A critic’s mailbox bulges over with invitations this time of year, particularly after the slow months of June and July. Anticipation is the rule. Even the most cynical observer of the scene has to admit that at the start of each new season, the heart beats faster with the vague hope that this time will be different—that the microcosm of the New York Art Scene will converge upon art and not around showbiz, money and ego. My crystal ball, ever the dud, guarantees only a sustained state of puzzlement.

The oddest thing to flit over my transom so far is an invitation for The Ted Williams Memorial Display with Death Mask from the Ben Affleck 2004 World Series Collection. For the first time, we are dutifully informed, a casting has been made of the Baseball Hall of Famer’s head while it rests in its “cryogenically preserved state.” From the photographs, the memorial looks creepy: A copy of Williams’ very dead head sits on a disk in front of a Boston Red Sox jersey. Tucked under the chin is a baseball with his autograph on it. The piece was assembled by someone named Daniel Edwards.

Not being a devotee of America’s national pastime or, for that matter, cryogenics, I’m not sure whether Edwards’ memorial is for real or not. Given that its venue, the First Street Gallery, usually dedicates itself to a rather traditional strain of figurative work, I have to guess that the Williams death mask isn’t a kitschy glorification of mass culture but, in fact, a ghoulishly sincere tribute. That we’re left scratching our heads over an object’s veracity—or its status as art—only indicates how banal is the notion that (pace Andy Warhol) art is what you can get away with. At the very least, Ted Williams should be allowed to rest in peace.

A more substantial consideration of the relationship between art and transience can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the sculpture and decorative works of the Marquesas, seven islands located 800 miles northeast of Tahiti. It’s odd that some savvy curator hasn’t already highlighted this part of the world. After all, the Marquesas Islands were the refuge and eventual resting place of the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin.

Not that the Marquesans—probable descendants of the Polynesians—require a Western painter to validate their culture. If anything, Gauguin looks increasingly to be the “great, bad painter” that the artist and art critic Patrick Heron made him out to be. It just seems that the quintessential irresponsible artist’s decision to linger in this locale long ago provided an easy rationale for an exhibit of the islanders’ exotic art.

Then again, documentary evidence makes clear the difficulty of presenting Marquesan culture in any kind of depth. It’s no coincidence that the artwork featured on the cover of the accompanying catalog is An Inhabitant of the Island of Nukahiwa, a copperplate engraving by Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius von Tilenau—decidedly not a son of Te Henua Te Enata (as its original inhabitants called it). Other drawings by non-native observers are featured as well.

Von Tilenau’s picture depicts a man covered from head to toe with elaborate, tightly knit tattoos. As with other forms of ornamentation, the Marquesans considered tattooing a sacred act. (It also served as a measure of one’s status within the community.) While allowing for a certain amount of license on the part of artists documenting a foreign people, a viewer nonetheless intuits that the intricacy of design and execution typical of Marquesan headdresses, pipe bowls, ear ornaments and war clubs found its fullest realization in living flesh.

I don’t want to suggest that the artifacts of Marquesan culture are negligible—not with objects as beautiful as the elegantly pregnant Lidded Bowl on display. But one can’t help but feel that Adorning the World flits around an aesthetic core that is, by its very nature, temporary.

Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 15, 2006.

A critic’s mailbox bulges over with invitations this time of year, particularly after the slow months of June and July. Anticipation is the rule. Even the most cynical observer of the scene has to admit that at the start of each new season, the heart beats faster with the vague hope that this time will be different—that the microcosm of the New York Art Scene will converge upon art and not around showbiz, money and ego. My crystal ball, ever the dud, guarantees only a sustained state of puzzlement.

The oddest thing to flit over my transom so far is an invitation for The Ted Williams Memorial Display with Death Mask from the Ben Affleck 2004 World Series Collection. For the first time, we are dutifully informed, a casting has been made of the Baseball Hall of Famer’s head while it rests in its “cryogenically preserved state.” From the photographs, the memorial looks creepy: A copy of Williams’ very dead head sits on a disk in front of a Boston Red Sox jersey. Tucked under the chin is a baseball with his autograph on it. The piece was assembled by someone named Daniel Edwards.

