Five years ago this month, one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history swept through Louisiana and Mississippi. An exhibition opening Aug. 28 (a day before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina) at the New Orleans Museum of Art puts a score of photos documenting the tragedy up on the walls. They were all snapped with a digital pocket camera by noted photographer Richard Misrach in the days and weeks following the hurricane. The show, dubbed "exhibitionUNTITLED [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast 2005]," melds a focus on graffiti and street art with fine-art photography. While there are no people in the pictures, the exhibition nonetheless calls up raw emotion and human sorrow with its images of homemade magic-marker signs and spray-painted messages scrawled on dilapidated buildings, fences, cars and trucks.

These messages range from the gut wrenching-"Destroy this memory"-to the cautionary: "Don't Try-I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman and two shotguns." The exhibition is meant to give Katrina's victims, said Mr. Misrach, "an unmediated voice, heard in a way that I haven't seen before." The American photographer is best known for producing major series, such as the vividly colored landscape suite "Desert Cantos" and a series on the Mississippi industrial area dubbed "Cancer Alley." His photos are in the collection of more than 50 U.S. museums.

"It is always important when a celebrated contemporary artist ... drops [his] work and rushes to the aid of such a calamity," said NOMA curator of photography Diego Cortez.

Far from random, the order of the exhibition is no accident-Mr. Misrach deliberately arranged the project in a narrative that follows "the profound range of emotions and responses" felt by victims, he wrote in an email exchange with The Observer. These emotions range from fear, to defiance ("Hey Katrina! That's all you got? You big sissy!!! We will be back!!!"), to anger, to mourning, to hope, to raw pleas for relief. After the three months Mr. Misrach spent in New Orleans photographing these messages, he came away with a single conclusion. "New Orleans is remarkably vital and resilient," the photographer said.

Mr. Misrach's Katrina photographs were printed in editions of five and complete sets were given to NOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Houston museum is also showing the photographs in an exhibition that runs through Oct. 31.

The exhibitions are meant to serve as a stark reminder, and a necessary one, that the aftermath of Katrina is still very much a part of everyday life in New Orleans. Mr. Misrach said he's been amazed that "the rest of the world had already forgotten."

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What do we call exhibitions that contain only a handful of objects, but whose significance is historically and artistically huge? Perhaps we need a more inclusive definition of “blockbuster”—one that gauges intensity of pleasure rather than mere square footage. If so, Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting, on display at the Frick Collection, is some kind of blockbuster.

Exhibitions where impact exceeds scale are an indispensable tradition at the Frick. There isn’t space there to mount humongous shows, so the museum’s curators have focused their efforts on the particulars of this or that achievement: Memling’s portraits, Goya’s late work, Parmigianino’s drawings and a solitary canvas by Raphael. The Cimabue show, though it contains a smattering of related objects, has as its foundation two tiny pictures: The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels and The Flagellation of Christ (both ca. 1280).

Actually, the exhibition’s raison d’être is the latter painting. Acquired by the Frick in 1950, The Flagellation of Christ had been attributed to Cenni di Pepo (ca.1240-1302), better known as Cimabue, though definitive authorship couldn’t be pinned down. Some scholars thought that Cimabue’s contemporary, the Sienese painter Duccio di Buoninsegna, might have painted it.

Close study has confirmed that The Flagellation of Christ is, in fact, Cimabue’s handiwork. Stylistic constants between the museum’s mainstay and The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels—a painting recently discovered in private hands and now part of the collection of London’s National Gallery—are in keeping with an established Cimabue altarpiece at the Louvre. The Frick picture is the real thing.

Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting is, then, an opportunity for the Frick to show off its “latest” masterpiece. Given the number of extant works by Cimabue—only four other small panels by the artist are known—the recent attribution is vital to the museum and, for that matter, the heritage of Western civilization.

Further scholarship has revealed that the two panels on view were once part of a larger work, though the exact format—diptych, triptych or altarpiece—is a matter of speculation. Whatever form they originally took, one thing is certain: Its constituent parts were cut apart and put up for sale—not an uncommon fate for historical objects made of multiple sections.

Seeing The Flagellation of Christ alongside The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels is a rare and, perhaps, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Just make sure you don’t pass by the paintings: They’re next to the museum store in a gallery that’s about the size of a broom closet. Whatever intimacy the space affords is lost in the awkward shuffling of feet, rubbing of shoulders and continuous apologies, but that’s a small price to pay for the chance to commune with a master.

Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari’s endearingly hyperbolic art-historical tract, kicks things off with Cimabue. “Destined to take the first steps in restoring the art of painting to its earlier stature”—Vasari was no fan of Byzantine culture—the artist formerly known as Cenni di Pepo grew up “covering his paper and books with pictures showing people, horses, houses, and the various other things he dreamed up.”

Upon reaching maturity, Cimabue would destroy his work when it didn’t meet his stringent standards. Perfectionism may explain his reputation for obstinacy: The name Cimabue is translated as “ox head.” His place in history was cemented by a mention in The Divine Comedy, though Dante does remark that he was eventually eclipsed by his disciple Giotto.

