Seeing Slowly by Michael Findlay

Author:Michael Findlay
Language: deu
Format: epub
Publisher: Prestel Verlag
Published: 2017-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Lose the Floor Plan

Most of us go to galleries and museums with a limited amount of time and the goal of seeing specific works. The more we try to cram into that time frame, the less we actually see. How long does it take to see a work of art? I would say at least a minute. Stare at your hand for a full minute. Quite a long time.

In fact, organized people who plan ahead with the museum guide and know exactly where they are headed probably see less than disorganized people. With this shopping list approach, they may end up with a full basket, but never get a good taste of anything. A disorganized person heads for the special exhibition, gets lost in the Greek galleries, barrels through the decorative arts, and ends up in contemporary art (which she doesn’t like), fascinated by an Eva Hesse sculpture, an artist she has never heard of.

If we are semi-organized, we can allocate one hour to seeing what we have planned to see and at least half an hour to wandering aimlessly, which is one of the great joys of life. Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, about a stolen painting, opens with Theo, the young protagonist, being led through the Metropolitan Museum:

I trailed behind my mother as she zigzagged from portrait to portrait . . . ignoring many of the paintings and veering to others without hesitation. . . . She’d never seen a great painting until she was eighteen and moved to New York and she was eager to make up for lost time. . . . “It’s crazy,” she’d said, “but I’d be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. . . .”55

It is too bad (spoiler alert) that Theo’s mother, a perfect art lover, does not make it to chapter four. When I started to visit the Metropolitan Museum in the 1960s, I often had galleries to myself. In those days, some of the great Impressionist paintings were hung in alcoves with seating. I would buy my lunch sandwich in a delicatessen on Madison Avenue and eat it on a bench in a nook enjoying Claude Monet’s Ice Floes (1893), and I would see no one for half an hour except perhaps a guard, who would turn a blind eye to my munching. In those days, admission was free, not a strongly “recommended” admission fee. What a luxury!

I was young but not in a hurry, and neither was anyone else in museums and galleries. It is a different story now, particularly with special exhibitions, but until museums install those moving walkways found in airports (not long now), we can stand still once in a while and, in hospitable museums and galleries, even sit down.

Although the efficacy of seeing slowly is borne out by personal experience, I am indebted to the essay “Reading in Slow Motion” by the literary critic Reuben Brower, based on a course he taught at Harvard University in the 1950s.

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