The not quite wholly satisfying major exhibition is, alas, becoming a New York standard. Long awaited shows such as last year’s Braque retrospective at the Guggenheim, “Courbet Revisited” at the Brooklyn Museum, or this summer’s survey of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art have turned out to be slightly less marvelous than hoped. “It’s not the show of your dreams,” I heard myself saying each time, “but you mustn’t miss it. There are enough really wonderful pictures to make it worth seeing even if it could have been better.”

Not that the subjects of these shows seemed less good than we thought they were. Quite the contrary. The high level of the best Braques or Courbets or Frankenthalers simply made you wish that the shows had been more comprehensive or better chosen. It’s always exhilarating to see a large number of works by a first-rate artist, no matter what the context, so I suppose we should be grateful for the opportunity, given the amount of dreary stuff that all too often fills museums these days. But the realities of the museum world being what they are, these not quite ideal exhibition’s will stand as definitive for a long time to come and that is the sad part. It would be refreshing if excellence were more frequently the chief criterion for selection rather than historical significance, relation to a theme, context, or typicalness. There’s no need to choose between quality and the scope of a show: