Daily Blague

There is a lot of shrewd character analysis in The Mixed-up Files, and the heroine's moment of recognition at the end will prepare attentive readers for the significant displacements of grown-up literature; this is a book that belongs on the short shelf of children's classics that every literate adult ought to read (or reread, as the case may be). I think that I have already said enough about the plot, although perhaps I ought to add that the story itself has less to do with running away from home and hiding out in the Met than it does with identifying a small Renaissance sculpture that might or might not be by Michelangelo. The children spend as much time out in the city as they do within the museum, and for all their frugal long marches, there's a magic-carpet feeling that gives the proceedings great brio. Difficulties and obstacles are agreeably minor as the sense of unimpeded inner adventure preempts the outward escapades. Mine is too heavy a hand, however, to sum up characters drawn to appeal to readers caught in the last long fires of prepubescence. 

What held my attention, naturally, was the portrayal of the museum itself, which I can dimly remember. I say that because it was a very different place in 1967. Helpfully, a plan of the two principal floors makes clear just how different today's museum is, how hugely expanded in every direction. In 1967, such fixtures as the Temple of Dendur, the André Meyer Galleries, and the Lehman Wing were all in the future. The façade of the old US Assay Office, now the face of the American Wing, was unwarmed by the great glassed courtyard that is now one of the city's finest interior parks. The great slabs of steps at the Museum's entrance did not exist. Altogether, the Met was a dinkier affair in 1967, dustier certainly (remember the old Costume Institute?), a magnificent Fifth Avenue front with a few old treasures inside. Every museum was like that in 1967. Parts of the Louvre still are. Museums were more about the earnest than the beautiful.

She had never even considered the possibility that he wanted her to be bored. She had given him first choice, and she was stuck with it. So she marched with him toward the long wide stairway straight in from the main entrance, which leads directly to the Hall of the Italian Renaissance.

If you think of doing something in New York, you can be certain that at least two thousand other people will have that same though. And of the two thousand who do, about one thousand will be standing in line waiting to do it. That day was no exception. There were at least a thousand people waiting in line to see things in the Hall of the Italian Renaissance.

How things have changed! The galleries at the top of the stairs are given over to large-format paintings by Tiepolo and David, and special exhibitions (of which there are always several) appear off to the side, or in another wing altogether. Lines are rare; the last one that I can remember was for a show of the late Mrs Onassis's clothes. (I stayed away.) Today's old masters galleries are almost as quiet as churches, and you can soak up favorite pictures undisturbed. Sargent's famous Madame X is buried so remotely in the American Wing that it is unlikely to be encountered by chance. (So are the three or four other very great Sargents in the collection.)

In an Afterword appended to the 2002 edition, the author notes that the Elizabethan bed on which the Kincaid children took their repose has been packed up and crated away. Big as it is, the Met still isn't big enough to show all that it has.