Melville House, the small press based in Brooklyn with a bookstore at 145 Plymouth St. (closed for the holidays, alas, from Dec. 23), has a first-rate series of 25 classic novellas, astutely selected and attractively packaged, each one $10 or less. You can play it safe with indisputably great works (Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Joyce’s The Dead, Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno); or spring a surprise with a neglected gem (George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Chekhov’s My Life, Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarrelled); or risk a curiosity such as Conrad’s Freya of the Seven Isles (odd for Conrad because it features a tragic heroine) or Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs, which features, yes, a pair of chatty canines.

Perhaps the oddest and most relevant title is Proust’s The Lemoine Affair, which is the story of a real-life financial scandal in which Proust himself was stung (Henri Lemoine claimed he could make diamonds out of coal—Bernie Madoff with a product). The sorry tale is served up in a series of pastiches in which Proust mimics Balzac, Flaubert and other 19th-century French authors. This is the first English translation of The Lemoine Affair—Michael M. Thomas, who wrote The Midas Watch in The Observer for many years, calls it “absolutely amazing.”

Two suggestions for additions to the Melville House list: Stephen Crane’s The Monster, and another Tolstoy novella, Hadji Murad. Maybe next Christmas….

THE LEAST EXPENSIVE, most portable and most improving present you can give is to memorize a poem and recite it for the lucky poetry lover on your list. How about “The Snow Man,” a wintry one-sentence masterpiece from Wallace Stevens, which is free on the web (www.poets.org) and still cheap in book form (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, $12.50)?

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

OR HOW ABOUT a poem by Elizabeth Alexander, the poet and Yale professor who’s scheduled to read at Barack Obama’s inauguration? This one, “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe,” is from American Sublime (Graywolf Press, $14):

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

The considerably less predictable Holiday in Reality: Edward Hopper (the title lifts from Wallace Stevens) provides sterling proof that Hopper’s art continues, almost in spite of itself, to gain in stature. However much we think we grasp Hopper’s achievement—only Andy Warhol among American artists is as ubiquitous and, as it is said, iconic—his paintings have yet to be exhausted by their popularity or, for that matter, their own recalcitrance. The proverbial tough nut to crack, Hopper isn’t an expansive artist, yet the work’s narrow mysteries are deeper than anyone could have expected. In his own laconic way, he’s as monolithic and imponderable as Johnny Cash.

The exhibition occupies the entirety of the museum’s fifth floor. An appreciative eye with a scalpel-sharp discernment has culled works largely from the Whitney’s more than 2,500 Hoppers—plus some loans from the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, MoMA and others.

Hopper paintings guarantee a steady flow of traffic, but the Whitney isn’t merely airing them for the sake of box-office receipts. Old favorites are on display: Who wouldn’t claim bragging rights for an image as indelible as Second Story Sunlight (1960)? Nighthawks (1942) will make a walk-on appearance come October. Many visitors will be reassured by their presence.

But the scholarly scrupulousness with which Holiday in Reality has been executed is surprising. That’s a radical departure from the Whitney’s blasé and often-contemptuous attitude toward art. Properly speaking, the exhibition isn’t a retrospective. But it explores nearly every aspect of the oeuvre, including Hopper’s forays in illustration, using aesthetic continuity and painterly process as guides rather than strict chronology.

The show confirms Hopper’s obdurate Americanness. Old saws about the particularities of place and light, as well as the alienation engendered by a too-insistent individuality, are as true as ever. No more so than the Post-Impressionist canvases that Hopper painted while in Europe: They are the flirtations of a man unconvinced by his paramour’s attractions. Looking at them, you can feel Hopper bristle at what was expected of a serious young painter in Paris.

Hopper’s idiosyncrasies are put into sharp relief in a perceptive essay by Guy Pène du Bois, no mean painter himself. Hopper’s “honesties,” we read, “carry considerable brutality with them. His cannot be called a social spirit. In both person and work his statements are apt to have a too unadulterated boldness, a shocking want of pliability, of ease.” Pène du Bois wrote those words in 1931, but they would stay accurate for almost 40 more years—the remainder of Hopper’s working life.

