It didn’t take long for Patrick Bringley to learn the maxim of the trade he had just arrived at. On eight- to 12-hour shifts, you get bored with art and people-watching; you get bored of people, you look at art. He had turned 25, he was exhausted, his older brother had just passed away from cancer and he needed to break with what he was doing. Change it for something simple and that would allow him to survive in New York. He believed that he would find solace in beauty and he stayed there for ten years. He now he has written a book.
When museums came out of the walls to become tools for citizen participation
Further
All the beauty in the world could have been titled The divorce of ambition. Because above all things, this book – which has just been published in the US and has not yet been translated into Spanish – is a call to resign. Patrick worked at The New Yorker magazine as an event planner and decided to leave. One fine day, he visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art with her mother and saw her cry before a Pietà. It seems that it was at that moment that he saw it clearly: perhaps he should become a caretaker at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MET). He was attracted to the idea of doing something simple, honest and useful. Something like protecting “some of the most beautiful things that human beings have made,” writes the author.
Bringley needed to stop. He was exhausted and in the halls he found himself at peace, with an empty mind. “My heart is breaking and I really want to sit still for a while,” he recounts. As he tells it, it was not difficult to join the squad of some 600 employees who work guarding the collection of the most visited museum in New York (with almost seven million annual visitors, double that of the Prado Museum, for example). It’s very interesting how he describes such a diverse group of workers, coming from all over the world, to his New Yorker peers, recent graduates from elite private schools.
It seemed to him that everything fit together. She had just landed in one of the most boring and inspiring jobs, as the author of these memoirs admits. “I have surrendered to the snail’s motion of a vigilante’s time,” he writes.
freedom time
His working day at the museum was simple. She was all about keeping her eyes peeled. “A wave of freedom washed over me,” she says. And her still mind began to wander. There were days when he would count the figures painted in the paintings in the Old Masters section. He totaled 8,496 characters at that time, spread over 596 paintings. It is an exercise that reveals the amount of time he had in carrying out his work. And, in between so much time to think, another piece of advice: learning about art is not as important as learning from art.
In Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings she found an explanation for the journey she had started: “Sometimes we need permission to stop and worship. A work of art allows us”. Permission to abandon, to stop. She says that she experienced a sensation similar to that of a lone traveler in a foreign city. The ex-watchman dissolved in his surroundings, in silence, with all the time to enjoy that transit.
Art is not the protagonist of this book. The time, yes. And also what you would be willing to do to conquer it as a worker. He yearns to flee the world in motion and settle in stillness. At least temporarily, to recover. Time, he relates, works differently when you’re a visitor than when you’re a guard. It seems obvious. Patrick was happy to have so much time to immerse himself in that inexhaustible place and establish a deeper relationship. Especially in the area of the old masters, because there he found “sadness” and “beauty.” “Luminously sad”, he describes them himself. These rooms reminded him of the atmosphere of hospital rooms. “There was something very comforting about that,” he says.
in another dimension
There is a work that is repeated as a private reference, Harvest, painted in 1565 by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. A table more than one meter high and almost 1.70 meters wide, included in a series that represents the cycle of the months of the year. The sixth table, corresponding to April and May, is now lost. The one at the MET that Patrick Bringley watched so much represents the summer (August and September) and the protagonists are the peasants in the middle of harvesting the fields. Bringley saw in this painting, and in others, a window that cut through the wall to look into another world.
This is incapable of appreciating the tourist, because he is dedicated to “galloping” through the museum. That verb is the one used by the former watchman when he sees them completing their journey to see the immense canvas of almost four meters high by almost seven meters wide, on which Emanuel Gottlieb painted in 1851 a Washington crossing the Delaware. And, of course, the Temple of Dendur, from the 15th century BC, dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. One day she stopped a young man who tried to climb a statue of Venus. He looked at the sculpture, its head and arms were missing. He looked around and said, “So all these broken things, they broke here?”
Bringley recommends getting lost. Wandering without guides through museum rooms. Get rid of whatever you brought to the museum. Of course, your prejudices. And feel small contemplating the goods of Egypt, Mesopotamia or Rome. That is the best advice in this book. He wants you to blindly trust the museum and the beauty it preserves, without asking you anything else. This installment contrasts with another publication: illustrious counterfeiters, written by the journalist and art historian, Harry Bellet, which has just been published in Spain by the Elba publishing house. The essay begins with Thomas Hoving, former director of the MET, declaring in 1997 that 40% of the works on display in the museum were forgeries or misattributed. Bellet wonders if Hoving didn’t fall short. So can we entrust our peace to museums so gleefully?
money for socks
The reader walks through the museum that is not seen, as big as the one that is in sight. The MET contains more than two million art goods, but only a fraction is shown. And he discovers the pains and cramps in his legs, that the floor of the European painters’ section is made of soft wood and ancient Greece and Rome in implacable marble.
He also mentions the 80 dollars a year that the guards receive to buy socks or the nine pairs of shoes he spent during the decade that he worked watching over the integrity of the pieces and some other anecdote about it. Once a man got lost and hit with his shoulder woman in white, by Picasso. “It’s just Rembrandt and me. Just me and the Botticellis. Just me and these ghosts that I can almost believe are flesh and blood”, writes the former guard about the moments before opening the doors and allowing visitors to go up the great central staircase.
The world outside the museum was never easy to paint, but I also had the feeling that I couldn’t do it without leaving the privileged world of the museum. He returned to the street when he felt recovered. “Standing up is a skill that can rust,” he told himself the day he put an end to his stage as a watchman.