Boston's Brahmins have firm opinions. On no subject are their opinions firmer than on Modern Art. In recent years Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has admitted a fine van Gogh, a good Cézanne, a very expensive Gauguin. But as late as 1926 F. W. Coburn, art critic of the Boston Herald, still denounced modernism in the tones of a Cotton Mather. To Pundit Coburn, Cézanne was a poor painter whose good dinners caused his friends to "whoop it up for him and get his pictures admitted to places where they wouldn't otherwise have been received"; van Gogh was "a crazy...
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