In an apt and unforgettable flourish, Pène du Bois described the engine of Hopper’s vision as “positive hatred.” This is particularly true in regard to his vexed relationship with modernism. Hopper can’t be considered a modern painter in the manner of Marsden Hartley or Fairfield Porter: His art evinces a deep-seated suspicion of modernism’s innovations. Hopper’s skepticism, part and parcel of a dour conservatism, found modern painting too frivolous and maybe even dangerous.

He did not find modernist painting entirely uninteresting, however—Hopper’s art is, in fact, unimaginable without it. The relentless anomie pervading his paintings marks them as peculiar to the 20th century. The people punctuating his desolate vistas are as robotic as those found in the more abstracted paintings of Fernand Léger and Oskar Schlemmer. A niggling strain of Surrealism filters through Hopper’s art as well: How else does one explain houses and rooms that have more personality than the people who occupy them?

It’s in the spare structure of the paintings—“straight lines bare of fuzz,” in Pène du Bois’ words—that Hopper is most plainly a modernist. The geometry underpinning the compositions can be almost shockingly blunt. Such pictorial foundations are not unknown in history—you can find them in early Renaissance painting, and in the enigmatic domestic interiors of Vermeer. Yet it’s the unapologetic nature of Hopper’s compositions, along with the emotional vacancy it helps to cement, that makes him a creature of the 20th century. However much a loner, Hopper remains tethered, if just barely, to the tenets of modernism.

One of the great strengths of Holiday in Reality is how it illuminates Hopper’s working process. The Whitney’s many drawings reveal a deliberate and painstaking artist. A single gallery is devoted to the genesis of MoMA’s New York Movie (1939), wherein a flashlight-wielding usherette stands isolated with her thoughts as an older couple sits in the theater.

A display case nearby contains close to 30 sketchbook pages of pencil studies for New York Movie. Exacting in detail if not necessarily in means, some are mere scribbles: We see Hopper mull over the fall of a dress, a decorative plaster molding, an archway—that is to say, everything. Once brush is put to canvas, not a moment is to be wasted or improvised.

Additional drawings reveal abandoned variations on the composition. In one, the theater is empty of people; in others, the usherette bends over or is nude. In the most beguiling drawing, she has the slightest wisp of a smile. Who smiles in an Edward Hopper painting? That Hopper entertained the possibility makes for a tantalizing, stop-in-your-tracks moment.

In such instances, the exhibition is revelatory; the intricacies highlighted are inseparable from the pleasures. There are also mundane, if no less fascinating, moments. In the artist’s notebooks, you can read persnickety notes on specific colors and brands of paint (Grumbacher here, Winsor & Newton there), as well as a sales tally, parts of which may have been the handiwork of Hopper’s wife, Jo.

We learn, for example, that the Whitney’s Early Sunday Morning (1930) was sold (in the evening, actually) for $2,000, after a one-third discount. Few details escaped the Hoppers, just as few details escaped whoever organized Holiday in Reality. The Whitney’s higher-ups are hereby encouraged to grace that insightful man or woman with a well-deserved raise.

Holiday in Reality: Edward Hopper is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, until Dec. 3.

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel seems to be looking for something similar at work: How did the unlived life—or, at least, the secret life—of her father seep into her unconscious? Did it shape her life as an artist? As a homosexual woman?

Ms. Bechdel calls Fun Home a “tragicomic,” a witty description of a graphic memoir for those of us who (though we’re aware of the new developments) are still adjusting to the idea that what we used to call “comics” can be a serious venture. And, in fact, Fun Home is sad, funny, dark, intense.

