Volume 41, Number 12 · June 23, 1994
Beyond the Picturesque
By John Updike
American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915 10–July 24, 1994
an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May
American Impressionism and Realism: Drawings, Prints, and Photographs 3–July 24, 1994
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May
American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915
catalog of the exhibition by H. Barbara Weinberg et al.
Abrams, 384 pp., $75.00
The megashow gives way to the talk show—an art exhibit where more time is spent absorbing the pedagogic text on the walls than in looking at the pictures. As insurance costs rise and government support dwindles, and the number of artists for whom the public will form long queues approaches its limit, the kind of global roundup that Matisse and Renoir and Picasso and Degas and Sargent and Caravaggio have received in recent years may be joining the junk-bond boom in the annals of heydays; in these drabber times museums are turning scholarly, delving into their and their fellow institutions' copious reserves of less than supremely fashionable works of art to assemble purposeful lectures through which we walk as if galleries were paragraphs and paintings were slides of themselves. 'American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915,' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, uses eighty-five canvases by twenty-six artists to illustrate its deconstruction of a verbal distinction that, in the minds of all but art curators and professionals, was rather hazy anyway.
Review, 2963 words
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