Lieberman was referring to the famous episode involving Rabbi Hillel, where he and another rabbi were challenged by an unbeliever to tell him all the teachings of the Torah while standing on one foot. The other rabbi threatened to chase the man away, but Hillel accepted the challenge:

"What is hateful to you, do not do unto others. That is the meaning of Torah. All the rest is commentary."

Good to think about these days...

Asked specifically if he felt that the wave of opposition to his candidacy had anything to do with his religion or his support for Israel, Mr. Lieberman paused, stepped toward the blue sedan that would speed him to a meeting outside of Hartford and said, "That's too big a question to answer on one foot. We should come back to answer that one."

As I reported for the Nation,
Bernard Steinberg, director of Harvard's Hillel center, brought this issue up unprompted to me: "I talked to someone in Harvard development and asked what the fallout had been, and he said, 'It's been seismic.'"

Martin Peretz in The New Republic,
"anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus"), desires to punish the university for Summers's departure and so plays the money card. "...[M]y own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous... I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey."

"I got kicked out of Aspen.... In early 2002 they held a conference on relations with the Muslim world. For two days nobody mentioned Israel. Finally, I said, 'Look, this is a Soviet-style debate. Whatever you think about this issue, the entire Muslim world is shouting about it.' I have never been asked back." In 2004 Lieven published a book, America Right or Wrong, in which he argued that the United States had subordinated its interests to a tiny militarized state, Israel.

The No. 1 saying in philanthropic circles is that the No. 1 reason why people give money is because they are asked.

-Matthew Schuerman

At the beginning of his career, Hartley was one of our most original abstract painters, and this was at a time when abstract art was still in its earliest period of development. At the end of his career, he was one of our most audacious figurative painters. From start to finish, he was one of our greatest landscape painters, and along the way he also produced memorable portraits, still lifes and some oddball pictures less easily classifiable. He was also an accomplished poet, and some of his essays on art, literature and other subjects are among the best that any American painter has given us.

Exactly why it has taken so long to recognize Hartley as one of the great American originals remains to be explained, but the current retrospective leaves no doubt as to his stature. New Yorkers may, of course, look askance at finding themselves obliged to travel to Hartford to see an exhibition that the Met or the Modern should have orchestrated long ago. But the Met has never given Hartley his due, and the Modern hasn't paid him much attention since it mounted a memorial exhibition in 1944. New York hasn't seen a major Hartley exhibition since the retrospective that Barbara Haskell organized at the Whitney in 1980, and now we're unlikely to see another for decades to come.

So my advice is: Swallow your irritation and go see this show anyway. It's marvelous. Newcomers to Hartley's work will be amazed, and even dedicated Hartley fans, among whom I include myself, will see important pictures they've never seen before. Besides, if you've never been to Wadsworth Atheneum, you'll be stunned by the quality of the permanent collection.

Of the first-generation American modernists whose work Alfred Stieglitz exhibited at the "291" gallery in New York in the early years of the 20th century, Hartley was, in my opinion, the greatest. Like other members of his artistic generation, he was greatly influenced by the Paris avant-garde, especially Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse. Yet it was in Germany that Hartley became an active participant in the European avant-garde. In Paris, despite the support he received from Gertrude Stein, he was made to feel an outsider. In Germany, he was invited to exhibit his work with Kandinsky, Klee, Franz Marc and other members of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich. One important consequence of this was an invitation to exhibit his work in the 1913 Berlin Herbstsalon, in the company of Kandinsky, Klee, Leger, Chagall, Boccioni, Delaunay and other luminaries of the European modern movement. Five paintings by Hartley were hung between pictures by Kandinsky and Henri Rousseau. He was the only American artist in the exhibition-an extraordinary distinction for an artist still so little-known in his own country.

His German friends offered Hartley something more than artistic recognition: comradeship in which his homosexuality proved not to be an obstacle. That was something he seems never to have felt confident of in America, even in the relatively permissive atmosphere of the Stieglitz circle. The fever of inspiration in which Hartley hastened to join the German avant-garde was thus fueled by a fusion of sexual passion, aesthetic daring and intellectual ambition unlike anything he felt before.

