Forgotten femme fatales of art come to life with Shady Ladies Tours
From the sovereign spitfires to vain vixens,
Andrew Lear showcases some of history's most misbehaved women.
BOSTON – In a dimly lit Grecian exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a group of museum-goers gathered tightly around a small black and red pot with interest. Andrew Lear, their tour guide, explained that this particular piece depicted a sex scene so graphic that the museum had to turn the pot around so the exhibit would remain family friendly.
“Are you calling us a bunch of perverts?” a participant of the tour asked.
“I hope so, for your sake,” Lear said as he walked away with a chuckle.
Lear is the founder of Shady Ladies Tours, a tour company focused on showcasing artwork with “sexy, intriguing, and sometimes scandalous backstories that cast them in an entirely new light,” according to its website.
In Boston, Lear personally gives the 90-minute Shady Ladies tours, and the popular Gay Secrets of the MFA through his other tour company, Oscar Wilde Tours. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where both companies are based, there is a wider selection of tours to choose from, including the “Ooh La La” tour and “Dressed to Kill” tour.
“The MFA is particularly a gay museum,” he said, because of its curatorial tradition and early collectors.
Lear, the former Columbia, New York University and Harvard professor, can’t do all the tours alone. Instead, he’s trained a small team of tour guides who are educated in various fields of art history to run a variety of tours at the MET.
Kirsten Lee, a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU and a proud classicist, is one of the other tour guides for Shady Ladies. For Lee, it’s a fun way to be able to teach and explore her passions.
“It is so fun to meet with a group of strangers on a Sunday afternoon and just, like, let loose, and be like, we're going to talk about sexy stuff for the next hour and a half, and we're gonna have a good time,” she said.
Lee also said Shady Ladies tours help make art less intimidating for people so they can enjoy it in a new and fun way.
“It's nice to kind of shake off the maybe the, the tension or fear some people can feel in these grand institutions and say like, no, trust yourself, let's find some fun things that we all like to look at. Let's talk about the history behind this, let's make this stuff interesting and accessible.”
Hear Lee discuss her favorite painting on the tour below.
Kirsten Lee giving a tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo Courtesy of Kirsten Lee.
Kirsten Lee giving a tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo Courtesy of Kirsten Lee.
Kirsten Lee describes her favorite painting, "Woman with a Parrot " by Gustave Courbet, which is on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Photo licensed by Creative Commons.
Kirsten Lee describes her favorite painting, "Woman with a Parrot " by Gustave Courbet, which is on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Photo licensed by Creative Commons.
While Lear also uses the tours as a chance to explore his academic passions, it’s also an opportunity for him to practice another passion, comedy.
“Well, it's kind of an expansion of my activity as a professor. And I’m just professing to the multitudes instead of professing to little classes at fancy little arts colleges,” he said. “I think there's probably also an aspect of being a comedian, which cannot be said of all professors. I think this is like the higher stand up.”
Hear Lear discuss his favorite painting on the tour below.
Andrew Lear speaks with tour attendees at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on April 17, 2019. (Photo by K. Sophie Will/BU News Service)
Andrew Lear speaks with tour attendees at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on April 17, 2019. (Photo by K. Sophie Will/BU News Service)
Andrew Lear explains an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on April 17, 2019. (Photo by K. Sophie Will/BU News Service)
Andrew Lear explains an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on April 17, 2019. (Photo by K. Sophie Will/BU News Service)
Andrew Lear, founder of Shady Ladies Tours, describes his favorite painting on the tour – "Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliott" by Thomas Gainsborough. Photo licensed by Creative Commons.
Andrew Lear, founder of Shady Ladies Tours, describes his favorite painting on the tour – "Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliott" by Thomas Gainsborough. Photo licensed by Creative Commons.
On his Boston tours, Lear noticed that no matter the tour, the attending group is mostly “young and heavily female”
At the Shady Ladies tour on April 17, that generalization rang true. Out of 14 attendees, there were only two men.
John Michael, (left) a 25-year-old Roslindale resident was one of the men in attendance.
“I met him in New York and I admired his work since I’m also in the tourism industry,” he said of Lear. “It’s very cool and very interesting.”
As Lear guided the group through the maze of the museum, he repeatedly encouraged attendees to get closer to the exhibits by saying, “Art is not scary! Come look at them closely.” At the same time, however, Lear said “Don’t read the label, they’re not telling you anything.”
Two attendees, Pam Reis and Karen Kesner (right), a 61-year-old duo who have been best friends since they were both 14, came all the way from East Providence, Rhode Island, just for the Shady Ladies tour.
“We found out about this on Facebook, we love art museums, so we traveled out of our comfort zones and braved the public transportation,” Reis said. “I’m a shady lady too, on occasion.”
“Yes, the Museum is a good place to spend the night,” Kesner said. “I wanted to be guided through this so we didn’t miss any big things, and it’s nice to know the history.”
Shady Ladies is active on social media, consistently featuring some of the art that they highlight on their tours with brief explanations to entice more attendees. Here's a sampling of their Facebook posts below.
It is important for Lear that as he guides a group through the museum to make sure to ask thought provoking questions and open the forum up for discussion.
“If you tell people stuff about different cultures, and how different they were, then you think you're kind of amusing them and intriguing them and then let them make their own conclusions,” he said. “You don't need to say 'and therefore sexuality is not as we imagined it,' but rather open the discourse for them.”
