Whenever I go somewhere new, one of the first things I look for is a museum or art gallery. When I was younger, I prided myself in my ability (so to speak) to appreciate art, but as time has gone by I’ve truly found enjoyment in it: I love learning about art, I love reading about art, I love looking at art.
Which is why, barring a month-long itinerary, in my first month in New York City I visited at least one museum a week. I didn’t think it would make much of a difference, seeing art in person (I’ve been more than happy to enjoy them on Wikimedia Commons), but then I found myself tearing up in front of a Newman painting. I don’t even like abstract art. Or at least, I thought I didn’t.
Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art
On my second day in New York, I visited campus to pick up my ID and some paperwork. I decided to walk around campus, eventually deciding on checking out the library, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a small museum on the first floor. It reminded me of the Old Rizal Library in Ateneo, and how I’d spend restorative afternoons staring at Edgar Talusan Fernandez’ Kinupot. Most of the artifacts on display were donated by a William D. Walsh, an alumnus of Fordham. All 260+ pieces on display, dating from 10th century B.C. to third century A.D., had extensive notes on the origin of the vases, sculptures, and coins, as well as how they were eventually acquired by the donor. It was a small detail in the scheme of things, but I appreciated them regardless.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Everyone wants to go to The Met. It's one of those iconic New York things, and I went there on a whim: it was my third day in America and earlier that morning I couldn't open a bank account because I didn't have a social security number and was too old to qualify for the bank's student banking account (even if I'm an international student). It took 10 minutes to remind me of the impotence of my arrival, and despite the kindness of the banker, I was harshly reminded that I didn't belong here. Which was fine, because I never wanted to anyway, and I never wanted to come to America, and I was angry about all of it while I walked to the subway station, and the cognitive dissonance isn't lost on me, I promise.
I expected to be amazed by the Met. In my mind, the villainy lay across the pond, in the British Museum. Of course I was wrong—and only as I stepped into one of the most famous galleries in The Met did I realize just how bad the whole place made me feel. The Temple of Dendur was given as a gift to the United States of America by Egypt as thanks for the country’s support in the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia: cultural monuments were “saved” from the effects of flooding caused by the construction of Aswan High Dam. A valiant effort, surely, and one worthy of rewarding: except, who constructed the dam in the first place, and what caused the country’s government to reach that point? (The answer will not surprise you.)
Then, I thought to myself that perhaps a view of Japanese art might calm me. Except the Japanese gallery exhibit is entitled “Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art.” I wondered if I was overreacting, or that the bad feeling stemmed from having visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in April, and watching Oppenheimer in July, but the title of the exhibit and the way it was curated was insulting in the way that it glossed over the effects of the war, as if the US hasn't remained the top nuclear power since.
The Japanese gallery was flanked by the Chinese gallery (beautifully manicured) and the Korean gallery. Past that lay the South and Southeast Asian gallery—yes, just the one small room with terracotta walls and a mishmash of art from the rest of the continent. It set my blood back to simmering: Oh, I said to one of the guards, is this all there is on display? They have a wall full of Buddha heads, suspiciously lacking provenance in their captions. When I was in Angkor Wat in 2017, a local guide told us that most of the statues had lost their heads to looters. The Cambodian government has requested the aid of the US Justice Department for the return of multiple artifacts. I couldn't stand it: my anger felt almost cartoonish in its extremity.
After all this, I found myself sitting in the gallery of Greek and Roman Art, steaming. I'd made the trip to see all these things—Whole temples constructed in 10 B.C., or The Death of Socrates—but I felt no grace at the moment, despite being surrounded by such splendor. I was consumed by anger.
A friend once told me that he admires me because I care, and that care colors what I do. When I was at the Met, I thought of what that friend said, because all of the sudden it felt like I cared too much. The Met felt, to me, like an edifice to the power structures that prevented the owners of these magnificent works from housing it in places where their countrymen could appreciate it from themselves. It felt like paying money to see any of it made me an accessory to a crime. I wasn’t grateful at all for the opportunity to see these things that, in any other life, I may never have seen in person at all. I felt robbed. And there wasn’t even any Filipino art on display.
I ended the day by visiting the Dutch Masters Gallery, which significantly lifted my spirits. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I should have visited all the galleries of colonizers instead, and turned off my brain. My favorite painting was A Vase of Flowers by Margareta Haverman. They also have an absurd amount of Rembrandts. Still, I didn’t find myself recommending the Met to anyone as a museum to visit. I didn’t think I ever would: for as much work as it goes into curating art, I felt the lack of descriptions on provenance, and sometimes simply just the context of the creation of certain artworks, was unforgivable. Maybe the only way to enjoy art in the Met is to enjoy it for art’s sake, and it irritates me that I couldn’t seem to do that in the largest museum in the Americas.
