REVIEW: All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley

Reviewed by Leslie Lindsay

In this exquisite, New York Times bestselling debut memoir, All The Beauty in the World, (Simon & Schuster; paperback October 2024) Patrick Bringley walks us through—quite literally—the decade he spent as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Image Credit: Leslie A. Lindsay

Bringley comes to The Met as an up-and-coming writer at the glamorous world at The New Yorker, he’s also carrying a deep wound, one requiring—yearning for—the balm of beauty. His older adored brother, Tom, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“In middle school, [Tom] was bussed to the local high school to take math. In high school, the community college. He understood math as fast as you could teach it and other subjects more adeptly than a math kid had any right […] he was cheerful, patient, helpful, modest, normal. He didn’t show off.”

As someone who prefers letters and words to numbers and equations, not because I am particularly adept at the former, but because I don’t know what to do with math, I was remembering the call of beauty, the love of art, as a child. When I thought of my childhood, there was no older sibling, but there was someone to grieve.

Bringley’s brother liked Raphael, so they thumbtacked the Madonna of the Goldfinch above his hospital bed. For Bringley, this was something akin to throwing a halo around the room, and it was about great art—both visual and written—that got him thinking about the idea of ‘gape,’ of gazing or staring back at, perhaps as we might when visiting a great cathedral, or diving into a dazzling piece of literature.

Tom takes his last breath in All The Beauty in the World, and I found that awe-inspiring, much as I tend to be enraptured by art. Ironically, the word, inspire, means to ‘breathe in.’

“For years,” Bringley writes, “I had noticed the men and women who worked inside New York’s great art museum. Not the curators hidden away in offices—the guards standing watchfully in every corner. Might I join them?” He dared to drop out of the forward-marching world and spend all day absorbing and gleaning from the artistic masters of the past. In the fall of 2008, he took up his post at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is fitted with a blue suit, which is custom-designed, and dry-cleaned frequently. He’s given orientation and training, a probation period. Special shoes and a sock allowance come with the gig. Concrete floors are less favorable than the cushier wood floors. Each section of The Met is referred to as a letter. C [the Great Hall] and J [Contemporary Art] and the Egyptian Wing is H. I’m starting to see the elegant formula to organization, perhaps it’s a bit like bio math, which Bringley’s brother studied, only one focused on interconnecting hallways and blocks, the two-million-square-foot treasure house that is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, instead of arteries and organs and the 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body, that perhaps math and art are in more conversation than we give credit.

What I found particularly compelling was how Bringley gave life to art and art history with his reverential and accessible prose, highlighting the significance of creation, how it’s interwoven into the daily matrix of humanity. Never is the prose condescending or snobbish, but humbling and honest. Not only do readers learn about important art works, they also glean the sheer immensity of The Met.

Over the course of a decade of Bringley’s 8-12 hours shifts, readers and lead through the expansive museum, which he writes is, “about the size of 3,000 average New York City apartments and contains near two-million objects, only a fraction of which are shown at a time.” He leads us to the basement, where wooden crates hold paintings and antiquities, some of which never see the light of day. All told, the museum employes two thousand individuals ranging from custodians to curators, carpenters, lampers (those who check for and replace missing lights), riggers (statues and art works are heavy), handlers, and more. All told, The Met employees near-600 guards, some who work overnight shifts.

The book’s unconventional, non-linear structure is relatively short, but it does not lack rich insight, not just about art, but loss and grief. Being an architecture and visual narrative fan myself, I was awed and delighted by the use of the museum’s floorplan, as well as the occasional illustration by the very talented Maya McMahon, which, of course, this being a book about art, was much appreciated. Perhaps the best part of a book well-read, is that it encourages the reader to act. Not only did All The Beauty in the World, expand my worldview, but it made me want to make art, whether written or visual. It also afforded a new perspective: grief can be compartmentalized and transformed into something of well, beauty.

While grief and loss play a significant role in Bringley’s work, at least initially, there’s also a shift, perhaps a great love. Grief is really another way to love, that to grieve someone or something is a promise to love them. What can only be said as a way for the author to retreat into an insular world of beauty, he emerges into a greater, brighter world in which he has become not just a husband, but a father. Perhaps, art is about propagation—of creativity and idea and humanity, certainly, but also the reinvention of an individual.