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 palette and languid imagery of the exhibition’s best
known Tahitian paintings took on new resonance when you
came upon
them straight from a steamy
New York street. The indolent women in
The Siesta (probably 1891–92, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Annenberg Collection) or the terrified, prone teenager of Manao
Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching) (1892, Albright-Knox
Gallery)
made a new kind
of sense when your own body
retained a recent memory of moving through stifling heat. But
that’s mere anecdote. What was really exciting about the
exhibition was
its comprehensiveness. Although drawn exclusively
from public and private collections throughout New York State,
including the Met’s own substantial holdings of the artist’s
work, “The