But is it good?

I was prepared to dislike Andrew Wyeth for all the usual reasons. Having seen his paintings and watercolors in reproduction, I assumed they were all posing, melodramatic crowd-pleasers. I remembered the whole Helga incident of a few years back, in which nudes of a woman who may have been his mistress were shrewdly parlayed by dealers into an orgy of mid-cult vulgarity. The ''informed'' opinion was that Wyeth was the world's greatest Sunday painter, the sort of hobbyist who gets a bowl of apples to look like a bowl of apples, and then wins first runner-up at the local bank.

But now, after seeing Wyeth's landscapes in the flesh at the Whitney's new exhibition, ''Unknown Terrain,'' I feel compelled to revise my assessment. More than that, I would go so far as to say that the almost universal scorn that has been heaped on this beleaguered painter over the past half-century is one of the most disheartening acts of critical injustice in the whole of the recent literature on art.

Looking at these frail, finely limned images of autumnal thickets and wintry glooms, one wonders what could have occasioned so much hatred. As the Whitney curator, Adam D. Weinberg, asserts in the catalogue, ''Few artists have made the blood of so many critics boil as Andrew Wyeth [has]. It's curious that one of the most traditional painters of the century raises more ire than many of the radical artists of the avant-garde.'' On one level, this exhibition can be seen as the Whitney's summer blockbuster, that financially astute act of atonement for the sundry bourgeois-shocking exorbitancies of the year that was. And since you can't have Edward Hopper eight years in a row, it pleased the museum to give Mr. Wyeth his day in the sun. All the same, this exhibition probably required greater curatorial courage, because of the very reasonable expectation of critical contempt, than all the canned vanguardist hysterics of the last ten Biennials combined.

For many years now, Andrew Wyeth has possessed a twofold uniqueness. He has been the one modern artist favored by people who don't like modern art. And he has been the one artist whom the art world, despite its inveterate servility, is willing to attack. He was always a loner. When abstraction was the rage, Wyeth invoked a realism whose technical virtuosity rivaled the masters of fifteenth-century Flanders. When irony and allusiveness became the bywords, Wyeth remained unflinchingly earnest.

I suppose that, if pressed, one could make the case that Wyeth is in fact a modernist firebrand in conventional clothing. One could presume to uncover in his works elements of the alienation and bleakness that are the coin of the modernist realm. One could even argue that the establishment critics' visceral disgust at Wyeth is the closest they can come at this late date to feeling what the beribboned Academicians felt when, more than a century ago, they first confronted the heresy of Impressionism. In short, one could argue that Wyeth is what real rebellion, real integrity, real artistic courage consists of: holding true to one's vision amid a tide of almost universal mockery and contempt. To argue in this way, however, would merely perpetuate the idiotic doctrine that, to be taken seriously, an artist must be modern, or post-modern, in the first place. In fact, the only criterion that we need apply to an artist is whether he is any good. And Wyeth, at his best, can be superb.

Reactions to Wyeth may well say more about the critic than about the artist. To see him as a dauber with a knack for painting grass, to identify him with his crudest imitators, is to overlook what any critic worth his salt must be able to see: that Wyeth is, at the very least, impelled by the same formal ambitions as the best old masters and the best modernists. He is superficial only to superficial inspection, and anyone who supposes that all Wyeth wants is to paint a house that looks like a house is simply not paying attention. In fact, Wyeth, like all good artists from time immemorial, thinks in forms and colors, and he reconstitutes everything he sees in those terms.

