When I go to a museum with friends, I remember the outing. When I go alone, I remember the art. Certainly, visiting a museum as a social occasion is a wonderful way to spend time with people we love. But there are also upsides to going by oneself, as the research suggests. A person’s response to a work of art may be an emotional, private experience. There are paintings and sculptures you want to fall into, wrestle with, or simply sit across from in silence.
Indeed, while conventional wisdom holds that social interaction helps museum visitors learn by discussing what they’re seeing with fellow attendees, a study published in Curator: The Museum Journal, challenged that notion, showing that there is no meaningful learning advantage to going with others or going alone; both can be equally beneficial, just in different ways. In the weeks after their visit, “solitary visitors were just as likely as paired visitors to have discussed the things they had seen or learned with family or friends,” researchers at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, reported. For the study some forty solo visitors and forty visitors in pairs were observed and interviewed during their visit to the Queensland Museum. Four weeks later, 40 percent of participants took part in a follow-up telephone interview. When asked how being on their own contributed to their experience, the most common response was that it allowed them to explore the exhibition at their own pace. Other reasons offered related to having greater choice and control, and freedom from distraction. Participants had responses like “I can look at what I want to look at,” “I can get more immersed in it,” “I can feel what I feel without input from others,” and “You miss more when you are in a group.”
Alone, we can also personalize our visit. Sandra Jackson-Dumont, who oversees the education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, once suggested that museumgoers “curate” their own experience by researching the collection ahead of time and choosing particular subjects or themes (gardens, oceans, dogs) of personal interest. A museum’s information desk can provide guidance, and larger institutions often offer online itineraries for thematic or abbreviated tours. One at the Louvre, for example, winds past a dozen masterpieces—including the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, and the Great Sphinx of Tanis—in an hour and a half. The free questions and lesson plans that museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Vatican Museums in Rome post online for students are valuable for adults, too. To further personalize the experience, Jackson-Dumont said we may also want to make our own music playlist at home and take headphones to the museum, letting us walk the galleries with Drake or Debussy.
Sometimes, we want the walk to be leisurely so we can read every last bit of wall text, or enjoy an audio tour in its entirety. Other times, we want to move at a clip. For instance, on a spring day in Paris I didn’t want to spend the sunniest hours inside the dim Musée Nissim de Camondo with its French furniture from the eighteenth century. At an exhibition called La Toilette: The Invention of Privacy at the Musée Marmottan Monet, I didn’t stay long because the galleries were packed. The show explored how, over centuries, the toilette went from being a social space, where women were accompanied by chambermaids and family, to one of solitude, even contemplation. There were paintings from the Degas series After the Bath and Pierre Bonnard’s Marthe à la toilette (1919), in which Marthe “seems to be thinking, allowing herself long moments alone,” as the wall text suggested. I was interested in the show, but moved swiftly; looking at a painting is different when we have the physical space to forget where we are than when strangers are accidentally brushing our shoulder or moving into our line of vision.
On the other hand, at a different time, while viewing the work of the contemporary Brazilian artist Vik Muniz at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in the Marais, I was delighted to linger. The show included his After the Bath, After Degas (Pictures of Magazine 2), 2011, an interpretation of the series by Degas, in which the image of the solitary nude woman is composed of ripped magazine pages and paper with parts of women’s faces and bodies on them. Muniz does with food, dirt, and junk what the Impressionists and Pointillists did with paint. He used melted chocolate to create a snapshot of faces in a crowd in Individuals (From Pictures of Chocolate), 1998, and pasta sauce to play off of Caravaggio’s Testa di Medusa, rechristening it Medusa Marinara, 1999. The museum was practically empty the morning I arrived. It was the first time I’d seen Muniz’s work, and I was able to experience the joy of discovery, unselfconsciously. I could get up close to After the Bath to examine the colors and shapes of the individual magazine fragments, then back away to appreciate how they formed the whole.
Yet the museum experience isn’t always about the particular works on view. A museum itself can be a “restorative environment,” a place that may “create a sense of peace and calm that permits people to recover their cognitive and emotional effectiveness,” as Stephen Kaplan, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan, and colleagues explained in the journal Environment and Behavior.
For me, this has almost always been true. Like a church or temple, a museum has its own physical and psychic architecture. Abstract art or dinosaur bones may anchor us to the world, while the space itself allows the mind to drift, free-associating, making meaning. This tranquility can be felt as much in the blank white box of a modern art museum just as it can in the dark, galactic halls of a planetarium. It can be experienced in sculpture halls amid frozen white nudes, or in a flowering courtyard between galleries.
I was a teenager when the first major retrospective in the United States in twenty-five years of René Magritte’s work opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During a class trip, we were allowed to split up and wander on our own among paintings of jingle bells and green apples. It was my introduction to Magritte, and I was taken with the bowler hats, the floating baguettes, the French words, and black umbrellas, at once playful and unsettling. I stood in front of the paintings, charged by the pleasure of discovery, not necessarily of something in them, but in me.