Not being a devotee of America’s national pastime or, for that matter, cryogenics, I’m not sure whether Edwards’ memorial is for real or not. Given that its venue, the First Street Gallery, usually dedicates itself to a rather traditional strain of figurative work, I have to guess that the Williams death mask isn’t a kitschy glorification of mass culture but, in fact, a ghoulishly sincere tribute. That we’re left scratching our heads over an object’s veracity—or its status as art—only indicates how banal is the notion that ( pace Andy Warhol) art is what you can get away with. At the very least, Ted Williams should be allowed to rest in peace.

A more substantial consideration of the relationship between art and transience can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the sculpture and decorative works of the Marquesas, seven islands located 800 miles northeast of Tahiti. It’s odd that some savvy curator hasn’t already highlighted this part of the world. After all, the Marquesas Islands were the refuge and eventual resting place of the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin.

Not that the Marquesans—probable descendants of the Polynesians—require a Western painter to validate their culture. If anything, Gauguin looks increasingly to be the “great, bad painter” that the artist and art critic Patrick Heron made him out to be. It just seems that the quintessential irresponsible artist’s decision to linger in this locale long ago provided an easy rationale for an exhibit of the islanders’ exotic art.

Then again, documentary evidence makes clear the difficulty of presenting Marquesan culture in any kind of depth. It’s no coincidence that the artwork featured on the cover of the accompanying catalog is An Inhabitant of the Island of Nukahiwa, a copperplate engraving by Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius von Tilenau—decidedly not a son of Te Henua Te Enata (as its original inhabitants called it). Other drawings by non-native observers are featured as well.

Von Tilenau’s picture depicts a man covered from head to toe with elaborate, tightly knit tattoos. As with other forms of ornamentation, the Marquesans considered tattooing a sacred act. (It also served as a measure of one’s status within the community.) While allowing for a certain amount of license on the part of artists documenting a foreign people, a viewer nonetheless intuits that the intricacy of design and execution typical of Marquesan headdresses, pipe bowls, ear ornaments and war clubs found its fullest realization in living flesh.

I don’t want to suggest that the artifacts of Marquesan culture are negligible—not with objects as beautiful as the elegantly pregnant Lidded Bowl on display. But one can’t help but feel that Adorning the World flits around an aesthetic core that is, by its very nature, temporary.

Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 15, 2006.

Never mind that the paradise of his dreams-principally Tahiti-turned out not to be as paradisal as the portents of Gauguin's eager imagination (and his assiduous reading) had envisioned. Whatever its disappointments and discomforts, Tahiti offered the artist an opportunity to realize his burning ambitions: to find a subject and a style sufficiently exotic to cause a sensation in the Paris avant-garde (and thus justify his departure); and to enjoy a lifestyle sufficiently primitive to satisfy his contempt for the civilization he was determined to repudiate.

Given all the role-playing, mystification, self-aggrandizement and self-delusion that Gauguin invested in this endeavor-not to mention cold-blooded indifference to the casualties, both in Europe and Tahiti-it's a mercy that the work of his Tahiti period is as good as it is. In this exhibition, moreover, we're given the most exhaustive account of the period that has ever been attempted in a single survey; and to the already immense literature on Gauguin's life and work, the show's well-written, scrupulously documented and lavishly illustrated catalog adds another 370 large, glossy pages.

Even so, Gauguin Tahiti is not to be mistaken for a retrospective. Large though it is, with more than 150 works-including quantities of sculpture, prints, manuscripts and photographs, as well as the better-known paintings-this is a narrowly focused exhibition. Excluded are the earlier paintings from the years (1879-1886) when Gauguin was a regular contributor to the annual Impressionist exhibitions in Paris. Excluded, too, for the most part, are the Pont-Aven paintings of Normandy peasants-Gauguin's first venture into a "primitivist" style-and the remains of his brief, ill-fated encounter with Van Gogh in the South of France. There's nothing here to distract the viewer from concentrating on Gauguin's romance with Tahiti in the last years of his tumultuous life. This gives Gauguin Tahiti a double advantage, for the Tahiti paintings include most, if not quite all, of his best work; and they remain today the work most closely identified with Gauguin in the public mind. If there's also a downside to this concentrated attention, it may be that it will leave some viewers feeling that they have had more than enough of Gauguin's Tahiti to last a lifetime. It is not, after all, an oeuvre of infinite variety and interest.

