Occasional Prose (14 page)

Such decisions, of course, are hard to make. What is interesting, though, is the fact that with any other costly material object but a work of art little anguish would have been felt either way. A decision
not
to pay ransom for a yacht or an airplane (“let them blow it up, then”) would not call for any agonizing reappraisals. Only a work of art, in such endangered circumstances, appears equivalent to a life, so that the decision to sacrifice it or risk it, in the interest of safeguarding other works of art, becomes political—a matter of common concern. “Do we stand firm and let them execute the Vermeer?” The old excruciating choice between the One and the Many.

With the nineteen pictures in the Beit collection, less emotion seems to have been felt. Housed on Irish soil and acquired with the proceeds of South African mines, the collection itself, in the newspaper accounts, made an impression of loot or booty stashed in a pirate’s haven and in that sense fair game for another set of hijackers, differently motivated. Of course many, perhaps most, art treasures have been looted from somewhere, usually a poorer country, but they are not such fresh loot as the Beit swag seemed to be; like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or Cleopatra’s Needle in New York’s Central Park, they have had time to grow a few roots. If the same paintings had been seized by three armed men and a woman from the Dublin National Gallery, much more outrage would have been experienced.

In the news stories of her capture, Bridget Rose Dugdale was described as an heiress “obsessed by inequalities.” If her police record can be taken as evidence, this obsession of hers centered on collections of art, and she is not the only one to feel that ownership of beauty in material form confers a kind of privilege not inherent in the possession of cars, stocks and bonds, furs, even diamonds. A mysterious moral privilege that is different from mere wealth though generally associated with it. Mere wealth, in fact, we often feel, should not entitle a person to a privy association with beauty. Comparing the owner with the Rembrandt on his walls, one is conscious of an awful discrepancy, an injustice of fate that has brought these two together like an ill-assorted couple. The owner, alas, is not worthy of his possession. Yet we would not feel that about a magnificent Rolls-Royce, though we might faintly envy its possession, or about one of Mr. Onassis’s yachts. Or Jackie’s clothes and jewelry. One may despise all those things or half-wish one had them, at least to try on, but there is no virtue in them, no magical property that we sense as communicable, no aura beyond that of wealth, of which they are the outward signs.

Most of us like to think that beauty is not only a good in itself but also that it is good
for
something. We envy those who are in a position to surround themselves with beautiful things—in the form of paintings and statuary but also china, antique furniture, well-laid-out gardens—not merely for the sensory pleasure that must derive from looking at them and handling them or for the status they bestow but because we are sure that if
we
lived with them we would become beautiful too. As though some of the beauty inherent in these objects would be bound to rub off on their possessor and
a fortiori
on the children exposed to them from birth. In our wistful imagination, the wonderful contagion extends even to those charged with their care and maintenance, if it is only a daily cleaning woman, who is lucky beyond her fellows, people like to say, to be in contact with
objets de virtù
, each in its ordered place, that she dusts and polishes. No doubt there is some truth in this: to serve a god, beauty, indwelling in beautiful things, feels more rewarding than to slave for some member of one’s own species. The daily service of beautiful things conduces to decorum; it is a rite, a kind of communion, as we notice whenever we wash a fine wine glass as opposed, say, to a jelly jar. Nearly everybody, even the most insensitive, has had some hair-raising encounter with the aesthetic present in man-made things, just as nearly everybody, even the most irreligious, can attest to some brush with the supernatural, if only in the form of thought-transference.

And yet museum attendants seem to be immune to contagion from the god; mysteriously, no magic rubs off on them. Maybe constant exposure to beauty has made them coarsely indifferent or is it constant exposure to crowds? To spend a working day watching over beautiful things is evidently not enough to turn you into a lover of beauty.

