Imagine you wake up tomorrow morning to two offers in your email inbox. The first is a return offer from your investment banking internship. The second? A guard position at an art museum.
Given the choice, no one would opt for the latter, and any hesitation at all would feel like a slight against the status, security, and opportunity such an offer represents.
Patrick Bringley surely felt the same when he quit his dazzling job at the New Yorker and began working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the surface, guarding art may not seem like the most glamorous career move—long hours on your feet, observing the quiet rhythms of a museum floor—but for Bringley, it quickly evolved into an incredibly nourishing experience that far surpassed his time at the magazine.
In Bringley’s New York Times bestselling memoir All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, he details his decade–long career in the field. He took up the post after his older brother Tom passed away from terminal cancer. With the floor beneath Bringley’s feet suddenly gone, he was whisked into unpredictable grief and desperately yearned for solace. But more importantly, an escape.
That led him up the Met’s grand marble staircase and into a world of mosaics made from a diaspora of people, living all walks of life—of dreamers and artists and old masters beyond our time. The museum has “a greater attendance than the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, and Nets combined,” he points out.
At the New Yorker, Bringley was surrounded by largely the same demographic. “My peers had all recently graduated from elite private universities and maybe had worked another job in publishing,” he says. It was a flashy institution, but vacuous and unfulfilling. Writing for the magazine meant playing pretend: faking a stylized voice and expressing opinions he wasn’t sure were his own.
“I was more than a bit blinded by the bright lights,” he admits. “But it’s very hard, when you’re in a good light … to accept that it isn’t you; it’s just light.”
But as a guard, he could freely voice his ideas and think in obscurity, alongside coworkers who were not only demographically nuanced, but “diverse along every axis.”
In addition to his interactions with coworkers and friends, Bringley’s memoir thoughtfully explores his relationship with the Met’s renowned collection. Beautiful paintings come into conversation with his suffering, and he examines how art energizes the static.
“The picture is so beautiful, so tenderly flush with life that it seems to be itself living,” Bringley writes of Titian’s Portrait of a Man, pointing to its magic and sense of permanence. The artwork, displayed in the Venetian Paintings section, brings about layered feelings in Bringley; these emotional complexities are as wonderfully passionate, bright, and what he “wished the human soul to be.” But if Titian enlivens Bringley, then Bernardo Daddi exposes a profound pain. In his Crucifixion, Daddi didn’t just paint the body of Christ; he painted a deep, potent, impenetrable torture that lingers. Bringley says the picture has “nothing on its mind except suffering,” and to understand it is to take in “the great silencing weight of suffering.”
Grief is a visceral pain we feel with every fiber of our body, as if it has taken refuge in the marrow of our bones. Yet its magnitude slips from our mind in the clamor of everyday life, until something reminds us again of our fragility. When that happens, we turn to great art that humanizes our pain and reminds us “this is real.”
Although Bringley mainly focuses on the Met’s artworks, he also remarks on pieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art in delicate profundity. At the PMA’s Author Talk: Patrick Bringley on “All the Beauty in the World,” he retells an intimate memory when he and his mother visited the museum shortly after Tom’s passing. Staring at an old master’s painting illustrating holy suffering, Nativity and Adoration of Christ, Bringley is reminded of the feeling at Tom’s bedside: one of “speechless mystery, beauty, and pain.”
During his talk, he reads aloud a section from his memoir where his mother sees Niccolò di Pietro Gerini’s Christ in the Tomb and the Virgin, a painting of a beautiful, young man, dead in the arms of his mother, who holds his body upright.
“I saw she wept because her heart was full as well as breaking, because the picture inspired love in her, bringing both solace and pain,” he says.
In the old master’s painting, Bringley apprehends beauty, but in his mother’s, he sees lamentation and evidence that life is suffering. He ends this excerpt with, “A great painting can look like a slab of sheer bedrock, a piece of reality too stark and direct and poignant for words.”
Reading Bringley’s work and listening to his talk, I’m reminded of the fixation on prestige and accomplishment on campus. During New Student Orientation, I dreaded being asked about my major. Being in the College came with the expectation that I would belong to the Holy Trinity of SAS majors: economics, PPE, and biology. They’re reputable, respected, and no one will blink twice at you. Yet it was hard to identify neatly inside this bubble when I wanted to study art history.
“That’s cute,” I would hear people say after telling them my intended major.
Art often becomes frivolous, overlooked, and undervalued because it won’t help you break into a Fortune 500. But all the beauty in the world does not stand on a corporate ladder or distinguish itself in office politics. Bringley reminds us that chasing big dreams doesn’t make us immune to the heartaches in life. In those moments of pain, turn to art.
You may not yet have words to capture how you feel, but art will supply explanations for you. All you have to do is allow yourself the vulnerability it takes to understand the human mind and heart behind each individual piece.
“Venture back into the world carrying something with you,” Bringley says. “Something … that weighs on you as you go forward and changes you a little bit.”