About the single most ambitious painting in the exhibition-the mural-scale canvas, measuring 148 by 55 inches, with its cosmic title, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98)-critical opinion is bound to be divided. Gauguin considered it his magnum opus, a summation of everything he hoped to achieve in painting in his Tahitian adventure. This is not, I think, the way the painting is likely to strike us today. Some of the smaller works related to the Where Do We Come From? painting are far more vibrant in color than the vaunted masterwork-among them, Bathers at Tahiti (1897-98), Delectable Waters (1897-98) and The Harvest (1897-98). And Tahitian Pastoral (1898), a smaller version of Where Do We Come From? , is in every respect a more compelling painting.

What's so curious about Where Do We Come From? is that chromatic invention-one of Gauguin's principal claims to fame-is largely abandoned in an effort to sustain tonal unity in such a large and complex composition. The result is a remarkably cool, almost bland painting, more akin in feeling to the pastoral idylls of Puvis de Chavannes than to the chromatic audacities of Gauguin's Post-Impressionist contemporaries VanGogh, Seurat, Cézanne and, indeed, of Gauguin himself at his best. As George T.M. Shackelford, one of the curators of the exhibition, writes in the catalog: "Although [Gauguin] downplayed the painting's relationship to the murals of Puvis on the grounds of procedure and intention, in formal terms he cannot have hoped that his figured landscape-for all its apparent rejection of classical formulas and execution-could escape comparison with the timeless groves that Puvis had popularized in murals for the museums in Lyon and Rouen, as well as the great hemicycle of the Sorbonne." It may have been for this reason that Matisse, whose gifts as a colorist were often said to owe something to Gauguin, emphatically rejected the claim, declaring in 1949 that "The basis of Gauguin's work and mine is not the same."

Gauguin Tahiti remains on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston-its only American venue-through June 20. Admission to the exhibition requires a special ticket, which can be purchased by calling 617-542-4MFA or visiting www.mfa.org.

Far from sating our appetite for revisiting the history of unfamiliar cultures and primitive customs, our familiarity with the exotic seems only to increase its appeal. For whether we search for the exotic in art, in politics or in tales of adventure, it serves as a compelling, pleasurable and sometimes edifying escape from the moral burdens and social routines of modern life. So much so, in fact, that a yearning for the exotic has become one of the spiritual staples of modern life.

No figure in modern cultural history more vividly symbolizes this yearning for the exotic than the French painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), whose work is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his life-especially in his life-as well as in his art, Gauguin is now permanently established as an icon of modern exoticism. No matter how familiar his life story may be-the archetypal story of the painter "who left his family and a career in finance to live like a native on an island in the South Seas," as a wall text at the Met reminds us yet again-it continues to command attention, respect and, in some quarters, even envy from a public that would never dream of attempting such a radical departure from bourgeois convention. We go to museums instead.

And not only in this country, of course. On a visit to Amsterdam earlier this year, I managed to get to see the blockbuster called Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South at the Van Gogh Museum by standing in line for half an hour before the museum opened at 9 o'clock. I had not seen the show when it first opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Dutch friend told me that it was only in the first hour or two on Sunday mornings that the exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum would be viewable without masses of people in attendance. It proved to be a splendid exhibition, marred only by the inclusion of a number of inferior Van Goghs-which are not as scarce as you might think. It was my impression, anyway, that the Gauguins were more carefully selected than the Van Goghs.

