Grand Siecle

Museum feet is an occupational disease to which all critics are prone. In Manhattan last week the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a sure solace for weary arches. In one gallery, subdivided for the occasion into three formal rooms, it presented 58 pictures and 60 statues which comprised the most important exhibition of 18th Century French art the U. S. has ever seen. In France and the U. S. 44 collections ranging from the Louvre's (which lent ten exhibits) to a Kansas City art museum's were raided to make the Metropolitan show possible. Such private collectors as the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Mellons, the Baches also contributed. Thirty million dollars was a conservative estimate of the show's total value. Gaping gallery-goers liked best three lush canvases by the father of French postcards, sensuous Francois Boucher (1703-70). Serious painters were most excited by the opportunity to see six first-rate canvases by Jean Honore Fragonard (1732-1806), an artist who antedated the Impressionists by almost a century in their passion for the effects of light and air on color. Other important numbers:

P:Houdon's marble bust of Voltaire, lent by the Comedie Franchise. P:Watteau's Jupiter and Antiopc, from the Louvre. P: Mme Vigee Lebrun's portrait of Marie Antoinette, lent by Edward J. Berwind. Every number in the list shone with that French gaiety which 20th Century Parisians have lost. Not even in the court portraits was there a trace of the stolid respectability of a Gainsborough or a Reynolds. In not one of the French masters was there a trace of the social responsibility of a Hogarth.

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