The New-York Historical Society
I learned of the existence of the New-York Historical Society (yes, the hyphen is part of it) because they had an exhibit on J.C. Leyendecker. I’ve always enjoyed his illustrations, and I was interested to see how the exhibit would explain how a gay artist helped shape the ideal American Man.
It was a fascinating exhibit, and I felt lucky to catch it: more than once, when looking up paintings and artwork, I found myself wishing to see it. But more than anything, I was thankful that the exhibit drew me to the museum in the first place.
The New-York Historical Society may be one of my favorite museums. The space goes deep into the history of New York City, and doesn’t sugarcoat the role of the slave trade in New York’s growth after the revolution and the civil war. Throughout the museum, it was evident that the curatorial team was cognizant of the importance of the social issues that continue to surround Indigenous American artworks and artifacts. Overall, the exhibits showed genuine care in educating visitors, and as someone who has general knowledge about American History (lol, thanks colonialism), it was a wonderful experience to learn more about New York. They have a beautiful gallery showcasing Tiffany Lamps that talks about the contributions of women to the art.
One of my favorite galleries was the exhibition called Objects Tell Stories. The idea that all these little things were kept with care, remnants from lives lived in New York, resonated with me. Also they have hourly short film screenings! It’s a shame that the museum is so overlooked, but understandably so: apparently, the guard at the entrance always has to ask people what they’re there to see, because most people enter thinking it’s the American Museum of Natural History, which is right beside it.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
My love for Monet began when I was 10 years old and my parents chose a 1,000-piece puzzle of Monet’s Woman with a Parasol. I remember running my hands over the box, marveling at how beautiful the painting looked—how the artist captured the movement of the clouds.
My mother's taste in art shaped mine greatly: she loved Monet, so I did too. For a long time, my favorite works were impressionist. I liked that they were just shy of real, that the style gave a sense of skill. I didn't understand abstract art, so on principle I didn't like it. I too joined the legions of people who thought, well, a five year old could throw paint on a canvas and they're not hanging that up in the Lourve.
I learned to appreciate art a bit more in high school: In class we learned about the different art movements, and during our discussion of impressionism our teacher made us stand up and come close to Monet's Water Lilies flashed on the screen, close enough to scrutinize each brush stroke. Then, as a group, we all stepped back, all the way to the end of the classroom, to see the work in full—to see the forest for the trees.
Fresh from the high of the New-York Historical Society, I looked up more New York-related art and exhibits, as well as American artists, who I don’t know too many of. To be honest, I wasn’t very keen on visiting MoMA—I knew the crowds would be wild, and I never learned how to appreciate modern art. Still, I knew that MoMA housed some of Monet’s Water Lilies; in previous travels, I'd always make a beeline towards Monet's work, so it only felt fair to do it here.
Going into MoMA, I didn’t realize the scope of modern art and what would be on display, and my day in the museum was one of pleasant discovery. Because of the layout of the galleries in MoMA, there was a moment that I caught a glimpse of Magritte’s The Lovers—which I didn’t even know was on display—and I had to turn away, because I didn’t want to spoil the moment of seeing it up close.
If you couldn’t already tell, the MoMA left a significant impression on me, chiefly because for once (or finally), I felt a connection to abstract art. As I entered the gallery for abstract expressionism, I remembered a podcast episode about a painting being defaced, and asked the guard if they had any of his paintings up. He seemed puzzled and asked, “Is that one of the Rothkos?” Well, close enough. I wasn’t very interested in seeing a Rothko painting anyway (aren’t they all just a bunch of rectangles, I foolishly thought to myself), but I passed one along the gallery and it was a physical reaction: I thought it was moving.
Rothko’s No. 16 is indeed just a bunch of rectangles. But to see it in person, to take in its size, its colors, the brushstrokes and simplicity of it gripped me. There’s a bench situated directly in front of it, likely for people who reacted similar to me: I sank down onto it and breathed in. Then, beside me, a mother asked her teenage daughter: “Can you expain to me… what’s so good about it?” Her daughter explained, quite patiently, that the artistry was in the technique, and sure, that may be true: there had to be some kind of skill behind it, to make it feel so spiritual and arresting. Perhaps it was something that came with age, I reasoned to myself. I first saw a Rothko in Spain when I was 19, in a visit to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, but it didn’t leave an impression. But seeing the Rothko in MoMA made me feel alive. I felt the passion move through me, that desire for simplicity.