It wasn't until Hartley went to live in Berlin, however, that he was able to give full expression to the erotic impulse in his work. Berlin was clearly the great romantic idyll of Hartley's life. The sexual freedom he experienced there, which centered upon a young German officer he had met in Paris, was never entirely distinguishable in his own mind from either his mystical beliefs or his aesthetic aspirations, all of which disposed him to find in the colorful pageantry of German military life both an imagery ideally suited to the artistic imperatives of abstraction and a pictorial correlative for its erotic subtext. It was in this sense-with what Hartley called his "cosmic Cubism"-that he made abstract painting first the vehicle of a sexual romance and then, when his beloved German officer was killed in the First World War, an elegy to lost love.

It was another episode of passion and grief that prompted the audacious figurative paintings of muscular fishermen and athletes in the last phase of Hartley's career. These are some of the boldest paintings of male figures in the history of American art. In the excellent exhibition catalog, Hartley is compared, albeit briefly, to Max Beckman-and high time, too, for he's indeed an artist of similarly high quality and power.

The Marsden Hartley retrospective remains on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum through April 20. It then travels to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D. C., (June 7 to Sept. 7) and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. (Oct. 11 to Jan. 11).

"Do you think it wise to have the ge- neral public rampaging through our museum?" a wary trustee of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., asked its director, Arthur Everett (Chick) Austin Jr., in the late 1920's, after a sudden 30 percent jump in the number of visitors.

Chick Austin went on to create such cultural ferment in the staid insurance capital that Philip Johnson hailed Hartford as "the navel of the world." During Austin's tenure at the Atheneum (1927 to 1945), aesthetically savvy New Yorkers like Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Warburg and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller dubbed Hartford the "new Athens" and made it a glittering place of pilgrimage.

Not only did Austin promote artists like Picasso, Balthus, Mondrian and Dali when they were virtually unknown in the United States, but he also amassed an important collection of masterworks (especially Baroque painting, Dutch still lifes and Poussin) on view at the Atheneum to this day. Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, told Austin: "You did things sooner and more brilliantly than any one."

In Magician of the Modern , his compelling biography of this trailblazing taste-maker, Eugene R. Gaddis chronicles how Chick Austin helped alter the way Americans looked at and thought about modern art. For starters, he organized the first Picasso retrospective in the United States, put on the first show of Surrealist art and, with Kirstein, helped engineer the immigration of choreographer George Balanchine and sow the seeds for Balanchine's School of American Ballet. He also oversaw construction of America's first International Style museum building, a major extension to the Atheneum that opened in 1934, five years before the completion of MoMA. Inside the addition's 300-seat theater, Austin staged the world premiere of the Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts , with a libretto by Gertrude Stein and an all-black cast. Austin's prodigious achievements helped cast off dusty, outworn museum traditions.

Likened by Mr. Gaddis to a charmed character out of a Noel Coward play, Austin was a boy wonder with matinee-idol good looks. He arrived in Hartford from Harvard University, where he was a protégé of art historian Edward Forbes. Together with other Harvard students who apprenticed at the Fogg Art Museum, Austin spent summers scouring Europe for treasures, dragging along batteries hooked up to automobile headlights to illuminate old pictures in dark church corners.

At the Atheneum-America's oldest public art museum-Austin swiftly established himself as a dynamic impresario and legendary connoisseur. He took a two-pronged approach to reinventing the stuffy if venerable institution. A windfall bequest of $2 million allowed him to buy masterpieces by Caravaggio, Strozzi and Tiepolo; at the same time, he zealously built up a fashionable temple of modernism. Meanwhile, he secured his place in Hartford society by marrying a cousin of J. Pierpont Morgan. (His bride was also the niece of the president of the Atheneum's board of trustees.)

"Visitors have, in reality, a right to find excitement in a museum as well as in a movie theater," he asserted. To heighten public interest and reduce resistance to avant-garde trends, Austin staged lavish balls and dramatic performances. He would lead the revels costumed as a sea god or a hussar or a pharaoh or a harlequin from a Watteau painting.