Alone, we can form a special relationship with art, observed Stéphane Debenedetti in the International Journal of Arts Management. Further, the “elevated, austere, even magical atmosphere of a museum,” as he described it, may allow for “self-reflection, tranquillity and personal freedom.” It may enable visitors “to develop identity and self-knowledge free of social constraints.” In other words, museums can help foster self-actualization.
Yet despite the potential benefits of a solo museum visit, many people are likely to forgo the experience, according to a series of studies by Rebecca K. Ratner, a professor of marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, and Rebecca W. Hamilton, a professor of marketing at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
Participants in one study predicted that going to a movie or an art exhibition wouldn’t be as much fun if they went alone, and they worried that people might infer that they didn’t have many friends. Yet when the participants actually explored an art gallery by themselves, their enjoyment of the experience did not significantly differ from that of the people who attended in pairs. By our not being willing to go alone, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Consumer Research, we miss out on opportunities—experiences that can be pleasurable, intellectually stimulating, and lead to new, possibly meaningful connections with strangers (more on that later).
In the same way that arriving at a museum with a companion doesn’t mean we have to tour the galleries with them, going alone doesn’t have to be completely isolating, either. We can break up periods of solitude by chatting with a docent or attending a lecture. Many museums today make it easy to be on our own yet still feel a sense of connection through guided tours, talks, and apps with audio tours. (Smartphone walking tours of cities like London and Tokyo, as well as places throughout the United States, are yet another resource; check out the Tips and Tools guide at the end of this book.)
The novelist John Steinbeck o
nce wrote about how overwhelming it could feel when visiting a vast museum like the Uffizi or the Prado. But later, after he had time alone to think about all that he had seen, he could return to the galleries to revisit those particular works that had spoken to him.
“After confusion I can go into the Prado in Madrid and pass unseeing the thousand pictures shouting for my attention,” he wrote in Travels with Charley, about his solo (if you don’t count his French poodle) road trip across America, “and I can visit a friend.”
* * *
Outside the Musée de la Vie Romantique, in the shade of tree boughs and umbrellas, visitors were spread across benches and café chairs in the tea garden with pink roses. I crossed the courtyard to the shady path between the high latticed walls back to the sidewalk.
In a way, all of Paris is a museum of romantic life. For centuries its apartments, churches, bars, and restaurants have provided reprieves for men and women who prized their alone time. Because of that, it’s easy to conclude that there must be hundreds of artists’ and writers’ homes in the city that are regularly open to the public. But there are, in fact, few of the latter, like the Maison de Victor Hugo in the 4th arrondissement in Place des Vosges, and the Maison de Balzac in the 16th arrondissement. What typically remains of writers are museums that feature re-creations of their workspaces, resurrected using the personal objects that outlived them, as is the case for Marcel Proust.
One morning in the Marais, I heard in the distance the belch of a tuba playing a sleepy, old-fashioned refrain. It was merry, though not exuberant; a fragile kind of joy. It sounded like the backdrop to a gathering and indeed, when I turned the corner from Square Georges-Cain I found that a small crowd had formed on rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
The tuba was in the arms of a salty-haired man in shorts and sandals. Beside him were a clarinet player, a banjo player, and an older woman in an overcoat and an olive beret with a flower on the side, dancing in place like a marionette, snapping her fingers, kicking her feet in moves from another time.
Across the street, behind huge wrought-iron gates, was the central garden of the Musée Carnavalet, two townhouses that chronicle the history of Paris, from prehistoric canoes to re-creations of centuries-old rooms with objects that once belonged to notable Parisians, like Proust’s brass bed from which he wrote much of In Search of Lost Time. The tutt-tutt of the tuba trailed after me as I passed under the archway, past the low hedge mazes with colorful flowers poking up, inside to the ticket counter. Admission, said the man behind the desk, was free, because the museum was preparing for a renovation. I remarked on my luck. He made a face and explained that regrettably many rooms were already closed, though I wasn’t discouraged. There are about a hundred rooms in the Carnavalet and on that particular day, I was there for only one.
We chatted for a short while about this and that, and where I was from, before I waved goodbye and walked through a courtyard and into galleries with elaborate metal signs, some as old as the sixteenth century. There were signs shaped like giant scissors for a tailor, a fork for an innkeeper, a key for a locksmith, so that even customers who couldn’t read would know what the various shopkeepers offered. A painted sheet metal “Chat Noir” sign shaped like a shabby, yellow-eyed cat with its tail curled around a crescent moon was hanging from the ceiling. In the late 1800s, it hung outside the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre.
I walked upstairs through room after room of ornate furniture, past Madame de Sévigné’s desk (she lived in the Carnavalet for nearly twenty years), thinking with each step that the next room would be Proust’s. He had lined it with cork to keep out noise, which made the belching tuba out front particularly droll.
I arrived at the end of a long hall and then retraced my steps, but there was nowhere else to go. I reached into my back pocket, unfolded the museum brochure with shaded rooms indicating which areas were closed, and discovered that they included room 147—the one with furniture from apartments where Proust used to live.