Even at that early hour on a Sunday morning, however, the galleries were quickly filled with visitors, but for the most part they conducted themselves with an air of piety and decorum very different from what we are used to at blockbuster exhibitions in New York: no incessant chatter, no elbows in the ribs, no jockeying for position. At times, indeed, I felt as if I were in the midst of a Sunday-morning service. Which, in some respects, I was, with the martyred Van Gogh and the fabled Gauguin functioning in lieu of divinities that no longer command such eager and unalloyed reverence. And it was not only the achievements of painting that were now the objects of worship in this temple of art, but the narrative of an artists' Calvary, with its legendary psychodrama of friendship, rivalry, paranoia, betrayal and tragedy.

The exhibition that Colta Ives and Susan Alyson Stein have now organized at the Met in Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic cannot lay claim to the kind of dramaturgy that gave the Studio of the South show its intense psychological focus. Yet in Gauguin's case, even without the presence of a heavyweight antagonist like Van Gogh, there's no shortage of the biographical histrionics that add so much personal mythology to our aesthetic interest in his art.

Gauguin was from the outset the dramaturge of his own fate. He spared no one, not even himself, in his fierce determination to realize his dream of a morally unfettered life in the service of his own artistic glory. What a mercy for us that he was as great an artist as he was (at his best, anyway), for in every other respect Gauguin was a fairly disgusting character. It's hardly a wonder that when he decided to leave Tahiti in 1901, two years before his death, for the more rugged island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, scarcely anyone had a good word to say for him. He remained a misfit-and at times a figure of derision and contempt-even in the earthly paradise where he created some of his greatest work.

As its title suggests, Gauguin in New York Collections is not a comprehensive retrospective of the artist's oeuvre . It's entirely drawn from museums and private collections in New York State. No doubt there will somewhere be a Gauguin blockbuster, as well as a flurry of new publications and other celebrations of the artist, to mark the centenary of his death in 2003. For Gauguin enthusiasts, however, there's more than enough in the current show to keep them going. Virtually every phase of Gauguin's development as a painter is well represented, and there are more works on paper and more examples of Gauguin's sculpture than we usually get to see. And added to all this, there are the Gauguin paintings in still another current show at the Met: The Age of Impressionism: European Paintings from the Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen -among them, the very beautiful Blue Tree Trunks, Arles (1888). And the splendid catalog for Gauguin in New York Collections provides us with what may be the best single guide to Gauguin's life and work. I note with interest, by the way, that for this catalog the subtitle of the exhibition, The Lure of the Exotic, has been elevated to the title itself-another sign, if we still need one, that the romance of the exotic remains a highly marketable commodity.

Gauguin in New York Collections remains on view at the Met through Oct. 20.

Among the most famous of the painters who acted upon this belief were Edvard Munch, who produced a series of outsize murals for the Assembly Hall at the University of Oslo; Claude Monet, who produced, among other similar works, the gigantic series of Water Lilies for the Orangerie in Paris; and Paul Gauguin, who produced what may be his greatest painting in the Tahitian allegory called Whence Do We Come? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Never one to suffer the pangs of modesty, Gauguin described his painting as "a philosophical work … comparable to the Gospels." Munch entertained similar ideas about his Oslo murals.

Other acolytes of this "beyond-the-easel" movement at the turn of the 19th century aimed for something cozier and more domesticated: the kind of bourgeois decorative painting that no one, least of all the painters who produced it, would be tempted to compare to the Gospels, even when the subject of the work was religious (as was sometimes the case with Maurice Denis). It is the work of four of these painters, all friends who are said to have been united in their aesthetic ideals, that is the subject of the exhibition called Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis and Roussel, 1890-1930 , which has now come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Because many admirers of Bonnard and Vuillard–the best, as well as the best known, painters in the group–are likely to flock to this exhibition with high expectations, I am obliged to point out that Beyond the Easel is not exactly an unalloyed pleasure. Some of it, in fact, is hilariously awful. It's not only that Maurice Denis and Ker-Xavier Roussel are distinctly inferior painters (and Roussel, in particular, a pretentious mediocrity). It is also the case that this exhibition contains some of the very worst–and certainly the silliest–paintings by Bonnard ever to be seen here.