Structurally, many of his works have about them the excellence of good photography -- that of Steichen or Walker Evans, for example. In Hoffman's Slough, from 1938, he translates a deep green field into a resonant flatness, the dimension of depth tellingly rendered as that of height. Heavy Sea, from half a century later, is inspired by the purely visual rhythms of a picket fence seen against a uniform green field. Although Wyeth is least dramatic as a colorist, preferring an almost monochromatic register of browns, beiges, and tawny greys, he uses color very skillfully in Laaka Farm and Snow Flurries, and occasionally he can surprise us with an oddly happy and unanticipated choice, as in the sudden, contained burst of blue that describes the window frame in Love in the Afternoon, from 1992. But the most obvious element of his art is his celebrated realism. Consider a single example from 1981, the jagged dry-brush profile of a buttonwood leaf, straining leftward from its gnarled stem. As a true realist, Wyeth has not only seen but has also felt the subcutaneous movement of sap through the leaf, expressing itself outwardly in the springiness of the stalk. He has fathomed perfectly the plantness of the leaf, the flawless convergence of function and form.

Employing these three tools -- dramatic formalism, pared-down color, and intensely observed realism -- Wyeth has constructed a world that is unique to him. It is, to be frank, a depressing world of fallow land and overcast skies in which man is an ill-omened afterthought. Wyeth's most famous painting, Christina's World, from 1948, is one of the few cultural products outside the realms of music and film to achieve iconic status in the past half-century. In it, a crippled woman, lying in tall grass in the foreground, gazes up at the house in which she lives out her life. As in all the best of Wyeth's works, the scrupulous realism of the execution is subordinated to a dramatic composition, in which, once again, depth is dramatically reconstituted as height. This work perfectly captures Wyeth's world: dreary, cantankerous, shorn of self-pity, and demonstrating no conspicuous compassion for anyone else. There is a Hardyesque fatalism to Wyeth, but with none of the poetic, mythological grace-notes that often mitigate Hardy's tragic sense of life. Given that this view is not entirely uncongenial to art-world types, what makes them turn away from it with such instinctive revulsion? Surely it is that, in this ironic age, Wyeth is the least ironic and the most morbidly forthright artist around.

*In the 1980s, the director of the Metropolitan Museum, Philippe de Montebello, scored points in the art world by refusing to receive a traveling exhibition of Wyeth's works. A decade has passed, and now ''Edward Burne-Jones, Victorian Artist Dreamer'' is wheeled in with his blessings. The catalogue's opening essay, ''A Critical Somersault,'' by John Christian, is extremely thorough in anticipating and belittling all the standard antagonism to this arch-Pre-Raphaelite, with a view to silencing all possible criticism.

Nonetheless, I went into this show thinking that Burne-Jones was a sad aberration in the history of taste, and I am afraid that the exhibition only fortifies that opinion. I always felt, and still feel, that he has one undeniable strength: he demonstrates in a few works that can be called Michelangelesque, like the famous Tree of Forgiveness, a knowledge of anatomical drawing that was unsurpassed in his time. He also had an unfortunately unexploited knack for portraiture, somewhat in the style of the German Nazarenes, as seen in his soulful and ethereal images of Frances Graham and Lady Frances Balfour.

Faint praise though that is, I can find little else to admire in this artist aside from his undeniable if inferior skills as an illustrator and a designer. The main problem, from which all the others proceed, is his subordination of art to literature, usually the pseudo-medievalism of Morris and Swinburne. His highest ambition is to reanimate a lost world, that of late-medieval England or Italy or some such place. Yet the results invariably reek of Victorian machine-made mid-cult, what Mary McCarthy called the ''tooled-leather school,'' as in those cheap souvenirs that tourists take home from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.

Burne-Jones is obsessively devoted to the artists of the Quattrocento -- whence the name Pre-Raphaelite -- but he has none of their compositional or chromatic tact. His work is never meant to be closely scrutinized, and his ambitions are not, in the main, the ambitions of art. If he can succeed in making you believe that you are really beholding a medieval object, with all the posturings of religious severity that delighted the growing secularism of the Victorian mind, then he is a happy man and wants nothing more. If, in turn, all you want out of art is a Masterpiece Theatre simulacrum of high culture, then this is the exhibition for you. Just don't forget to stock up on those faux - William Morris doilies at the concession stand on your way out.