Christine Coulson - Metropolitan Stories
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- Book:Metropolitan Stories
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- Publisher:Other Press
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- Year:2019
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From a writer who worked at the Metropolitan Museum for more than twenty-five years, an enchanting novel that shows us the Met that the public doesnt see.
Hidden behind the Picassos and Vermeers, the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing, exists another world: the hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms, and cafeteria that are home to the museums devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 peoplealong with a few ghosts.
A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art...
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Stories define museums, and none more so than the Met. But it takes imagination as much as knowledge to recognize and appreciate them, as Christine Coulsons enchanting novel reveals. Melding fact and fiction, art history and autobiography, her strange tales of mutually dependent artworks and caretakers beat with a pulse that oscillates between the real and the unreal, the ordinary and the extraordinary. More than any scholar or connoisseur, Coulsons exquisite book captures the essence of the Metits ability to delight, surprise, astonish, and, ultimately, to dream.
Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge, the Metropolitan Museums Costume Institute
Every painting, every tapestry, every fragile, gilded chair in the Met not only has a story, but gets to tell it, in Christine Coulsons magical book. The history, humor, wonder, andperhaps above allbeauty that Coulson absorbed in her twenty-five years at the museum burst forth from these pages, in her wry and imaginative tales of the people and objects that make the Met all that it is.
Ariel Levy, The New Yorker staff writer and New York Times bestselling author of The Rules Do Not Apply
Copyright Christine Coulson 2019
Production editor: Yvonne E. Crdenas
Text designer: Jennifer Daddio
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
For information write to Other Press LLC,
267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.
Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Coulson, Christine, author.
Title: Metropolitan stories / Christine Coulson.
Description: New York : Other Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019007798 (print) | LCCN 2019000107 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590510582 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781590510636 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3603.O885 M48 2019 (ebook) | LCC PS3603.O885 (print) | DDC 813/.6dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007798
Publishers Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.
Ebook ISBN9781590510636
v5.4
a
For Philippe de Montebello,
Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 19772008
And for all the extraordinary people
who have devoted their lives to our beloved museum
You are my heroes.
We protect them and save them and study them. After a time, we realizesome of us slower than othersthat they are protecting us, saving us, studying us.
We are generations of golden children, thousands of staff members, raised by the Metropolitan Museum, put in its ward and shaped and stretched until our eyes can spot beauty like were catching a ball, quick and needy, clutching it to our chests so it is ours, all ours.
Our knees buckle as we learn every one of the museums tangled pathsevery gallery, every limestone hall, every catwalk and shortcut, every stairway up and down and across and overuntil our muscles, tutored and trained, always bend us in the right direction.
We dream of chalices and Rothkos, African masks and twisting Berninis unfolding in our minds like so many fluttering pages. Our hearts stutter with their stories, so many stories that words wont do. We need to show you what we see, what we have woken up, right here, right now, in this shiny box.
They are the objects, the art, the very stuff of the place. The things the public comes to see and longs for us to sing about, loudly and clearly and with every breath, until the visitors are too inspired, too tired, to see another bronze, another altarpiece, another sword or portrait or vase. After buying a bag of proof in the shopa sack that says the museum has been done, with Van Gogh napkins to prove itthe visitors leave.
We and the objects stay. We have our evenings to cling together and our mornings to reunite. We connect like neighbors across a fence, one side always knowing more; we like to think its us, but its them. Our hungry scholarship scratches for what theyve already lived. Those objects were there, saw the whole thing, right in front of them. Watched the tomb door close, pinching the sunlight until it narrowed to one last blinding stripe, then thrrump! Gone.
We depend upon their magic, know it like a quiet superstition. The objects glide into our worldonce fixed, now movingeach time showing up somewhere we did not expect. Because we did not realize that we needed to be rescued by marble and silk, or canvas and oil paint, or charcoal upon a page, pushing beyond gilded frames and glass cases to reach out and do with us what they will, always for good. Never against us. Those works of art workto make the right things happen and sweep the wrong things down the steps of the museum in heavy drips that collect and wash away. And we are breathless and relieved to have the art on our side. It is why we never leave.
Sometimes I wish we had a support group. We would start by introducing ourselves.
Hi, Im a fauteuil la reine made for Louise-lisabeth, Duchess of Parma.
The other chairs would immediately think Im an asshole, particularly the older Windsor chairs.
Everyone would know that I still have my original upholstery and that Ive made cameo appearances in a few minor paintings. Theres some cred in that, but also a lot of resentment.
I remember back in Paris when a master carver sculpted me into coils and tendrils, decoration so florid that even my smoothest surface arched into acrobatic movement: swinging, reaching, bounding, wrapping with wisteria determination.
Gold leaf coated each of these spiraling forms. The sheets of the precious metal, impossibly thin, floated onto my exposed wood like a soft rain, cool and tender. Silk velvet was then stretched across my curves, a fine, bespoke suit, taut and precise, with glistening ornament along its edges.
I can picture Louise-lisabeths daughter, Isabella, age eight, on the day I arrived from France at the Ducal Palace of Colorno in Parma. It was 1749, and she stroked my crimson velvet with such care, trying to appear grown up and sophisticated.
But I also remember when she curled herself within my arms and cried fat, messy tears, her knees tucked tightly beneath the panniers of her gown with its flowers and ribbons. I can still feel the heaving of her chest against my back as she shivered gently to the rhythm of her sobs. How I wish I could have swayed along with that pulsing sorrow to comfort her.
Only five years later, Isabellas siblings, Ferdinand and Maria Luisa, would topple into me during audiences with their parents and pull at my gold trimmings, as clumsy and silly as any children, despite their finery.
One time at the Met, a small boynot more than three years oldwandered past the barriers in the Wrightsman Galleries and headed straight for me. Almost two hundred and twenty-five years had passed, but he reminded me so much of those toddlers back in Parma.
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