In the first few pages, we’re introduced to an unhappy family: a tense and cold marriage, repercussions felt by the three children. We see a father who’s exacting, full of self-hate and ruled by an intense passion for home decorating. Early on, Ms. Bechdel jokingly compares her father to Martha Stewart, but later we see how his seemingly benign preoccupation takes its toll on the family. He yells at his children and hits them; he treats them as “extensions of his own body, like precision robot arms.” It appears that most of their childhood is spent decorating, dusting, rearranging their museum of a home. Ms. Bechdel writes: “[S]ometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or at least, the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children.” The drawing here is of three small children kneeling at the foot of a gigantic Christmas tree, flanked on either side by long, heavy curtains; their father standing in the shadows, drinking wine and admiring the scene.

The father, it turns out, is a closeted homosexual who has sex with the family baby-sitters, yard hands and others. He brings these young men along on family vacations while the mother stays behind—because she “doesn’t like the woods.” Of course, the mother is aware all along of what’s going on, but she chooses not to make trouble.

As an adult, Ms. Bechdel finds an envelope marked “FAMILY” in her father’s handwriting. Inside, along with pictures of her and her two brothers on one of the family vacations, is a photograph of the young baby-sitter who accompanied them on several holidays. He’s posed on a hotel bed in his underwear. The photo is dark and sexy.

So there it was, the whole time, only partially veiled.

Ms. Bechdel, who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, got her start more than 20 years ago when she began drawing a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. Since then, DTWOF has become a cult favorite, spawning a biweekly strip that’s syndicated in over 50 periodicals, as well as 10 book-length collections. Fun Home is Ms. Bechdel’s first full-length foray into autobiography, and she does an excellent job. The writing is smart and meditative; the drawings are sharp and gothic and add depth to the already layered memoir, reinforcing the darkness of the text.

Literature played an important part in Ms. Bechdel’s development, and she makes more than just passing reference to Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wallace Stevens. Her father introduced her to the great works and accidentally showed the way to a life of writing. It was through her father that Alison was introduced to lesbian culture in literature: He insisted at one point—before she came out—that she read Colette.

The title of Fun Home refers to the family business, a funeral home. Ms. Bechdel’s father took over the business when his own father became too ill to clean up corpses and arrange funerals. It was at the Fun Home, when Alison was still a child, that her father introduced her to death—in a manner befitting a cold and unemotional family: He calls her into the back room of the funeral home, where he’s preparing a corpse. Ms. Bechdel recalls the “strange pile of genitals,” but what really gets her attention was the corpse’s “chest, split open to a dark red cave.” She tries not to betray any emotion. Her father asks her to hand him the scissors. “It felt like a test. Maybe this was the same offhanded way his own notoriously cold father had shown him his first cadaver. Or maybe he felt that he’d become too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of.” She hands her father the scissors and asks if that’s all, just the scissors. “Mm-hmm,” is her father’s only response.

In a chapter titled “Happy Death” (an allusion to Camus’ novel), we find out that Ms. Bechdel’s father died after being hit by a truck. It’s not entirely clear whether it was an accident or not, but Ms. Bechdel chooses to think of it as suicide: “It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials … smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.”

Ms. Bechdel came out to her parents in the hope of putting some distance between her and the family, only to be “pulled further into their orbit.” From a liberal-arts college in a different state, she types a coming-out letter. When her mother gets the letter, she phones to disclose all the family secrets. Alison’s own coming out is overshadowed by her father’s hidden life. Note that the mother, not the father, delivers the news.

Alison does get to share a moment of honesty with her father about their sexuality. At the end of the memoir, on their way to see Coal Miner’s Daughter, Alison asks her father whether he knew what he was doing when he gave her Colette to read. This is how she broaches the subject of their shared gayness. The father doesn’t acknowledge his role in her gayness, but does admit to feeling jealous of the openness exhibited these days on college campuses. Then, in an interaction typical of their one-sided relationship, he rattles off the names of men (boys) he’s been with over the years, never thinking to ask her about her sexuality. All the while he’s facing forward, driving. He has one hand on the steering wheel, the other on his face, holding up his chin.