In Flagellation, Christ stands in the center, his arms cuffed around a post, towering above his two tormentors. His gaze meets us with an all-but-impenetrable expression—forlorn perhaps, incisive surely, and resigned. Christ’s head is the most tightly focused part of the composition; its structure is full, the features specific. His tormentors are ciphers and their cruelty oddly pro forma. The two men may be flogging Christ, but their gestures are without force. The droop of Christ’s hands and, in particular, the sinuous arch of his torso contain infinitely more personality, humanity and grace. Of course, that’s the point.

The Virgin and Child, while no less felt in devotional terms, is a very different painting. The symmetry is more stable; the composition is stolid and immovable. The figures are archetypal and, as such, generic. The worn-and-torn surface of the painting hints at a once-resplendent chromatic range.

The Flagellation is in better condition, more fully preserving Cimabue’s touch, palette and authority. Certainly, the London picture lacks the cool and glowing tonalities of The Flagellation. History is enriched by both paintings, but let’s be honest: The Frick’s is the keeper.

The other objects on view help to establish some context. A diptych by Pacino di Bonaguida is included as a means of conjecturing about the original format and arrangement of the two Cimabues. Di Bonaguida’s tempera-on-panel paintings are good enough to call for a more thorough showing of his oeuvre. Any painter able to convey the frailty of flesh with as much nobility, sensuality and painful truth as he does in his Crucifixion deserves greater scrutiny.

All the same, Cimabue’s accomplishment—even on the slender evidence here—renders di Bonaguida a bit player. The definitive attribution of The Flagellation of Christ is cause for celebration. Would that such discoveries were a regular occurrence. As it is, New Yorkers should be grateful and proud it happened here.

Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting is at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, until Dec. 31.

Upon opening his gallery in 1895 at the age of 29, Vollard took a huge risk. From our vantage point, the lofty status of Bonnard, Maillol, Matisse and Vuillard is something we take for granted. Vollard didn’t have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight. His embrace of the avant-garde, at a time when its presence was real and its impact controversial, evinced a sensibility that stands in marked contrast to our own generation of hotshot dealers. Vollard, after all, had integrity, conviction and an eye.

Along with works by Renoir, Picasso, Bonnard and Derain, Cézanne to Picasso will feature Gauguin’s portentous masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-1898), as well as a triptych by Van Gogh that’s being re-assembled for the first time since Vollard displayed it in a 1896-97 retrospective. That alone guarantees congested galleries, neck-craning and the pervasive chatter of audio guides. On the whole, more than a few moments of aesthetic bliss are undoubtedly in the offing.

From the Met we expect blockbusters, but what of the Frick Collection, its less-encyclopedic comrade-in-quality down the street? In recent years, the Frick has surprised many people—not least its own curatorial staff—with the overflow of crowds lining up to take in a string of intimate, sometimes eccentric and, in the case of the recent Memling show, earth-shaking exhibitions.

How Cimabue and Early Devotional Painting, which opens on Oct. 3, will fare at the box office remains to be seen, but it’s sure to herald artistic pleasures of a high order. Certainly the museum is pleased to highlight Flagellation of Christ (c. 1280), a tempera on panel from its own collection. The painting has only recently been confirmed as the handiwork of Cenni di Pepo, the Florentine painter better known as Cimabue (c. 1240-1302). That makes the Frick’s picture the only known Cimabue in an American collection. Given that few of his paintings have survived at all, a celebration of some sort is clearly in order.

Though Cimabue worked in a Byzantine manner, he is the progenitor of a greater turn to realism and, as such, a point of origin for the Renaissance. He earned the kudos of Giorgio Vasari, the consummate P.R. man of Renaissance Italy, and the poet Dante Alighieri, who saw fit to make Cimabue a bit player in The Divine Comedy.

The mention in Dante’s epic poem did a lot to insure Cimabue’s historical standing, as did his renowned obstinacy—not for nothing was Cimabue nicknamed “Ox-Head.” What is less sure is the role he may have played in the mentoring of a young painter by the name of Giotto. Whatever: The Frick will pair its new find with The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels (c. 1280), on loan from the National Gallery in London, giving New Yorkers an exemplary opportunity to commune with a seminal and stubborn master.

Contemporary abstract painting gets a rare leg up from a couple of our museums this fall. MoMA is fêting the New York–based artist Brice Marden with a retrospective of paintings and drawings, opening on Oct. 29. Beginning with the monochrome panels with which he made his name in the 1960’s, the exhibit will culminate in the open-ended, linear networks that have occupied Mr. Marden for the past 20 or so years. Whether you consider him the Great White Hope of painting or a studious purveyor of elegantly contrived pictorial tics, it will be interesting to see how this Major Rep has fared over the long haul.

