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

"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 next shot: a ball trickles into a sand trap. That's not a bad analogy for Hassam's destiny as a modern artist.

American Impressionism, as a concept, was always oxymoronic, like, say, Canadian salsa. The spiritual drive of French Impressionism was an appetite for sensuous intensity, steadied by formal rigor and an almost scientific detachment. Monet and the others--Monet above all--channelled the optimism of an ascendant audience, the modernizing bourgeoisie, with a here and now in paint that mirrored the here and now of a smiling world. Monet's serial motifs--haystacks, cathedrals--anticipated modern marketing of name-brand sensations, keyed to the latest thing. (Imagine a collector enjoining a dealer, "I want one just like the one that Mrs. Bigwig has, but different.") Monet risked seeming empty-headed. In truth, his style was a coup of reductive analysis. Eschewing any appeal that did not meet the eye--the literary and moral longueurs of the academy--it reengineered painting to serve strictly visual experience. French Impressionism bequeathed to its successor movements--Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism--a commitment to method that didn't cultivate effects but discovered them. The prettiest Monet shares with the grittiest Cubist Picasso the blinking innocence of a newborn fact. It was the misery of American Impressionists to chase the look of French painting and yet remain numb to both its radical hedonism and its tough-minded gravity.

Frederick Childe Hassam was born in 1859 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the son of a cutlery merchant who collected American antiques, and who lost his business in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Childe was the name of an uncle. Hassam was a corruption of the English Horsham. Welcoming friendly lampoons of its Arabic ring, he took to decorating his signature with a crescent. Hassam dropped out of high school and apprenticed in an engraving shop. By the age of twenty-three, he was set up as a professional artist in Boston. He painted sumptuous street scenes of strolling citizens at twilight, essentially tonal, with tinted, misty atmospheres, often generating pleasant tensions between fleeing perspective and brushy surfaces. These were credible instances of a not quite academic, not quite naturalist, not quite Impressionist international style of the era, sometimes termed the juste-milieu (roughly, "middle of the road"). Conservative to the core, Hassam gloried in his ancestors, American on both sides since the seventeenth century. He married a woman with a matching pedigree. They were childless. He was a heavy drinker. ("Old Hassam has been off on a bat for three weeks but is all right again," a friend wrote in a letter in 1904.) He and his wife spent the years 1886-89 in Paris, where Hassam studied with prominent academic painters and fastidiously shunned anything that smacked of bohemia. Thereafter, he settled in New York, with frequent sojourns on Appledore Island, in Maine, and in other picturesque New England spots. After 1919, the Hassams passed half of each year in the decorous art colony of ...