I (Heart) an Art Museum
I love art the way some
people love Star Wars or professional
football or designer clothes…well, I love designer clothes, too, even if my
budget doesn’t. I also enjoyed fundraising (really) as part of my career. So it
made sense for me to write a mystery series in which the protagonist earns her
living raising money for a fictional art museum.
The Devor Museum in San
Francisco is a construction that exists only in my head, although there are
aspects of it that might remind readers of SF’s Museum of Modern Art, before
the massive and exciting expansion it’s currently undergoing.
But my heart lies with the
art museum of my childhood, the great and wondrous Metropolitan Museum on upper
Fifth Avenue in New York. I was born nearby, before living there cost the
earth. As World War II ebbed, my father was a war correspondent in Europe and
the Pacific, and my mother was a CBS radio producer, and so it was nannies who
had to figure out what to do with a curious child on rainy, cold days. The Met
became my playground, an endless, mysterious source of play, of surprises, of
quiet moments to imprint images and ideas on my small, fertile brain. Believe
it or not, in that era, the Met was chilly, dark, and empty. I still remember
climbing the sides of a stone sarcophagus to see who might be interred, and
wandering among the hieroglyph-covered walls in the Egyptian area.
Today, the Museum is packed,
noisy, brightly lit, re-imagined to engage in new ways with literally millions
of visitors from around the world. There are new galleries, new wings, periodic
re-arranging of the fine and decorative arts, and a more comprehensive global
perspective than in my youth. The Temple of Dendur, reassembled from the
flooded Nile, has its own wing, surrounded by light. The American Wing includes
the entire façade of an elegant building. The huge gift shop could consume my
annual discretionary funds if I let it.
I’ve probably been to the
Met a couple hundred times and I discover something new every time. A
relatively new favorite is a small gallery in which Buddha statues, many of
them life size or larger, from a handful of countries surround me and remind me
to slow down and stay in the moment even as I admire the artistry in the
sculptures.
I have a couple of
touchstones, works I have been looking at for many decades, works so iconic
they don’t get moved. My absolute favorite is a self-portrait of Rembrandt in
middle age, the rough red skin, the wrinkles around his eyes, the slightly worn
clothing, the posture of fatigue, and those eyes – when I was five, I realized
they follow you around the room. Wherever you are, the painter is looking right
at you, communicating his feelings about his life at that moment, asking you to
remember him and to come back again to visit. I promised then, and I continue
to promise every time, that I will return.
Do you have a museum you love?
I’d love to hear your stories.
Mixed Up With Murder
In the third in the Dani
O’Rourke Mysteries series, Dani visits a small New England college to help them
as they accept a stunning art collection and a cash gift to support a new
gallery for it. The financial vice president has some concerns about the gift
and when he drowns on a golf course before he can share them with her, Dani has a terrible feeling she may have gotten herself
mixed up in murder once again.