At the Whitney Museum of American Art, the work of the youngish Los Angeles painter Mark Grotjahn—he was born in 1968—gets an airing out. (The exhibition opens on Sept. 15.) Mr. Grotjahn’s art has only sporadically been displayed here in the city and remains something of a mystery. As seen on a piecemeal basis in group exhibitions, his zooming, perspectival pictures have fairly stolen the show from the competition. For my money, Mr. Grotjahn’s Untitled (large colored butterfly white background 9 wings) (2004) is one of the least spurious pieces of contemporary art that MoMA has acquired in recent memory. That the ever-ravenous Saatchi Collection has blessed the artist shouldn’t scare us away from what just might be heartening evidence of abstraction’s continuing vitality.

Upon opening his gallery in 1895 at the age of 29, Vollard took a huge risk. From our vantage point, the lofty status of Bonnard, Maillol, Matisse and Vuillard is something we take for granted. Vollard didn’t have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight. His embrace of the avant-garde, at a time when its presence was real and its impact controversial, evinced a sensibility that stands in marked contrast to our own generation of hotshot dealers. Vollard, after all, had integrity, conviction and an eye.

Along with works by Renoir, Picasso, Bonnard and Derain, Cézanne to Picasso will feature Gauguin’s portentous masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-1898), as well as a triptych by Van Gogh that’s being re-assembled for the first time since Vollard displayed it in a 1896-97 retrospective. That alone guarantees congested galleries, neck-craning and the pervasive chatter of audio guides. On the whole, more than a few moments of aesthetic bliss are undoubtedly in the offing.

From the Met we expect blockbusters, but what of the Frick Collection, its less-encyclopedic comrade-in-quality down the street? In recent years, the Frick has surprised many people—not least its own curatorial staff—with the overflow of crowds lining up to take in a string of intimate, sometimes eccentric and, in the case of the recent Memling show, earth-shaking exhibitions.

How Cimabue and Early Devotional Painting, which opens on Oct. 3, will fare at the box office remains to be seen, but it’s sure to herald artistic pleasures of a high order. Certainly the museum is pleased to highlight Flagellation of Christ (c. 1280), a tempera on panel from its own collection. The painting has only recently been confirmed as the handiwork of Cenni di Pepo, the Florentine painter better known as Cimabue (c. 1240-1302). That makes the Frick’s picture the only known Cimabue in an American collection. Given that few of his paintings have survived at all, a celebration of some sort is clearly in order.

Though Cimabue worked in a Byzantine manner, he is the progenitor of a greater turn to realism and, as such, a point of origin for the Renaissance. He earned the kudos of Giorgio Vasari, the consummate P.R. man of Renaissance Italy, and the poet Dante Alighieri, who saw fit to make Cimabue a bit player in The Divine Comedy.

The mention in Dante’s epic poem did a lot to insure Cimabue’s historical standing, as did his renowned obstinacy—not for nothing was Cimabue nicknamed “Ox-Head.” What is less sure is the role he may have played in the mentoring of a young painter by the name of Giotto. Whatever: The Frick will pair its new find with The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels (c. 1280), on loan from the National Gallery in London, giving New Yorkers an exemplary opportunity to commune with a seminal and stubborn master.

Contemporary abstract painting gets a rare leg up from a couple of our museums this fall. MoMA is fêting the New York–based artist Brice Marden with a retrospective of paintings and drawings, opening on Oct. 29. Beginning with the monochrome panels with which he made his name in the 1960’s, the exhibit will culminate in the open-ended, linear networks that have occupied Mr. Marden for the past 20 or so years. Whether you consider him the Great White Hope of painting or a studious purveyor of elegantly contrived pictorial tics, it will be interesting to see how this Major Rep has fared over the long haul.

At the Whitney Museum of American Art, the work of the youngish Los Angeles painter Mark Grotjahn—he was born in 1968—gets an airing out. (The exhibition opens on Sept. 15.) Mr. Grotjahn’s art has only sporadically been displayed here in the city and remains something of a mystery. As seen on a piecemeal basis in group exhibitions, his zooming, perspectival pictures have fairly stolen the show from the competition. For my money, Mr. Grotjahn’s Untitled ( large colored butterfly white background 9 wings) (2004) is one of the least spurious pieces of contemporary art that MoMA has acquired in recent memory. That the ever-ravenous Saatchi Collection has blessed the artist shouldn’t scare us away from what just might be heartening evidence of abstraction’s continuing vitality.

Sounds good to me. If only the Met had installed benches in the gallery they’ve devoted to Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece. Then visitors could sit comfortably and look all day, taking in its myriad virtues at an appropriately contemplative pace.

While visiting this must-see exhibition, a sense of disappointment about the state of contemporary art passed through my mind. There are reasons to feel good about 21st-century art. But our most accomplished artists will be moved and daunted by Raphael’s tour de force—particularly the main panel’s Madonna and Child surrounded by a bevy of saints. It’s a masterpiece of supernal proportions.

The show accomplishes a significant historical feat: It reconstitutes Raphael’s altarpiece for the first time in over three centuries. Staples of the Met’s permanent collection, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints and its accompanying lunette, God the Father Blessing, with Angels, have been reunited with five small paintings from the altarpiece’s predella, works that are otherwise spread out among the collections of London’s National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and, again, the Met.