He built himself an astounding house-now a National Historic Landmark that proved a spectacle in its own right. The neo-Palladian villa with Baroque, Rococo and Bauhaus interiors became a gathering place for artists like Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, Salvador Dali and Aaron Copland, who exhibited their work, staged plays or gave concerts at the museum. Neighbors derided the pilastered house as a "pasteboard palace," but others like Philip Johnson esteemed it as a precursor of postmodernism. The two-story residence was a mere 18 feet deep and resembled a stage set. "The house is just like me-all façade," Austin declared.

Stagecraft dazzled Austin. His devotion to the visual arts could not keep him away from theatrical productions. To the dismay of some Hartford burghers, he frequently abandoned the museum to star in Shakespeare plays and Jacobean tragedies. He also staged elaborate magic shows at the Atheneum-on these occasions he called himself "The Great Osram," after a brand of German light bulbs.

Mr. Gaddis tells Austin's antic life story with verve, successfully capturing the thrill of modernism's early years. But though he draws upon formidable research-he spent more than a quarter of a century conducting interviews for the book-Mr. Gaddis at times seems too enamored of his subject. He deals tactfully with Austin's bisexuality and the erotic adventures that led him to abandon his wife and two children at critical junctures. Fair enough. But the impact of Austin's glitzy showmanship on the museum world at large merits a more thorough critique. "Fashion in art is very much like fashion in dress," Austin proclaimed; he suggested that artworks, like clothes, need not be taken too seriously and could be discarded when judged passé.

In the midst of the Depression, Austin hired Pavel Tchelitchew to transform the new museum wing for a "Ragpickers Ball"; the Surrealist artist covered the white cantilevered balconies with painted newspapers and colored lights. Austin came to the party clad as a whip-cracking ringmaster, followed by a group of young men dressed as cowboys and bare-chested Indians, all wearing makeup and false eyelashes. The high jinks reached their climax when sculptor Alexander Calder plunged Austin into the annex's atrium fountain pool.

"Chick Austin was air and fire," according to the writer Marguerite Yourcenar. By the 1940's, it would have been more accurate to say that Austin was ready to crash and burn. War kept him from visiting Europe and making new acquisitions, and his irrepressible frivolity left him increasingly out of step in straitened times. His slipshod management style (combined with the subversive remarks and the penchant for avant-garde extravaganza) inevitably led to difficulties with the Atheneum board. While he was away on leave in 1945 (making an abortive foray into Hollywood show business), a trustee-ordered audit found that Austin had borrowed 30 paintings from art dealers on approval; there were overdue bills dating back more than four years. The museum quietly fired him.

Austin spent his last decade as director of the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla. Although outside his customary orbit, the post was a good fit: The Ringling had a major collection of Baroque art housed in a fanciful reinterpretation of the Doge's Palace in Venice. Austin again created a splendid annex, this time to house a jewel-like 18th-century theater imported from Asolo, Italy. The idea, typically, was to add the dramatic arts to the Ringling's offerings.

"I get bored with buying pictures painted by others for someone else," he remarked before his death in 1957. "To me the joy of living is active participation." Magician of the Modern deftly recounts how exuberance and an expert eye helped reshape American art museums, turning them from tranquil repositories into more freewheeling stages for both glamorous blockbusters and genuine cultural innovation.

Michael Z. Wise is the author of Capital Dilemma: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy (Princeton Architectural Press).

As a personality O'Keeffe was, by all accounts, extraordinary. She certainly had little trouble captivating the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, who was not an easy mark-though he did, to be sure, have a thing about women much younger than himself. But as an artist? How much does O'Keeffe's current claim to fame owe to factors entirely extrinsic to her actual artistic accomplishment?

Or, to state the question even more invidiously: How much did O'Keeffe's initial reputation as an American modernist owe to her romance with Stieglitz in the earlier decades of this century, and how much does her current status as an American classic owe to the tidal wave of feminist politics and so-called gender studies that has lately engulfed the study of art history in the academy, the museums and the art press?

