We all know the joy of being lost to the world for hours in the galleries of a museum. It is easy to forget that these tranquil spaces are a carefully burnished front—their own kind of art object—covering a beehive of activity and logistical organization. In All The Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, published last year, Patrick Bringley evokes the “stillness and mystery” of art, while also drawing back the veil on the mechanics of it all from the standpoint—literally—of a museum guard.
Shortly after his older brother Tom’s untimely death, and partly seeking time and space in which to process this devastating loss, Bringley applies to be a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still a while.” He takes us through his first days as new member of an army that is divided into platoons, in which hundreds of troops are marshaled hourly in complex logistical maneuvers. He is in the third platoon, team one, section B, always on the move, a new guard always arriving to push them along to their next post.
He trains himself to watch the rivers of visitors as they watch the art. “I melt into the furniture, maybe, but never the crowd,” he writes. They are “a pageant for whom I’m the steadfast audience.” He listens to their conversations, their questions, their comments—appreciative, plaintive, annoyed, and comical: “Goddamit, I’m in the Jesus pictures again!”
We hear about Mondays, when the museum is closed and the galleries are flooded with curators, technicians, riggers, painters, and electricians, and about the frenzy of major exhibits: “It’s hard to feel that all is well when you’ve just seen a swinging Picasso.” We hear about the physiological impact of marble vs. wooden floors, and the fatigue from hours of calling out “Not too close!” and “No flash please!”—and then a gallery will empty out and we, with Bringley, are left to silence and the mystery of the art.
As his post moves over time from collection to collection, we are treated to a tour of the museum. In the Old Masters wing, he counts every inhabitant of every painting, down to each ant-sized background cherub or soldier, nearly 9,000 strong, and notes, “If you’re wondering how I could possibly count all that, you underestimate the kind of time I have.” In the Asian galleries, he loses himself in Old Trees, Level Distance, a hand-painted scroll by the Northern Song Dynasty master Guo Xi: “My eyes could never exhaust this scroll, and neither could my mind, so I drift into an even deeper silence, trying to absorb the fullness of the world it presents me.”
Eventually Bringley grows older than his older brother, and “it’s strange and unnatural, like having grown taller than a childhood climbing tree.” Every day he watches people leave the building, transitioning “out of a speechlessly beautiful world and returning to the forward march of their own lives,” and at last he feels the urge to do the same. But we are left with a window onto the art, onto the world behind the art, and onto the millions of visitors who stream through the galleries each year, each in their own way seeking, and each seeing as they are being seen.
All the Beauty in the World is rich in eccentric characters, both colleagues and visitors, and movingly evocative of the experience of standing before art that enlivens us—a window well worth pausing by as we walk toward spring.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.