Boston Exhibit Celebrates the Guitar

B O S T O N, Nov. 3 -- As curator Darcy Kuronen installed his upcomingexhibit, he cradled one of the show’s painted centerpieces in hisarms, pointing to the graceful lines, the bold colors and theleft-handed whammy bar Jimi Hendrix twanged into fame.

Hendrix’s 1967 Gibson Flying V guitar, colorful swirls repaintedonto the body, is part of a fall exhibit at the Museum of Fine Artsthat hardly conjures the image of staid masterpieces and dustymuseum galleries: the guitar as objet d’art.

From Stradivari to Prince

There are about 130 guitars in the “Dangerous Curves” exhibit, which opens Sunday. Ivory-inlaid guitars. Guitars shaped as lyres.Spangled guitars. An inflatable guitar. A transparent guitar.Guitars with five necks. With 42 strings. A 300-year-old guitarcrafted by instrument-maker Antonio Stradivari. A banana-coloredelectric Yellow Cloud, a guitar formerly owned by The ArtistFormerly Known As Prince who now goes by the name he formerly wasknown as — Prince.

“This is a fun show, and it brings a different viewpoint,”says Kuronen, the museum’s curator of musical instruments. “I think it would personally be kind of boring if we were always doing paintings.”

A Stratocaster guitar may not have quite the lasting greatnessof, say, a van Gogh painting. But the guitar — as a mirror ofpopular culture and changing fashion — is worthy of examination, hesays.

He calls the guitar an “instrument of the people.” Unlikeinstruments that have remained essentially the same for centuries,the guitar is a palette of changing popular culture.

“The guitar has always rapidly responded to changes in fashionand music,” Kuronen says. “They always mirror what else is going on. No one restyles a saxophone to reflect current fashion.”

Some of the instruments at the exhibit are centuries old, likethe baroque guitar made by Stradivari in 1700, and a French guitarfrom 1693 with a back made of a tortoise shell.