Cricket lessons to crucifixions: the secret life of a museum guard

All The Beauty In The World Patrick Bringley Bodley Head £20 ★★★★★

Ever wondered what goes through the minds of those uniformed guards loitering at the corners of museum galleries? It seems a dull vocation – monotonous, drab and tiring.

Patrick Bringley begs to differ. Having spent ten fruitful years in that capacity at New York’s Metropolitan Museum Of Art, he has written an uplifting memoir that recalls his time behind the scenes there with colour, pathos and flair.

His book starts early this century when, not long out of university, he works in a seemingly prestigious public relations job at the New Yorker magazine. But he cannot handle the competitiveness, which hampers his own efforts to write and get published.

After his brother is bed-ridden with terminal cancer, Bringley’s life is defined for almost three years by regular hospital visits which, while not improving his disposition, introduce him to a beguiling atmosphere of quietness, beauty and grace – something he’d only otherwise experienced in great art. So he decides to seek this elusive quality further by applying to work at the Met.

Bringley proves adept at breathing life into a vast public institution, which houses two million objects ranging from Greek pots to American baseball cards.

On his first day he is offered his only perk, a ‘hose allowance’ (for socks) of $80 a year. An on-site tailor is on hand to ensure sartorial regularity.

The largest contingents among the

600 guards come from Guyana, Albania and Russia. In the cramped downstairs locker room, he learns about cricket from a Guyanese colleague, whose doctor son later serendipitously delivers his son, bringing a sense of cyclical renewal to his story.

He is astute about the visitors who bustle around. The Egyptian department has the widest appeal, attracting ‘schoolchildren and tweedy professors, New Age healers and Afrofuturist comic book artists’. He believes he learns more about ancient Egypt from seeing rather than reading about the contents of a pharaonic village, because great art, unlike literature, doesn’t spew out bullet points but speaks of things that ‘are at once too large and too intimate to be summed up’.

We look, learn and empathise as Bringley enthuses over scores of items, from a Chinese scroll with ‘achingly beautiful’ calligraphy to a Monet painting that causes him to reflect that, for artists, there is no such thing as sunlight, only colour.

This style can seem twee, but isn’t. The museum’s most wonderful sculpture in his opinion is a mid20th Century Congolese ‘nkisi’, which he describes as a divine being with a powerful air of inwardness.

The painting he covets most is a Crucifixion painting by the 15th Century Italian friar Fra Angelico, where the compassionate figures at the bottom comfort him by recalling his vigil for his brother.

He concludes with a bustling scene at the museum’s closing time with the crowd ‘transitioning out of a speechlessly beautiful world and returning to the forward march of their lives’. He compares this to the fleeting moments of beauty, truth, and emotion captured by artists inside. As throughout, it’s an appropriate and elegantly conveyed observation.