In May of last year, Marie-Chantal bought a five-story townhouse just five blocks north, at 154 East 78th Street, for about $7.5 million, and Pia owns a house two blocks east of that, between Fifth and Madison avenues.Paul Wilmot, who represents Ms. von Furstenberg, a creative director at Diane von Furstenberg, and her husband, did not return calls for comment on the sale.

It wasn't clear whether the purchase meant that the von Furstenbergs would put their apartment in the Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street on Madison Avenue, on the market. But the two, who have a young daughter, have been looking for a townhouse for some time. About two years ago, independent broker Larry Kaiser started showing them Upper East Side houses, though this deal was struck by broker Richard Steinberg of Ashforth Warburg, who represented both the von Furstenburgs and the seller of the house.

The seller, Michael Cannon, a wealthy English businessman in his 50's, bought the place for $4.8 million last year and then had it completely redone. John Springer, the architect who performed the necessary alchemy on the dusty offices, told The Observer in an earlier interview that he gutted the house, preserving only the French neoclassical façade while outfitting it with seven bedrooms, seven fireplaces (including one in the master bathroom), a new deck in the back to match an existing deck in the front, and a garden in the rear.

After flickering onto the market earlier this year for $11 million, it was taken off again mysteriously, despite an $11.5 million offer from "a close friend of Puffy's," said one source, referring to hip-hop mogul Sean Combs. It went back on the market May 9. In the interim, according to papers filed with the Department of Buildings by Mr. Springer, an estimated $300,000 more in renovations was put into the place, to clean up the façade and add more walls.

Now that the von Furstenbergs have found a home in the city, the next step may be to buy a place in the Hamptons. They've been fixtures there: This summer, the couple rented a three-bedroom house on the ocean on Flying Point Road in Water Mill for about $100,000. A July 6 clambake at the home attracted the likes of actress Tara Reid and then-hot publicist Lizzie Grubman. Ms. Grubman drove off in her Mercedes S.U.V., headed eventually for the Conscience Point nightclub in Southampton. The rest is history.

EAST HAMPTON

POLLOCK, KRASNER BARN SOLD AT AUCTION FOR A SONG Looking for a bargain on an old Hamptons property with a hot artistic pedigree? Do what Richard Hammer, an East Hampton town attorney, did: Watch the state property-auctions schedule for Riverhead, N.Y., closely and then make your move.

On Aug. 17, Mr. Hammer bought at auction a small lot–100 square feet–with a 19th-century barn on it. That barn had been converted into a house by Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock after they bought it for $750 in 1954. The barn had served as Krasner's studio until Pollock died in 1956, after which she'd moved into his less humble studio quarters on adjoining property to pursue her painting career, in between jaunts to the city to publicize the work of her late husband. Mr. Hammer paid $455,000 for the parcel.

Not everyone is happy about the sale on Fireplace Road in the Springs section of East Hampton, a quiet, largely undeveloped niche that has been spared the glare and glamour of much of the rest of the town. When Krasner died in 1984, she bequeathed her and her husband's property–except the 100-square-foot parcel and small barn–to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Situated on Accobonac Harbor (which Jacques Cousteau called "one of the most beautiful harbors in the world"), the property became the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, a museum dedicated to the artists' legacy. Krasner had left the small parcel, which has a separate deed from the adjoining property, to her nephew, Ronald Stein, who in turn promised to will it to the Pollock-Krasner Museum, according to the museum's director, Helen Harrison. But when he died last year at the age of 69, Stein hadn't changed his will, and so the property went to auction.

The Springs district is known among celebrities, especially stage actors, as a quiet nook of the Hamptons; it's where Bea Arthur's husband, Robert Arthur, built a baseball diamond on his property and started the first Artists and Writers softball game. Said local broker Sandra Phillips Flax of East Hampton Village Realty, "It's kind of an area where people who know who they are and don't have false ideas and are not nouveau riche" end up. Terence Stamp, Mercedes Ruehl and authors Linda LaPlante and Chico Hamilton all have houses in the area and may be interested to find out what the new owner plans to do with the place. But he's not speaking.

