“Christ,” thinks the wife of Harry Morgan, the hero of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, “I could do that all night if a man was built that way.” But, of course, a man isn’t. Men aren’t built other ways as well. “Men don’t like complicated food,” says one spinsterish character to another in a Barbara Pym novel.
I would like to add another male deficiency. With the exception of those who make their living in and around the places, men don’t have much museum stamina — the ability to spend hours contemplating works of art, even the greatest works of art, with anything like the same concentration women seem able to bring to the job.
I base my opinion on a by-no-means random opinion sample: my wife and I. My wife can, in the museological equivalent of Mrs. Harry Morgan’s sentiment, go all night. And I? I have just returned from a week in England, where I visited only two museums: the Courtauld in London and the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. Both have what I think it fair to call small but select collections of painting and sculpture and art objects. Yet in both places I felt my attention wandering. I longed for fresh air. Surrounded by grand works of art, I nonetheless wished to be — elsewhere. I used to say that my museum stamina extended to roughly 90 minutes. I fear it is now under an hour, and shrinking.
The energy for the acquisition of culture seems to be diminishing in me. I used to want to read — and, truth be known, own — all the world’s excellent books. This desire has departed, sent packing by the realization that it can’t be done. I don’t care enough about opera to want to see all the world’s operas, though I continue to want to hear as much serious music as possible. I once thought I wanted to see all the world’s — or at least all the Western world’s — great paintings and sculpture, and I still do, but I shall evidently have to do so in half-hour sessions.
The slightly alarming thought occurs to me that I may already have seen too much art, and thus have become, without my quite knowing it, jaded. Owing to the ease of contemporary travel as well as to the ingenuity of contemporary curators in putting together “super” shows, I have doubtless seen ten times the art that a man of my equivalent level of culture was able to see a century ago.
A few months ago I was in a Park Avenue penthouse once owned by Helena Rubinstein, whose walls were all but papered with Renoirs and other paintings, so little space was there between works. I found myself deeply unmoved and greatly unimpressed. If you have seen one Renoir, as the late and not-too- soon forgotten Spiro Agnew said about slums, you have seen them all. Or so I concluded, as I plowed into my dessert, oblivious to the art all around me. Let the Renoirs go hang, I said to myself, which was what they were already doing. As I say, jaded.
This past summer I was in Philadelphia and went to the Barnes Foundation, a peculiar museum out on the Main Line. The brilliant accumulation of a most eccentric man, a physician who made his fortune selling an antiseptic called Argyrol, the Barnes Foundation contains 60 Matisses, 69 Cezannes, and 180 Renoirs, and much else that seemed to me dazzling, all mounted in the most higgledy-piggledy fashion. Taken together, it was as pleasing a museum experience as I have had in recent years, though the rooms were awash with art gobblers such as myself.
A break for lunch, then on to the super Cezanne show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I had written away for tickets months before. When I arrived, vast lines had already formed, and I joined what Henry James, in a not dissimilar situation, once called “my detested fellow pilgrims.” (Since I first encountered it, I have found the phrase immensely useful for dealing with the problem of tourism and snobbery, or the dislike for people who are all too identical in their interest to you: that they are fellow pilgrims doesn’t mean you can’t detest them.) Although the Cezanne paintings were splendid, the crowd wasn’t, and my stamina, after my session at Dr. Barnes’s joint in the morning, was at low ebb. I had, clearly, over-arted myself.
In viewing art, it may be that less is more. It may be, too, that I have to put myself on an art diet. No more super shows; no attempts to do large museums in one fell, or even a triple fell, swoop. Abstinence may be required.
Perhaps a year’s lay-off would be helpful. After that I might be able once again to view a Gauguin or a Chagall or a Picasso as something more than very costly wallpaper, which is what these artists’ paintings have pretty much become for me. A year off — who can say? — might remove the pink from the cheeks of all those Renoir ladies and put it back in my own.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
