…Here are some practical suggestions. They are recipes for strong encounters with works. If you follow them, you'll have a better chance of discovering if paintings can speak to you.
First, go to museums alone. Seeing paintings is not a social event, not an opportunity to spend quality time with relatives and friends. It takes concentration and calm, and that is not easy when you are with someone else.
Second, don't try to see everything. Next time you go to a museum, resist the temptation to see the whole collection. Get a map of the museum, and choose just one or two rooms. When you find those rooms, look around and choose just one painting. Pictures do not work well all together, unless you are trying to use them to learn about a certain culture or period—and in that case, you're only using paintings, not really looking at them.
Third, minimize distractions. Make sure the room is uncrowded. It's best to choose a painting in an out-of-the-way corner. Don't even bother to look at a picture that's in a bright, crowded hallway. Make sure there is no glare on the canvas, so you can see the whole picture clearly, if a guard starts staring at you, choose another room. (Rich people have an advantage in this, because they can have major paintings in the privacy of their homes. Philip II of Spain cried looking at Titian's Christ Carrying the Cross—but it was in his own private oratory, lit by candles. Most of us have to put up with the local museum and its fluorescent lights.)
Fourth, take your time. Once you've chosen the painting, give it a chance. Stand in front of it and think a bit. Step back, and look again. Sit down and relax. Get up, walk around, come back, and look some more. Paintings are very slow. It can even take weeks, even years before they decide to speak.
Fifth, pay full attention. You need to do nothing but look, care about nothing but looking. Absentminded staring, like that of the people who meditate in the Rothko chapel, won't do it. You have to concentrate on understanding what you see. That takes sustained and focused energy. There's a strange state of mind involved, in which you forget yourself just enough to lose track of the boundary between the picture's world and your own world. Michael Fried, the art historian who wrote on "presentness" and "grace," calls the state "absorption." Bertrand Rouge thinks of it as crossing over a bridge into the painting's world. However it is named, it means you have to pay strict attention to the picture at the expense of everything else.
Sixth, do your own thinking. It would be wonderful if more writers in my field would admit how little we understand about some pictures, in order to instill skepticism about the mass of received ideas. Read as much as you like, take the audio tour, study the label, buy the book: but when it comes to looking, just look and make up your own mind.
Seventh, be on the lookout for people who are really looking. Virtually everyone who visits art museums moves at the Official Museum Pace: an ambling walk, punctuated by stops to glance at paintings and slight forward bends to read labels. There are always a few people who don't walk at the Official Museum Pace. If you can find such people, watch them for a few minutes. Notice their patience, and the concentration they bring to bear on the pictures. If they take a break, go talk to them. In my experience, many have interesting stories about the paintings they go to see. Virtually all the people who wrote me letters had that kind of relationship with the paintings that made them cry.
Eighth, be faithful. Once you've spent time with a painting, promise yourself you'll come back to see it again.
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