Illustration by Nivita Chaliki
There is no required fee for a ticket to the Met, but they do encourage donations of any amount. Unsure of what’s appropriate and feeling guilty for all the times I said I’d go and didn’t, I decide that fifteen dollars is a suitable amount.
“Are you sure?” asks the cashier.
Nervous that I lowballed the Met, I confirm that I’ll pay fifteen dollars.
“Thank you so much!” the cashier says as he charges my credit card.
Pity fills my stomach and I wonder what everyone else decides is a worthy price for art.
The main hall is noisy and crowded and the air is filled with the babel of multiple languages. I go up the main stairs of the Met and head toward the European Art Wing. As I approach the art, the cacophony of the crowd fades, and my footsteps take its place. They make a specific sound, the kind that is only heard in a museum. The pleasure I get from walking in the museum knows no bounds. I get lost in the rapping before I realize I’m surrounded by historical paintings, so old that they predate New York City.
Most of the paintings in this room come from the Renaissance era. They depict Jesus, Mary, and other saintly characters that I have no knowledge of, in various forlorn states. There’s an absurdity to them—not in a cynical, atheistic way—because this old style reminds me of the cartoonish characters from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I think of the holy hand grenade of Antioch, and the Knights Who Say “Ni!” and of swallows, and coconuts. Looking at the paintings now in the museum rather than on screen, I see their sophistication. They feel almost contemporary, almost like a Picasso. The figures are made of ovals and often curve over each other with obtuse proportions and stoic faces. Jesus, depicted as a baby, sits on the lap of Mary, as though he were her king and she, his throne. My eyes strain as I scan through each painting, trying to pick apart the subtleties and the meanings. Assorted artifacts dot their foregrounds and backgrounds, alluding to some deep symbolism and mysticism. There’s beauty here and I briefly contemplate what life would be like if I had grown up believing in God and religion. I was always a skeptic and my many years in Hebrew school did nothing to affirm my faith.
I move past this aged room and enter another room where many portraits hang from eggshell-colored walls. The women in the portraits stare at me through time from their square windows. But the notes on the paintings fascinate me more than the paintings themselves. Context reveals more than I can discern from just observing. One portrait in particular by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres is a portrait of an aristocratic princess. The portrait emphasizes the clothes and accessories she wore rather than the sitting model herself. At first, I think that it’s just a nice portrait if not a little simple. The model is certainly made out to be pretty enough for a portrait that will someday hang in a museum. But after reading the little blurb on the plaque beside the painting, I learn about the painstaking lengths the painter went through to recreate the texture of the dress and jewelry. I step back to look at the princess again and all at once those details emerge from the canvas, and her once simple blue dress leaps off the wall. It shimmers with iridescent luster, and her diamonds and pearls sparkle. Still, as impressive as the painting is, I fail to grasp more meaning from the work.
This is how I generally feel around paintings. I feel as though I’m looking at rectangles of various sizes and degrees, and that I’m trying to discern meaning from them. Paintings and sculptures are supposed to inspire, but I usually look at them with perplexity, my head cocked to the side, trying to see more than might be there. I feel like Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when he is struck by the Seurat painting, except there’s no John Hughes movie soundtrack in the back, and I fail to fall into the painting the way Cameron does. The pressure to discern meaning increases when other people are nearby. I’m afraid that they see something I can’t. But very few people stop and give a painting more than a passing glance. They leave me alone, stuck in place, stressing over a simple parallelogram.
I write down my observations in my notebook when I realize art is presented in rectangles. Paintings, books, stages, statues that are cut from marble rectangles, even phones. I think of all the rectangles I’ve passed through in the world. Everything around me begins to disintegrate into polygons and right angles. I sit on a bench to catch my breath, flushed from overthinking and overheating. I scan the room, taking in the art and the rectangles that adorn the walls. Inside the hard lines of the rectangle is the soft curves of the circle. The figures in the squares are round and twist with kinetic energy. Even when they’re straight, they have a lyrical quality. I take comfort in the circles, the same way I take comfort in the dancers on stage, or in the letters on the page. That comfort soothes me and I feel I accomplished something personal. I walk past swirling images and marble figures as I exit The Met, leaving the sound of my footsteps behind.