Assemblage looks like art, but repels engagement. We don’t lose ourselves in it the way we do in a good book—it’s too literal, too blunt in its material certainty. It’s fitting, then, that it was Cornell, a dreamy loner from Queens with no formal training in art, who realized and encapsulated the medium’s potential.

But don’t peg him as an outsider—he was a sophisticated habitué of the Manhattan gallery scene, counting among his acquaintances and admirers the Dadaist kingpin Marcel Duchamp. In his art, Cornell shared with the Surrealists a reliance on the unconscious, however weird or distasteful its vagaries. A tone of wistful obsession centers his fragile and often hallucinatory visions. Drawn to children, actresses and dancers, he was known to have stalked the ballerina Allegra Kent—Cornell was, in the most gentle of ways, an unseemly character.

IN JOSEPH CORNELL'S DREAMS, RECENTLY ISSUED by independent publisher Exact Change, artist and editor Catherine Corman proposes to draw Cornell’s life and art into a single strand. Most of Dreams is just that—fragmented dream recollections drawn from Cornell’s journals, presented in chronological order from 1944 to 1972. Each entry is given a full page; much of the book is clean white space.

An introduction and three “appendices”—short interpretive essays that attempt to give context and coherence to Cornell’s jottings—account for nearly a quarter of the volume. In the first appendix, “Themes to the Dreams; Themes Within the Dreams,” Ms. Corman offers an alphabetically arranged glossary of Cornell’s dream motifs, running from “Animals” to “Water,” intended to shed light on his psyche and, by implication, his art. She does so with a simplicity that is at times gratifying, yet at other times verges on naïveté—as when she asserts that Cornell’s brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy, figured in some of the “most important dreams of [Cornell’s] life.” Ms. Corman doesn’t explain how she knows this.

The list of themes invokes Freud, as is appropriate given Cornell’s interest in psychoanalysis—but Ms. Corman overreaches when interpreting symbols. “Dreams of animals invoke tenderness,” we are told. “Fire is related to fragile people” and the “lawn is … linked with death.” To paraphrase the good doctor, sometimes a lawn is just a lawn. Still, Ms. Corman should be commended for slogging through Cornell’s 30,000 journal pages, 500 of which were expressly dedicated to dreams.

Most of Cornell’s dream recollections are a line or two, punctuated, if at all, with ellipses and dashes. It’s become a cliché to invoke poetry when writing about Cornell’s art, and it would be foolish to read Cornell’s obscurantist jottings as poems. “Suzy B. treading glowing cinder in dream,” goes one; “dream white cockatoo on deep blue” says another. You begin to wonder whether the staggered sentences are indicative of how they originally appeared in the journals, or if Ms. Corman has taken the liberty of arranging them that way. Nowhere in the book is the organization of the journals’ manuscript version discussed. Why not?

The only inscription that comes close to poetry is dated March 3, 1944: “Dream of going back to Nyack/ seeing school as the palace I made of mirrors it was like/ the Plaza only seen as a front facade/ resplendent in the sunlight.” Here the elusive magic we associate with Cornell’s art is given literary body. Otherwise, arbitrariness dominates. If Cornell is responsible for arranging the entry from June 1960—“dream/ inspired/ by Bay of/ Naples/ gouache/ color”—we should be grateful that he relegated his pretensions to the page, and didn’t put them in a box.

Nevertheless, those with the patience to do so will divine the telling turn of phrase. When Cornell mentions how the “irrational” sometimes “obtrudes,” or how moths sympathize with him as he stands in the rain, you think: Now we’re getting close to “the verbal equivalent of Cornell[’s] boxes” promised by the book’s publicity. But those moments are rare and hardly worth digging out. Joseph Cornell’s Dreams reminds us that keeping a journal is a private endeavor, and that dreams are interesting primarily to the dreamer. They give us some entry into the artist’s head, but do nothing to illuminate his art—which is, come to think of it, exactly how it should be.

This approach doesn’t necessarily guarantee success, of course. Artists can miss the forest for the trees (or vice versa) as much as anyone. Who hasn’t spotted a painting or sculpture from a distance and walked up to it in a state of anticipation, only to be disappointed by drab or unfelt crafting? Similarly, a piece that entrances us as we press our nose against its surface may become indistinct from even a few feet away. The ability to hold our attention from near and far is a significant indicator of merit.