Some have grumbled that the pictures haven’t been reconstructed exactly as they were originally seen at Sant’Antonio di Padova in Perugia. Sticklers for historical precedent have a point, I suppose, yet the truth of the matter is that devotees of painting will be happy to sacrifice architectural veracity and a bit of devotional integrity for the chance to relish such mastery up close and personal.

Raphael’s painting realizes incredible complexity through astonishingly succinct means. The divine imagery—a prime concern of the Franciscan nuns who commissioned the work, but whose tastes ran (or so we are told) to “the conventional and retardataire”—is inextricable from the crystalline intensity Raphael brought to his craft. The interdependence of form and content is a shopworn conceit—until a painter such as Raphael reminds us how vital it is.

Criticism surrenders, inevitably and with gratitude, to pleasure. There isn’t a fallow moment in Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints. The slow, sensual curve of yellow drapery worn by Saint Peter; the machine-like rhyme that occurs between the quills held by Saint Catherine of Alexandria and the unidentified female figure at the right; the strange, fleshy tone of the surface of the entire tableau; a palette of almost unbearable purity and depth—enumerating the characteristics of the painting can make it seem like a mere inventory of pictorial features. But however startlingly individual the parts may be, Raphael always leads us back to the overriding logic of the sacra conversazione.

To gauge Raphael’s genius, you just need to turn around: At the opposite end of the gallery housing the altarpiece is a pair of paintings by Fra Bartolommeo, a painter of no mean gifts and a source of inspiration for the young Raphael. There’s much to commend in The Holy Family (c. 1498) and Madonna and Child, with the Young Saint John the Baptist (c. 1497), especially the quietude that envelops both scenarios. But how leaden and ill-formed they look when seen within a stone’s throw of Raphael! It’s a great, if inadvertent, lesson in connoisseurship.

Maximizing sumptuousness while hewing to a steely control, Raphael’s extraordinary gift for color is patent throughout all of The Colonna Altarpiece. The five paintings from the predella are, on the whole, less sturdy compositionally and lighter in cadence, yet the palette is just as finely tuned. Of particular note is the lively parade of yellows punctuating the centerpiece, The Procession to Calvary (1504-5).

Raphael brought irresistible and sometimes outrageous shifts to what appear to be contained areas of color. An almost neon yellow-green is used as a highlight for, of all things, a cool salmon red; elsewhere, a silvery cream radiates within a velvety passage of gray. Here’s another reason to be grateful for the chance to nose up to the Met’s bits-and-pieces installation: Were it installed on high, our delight in the smoky blue field surrounding God the Father, a pair of angels and the cherubim featured in the lunette would be much less immediate and visceral.

Additional paintings, drawings and prints by such artists as Perugino, Pintoricchio and Leonardo da Vinci (as well as Raphael himself) explore the sources that informed The Colonna Altarpiece. An adjacent gallery details its elaborate provenance, including the Colonna nobility for which it is named, culminating in J. Pierpont Morgan’s purchase of the main section in 1901 for the princely sum of two million francs.

So what was that about welcoming the new? The care and depth that Raphael brought to Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints provokes tough questions about the work being created today. It’s a fool’s labor to pine for “good old days” long gone; yet one can’t help but compare the richness of this single painting from the cinquecento to the dizzying varieties of contemporary art. It’s hard not to find examples of the latter narrow, lacking and impermanent. The joy elicited by The Colonna Altarpiece, on the other hand, will not lose its urgency in the coming years—its mysteries are too profound and its beauty too certain.

Has our culture kowtowed to an age of diminished expectations? How much do we ask of art? How much does it ask of us? A painter on the scale of Raphael prompts a sense of measure. History makes us humble. It can inspire as well: The “Prince of Painters” offers an invigorating challenge to our own prospects. It’s up to today’s artists to follow through.

Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, until Sept. 4.

These weren’t just any comic books, but my prize collection of underground comics by Robert Crumb, the creator of Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat, whom the critic Robert Hughes described as “the Breugel of the last half of the 20th Century.” And James wasn’t asking for them because he wanted to read them, but because he wanted to use them as part of an exhibition that Vassar was mounting.

Perhaps “exhibition” is too strong a word. As James explained it, the Friends of Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center sponsors an art-film series that would be showing Crumb, the 1994 Terry Zwigoff documentary about the artist. The comic books were sort of visual aids, supporting material, atmospherics to supplement the film.

To describe Mr. Crumb’s work as politically incorrect would be grotesquely to understate his contribution to popular culture. He’s virtually the Moses of political incorrectness. Zap #2, for example, features Angelfood McSpade, a sex bomb lurking in darkest Africa, whose scent is so intoxicating that she’s off-limits to all but pencil-necked researchers—“and those creeps can’t hardly ever get one up.” And Zap #4 visits the all-American, aptly named Joe Blow family, who consider incest a family activity. “That’s it. Pretend it’s candy,” Joe instructs his daughter.

Knowing the no-nonsense reputation of Vassar girls (or should I say women?), I was concerned that they might take offense, perhaps even stage violent protests and—worst of all—damage my comic books. But James assured me Vassar students aren’t like that. “The students are so blasé about anything scandalous,” he said. “You can’t shock anybody here—the racier, the better.” If we were going to have any problems, he added, it might come from the Poughkeepsie natives who like to visit the museum on weekends.