This is an admittedly provocative way of attempting a critical assessment of O'Keeffe's work. Yet confronted-as we are in O'Keeffe's case-with a reputation so woefully at odds with the artistic reality, drastic measures are called for. I have already had occasion to take note of the absurdly inflated place that has been accorded her work in the Whitney's current American Century blockbuster. Now, two other current exhibitions- Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe & American Modernism at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.-offer contrasting accounts of O'Keeffe's life and work. Taken together, you could hardly ask for a better demonstration of the equivocal character of O'Keeffe's artistic standing.

In the American Modernism exhibition in Hartford, O'Keeffe is mainly seen not as an artist but as a love object-as the object, that is, of Stieglitz's sexual passion and as a subject of his camera work. Much of the exhibition is indeed organized around the famous suite of photographs that Stieglitz devoted to O'Keeffe in the years 1918-1930. While there are also some examples of O'Keeffe's paintings in the show, they are relegated to an ancillary role. In this account of American modernism, photography dominates-as one would expect it to in an exhibition celebrating Stieglitz's accomplishments. Yet the photographs he devoted to O'Keeffe are by no means his own most important artistic contribution to modernism. That is to be found in the ambitious Equivalents series of photographs of skies and clouds that are Stieglitz's most distinctive attempt to make photography a medium of abstract art.

About this aspect of Stieglitz's work, the authors of the excellent catalogue of the Hartford show, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Amy Ellis, make an interesting observation. "Stieglitz's cloud series," they write, "resulted in pure abstraction and reflected his belief that abstraction was 'the true medium.'" Yet their further observation that the Equivalents pictures were "simultaneously abstract and representational" underscores something important not only about Stieglitz's own esthetic but that of the modernist artistic circle he gathered around him at his 291 Gallery. Their conception of abstraction was fundamentally an attempt to reconcile the conflicting interests of nature and abstraction. This put them very much at odds with the ideas of the pioneers of European abstraction-Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian-who conceived of abstract art as an escape from the observation of nature. To effect a total rejection of nature was not something that the modernists of the Stieglitz circle could ever bring themselves to do.

Which brings us back to the problematic character of the art of Georgia O'Keeffe, who, despite an alleged devotion to Kandinsky's treatise On the Spiritual in Art , never really had a clue as to what the esthetic of abstraction was about. In the O'Keeffe exhibition at the Phillips Collection, much attention is lavished on the influence of Arthur Wesley Dow-"Pa Dow," as O'Keeffe called him-on O'Keeffe's own version of modernism, and rightly so. Yet the conclusions to be drawn from that influence do a lot to explain O'Keeffe's artistic failures. For when you penetrate the mystical vapors surrounding Dow's ideas, what you find is a rather low-level version of 1890's estheticism and Art Nouveau, an esthetic in which nature, far from being rejected or transcended, is turned into something ornamental and decorative.

And sure enough, in the early (1915) charcoal drawings that are included in the O'Keeffe show at the Phillips Collection, what you find is an academic version of an Art Nouveau style that had already been consigned to oblivion by the modernist avant-garde. In the catalogue of the Phillips show, Elizabeth Hutton Turner writes of these quasi-abstract charcoal drawings, which O'Keeffe called Specials , that "they mark the start of something new," and that they "aligned

O'Keeffe's quest with that of the European avant-garde," but this is precisely what they are not. They are an attempt by a provincial talent to catch up with something the European avant-garde had already rejected. What in 1915 had captivated the interest of the European avant-garde-the legacy of Cézanne, the chromatic inventions of Matisse, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the Futurism of Marinetti and Boccioni and the early abstractions of Kandinsky-were all developments that O'Keeffe never really comprehended or acted upon in her art.

Whether this fundamental backwardness in her art, which found its principal expression in all those overscale flower illustrations, magnified clam shells, etc., all tricked out with smarmy suggestions of a kind of freeze-dried eroticism, is traceable to Dow's retardataire influence, who can say with any certainty? Whatever the cause, O'Keeffe remained a provincial talent, and she seems herself to have understood that this was the case when, in the end, she left Stieglitz, left New York, and re-established herself in the more comforting provinciality of New Mexico. That so failed a talent should now be treated as a major artist tells us a lot more about the sexual politics of the art world of the 1990's than it does about the art of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe & American Modernism runs until July 11 and Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things will be on view until July 18.

