Room 86 and the absence of one that’d hung there for as long as I had been working at the National Gallery. It was typical of curators not to let guards know about changes—overnight, paintings would be switched around or taken down and the next day you would send someone to the wrong room to see a painting that was no longer there.
In the Sainsbury Wing, one of the first things our new director had done was move the location of the
Battle of San Romano;
he decided the Italian paintings should be shown chronologically and that this Uccello should come earlier, so one day we arrived at work and saw it had been moved from Room 55 to 54. Ever since, people have walked past it. Had we been asked our opinion we would have told him that its original place on a wall that could be seen as one approached from several rooms away was more powerful than its current peripheral location. But no one takes our views into account.
During my tea break I went down to Human Resources and complained about the change in Room 86, struggling to contain myself as I explained that in order to do our job well we needed to be kept up to date on every alteration in the Gallery, that they ran the risk of making their guards look like fools by keeping us in the dark, and that if it were ever repeated I would resign, a lie naturally but I wanted to throw in some drama to make more of an impression. The woman nodded from behind her desk, glancing over at her colleagues to see their reaction, everyone was absorbed in a task, and she said
note taken
without taking much note, and before I knew it, it was time to get back to work.
Thursday was especially relentless. From room to room, post to post, a weary transference of grey as my colleagues and I released ourselves from one position and slipped into the next, rooms chairs thresholds, thresholds chairs rooms, as we carried out our silent musical-chairs rotation.
At half past four, time seemed to decelerate to an unbearable pace. Rotation didn’t solve anything. In each room the minutes got caught in the same thick transparent gel. Searching for signs of movement, I studied the visitors. A hunched man in his seventies wearing trainers and a plastic rose ring—a retired actor perhaps, or a famous painter, or a tourist from Miami. A woman with cropped black hair and bright red glasses who kept checking her watch as if about to run off. A fat man with his shirt hanging out of his trousers, who seemed perpetually short of breath, stopping to pant in front of every painting. It was often tempting, and all too easy, to transfer a bad mood on to others—all I had to do was go up and scold someone for standing too close to a painting when they’d been keeping a respectful distance and then ignore their protests. I considered approaching the woman in red glasses just for some variety but she left before I had the chance.
A couple walked in and went to stand in front of paintings at opposite ends of the room. They moved counterclockwise, overlapping only once at a painting in the centre, and finished at the same time, then floated silently into the next room. Not long afterwards another couple, far less silent, the man pontificating without breaks, entered and exited the room, leaving behind a different kind of mood.
Two young Italians, one in a wheelchair, appeared, speaking loudly. One could tell they were brothers, they had the same forehead, the same curly dark hair, the same pitchy eyes, but the one in the wheelchair had a larger, more distinctive nose and was therefore more handsome. Each time his brother wheeled him before a painting he would crane his neck and try to make himself higher, a casualty, along with children and small people, of the established dictates of museum height. Yet his brother kept pointing at things from an angle that ignored the constraints by which his sibling was bound. Each time he pointed, the other one strained to see, and I fought the urge to walk over and gently
In the Sainsbury Wing, one of the first things our new director had done was move the location of the
Battle of San Romano;
he decided the Italian paintings should be shown chronologically and that this Uccello should come earlier, so one day we arrived at work and saw it had been moved from Room 55 to 54. Ever since, people have walked past it. Had we been asked our opinion we would have told him that its original place on a wall that could be seen as one approached from several rooms away was more powerful than its current peripheral location. But no one takes our views into account.
During my tea break I went down to Human Resources and complained about the change in Room 86, struggling to contain myself as I explained that in order to do our job well we needed to be kept up to date on every alteration in the Gallery, that they ran the risk of making their guards look like fools by keeping us in the dark, and that if it were ever repeated I would resign, a lie naturally but I wanted to throw in some drama to make more of an impression. The woman nodded from behind her desk, glancing over at her colleagues to see their reaction, everyone was absorbed in a task, and she said
note taken
without taking much note, and before I knew it, it was time to get back to work.
Thursday was especially relentless. From room to room, post to post, a weary transference of grey as my colleagues and I released ourselves from one position and slipped into the next, rooms chairs thresholds, thresholds chairs rooms, as we carried out our silent musical-chairs rotation.
At half past four, time seemed to decelerate to an unbearable pace. Rotation didn’t solve anything. In each room the minutes got caught in the same thick transparent gel. Searching for signs of movement, I studied the visitors. A hunched man in his seventies wearing trainers and a plastic rose ring—a retired actor perhaps, or a famous painter, or a tourist from Miami. A woman with cropped black hair and bright red glasses who kept checking her watch as if about to run off. A fat man with his shirt hanging out of his trousers, who seemed perpetually short of breath, stopping to pant in front of every painting. It was often tempting, and all too easy, to transfer a bad mood on to others—all I had to do was go up and scold someone for standing too close to a painting when they’d been keeping a respectful distance and then ignore their protests. I considered approaching the woman in red glasses just for some variety but she left before I had the chance.
A couple walked in and went to stand in front of paintings at opposite ends of the room. They moved counterclockwise, overlapping only once at a painting in the centre, and finished at the same time, then floated silently into the next room. Not long afterwards another couple, far less silent, the man pontificating without breaks, entered and exited the room, leaving behind a different kind of mood.
Two young Italians, one in a wheelchair, appeared, speaking loudly. One could tell they were brothers, they had the same forehead, the same curly dark hair, the same pitchy eyes, but the one in the wheelchair had a larger, more distinctive nose and was therefore more handsome. Each time his brother wheeled him before a painting he would crane his neck and try to make himself higher, a casualty, along with children and small people, of the established dictates of museum height. Yet his brother kept pointing at things from an angle that ignored the constraints by which his sibling was bound. Each time he pointed, the other one strained to see, and I fought the urge to walk over and gently
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