Shaina Feinberg is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

It's a lovely title, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men , and also unlikely: as if anything from the pen of David Foster Wallace, the profligate Wunderkind who gave us 1,079 pages of Infinite Jest could ever be brief. Mr. Wallace has a pause button (he's famous for his footnotes) but no mute, no stop, no off. Or that's what I thought till now.

This new collection of short fiction proves that the 36-year-old Mr. Wallace, who is now known in knee-jerk blurb-mode as the major talent of his generation, can do it all, even brevity: The first item, a bitter little ditty, weighs in at less than 100 words; none of the stories bulks up to more than 30 pages. This is Mr. Wallace lean and mean, bantamweight, light on his feet, quick with his hands.

Scratch that. The boxing riff is too macho; it suggests kinship with hideous men. Say instead that Mr. Wallace has mastered the art of "focus"–that's the term used in one of these stories by a young woman, a "Granola Cruncher," a devotee of an imported, "apostrophe-heavy" religion. By "focus," she means a kind of prayerful soul-to-soul connection that involves "intense concentration further sharpened and intensified to a single sharp point … a kind of needle of concentrated attention whose extreme thinness and fragility were also … its capacity to penetrate." (This in a story about rape.)

In most of Brief Interviews , Mr. Wallace uses his "focus" to penetrate the souls of hideous men. It's painful and often funny and very often hugely impressive and achieves, amazingly, exactly what the granola-crunching young woman promised: Piercing layers of irony, self-consciousness, fear, hostility, neurosis and plain old stupidity–piercing, in short, the "insoluble flux" of the conscious self (what Wallace Stevens called "the evilly compounded, vital I"), Mr. Wallace touches "the beauty and nobility of the generic human soul," a quick glimpse of common humanity in every grotesque. When he parrots new age nostrums, he's indulging his fascination with jargon; it's not a sign of insincerity. What he wants to get at is "some sort of weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships"–sounds better, doesn't it, in his own edgy, pop pedant voice? He lets us know, in meta-mode, that he feels a "queer urgency " about all this. It's catching.

There are all manner of stories in this collection: a footnote-heavy, maddening descent into the hall-of-mirrors unhappiness of a woman obsessed with her mental health ("The Depressed Person"); an elliptical, arty tone-poem ("Church Not Made with Hands"); an aborted "cycle of very short belletristic pieces," transformed, mid-cycle, into a metafictional meditation on the difficulty of what "you, the fiction writer" are trying to achieve ("Octet"). Tying it all together are the "Brief Interviews" themselves, 18 encounters parceled out in four sections, each encounter carefully labeled and dated ("B.I. #72 08-98, North Miami Beach, FL," for example), as though they'd been plucked from a vast archive.

Hideous men come in all colors: physically deformed, psychologically deformed, brutish, smug, arch, conspiratorial. Some stoke subterranean violence. Each reveals himself in his own voice; each registers as real, a bad dream or even a nightmare, and pinching yourself is no escape. A vestigial "Q." is all that's left of the questions asked by an anonymous interviewer. The reader sees only the response, which is always performative. The interviewee is conscious of an audience–i.e., the questioner–and thus self-conscious (a state of mind Mr. Wallace has made his specialty), and yet also unconsciously revealing himself. It's a tough format to work with, which means that every success looks like a tour de force .

Exactly what you think of "B.I. #42 06-97, Peoria Heights, IL," a son's cruel exposure of his father's "career" as a washroom attendant in a grand Midwestern hotel, "the single finest men's room between the two coasts, surely." The son dwells obsessively, graphically on the sounds and odors in an "opulent and echoing" space equipped with eight toilets, six urinals and 16 sinks, the room where his father has stood, dressed in "Good-Humor white," nine hours a day, six days a week, for more than 25 years. The descriptions are minute, unbearably vivid and precise: "The damp lisp of buttocks shifting on padded seats.… The urinal's ceaseless purl and trickle." Mr. Wallace makes sure your nostrils are assaulted by the "difference in some men's odors, the sameness in all men's odors."

