When life feels heavy, masterpieces offer quiet comfort [Book Review]

"Paintings seem to carry a secret frequency that draws me in."

The new book "I Go to the Museum When I Want to Protect Myself" opens with that confession. The author describes how, at each turning point in her life, certain masterpieces seemed to illuminate her circumstances — and how, drawn to those works almost instinctively, she found herself quietly consoled. On days when the future felt uncertain and the weight on her shoulders grew heavy — whether she was struggling with a hereditary condition that gradually destroys peripheral nerves, anxiously raising a child whose development lagged behind peers, or pushing through one challenge after another to keep her family afloat — she turned to the museum. Going there, as the book's title suggests, was her way of protecting herself.

The author reflects on her life through 28 paintings created from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Rather than explaining art-historical significance or stylistic movements, she tends to examine the personal experiences and thoughts she projects onto each work, alongside the lives of the artists themselves. Particularly because she gave up her own dreams to live as a mother raising a child, paintings featuring women, children, or mothers with children prompted deep reflection. The book also includes a number of works by female painters whose talents went unrecognized in an art world dominated by men.

Standing before Helene Schjerfbeck's 1886 work "Mother and Child," for instance, the author finds a cascade of thoughts: memories of her own childhood, her current relationship with her child, her role as a mother, and a newfound understanding of her own mother that only came after becoming a parent herself. In the painting's gaze — a mother holding her child and looking at them with quiet intensity — she recognizes the younger version of herself who missed a mother who had left her and her sibling in the care of relatives to go out and work. She also, at last, understands the weariness of a mother who had to leave her young children behind to earn a living. And she rediscovers her own deep affection for her child, who regards family as a lifeline and sees her as the whole world.

Yet an intriguing paradox lies within this painting. Schjerfbeck, who created a work that stirs maternal feeling in viewers, had no experience of motherhood herself. Nor did the painting emerge from a happy marriage — she completed it just before leaving Paris alone, after her fiancé abruptly called off their engagement. "Art is not born from the reproduction of experience," the author writes, "but from the point where deep imagination reaches toward what has not been experienced." What had evaporated in reality found full expression on the canvas: the happy marriage she had dreamed of, the warmth of a mother's love given without restraint.

Elsewhere, the author looks at Paula Modersohn-Becker's 1906 "Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary" and, through the painter's struggle between her identity as an artist and the traditional image of womanhood, reconsiders what it means to be true to oneself. Before the empty drawing room in Vilhelm Hammershøi's 1903 "Sunlight in the Drawing Room III," she arrives at the realization that stillness is not something to be seized but something to be allowed and negotiated. "The consolation that art offers," the author writes, "does not come from grand meaning or critical recognition — it comes from the mirror that reflects your own life back at you."

"I Go to the Museum When I Want to Protect Myself" / by Oh Hee-seung / Geuraedo Bom