I was reminded of this fundamental notion while attending two exhibitions devoted to the medium of collage: Lance Letscher at Howard Scott Gallery in Chelsea and Joshua Dorman at Pierogi 2000 in Williamsburg. It’s difficult not to be hooked by the specificity of the materials they employ, yet that specificity doesn’t hinder an overriding unity and flow. The work of each artist will have you shuffling back and forth in bewilderment and liking every second of it.

Of the distinctive set of materials particular to each art form, some announce themselves more forthrightly than others. The challenge for artists using readymade items for collage—newspaper photographs, scraps of fabric, train tickets, what have you—is to transform a functional and, at times, stubbornly physical object into a vehicle for metaphor, into something other and greater than a mere thing in the world.

Mr. Letscher and Mr. Dorman are wise to the transformative properties of art and apply their knowledge with persuasive skill. Both men can trace their roots to the Surrealists and Dadaists, who prized the pictorial discord that arises when disparate bits and pieces are cut and pasted together.

Mr. Letscher owes a debt to Kurt Schwitters and his loving amalgams of everyday detritus. Automatism—or, at least, the mind’s more obscure wanderings—feeds Mr. Dorman’s methodology.

Yet the artist whom their work evokes most strongly is Joseph Cornell, the reclusive mama’s boy from Flushing whose dioramas of dolls, bottles and vintage bric-a-brac simultaneously offer an homage to childhood and a curse upon it. Cornell’s example is so utterly singular as to prevent anything resembling a school from following in its wake. Mr. Letscher and Mr. Dorman aren’t, strictly speaking, his students.

What they do share with Cornell is a conviction that the objects amassed over a lifetime—mundane stuff that has been used, damaged, forgotten or discarded—are imbued with the residue of events, personalities and bygone eras. It’s a measure of Cornell’s deep regard for his materials that the items at his disposal were allowed a certain independence. His art elicited and elaborated upon, rather than prescribed, the memories attached to them.

Mr. Letscher and Mr. Dorman exhibit the same sensitivity, acumen and generosity. Mr. Letscher favors hardcover bindings, ledgers, notepads, album covers, something that looks like a tourist brochure from 1952 and other ephemera. Mr. Dorman’s collage palette, as it were, is more limited but no less evocative: Topographical maps, yellowed with age, serve as the grounding upon which he draws, paints and doodles.

Of the two, Mr. Letscher, who’s fruitfully squirreled away in Austin, Tex., is more purely dedicated to the piecemeal aesthetic of collage. The work makes itself felt through accumulations of discrete and often tiny bits of material. Notations and jottings by anonymous persons and staining caused by excess adhesive are the only direct intimations of the hand.

Keenly attuned to the surface qualities and tonal palette of the myriad items he works with, Mr. Letscher creates images that evoke the cosmos, microcellular life forms and, in the case of the monumental Lucky Cat (2005), the deepest reaches of the earth’s crust. Diagrammatic structures, floating ovoid forms and radiant pinwheels of baby blue and dusky pink are created and choreographed with a clear-eyed aplomb. A strain of mysticism typical of his earlier work is less in evidence here, but the pieces certainly aren’t lacking in poetry and, at moments, a newfound whimsy.

Mr. Dorman’s encompassing art is less focused than Mr. Letscher’s, but that’s probably the point. Accentuating and sometimes obscuring the rhythmic patterning of maps, he creates elaborate and fanciful landscapes that you can “stare at 150,000 times and always get something different” (as one visitor to the gallery exclaimed).

Alien monsters ensconced in a box, turd-like sculptures, precisely rendered insects, veering cityscapes, splats and spills are just a few of the zillion or so events that dot Mr. Dorman’s scribbled, vertiginous vistas. Meandering this, that and every which way, the pieces go nowhere in particular, and they do so with peculiar invention and charming illogic. Like Mr. Letscher, Mr. Dorman follows, with enthusiasm and gratitude, where his materials lead him. It’s a pleasure to get lost with both of them.

Lance Letscher: Recent Works is at Howard Scott Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, until Jan. 7, 2006; Joshua Dorman: Lost Travels in End Land is at Pierogi 2000, 177 North Ninth Street, Brooklyn, until Dec. 23.

(The loud thwack you just heard is the sound of abstract painters all over the city smacking their foreheads in disbelief: What is he talking about?)

Take a look at what dominates the scene: big-budget installations, obscurantist videos, interminable performances, conceptualist novelties, anti-art high jinks and photographs by photographers who don't know how to focus their cameras. The best-known contemporary painter at the moment is a figurative artist: John Currin.