You soon realize that the hotel washroom ("that miasma") haunts the son. He hasn't seen his father in decades but he's nonetheless scarred by the shame he still feels at the indignity of his father's work. He's scarred also by his father's emotional absence. Hideousness, in this case, begins with an awful occupation: "He showered thrice daily and scrubbed himself raw but the job still followed him." Followed him home, in fact: "The face he wore in the men's room. He couldn't take it off." Whence (we deduce) the son's appalling condition–fitting punishment, perhaps, for having turned his back on the afflicted paterfamilias. Now the son is condemned to hear in his head a concert of "flatus and tussis and meaty splats." But remember: In back of this inherited hideousness is our biological "sameness," the human inevitability of excrement. The son, desperate to detach himself from the father, draws closer. "The door tells the whole story. MEN ."

The boy in "Forever Overhead" is not yet a man, though "hard curled hairs" have sprouted around his "privates." It is his 13th birthday, and at a public pool just west of Tucson, Ariz., he screws up his courage, gets in line and climbs to the top of the tower for the high dive. That's it. That's the story: Mr. Wallace leaves him up there on the board, clenched by fear. It sounds slight but it isn't. The surface shimmer is gorgeous, a shocking accuracy of detail; the suspense, brief and unresolved, had me suffering vertigo; and the resonance (this comes after several readings) compels respect.

Once the boy has decided to jump, he joins a procession of people who climb; "the line … has no reverse gear." He's stuck, and you're with him, climbing every rung on the tower's ladder. "The rungs are very thin. It's unexpected. Thin round iron rungs laced in slick wet Safe-T felt." Pause to admire, please, the echoing beauty of that last sentence. Here's how it is at the top, for him, and for you: "The rough white stuff of the board is wet. And cold. Your feet are hurt from the thin rungs and have a great ability to feel. They feel your weight." He is most disturbed (you both are) by the two "dirty spots" at the end of the board: "They are from all the people who've gone before you.... They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight.… The weight and abrasion of their disappearance leaves little bits of soft tender feet behind, bits and shards and curls of skin that dirty and darken and tan as they lie tiny and smeared in the sun at the end of the board." And below? "The square tank is a cold blue sheet. Cold is just a kind of hard."

Happy birthday. And welcome to adulthood, the one-way climb to abrasion and disappearance. If you want reassurance, consider what happens each time a diver's body hits the "cold blue sheet": The tank "heals itself." After each fall a splash, "a great fizzing. Then the silent sound of the tank healing to new blue all over again."

Well. Now we know he can write short. Let's just hope he writes for a long, long time.

Richard Pousette-Dart was one of the youngest and most precocious painters of the New York School. He was also one of the most productive, enjoying a career that was far longer than almost any of his contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement. He came to his vocation as an abstract painter earlier than most, and in the painting called Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental (1941-42), he produced at the age of 26 what may very well be the first large-scale masterwork of the New York School. And he continued to create paintings of remarkable quality, variety and size for another 50 years.

Yet it is a fact of cultural life in the 1990's that this artist's work still remains more or less unknown to the many people in the New York art world who fancy they know everything there is to know about the art of the New York School. All of this might have definitively changed had the marvelous retrospective organized by Joanne Kuebler in 1990 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art come to New York. But it didn't, and so an entire younger generation in the New York art world-including some of its critics-has been left in ignorance about a body of work never actually seen in all of its amazing variety and depth.

It is no criticism of Ms. Sims, who has devoted many years to the study of the artist's work, to report that the exhibition she has now organized in Richard Pousette-Dart, 1916-1992 is not a retrospective on the scale of the Indianapolis exhibition. Consisting, as it does, of 33 paintings from the years 1939-1990, plus some early drawings, a few sketchbooks and a display of brass objects, the current exhibition at the Met is more in the nature of an introduction to the artist's oeuvre than a full-scale account of it. As such, it serves its purpose well, and it has the additional virtue of bringing us certain pictures that few of us are likely to have seen before. The scandal is that an artist of Pousette-Dart's accomplishment still needs an "introduction" to our increasingly amnesiac art public.