I wasn’t totally sold, but the allure of being a donor, a benefactor, was hard to resist. A close relative recently donated a Dutch painting to the National Gallery in Washington, and he didn’t hesitate to rub it in. Utterly apart from the prestige associated with having a plaque with your name on it in perpetuity, he touted the tax advantages. Apparently, he made so much money last year that he needed the charitable deduction.

My taxable income last year—or any year, for that matter—isn’t sufficient to warrant frittering away a masterpiece. In fact, lending a few comic books to Vassar for a couple of weeks is about all the largesse my Form 1040 can bear. Nonetheless, James assured me that were I to loan my comics to the museum, he could probably arrange a plaque with my name on it, too. So I agreed.

He dropped by a few days later—his attitude no less solemn and seigniorial than I suspect Philippe de Montebello’s was when he was negotiating the repatriation of that looted ancient Greek plate or urn or whatever it was with the Italians—to examine the collection and pick several items that would best summarize Mr. Crumb’s oeuvre.

Unfortunately, those that would aren’t suitable for women and children.

For example, the cover of Your Hytone Comics features a fellow whistling a happy tune as he takes a whiz. And Snatch #3, I believe it is, stars a rumpled, middle-aged commuter impishly nudging his hard-on into the lady in front of him as they line up to board a bus. James eventually left with several comics, none of them quite so graphic, as well as a Crumb-designed Devil Girl chocolate bar and matching tin of “Hot Kisses” cinnamon candy.

I first discovered Crumb back in 1971. Someone had abandoned one of his comic books in the senior room at the Browning School, and I was immediately hooked by its unrepentantly adolescent sensibility and high pornographic content. I shouldn’t boast, but I suspect that my brother James (an art and architecture critic) and I may be the only siblings cited in Mr. Crumb’s work.

He quotes a passage from my brother’s 1993 book Culture or Trash, lamenting the commodification of art, in his own 1996 Art and Beauty Magazine, on a page that features the thoughts of Da Vinci, André Gide and Einstein.

My citation is somewhat less impressive. It comes, unattributed, on page 246 of a Crumb sketchbook, taken from an article of mine that appeared in Penthouse magazine. The piece was about men who worship strong women—a Crumb fetish—and like to play-wrestle and stroke their muscles.

“Tami Frazier,” Mr. Crumb writes, paraphrasing my prose, “a female body builder from San Diego, says she and her athletic girlfriends are not attracted to men with scrawny chests and a self-mocking sense of humor. ‘They can never have somebody like us,’ she explains.”

To which Mr. Crumb adds, “oboy.”

James, sensing my apprehension, called to inform me that my material arrived in Poughkeepsie safely and had been handsomely installed. No Vassar coeds had yet flung their bodies at the display cases in feminist mortification. However, he reported that his decision to feature the “Grand Opening of the Great Intercontinental Fuck-In and Orgy-Riot” spread from Snatch #1 had “raised eyebrows” and promoted “quizzical looks” in the faculty meeting that had just adjourned.

Furthermore, since school groups—not to mention families with children—apparently traipse through the museum at will, the staff had decided to place a “Viewer Discretion Advised” warning label on the works.

James said that a professor of Japanese art had approached him for information about this Ralph Gardner Jr. character—as in “On Loan from the Collection of …. ”

“Is he a Vassar graduate?” the professor asked. “How do we know him?”

While James assured me that interest was high, and that the Vassar student body had shown impressive restraint—like all top-tier colleges, their undergrads are far more serious and focused than they were in my day—he added that we weren’t out of the woods yet. Weekends were usually when the locals showed up, and how they’d react to Mr. Crumb’s brand of social criticism was anyone’s guess.

As it turned out, the exhibition went off without bloodshed, and James returned the works to me the following week, together with the wall placards describing the material, in impressive museum-quality font. He also tossed in the “Please be advised that some of the contents in this case are of a mature nature” sign.

I placed it in front of the collection on our bookshelf and proudly showed it to my teenage daughter when she got home from school that afternoon. After all, some day this would all belong to her. Perhaps it’s not the same thing as having your name hallowed in the halls of the National Gallery; nonetheless, I was feeling rather good about myself, my collection and my eye—until she spoiled it all.

“Isn’t that pathetic?” she said. “This is your collection … other people collect art.”

It's the great merit of the exhibition called The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting , on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, that it gives us such a clear and sympathetic account of the period's widely divergent currents and countercurrents. While there's an abundance of frippery and ostentation that we associate with certain aspects of 18th-century French taste, pangs of social conscience are on display, too. And so is that other universal pastime: the game of love.

Paintings devoted to the latter subject constitute a virtual genre of their own within the very loosely defined boundaries of what is called genre painting. Which leads one to ask: What is genre painting anyway? This is a question that may be more easily answered by listing what it isn't. It isn't pure landscape, though landscape often provides the setting, and it isn't any painting devoted to historical, mythological, religious or allegorical subjects. Some portraits seem to qualify but not others; what the criteria are remains to be explained.

