All the Beauty in the World

They say that the roots of a tree are every bit as extensive as the branches. The Met is like this, too, with two floors below the galleries exactly as endless as the areas the public knows. Talented guards have internalized the whole of it in three-dimensions, such that they can tell you outside of a basement restroom that Aztec deities are overhe

A couple of galleries away, there is a series of pictures Stieglitz made of his partner and later his wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. They aren’t portraits, and they aren’t snapshots. Studies, I suppose you’d call them: efforts to see her better—her hands, her feet, her torso, her breasts, her face, her face again, her face again. She was strik

Not along any path, I thought, that would find me scrapping and scraping and muscling my way forward through the world. I had lost someone. I did not wish to move on from that. In a sense I didn’t wish to move at all. In the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I had been allowed to dwell in silence, circling, pacing, returning, communing, lifting my eyes u

I had visited the Cloisters before, but somehow the precise definition of a cloister eluded me. I would have guessed it was a tiny cell where a monk shut himself away to pray. In fact, a cloister was the open-air center of a monastery, a place set apart from the wider world but not from the sun, moon, and stars.

I especially like it when baffled people ask me questions. I like baffled people. I think they are right to stagger around the Met discombobulated, and more educated people are wrong when they take what they see in stride. Baffled people are surprised by things that are, in fact, surprising—that a Picasso is right there for them to breathe on, that

“You know,” he tells me, “it really isn’t a bad job. Your feet hurt, but nothing else does.”

If you want to know if something is funny, see if it makes you laugh. If you want to know if a painting is beautiful, see if it evokes an equivalent response, one as definite as laughter though usually quieter and shyer to emerge. I step up to a landscape painting called Vétheuil in Summer, close enough that it swallows my field of vision. I find t

a bare concrete corridor where signs warn: Yield to Art in Transit.

Each morning, her priest would have opened her temple’s doors so that the limestone statue would catch the morning light. At that moment, she (the eternal Hatshepsut) would transform into an akh, a radiant being, in communion with her father, the sun. (More precisely, Amun-Re was the power that powered the sun, the invisible creative force behind t