These are the three large decorative paintings– After the Flood ; Landscape Animated with Bathers , or Pleasure ; and Pleasure: Decorative Panel , or Games (all 1906-10)–commissioned by the legendary Misia Natanson Edwards for her capacious dining room at 21 quai Voltaire, in Paris, and exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1910. Wouldn't you know that on the latter occasion, the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who had only recently savaged Matisse by dubbing him a "Fauvist," or wild beast, had nothing but extravagant praise for these ghastly paintings by Bonnard, extolling their "fantasy, instinct, ingenuous spontaneity, French charm," etc. Well, at times French art criticism too has its charms, but not because it can always be relied upon for serious judgment.

To my eye, anyway, Bonnard's dark, overstuffed decors for Misia's dining room–crowded as they are with fatuous allegorical detail and symbolist embellishments–have the look of something seen through a gelatinous scrim the color of brown gravy. One person attending the press view of this exhibition at the Met the other day asked me if Bonnard's paint had darkened over the course of the last century. It was a generous thought, but at the risk of disillusioning her I had to break the bad news: This was obviously what Bonnard believed was expected of him for this commission. Still, it is reported in the catalog of the show that these silly pictures were much admired in their day by, among other eminences, André Gide and Marcel Proust. You can make of that what you wish.

Vuillard's standard never falls quite as low as Bonnard's worst, but more than a few of the Vuillard paintings in this show are far from being masterpieces. Mercifully, however, there are some masterpieces here as well, in the five decorative panels known as Album (1895), another of Misia's commissions. There are some great Bonnards, too– The Terrace (1918), from the Phillips Collection, for example–but these seem to have little to do with decorative commissions. Bonnard's only masterpiece among the commissioned decors is the grand triptych called Mediterranean (1911), which was commissioned by the Russian art collector Ivan A. Morozov for his Moscow residence. Confiscated by the Soviet government after the Revolution, Mediterranean is now part of the collection of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which is where I first saw it in 1957. In that benighted period, this delightful triptych was still considered politically incorrect and could not be publicly exhibited. But it was often shown to critics and other visitors in the so-called "reserves" of the Hermitage. It may be difficult for some younger visitors to the Beyond the Easel exhibition to believe that a work like Mediterranean was long considered a threat to the Soviet regime–the threat of "bourgeois formalism"–but that's the way it was in Russia for much of the 20th century.

About the insipidity of Maurice Denis' paintings and the sheer vulgarity of Roussel's, the less said the better. They were the workhorses of the beyond-the-easel movement, and their art now has only a certain historical interest. Denis is remembered today for something that he wrote–his celebrated observation "It is well to remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." This was indeed a brilliant insight, and one that was revolutionary in its implications, for it inevitably pointed the way toward abstract painting.

If not for the paintings by Bonnard and Vuillard, Beyond the Easel would scarcely exist as a serious exhibition, and it is for their work–however unevenly represented it may be here–that everyone with a serious interest in painting will want to see it. Beyond the Easel remains on view at the Met through Sept. 9.

encroachments and commercialism of modern civilization in primitive,

out-of-the-way places of unspoiled natural beauty, the French painter Paul

Gauguin (1848-1903) is probably the most legendary. The story of his

life-quitting a profitable job on the Paris stock exchange and then abandoning

his wife and five children for the unfettered freedom and exoticism of Tahiti-has

long served as an archetype of the modern artist's alienation from bourgeois

society. His declaration, in a letter to his abandoned wife, that "I am a great

painter and I know it. It is because I am that I have endured so much

suffering," has similarly become part of the mythology of the modern artist.

Before he settled in Tahiti, where he produced his most

celebrated pictures, Gauguin sought refuge in Provence, and it was there that

he had his famous quarrel with Van Gogh in Arles. He then traveled to Brittany,

going first to Pont-Aven, where he worked with Émile Bernard, and then to the

seaside village of Le Pouldu in 1889. It is for this reason that Le Pouldu is

sometimes referred to as Gauguin's "first Tahiti in France."

It is of this latter,

short-lived period in Gauguin's career that the exhibition called Gauguin's "Nirvana": Painters at Le Pouldu,

1889-90 , currently on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, offers us

a vivid account. Although arrogant and quarrelsome by nature, Gauguin made a

point of gathering an assortment of lesser talents around him in his places of

retreat. At Le Pouldu, the most important of these followers was a Dutch

painter and patron, Jacob Meyer de Haan (1852-95), who also served as a subject

for some of the most memorable works Gauguin created in this period.

