HALLIE EPHRON: Right now I am reading a memoir, ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD: THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART AND ME. Author Patrick Bringley writes about finding solace in art, leaving a job at The New Yorker to become museum guard at the Met after his brother’s death.
Of course it’s about grief. Also about great art and its power to sustain us. I'm enjoying it immensely.
Reading it takes me back to the art history classes I took at Barnard College in New York and the many trips I took to the Met. I think it was the #5 bus which you could pick up near Barnard and it would go across town and down Fifth Avenue and drop you right at the front steps of the Met.
For me it was a revelation.
Having grown up in Los Angeles the only “art” I’d seen in a museum were what hung in the Huntington Museum. Gainsboro’s saccharine Pinkie and a companion work Blue Boy weren’t exactly my cup of tea.
The paintings at the Met (and in those days it was free) were transporting.
Room after room of paintings from the Middle Ages, loaded with cardboard cutout figure and symbols with Biblical meaning, to the life-like, harmonic, contained paintings of the Renaissance, to (my favorite) dissonant Mannerist works, and on the dramatic Baroque paintings that practically reached out of the canvas to grab you, and on to puffy, flamboyant Rococco. And that was before you got to Rembrandt.
I grew up in a family steeped in popular cinema and jazz, so this was a story I’d never experienced.
I never left the Met without a visit to the hall of armor. And I loved getting lost in the reconstructed period rooms.
Now one of my favorite way to spend a day is wandering about at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, especially the third floor of the American Wing. And when I’m visiting my kids, it’s the Brooklyn Museum’s reconstructed Frank Lloyd Wright house and the museum’s collection of stained glass.
What are your favorite museum exhibitions to get lost in, and how did you find them?