For the visitor to commune with works of art, it seems essential to be alone with them or relatively alone, and the mere presence of a crowd, the sound of other voices, in a museum or art gallery, is felt as a sacrilegious intrusion, just as in a forest or on a mountain peak. The purely visual experience of beauty is peculiar in this respect, distinct from other aesthetic forms such as concerts, operas, plays, which are enjoyed democratically. I do not think anybody would like being the only spectator at a play. True, reading demands solitude or at least freedom from distractions, but that does not apply, obviously, to listening to a novel or poem being read aloud or declaimed, which was our original experience of literature and still is for children, who relive phylogenetically the experience of the race: “Tell us a story.” By contrast to the ear, the eye is a jealous, concupiscent organ, and some idea of ownership or exclusion enters into our relation with visual beauty. The eye is a natural collector, acquisitive, undemocratic, loath to share. Possession, appropriation, may be purely cerebral. I “collect” a painting or a statue or a passage of landscape when I stand before it in contemplation. I am storing it away—or trying to—in my mental treasure-house. Nobody could feel covetous at a concert, but who, going through a museum or a stately home, has not had an itch to possess some object (generally a small, portable one) on display?

The idea of taking his art collection with him into the next world does not occur to a modern millionaire. Yet for older materialistic cultures—the Egyptian, the Etruscan, the Mycenean, with its famous beehive tombs—those who had the good fortune to live with beautiful things could count on their companionship throughout eternity. The dead man in his tomb was equipped for the after-life with what he had enjoyed most in his sensual life: vases, cups, jars, painting, statuary, food and drink, slaves in simulacrum, bracelets, necklaces. The Etruscans buried a dead child with his toys around him. These pagan burial customs have a whiff of suttee about them—a sacrifice of the living (if art can be thought to be living) to comfort the dead. Such piety appears to us barbarous. We would not bury an oil man with his favorite Giorgione or Titian or even his Francis Bacon. What a waste, we would think. They should go to a museum, of course, together with his signed French furniture, and his estate will benefit from a tax write-off. To bury a piece of property of world-recognized value would strike most modern people as nothing short of criminal, and a will containing such a proviso would be taken, probably, as prima facie evidence of unsound mind.

Yet is the museum as the last resting-place for “priceless” works of art really the solution that socialists and civic-minded millionaires like to fancy for the disposal of this unique category of property once jealously kept in the family, in papal and episcopal palaces and the gold-encrusted chapels of high-born cloistered nuns? Socialists think that art ought to belong to everybody and not to a favored few. This sounds right in theory, but in practice there is no way that that particular pie can be cut and distributed fairly. Once a work of art enters a museum, instead of belonging to everybody, it belongs to nobody. Shares in it, that is in the physical space in front of it, are disputed between touristic groups with their guides, individual visitors, artists with sketch pads, copyists sitting at easels. As public interest in art mounts, the situation worsens. The inflation of art values encourages a kind of voyeurism, which in turn stimulates unbalanced persons and others with private or social grievances to commit acts of violence within the sacred precincts, and these acts of violence, in their turn, draw bigger crowds. The Kenwood House Vermeer, before last February, was probably one of the few Vermeers outside private collections that you could look at in peace; no more—once it is restored and put back in place, it will surely be mobbed, as happened with the Michelangelo
Pietà
, already a crowd-collector. I was not in Florence when that madman (never identified) pierced tiny holes in the eyes of the fourteenth-century female saints, but I can imagine that those first rooms in the Uffizi, normally quite deserted, were thronged that summer with curiosity-seekers trying to make out where the holes had been and closely querying the guards.

What happened with the Mona Lisa in Tokyo is a perfect illustration of the problem. In excluding handicapped people in wheelchairs, the Japanese Cultural Affairs Agency had made a democratic decision. Estimating the crowds that would queue up to see the picture, they allotted thirty seconds per visitor for viewing: obviously people in wheelchairs would slow up the flow of traffic and deprive others still waiting of the chance to see the Mona Lisa. In fact, as I read somewhere, because the crowds were even bigger than had been estimated, or because the demonstrations and their aftermath created bureaucratic confusion, the allotted viewing time was eventually cut to ten seconds. But nobody can “see” the Mona Lisa in ten seconds
or
thirty. The whole idea is an absurdity. When you think of the dilemma—and things are not much better around the painting when it is at home in the Louvre—you wonder whether a better solution might not have been to resort to the Etruscan expedient of burying the Mona Lisa with her first owner, François I, back in the sixteenth century.