Mr. Hammer, who did not respond to calls for comment, told Newsday on Aug. 31 that it was "too early to speak publicly about anything" concerning his new parcel–which, at close to half a million dollars, was bought for a song, according to Ms. Phillips Flax. "Even for that area, that's cheap," she said.

CARNEGIE HILL

17 East 96th Street

Two-bed, 1-1/2 bath, 1,200-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $710,000. Selling: $700,000.

Charges: $1,081; 41 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: one week.

YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN, BUT IT'LL COST YOU Both the buyers and sellers of this prewar two-bedroom apartment at 96th Street and Madison Avenue were going back to their roots. The sellers, a couple with two children, had come to New York from Boston, where they both grew up, about 10 years ago. According to their broker, Joan McLaughlin of the Corcoran Group, they loved the city, but when the wife got an offer to work in Boston, she couldn't refuse, and the family bought a place in the Boston suburbs. The buyers, a couple who were married this August, were looking for a new home to move into post-honeymoon. The bride was particularly fond of the apartment because it was in the neighborhood where she grew up. The apartment has an eat-in kitchen, formal dining room and decorative fireplace. The newlyweds are having cosmetic changes done to the place and plan to move in in September.

UPPER EAST SIDE

200 East 69th Street (Trump Palace)

Asking: $7.9 million. Selling: $7.4 million.

Four-bed, 4,000-square-foot condo.

Charges: $3,865. Taxes: $4,325.

Time on the market: six months.

A PLACE FOR A FAMILY–JUST NOT PUFF DADDY'S A mother and daughter bought the only two apartments on the 41st floor of the Trump Palace, at 69th Street and Third Avenue, about five years ago. They did a major renovation to them, including adding a pass door from one apartment to the other. (Of course, the door works both ways: It can be locked to divide the apartment again.) But just because the two apartments are now connected doesn't mean that they look like one continuous unit. It turns out that mother and daughter have different tastes. The daughter (who has grown children herself) decided to do her side of the apartment in a modern style, with a smooth epoxy-material floor in the entrance hall that reflects the sky. The mother chose a more traditional style, with a trellised garden room and tapestries on the wall. "For people who wanted a traditional home, it didn't work," said Marcy Grau of Stribling and Associates, who represented the sellers. It didn't work for Puff Daddy, who came to see the place. "He decided he wanted something bigger," said Ms. Grau. Eventually the place was bought by a European industrialist with homes all over the world, who was represented by Steve Salmon of Salmon and Company.

WEST VILLAGE

15 West 12th Street

Studio, one-bath, 450-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $265,000. Selling: $265,000.

Charges: $615; 60 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: one week.

MEET THE NEIGHBORS–YOU! For the past two years, the developers of this building on West 12th Street just off Fifth Avenue had been renting out this studio apartment to the tune of $2,000 a month. Not bad for a 450-square-foot space–but recently they figured they could sell the place for $265,000. So they put it on the market with Petra Scholder of Benjamin James Real Estate. As it turned out, the people who had the two-bedroom next door were very interested. They had been feeling the need for an extra bedroom, and were happy not to have to leave the building, which had just had its elevator cab and lobby renovated. They made a full-price offer within the first week the place was on the market.

UPPER WEST SIDE

277 West End Avenue

Three-bedroom, 2-1/2 bath, 2,400-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $2.195 million. Selling: $2.2 million.

Charges: $1,793; 60 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: three weeks.

DO-IT-YOURSELFERS CAVE IN A couple with twins were planning to move to Larchmont when they called broker Katie Rodgers last December. An acquaintance had thought that Ms. Rodgers would be willing to give them tips on how to sell their apartment themselves. She came over the next day with a printed list of do's and don't's, but immediately saw that the place would be an easy sell. "It's what they call a prewar classic seven–three bedrooms, a maid's room, everything," she said. "And it was totally gut-renovated, and it was 2,400 square feet and in impeccable condition." Two days later, the husband called Ms. Rodgers. She said he "liked my honesty, and that I didn't try to persuade him to" hire me. So he did. After multiple bids, a young couple represented by Evelyn Ricci and Marcia Chesler of Ashforth Warburg saw the place and fell in love. They got it with an offer $5,000 above the rest of the anxious buyers' bids. Regarding the successful outcome, Ms. Rodgers said: "It shows that honesty and concern about the sellers still gets you somewhere." Not to mention a nice commission.

