Art: Wyeth's Cold Comfort

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The show's weakness is its monotony. Director Hoving, who was obliged to step in as his own guest curator when the Met's curator of 20th century art, Henry Geldzahler, refused to touch the show, has given Wyeth the kind of treatment that only major draftsmen merit. Each painting is surrounded by a flock of its studies and sketches that reveal the working method, the small adjustments, tunings and abstractions that come between the first view and the final painting. If Wyeth were Rubens the spectacle would be fascinating. But since he seems to work upward from illustration and his capable brisk notes are mostly unremarkable as drawing, the cumulative effect of all those little brown studies is numbing.

Starting with Jackson Pollock, one can easily think of a dozen modern American artists who have not had retrospectives at the Met but whose works possess richer cultural and historical meaning than Wyeth's. Why, then, the immense accolade? The reason is simply box office. The Metropolitan Museum hopes to make at least $2 million from the sales of Wyeth catalogues and souvenir reproductions alone. To ram the point home, a boutique has been set up at the show's exit, and visitors have no choice but to run the gauntlet. Hard sell Hoving strikes again; and one sees another small but distinct step in the Met's transformation from the greatest encyclopedic museum in America into a grandiose West Side extension of Bloomingdale's.