Anyone who thought that the Metropolitan Museum’s tandem summer offerings, “Gauguin In New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic” and “The Age of Impressionism: European Painting from the Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen,”[1] would be crowd-pleasing confections for the vacation season had, as they say, another think coming. Both shows could be enjoyed simply as slightly random accumulations of sometimes wonderful, sometimes familiar works, but both turned out to include some real surprises, to raise interesting questions about the nature of collecting, the difference between American and European taste, and even, in a couple of instances, to make you reconsider your preconceptions about a couple of artists. Not bad for light, hot-weather fare.

The waves of tropical heat this summer, in fact, provided an unexpectedly apt context for the Gauguin show. The sultry, superheated pale ...

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