In death, moreover, de Hooch has had to wait more than 300 years for the first one-man exhibition of his paintings to be mounted anywhere in the world. This exhibition has now been expertly organized at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., by its director, Peter C. Sutton, himself an internationally recognized authority on the subject. Pieter de Hooch, 1629-1684 has already been seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, its only other venue, and it remains on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum through Feb. 28.

This is an exhibition that everyone with a serious interest in the art of painting will want to see. Not only has it never been done before. Given the range of loans in the present exhibition, which brings together paintings from museums in St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig, Dublin, London, Madrid, Stockholm and Amsterdam, as well as from a number of American collections, it is unlikely to be done again for a very long time to come. For most of us, this is truly a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Pieter de Hooch was born in Rotterdam to humble circumstances. His father was a bricklayer, which may account for the fastidious attention the painter lavished on brickwork, tilework and other feats of homely craftsmanship in his paintings of Dutch domestic life. His mother was a midwife, which may or may not account for the sympathetic attention given to children in de Hooch's paintings. (He was himself a father of seven, two of whom did not survive their infancy.) From what little else we actually know about de Hooch's life, it is said that he may have been trained in Haarlem, Netherlands, with a landscapist, Nicolaes Berchem. What we know for certain is that de Hooch settled in the city of Delft around 1652, married a local woman there in 1654 and joined the Delft artists' guild in 1655.

It was in Delft that de Hooch made his mark as an artist, painting some of his greatest pictures in the years 1657 to 1660. It is one of the triumphs of the current exhibition in Hartford that it brings together some 16 paintings from this period of de Hooch's highest creativity-one more, by the way, than was shown at Dulwich. For between the initial organization of the exhibition and its showing in Hartford, Mr. Sutton succeeded in persuading the private owner of Figures in a Courtyard (1658) to allow this painting to be exhibited alongside a very similar masterpiece, A Courtyard in Delft With a Woman and Child (also 1658), on loan here from the National Gallery in London. (It is for this reason that Figures in a Courtyard is not represented in the catalogue of the exhibition.)

This is believed to be the first time that these two courtyard paintings have been exhibited together, and the comparison that this close proximity affords has much to tell us about the mysteries and complexities of de Hooch's pictorial esthetic. What we are made to feel at the outset are two completely realistic depictions of the same informal courtyard scene, with only the placement of the figures as variations, turns out on closer examination to be something quite otherwise. Not only do the structures and spaces enclosing the courtyards differ in significant detail, but the courtyard itself turns out to be pure pictorial invention. No such courtyard actually existed. As a pictorial mise en scène it was assembled in de Hooch's capacious imagination from his mental inventory of observation, memory and embellishment, and composed to conform to a certain idea of what the "reality" of the subject needed for its complete realization.

Once we are alerted to this element of invention in de Hooch's much-vaunted "realism," our whole notion of illusionist space in his painting begins to seem itself to be something of an illusion-which is to say, a pictorial invention compounded of what Mr. Sutton describes as "multiple light sources, more complex perspective systems, and views of adjacent spaces." The paradox of his art, particularly in the Delft paintings, is that the more he invents and embellishes his subjects and the spaces they occupy, the more persuasive they are as accurate renderings of what has been closely observed. There is thus a dialectic of illusion and reality in these paintings that does not readily reveal its mysteries to the casual observer.

Something similar can be said of de Hooch as a painter of cityscapes. After all the misguided comparisons we have been treated to over the years that lay claim to de Hooch as a forerunner of Cubism, an ancestor of Mondrian, and so on-all owing to his mastery of rectilinear form and multiple perspectives-I am almost embarrassed to say that the one modern painter he most reminds me of, especially in his cityscapes, is Giorgio de Chirico, the de Chirico of the piazze d'Italia pictures. Never mind that de Hooch and de Chirico were utterly different in many other respects. There is an element of fantasy in de Hooch's cityscapes that strikes me as more akin to de Chirico than to any other painter.