De Haan, whose work many visitors to this exhibition are

likely to be seeing for the first time, was born in Amsterdam into an Orthodox

Jewish family that made its money producing bread and matzoh. He was a man of considerable

esoteric learning; he was also a hunchback. Early on, he gave up his interest

in the family business in exchange for a stipend to study painting, and his

early work shows him to have mastered the academic conventions of Dutch genre

and portrait painting. It was his contact with Gauguin that turned him into a

modernist of the Symbolist school.

Inevitably, then, it is Gauguin who is the dominant spirit

in this show of Painters at Le Pouldu .

Yet, though he was never to be Gauguin's equal as a painter, de Haan also looms

as a strong presence in this exhibition-both in Gauguin's Symbolist portraits

of the Dutch artist and in de Haan's own remarkably successful attempts to

paint in a Gauguinesque style. Uniting the master and his disciple, moreover, was

a strong but by no means unequivocal bond of mutual dependency.

Gauguin was dependent

upon the money de Haan paid him for instruction in the mysteries of the

Symbolist aesthetic, while de Haan remained dependent upon Gauguin's artistic

leadership. Both, of course, were exiles from the world of bourgeois

respectability, and their relationship was further complicated by the fact that

they were sexual rivals for the favors of the woman who operated the inn at Le

Pouldu, where they lived and had their studio space. De Haan is known to have

been the father of her child.

Exactly what Gauguin thought of de Haan is itself something

of a conundrum. In de Haan's own Self-Portrait

(circa 1889-91), one of his most beautifully painted pictures, there is nothing

in the least exotic or demonic in the depiction of his facial features. On the

contrary, he looks rather solemn, grave and careworn. Yet in virtually all of

Gauguin's portraits of de Haan, those same features-especially the eyes and the

ears-are transformed into something fierce, lascivious and animalistic. Indeed,

the eyes and ears in these Gauguin portraits of de Haan are almost identical to

those of the symbolic fox that presides over the pale body of the prostrate

naked girl in Gauguin's The Loss of

Virginity (1890-91), a painting set in the Le Pouldu countryside.

It has been suggested, by the way, that Gauguin's distorted

depiction of de Haan in these portraits may have exerted an important influence

on the conception of the figures in Picasso's Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon (1907), for there had been a huge

retrospective of Gauguin's work in Paris in 1906 which Picasso is known to have

seen.

Be that as it may, it is certainly beyond doubt that the

visage of Jacob Meyer de Haan remained fixed in Gauguin's imagination as some

sort of symbol, even after both had been obliged to make their separate

departures from Le Pouldu. When de Haan's family stipend ran out in 1890,

neither could afford to remain in their Brittany retreat. De Haan returned to

Amsterdam, and Gauguin soon departed for Tahiti. In the last painting that we

see in the Hartford exhibition-Gauguin's Contes

Barbares , or Primitive Tales ,

painted in Tahiti in 1902, when de Haan had been dead for seven years-Gauguin's

student reappears with his fox-like demonic features in the company of two

bare-breasted Tahitian girls. Similar images of de Haan can be seen in other

later works that are not included in the present exhibition.

In the end, of course, it is as a chapter in the development

of Gauguin's art-a Symbolist, Post-Impressionist art that would influence a

great deal of early 20th-century modernist art-that the Painters at Le Pouldu exhibition makes its principal claim on our

attention. In this respect, certainly, this show beautifully succeeds in recalling

us to a time and place and to the strange friendship that proved to be crucial

to the tragic finale of Gauguin's tumultuous career. This is the first

exhibition to be devoted to this brief period in

Gauguin's development, and it is unlikely that it will be done again

anytime soon. It remains on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum through April 29,

and will not travel.

