The Museum Cure

I sometimes imagine earth and its inhabitants disappearing. I imagine the only remnant is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, somehow preserved from oblivion. I imagine extraterrestrials coming upon this granite and glass vault of entombed human treasures, suspended in aether. From the contents of that sole structure, I believe, they could recreate a vivid image of life on our lonely planet.

This daydream first appeared one early spring evening in 2016 as I walked in the fading light of dusk from The Met into Central Park. Lucius, my roommate, dear friend, and comrade-in-arts, was by my side. I shared my vision with him knowing he would understand. It was the only way I could express my reverence for museums the world over, and The Met in particular.

Later that summer, Lucius’s visa application, which would allow him to remain in New York as a fledgling auctioneer at Sotheby’s, was not chosen from the lottery of applicants. Insult followed injury when, soon after, his countrymen voted to extricate the United Kingdom from the European Union. I could not fully empathize with his distress until late the night of November 8th, 2016. By that fateful evening, Lucius had returned home and resumed work at Sotheby’s in London. When election night’s outcome became clear, he was the first person I texted: “Now I know how you feel.”

The world of our innocence was splintering. Those words written by Yeats between the wars seemed ever pertinent: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” That weekend, I sought refuge in the only cathedral I knew: the museum.

Some months before the long-awaited transition of power, I had moved from a cramped Brooklyn apartment to uptown Manhattan. When my Brooklyn friends ask me why, I answer honestly: to be closer to The Met. Surrounded by mementos of humanity’s oft-obscured brilliance, I find peace in the city. In Lucius’s absence, however, most of my expeditions to New York’s galleries and museums are in solitude. But surrounded by familiar paintings — those works that have become my patron-saints, or to be more accurate, my therapists — I’m never quite alone.

This past March, Lucius and I took a week of vacation to reunite in London after months of sporadic contact. He met me at the door of his family’s John Nash-designed townhouse overlooking Regent’s Park, sparkling with dew and morning light. As if no time had passed, we were soon cackling and coining spontaneous neologisms, marching from Regent’s Park through Fitzrovia and Covent Garden at his signature brisk pace. What our first destination would be, there could be no doubt; though we had communicated minimally leading up to the trip, of course a museum would christen our week of play.

First stop was the Herzog & De Meuron-designed Tate Modern, whose renovation from defunct power station to contemporary art mecca I had read of in the pages of ​The New Yorker​ as a child. We wandered through a ​wunderkammer​, or cabinet of curiosities, by Louise Bourgeois (one of the permanent Artist Rooms funded by British art dealer Anthony d’Offay), then through an exhibition of works by German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, and on to the building’s viewing deck, where Lucius traced the skyline with his finger, indicating landmarks old (St. Paul’s Cathedral) and new (The Shard). Before moving on, we had a final silent moment, spellbound in the expanse of the Tate’s vast turbine hall.

En route to our next museum — I insisted it be the Wallace, as I couldn’t wait to see Fragonard’s Swing — Lucius stopped for cigarettes at a small, dusty market along the Thames. A newspaper announced Prime Minister Theresa May’s intention to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, thereby initiating two years of negotiations with the European Union before Britain’s final exit in April of 2019. Of course, just as I had been immersed in the offal of American politics, so had Lucius been wrestling with his own national crises. A small contingent of Remainers shuffled by with signs bearing the blue and gold flag of the European Union. They looked tired. It’s exhausting to stand athwart history. We forged onward, in the opposite direction.

The next morning found us in the British Museum, floating through reconstructed Assyrian temples, quietly arguing over the ethics of the Elgin Marbles, and marveling over exquisite Mexica masterworks. We explored until both of us were struck with art fatigue, recharging with a pint of cider in a nearby pub before crossing town to hip Shoreditch by bus.

In the following days we communed with Thomas Gainsborough’s elegant portraits of English gentry at the dizzying National Gallery (taking a break for beers across the square before re-entering for round two), circumnavigated David Shrigley’s phallic, politically-incisive ‘thumbs up’ sculpture in Trafalgar Square, and paid respect to the recently-deceased English painter Howard Hodgkin, whose retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery was poised to open at the time of his death. By night, we hopped from pub to pub, drinking liberally, though never enough to prevent our daylight rambles. There was a sublime simplicity to this cycle. We were two close friends, almost genetically aligned for travel in each other’s company.

An extensive Cy Twombly exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris had been tempting Lucius. So, midweek, we boarded a EuroStar train at St. Pancras Station and shuttled through a foggy English countryside, under the Channel, and out into the crisp light of the Parisian afternoon. The next morning, our sights set on Twombly and the Pompidou, we raced through the city on foot from our austere hotel in Montmartre.

Rounding the corner to reveal the square in lee of the Pompidou, we noted something amiss. Fanny-packed visitors milled about in the museum’s shadow, peeking in the tinted windows, reading white placards affixed to the entrance doors. Of course. The Pompidou was closed for a strike. Lucius was disappointed, as was I, thought I was simultaneously relieved to have an excuse to visit one of my favorite museums, in nearby Le Marais — the Musée de la Chasse et de Nature — an eccentric private museum of taxidermy and sporting art housed in a 17th century former hotel. For Twombly, there was always tomorrow.

But tomorrow brought further strikes. We ended up spending the day and part of the evening eating beef bourguignon and watermelon-pomegranate-seed salad, drinking consecutive bottles of rosé, and exchanging stories and laughs at the Montmartre apartment of close family friends. As the sun began its descent, we climbed the hill to Sacré-Cœur, that sacred aerie atop the butte Montmartre, the highest point in Paris.

On our return trip to London the following day, Lucius and I tallied our progress. Though the Pompidou had denied us, we managed to check the Musée de la Chasse, Musée Picasso, Palais Royale, and Palais Tokyo off of our list. At the Palais Tokyo, we observed Abraham Poincheval, (the French performance artist known for floating down the Seine in a large glass bottle and hiding for a week within a taxidermy bear placed in the Musée de la Chasse), as he sat on chicken eggs waiting for them to hatch, all of this encased in a large glass box within a bustling gallery. I smiled and nodded at the artist. He smiled and nodded back. At the time I write this, his first chick has just hatched. He has nine to go.

Our final day in London, we continued our pilgrimage, moving slowly through the Victoria & Albert Museum and soaking in a late viewing of a vast David Hockney retrospective at Tate Britain. The morning before my flight home, we forewent a proposed visit to Dover Street Market to sneak in a final saunter through the Royal Academy of Arts, where an exhibition of Soviet art from 1917-32 was calling my name. Hurrying back to Regent’s Park, we took final stock. 13 museums in nine days, including some of the finest on earth.

On my flight back, I flipped through my notebook, filled by that point with a list of artists, works, and movements to research back home. I was certain: it wasn’t the volume of art that moved me so, nor the splendor of the grand spaces in which we dwelled. It was, rather, the singular joy of sharing something so deeply personal with my fellow man.

Spurred by a sense of civic duty in trying times, I attempt to absorb each day’s frenetic flow of news and commentary. Indeed, I believe that education is vital for democracy. I believe that ignorance encourages our worst impulses. But I also believe that over-saturation of anything tends to exhaust the soul and dull the mind. Such times call for a reinvigorated communion with museums. Within the walls of great museums, we find nourishment for our own, personal trees of liberty. Like any house of worship, museums simultaneously fortify us from darkness, while opening us up to the light of the world.