In June 2008, days after author Patrick Bringley turned 25, his brilliant slightly older brother, Tom (who was pursuing a doctorate in biomathematics), died after a nearly three-year battle with cancer. That his beloved brother’s funeral took place on his own wedding day is the kind of terrible, almost metaphorical conjunction of love and death that we might anticipate from art, but that we don’t. never expect to experiment in life itself. But maybe we should. In his early memoirs, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MeBringley revisits again and again the many ways in which art meets life and the art of life, and how death is often the bridge between them.
Before his brother’s death, Bringley had the kind of seemingly hip white-collar job that young big-city humanities types aspire to. He worked in the New Yorkerfrom the public events department of (hoping to write for the magazine, naturally), close to some literary fame that included encounters with Stephen King and Michael Chabon. cool cool. But also, for him, a little hollow. With the death of her brother, Bringley experienced a quiet reckoning, away from effort and in silence. “My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I desperately want to stand still for a while,” he wrote. In the fall of 2008, he left his New Yorker concert to stand alongside other uniformed museum guards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He will stay there for 10 years.
I admit I was initially interested in Bringley’s memoir for the Met’s employment side. Like him, I was a young aspiring writer and myself worked at the Met for a few years after graduate school as an administrative assistant (read: secretary) in a non-curatorial department. I saw with my own eyes how much nepotism, cronyism, “good school,” and some income outside of a Met paycheck just above minimum wage meant, if not everything, then a lot. At the same time, it was pretty awesome to pass mummies on the way to the staff cafeteria or to experience one day a week where you could be alone with great art (it’s a day that no longer exists now that the Met is open to the public seven days a week). Those times were often magical, but it’s also nice when you can afford to buy lunch. Given the many recent stories, in Hyperallergic and elsewhere, on strikes and organizing efforts at museums, and climate activists using art to publicize a global crisis, I thought a guard’s memoir at the Met might touch on anything that precedes. But Bringley’s memoir is not that kind of book at all. And by the time I read it, I was no longer the same person who had anticipated it.
Bringley, it seems, has felt an affinity for the visual arts since childhood. He describes his first visit to the Met, at the age of 11, and seeing Pieter Bruegel’s “The Reapers” (1565): “What was beautiful in painting was not like words, it was like painting – silent, direct and concrete, resisting translations even in thought. As such, my response to the image was trapped inside me, a bird floating in my chest. Much of the power, and some of the pitfalls, in All the beauty in the world is Bringley’s attempt to express in words this inner wavering of art.
He shares his deep experience of art with his family. For example, his brother Tom, a scientist and mathematician, has a reproduction of Raphael’s “Madonna with the Goldfinch” hanging above his hospital bed. Bringley does not mention that it is a painting of a mother with two young boys, and that may not be the point. Thing is, his brother finds a meaningful Raphael reproduction and wants to have it nearby while he’s in the hospital. Time and again, Bringley conveys that finding such meaning in historical art is the opposite of preciousness, and how much even High Renaissance art can inform the present. He describes an early morning in Tom’s hospital room with their mother: “She looked at her sleeping son. Looked at me. I saw the light, and the body, and the horror, and the grace. “Look at us, she said to me, look. We are a fucking old painter. Later, shortly after Tom’s death, Bringley visits the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his mother, where he finds her weeping over a Lamentation of Christ. It’s a moving, even brutal, scene to see a parent in such pain, and also an appreciation for how art still encounters her through time.
Although he sometimes goes too far for the poetic (“There is a particular clarity of light that seems to fall from a star of wonderment, the same clarity you see in Old Master paintings” ), Bringley is more often concise and to the point, as when describing a painting as “a kind of machine to aid in necessary thinking”. Being able to stand eight to twelve hours a day in the midst of such machines to think was the only reason he accepted the job of museum guard.
That it is more precious to learn Since art that in regards to art history is a refreshing, even moving notion. As someone who has spent most of his adult life teaching, researching and writing about art history, period taken. I read this book under very different circumstances than I expected. I couldn’t have known that the moment I picked it up, my own beloved brother would suffer an unexpected cancer setback, or that my elderly mother would finally contract COVID, then pneumonia, her health deteriorating suddenly after a long and vigorous life. I expected to encounter Bringley’s memoir from an entirely different angle, that of a youngster who worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a position that was mostly invisible, with its financial and personal affronts, but who instead found a story that met my life now, as a middle-aged sister and daughter sitting in dimly lit sick rooms, waiting. They are scary but sometimes beautiful spaces that most of us will experience sooner or later.
In the Met’s Musical Instrument Galleries, Bringley describes a “playful and deadly serious” Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) snapping turtle rattle as a sort of dead moment. This Latin phrase – once helpfully translated for me by a graduate student when I was an undergrad as follows: remember you are going to die — might serve as a fitting descriptor for Bringley’s book project as a whole. The Metropolitan Museum of Art as dead moment. All the beauty in the world, and that won’t save us. But along the way, art can help.
All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley is published by Simon & Schuster and is available online and in bookstores.