Painting itself is not having an easy time of it: Though news of its death has become a joke even to those who pine for the day, many artists continue to view painting as a plaything to be mocked rather than its own independent pleasure. Try putting brush to canvas with sincerity, passion or ambition and you'll be shown the door-and given large-type directions to the nearest pasture.

As for abstraction, it's no longer the engine of culture or the culmination of Modernism; it's now a specialist's pursuit. The minimized status that abstraction was given in the millennial exhibitions mounted by MoMA only ratified current opinion: Abstraction is just there , another byway of artistic pursuit in the anything-goes bazaar of the contemporary scene.

Sowhat'sgoodabout all that?

Out from under the burden of historical necessity and away from the limelight of successful innovation, abstraction is free . Having been marginalized by Pop, politics, fashion and theory, abstraction has retrenched and set off on pathways that might once have been thought inappropriate, untenable or ridiculous. The quest for "the final painting"-a goal once considered the hallmark of Modernism-degraded the form into a feeble simulacrum of itself. (Just stroll through the gallery at Dia:Beacon devoted to the austere pseudo-paintings of Robert Ryman-you might as well be visiting a tomb.)

Purity, having been achieved, was not the apogee of painting, but a dead end masquerading as artistic truth. Having seen how much could be taken out of a painting and still leave a painting (or something like it), many contemporary painters want to discover how much you can put back into a painting and still have an abstraction. In fact, the best abstract painters working today are a rather impure lot. Inclusiveness is their watchword: They're willing to try anything once, maybe even twice. They take the whole of human experience as their inspiration.

This inclusive approach is not brand-new. Robert Delaunay, Arthur Dove, Stuart Davis and Piet ("Boogie-Woogie") Mondrian all invited the world into their abstractions, and the results were salutary. The list of today's abstract artists who favor a welcoming impurity includes Thomas Nozkowski, Shirley Jaffe, Laurie Fendrich, Bill Jensen, Ross Neher, Juan Usle, Andrew Masullo, Harriet Korman and Pat Adams. Their efforts constitute a healthy, if unheralded, artistic moment.

And now we can add Abraham Lacalle to the list. Mr. Lacalle is a youngish Spanish painter (he's in his early 40's and hails from Madrid) who's having his first one-person show in New York, at Marlborough Chelsea. Knowing that inspiration is various and eternal, Mr. Lacalle looks for it everywhere. The paintings are mix-and-match accumulations of pattern and geometry and-less so-color and representation. He makes a brusque patchwork of cross-hatching, dots, stripes, lozenge-like forms, doodles and drips, as well as cacti, hats, fish and hands.

The juggling of pictorial motifs is reminiscent of any number of contemporary painters who promiscuously lift and juxtapose motifs from history's warehouse of style. But no one will mistake what Mr. Lacalle does for appropriation. Like the proverbial child in a candy store, Mr. Lacalle surveys 20th-century art (particularly, though not exclusively, Cubism) and likes what he sees. His enthusiasm is infectious.

The paintings, with their distinctly Spanish palette of scrubby ochres and grays, revel in disjunction. Mr. Lacalle's touch, unencumbered and endearingly clumsy, evens the temper of the fragmented compositions. The bigger canvases are overcomplicated machines; their size and ambition can't disguise a certain flimsiness or a bent toward formula. The less-cluttered smaller pictures are playful and loose; a minor key suits Mr. Lacalle's informality. Particularly smart are Sarasine 4 (2003) and Sarasine 6 (2003), both of which neatly mark the distinction between sophistication and amateurishness. At the moment, Mr. Lacalle is less a fully formed painter than a precocious talent; his best work lies ahead of him. Still, you'll be happy to make his acquaintance.

Abraham Lacalle: Pinturas de Ida y Vuelta (Back and Forth) is at Marlborough Chelsea, 211 West 19th Street, until Feb. 9.

Flea-Market

Mummification

The aesthetic terrain mined by Joseph Heidecker, whose work is on display in the back room at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, is so meager it's a wonder he unearths anything at all. Anti-portraiture is his specialty: Mr. Heidecker applies beads, string, collage snippets, metallic spangles and sundry other materials to vintage photographs and small plaster busts.

Decorating the heads, and sometimes the bodies, of the individuals portrayed, Mr. Heidecker plays a Dada-inspired game of identity and denial. The key piece is a photo of a dowdy matron from Norwich, Conn., for whom Mr. Heidecker has fashioned a cock-and-balls mask clipped from the pages of a porno magazine. A clever shtick like this can be good for a chuckle-after which you'll feel sorry you were suckered.

