It’s cold and rainy here in New York, and my building has turned off the heating in a valiant attempt to pretend that winter has officially ended. The result is that I shuffle around my apartment swathed in trailing shawls and fingerless gloves, like a Dickensian ghost. The air is the kind of moist that gets into your bones and makes all your old muscles injuries spasm symphonically and I’ve already had three Synflex since breakfast. Considering that May in Lahore is basically a preview of boiling summer, you’d think I’d be happy to catch the end of winter, but the truth is: it’s limiting. My life here has been in stasis for the last six months while I was in Pakistan – packed and paused. I’ve been dusting it off this past week by taking walks, both as an excuse to not have to rush back to the gym and also to reacquaint myself with the neighbourhoods. It’s a cliche to say, especially here, but a lot changes in six months. My neighbours are all new people; my building corridors have gone from a vomit brown to an intestinal pink; my favorite coffee shop closed down and is now a shoe store; my favorite shoe store has closed and is now a Starbucks; and the homeless man on the corner who spits at people walking by has coupled up with a homeless woman. Ah, I thought as I saw her holding his hand while preparing his next projectile to attack an oncoming pedestrian, spring in New York.
But the one place that I go to that remains a constant is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Always. Whenever I need to navigate the culture shock of coming back to a New York life, the Met is there. You know that no matter which buildings come and go, you can always find the Met standing in wide stability, ready to welcome you back home again. So I went the other day and made my way to my favourite painting. It’s a small piece by Jean-Leon Gerome called ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’. I came across it years ago in an abandoned corner beside the more touristy thoroughfares that house the Rodin sculptures. It’s based on the myth of Pygmalion, in which an artist brings his creation to life and falls in love with her. In the painting, a sculptor embraces his white marble sculpture who is transforming into a real woman before his eyes. It’s lovely, but when I turned the corner avoiding the Japanese tourists with selfie sticks, I was confronted with a blank wall. The painting was gone. For a brief second I thought I should shout out “We’ve been robbed!” but thought better of it. How could the piece have just disappeared? Which monster could do that? When I asked a guard about it, they referred me to the information desk, who told me to talk to the librarian, who told me to talk to the curators, who were in a meeting.
'The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer' - iconic work by Jean Leon Gerome
Eventually after 45 minutes of skulking and sleuthing, a petite woman in an oversized suit told me that the piece has been “rotated out” and is now back in the vault.
“When will it be back?” I asked
“Oh,” she said, making an exaggerated show of trying to think, “probably not for another decade or so.”
“A decade!”
“Probably, yeah. Sorry,” she added and walked away.
But I was not nearly done with Little Miss Power Suit, and I walked after her explaining how there should be laws about this, explaining how one does not simply “rotate” a picture out with no warning, as if the museum doesn’t have a responsibility to its visitors. “You owe it to us!” I thundered. After her initial and apparent fear at being followed by an irate man subsided, she did agree that it must be an alarming discovery. “They had put a note next to the piece for three months though,” she said.
“Well,” I stuttered, “I mean, I was away.”
“Hmm,” she said, and we both knew I had lost a crucial moral high ground. “We do have other Gerome’s,” she added, and led me to a tiny little room, a five-minute walk away. “And if you really want to see that painting again, you can always request to study it in the library under supervision.”
This felt wrong, as if I’d lost the right to see my own kin unsupervised. But to her relief I thanked her and let her get on with her day. The room she led me to had a label outside it that read ‘Orientalism’, and it was filled with paintings of mosques and arches and Muslims praying – the staple of Orientalist pictures. Some of there were indeed by Gerome, and as beautifully painted as they were, I felt a strange panic in that room. Those paintings, filled with gibberish writing pretending to be Arabic scriptures and idealised sunsets in a desert landscape, made me feel unwelcome. It was just the feeling I had come to the Met in the hope of avoiding.
When I read James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, there are several passages in those essays in which he expresses his discontent at not feeling like the entirety of human creative expression was his to own to claim. As a black American man in the 1950s, his world probably made this feeling painfully conspicuous. I do not feel this way. It is the advantage of my generation that we can lay claim to any cultural output as our own, even if it comes from cultures that do not look or sound like ours. We know that Eurocentrism exists, and in being aware of it we can attempt to combat its exclusionary impulses. Standing in the Met, I can marvel at the Renaissance paintings or medieval manuscripts or Mughal miniatures as my own cultural inheritance from the world. But that room, filled with its exoticisation of my otherness, made me feel ill at ease.
I walked away into other rooms, remembering that though I lost one, I do have other favourites. I realised that maybe that’s the lesson that the culture shock asks me to learn every time. That everyone is centric to their own point of view, and the reason we are encouraged to leave and travel is to confront this laziness. In any case, I still think they should send out an email blast or something before removing a picture, because I feel like I just got dumped by a painting.