Add to this the biographies of Pollock that often had the effect of turning both her private life and her artistic aspirations into a public soap opera, and the recent Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art that contributed further layers of mythification to her husband's life and work, in the development of which she often played an important role. Now there is a movie about them, too. Is it any wonder that Krasner's own paintings have not always met with the attention they merit?

Given this melancholy history, I wish it were possible to say the retrospective that has now come to the Brooklyn Museum of Art writes "finis" to the muddle, hearsay and question-begging that have long surrounded Krasner's work. But this, alas, is not the case. For this exhibition, organized by Robert Hobbs for a group called Independent Curators International, is so heavily burdened by an attempt to reinvent Lee Krasner as one of the intellectual heavyweights of her time that it, too, only succeeds in making yet another mess of her artistic oeuvre .

Suffice to say that it is Mr. Hobbs' solemn but mistaken opinion that Lee Krasner was, of all things, a "postmodernist," long before the term itself even existed. To support this preposterous claim, Mr. Hobbs is obliged to engage in some tortuous psychobabble about Krasner's alleged "investigation of selfhood through decades of modernism, existentialism, analyses of language and the problems of communication." All sorts of subjects–the psychoanalytic theories of Harry Stack Sullivan, the Holocaust, the post-World War II discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, even the Trotskyism of the New York intellectuals–are pressed into service to support this notion of Krasner as some sort of postmodernist avant la lettre . The only thing missing in this inventory of interests is some close attention to Krasner's artistic thought.

The paintings on the walls of the Brooklyn Museum of Art tell a different story, of course: the story of a gifted, dedicated follower of modernist painting who sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed in her fierce but troubled ambition to create the kind of aesthetically demanding abstract painting that would meet the standards set by the modernist masters. If divorced from this commitment to a modernist aesthetic, which dominated Krasner's work from her years of study with Hans Hofmann to the end of her career, her art cannot be understood.

On what basis, then, does Mr. Hobbs assign Krasner to the ranks of the postmodernists? Well, because over the course of her career as a painter she was, in his words, "unable to settle for long into the comforts of a distinctly individual style." But this was true of a great many modernist painters. It was even true of Pollock for most of his career. It was only for a very few years, after all, that he concentrated on the so-called "drip" abstractions that won him his greatest fame. Both before and after that brief period, he too was "unable to settle for long into the comforts of a distinctly individual style." Does this make Pollock a postmodernist as well?

None of this nonsense would matter much if it were confined to the show's catalogue, which, except for its chronology of Krasner's life and work, is a litany of postmodernist academic twaddle. (Even the color plates badly misrepresent Krasner's color in some of her most ambitious pictures. Is this to be taken as a postmodern commentary?) Unfortunately, the wall texts which festoon the installation of this retrospective in Brooklyn recycle a good deal of this twaddle wherever one turns. This is one of those exhibitions in which the curator insists upon telling us what to think about what we see–or, even worse, what the pictures might mean or refer to, or be construed to refer to, at every shift in the artist's life.

This is a terrible way to exhibit abstract paintings, for its implicit message is that the paintings are incapable of speaking for themselves. It takes an immensely powerful talent to transcend this reductive practice, which brings every aesthetic decision down to the level of gossip and anecdote, and Krasner was only intermittently a painter in command of that level of talent. The first big moment in the show comes when you enter the huge gallery containing the artist's two most ambitious Abstract Expressionist pictures, The Seasons (1957) and Celebration (1960), paintings that put to rest any doubts we may have about the scale of Krasner's artistic aspirations. Yet even these paintings, fine as they are, turn out to exhaust the very impulse that is essential to their vitality. Some of the smaller paintings from the same period– Birth (1956), Thaw (1957) and Cornucopia (1958)–have something of the same headlong vitality, but then it begins to recede. The hot color, which was one of Krasner's strengths when she was equal to its demands, abruptly disappears. It is last seen at full throttle in the huge Gaea (1966), after which the paintings slump into Abstract Expressionist boilerplate.