What Mr. Heidecker does to the plaster busts is less predictable. He obscures the faces by covering them with twine, say, or polka-dot fabric, or flattened and rusty bottle caps. The results are creepy-a flea-market mummification-not least because it's done with consummate dedication.

This is Joseph Cornell territory, a place where emotion is wrung from discarded tchotchkes. But Cornell's accomplishment-singularand grand-doesn't allow much room for complication or development. That's why Mr. Heidecker spends most of his time cracking jokes. Still, the fact that he's managed to eke out a little weirdness from the three-dimensional pieces counts as a kind of feat.

Joseph Heidecker is at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, third floor, until Feb. 7.

The Shadowplay volume includes extensive commentaries on Cornell's life and work by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Richard Vine, Robert Lehrman and Walter Hopps. The book also comes with DVD-ROM containing an exhaustive survey of every aspect of the copious Cornell oeuvre . No bauble, soap-bubble set or ballet dancer in the artist's work goes unrecorded in this electronic directory of his entire repertory of images. Such a comprehensive image bank will no doubt be a boon to Cornell scholarship, yet one shudders to think of the Niagara of Ph.D. dissertations, interpretations and dissections that will soon be rolling off the academic presses thanks to this massive documentation. Come to think of it, some of the interpretations on offer in Shadowplay read like a preview of coming attractions.

I've been an admirer of Cornell's work for more than half a century, but I must confess it never occurred to me to suspect that this consummate aesthete and fantasist had all along been living a secret life as a Christian mystic. We owe this revelation-if that's what it is-to Richard Vine's go-for-broke essay, "Eterniday: Cornell's Christian Science 'Metaphysique,'" which attempts to trace the influence of Mary Baker Eddy's religious doctrines on virtually every aspect of Cornell's life and work. (Mary Baker Eddy, of course, was the founder of Christian Science.) To convey both the zeal and the ingenuity that Mr. Vine brings to this Christian Science analysis of Cornell's art, his essay must be quoted at some length. Here's a representative passage:

"In Cornell, with his emphasis on supra-logical conjunction (eterni-day), as in the entire Romantic tradition from which his procedure derives via Symbolism and Surrealism, that psychic mechanism was the very basis of his art. The exalted Fanny Cerrito, Hedy Lamarr, Marie Taglioni, Susan Sontag, or Tamara Toumanova, like a thousand young women noticed on the street, betoken much more than themselves; they are spiritual avatars, muses to the forlorn soul in quest of deliverance from sin, banality, and time. Cornell's frequent shame came only when he slipped into regarding these spiritual emissaries with mundane lust. (For this, Eddy provides stern admonition: 'Thoughts unspoken are not unknown to the divine Mind. Desire is prayer …. ') But sacred inspiration is the very function fulfilled by Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura, culminations of the troubadour tradition from which, according to Denis de Rougemont (one of Cornell's most studied authors), the reigning modern conception of romantic love has evolved. That somewhat perverse amatory mode always entails an obstacle to passion-a rival, a social barrier, great distance in time or space, above all, death-yet affords thereby an inducement to greater devotion. Frustration intensifies desire, and renders ever clearer the object (and significance) of veneration …. " And so on and so on, and on and on, until we are invited to believe that in creating his boxes and collages, Cornell "was engaged in a form of worship-communing with God by seeking to replicate, in small, unprepossessing ways, His elegant time-within-eternity handiwork."

Reading Mr. Vine's essay, I was reminded of a more secular analysis of Cornell's art written some years ago by the painter Fairfield Porter, who was also a first-rate critic. "Cornell uses his elements as though they were words," wrote Porter, "but what they allude to have no verbal equivalents." By attempting to supply such verbal equivalents from the literature of Christian Science theology and other religious texts, Mr. Vine has burdened Cornell's art with a mission and a meaning it cannot support. Comparisons with Dante and Petrarch only make matters worse, as does Mr. Vine's attempt, elsewhere in the essay, to stir T.S. Eliot's religious beliefs into the stew. Moreover, equating Cornell's pathetic voyeurism with the glories of the troubadour tradition would be comical if the whole subject of the artist's sex life wasn't so utterly sad. It's not as a saint or a sinner, but as an artist who found his vocation in Surrealist collage that Cornell makes a claim on our attention.

