All the Beauty in the World - The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me – Patrick Bringley

All the Beauty in the World – Patrick Bringley 

Have you ever stepped into a museum and felt time slow down? // Imagine walking past centuries of art, each piece whispering its own story, while most people rush past without a second thought. // This is the world Patrick Bringley invites us into in All the Beauty in the World.

After the sudden death of his brother, Bringley left a promising career at The New Yorker seeking something he couldn’t yet name. // He found it in the quiet halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he became a guard — not a high-profile curator, not a celebrated scholar, but someone who saw the world from a perspective few notice.

Here, Bringley’s days are filled with subtle wonder: the way sunlight falls on a sculpture, the hush of an empty gallery, the small gestures of visitors as they encounter art for the first time. // But it’s not just about beauty; it’s about life, loss, and what it means to heal. // As he watches, he begins to see that art can carry grief, hope, and resilience — if only we stop long enough to notice.

The memoir introduces us to the people who make the museum tick: colleagues with their own secrets and stories, each contributing quietly to the magic behind the scenes. // Bringley observes them, learns from them, and shows us how community, even in the most unexpected places, can transform pain into purpose.

And the art? Oh, the art becomes almost a character itself. // Paintings, sculptures, and artifacts are mirrors of the human experience, reflecting joy, sorrow, ambition, and love. // Bringley shows us how attention — even the simplest act of noticing — can reveal depth, meaning, and connection in ways we often overlook.

So — why should you read All the Beauty in the World? // Because it’s not just a memoir; it’s an invitation. // An invitation to slow down, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, to recognize how art, observation, and human connection can guide us through life’s hardest moments. // For anyone who loves beauty, storytelling, or moments that make your heart pause, this book will resonate deeply.

In the end, Bringley leaves us with a simple, powerful truth: sometimes the quietest places, the smallest gestures, and the unseen details hold the deepest meaning. // He shows that grief can be transformed, that beauty can heal, and that even the most ordinary life can become extraordinary if we choose to look closely. // And that is what makes All the Beauty in the World a story you’ll remember long after the last page is turned.

Reading 1 (Part 2)

In the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, below the Arms and

Armor wing and outside the guards’ Dispatch Office, there are stacks of empty

art crates. The crates come in all shapes and sizes; some are big and boxy, others

wide and depthless like paintings, but they are uniformly imposing, heavily

constructed of pale raw lumber, fit to ship rare treasures or exotic beasts. On the

morning of my first day in uniform I stand beside these sturdy, romantic things,

wondering what my own role in the museum will feel like. At the moment I am

too absorbed by my surroundings to feel like much of anything.

A woman arrives to meet me, a guard I am assigned to shadow, called Aada.

Tall and straw haired, abrupt in her movements, she looks and acts like an

enchanted broom. She greets me with an unfamiliar accent (Finnish?), beats

dandruff off the shoulders of my dark blue suit, frowns at its poor fit, and whisks

me away down a bare concrete corridor where signs warn: Yield to Art in

Transit. A chalice on a dolly glides by. We climb a scuffed staircase to the second

floor, passing a motorized scissor lift (for hanging paintings and changing light

bulbs, I’m told). Tucked beside one of its wheels is a folded Daily News, a paper

coffee cup, and a dog-eared copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. “Filth,” Aada

spits. “Keep personal items in your locker.” She pushes through the crash bar of

a nondescript metal door and the colors switch on Wizard of Oz–style as we

face El Greco’s phantasmagoric landscape, the View of Toledo. No time to gape.

At Aada’s pace, the paintings fly by like the pages of a flip-book, centuries rolling

backward and forward, subject matter toggling between the sacred and profane,

Spain becoming France becoming Holland becoming Italy. In front of Raphael’s

Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints, almost eight feet tall, we halt.

“This is our first post, the C post,” Aada announces. “Until ten o’clock we

will stand here. Then we will stand there. At eleven we will stand on our A post

down there. We will wander a bit, we will pace, but this, my friend, is where we

are. Then we will get coffee. I suppose that this is your home section, the old

master paintings?” I tell her yes, I believe so. “Then you are lucky,” she

continues. “You will be posted in other sections too eventually—one day ancient

Egypt, the next day Jackson Pollock—but Dispatch will post you here your first

few months and after that, oh, sixty percent of your days. When you are here”—

she stamps twice—“wood floors, easy on the feet. You might not believe it, my

friend, but believe it. A twelve-hour day on wood is like an eight-hour day on

marble. An eight-hour day on wood is like nothing. Pfft, your feet will barely

hurt.”

We appear to be in the High Renaissance galleries. On every wall, imposing

paintings hang from skinny copper wires. The room, too, is imposing, perhaps

forty feet by twenty, with egress through double-wide doorways leading in three

directions. The floor is as mellow as Aada had promised, and the ceiling is high,

with skylights aided by lamps pointing down at various strategic angles. There is

a single bench near the center of the room, upon which lies a discarded Chinese￾language map. Past the bench, a pair of wires dangle loosely toward a conspicuously empty spot on the wall.

Reading 3 (Part 4)

If you were to stand at the center of the Greek sculpture court and look up, you’d

see a plaster barrel-vaulted ceiling overhead. In Homer’s day, the sky was thought

to be a brazen dome every bit as concrete and solid. It rested on columns footed

in the sea, which encircled the disk-shaped earth. Beyond the sea, there was a

netherworld that saw only the back side of the disk-shaped sun. And beyond the

netherworld there was nothing—not even nothing, really. Being a very hands-on

people, the early Greeks didn’t make room in their philosophy for the concept of

infinity or of the void, neither of which is observable in nature. As Greeks’

thinking developed over the centuries, they never entirely lost their peculiarly

concrete habits of mind. Everything in their world, even their gods, had shape—a

quality that supercharges their visual art.

