Ample galleries give plenty of space around more than 175 works, even with the crowds in search of better Renoir reproductions for the living-room sofa. The exhibition's thesis may be harder to pinpoint, but the curator's heavy-handed style is instantly recognizable. As in his recent survey of American Impressionism , paintings hang on dark, dreary walls, not the pristine whites of SoHo. They also hover just a little too far above eye level, leaving me with a sore neck well before I reached the end. In both shows, the Met traces modern art to the competition with academic realism .
Rooms then take up a single genre, be it portraiture or still life.
They juxtapose very different tastes and skills indeed, the breakthrough artists alongside, well, the not so courageous. Many visitors have mistaken the Met's intentions. As the endlessly intrusive wall labels make clear, it is not out to put retrograde painters back on the map. It wants Impressionism once again to look as startling as over a century ago. The show therefore tries to restore Impressionism to its historical context, and it sticks to a single decade, when a brave new style began to emerge.