To make such a difficult figure even remotely intelligible to a late 20th-century public is certainly a formidable task, and I intend no disparagement of the current exhibition at Hunter in saying that it only partially succeeds. By concentrating on Mallarmé's relationship with certain painters of his period, A Painter's Poet does succeed in illuminating an important aspect of his career, for Mallarmé had a real passion for painting and often wrote about it with keen insight. See, for example, the passage in his essay on "The Painting Jury for 1874 and Monsieur Manet," which is translated in the exhibition's catalogue, in which Mallarmé speaks of "the delicious range found in the blacks" in Manet's The Ball at the Opera . Yet it is a disappointment that the painting itself is not included in the exhibition.

For that matter, there are no paintings to be seen in A Painter's Poet . Although Manet is one of the principal subjects under examination in the catalogue, he is represented in the exhibition by his illustrations for Mallarmé's most famous poem, L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876) and his translations of Edgar Allan Poe.

A Painter's Poet is not, then, primarily an art exhibition. It is a documentary exhibition designed to trace the course of a certain aspect of Mallarmé's career-or, more accurately perhaps, a certain aspect of his   homage to Mallarmé's life and work. It does not attempt to give us any independent account of the paintings to which Mallarmé was most deeply indebted for his thinking about art. There are, to be sure, some delightful surprises among those works on paper-the Portrait of Mallarmé (1891), an etching by Paul Gauguin, for example, which I had never seen before, though it turns out to be on loan from the collection of the New York Public Library. There are also two marvelous etchings by Henri Matisse from the edition of Mallarmé's Poésies published by Albert Skira in 1932. Those are likewise on loan from the New York Public Library.

The real substance of the exhibition is to be found in the extraordinary selection of autographed manuscripts on loan from the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris. These are, of course, mainly of interest to specialists in the study of French literature, yet their presence is likely to be fairly thrilling even for the nonspecialist who has an interest in Mallarmé. Among these documents are the charts Mallarmé devised for the teaching of English, a task that occupied a large part of the poet's life. For Mallarmé earned his living-and a hard living it was, too-as a schoolmaster, a vocation that exacted a kind of martyrdom that is not unrelated to the sainthood he achieved as a poet and as a prophet of absolute purity in art.

For there is in all of Mallarmé's writing and thinking-not only in his poetry but in his prose writings as well, including his letters-a profound and uncompromising rejection of the quotidian world he inhabited as a long-suffering schoolmaster and as a rare genius trapped in the workaday conventions of the bourgeois life of his time. The humdrum social realities that Mallarmé considered too "base"-that is, too contemptible and valueless-to qualify as proper subjects for poetry and art, were precisely the realities of his daily life. His mission as an artist was therefore conceived as a quest for transcendence.

"To name an object," he insisted, "is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment." The ideal, for Mallarmé, was "to suggest the object." What he called "the magic charm of art" required, then, not description "but rather evocation , allusion , suggestion ." It was only by abandoning the objects of earthly life that poetry and art could achieve a "universal musicality"-a musicality that he identified with "a state of soul."

This was, without doubt, the most radical view of the artistic vocation to be found in the entire history of the modern movement, and it has remained a very controversial view down to the present day. That it was upheld by a writer who was so closely identified with the Impressionist painters, who exulted in the depiction of the quotidian realities Mallarmé rejected in his own work, remains a considerable paradox-and all the more so since it was in the early history of abstract painting, which Mallarmé did not live to see, that his theories seemed to have been triumphantly fulfilled for the first time. Like many a prophet seeking release from the workaday banalities of the world, Mallarmé did not live to enter the Promised Land himself. What he would have thought of an art devoid of objects, had he lived to see it, we cannot know, but that was certainly the direction in which his own artistic theory and practice were heading.

A Painter's Poet , organized by Jane Mayo Roos and a group of Hunter College graduate students, remains on view at the college's Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Lexington Avenue at 68th Street, through March 20.

"All he could wish for," Valéry wrote, "was to please himself, which meant satisfying the severest, most difficult and incorruptible of judges. No one more positively than he despised honors, advantages, wealth, and the kind of glory that writers can so lightheartedly hand out to the painter. He was harsh in his mockery of those who entrust the fate of their work to the discretion of opinion, established prestige, or commercial interests. As the true believer keeps his mind on God, in whose sight no subterfuge, negligence, contrivance, or collusion, no attitudes or appearances can avail, just so did Degas remain impervious and inflexible, exclusively devoted to the absolute idea of his art, which possessed him."

