There are roughly eight hundred galleries that hold the permanent collection of the Met, and as of a recent Tuesday morning the married writers Dan and Becky Okrent had examined every piece in all but two. “We tried to be largely chronological, which is to say, we began in ancient Sumer, and then we did Egypt, and then we did Greece and Rome, and then we went through the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance,” Dan said, as the couple arrived at Gallery 910, in the back left corner of the first floor, home to Cubism, Futurism, and Synchronism. “We stumbled into the modern contemporary work. We entered the wrong way. So we were looking at Frankenthaler and Klee and Pollock before we came down here.” He added, “We’re completists but not systematic.”
The Met Project, as the pair took to calling it, arose seven years ago, at a time when the Okrents were contemplating retirement. A weekly crosstown bus from their Upper West Side apartment to look at some art seemed like a healthy beginning—purposeful, in an ongoing way, without feeling onerous. They were novices, delighted by the absence of lines on a Wednesday morning, only to realize that the museum was closed. Their progress was further slowed by the fact that they now spend half the year in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and by Covid, and by Dan’s decision to write another book. Plus their pacing was deliberate. “We read every label,” Dan said, adding, “Some labellers seem to be working for the Progressive Label Party, and other labellers are art historians.” He posted occasional screeds on Instagram about the first group. (“Dwight Garner says, ‘Boring!’ ” Becky recalled, of the Times book critic, a friend.)
So here they were, on the project’s final day, a pair of marathoners incognito among the walkabouts. Becky paused in front of a Kandinsky. “I think this has more sexual references than the label points out,” she said.
“That’s your mind.”
“I know,” Becky said. “I have a dirty mind.”
“You know what I thought of, Becky, was the cave paintings at Lascaux. There’s something bull-like.”
And on they went, sometimes lingering in opposite corners before reconvening at a sculpture or a glass case in the middle and sharing observations. “He does facts, I do feelings,” Becky said. Amid all the modernism, she declared herself “homesick for Sumer.”
“That’s your favorite?” Dan asked. (His personal favorite, for the record, was Guido Reni’s painting “Charity,” circa 1630—a woman breast-feeding.)
“Well, the ancient stuff really speaks to me,” Becky said. “There’s something intimate about it. Like a message from long ago, and you just drift back in time.” She added, “I’m also—confession—like a goldfish in a fabulous bowl. The good news is I can keep going round. There’s familiarity, but you forget so much. So I might as well start back at the beginning.”
A tour guide arrived, leading a noisy pack of students. The Okrents shuffled into Gallery 908, their final gallery, and converged on Picasso’s “Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair,” where they struggled to identify some of the abstracted body parts described on the label. “I couldn’t find the raised left arm,” Dan said.
“It starts here, on her shoulder,” Becky said, turning her back to the painting and embodying the woman’s gestures. “She’s like this.”
A security guard swooped in: “Too close!”
Several Picassos later, Dan acknowledged a completist’s lament. He was starting to feel about some of the lesser Picassos the way Becky had felt about certain depictions of children in the Renaissance—not great. (“I mean, in the early Nativity scenes, Jesus is a hot dog with eyes!” she said.) Their last unseen piece was “Still Life with Checked Tablecloth,” by Juan Gris, which reminded Dan of an old college friend, John Gray: “He always referred to himself as Juan Gris. He thought he was clever.”
“That is clever,” Becky said.
“Have you read this label yet?” Dan asked, gesturing to the right of the painting. “I never would have found the bull’s head without this excellent label.”
“A bull’s head? Oh! The bull’s head, with a striking eye. Yeah!”
“Congratulations, darling.” Dan extended his hand.
“Thank you, dear,” Becky said. “It’s been a lovely voyage.”
On their way out, the Okrents found themselves recalling a several-thousand-year-old statue they’d both admired for its “absolutely contemporary body language,” as Dan put it, and decided to make a pit stop, to bid farewell to Memi and Sabu, “The King’s Acquaintances,” from ancient Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty. “His hand’s on her breast,” Dan noted, upon arrival. “But look at her gesture—her hand around his waist. It’s really kind of stunning.” Becky concurred, and with that they had a crosstown bus to catch, and another project to conceive. ♦
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