Around 1661, de Hooch quit Delft for the more cosmopolitan environment of Amsterdam. To these later years belong his ambitious paintings of family portraits of the rich and the mighty. These Amsterdam paintings, of which there is also a marvelous representation in the Hartford exhibition, are full of wonderful things, yet they strike us as somewhat less personally engaged than the pictures of the Delft years. Similar liberties are taken with spatial invention, yet an element of affectionate expression is missing. The elaborate decorations and furnishings depicted in these paintings are masterfully rendered, but out of respect rather than love. Those enchanting scenes of domestic felicity and homely pleasures are supplanted by an impulse to flatter and exalt.

Is it owing to this change in the artist's relation to his subject that the Amsterdam paintings tend to be darker, their contrasts of light and shadow more facile, and the need to embellish the composition with pictorial conceits more rampant? Some of the latter, to be sure, are quite astonishing-the bizarre lunette in A Music Party in a Hall (circa 1663-65), for example, in which de Hooch painted a partial copy of Raphael's School of Athens . Yet it is to the paintings of the Delft years that one inevitably returns for the most complete account of de Hooch's genius.

As to what the mystery of de Hooch's pictorial genius consisted of, it has never been better described than it was by the 19th-century French writer and painter Eugène Fromentin in the book he wrote about Dutch and Flemish painting, The Masters of Past Time , in 1876. "The mystery of a Pieter de Hooch, [is] due," wrote Fromentin, "to there being a great deal of air around the objects, many shades around the lights, much softening of the vanishing colors, a great deal of transformation of the aspects of things-in a word, the most marvelous use ever made of chiaroscuro, or, in other terms, the most judicious application of the law of values."

Pieter de Hooch, 1629-1684 is a great exhibition, and both Mr. Sutton and his colleagues at the Wadsworth Atheneum are to be congratulated on its triumphant realization.

No, sir: When I say that I did my bit for the welfare of these United States, I mean that I contributed to the national well-being by operating a motor vehicle for hours at a time through various portions of the Northeast. This may seem but a small measure of devotion, but consider what the economists and boating enthusiasts call "the ripple effect."

In making splendidly inefficient use of the regional highway system thanks to a potentially deadly outbreak of Map Avoidance Syndrome (this is a common ailment among males who have fewer brain cells than their motor vehicles have cylinders), I helped wear out concrete and asphalt in no fewer than five states. Thus, the legislators, lobbyists, bond underwriters and construction moguls who inhabit five state capitols now have fresh statistics to bolster their claims that all those billion-dollar highway repair contracts are necessary and are certainly not to be confused with the system of bribery, extortion, waste and patronage known as "local politics."

In the course of 12 days spent contributing to regional economic development, my individual transportation unit traveled about 1,000 miles. During the course of these travels, my family unit-consisting of two adults and two toddlers-made 147 visits to roadside merchants, spending an average of 11.2 minutes per stop, during the course of which the family unit contributed $32.76 to purveyors of fast food, trinkets and toilet paper. According to Dr. Petrol Glutt, an economist with the Enterprising American Institute, this bit of patriotic consumption led to the creation of two seasonal construction jobs in New Jersey, four part-time gas-pumping positions in rural New England, 14 hamburger-flipping posts in the Hudson Valley and 217 full-time openings for construction lobbyists, transportation consultants and legislative aides in Albany, Boston, Hartford and Trenton. "Best of all, from an economic development perspective, you avoided mass transportation," Dr. Glutt said. "This is what distinguishes a genuine American from the sort of namby-pamby person who insists that World Cup soccer is a form of athletic artistry."

I certainly felt like an authentic, all-American, job-creating entrepreneur until Dr. Glutt raised objections to my particular sort of individual transportation unit, it being of the subcompact variety, chosen for the large distances it can travel without need for fuel replenishment.

"How very late-1970's of you," he sneered. "No doubt you are the sort who puts on a cardigan sweater rather than turn up the heat in wintertime." I confessed that I was, although I pointed out that the cardigan was made in the United States. "Fiddle-faddle," Dr. Glutt replied. "America hasn't knitted together so much as a sleeve on a sweater since the last days of Jimmy Carter. So your sweater is at least 20 years old and you're driving a car that gets 30 miles to the gallon, and you call yourself an American? Get with the program, son: This is the 1990's, and they're almost over. You're missing out on the greatest American party since the 1980's!"