Now, in the presence of the art collection that Degas painstakingly acquired for his own pleasure and instruction, we are reminded that he brought the same standard of scrupulousness to his judgment of other artists' work. In this collection, some of the greatest artists of the era in which Degas himself lived-he died in 1917 at the age of 83-are seen in the company of others who are either minor or, in some cases, quite unknown to us today. "Opinion, established prestige, or commercial interests" clearly played no more role in Degas' decisions as a collector than they did in the execution of his enormous oeuvre . And in regard to his own oeuvre , nothing is more interesting in this exhibition of his collection than to see which of his works he reserved for himself. In this exhibition, Degas as a painter faces some pretty stiff competition in the works of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, yet he proves to be the equal of the greatest, if not, indeed, greater than some-Gauguin, for example.

We naturally would expect to see Ingres occupy a place of honor in this collection, for Degas looked upon Ingres as something of a god, and we are certainly not disappointed on that score. It is more of a surprise to see Delacroix so strongly represented as well. And what a selection of Delacroix this is! Seldom do we get to see such a broad range of Delacroix's drawings. And of special interest too, both as a painting of remarkable quality and as a measure of the depth of Degas' devotion to Delacroix's art, is his Copy After Delacroix's "Entry of the Crusaders Into Constantinople, " circa 1860. To find that painting in the same collection with Delacroix's own painting of Henri IV Entrusts the Regency to Marie de Medici (A Copy After Rubens) , circa 1834-35, is proof, if we still needed any, that Degas was as much the artistic heir of the pictorial tradition that spurned Ingres as he was an heir to Ingres himself.

In some respects, however, the most astonishing "finds" in this exhibition are the two paintings by El Greco, which Degas seems to have acquired in the 1890's. The Saint Dominic , circa 1605, is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Saint Ildefonso , circa 1603-14, in that of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Degas' collection is, with few exceptions, concentrated on the art of the 19th century. His devotion to the old masters was profound, but he did not go in for collecting their work. But in the 1890's, El Greco was a new "discovery," after a long period of neglect, and Degas was quick to get hold of what he could.

It still comes as something of a shock to realize that as recently as 80 years ago, Degas' collection was still intact. He had hoped to organize his own museum, but it was a project never realized. So following his death in 1917, his collection began to be dispersed, and in the fiercest period of World War I, with the French suffering appalling losses and Paris under bombardment, dealers and museum directors descended on the French capital to acquire from the collection what they could.

It is impossible, I think, not to have mixed feelings about the fate of Degas' collection. On the one hand, it would have been enormously interesting for us to have had the museum Degas had in mind to organize. On the other hand, what enormous pleasure the world has derived from the dispersal of his collection to the even greater museums where so many of them now repose.

About the current exhibition of The Private Collection of Edgar Degas at the Met, however, there can be no mixed feelings. It was a wonderful idea to reassemble so much of the collection for this exhibition, and it has been done with a taste and discretion that are equal to its great subject. The mind reels in trying to imagine what feats of scholarship, diplomacy and patience are required to bring off an exhibition of this sort. Even the wall labels are remarkably intelligent and discreet, and the catalogue, too, proves to be full of interesting things. I was particularly touched by Françoise Cachin's account of Degas' relations with Gauguin, whom I would not have imagined to be much to Degas' taste. But it turns out, as Ms. Cachin writes, "These two recognized, admired, and had great affection for each other," And this is, in part, what Gauguin wrote to an artist-friend about Degas in 1898 when Gauguin himself was living in Tahiti:

"Oh, yes! Degas is often said to be vicious and biting.… But this is not true for those whom Degas judges worthy of his attention and respect. He has an instinct for warmth and intelligence."

He was certainly a figure who looks more and more remarkable the more we know about him, and this exhibition of his collection adds something crucial. It remains at the Met through Jan. 11.