Still, there is a final moment when Krasner moves into a more subdued mode of abstraction, which Mr. Hobbs mistakenly labels "Minimalist Abstract Expressionism." (He apparently means "Hard-Edge Abstraction," but "Hard-Edge Abstraction" and "Minimalism" are by no means identical.) This, too, is primarily a vehicle for color, and is obviously inspired by Matisse's late cut-out pictures. After that, she took to making collage compositions out of her earlier Cubist drawings. The result is something of a downer after the high-energy Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950's and 60's.

It should not be necessary to observe that Lee Krasner was not a major talent, but recent attempts to elevate her achievement to major status require that it be said. She was, however, one of the most gifted minor painters of the Abstract Expressionist generation, and her work, uneven as it may be in quality and conception, deserves a more intelligent presentation than it has been given in this ill-conceived retrospective. She was famous among her friends for despising art-world cant; she was positively furious, for example, about Harold Rosenberg's blather about "action painting," which she understood was a cynical anti-aesthetic slander of Abstract Expressionism. I think she would have been equally furious to see herself packaged as a postmodernist. But this is the situation that now prevails among our art curators and art historians, and it is a pity that she isn't around to tell them off.

Still, the best of her work survives such nonsense, and for souls willing to brave the barricades of postmodernist twaddle, this retrospective remains on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art through Jan. 7.

At the Whitney, directors come and go. Curators appear and disappear with the regularity of cast changes in some long-running soap opera. And successive boards of trustees merrily perform their charade of oversight and responsibility while remaining supinely oblivious to the travesties that are committed in the name of their authority. It is almost enough to make one believe in a curse of some sort.

Whether we attribute this wretched track record to some preordained malediction or to what is more likely to be the cause of the Whitney's troubled history-a conspicuous lack of intellectual leadership-the result has been an enduring and disabling paucity of public confidence in the museum's judgments. In matters large and small, the Whitney seems fated to be governed by ambitions that continually exceed both its professional competence and its intellectual mastery. Even worse is the museum's muddled conception of its basic mission, which in recent decades has suffered almost as many changes and reversals as the curatorial staff.

It should come as no surprise, then, that with the opening of Part 1 of the most ambitious project ever undertaken by the museum-the multimedia extravaganza called The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000 -we are still left pondering the question that was posed (and left unanswered) in a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine : "What does [the Whitney] want to be when it grows up?" An even better version of the question might be: "Does the Whitney still want to be an art museum?"

For that is the issue that is left most in doubt by the very conception of The American Century , which-in this first installment, anyway-subordinates 50 years of American art to a concatenation of pop sociology, sound-bite shibboleths and politically determined priorities that effectively marginalizes the kind of esthetic distinctions that were of paramount concern to the most accomplished artists in the period under review.

One of the principal effects of this conception is to turn even the finest works of art in this period into mere illustrations of some ill-formulated social or political cliché. The governing conception of The American Century is, in other words, that of a social documentary. In this documentary narrative of American art, what we used to call the fine arts-painting, sculpture, drawing and architecture-are made to share attention with bathroom fixtures, popular songs, magazine covers, clips of old movies, book jackets, industrial design and journalistic coverage of political events, not to mention the many musical soundtracks that are piped into some of the galleries or available by banks of telephones in others. I may have missed it, but the only thing that seems to have been omitted from Part 1 of The American Century is the kitchen sink. Perhaps it is being saved for Part 2.

Still another baleful effect of this documentary conception is that it all but eliminates distinctions of artistic quality in the selection of objects to be included. There are, for example, some marvelous pictures in this marvelous show, but there is an even greater number of second-, third- and fourth-level pictures that have been included either on the basis of the subjects they illustrate or because of a need to satisfy politically correct sexual and racial quotas. As a consequence, the large fine-arts component of The American Century is esthetically incoherent where it is not simply an outright distortion of history.

It was certainly not an esthetic standard that inspired the organizers of The American Century to aggrandize Georgia O'

Keeffe in this exhibition while consigning Alfred Maurer, a far greater painter, to the periphery. By the same token, Lee Krasner has been elevated to the top rank of the Abstract Expressionist painters in the 1940's, a position she never enjoyed in real life. The fact is, Krasner didn't produce her most important work until after the death of her husband, Jackson Pollock, in 1956. But the politics of feminist art history now demands that such disobliging realities be amended to meet the politically correct standards of the 1990's. There is quite a lot of this politically determined posthumous revisionism on display in The American Century -there is scarcely a room in the exhibition where it does not make an ideological hash of the historical record-but this, too, is to be expected of a project that is only marginally concerned to concentrate on high artistic achievement.

