The Metropolitan Museum of Art has done so many problematical and downright awful painting shows in the past few years that the end-to-end perfection of this autumn’s Velázquez retrospective may leave museum-goers giddy with happiness and disbelief.1 By the time “Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment” rolled around last spring, many of my friends didn’t even want to take a look. A museum that had already wasted a big retrospective on the slick tricks of Boucher, stretched Fragonard’s delicate genius beyond the breaking point, and turned Zurbarán into a dull and ultimately saccharine artist was certainly not going to know what to do with an eighteenth-century Spaniard who could be playful one day, Michelangelesque the next. And “Goya” did turn out to be another of those messes that you left wondering, “what’s it all about?” The paintings and prints were carcasses dragged in to illustrate some thesis about revolutionary Europe, a thesis that you didn’t get or, if you did get it, you disagreed with. A show like this sours you on masterpieces: they become pawns in a megabuster game.
The Metropolitan has fared better with its shows of late nineteenth-century masters, no doubt because there isn’t so much difficulty in establishing a raison d’être. Manet, Van Gogh, and Degas are legendary figures—big box office—and the retrospectives of their work are foolproof popular hits. A Van Gogh or Degas show puts itself over, and thus speaks the only language—the language of crowds and cash registers—that the Metropolitan