It needs also to be said, however, that Pousette-Dart's paintings do not easily conform to certain ideas that have come to be identified with the art of the New York School. There is little in his painting, for example, that resembles the kind of athletic improvisational gesture that characterizes certain works of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and there is even less that conforms to the hard-edge geometrical forms we find in Ad Reinhardt or the fields of unbroken color in Barnett Newman. From the outset, Pousette-Dart was a painter who brought a more deliberate, painstaking concentration to the physical realization of the painted surface. While many of his contemporaries in the New York School worked toward simplifying their forms and thinning their facture to a watercolorlike transparency, Pousette-Dart remained committed to working by means of a slow accretion of dense painterly touches that brought to his pictures a visual richness and complexity that could not be achieved by any other means.

The miracle is that a pictorial method so dependent upon the working and reworking of the painting's material density should result in an imagery of such extraordinary spiritual radiance. But this is the miracle we encounter in all of the artist's most successful pictures. It is all the more remarkable when we see, as we are able to do in the current exhibition, that this essential impulse in Pousette-Dart's work has its origins in an art immersed in nocturnal shadows-not only in Symphony No. 1 but in Figure (1944-45), Fugue No. 4 (1947), and certain other early pictures-and only slowly found its way toward celebrating a kind of celestial light in Path of the Hero (1950), Chavade (1951) and in so many of the paintings that follow in the remaining decades of the artist's life.

It was in the pursuit of that celestial light, which gave expression to the artist's mystical beliefs, that Pousette-Dart's pictorial imagination was most deeply engaged throughout his long career. Lest it be thought peculiar that painting of this abstract persuasion should owe so much to mystical belief, it is worth recalling that the principal pioneers of abstract painting-Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich-were all similarly disposed to identify their pictorial innovations with a variety of mystical ideas. Far from being an eccentric in this respect, Pousette-Dart may be said to have carried forward one of the central traditions of modernist painting in allying his art with the realm of mystical thought.

For nonmystics like myself, however, this inevitably raises the question of exactly how we are to respond to the "content" of an art so deeply immersed in a mode of mystical belief. The best answer to that question that I know of is to be found in one of the essays of Wallace Stevens, written around 1937, in which this great poet offered some reflections on the problem of "the irrational" and "the unknown."

"The irrational bears the same relation to the rational that the unknown bears to the known," wrote Stevens. "In an age as harsh as it is intelligent, phrases about the unknown are quickly dismissed. I do not for a moment mean to indulge in mystical rhetoric, since, for my part, I have no patience with that sort of thing." But then, Stevens reverses his course by observing: "That the unknown as the source of knowledge, as the object of thought, is part of the dynamics of the known does not permit of denial." And further: "We accept the unknown even when we are most skeptical. We may resent the consideration of it by any except the most lucid mind; but when so considered, it has seductions more powerful and more profound than those of the known."

This may be a useful thought for visitors to the Pousette-Dart exhibition at the Met to bear in mind as they encounter some of the artist's statements that are inscribed on the walls of the show and quoted at greater length in Ms. Sims' contribution to its catalogue. As Stephen Polcari also makes clear in his essay for the catalogue, to ignore such questions in relation to the art of the New York School is to ignore something essential about the ideas that shaped the early course of the Abstract Expressionist movement. It is certainly to ignore something essential about the ideas that governed the art of Richard Pousette-Dart.

But in regard to our understanding of that art, the current exhibition at the Met must be regarded more as a beginning than a culmination. There is far more to be discovered in Pousette-Dart's oeuvre than the public has ever been shown or the critics have ever written about. Meanwhile, the show at the Met remains on view through Feb. 22, and there are also two other current exhibitions of the artist's work to be seen: paintings at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street, through Nov. 29; and Pousette-Dart's photographs, at the Zabriskie Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, through Dec. 20.