My Life with Museums -- an Introduction

In the course of my long life, I've visited hundreds of museums -- more than I can possibly count or remember. Nor just the famous and glorious ones: how many times, driving in unfamiliar locality, or wandering in a new city, have I been irresistibly lured into the local landmark?  Even in the most modest establishment, there's something new to learn and discover. Nevertheless, my focus, lifetime, has been on art museums, where even the most iconic, most reproduced painting or sculpture acquires new life when viewed in the flesh. Let's face it: copies can be useful and informative, but the real thing is the real thing -- always revelatory, and sometimes transcendent or sublime. In fact, let me confess, in the Rembrandt Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I experienced a transient version of the so-called Stendhal Syndrome. Once and once only, but never to be forgotten.

I'm dazzled, in memory, by the vast holdings of the Borghese, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, and an early love, the under-appreciated Brooklyn Museum right there on Grand Army Plaza.  

I'm grateful to the exhibitions and the hard-working curators that introduced me to major painters I wouldn't otherwise have appreciated: Aelbert Cuyp and Jan Steen at the National Gallery, Camille Pissarro at the Jewish Museum in New York; many more. And also the specialized museums, chief among them the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, which taught me more about life in the seventeenth century than could a fleet of books. And a special favorite, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York -- a most wonderful and comprehensive display of an ancient and modern craft. But also the many local museums that I visited during my thirty-eight cross-country migrations. Who could ever forget the Donna Reed Museum in Denison, Ohio, or the Jell-O Museum somewhere near Buffalo, New York?  Gosh, I'm still hoping that someday I will make it to the National Museum of the American Coverlet in Bedford, Pennsylvania.

And then there are the troubling museums. I wonder if I will ever have the courage to enter the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It was disorienting enough to visit an open-air museum, somewhere in Lithuania, where a variety of preserved structures from that country's miserable past have been brought together to simulate a peasant village. It was a strange dispiriting visit. After all, my ancestors as far back as we can know lived and worked in such a sad little village. My visit was, I suppose, educational -- but also melancholy and depressing. The village seemed not so much preserved as embalmed.

Comments

[Fran Gardner]

Thank you for pointing me toward this entry. It was a great read. I haven't been to enough museums.

One that I have been to is the Corning Museum of glass. My daughter teaches law at Cornell, and when I visited her, that's the place that she took me. It was pretty nifty.

I've also been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I was prepared for the exhibits to be emotionally difficult, but I couldn't handle the emotion radiating from the other visitors. I couldn't get out of that museum fast enough.