Part of the Composition
During my uptown walk along empty Upper East Side streets to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its reopening after five months of being closed, I envisioned myself standing before certain works. It wasn’t until I mounted the Fifth Avenue steps, though, that I knew where I would go first.
At the top of the museum’s main staircase, I took a number of turns and shortcuts I knew well until I reached the eighteenth-century Syrian palace room, in a far corner of the Islamic wing. I went there to hear the room’s plashing floor fountain, to follow the horizontal lines of the maroon banquettes that trace its walls, to look into the red, cobalt, yellow panes of the stained glass windows through which I imagine real sunlight passing but from which instead issue a faux sunshine. During the early, darkest days of the shut-in or lockdown or sheltering-in-place, whatever we are to call it, I imagined being in this room, even though visitors are never fully able to occupy it. Instead, at best, we are made to stand at its threshold, behind a drooping velvet rope, where we can gaze into the space, and, if we wish, swipe a screen for more details.
I visited this room, in my imagination, while I was inside my own apartment, alone, as many of us were. The royal room is certainly nothing like my 21st-floor one-bedroom or the suburban ranch house in which I grew up in my beautiful hometown of Evanston, Illinois, but the marble-floored space, with its elaborate wooden scrollings, always evokes a house and home when I visit it. The galleries in the Islamic wing are always among the dimmest and the quietest in the Met, never heavily visited. I suppose, too, the isle-sized Oriental rugs hanging on walls also mute ambient noise, as does the gurgling fountain. There is also the holy reverential hush that characterizes galleries of any religious art and artifacts; people often treat such galleries as if they have entered a church or mosque or synagogue.
When I arrived at the Syrian room, it was closed to the public, meaning that visitors weren’t allowed even to linger at its threshold, probably because of social-distancing concerns. While I was disappointed, I was, however, able to see into the room from a distance and re-experience the space. So few people wandered the gallery that afternoon that a sympathetic guard, sensing my desire to see the room, subtly offered me the chance to get closer, pantomiming with a finger that it would be okay for me to take photos (actually a self-narrated video, which I posted on my Instagram).
During the months away from the museum, my appetite for art had grown large, but I wanted also to savor each item I chose to visit that day. After I tasted the sight of the silent room, I then wandered into adjacent galleries filled with diminutive, appetizer-scaled works of early-to-mid nineteenth-century European art—self-portraits of artists of the time in rooms in Rome, figures wandering stormy northern Continental landscapes, people gathered at twilight on the docks of Copenhagen. Quiet, poetic scenes of people alive in the world, doing things so simple that their endeavors are profound. For the months we all had to learn to be inert, but seeing these people occupying such spaces, unimpeded, was a tonic. By simply looking into these canvases, I was quenching my thirst for my own city, for seeing people again in public.
In one of those galleries, I was startled to find a painting I had seen years earlier hanging in a grand apartment on lower Park Avenue. I had been commissioned by a magazine to write about an artwork owned by the (now late) jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane. When I met Lane in his Moroccan-fantasy of an apartment, in a landmarked Stanford White–designed building, he choreographed our event by having me sit opposite Jean-Leon Gerome’s portrait of a handsome Moroccan soldier, what’s known as a bashi-bazouk. The figure glowed against mahogany paneling, his traditional military garb assuming jewel-like hues as it was bathed by a picture light. And here was the figure now on this wall of the museum—where Lane had promised it would be when that “time comes in my life,” as he had told me in our talk years earlier. Gallery 804 is even named for Lane, the result of his having endowed it. I regret still not having followed up on my casual suggestion to take him, then an elderly and discernibly lonely man after a lifetime as a central figure in New York social life and a bejeweler of First Ladies and Hollywood royalty, to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to see other Gerome works.
“I would like that very much,” he said when we shook hands goodbye at his threshold. “Call me. I make a good passenger.”
In preparation for my article about him, I had done too much research on Lane’s past and I was intimidated by it; what conversation could I provide during a three-hour drive northward? I’ve discovered, increasingly though, that people who were famous at another point in their lives or once beautiful are content with the company of people not of their former worlds. It’s not a matter of lowering their standards, but of recognizing who and what is available to them. They adjust—and maybe that is part of why they were successful in life.
I then made my way to the American Wing to become reacquainted again with a maternal grandfather I had never met (he died in 1939). A staircase from the late Old Chicago Stock Exchange building, designed by Louis Sullivan, rises there. For years, my grandfather maintained a “standing seat” on the Chicago exchange, going there daily to trade and be with friends and business colleagues. My mother often spoke of his having taken breaks on the stairway landings—to smoke a cigarette, jot something in a journal—and, so, every time I see the staircase, I think of him there on it. The patina of the burnished wood banister, I reason, might contain some trace of him, and when I grip it, I feel as if I am holding his hand. The staircase, which links the two levels of the American Wing, remains closed for climbing, but its series of balustrades, zig-zagging upward, promises a future ascension.
On the way out of the museum, passing the panes of Medieval stained glass from French and German cathedrals, cabinets of Byzantine jewelry, and the reconstructed Spanish courtyard with its balcones, I felt sated. For now. My imagination had been replenished. I had seen not only art, but people looking at art—fellow New Yorkers who had been inside their own homes for too long, absent other people.
When I walked out on to Fifth Avenue, I realized that art is really about people. People on the canvases, the people who made whatever appears on a canvas or out of stone, people who once occupied the room of an old palace, people alive now looking at people of the past. I was a figure of the present on the streets of a reawakening New York, part of the composition.
