Like a lot of Upper East Siders who are members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I feel lucky to have such an amazing art collection at my doorstep. Every once in a while, though, it hits me, with a palooka punch, that I have an amazing art collection at my doorstep, one that I can walk into as often as I want to, at no additional charge; one that I’m familiar enough with that I can navigate through it without getting lost or wondering where the things that I like to look at are kept.
It isn’t Schadenfreude, exactly, but when I think that most visitors have to make the most of their time in the Museum, be it an entire day, before heading back to wherever — “wherever” being considerably farther away than a twenty-minute stroll — I’m humbled and elated at the same time. I’ve been told that I’m privileged since I was old enough to understand English, and exhorted to act worthily. But it becomes harder and harder to imagine going to the Museum as a duty.
I went on Friday morning, not because I was burning to see anything but because I had a bunch of errands on Madison Avenue, and because I like the Museum’s cafeteria. (I like all of the Museum’s eateries, but I especially appreciate the cafeteria, because it realizes the Platonic Idea of what we all had to put up with in school; as in heaven, the unpleasant bits have been swept away. The burgers and fries are tasty, not greasy, but still disreputable enough to relish.) I did have a few Museum-specific objectives. The Times had run a quiz of sorts, that morning, featuring animals in blown-up detail from various things in the Museum, and I wanted to see if I could find the greyhound — which I did, but not in the Robert Lehman collection, where I looked first, but in the Old Master galleries: St Dominic raising somebody from the dead, by Bartolomeo degli Erri. And then there was the question of the Rembrandtine mustache. A friend had written of seeing a man dressed in black who sported a “Rembrandtine mustache.” What might that be, I wondered. The answer was more elusive than degli Erri’s greyhound. The only mustache that looked “Rembrandtine” belonged to a face by Frans Hals.
I went to the Museum again this morning. This time, it was to make sure that Kathleen saw the three interesting shows currently on exhibit: Turner, pietre dure, and the great photography show, “Framing A Century.” The last was a big hit. Pietre dure didn’t do anything for Kathleen; although impressed by the technique of hardstone mosaic, she was not moved by any of the pieces. (But she did think that the lithothèque was cool [it truly is], and she liked the shells console.) She wasn’t in the mood for Turner, either. But she loved the photographs. She couldn’t get over how good the older prints look, even after a hundred and fifty years, and the rich intonation of their details. Looking at the photographs through Kathleen’s eyes, I couldn’t get over how good the prints look, either. And I noticed, for the first time, that Roger Fenton’s Roslin Chapel, South Porch (1856) — a picture I can’t get enough of — is not a small print.
Then we came home. We had had breakfast right before, and I made BLTs for lunch shortly after we got back. Kathleen smiled with the delight of feeling “virtuous: it’s early afternoon still and I’ve already done something important.”
If she could only go as often as I do, it wouldn’t seem so important. It might begin to feel as though we were living in a very large apartment.
