BOSTON — You love art. When and where did that start? In school? At home? In books? For me it began when I was a kid in the 1950s and ’60s, before and during my teens. The primal scene was divided between two Boston museums where I spent a lot of time. I visited both again last week to check memory against reality and got a surprise: sometimes they match up.
I come from an art-loving family. Midwinter Saturdays, slushy and short in New England, were museum days. Our mainstays were the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, close to each other on the Fenway, a bayou-like tract of Olmsted parkland. There were early hopes that the area would attract rich residents, become chic, but it didn’t and the museums were a bit marooned there.
That was O.K. It meant they were quiet. In the preblockbuster 1950s foot traffic was light and the number of guards small. I knew them, they knew me. And I knew my way around. I could spend a day more or less on my own there, and I’d be fine.
Looking at art in a sustained, serious way is a funny thing — odd, not bad — for a young person to do. It entails a certain amount of simply staying still, maybe an appetite for language given art’s exotic names and terms, and a readerly knack for imaginative projection, for participating in stories rather than just receiving them.
That said, I think I first got hooked on museums the way many kids do, through the thrills and chills of Egyptian art.
Why? For one thing, the Museum of Fine Arts had a ton of it, the largest collection outside Cairo. In 1905 the museum had teamed up with Harvard on archaeological digs in Giza, after striking a divide-the-spoils deal with Egypt: half of what was excavated would stay in that country, the rest would go to Boston.
Treasures came, and they look as magnetic now, and in some of the same ways, as they did when I was 10. Of all ancient art Egyptian feels particularly modern, even futuristic, or so I thought. With their neat figures and confident smiles, the Old Kingdom ruler Mycerinus and his queen, in a renowned carved portrait, looked like friends of my parents arriving for cocktails, straight from a spaceship.
The doll-size wooden models of everyday scenes stockpiled in tombs made it seem as if, for the Egyptians, eternity was an endless game of playing house. (You’ll find nearly a hundred of these miniature sculptures, all belonging to the museum and all on view for the first time, in a special show called “The Secrets of Tomb 10A: Egypt 2000 B.C.”)
And then there were mummies, laid out, just as I remembered, in a cryptlike space. They’re probably the real reason for preteen Egyptomania. They aren’t art, they aren’t objects: they’re bodies, and for many children they give a riveting first brush with the physical fact of death. They did that for me, and it took years before I could get beyond it to see Egyptian art as, above all, about the irrepressible hunger for life.
The Egyptian galleries were an immersive environment, but they weren’t the only ones. There was also the chapel-like enclosure for the display of 12th-century frescoes from the apse of a Catalonian church.
The main image, a giant Jesus with a doleful face and bizarrely long fingers, appeared to change shape and dimension before my eyes, swelling into the dome, floating free of it, flattening out and tipping forward as if to crash into the room. How, I wondered as a kid, did artists get such effects from plaster and paint? I don’t know, but the effects work; the paint — protected with a solution of lime and Parmesan cheese when the frescoes arrived from Spain in 1919 — still looks fresh.
For me individual paintings were the worlds within worlds that really mattered, which is why I loved them so much so early. Rogier van der Weyden’s mid-15th-century “St. Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child” was a favorite. I looked at it inexhaustibly, not because of the subject but because every detail was concrete and complete: the main figures in a neat tight room with a hint of adjacent rooms and beyond that a garden, the turreted town, a canal or river running to the horizon.
This picture taught me what perspective was. And it taught me what art, and specifically painting, was or could be: an embodiment of order, a universe that you could, just though looking, move into and inhabit, where you could set up a life, live an ideal.
Art also held uneasy mysteries, the seeds of a moral and sentimental education. I remember looking again and again at Velasquez’s “Don Baltasar Carlos With a Dwarf.” The blond baby prince in the gold-stitched gown commands the picture, but more interesting to me was the second child, who wasn’t a child — or was he? — with his bristly hair, white apron and slack, cautious sideways glance. What was this pairing about? I didn’t know, but there was sadness.