Book Review | ‘All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me’ by Patrick Bringley

What in the world are they thinking, those uniformed museum guards standing in the corners of the galleries, looking alternately stern and bored, sneaking glances at their cell phones, occasionally whispering conspiratorially to one another? The answer, according to Patrick Bringley’s new memoir All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, is quite a lot.

Bringley was in his twenties, working an unrewarding job at The New Yorker, when his older, much admired brother, Tom, died of cancer. The boys’ mother had always taken them to art galleries, and in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, still deeply affected by his brother’s death, Patrick has a revelation: the best job for him to deal with his trauma is one that will involve standing and quietly looking at works of art.

Learning not to move for long periods of time allows Bringley to develop a method of approaching a work of art: “I resist the temptation to hunt right away for something singular about a work, the ‘big deal’ that draws the focus of textbook writers.” Instead, he advises that the “first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that’s there…. Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn’t think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.”