For today, I see no solution. There is no way of persuading people, democratically, by television appeals, to stay away from museums if they are not urgently interested in art. The nineteenth-century philanthropists, endowers of provincial universities and schools of art and design, had a good idea: to present casts and copies of famous works of art to small cities and towns, for students to work from and citizens to look at, to improve their general culture. One American, a relation of Harriet Beecher Stowe, commissioned the painter Fantin Latour to copy
all
the paintings in the Louvre. Andrew Carnegie, in Pittsburgh, made a collection of replicas (now the Carnegie Institute) of the standard art repertory—not just statuary and paintings but also familiar masterpieces of architecture—portals, façades, porticos. The cream-colored big room housing them still stands as he left it and has an eerie, haunting or haunted, beauty, but today it must be unique. Today originals are demanded. Every town, every college must have originals for its museum. The old plaster casts of the Laocoön, of the Hermes of Praxiteles, Venus of Milo, that stocked the provincial museums of my childhood have vanished without a trace. Are they stored in museum basements or have they simply been junked, like the copies of Rembrandt’s
Old Woman Cutting Her Nails
and the
Blue Boy
that Americans used to hang in their living-rooms? The scurry for originals of any and every description naturally helps to send up prices, and at the same time it is these very prices, which they have read about in news magazines, that make people curious to see the most famous and costly originals of all and, if not prevented, to touch them wonderingly, as if to make sure they are real. Tourists who have been given to understand that paintings and sculptures are the only kind of currency that is not going to depreciate will naturally not be satisfied by copies, as their grandparents were, but must file in person past the Mona Lisa, the Birth of Venus, the Night Watch, gaze up at the Winged Victory and Michelangelo’s David. Yet this is not the whole story.

In addition there is the belief, which I spoke of just now, that direct contact with visual beauty is, in Berenson’s phrase, life-enhancing and hence that deprivation of it or the acceptance of substitutes—reproductions and plaster casts—amounts to spiritual starvation. That is why any program, however rational, for limiting access to famous works of art known to contain large quantities of that essential element would have as little chance of gaining approval in a modern society as a zero-growth program designed to take away milk from schoolchildren.

But is there any empirical foundation for such a body of beliefs? What does beauty do, exactly, for those people we consider fortunate in comparison with ourselves, in that they are exposed to it regularly while we are not?

Let us look at art dealers, to start with. Well, as a class, they are not morally better than butchers or dentists; certainly they have a worse reputation. They are not more enlightened or refined than most other groups in the population; in fact, in my experience, they tend to be rather vulgar. They have a certain amount of specialized knowledge, most of it highly technical but nonetheless more interesting to the rest of us, since we
are
interested in art, than what is contained in a dental journal. As a class, that is about all you can say for them. But you could argue that art dealers are not a fair example to choose, since their relation to art is commercial; they are buyers and sellers of produce.

Let us turn, then, to museum curators. Again, no moral effect of the regular exposure to beauty is perceptible. As a group, they are probably more upright than stock speculators or used-car dealers. They are better educated than the average person, but that is not an effect of being a curator so much as a cause. Having studied art history in a liberal-arts curriculum and done some post-graduate work, they qualified to become curators. It is not a job you work up to by starting as a guard. In general, they are better dressed than the national average and have better manners. The job requires them to be fairly presentable and to have a fund of lively or informative conversation. They are rather good at gossip. In every other respect, I would say, they are timid and mediocre creatures, though I can think of a few shining exceptions, mostly women. Association with beauty has not given the mass of curators large hearts or soaring minds; in extenuation, it must be said, that they have been obliged to associate not just with Assyrian cylinder seals and Coptic portraits but also with art patrons and donors: they have learned to flatter and suck up for the museum’s sake and to do quite a little lying and glossing over, in justification of museum policies. Once more, as with art dealers, their relation to beauty is impure. A good part of the job, on the higher levels, is promotion and public relations, and the professional concern they must have with wills, the fierce competition between museums for legacies and bequests, brings out a suggestion of the tactfully hovering vulture.