According to Colin B. Bailey, writing in the catalog of the current exhibition, genre painting was defined in France in 1752 as "paintings of gallant or country scenes, fairs, smoke dens, and other cheerful subjects"; later, in England in 1873, it was defined as "a style of painting which depicts scenes and subjects of common life." A classification that brings together paintings as radically different in style and spirit as Watteau's series of fêtes galantes and Greuze's melancholy scenes of family grief-the one pure poetic fantasy, the other didactic in the manner of social realism-is less a classification than a conundrum without a key.

The paintings in this exhibition embrace such immense differences in social classes that the very notion of "common life" or "cheerful subjects" is all but meaningless. Between the gaggle of women depicted in Etienne Jeaurat's Prostitutes Being Led Off to La Salpêtrière (1757) and the female figures in Pierre Subleyras' The Amorous Courtesan (circa 1735)-a painting based on a tale of La Fontaine-there's neither a "common life" nor a common style. The former is rendered in a public style more appropriate to the depiction of celebratory procession, whereas The Amorous Courtesan is a triumph of painterly virtuosity.

Never mind. We don't go to art exhibitions to be instructed in the vagaries of academic classification. We go to them for aesthetic pleasure, and by that measure The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard is an unalloyed delight. If it included only the paintings by the artists who are advertised in the title, the show would be a capital event-but it also includes marvelous paintings by Nicolas Lancret, Jean-Baptiste Pater, Jean-François de Troy, François Boucher, Hubert Robert and, of course, Greuze.

For me, the most delightful discovery in the exhibition is the work of Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845), especially two paintings: Young Woman Ironing (circa 1800-1803) and The Game of Billiards (1807). With Boilly, we leave the world of 18th-century divertissements for the realm of 19th-century realism-and we do so with a certain relief. In some respects, The Game of Billiards is as sexy as anything else in the exhibition, but in Boilly it's sex devoid of artifice and fancy.

The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting remains on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington through Jan. 11, 2004, then travels to the Staatliche Museum zu Berlin, Gemaldgalerie, in Germany (Feb. 8 to May 9, 2004).

What's new to me in this exhibition is some of the early work from the 1940's, executed in the vernacular expressionistic style that was then a common pictorial idiom for painters attempting to align themselves with the politics of social protest. As an African-American, born in North Carolina and raised in Harlem in the Jim Crow era, it was all but inevitable that Bearden would ally himself with that imperative. As early as 1934, in an essay called "The Negro Artist and Modern Art," Bearden affirmed that alliance in declaring that "An intense, eager devotion to present-day life, to study it, to help relieve it, this is the calling of the Negro artist."

Yet even in this early period, Bearden's art never conformed to the simplistic conventions of the 1930's social-realist school. Picasso was a more potent influence on his work than, for instance, the likes of William Gropper, and when Bearden hit his stride in the 1960's, it was in the medium of Cubist collage that he found a style in which he could triumphantly integrate the demands of his modernist aesthetic aspirations with those of his embattled social conscience.

In 1970, in The New York Times , I wrote about this development as follows: "The collage paintings of Romare Bearden, with their fragmented images of Negro life locked into an elegant Cubist design … raise some interesting questions about the relation of black experience to modernist forms of painting and sculpture. Mr. Bearden uses a great many photographic fragments of African masks in a sort of montage synthesis with contemporary black figures. There is an interesting idea at work in the use of these African mask motifs-a suggestion of the morphology of certain forms that derive originally from African art, then passed into modern art by way of Cubism, and are now being employed to evoke a mode of African-American experience."

Returning to the subject in 1977, I coined the term "Patchwork Cubism" to characterize certain aspects of this development that proved to be crucial to the artist's later work. "What is remarkable about his vein," I wrote, "is that it permits Mr. Bearden to do many of the things that modernist art is not supposed to do. He attaches his art to a story-in this case, the story of his own life. He is anecdotal. He is affectionate-in fact, tender-in the attitude he takes toward his subject, and there is never any doubt that he does, indeed, have a subject, and that the subject is not art itself."

And further: "The style that serves this personal iconography might best be described as patchwork Cubism. The folk-art conventions of the patchwork quilt have often been used by Mr. Bearden in the past, and they are again used here. Actual quilts, too, are depicted in appropriate settings. I think there is a key here to the special quality Mr. Bearden achieves in his collages. The patchwork quilt is, after all, a kind of primitive Cubism in itself, and its use allows the artist both a free play on personal memory and the discipline necessary for art."

What I didn't know in 1977 was that Bearden had already created his most ambitious foray into patchwork Cubist collage in an astounding mural that measures 10 by 16 feet. If this isn't the largest collage ever created, I don't know what is. Its title is Berkeley-the City and Its People (1973), and in January 1974 it was installed in the City Council chambers of what was then the City Hall. As a caption in the current exhibition's catalog states, "This was one of Bearden's rare undertakings not rooted in autobiographical experiences in Mecklenburg County, Pittsburgh, or New York, yet he managed quickly to grasp the essence of his temporarily adopted university community" in the Bay Area.