I am standing in a doorway adjacent to the sculpture court when I overhear

teenagers discussing a homework assignment. It seems they’ve been given the

following writing prompt: “Did the ancient Greeks really believe in their gods?

Explain why you think they did or they didn’t, citing two works of art as

evidence.” It is an admirable assignment, and I decide I’ll eavesdrop long enough

to learn the students’ verdict. A young lady, picking her lip, argues that they must

have, obviously, I mean look around, right? It’s weird, but… and she shrugs.

However, the young man she is with doubts it. He thinks it was probably more

like the devil: some people think there’s an actual devil, like an actual guy who’s

the devil, but most people think it’s a story, don’t they? And with that, they look

around blankly at silent gods and goddesses, apparently at an impasse.

My fear is that they’ll eventually compromise on a cop-out answer like “sort

of,” so gingerly I step in. “Hey, do you guys want help?” For a startled second,

they see my uniform and think that they might be in trouble. But my expression

is reassuring and they say sure, they’d love help. I give them a word to use in their

essay: the Greek word epiphany, which described a visitation from a god. The

Greeks were having epiphanies all the time, I say, both in dreams and in the

waking world. “Here, look at this….”

I take them over to the head of the so-called Medici Athena, an ancient

Roman copy of a now-lost masterpiece by the classical sculptor Phidias (the body

of this version is lost, too). Together we look at a face that is placid and impassive

but not fixed or frozen—a supple, blood-in-the-cheeks vision of what the goddess

of wisdom looked like, her beauty all sturdiness and strength. “Athena was the

goddess of a special kind of wisdom,” I tell them. “Have you read the Odyssey?

You have—perfect. In the Odyssey, Athena shows up every time Odysseus needs a

jolt of confidence and inspiration. You know the feeling…. You’re stumbling

around feeling blah and out of nowhere your mood lightens and you have the

energy and courage and clarity required to do something that felt impossible

moments before. Today we would think that the change came from inside us, but

the Greeks didn’t believe that. For them, all forces originated in the external

world, forces that were powerful and unpredictable and grabbed hold of people’s

emotions just like it controlled their fates. Athena was sometimes called the

goddess of nearness because of the way she could penetrate and transform

minds”—I gesture to the face—“for the better, wouldn’t you say? Look at her

awhile. Look at what the Greeks thought wisdom looked like. See if she improves

your mood.”

Reading 3 (Part 4)

I leave the dome and search out drawings linked to his other last project, a

sculpture of the Pietà, left unfinished at his death. On one sheet there are five

studies made with a shaky, octogenarian hand. Small, intense, earnest, they don’t

bear a trace of consciousness they’re being made by the most famous artist in the

world. (Even in his eighties, Michelangelo could upbraid himself for a misstep

causing construction delays on Saint Peter’s: “If one could die of shame and

grief,” he wrote, “I would be dead.”) Two of the drawings resemble the marble

sculpture he eventually produced, with the dead Christ vertical, his mother

supporting his great weight. Michelangelo originally carved a stout and muscular

body of Christ, but then he just continued to carve, steadily emaciating the

figure until it looked frail and shrinking and oddly like modern expressionistic

sculpture. His Pietà of the 1490s was a virtuosic display. This was something

more pained and private.

I look again at the drawings, which express love, piety, and exhaustion. I think

about an old man bent over a white sheet, struggling to make his hand perform

what his mind and heart require. What made Michelangelo Michelangelo came

in the next step. After completing his study, he got up and worked to make the

thing real. He was hammering a chisel against obdurate marble just days before

his death.

The next exhibition sneaks up on me. Whereas Michelangelo’s arrival at the Met

was heralded by banners along Fifth Avenue, I haven’t so much as heard the

words “Gee’s Bend” until I am posted in a small exhibition in the Modern and

Contemporary Art Wing. Ten quilts hang on the walls of two spacious galleries.

Ten quilts by eight quiltmakers, four of whom share a common surname:

Pettway. “What is this?” I whisper under my breath, feeling my pulse quicken as

I walk from one disorienting piece to the next. Boldly contrasting colors,

asymmetrical patterns, rough and worn materials joined by visible stitches… This

is all that I can make of the quilts on my first day working the show, but my

heart rate tells me they are beautiful.

Over the next few weeks, I learn everything I can about these quiltmakers. I

read interviews with dozens of women who quilted in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and

spoke about their work and lives. “Hard” crops up so often in the interviews it is

like a refrain. “We come up hard….” “Time was hard….” “We had a hard way to

go….” “Lord, we did work hard….” “Not easy. Hard.” Lucy T. Pettway (1921–

2004) is one of the artists in the show. As a child, she attended school from late

November until late March, at which time she was needed to “knock cotton

stalks, cut bushes, clear up new ground, get ready to break the land and plant.”

Like virtually all the women, her people were tenant farmers, but Lucy also

brought other work to the fields. Each day she carried a handful of quilt pieces to

stitch together during her meal break. She hoped to finish “a block or so” (many

quilts consist of nine blocks). It was Lucy T.’s version of a giornata.