As you can imagine, I was chagrined. I had spent 12 patriotic days on the highways, suffering from Map Avoidance Syndrome, wearing and tearing at concrete and asphalt, visiting gas stations, stuffing my toddlers with Happy Meals, and now Dr. Glutt was saying it was all for naught. What a shame!

Sensing my mood, Dr. Glutt recommended a stroll along any north-south artery on the island of Manhattan, where, he said, I would learn a lesson in 1990's-style Americanism. I told him this could present a problem, as the Mayor insists that such passages are fraught with danger, what with all the hot-dog carts clogging the sidewalks. "Forget the sidewalks!" he said. "Look at the roads! See America in action!"

I followed his prescription, and soon found myself surrounded by Cherokees and Mountaineers and Pathfinders; Navigators and Foresters and Durangos. There they were, parading through the streets of Manhattan with their gas-eating, consumption-celebrating, red-blooded-American sport utility vehicles! Behind the wheel of each of these massive trucks was a smooth and confident baby boomer, proud to be stuck in traffic with a vehicle that spoke of rugged, rural Americana. How had I missed this transformation of the boomers into self-absorbed, self-indulgent, mega-consuming, airheaded, status-seeking, planet-destroying morons?

I posed this question to Dr. Glutt.

"The answer is simple," he said. "You have to get out on the road more often, like a good American. And you really ought to watch more television and read more slick magazines."

Add to this the glamour that, for good reasons and bad, now attaches to Caravaggio's fame, and you have an event guaranteed to attract a good deal of attention. It is therefore a considerable mercy that the show is as good as it is. Caravaggio and His Italian Followers is not, to be sure, a major survey of its subject, and does not pretend to be. But for newcomers to the subject, to which 20th-century art historians on both sides of the Atlantic have devoted extensive study, the exhibition provides an intelligent introduction, and for those already acquainted with the Caravaggio literature, it affords an opportunity to re-examine some of its claims and counterclaims.

About the circumstances in which the exhibition was conceived, much has already been written. Suffice to say that in 1965, the Atheneum acquired in good faith a painting- The Bath of Bathsheba by Jacopo Zucchi (1540-1596)-that turned out to have been stolen from the Italian Embassy in Berlin in the closing days of World War II. Satisfied that the Italian Government had a legitimate claim to the painting, the current director of the Atheneum-Peter Sutton, who came to the museum two years ago-agreed to restore the picture to its rightful owners, and in return the Atheneum has been rewarded with the temporary loan of 29 paintings from the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica di Roma. Together with 10 paintings from American collections, most of them from the Atheneum itself, these are the pictures that make up the current exhibition. For the run of the show, by the way, The Bath of Bathsheba remains on view at the Atheneum, where it hangs by itself outside the entrance to the exhibition.

As the Atheneum was the first American museum to acquire a painting by the now much admired and much written-about Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), having bought The Ecstasy of St. Francis in 1943, and as it has long been the repository of a fine collection of Baroque paintings, it was an inspired move on Mr. Sutton's part to make the return of the Zucchi picture the occasion for an exhibition that recalls us to the distinction of the Atheneum's own holdings. With the mounting of Caravaggio and His Italian Followers , moreover, Mr. Sutton has gone a long way toward putting the Atheneum back on the map of museums essential to visit on a regular basis-a position that, for reasons irrelevant to the present occasion, the Atheneum had largely forfeited in recent years.

In this respect, the museum could hardly have come up with a better draw than an artist like Caravaggio. He not only changed the course of European painting, exerting a decisive influence on artists greater than himself-among them, Rubens, Velázquez and Rembrandt-but he was himself a figure of considerable controversy in his own period and has remained a subject of spirited speculation and debate in ours. Did he actually commit murder, as has sometimes been said? Well, he was certainly quarrelsome, occasionally violent and of a generally rebellious temperament-not, in any event, a model of piety and decorum. And it is important to remember that he died young, while still in his 30's.

Then there is the much contested matter of Caravaggio's sexuality. Are his highly charged depictions of young male subjects to be read as an expression of his own homosexual proclivities? Some widely respected scholars have attempted to make that case, too, and there is little question but that in certain pictures-I would include The Ecstasy of St. Francis among them-the erotic element can scarcely be discounted.