I cannot recall ever reading about this mural before the current show in Washington, and none of my artist friends in the Bay Area has ever mentioned it, which suggests to me that they are unlikely to have seen it. Yet it's without doubt one of the most successful achievements in public art in this country in the 20th century-and I mean aesthetically successful. Almost as amazing as the work itself is the fact that it has been brought to Washington for this retrospective-yet another reminder that we're still discovering the full scope of Bearden's accomplishments.

The Art of Romare Bearden remains on view at the National Gallery through Jan. 4, 2004. It will come to the Whitney Museum in New York next fall (Oct. 14 to Jan. 9, 2005), and will also be seen at the Dallas Museum of Art (June 20 to Sept. 12, 2004) and Atlanta's High Museum of Art (Jan. 29 to April 24, 2005). I am told that the Berkeley mural will be traveling to each of these venues.

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It's an achievement far more astonishing than even the most devoted of Vuillard's admirers-among whom I count myself-might have expected. Vuillard's work tends to be so closely identified with the Nabi period and the early domestic interiors that it still surprises us to be reminded that he produced so much else. And it's not always an agreeable surprise for us to be recalled to some of the paintings of the artist's later decades. For over the course of his career in the 20th century, Vuillard's work underwent some significant changes-some of them remarkably audacious, to be sure, but some in the direction of a more "public" style that is bound to be disappointing to fans of his early intimist period.

Early Vuillard, with its inspired, headlong transformations of bourgeois domesticity into a highly original mode of chromatic abstraction, remains for most of us the classic Vuillard, and with good reason, too. In these small domestic-interior scenes, with their radically cropped figures of family and friends all but surrendering their identity to the vivid patterns of the clothes they wear and the textiles, wallpaper and lamplight that define the spaces they occupy, we're given one of the primary achievements of the Post-Impressionist era.

The late Fairfield Porter, who acknowledged Vuillard as one of the two principal influences on his own paintings (the other was Willem de Kooning), said it best when he wrote: "He had a greater range than his contemporaries, with an ability to construct that surpasses the abstract painters, and a diversity of material that the realists have not attained, united by a sensitiveness that is more personal than that of the Impressionists, and therefore more human."

It is to the early interiors that the visitor to this large retrospective feels compelled to return again and again. Though the paintings tend to be small in size, they are often immense in the scale of the visual poetry they encompass-a poetry that does not always reveal itself in a flash, but requires patient attention to its subtle, painterly details. Vuillard himself spoke of poetry and music in regard to his own work: "There is no art without a poetic aim," he said. "There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting."

Vuillard was sustained, and indeed inspired, in his quest for poetry and music in his art by his close association with three avant-garde groups in Paris, all of which played a major role in shaping his artistic thought in the most fertile period of his development. The first was the circle of painters-among them Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis-who called themselves Les Nabis ("The Prophets") and took their cues from Gaugin, Puvis de Chavannes and, in Vuillard's case, the Neo-Impressionists in breaking with the orthodoxies of Impressionism. The second consisted of the theatrical artists, especially Paul Fort and Aurélian Lugné-Poë, who commissioned Vuillard to design their pioneering productions of plays by Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Strindberg.

The third of this trio of modernist groups was the circle of artists, writers, aesthetes and patrons associated with La Revue Blanche , the elegant journal founded by the Natanson family that served as the literary voice of the fin-de-siècle Paris avant-garde. Together with Vuillard's stage designs, it was the decorative paintings commissioned by the Natansons that launched him on the large-scale "decorations" that marked a decisive break with the intimism of the early interiors.

First with the decorations and then more blatantly with Vuillard's late portraits-many of them anything but intimate in feeling or scale-we find ourselves in the presence of an artist who has greatly expanded his outlook on the world and modified his work accordingly. Landscape and cityscape now loom as more compelling subjects, and so do the glamorous figures of the haut monde . Is there also in the decorations an impulse that at times bears a certain resemblance to Salon painting? Sometimes, yes. But it's in the late portraits of people in high places that Vuillard succumbs to something very much akin to Salon art. Like everything else Vuillard produced, the late portraits are beautifully executed, yet they are devoid of the poetry and music we treasure in the early pictures.

Not everyone will agree, then, with the claim made in the catalog by Kimberly Jones that "the decorations are among the artist's most personal works." After all, what could be more personal than the intimist interiors presided over by Vuillard's mother, with whom the artist lived until her death in 1928? And the interior scenes presided over by Misia Natanson are similarly far more "personal" in every sense of the word.

Still, everything Vuillard put his hand and mind to compels our interest, and among the late paintings there are some real shockers: a painting of a prisoner of war under interrogation, for example, and another of surgeons performing an operation. Needless to say, Vuillard's "failures"-if that's what they are-are far more engaging than most other artists' successes.

