The Lady of the House

Museum director Anne Hawley in her office, a space where Gardner herself once welcomed guests. (photograph by blake fitch)

The offices on the fourth floor of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum have little of the grandeur of the galleries below. The top floor is instead choked with clutter, teeming with exhibition booklets and chopped up by cubicles. Reaching it requires a ride in a rickety elevator, which Gardner installed when she was building her yellow-brick palazzo on the Fens more than a century ago. The elevator rises slowly, past the museum’s second floor, with its Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and past the Titian and Botticelli on the third—past all 2,500 works of art that were arranged by Isabella Stewart Gardner herself.

For several months each year, Gardner used this space as her private apartment. She felt that a caretaker’s close attention was so important that before she died in 1924, she mandated in her will that future museum directors were to live here, as well. That dictate and others similarly designed to preserve her museum have contributed to its unique charm as a timeless place. But they’ve also been an obstacle to its management as a modern institution.

As the museum’s staff grew from 15 to more than 100 in the decades after Gardner’s death, its leadership was eventually prompted to convert the apartment to offices. The renovation was a makeshift solution to overcrowding that, in deference to her will, left certain domestic accoutrements in place. Gardner’s china is still kept in her kitchen, and a photocopier sits away from the wall in her old dining room lest it scuff the antique wallpaper. One unlucky staffer works in what used to be one of Gardner’s closets. “It’s been a little rabbit warren up here,” says Anne Hawley, the museum’s current director. “My board president says she expects someone to claim the bathtub soon.”

Hawley’s own office, in the former drawing room at the end of the hall, is decorated as it was when Gardner welcomed guests here: thick Oriental rugs, grand piano, ornate chandelier. Hawley, who is 65 and favors dark jackets accented by colorful scarves, has an expressive face and, when engaged in conversation, a way of emphasizing her point by reaching out to touch the other party’s arm or shoulder. Hired 20 years ago to shake up an institution that an uninspired board of trustees had let lapse into irrelevance and disrepair, she is widely credited with infusing the museum with a vitality that hadn’t been felt since the days of Gardner herself. And yet Hawley has also weathered enormous losses. She was on the job less than a year in 1990 when thieves talked their way past the security guards and made off with some $500 million worth of art in what remains the world’s largest art heist. Making the blow doubly devastating, the cash-strapped museum had been unable to afford theft insurance.

Since then, Hawley has orchestrated a metamorphosis, increasing attendance by 60 percent with a mix of ambitious new programs. But preservationist-minded critics say Hawley has steered the museum dangerously far from Mrs. Gardner’s vision. To them, there’s no greater cause for alarm than Hawley’s audacious new plan: a dazzling glass and steel addition designed by star architect Renzo Piano. Larger than the original museum building, the new wing will become the main entrance and will feature a performance hall, exhibit space, and a vastly expanded restaurant and gift shop, all at a price tag conservatively estimated at $60 million.

Inside and out, the charmingly old-world Gardner Museum has hardly changed since it opened in 1903. Because of Gardner’s will, Hawley’s planned addition required the approval of the state’s highest court. (Photograph COURTESY OF THE ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM, BOSTON.)

Envisioned as an antidote to the overcrowding that Hawley’s own programs have caused, the expansion is the sort of thing that makes museum directors gush with pride. Anywhere else, such plans are talked about with the same unalloyed enthusiasm that accompanied the opening of the ICA, or the construction of the new wing at the MFA now rising outside Hawley’s window. But because of the peculiarities of the Gardner, Hawley isn’t afforded that luxury. “I never thought I was going to have to build a building,” she says, a note of apology in her voice. “I didn’t want to build a building.”

Because Gardner’s will is so specific, such an addition required the approval of the state’s highest court—which, when it was granted last month, was a stinging blow to a group of neighborhood preservationists who had been trying to block the project for months. To them, it reveals a shift in values that now imperils the museum. Hawley, they say, has gotten caught up in her own ambitions and forgotten that she serves at the will of Gardner herself. “I think Anne Hawley wants a legacy other than the theft,” says Ellen Moore, who is part of the group, called the Friends of Historic Mission Hill. “Instead,” adds Mary Ann Nelson, another member, “she’s going to be the person who destroyed the Gardner.”

At the time of her hiring in 1989, Anne Hawley was an improbable choice for director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Unlike her three predecessors, she was not an art historian and, more important, not inclined to regard the job as a static, curatorial undertaking. The first woman to hold the position, Hawley had studied English and voice at the University of Iowa, just 20 miles from the farm where she’d grown up. When it was clear that the soprano would never become the opera singer she’d hoped to be, Hawley moved east, earned a master’s degree in urban studies from George Washington University, and took a succession of jobs at nonprofits in DC. In 1974, she arrived in Boston, where she founded the nonprofit Cultural Education Collaborative. Three years later, Hawley, then in her early thirties, was appointed executive director of the state cultural council, a public arts-funding program. (It was widely speculated that had Michael Dukakis won the presidency in 1988, Hawley would have been tapped to run the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Hawley’s work at the council won her a reputation as a master networker and a dogged fundraiser. “Anne was someone who found it easy to ask for money,” says a former Gardner employee. By 1989, money was exactly what the museum desperately needed.

Over the previous two decades, the Gardner had wilted under the well-meaning but inadequate care of the Brahmin trustees who filled its board. Attendance had been in free-fall since the 1970s, and by the time Hawley was hired, the museum was running a six-figure annual deficit. All the while, the stodgy Yankee pride that had kept the board from soliciting donations was threatening the museum’s treasures. Paint was reportedly flaking from Botticelli’s The Tragedy of Lucretia, while a Rembrandt self-portrait had nearly disappeared beneath a layer of grime. Though the trustees had been able to cobble together the $13,000 it would cost to clean the Rembrandt in New York, the plan had to be scuttled when they couldn’t find the $10,000 they’d need to insure the painting on its journey.

Ironically, the inaction reflected just how large Isabella Stewart Gardner loomed in the board members’ minds. Out of respect for the woman they invariably called “Mrs. Gardner,” they resisted making even the most basic changes. Gardner had handpicked her original trustees, granting them lifetime appointments that were then typically passed down through their families. “Several trustees said to me, ‘It’s very difficult for anyone who knew her to pick up and [make changes],'” Hawley recalls.