Museums and their Inhabitants

Home a week now, and no nearer to catching up. Writing impressions of New York while you're waiting to go to work in Kamloops is a rather different proposition than doing so from a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan. Even though the place stays twisted into you like a fish-hook, the immediacy fades and mutes too quickly. Anyhow, onward.

One of the tourist things you can do without feeling a vague embarassment is, of course, to see as many galleries and museums as you can, and there are a lot. Trouble is, everybody else has got the same idea, and not all of them had good mothers who taught them how to behave in public. Funny thing is (actually, it isn't funny at all, and it probably shouldn't even be all that surprising), the more modern and fashionable the gallery, the more ill-mannered are the clods who gather there, mercilessly booming out their opinions for all to enjoy. Pity that you couldn't see what they were banging on about, since they'd parked their gigantic ignorant selves squarely between you and the exhibit you'd been looking at. Considering the clatter they were all making, you'd think they'd realize there were other people around, but obviously not. MoMA was particularly infested with these types.

The crowd at the American Museum of Natural History was no less raucous, but far more gleeful and much less self-regarding. This was the furious din of curiosity - there are lots of joyous sounds in the world, but the sound of kids yelling in wonder with their grubby paws all over the stuff of the earth is one that makes me smile the most. There were exceptions, of course, like the couple with the eye-popping mass and girth, propelling their gelatinous bulk through the crowd with indestructible disregard for all others. Their runts, as small and hard to swat as their parents were vast and impossible to avoid, jumped railings and thumped on display cases like miniscule monkeys on meth. But they were, as I say, the exception.

But then, ah...a place like the Frick appears like a mirage through the humidity. The Frick Collection (not a museum, as you are pointedly informed) is contained in the Upper East Side home of Henry Clay Frick, a steel magnate who made his fortune in the late 19th and early 20th century. He consorted with the likes of J P Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, but walking through the extraordinary collection of art he left to the public, it's hard to imagine him a robber baron.

Rembrandt, Titian, Vermeer, Goya, El Greco, all the heavy hitters are represented here. You could sit all day in the monumental West Gallery, on one of the couches provided, and contemplate two huge Van Dyck portraits of people you never heard of, or maybe a couple of Turners or a Velazquez or Gainsborough. The Holbein portraits of Cromwell and Sir Thomas More will stop you dead in your tracks in the Living Hall. In the Enamels Room, you can get your face inches from a Cimabue altarpiece from the late 13th century - no ropes, no plexiglass sneeze-guard, just a stunning 700 year old masterpiece staring right back at you.

Paintings don't do it for you? How about exquisite Houdon sculpture? How about 18th century porcelains and furniture? How about just everyday objets that are so beautiful they'll break your heart? That's the alluring thing about this place - it has the tranquility of a private residence, combined with the almost nauseating beauty of some of the greatest works of art humanity has ever produced. And the crowds know it. There's no hollering here, just the musing, contemplative murmer of people at peace in a lovely place.

I don't care if he was a robber baron. Much can be forgiven for a gift like this.