CB: For a while--in the 1940s and '50s--Boston was associated with expressionism. St. Louis has great expressionist holdings. That in fact was associated with the man who left [St. Louis] and became the director of the MFA. He brought that particular interest with him to the Boston area, and it coincided with interests at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. People like Max Beckmann had shows then, and Kokoschka. So at the Museum School in the late '40s and 1950s there was a strong identification of Boston with that expressionist tradition. But I think after this, as you get into the '60s and certainly the '70s, Boston is as pluralistic as any other place, nor is it as identifiable with any regional style. And I guess the show confirms the idea that Boston is eclectic.

THC: Where do you think the vitality is in the Boston scene, now?

CB: Over the years there have been from time to time artists' centers. Back in the early '70s there was a huge building across from South Station that was filled with artists, and now Fort Point, which is getting dislodged. It's the same old story: artists move into these spaces, and then there's development.

THC: How did you feel about the responsibilities of a college art museum?

CB: From my background, I guess I grew up with a traditional notion of what they called "teaching-related exhibitions." Places like Ivy League schools think of the university art museum as a laboratory for students studying the history of art. When I started at the Rose back in the mid-1970s I was kind of naturally inclined to provide some exposure for Boston-area artists, to broaden support. For years I felt guilty that I didn't do any so-called "teaching-related exhibitions." I guess my approach was that you put up some reasonably good works and that the mere encounter with them would be an educational experience.

Of course, you have to think of the overall goal, what the mission of the museum is--the Fogg, for example, is a kind of encyclopedic museum. When the Rose was opened in the 1960s, there was a hope that it would be based on the model of colleges like Harvard or Yale, and that we would collect from all different periods and places. It was at the end of the 1970s that we redefined the mission: that we would deal with modern and contemporary art.

THC: What was the particular experience of curating Visual Memoirs, and the concerns specific to group shows?

CB: I wrote the catalog up here [in Franconia, N.H., where Belz and his wife moved last year] and had to rely on memory for what the pieces looked like. I thought initially that maybe I could get in 100, sort of salon style, but then felt that wouldn't do as much justice to the individual artists as I wanted, so I had to start picking and choosing. As it became time to install the show I was anxious, wondering how they would hold up as they were all together. When I got to the Rose all the pieces were out on the floor, and I thought "These look good!" and that they were engaging and relational. I decided right away I wouldn't put the realist or minimalist or gestural pictures together. I thought that would not reflect accurately the eclectic or pluralist nature out of which those objects came. So we began to mix and match and on an intuitive level to think, these are nice in relation to one another. Or one piece would be realist and one would be gestural, but the color or handling were similar. It wasn't meant to be didactic; it was often on the basis of feeling.

THC: If you could characterize the decades that you were at the Rose, would you say that they followed those trends now so canonically recognized by art history, through the post-modernist discourse and the appropriation art of the 1980s?

CB: Those structures or those approaches that frame you when you're learning--it amazes me how deep they run. It was a while before I began to realize how formative they are. I often had to battle those biases that had shaped my own thinking with modernism as a business. I continued to cling to some of them while being responsive to other kinds of things and I guess, to some extent, clinging is evidenced by my ongoing conviction that modernism ain't necessarily dead and that I get frustrated sometimes with writers who want blithely to say, "with the discrediting of modernism."

Yes, modernism has, to some extent, been eclipsed. But good artists are still working in that tradition, so I hope that people aren't too quick to discredit it.