Museums

Writing about museums: the first things that come up are the big names like the MoMA, the Reina Victoria, the Louvre, Lyon, the National Museum in Lisbon and many others. I turn to my collection of museums of the world, I take out the last volume, number 20, and I step into the most important museum in Lisbon. The building is a historic palace and the whole thing is an architectural museum in itself, the works were brought from abandoned temples and churches and were rescued, it's a marvel of religious art from the 1600s onward. We can appreciate how each artist interprets the same chapter in a different way, in all of them there is beauty, harmony, religion in that era was the driving inspiration.

In the final chapters works by Raphael, Tintoretto, Leonardo Da Vinci, Bartolomé Bermejo and many other greats appear, and in the middle of my reading I remember a lovely museum I visited in London, the Toy Museum, where you can see the evolution of humanity through toys, we go from a rag doll to a wooden one, the porcelain little face keeps changing and the body is still cloth, and so we arrive at today's Barbies who talk, walk, and so on; in children's toys, from cars pulled with a string to today's ultrasonic battery-powered cars.

I'm talking about toys, about children, I shudder, a chill runs through my body, the Holocaust museum in Israel comes to mind with the room dedicated to the children, terrible, it hurts, I have to get out of there, I come back to reality, I go off to Balcarce, the car museum, it shows the madness of this era, the speed, the defiance of life, the danger. I keep wandering and I find myself in a museum of modern art, everything very modern, even the building.

I go into the first room, I don't understand the paintings, stripes, dots, colors, everything mixed together, what is this?, I ask myself. I go up to a young woman with a know-it-all face, I ask her and she answers: it's projective, each person projects what they see in it. I think: so even here psychology has stuck its tail in, each one an individual, just like society. I turn around and see the young lady explaining the painting and I think: now she wants everyone to see the same thing. I leave, I know there's a French artist showing at the Colón, I go, there's a line to get in, it must be very good.

I go in, I can't see, there are lights moving, forming images, I get dizzy, I sit down, I try to understand, my ignorance is total, I think, I've fallen off the world, I'm in the Colón theater, all these people came to see this, I don't understand, where are the painters, Velázquez, Michelangelo? I keep searching all the way to the Louvre in France, there's everything there, from the Mona Lisa with her mysterious smile, to some cave paintings, paintings by primitive man who painted on the only thing he had, stone or wood.

This brings me back to modern painting which resembles the primitive kind, and I think: today's man hangs earrings and necklaces on himself, covers his body with tattoos, is going back to nudism, and I ask myself is it progress or a step backward?… Will they appear that way in the museums of the future? Will photography replace painting? Won't there be any more love letters or political letters like the ones found in historical museums, which served to help us know parts of the history and life of our ancestors? So ends my story, forgive my rambling.