Too high the cornices: the Met's new galleries.

In a lavish feat of nostalgia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has spent $12.4 million on the renovation of a wing to house its renowned collection of nineteenth-century paintings and sculptures. The new installation, a suite of twenty-one galleries called the Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, has been constructed with a classical serenity in mind: visitors walk through arches, past Ionic columns and cornices, and under ovolo moldings with egg-and-dart patterns. With their gleaming parquet floors, daunting wall space, and ageless motifs, the galleries have an imposing, almost regal atmosphere to them, for all the weightless elegance of their particular details. The centerpiece of the new exhibition is Walter Annenberg's gift of fifty-three impressionist and postimpressionist gems, including some miraculous paintings by Cezanne. These sumptuous works will be on display six months of every year, from July to December, until Annenberg's death, when the museum will permanently take over the collection.

The critical consensus on the previous home of the nine-teenth-century collection, the Andre Meyer Galleries, was that they had displaced older art into a modernist setting. Detractors claimed that the galleries made "great paintings seem minor," as the senior critic for the New York Times recently put it. The Metropolitan curators seem to feel that with the close of the postmodern eighties, the Great Modernist Conflagration has finally burned itself out, and they have seized the opportunity to build a revised interpretation of nineteenth-century art.

The conviction that inspired these new galleries was that, again in the words of the Times art critic, "nineteenth-century art looks best in nineteenth-century rooms." And these rooms are indeed calm, spacious, and pleasing to the eye. The problem with the new galleries, though, lies not only in their self-conscious grandeur that often makes the marvelous works they house seem like reproductions straining to live up to their originals' reputations. The problem is also in defining what exactly a nineteenth-century ambiance is.

Architecturally, the representative nineteenth-century style could be neoclassical. But it could just as well be neogothic, or a Beaux Arts eclecticism that includes Renaissance and baroque elements, or English Regency, which could mimic Islamic structures. It might be possible for the right architectural environment to capture the spirit of an age in which the paintings and sculptures were made (never mind that this exhibition covers an epoch with countless contrary spirits). Yet the fact remains that many nineteenth-century artists worked in opposition to whatever they perceived the spirit of their age to be.

In the old Andre Meyer Galleries, the painting collection was hung in a vast rectangular space on walls and obliquely placed movable screens. The effect was disconcertingly satisfying, random beauty springing up out of apparently ordinary chaos. Though the spontaneity could seem willed, the display was the museum equivalent of Chekhov' s celebrated imperative for writers to evoke "moonlight on a broken bottle," only here it was the viewers who turned comers and met the epiphanic shards of what was once the big picture.

This style of presentation had much to recommend it. The British philosopher T.E. Hulme's description of romanticism as spilled religion can be applied to most of the art movements that turbulently succeeded each other throughout the nineteenth century. Modernity broke up the vision of infinity that earlier had been held together by sacrament and ritual into the fragments of "isms." Competing rituals of style, each one rooted in a different sacramental-like aesthetic doctrine, flourished with sectarian ardor. Romanticism, realism, impressionism, postimpressionism, symbolism are the colors that stain the windows of nineteenth-century modernity, every movement projecting its own version of visual truth. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, as art in the nineteenth century progresses, the source of light in paintings becomes more and more obscure.

The neoclassical grandiosity of the new galleries does very little to help the viewer appreciate Daumier's The Laundress, or Millet' s peasants, or anything by Courbet, whom French police chased around Paris during the 1848 revolution after having got wind of the artist' s plans to blow up the column in the Place Vendome. (The father of modem realism, Courbet refused to depict anything that could not be seen: "Show me an angel," he once famously declared, "and I'll paint one.") The lofty, sedate room devoted entirely to portraits by Manet is, in its sensitivity to Manet's cultural stature, strangely insensitive to the overturning of tradition that the creator of the scandalous Dejeuner sur l'Herbe was trying to accomplish with his harsh photographic light, dislocated figures, and self-conscious irony. The earlier galleries might have made "great paintings seem minor"-- though anyone who can tell the difference should not worry about coming away with that impression--but the failing of this new space is to make great paintings seem merely great.

Of course, some curators today make the mistake of narrowly projecting contemporary issues onto older art; thus in accompanying catalogues and wall texts, one exclusively gets the artist' s violating "gaze" instead of the nude, the forms of power behind the captive forms of artistically rendered objects, and so on. For all their undoubtedly good intentions, the Metropolitan' s curators are equally reductionist, but in the opposite direction. What sinks this new permanent exhibition, a neoclassical Titanic sporting distinguished passengers and high society polish, is the deadly iceberg of Kultur.

A fantastic and proprietary notion of culture as an autonomous, self-enclosed realm has been created in these galleries, as if the paintings had no meaning or force outside the generic standards of officially cultivated sensibility that the new decor now represents. They grace the walls like debutantes at a coming-out ball. The complicatedly layered aims--personal, philosophical, spiritual, aesthetic--toward which all these wildly different artistic identities worked have been ruled unreal by the caveat of business, law, and banking money.

Consequently, some of the hanging is uninspired, like the Turners facing off across a large room with Delacroixs on the opposite wall, as though it were the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. Some is almost vaudevillian, like the mediocre d'Aligny stuck next to a doorway between some masterful Corots. And some is ridiculous, like the Renoir watercolor hung below a watercolor by C6zanne, a contrast that might begin a movement urging the museum to sell its Renoirs and use the money to expand the often overcrowded cafeteria.

There is no feeling, as there once was in the Andre Meyer Galleries, of suddenly coming upon art in the midst of life, and of happily paying for it in the currency of new sensations, thoughts, or perceptions. The viewer' s response has been encoded in the columns and cornices, the archways and moldings: you shall be overwhelmed by the power of culture--as if institutionalized culture were not time and time again overwhelmed by Rousseau's secrets, Corot's silvery sentience, Monet's beautiful lies, Degas's hardness, Van Gogh's mad yellows, Gauguin's lustful geometry, C6zanne's post-Edenic apples, which are not meant to be seen but bitten by modern eyes impatient for appearances to fall.

The result--until familiarity sooner or later pushes these unbearably magnificent rooms back into the margins between the paintings, where they belong--is a momentarily refreshing reminder of the old stuffiness. After so many artistic deaths by politics, a death by culture provides a cautionary tale of excess on the opposite end of the curatorial spectrum.

But the curators have made a statement and a decision, and very deliberately so. The first paintings that one comes upon are some portraits by Jacques-Louis David. They are a significant choice. Modern art can be said to begin with several figures, among them Goya--not in the exhibition--Courbet, or David. David, who staged the French Revolution, put classical form in the service of revolutionary goals. The curators are reminding us that those revolutionary goals were eventually, and undramatically, absorbed by the embourgeoisement of nineteenth-century society. That is, when all is said and done, one of history's more benign developments. But in the gradual course of change passion became good taste. And though art is long and life short, the arbiters of good taste--the people who paid millions of dollars to have some of the world's most stubbornly unclassifiable paintings moved from one set of walls to another--live forever. LEE SIEGEL

Lee Siegel, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is a free-lance writer living in New York.