Lance Esplund

A security guard in the art gallery burst into dance, suddenly leaping and turning. I was surprised, but his compulsion was completely understandable.

People walk through a downpour yet never get wet.

It was dark, crowded and loud, strobe- lit by Sex Pistols concert footage. I smelled leather and vinyl. I immediately got a headache.

I was immersed in Velazquez’s “Portrait of Duke Francesco I d’Este,” now on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, when someone grabbed my arm.

You enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s poignant exhibition “Photography and the American Civil War” through a white military field tent.

“It smells funny in here,” a little girl observed, as she screwed up her face and held her nose.

Pale Ophelia floats in a tangle of flowers, yet her open-mouthed expression suggests not the coming of death but an artist’s model immersed too long in a cold bath.

A beautiful child with curly locks, the boy is pensive yet determined, his lengthy index finger pointed knowingly forward.

“You got a particularly morbid one!” the Guggenheim employee told me.

Hair carefully coiffed, a woman looks over her shoulder as her kimono parts to reveal a swelling breast.

Edwardian opulence was epitomized by a luxurious ostrich-feather fan presented to Mrs. James de Rothschild on her 1913 marriage into the banking dynasty.

I felt woefully underdressed taking in the sumptuous new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.