Fortunately for us, what Cornell made of that vocation is beautifully represented in the current exhibition at the Feigen gallery, and the best things about the Shadowplay volume accompanying the show are the high-quality reproductions of Cornell's work and Ms. Hartigan's sensitively written commentaries on the illustrations. They're a far better guide to the complexity of Cornell's aesthetic imagination than anything in Mrs. Eddy's theology.

Joseph Cornell: The 100th Birthday remains on view at Richard L. Feigen and Company, 34 East 69th Street, through Feb. 23.

It was a poetic method derived from Surrealist collage-specifically, in Cornell's case, from an encounter with Max Ernst's collage album, La Femme Cent Têtes , in the early 1930's. In Ernst's collage aesthetic of incongruous juxtaposition, Cornell discovered his lifetime vocation. From collage, Cornell soon turned to the creation of "boxes," for which he's far better-known to most of today's art public. But two-dimensional collage remained an abiding passion, and he was prolific in producing them almost to the end of his life, as we can now see in the exhibition Joseph Cornell: Collages , currently on view at C&M Arts. The show consists of 62 collages, all of them drawn from the Cornell estate and none of them publicly exhibited before now. Most of them date from the 1960's.

The question that inevitably arises from this exhibition is: Does "late" Cornell differ in any significant degree from the Cornell collages that are already familiar to us? I think they do, in one respect: I can't recall any earlier exhibition in which there were so many collages that focused on images of naked girls. There's always been a current of voyeuristic reverie to be seen, or at least inferred, in Cornell's iconography, but in the past this tended to be represented by illustrations of celebrated ballerinas of an earlier era, or by details of female figurines clipped from reproductions of Renaissance paintings. They were nothing if not discreet. It's my impression, anyway, that the voyeuristic impulse is a little more explicit in some of the naked-girl collages in the current exhibition.

It may be that as Cornell grew older and had reason to believe that his position as a modern master was beyond doubt, he felt freer about what he permitted himself to express. Or was it only that an unfettered expression of erotic fantasy had become a more and more acceptable feature of mainstream cultural life?

About such matters, we can only speculate. For the most part, the Cornell we see in the current exhibition is the Cornell who has long been familiar to us: the Cornell who was, above all else, a visual poet whose collages and boxes evoke a dreamlike combination of the exquisite, the esoteric and the commonplace. Every one ofhiscreations, whetheratwo-dimensional(and sometimestwo-sided) collage or a three-dimensional box, is a remembrance of things past-sometimes, to be sure, an imaginary past. Images of the heavens enjoyed an aesthetic parity with Renaissance icons, but neither was more important than Cornell's fondness for the ballet or his affectionate hommages to the playthings of his childhood.

The Surrealist movement as it emerged in Europe in the 1920's and 30's was a fairly radical and rackety affair that made large claims about transforming the nature of life by means of an assault on the unconscious. It aspired to provoke a political as well as a sexual revolution. The American version of Surrealism was, in every respect, a good deal tamer and less political. It gave priority to precisely the kind of aesthetic concerns that the European Surrealists loudly disavowed.

This is one of the historical contexts in which Cornell's artistic achievement needs to be understood. But another is the fact that his career as an artist paralleled that of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the New York School, for the contrast between his apparently modest ambitions and their pursuit of the big bang gave him an unexpected advantage. It made him look like a one-man movement, which in America he then was. While the Abstract Expressionists were busy erasing representational imagery from their pictures, Cornell was quietly filling up his collages and boxes with a surfeit of compelling images and objects. The difference was noticed, and acted upon.

The fallout from this division of aesthetic labor came in the next generation, the generation of Rauschenberg and Johns and their many imitators. For where did Mr. Rauschenberg, in particular, get his idea of combining painting with objects if not from Cornell? In the early 1950's, Cornell's New York dealer was Charles Egan, whose gallery gave Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline their first solo exhibitions. Around the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg's mother-in-law was buying Cornell boxes from Charles Egan. Without a doubt, Duchamp had set the stage, but it was Cornell's example that served as the catalyst forbothMr. Rauschenberg and Mr. Johns making Cornell-typepictures with objects on an Abstract Expressionist scale. This would make Joseph Cornell one of the most influential figures in the historyof20th-century American art-a claim that Cornell himself would probably have found shocking.

Joseph Cornell: Collages remains on view at C&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, through Sept. 13. Summer gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday to Friday.