What this is all about, though, really, is encountering Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis. I got goosebumps when I saw it, first because of its sheer scale, and then because of how it made me feel. It’s just a big red painting with some lines painted on it, and it makes me feel crazed when saying that it’s so much more than that. To go up close to it felt like being engulfed. The austerity of it almost makes it feel like a mirror. It does not bear the signs of its creation: it exists, it is what it is, it just is. And when I stepped back to take it all in, I cried. There have been a handful of times I’ve ever cried in an art gallery, and this may be one of the most significant: I felt like I was seeing something for the first time, understanding it, and I cried because I felt like it was seeing me, too.
I read up on Newman on the train back home and found that abstract expressionists “suppressed any signs of the action of the painter’s hand”—which also explains why it was so difficult (well, impossible) for any restoration to be done when his paintings were cut up.
The Frick Collection (Frick Madison)
Being in The Frick reminded me of how deeply I love art, and how, in my journey of learning to appreciate art, I have always gone backwards in time. The Frick is a permanent collection of Old Masters, and they appealed to me because the first genres of art I learned to like were classics. I was drawn to realist, romantic, baroque paintings because the taste came preordained. They had passed through the sieve of time and been deigned worthy of remembering.
There were multiple times in The Frick that I gasped and stopped in my tracks, simply because the entire collection is one full of famous artists—artists I’d learned of first because of their fame, then for their actual work. I felt my heartbeat quicken when I gazed upon three Vermeer paintings, marveling at the way he painted light, just as countless others have marveled at his work.
The third gallery I entered was a one-two punch. It had a John Constable painting, and the clouds gave it away. The first time I’d heard of Constable was in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Seeing one of his paintings reminded me of a passage in the book:
“If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you. (…) I was painted for you.”
The painting directly the Constable painting was something I’d longed to see for years: J.M.W. Turner’s The Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile. Turner was a painter I’d discovered on my own, going on a Wikipedia binge for artists who were known for their seascapes. I never thought I’d see a Turner painting in person, and from all my time looking at his paintings and having them as my desktop wallpapers, I never really considered how large they were. They were so large that it felt like I was only a street away from the scene.
But the showstopper was definitely the portrait of Thomas Moore. There's a book about the museum entitled "The Sleeve Should be Illegal," and I agree. The sleeve alone carried so much depth, it’s as if at any moment Thomas More could adjust his arm and the velvet would ripple with movement.
Going to grad school in New York means meeting people from all over the world, which is a wonderful thing, and one of the main reasons I wanted to go back to school in the first place. I knew too, though, that this would eventually touch on explaining myself: my background, how I got here, how I can afford to live this way.
As much as I thought I was prepared to explain the classist system of society in the Philippines, the words always still somehow stuck in my throat. How could I explain that I was raised to speak English by my father, who had taught himself English by doing the crossword? That as much as the concept of taste is classist, it is something I learned from my mother, who has only ever traveled through books, and only enjoyed her money for herself over the past two years, after paying off debts from caring for her parents?
Most of all, how could I explain that beyond that, I am still extremely privileged by the decisions my parents made—to have been sent to two “good” schools, and then to even have the opportunity to go to grad school in New York? The fact of the matter is that the only reason I can speak so eloquently about the layers of class in Philippine society is because I am part of that system: I have benefited from it. And one small, insignificant part of that complicity has manifested in my taste in art.
Appreciating different types of art means constantly wrangling with that ingrained sense of taste, now. Because the way I interact with art includes the desire to understand the context of its creation, as well as the provenance of each piece. To love is to see, and to recognize the systems of power that enabled me to view these works at all. To enter a museum in New York requires me to guard my heart. For as much as the works are transformative, I find myself seething at works’ provenance—or lack thereof.
I started my journey through some of New York’s famous art spaces full of displeasure—which was, ultimately, reflective of how I felt about coming here at all.
In the preface of the "The Sleeve Should be Illegal", Ian Wardropper, the Director of the Frick Collection wrote: “There is no one way to look. We see artworks through the lens of what we bring to them and what we are seeking.”
The thing about art appreciation, I've found, is that anyone can do it. But being moved by a piece of art is, to me, only the first step. When art stays with me, then comes the desire to learn more, to uncover, to keep seeing.
I did not immediately fall in love with New York City upon my arrival. But as each hour, day, month passes, I am learning about my own definition of appreciation. After all these art galleries and their revelations, I’ve learned not to pass judgment too swiftly.
After all, these past two months have made me think about provenance: both definitions of the word. First, the record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, and second, my own origins and how those have shaped me and my perspective. Being in a city that is both so old and so new, all at once and constantly, has made me recognize my own rebirths here, at each new encounter.
Perhaps in time, I’ll stop in my tracks as I hustle towards a subway station and realize that I’ve come to a pocket of a neighborhood that I’d written off as not my type. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Having A Coke With You — Frank O'Hara is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it