Quite apart from legends of sex and violence, there is also the problem of Caravaggio's place in what might roughly be called European thought. "So much fancy ink has been spilled about Caravaggio during the last 35 years," wrote the English art historian Ellis Waterhouse in 1962, that "the innocent reader of art-historical literature could be forgiven for supposing that his place in the history of civilization lies somewhere in importance between Aristotle and Lenin." Well, you get the idea.

And since then, of course, we have seen no less an eminence than Frank Stella lay claim to Caravaggio as a precursor and inspiration for his own graffiti-style polychrome abstract constructions-an aesthetic linkage that would have remained permanently unsuspected had Mr. Stella not placed Caravaggio at the center of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University in the 1980's. Given this history of Caravaggio's reputation in our own century, it will be something of a miracle if we do not get to see a trashy movie version of the artist's life, undoubtedly starring Leonardo DiCaprio, in the next.

There is nothing like a firsthand encounter with even a few of Caravaggio's own paintings, however, to clear the air of all this legend, hyperbole and mystification, and put us back in touch with the raw audacity of the artist's pictorial powers. What could be better arranged to underscore that audacity and its effect on the painter's contemporaries than the installation of Caravaggio and His Italian Followers , in which the visitor moves from a Mannerist confection like Zucchi's The Bath of Bathsheba at the entrance to the show to the knockout Realism of Caravaggio's The Cardsharps a few steps away?

Bathsheba (circa 1570) dates from around the year of Caravaggio's birth, whereas The Cardsharps (circa 1594-95), on loan here from the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Tex., is the work of a painter still in his 20's. Yet the latter instantly heralds a new era by sweeping away the posturing and punctilio of the Mannerist style to give us a vivid contemporary scene of disreputable intrigue. Never mind that Caravaggio's Realism is as much an invention as any other pictorial style. In art of this persuasion, it is the achieved illusion of reality that counts, and Caravaggio was a consummate master of that particular pictorial strategy from an early age. That was what made him a painter of such extraordinary influence on his own contemporaries and on the generations that followed.

Did he achieve that position by lowering the tone of pictorial art, bringing it down to earth, so to speak, from the exalted spiritual heights of the High Renaissance? Undoubtedly. This is what we have learned to expect from the Realist impulse in art from Caravaggio's day to our own, four centuries later, and it is precisely what makes Caravaggio the progenitor of so much that has occurred in the history of painting ever since he first burst upon the scene with his revolutionary style.

Realism of this persuasion is not without its downside, then, and in Caravaggio's case it has the effect of rendering the ostensible content of the paintings devoted to religious subjects more than a little dubious. Suffice to say that as a painter, Caravaggio is always more persuasive in depicting the things of this world, especially the sensual attributes of the human physique, than in evoking the realm of spiritual exaltation. The kind of candor he brought to the portrayal of human experience is the key to the power his art still commands for us today, but it is so firmly anchored in the emotions of earthly life that it proves to be an unpersuasive instrument for instructing us in the vocation of sainthood. Caravaggio himself seems never to have bothered to pretend otherwise-and that, too, alas, is probably one of the sources of his modern appeal.

This is also, I think, one of the aspects of his art that separates it from that of his Italian followers. However much they aspired to appropriate the pictorial elements of his revolutionary Realism, few proved to be a match for the master when it came to replicating anything like Caravaggio's candor and audacity. Marvelous as some of these painters undoubtedly are, they nonetheless tended to make something more respectable and less provocative in their art than Caravaggio himself was temperamentally inclined to settle for. Which is, perhaps, only another way of saying that for the most part, they remained followers rather than leaders in their own right.

One unintended consequence of Caravaggio and His Italian Followers -if, in fact, it was unintended-is that the exhibition as a whole, but especially the Caravaggios in the show, leave us with fewer regrets about the loss of The Bath of Bathsheba than might otherwise have been the case. Whatever the charms of this painting may be, its proximity to Caravaggio in this show succeeds in reconciling us to its future absence from the museum's collection.

Caravaggio and His Italian Followers remains on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford through July 26.