At the Met, however, we have come to expect a different order of priorities, and we are not usually disappointed. Yet on this occasion, the museum has embraced an exhibition that is so determined to create a sensation–not a difficult task when the subject is Surrealism–that it scarcely pays any attention to significant artistic achievement. As a result, Surrealism: Desire Unbound is, more often than not, less interesting as an art exhibition than as an overscale social documentary of Surrealism as cultural history–one of those heralded "new narratives" that have now supplanted an interest in art itself at Tate Modern, and a good many other museums specializing in modern art.

Consider, for example, the exhibition's treatment of Joan Miró, who was surely the greatest of the Surrealist painters. Except for two works on paper from the artist's Constellations series (both 1941) and a single example of a peinture-poème picture– A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress (1938)–there is little in Surrealism: Desire Unbound that attests to the full range of Miró's pictorial powers. None of the three paintings from 1925 that we see in the room devoted to the theme of "Automatism" is an important example of his work–and none, by the way, is automatist either in spirit or in execution. But this is the way it often is with these thematic "new narrative" exhibitions: Authors of the wall-text narrative say one thing, while the pictures selected to illustrate the text say something else.

There is, in any case, a good deal of muddle here about the concept of automatism in painting. It was often more of a theory or a pretext than a practice in Surrealist painting, and Miró himself was at some pains to explain why. Writing in 1948, he made a clear distinction between the "free, unconscious" element that "may suggest the beginning of a picture," and the "disciplined work" that went into the making of a painting. "Even a few casual swipes of my brush in cleaning it may suggest the beginning of a picture," he wrote. "The second stage, however, is carefully calculated. The first stage is free, unconscious; but after that the picture is controlled throughout, in keeping with that desire for disciplined work I have felt from the beginning."

The "desire for disciplined work" is not, of course, the kind of desire that is alluded to in the title of this exhibition, for "disciplined work" in art is never unbound. In the realm of sexual fantasy, however, anything goes–anything that the imagination can conceive of–and this is what the current exhibition is mainly about: the sexual fantasies of the Surrealist painters and poets. As so many of these fantasies are fairly putrid, I shall not attempt to describe them here. Suffice to say that a robust appetite for voyeuristic experience is likely to be amply satisfied.

Most of the art, however, is pretty bad. Unless you have an unbounded taste for perverse subjects rendered in a pompier style, the many works here by Salvador Dalí–more than a dozen–and Max Ernst are likely to leave you cold, if not indeed shuddering. Their female imitators–among them Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning–are even worse. But then, so are many of their male imitators. Attempting to determine the very worst painting in this exhibit is hard work, but my first choice would be Oscar Dominguez's Electrosexual Sewing Machine (1934), with Roland Penrose's Winged Domino: Portrait of Valentine (1938) a close runner-up. This is the kind of thing you find yourself thinking about in a show of this size, which numbers more than 300 items.

This is not to say that there aren't some fine things in the show, too. The first room is entirely devoted to Giorgio de Chirico–not a Surrealist, to be sure, but a huge influence on many painters who were. De Chirico's magic may have worn a little thin, but his paintings nonetheless remain vastly more appealing than those of his imitators. After the de Chirico room, however, it isn't until you get to the eighth room in the exhibition, with the work of Picasso and Giacometti, that you get to see something really worth seeing. The next room then descends into the underworld of sexual perversion, with illustrations of the writings of the Marquis de Sade–a great favorite of the Surrealists–by André Masson and Roberto Matta, and the sex dolls of Hans Bellmer, my nomination for the single most repellent artist in the show.

This is followed by a room mostly devoted to the boxes of Joseph Cornell. Much as I admire Cornell, it strikes me as ridiculous for an exhibition of this size to devote a room to him while the work of Jean Arp, for instance, is represented by two very minor works. But it's true, of course, that Arp's work doesn't minister to either perverse or voyeuristic tastes.

Finally, in the last room, there is Arshile Gorky's beautiful Diary of a Seducer (1945) and a stunning picture by William Baziotes called The Flesh Eaters (1952). But by then, alas, one is grateful to be able to leave this botched exhibition. For anyone old enough to remember the exhibition called Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, which William Rubin organized at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968, or more recently, the wonderful Miró retrospective that Carolyn Lanchner organized at MoMA in 1993-94, the way they differed from the debacle of Surrealism: Desire Unbound is certainly striking. For these earlier exhibitions concentrated on artistic achievement. As I recall, Mr. Rubin was attacked by Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker for failing to convey the revolutionary aspects of the Surrealist movement–in 1968, of course, revolution was all the rage–in an exhibition that concentrated on aesthetics. Were he still around, I think Rosenberg would have loved Surrealism: Desire Unbound , which remains on view at the Met through May 12.