How We Look When We Look at a Painting

In Frederick Wiseman’s “National Gallery,” the filmmaker’s studies of people entranced, or stupefied, by Leonardos and Vermeers amount to a pictorial essay on self-forgetting.Everett

Among the abounding fascinations of Frederick Wiseman’s “National Gallery,” a three-hour documentary about the museum on London’s Trafalgar Square, is a leitmotif of lingering shots of solitary viewers of paintings. Looking at art may be the most unguarded action that we perform in public. We aren’t aware of performing, of course, nor do we openly watch one another doing so. A ghostly protocol—hushed, a bit churchy—governs the behavior of all except small children and the occasional yahoo. Wiseman’s studies of people entranced, or stupefied, by Leonardos and Vermeers amount to a pictorial essay on self-forgetting: faces young and old, plain and fancy, each as vulnerable as that of a sleepwalker.

The mystery of what is happening behind those faces magnetizes Wiseman’s characteristically energetic and subtle anatomizing of an institution—the latest of dozens, from his exposé of a madhouse, “Titicut Follies” (1967), to his excavation of a university, “At Berkeley” (2013). As always, his patient cameras gather masses of material—a hundred and seventy hours of it, in this instance—which he edits to delicately insinuating effect. There’s no voice-over commentary, only the camera’s observation, which homes in on the tensions between ideals and realities that beset every organized human endeavor. “National Gallery” is notably gentle in this respect: amused at times, but not too worried. It is special—a tour de force—also because its subject’s reason for being is visual. The Old Masters were the cinema of their times. There’s something collegial about Wiseman’s closeups, zooms, and pans of eloquent, gorgeous works of art. He’s an artist communing with his ancestors.

An anxiety to promote and enhance, and perhaps to exploit, the experience of art is what gets museum people up in the morning. How do you administer the ineffable? Wiseman attends as docents and educators gamely model interpretations of paintings for groups of visitors, in a kind of institutional performance art. One explainer asks viewers of a Gothic altarpiece depicting worshipful clerics to approximate the adoring mood by imagining that its object is “a fluffy kitten.” (The painting, which has survived centuries of who knows what, appears confident that this, too, shall pass.) More substantially, another guide recounts for a group of black youths the founding of the National Gallery, in 1824, with wealth derived in large part from the slave trade. The question of what to make of that hangs in the air. It must matter. How?

Wiseman eavesdrops on meetings where the fundamental agony of maintaining standards of high art in a state-funded facility that is accountable to everybody—or, from the other side, of opposing democratic values to lurking snobbery—rankles endlessly. The museum’s long-suffering director, Nicholas Penny, resists demands for collaboration with an opportunistic charity, pointing out that the free-admission National Gallery is itself a charity. This cuts no noticeable ice with the do-gooders. But bending to civic pressures without breaking comes with his job of shielding his staff and curators’ solicitude for art.

The museum’s functionaries—from floor-polishing janitors to pertinacious scholars and fantastically skilled restorers—emerge as the film’s heroes. I could joyously have passed the full three hours of “National Gallery,” followed by drinks and dinner, in company with a humbly conscientious, profoundly informed and soulful man whom we hear named only as Larry. (He is the museum’s head of conservation, Larry Keith.) Wiseman reserves for the film’s climax two scenes in which Keith explicates his work in progress on a Rembrandt and a Velázquez. To lay hands on Velázquez’s early painting “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”—in which an old woman counsels a grumpy young one who is preparing food, as the latter’s sister is seen, through a window (or is it a picture on the wall? or a rectangular thought balloon?), sitting at the feet of Jesus—takes something besides nerve.

Keith describes the work’s slight but evident losses of dark pigment. (When a painting is over-cleaned, we learn, blacks are commonly the first to go.) He will touch up the shading of a foreground wall, not to “renew” the picture—an impossible presumption—but to clarify the sense of “what is going on” in that part of it. He will do so with paint atop a layer of varnish, such that it may be removed at any future time—perhaps hundreds of hours of work, by him, reversible “in fifteen minutes.” Keith’s face, as he speaks while scrutinizing the masterpiece, is the one I’ll remember. It is alive with comprehension of what art is and may mean at the far frontier of the human capacity to know and feel. Wiseman saw that; so we do.