ALL-AMERICAN.(exhibit, 'Childe Hassam: American Impressionist,' Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York city)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 12-JUL-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"He lived with gusto, smoked a pipe, played golf, kept a good cellar, buffeted the East Hampton surf with a great, bronzed body, and worked joyously until his last illness," an obituary notice in the Times gushed of the painter Childe Hassam when he died, in 1935, at the age of seventy-five. Hassam was a force on the American art scene throughout most of his prodigiously prolific, half-century career. He was an energetic promoter as well as a practitioner--"whose word was law to 57th Street," a fellow-painter wrote--of poky variants of Impressionism which, having begun in response to Parisian innovation, persisted as bulwarks against further novelties. There are a few fine and lovely paintings in "Childe Hassam: American Impressionist," an overstuffed retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. Hassam could be good enough to leave one exasperated by his penchant--it can seem a passion, even--for mediocrity. The show valuably reflects on a long episode in the history of American taste. It includes the piquant curio of a silent film, produced by the Met in 1932, that observes the portly artist at work and at play. We witness his rickety golf swing. Somebody's sense of humor, perhaps his own, dictated the...

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