to make each of them so large and lasting a contribution to his community...
...Did this collection reflect money without taste...
...THE LATE Alvan T. Fuller, businessman and twice Governor of Massachusetts, collected paintings...
...and at the bottom, "Be sure to include this picture among the masterpieces of Alvan Tufts Fuller, now on exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts...
...The next day there were some two dozen lines on the art page of the New York Times with the story of the protest...
...The sympathetic account began, "The ghosts of 'a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler'—anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed for murder in 1927—came back as they often do, to haunt Boston today...
...By the front door of the museum, they stood in the gray cold until shooed off the property by museum guards, who threatened arrest...
...His name will live only as the names of Sacco and Vanzetti live...
...both of them hollow from their prison hunger strikes—these faces were missing, were what killed the truth and quality of the Fuller exhibit...
...It is told that in his lifetime Fuller was a very generous man...
...And there were some in Boston who had surmised it, for at ten o'clock on the morning the Fuller exhibit was officially opened, three men and a woman stood at the front entrance to the museum distributing leaflets...
...REMEMBERI the leaflet read, MURDERED AUG...
...They had with them the original Sacco and Vanzetti death masks, cast in stark white plaster...
...His presence in Congress for four years and his two terms as Governor of Massachusetts from 1925 to 1929 exemplified public stewardship of a high order, marked as they were by his forcefulness and independence . . . But on to the collection...
...So after more than thirty-two years—a generation— Sacco and Vanzetti are still frontpage news in the city that put them to death...
...The United Press sent the story through New England towns...
...Best were some Sargent exercises: "copies" after Dutch masters...
...In another room were five Renoirs, small and second-rate, a Pissarro, a Monet, a Degas...
...Vanzetti's haggard, hook-nosed, with the bushy mustache...
...The one original Sargent was a murky oil...
...The Boston Globe carried the story in two columns on its front page: "Art Museum Police Rout Sacco-Vanzetti Pickets...
Vol. 6 • July 1959 • No. 3
