How to experience a museum like an artist
An interview with multimedia journalist and author Emma Jacobs
Last weekend, I visited the Musée des Arts et Métiers, a historical science and invention museum. What I thought was initially a rainy day kid activity turned into a fascinating research opportunity. I’ve been wanting to pitch a New Yorker cover rendering the inner workings of city life like it’s in the inside of a clock but I haven’t yet nailed the internal gears of a machination. Thanks to this improvised visit, I took some snapshots of internal engines from the 18th century which I can use to add more steampunk interest to my sketch.
As a working artist, it’s so important to develop archives of my own reference images to avoid falling into the sameness of Google Image research. These can include iphone snapshots, magazine clippings, postcards, vintage books and garbage can finds. As the world becomes more and more digitized, a lot of images on paper will disappear forever so it’s essential to start hoarding, ahem, collecting. Visiting museums is also something I regularly seek out to continue enriching my internal and external archives.
In the same vein, I asked Emma Jacobs, multimedia journalist, illustrator and author of The Little(r) Museums of Paris: An Illustrated Guide to the City's Hidden Gems to share a few tips on how to approach a museum visit pragmatically almost like a visual scavenger hunt. Emma’s book is a terrific introduction to which museums to visit if you are beating the crowds and have any specific interests (hello Edith Piaf museum). Pick up a copy on your next trip and thanks Emma for the tips.
Q: How you get the most out of museum visits?
A: In some cases, I'll have done at least some minimal reading about a museum before I go, as time permits. Paris is fantastic for the amount of good writing that's out there about virtually every corner of the city. I'm often curious to learn more about the person or persons behind the creation of a museum, which can give you a narrative frame to understand what interests drove and run through the collection. Objects leap out once you know a little bit of that history.
I like to pick museums that will also take me to new neighborhoods and that have some immersive atmosphere to them. They're not everyone's cup of tea but I love house museums. The pace of visits varies most based on how much time I have available and if I'm on my own or not. Not everyone wants to sit down in front of one cabinet of fossils for an hour. If you're doing multiple museums, organizing your day to break things up with a walk or another sort of pause, so that you're not going from one museum straight to the next helps prevent museum fatigue.
France has a lot of categories of people for whom museum visits are free or discounted, including journalists and art students. If you qualify for one of those and can come and go through a big museum like Arts et Metiers in stages, that's the dream.
Q: Do you bring watercolor supplies? How do you document your visit? Is there a certain amount of time to visit so you don't reach your saturation point? Any other tips on getting the most out of an experience?
A: I usually have a sketchbook on me when I go museum-ing, and just on me in general.
Watercolor is a little less portable and less popular with security guards -- sometimes they don't even like to see pen, only pencil. It's easier to take out paints outdoors in museum courtyards and that sort of setting without alarming anyone. So I may start something in person as a sketch and add color later (that's also where those photos come in handy). The one and only time I had my paints confiscated out of my bag just going through security was at the Pinault Collection. They made me check them and retrieve them on my way out.
I take a lot of photos just to have later. I have a little visual reference library of museums that goes back a decade or so now. It continues to grow, even though I don't have any museum "project" underway now. I think of the photos both as reference to draw objects or scenes from, but also sometimes just for patterns. I was at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont this summer, which is this weird, incredible place which includes a huge collection of daily objects and folk art. It had rooms full of hat boxes with different, interesting motifs and color combinations. I also photograph informational captions and sometimes maps and brochures sometimes, just to have access to later if I want.
Images drawn in person can also turn out a little more lively-feeling. But the advantage of drawing later from photographs is that I can be a little more strategic about choosing among them, like what will best accompany text that comes together later. Taking the photos also keeps me from getting paralyzed during a visit because I want to draw everything all at once ... and it preserves what is ultimately just a comforting illusion that I could get to sketching all of it someday.
Picking up books for the beautiful reference photographs gets really expensive really quickly as well as feeling wasteful. Libraries tend to have extensive collections of art books and exhibition catalogues I'll go back to later to fill in gaps. Some particularly good reference libraries of art books can be found at the NYPL's main Manhattan branch and the library of the Frick Collection, also in New York. Some museums have their own art history reference libraries, like the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. I also find having things on loan helps me to really focus on them for a couple hours in a way that's actually more challenging with a very visual book I own and so can keep putting aside for later.
So, a museum visit for me can extend beyond the museum visit to some extent. And that's a good thing too, I think, in that you're able to enjoy the atmosphere and save some of your questions and reading for later.
I love all of this, as an art lover/writer/collage artist/armchair historian, and I heartily second the recommendation of smaller unusual places - the Bangkok Folk Museum is marvelous, and in a far neighborhood with excellent street food.
I also take tons of photos in museums + pics of the didactics because I will otherwise forget the details I want to use later in writing.
Thank you for sharing, I’ll be getting Emma’s book asap. ♥️
This is such an important lesson:
"As a working artist, it’s so important to develop archives of my own reference images to avoid falling into the sameness of Google Image research. "