And so, in the end, I saw the brass bed from which Proust wrote In Search of Lost Time not in room 147 of the Musée Carnavalet but on a postcard in the gift shop. It was a bit dreary. The brass bed was pushed up against yellow, cork-lined walls, giving the setup an institutional air. The actual apartment where the bed and cork walls had been was about two and a half miles away, and it had become a bank.
To conjure Proust in Paris, it’s more fun to do so in one of his old haunts. There are many, including the sprawling Bois de Boulogne on the west end of the city. But as Proust himself appreciated quietude—“I discover pleasures of another kind,” he wrote in In Search of Lost Time, “of tasting the good scent on the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor”—I decided to go someplace more intimate: Parc Monceau.
* * *
The long streets of pale stone houses, immaculate and symmetrical with their tall windows and wrought iron balconies, were practically blinding in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, more like walking the old city in Istanbul than the 8th arrondissement.
In the nineteenth century, this area went from being a commune on the outskirts of the city to its latest wealthy neighborhood. It attracted banking families like the Rothschilds; the Méniers, the French chocolatiers (who eventually sold their business to Nestlé); Henri Cernuschi, a leader of the Lombard revolution of 1848 and an Asian art collector; and yet another prominent banking dynasty, the Camondos, who once owned one of the largest banks in the Ottoman Empire. The family’s former mansion at 63 rue de Monceau is now a museum, named for the son of Count Moise de Camondo, who was born in Istanbul and became a Parisian banker and art collector.
Smaller, less-frequented museums, particularly those that were once homes, feel made for solitary visitors. Their intimacy seems to say, This painting, this sculpture, exist only for you. The Musée Nissim de Camondo is not modest—it was modeled after Louis XV’s Petit Trianon, the Greek-inspired château amid the gardens at Versailles—though it feels personal nevertheless. It’s been widely praised for its extraordinary collection of eighteenth-century furniture and objets d’art—a mahogany rolltop desk by Claude-Charles Saunier is said to be one of the highlights—but I confess I was more interested in the bones of the house and the flowering park beside it than in the desk.
I wound through rooms: the great study, the great drawing room, the dining room, the small study, the porcelain room where the count dined when he was alone. The wood paneling was dark, the carpet thick, the drapes and velvet chairs of another time, another season. From a high window I looked down to see a handful of people sketching on folding chairs and stools on the grass and pebbled paths in the family’s private garden beside Parc Monceau.
Monet made half a dozen landscape paintings of the park in 1876 and in 1878. In one, women in white frocks and hats sit in the shade at a bend in a leafy path, children at their feet. Another—a swirl of green, pink, and yellow—captures the fertility of the park in springtime, just as it was on this particular afternoon.
There’s an entrance to the park around the corner from the Camondo house. Tall black and gilt gates lead to a short block where, at the end, another set of gates, far less grand, ring the park, inaugurated by Napoleon III in 1861. A photograph of Proust in Parc Monceau as a teenager shows him standing beside his friend Antoinette Faure at her birthday party. (Her father, Félix Faure, would one day become the president of France.) It was Antoinette who asked Proust to complete what was known as a confession album, “An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc.,” which eventually evolved into various versions of the Proust Questionnaire, including Vanity Fair’s regular feature that begins by asking, “What is your idea of perfect happiness?”
Monceau provided both a respite and fodder for artists and writers. Zola described it in Nana as the “luxurious quarter at that time springing up in the vague district which had once been the Plaine Monceau.” Henry James called it “one of the prettiest corners of Paris.” Colette s
aid the park’s “soft lawns veiled in misty curtains of spray from the sprinklers” attracted her “like something good to eat.” She also liked that Monceau had fewer children than the Luxembourg Gardens, declaring, “It was better altogether.”
The Prousts lived at 45 rue de Courcelles, a five-minute walk from the Camondo mansion. Flaubert lived between them at 4 rue Murillo, Parc Monceau. I wound around the paths they walked, the paths their characters walked. People and roses were withering in the heat. Schoolchildren in sandals and baseball caps circled an Egyptian pyramid. A barefoot woman filled a yellow pail at a fountain. A boy, not quite up to his father’s waist, strolled beside him in the shade. This is what Monet’s paintings capture: the conviviality of park life, the gathering of families.
The springtime paintings of a lesser-known Impressionist, Gustave Caillebotte, however, depict “a more solitary vision of the park,” as a Sotheby’s auction catalogue once put it. In one painting, a gentleman in a suit and hat walks alone along a leafy, curving path. I followed one just like it.
Every now and then along the oblong perimeter of Monceau dotted with weathered green benches, paths slice in, leading past sculptures—here, a composer; there, a playwright—on grounds dense with unruly ferns and shrubs. There are beds of slender wildflowers, a carousel, a pond, and follies like a Venetian-inspired bridge and the pyramid, closer to the size of a teepee than anything you’ll find at Giza. There’s even a Renaissance archway that was once part of the former Paris City Hall. Yet what caught my eye were the plaques amid the leaves along a fence. They depicted a man alone in the basket of a hot air balloon, a nod to the world’s first frameless parachute jump in 1797 by the balloonist André-Jacques Garnerin, thousands of feet above the ground on which I was standing.
Alone Time Page 7