It's staggering to think of all the work that's gone into the organization of this splendid retrospective and the writing of the enormous catalog that accompanies it. All praise, then, to Guy Cogeval, director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, who is the chief curator of the exhibition, and to his collaborators on both the exhibition and the catalog. I am not usually a fan of exhibition catalogs almost too weighty to carry home, and this one runs to more than 500 glossy pages. Yet in this extraordinary volume, Mr. Cogeval and company have given us a study of Vuillard that is so readable, so illuminating and so perfectly attuned to the sensibility of its subject and its period that it's well worth reading even if you cannot get to see the exhibition itself. At times, it may seem as long as Proust-about whose relations with Vuillard, by the way, the catalog has some interesting things to report-but it's worth the time and effort.

Meanwhile, Édouard Vuillard remains on view at the National Gallery in Washington through April 20, and will then travel to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (May 15 to Aug. 24), the Grand Palais in Paris (Sept. 25 to Jan. 4, 2004), and the Royal Academy of Arts in London (Jan. 31 to April 18, 2004).

However we may wish to characterize Goya's place in the canon of Western painting, he is clearly a towering figure, and in my adult lifetime there has never been a more compelling account of his achievement than the exhibition which Janis Tomlinson has now organized at the National Gallery in Goya: Images of Women .

Don't be put off by the title. This is definitely not one of those politically correct, gender-bending projects so prevalent nowadays in the academic study of art history. Its focus on Goya's images of women was, in any case, proposed by the Prado Museum in Madrid, with which the National Gallery has collaborated on this exhibition and which has lent many important works from its own collections, some never before seen on this side of the Atlantic.

A somewhat different version of the exhibition was seen last fall in Madrid. Washington is the show's only other venue. For the Washington version, which numbers 113 items, Ms. Tomlinson, the guest curator, has divided the exhibition into seven sections. It opens with a selection of Goya's early tapestries and the so-called cartoons for tapestries, which are actually full-scale oil paintings commissioned as designs for the silk and wool tapestries for the private rooms of the royal palaces, El Pardo and El Escorial. These date from 1775 to 1800, and generally concentrate on subjects drawn from folklore and popular literature. The irony for us later viewers of this early commissioned work is that the painted cartoons are far more dazzling in their painterly virtuosity than the tapestries based on them, which inevitably reduce the vivacity of Goya's artistry to a predictable and rather dull decorative convention.

It is in the second section of the show, from the years 1783 to 1790, that we begin to see Goya at something close to his full glory as a painter of group portraits of the Spanish aristocracy. Here the undoubted masterwork is The Family of the Infanta Don Luis (1783-84), one of the paintings never before seen in this country. Everything about this large picture compels our attention and admiration, from the depiction of the doddering old husband and his much younger wife, attended by her male hairdresser, at the center, to the figure of the artist working at his easel in the lower left corner, and the many other penetrating characterizations that transform the convention of the group portrait into a brilliant comedy of manners.

We then move on to a section which Ms. Tomlinson delicately entitles "Gentlemen's Paintings"–paintings of women created for male patrons from the 1780's to around 1805. This is where we encounter Goya's most famous pictures of women–both The Naked Maja (1797-1800) and The Clothed Maja (1800-1805), with the latter curiously more provocative than the former. Also of great interest is a less familiar painting called Sleep (circa 1798-1808), which has a poetic delicacy that is very different from the more confrontational Maja classics.

Then comes our first encounter with the etchings called The Caprichos and related drawings from 1795 to 1799. Here the range of expression widens to encompass the kind of explicit satire and social criticism that is only hinted at in the commissioned portraits. There then follows a section devoted to the later portraits, from 1795 to 1816, when Goya was much in demand for such commissions; another section devoted to the later uncommissioned prints and drawings; and a final section of paintings and miniatures devoted to genre subjects, which are often treated with a ferocity of invention and invective far removed from the gentler treatment of genre themes in the early tapestry cartoons.

It was certainly a wise decision on Ms. Tomlinson's part to organize this exhibition chronologically. (The Madrid version of the show opted for a more thematic structure that scrambled historical chronology.) As a result of this chronological structure, we can clearly follow what Ms. Tomlinson describes as "Goya's journey from an artist of polite society to one who took his inspiration from all facets of the world around him, producing a body of work, some of which is still unmatched today for its unvarnished, even brutal, realism."

Realism is indeed the keynote that is sounded in every aspect of Goya's art, and Goya's realism commands such a range of feeling and observation that it compels us to re-examine the very idea of realism in painting. If, in some of the portraits, it is a realism tempered by respect for the position of his patrons, in others it is a realism so candid in its depiction of human decay and pretension that you have to wonder why his patrons put up with it. But it is, of course, in the uncommissioned paintings, drawings and prints that Goya develops a realism of the macabre and the horrific that still has the power to stun even the most jaded of modern sensibilities.

In the end, it was a realism deeply rooted in the muck and sentiment of worldly experience. Imposture of any sort was alien to its spirit, and its comprehension of the darker sides of human nature was profound. Which is why Goya still has the power to shock us as well as inspire our admiration.

Goya: Images of Women , which remains on view at the National Gallery in Washington through June 2, is an exhibition that everyone with a serious interest in painting–or, for that matter, in life itself–will want to see.