On Art

...The black-and-white illustrated catalogue ($6.95) lists 1,300 of the new pieces...

...Still, such remarkable pieces as the Greek figurines from the 3rd millenium B.C...

...A new work is accepted, we are told in the catalogue, either because of "unsurpassed artistic quality," or because it fills a gap in a collection, or simply because its presence will enlarge "understanding of the many facets of man's achievements in the visual arts...

...Moses Striking the Rock by the Dutch mannerist Abraham Bloom-aert similarly falls into this elastic category, although it has a kinky charm...

...To these I would have added a Rubens wash drawing of a draped female figure seen from the rear, Seurat's black conte study of a monkey for his Sunday on the Island of he Grande Jatte, and a 17th-century coverlet made in Bengal for the Western market...

...Curatorial selectivity, it turns out, is quite as important as the more obvious mission of exhibiting art, and considerable vigilance is needed to keep the two activities reconciled...

...Maybe it was assumed that the audience would be bored by background material other than the bare facts...

...Made of walnut, it stands, complete with carved, panelled head- and footboards, on a dais about two feet high that trebles as a seat and storage chest...

...In this, Director Thomas Hoving and members of the staff try to live up to the promise of the title by telling the stories behind some of their more expensive coups...

...From a distance, it looks like a huge, blond oriental carpet...

...Moreover, the statement bespeaks values hardly appropriate to an institution housing works of art...

...with its three porcine cherubs in various shades of pink swarming over the cement-colored bosom of the central figure, probably should be set apart for precisely the opposite reason...

...And it may explain another unhappy development as well...

...To exemplify the process, Patterns of Collecting presents 500 of over 15,000 works recently gathered —a total that excludes bulk donations like the Lehman Collection, though it and three other private accumulations are represented...

...Set in a shadowed background, the wee figure of Moses is not easy to find, and is upstaged by a crowd of semi-nudes with enormous hands and feet, all converging on the liberated water...

...The crowning absurdity, of course, is the surreal pavilion representing Robert Lehman's house, where the surroundings render the art almost invisible...

...Since it eclipses all other paintings in the vicinity, it ought to have been set apart...

...Confronted at the outset by small groupings from particular benefactors, one is distracted from the works themselves by the clues they offer to the collectors' personalities...

...It can also be had on the way out through the new Islamic wing, where there are carpets too exquisite to have been made by human beings...

...The museum itself raises and more or less answers this question with its show Patterns of Collecting: 1965-75 (through March 23...

...On the other hand Guido Reni's Allegory of Charily (circa 1630...

...Surely the health of a culture is measurable not in the possessions of its rulers or in museum attendance figures but in the quality of its everyday artifaots, and Patterns of Collecting, as a conception, is yet further evidence of a general visual, tactile and psychic starvation...

...A book of essays...

...The Chase, The Capture: Collecting at the Metropolitan Museum ($12.50) is also available...

...According to Calvin Tomkins' Merchants and Princes, General Luigi Cesnola was probably the first to insist that pieces from his private collection (Cypriot antiquities which he sold to the Met) be exhibited together under his name...

...Occasionally, one feels a National Geographic writer is at large in the building...

...It is here that the museum gives the clearest account of its stewardship...

...The precedent having been followed for a hundred years, the museum now looks like a department store afflicted with boutiques called "The Josephine Bay Paul Gallery," "The Wrights-man Rooms," "The Lesley and Emma Sheafer Collection" and so on—each of them containing treasures that could, were modesty fashionable, have been distributed in the existing period rooms...

...Hanging in the same section is the beautiful Velazquez portrait of Juan de Pareja—composed of the dark gray of the subject's clothes, the white of his collar, the light gray of the background and, cli-macticully, the radiance of his pecan-colored flesh...

...An accompanying pamphlet announces that he liked objects "from historical homes or linked to distinguished owners...

...My collection would include a stunning Florentine bed from the 15th century...

...Museums, therefore, apparently have little choice—in a world where there are few masterpieces left to buy—but to caress putative donors, work previously ignored lodes of history, admit more modernism (some of it before its time), and avoid overly shady deals...

...Nonetheless, the show does make one want to spend many additional days at the Met, seeking respite from the ugliness outside and taking pleasure in the art itself...

...In the main part of the show, individual gifts and purchases are arranged in roughly chronological order and, where possible, in geographical context...

...The entire message is brought to us by the Shubert Foundation, an organization better known for its theatrical interests than for its support of the fine arts...

...Thus, from a rather ugly Elizabethan cupboard, a far-from-dainty 18th-century Fnglish commode and various silver-gilt Eng-lish tankards and bottles of the 16th and 17th centuries, a visitor surmises that Judge Irwin Untermeyer was a man of robust, meaty tastes...

...Apparently identical, they differ subtly in the disposition of their branching leafy forms, making two very springy and vigorous sculptures that I would have enjoyed taking home with me...

...By pleasure I mean the lurch in the solar plexus that signals the arrival of a piece of perfection—a sensation that can be experienced in the Norbert Schimmel collection of Egyptian reliefs that precedes the Patterns display...

...For a moment, I mistook it for a native realist work of the '30s...

...A bedroom boasting this would need few other pieces of furniture, indeed, could scarcely accommodate them, the overall length of the masterpiece being eight-and-a-half feet...

...deserve better than the comment that "their prices have risen rapidly since World War II...

...Its capture, achieved with a lure of $5.5 million, is vividly recorded in the aforementioned book by Hoving, who comments that the master painted it in 1650 "to limber up his fingers" before tackling the even more staggering portrait of Pope Innocent X. located in the Vatican...

...Measuring 10 feet by 8 feet, 11 inches, its white cotton ground is encrusted with minute stitches in raw silk that combine into a pattern illustrating Indian and Biblical stories...

...Doubtless a gap-filler, the picture leads one to suspect gaps sometimes open up to make room for gifts already accepted...

...The range of items extends from ancient and primitive work to the painting of this century, and includes photography as well as the applied arts...

...And one gets the opportunity to play the taste-game, too...

...The catalogue, unfortunately, is not very helpful on unusual works...

...While the exhibition is well worth visiting, it is at first difficult to take in...

...But a pair of gilt-bronze Rococo wall-lights designed to hold three candles apiece lifted me out of Re-ni's and Bloomaert's leaden reality and back to my collection-fantasy...