Rooms held
in the long
quiet of looking.

When Margaret Halden gave the city of Boston the first ninety paintings of what would become this collection, she wrote to the board that her one condition was, in her phrase, “rooms enough to let the work breathe.” We have kept that condition. In an age that has learned to scroll, we are a museum that asks you to stand still. Seventy-seven years on, the rooms are still the point.

This autumn we open three exhibitions that, taken together, trace one of the central questions modern art has not stopped asking: what does it mean to look attentively at the everyday? In Quiet Rooms, Vilhelm Hammershøi answers from a sunlit Copenhagen interior. In An American at the Tea Table, Mary Cassatt answers from a parlor of blue-and-white china, painted in the year an American woman first showed with the Impressionists in Paris. And in The Steerage and After, the answer is photographic — Alfred Stieglitz and the generation he sponsored, working out a modern way of seeing in silver and salt.

We hope you will come, and stay longer than you planned.

— Dr. Yuki Tanaka-Reyes
Director and Chief Curator