Where esthetic standards are thrown to the winds, there is always an abundance of ideology to fill the resulting void. In the 1930's, it was precisely a scenario of this sort that elevated the Regionalist and Social Realist schools at the expense of American modernism. The only difference now is that an exhibition like The American Century is equally indifferent to the esthetic standards of all the movements and groups that were then contending for patronage and attention. So everything gets thrown into the same potted narrative without regard for artistic merit. At least in the 1930's the conflicts were about real artistic issues.

Even so it must be said that The American Century exhibition is much to be preferred to the awful hardcover book that accompanies it in lieu of a catalogue. In the exhibition, a persevering visitor who is able to steel himself against the multimedia claptrap and agitprop sloganeering will find a good many works of art worth looking at. In the book version, however, everything is reduced to illustration and a text that reads at times like a throwback to the Popular Front mentality of the 1930's, not to mention a layout that makes the "Best Bets" section of New York magazine look demure by comparison.

The book version of The American Century , which runs to some 400 pages, also has pretensions to being some sort of cultural or intellectual history of the period it covers, and the result is an even greater travesty than the wall texts in the exhibition. In this version of American cultural history in the first 50 years of the century, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land gets a mention only in the context of the Harlem Renaissance-I kid you not-and William Faulkner isn't deemed to be sufficiently important to merit the mention of a single book title. Even so, he fares better than Willa Cather, who never gets mentioned at all. Neither does H.L. Mencken, whom Walter Lippmann famously described as the single greatest intellectual influence on post-World War I America. This isn't even good popular history.

Nor is the book's account of the American art scene in the first half of the century any better. The founding of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 is likewise treated as somewhat marginal-no doubt because MoMA's influence on the subsequent course of American art in this century has proved to be so much greater than that of the Whitney Museum. For similar reasons, I suppose, the name of the Museum of Non-Objective Art, which was founded in New York in the 1930's, is also not specifically cited, though a few of the painters associated with it are included in the exhibition. This reluctance on the part of the Whitney to acknowledge the contributions of the other New York museums that were established within a few years of itself is not only bad history. It is another measure of the politically parochial views that govern the entire conception of The American Century .

Then, of course, there is the title itself, which has been appropriated from the late Henry Luce, the founder of Time , Life and Fortune . Whatever one may think of Luce's idea, his notion of an American Century is totally inappropriate to an exhibition of American art before 1950, a period of European domination in art. This fundamental distinction would have been made much clearer in the American Century exhibition if more detailed attention had been lavished on the role played by the expatriate experience in the creation of the best American art in the early decades of this century.

But on the subject of making a hash of the historical record, the prize must go to whomever was responsible for deciding to put Jasper Johns' Three Flags on the cover of The American Century , the book, for that painting doesn't even belong to the period the book pretends to account for. (It was painted in 1958.) Yet because the painting belongs to the Whitney Museum and it cost one of its patrons what was considered an enormous sum of money at the time-and it is, of course, a very famous painting-its image has been pressed into service to advance book sales. Who was it who said that history is bunk?

Finally, some mention must be made of the third version of The American Century , which is not only a multimedia exhibition and a hardcover book but also an Internet entertainment-or should one call it an infomercial? Yes, you can see the whole extravaganza on the Internet, plus some additional documentary embellishments. Need one add that the corporate sponsor of The American Century is Intel?

It only remains to be said that I am very saddened by the fact that the principal curator and author of this first installment of The American Century is Barbara Haskell, who in the past has organized some of the best exhibitions to be seen at the Whitney. I hope the time will come again when she will be free to organize exhibitions on the order of the Marsden Hartley and Milton Avery retrospectives, which gave the New York art public so much pleasure. It pains me to see her associated with a travesty like The American Century -but that's what we mean, of course, when we speak of the Whitney's lack of intellectual leadership at the top. It isn't only public taste that is corrupted by such fiascoes. The staff pays a price, too.

Part 1 of The American Century remains on view through Aug. 22.