THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 28, 1996 TAG: 9610280048
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 56 lines
All through grade school, teachers showed us ``The Angelus,'' a peasant couple, heads bowed in prayer as a bell tolled from a distant church.
And the painting by Jean Francois Millet rang a bell with me. My two youngest uncles, Bob and Charles, used to plow with Dan, a mule, in Georgia's red earth.
More likely they cussed than prayed in the sun; but before breakfast and at night before bed, the family got on its knees to pray.
What painter do you suppose teachers hold up today?
All this arises because during an interview by phone from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, director Malcolm Rogers mentioned Millet as among his favorite artists.
In two years Rogers transformed Boston's staid matriarch of a museum, its holdings second only to those of the Metropolitan Museum, into a lively, nervy maiden aunt.
He will talk about its revitalization at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at Norfolk's Chrysler Museum. His lecture and a preceding coffee at 10 a.m. are open free to the public.
When Rogers left as deputy director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, 20 American museums were seeking a director, a job The New York Times termed ``so difficult no one wants it.''
Of them all, the one in Boston ``stood out as the most curious and the most challenging.''
The venerable institution was running a deficit that Rogers cut ``so the museum could hold up its head in the community.'' Reducing staff demanded hard decisions, he said, but last year the museum showed a surplus of nearly $3 million.
Meanwhile he reopened the glorious main entrance, which had been closed for economies, and restored Boston's largest enclosed garden of art. Attendance has exceeded a million viewers. Donations have topped $60 million in a drive to raise $110 million. ``We expect to reach that goal,'' he said.
One thing he likes about the American museum system is the structure of volunteers offering both time and financial support. ``It's wonderful you can count on so many people,'' Rogers said.
``I do see it as the museum's mission to get its educational message to the public,'' he said. With TV and sporting events offering very strong competition, ``we have to work much harder to win people.''
He fell under the spell of the arts when he began buying prints from junk and antiques shops for his room in Oxford. Collecting ``in a very small way,'' he felt the magnetism of art. Traveling in Italy, ``something told me it was important to do and I was astonished at how beautiful everything is.''
Millet reminds him of his childhood on a farm. He admires John Singer Sargeant, Velazquez, and Anthony Van Dyck, one of the greatest portraitists in conveying, with delicacy, character and emotion and evoking tremendous grandeur. ILLUSTRATION: Malcolm Rogers by CNB