The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

PARIS — With impeccable timing and taste, thieves in the wee hours of Tuesday morning plundered an art museum in the Netherlands that was celebrating its 20th birthday and made away with seven borrowed paintings, including valuable works by Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Matisse and Lucian Freud.

The Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam — which was exhibiting a private collection owned by the Triton Foundation — was closed to the public after the theft, but the bare spaces on its walls were visible to photographers through windows in its modern building by Rotterdam’s museum park and busy Maasboulevard.

The theft was the latest alarm about museum security in Europe, now a prime hunting ground for art thieves. In 2010 five paintings, including a Picasso and a Matisse, together valued at about 100 million euros, or about $130 million, were stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; they are still missing.

Police investigators combed the grounds of the museum and studied surveillance video for clues to the burglary, which they said happened about 3 a.m. and set off an alarm linked to a security agency. But by the time police arrived soon after, the works had vanished.

The art, part of a collection amassed by a Dutch investor, Willem Cordia, who died in 2011, was exhibited in public for the first time last week at the Kunsthal, which does not have a collection of its own. The stolen paintings span parts of three centuries: Meyer de Haan’s “Self-Portrait” of 1890 and Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; Monet’s “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London,” both from 1901; Matisse’s 1919 “Reading Girl in White and Yellow” and Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head”; and Freud’s haunting 2002 portrait “Woman With Eyes Closed.”

The theft “was carefully thought out, cleverly conceived and it was quickly executed, so that suggests professionals,” said Charles Hill, a retired Scotland Yard art detective turned private investigator who went undercover to retrieve a version of “The Scream,” by Edvard Munch, after it was stolen in 1994 in Oslo.

“The volume,” he added, “suggests that whoever stole it owes somebody a lot of money, and it’s got to be a major-league villain.”

“My best guess is that someone doesn’t have the cash to repay a loan,” he said.

Marc Masurovsky, a historian and an expert on plundered art in Washington, noted the possibility that the theft was “a contract job,” adding: “These works were picked out. Could it be they had been targeted well before the theft, and the exhibit was the opportunity to strike?”

Willem van Hassel, the chairman of the Kunsthal’s board, announced the closing of the museum on Tuesday and later held a news conference to declare that adequate security measures had been taken.

At the same conference, the museum’s director, Emily Ansenk, said that night measures involved “technical security,” with no guards but camera surveillance and alarms. Museum officials said that the police had arrived on the museum grounds within five minutes of the alarm.

Ms. Ansenk told reporters that the burglary “has hit the art world like a bomb” and described it “as a nightmare for any museum director.” Kunsthal officials declined to estimate the value of the stolen works, though experts say they are collectively worth many millions of dollars, possibly hundreds of millions. Still, it would be difficult for thieves to sell such easily identifiable artworks, contributing to suspicions about underworld finances.

“I think it’s a form of repayment in kind, a barter — 'I don’t have cash, but I have these paintings,’ ” said Mr. Hill, the art investigator.

Kunsthal officials vowed that the museum would reopen on Wednesday.

-By DOREEN CARVAJAL

 

Banker Herb Allen's family plans to auction one of Monet's water lily paintings for between $30 million and $50 million. Collectors are buying famous works on hopes they retain their value in the current economy.

In another sign that the smart money set is selling art this auction season, Christie's plans to auction off a Claude Monet painting of a water lily pond for between $30 million and $50 million. The painting was donated to a school by the family of investment banker Herb Allen.

The planned sale next month comes as prices for Monet's watery scenes continue to climb, buoyed by interest from emerging collectors in China and Europe who think values for name-brand artists will hold up during times of economic uncertainty even if prices for lesser-known painters plummet.

Monet's Water-Lily series—the artist painted more than 160 views of his garden pond at Giverny, France between 1905 and his death in 1926—seem particularly popular. Five of the artist's priciest paintings at auction depict his garden, including "The Lily Pond," a 1919 example that Christie's auction house sold to a European buyer for $80.4 million at the peak of the last market in 2008.

"Water Lilies," a painting that dates from 1905 and shows mint-green lily pads bobbing atop a periwinkle pool, will be offered at Christie's evening sale of Impressionist and modern art in New York on Nov. 7.

Christie's specialist Conor Jordan said Chinese interest is already piqued by "Water Lilies," so he's shipping it to Hong Kong next week so potential bidders can take a closer look.

Mr. Allen, the founder of the annual mogul-fest in Sun Valley, Idaho, said his father bought the painting in 1979 with his wife, Ethel Strong Allen. After Mr. Allen's father died in 1997, the painting remained in the collection of his stepmother, who died in June.

Mr. Allen said the school is also auctioning off a pair of Impressionist paintings by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley that were included in his stepmother's bequest.

Pissarro's 1895 landscape, "Apple Trees and Haymakers, Eragny," shows a pair of women using pitchforks to rake hay into piles in an apple orchard near Pissarro's home in Eragny, France. Christie's estimates the work will sell for at least $2.5 million.

Pissarro's performance at auction has been patchy lately, with several works going unsold, but collectors tend to pay a premium for scenes like this one that show Pissarro's signature way of painting long, afternoon shadows.

Christie's also expects to get at least $2.5 million for Sisley's "Alley of Poplars at Moret on the Bank of the Loing," an 1890 view of a poplar-lined path near a riverbank in the French town of Moret. Sisley's auction record is similarly hit and miss these days, but his poplar series still seems to find plenty of takers: Seven of the artist's priciest works at auction feature riverbank views of Moret—including an 1891 example that broke the artist's auction record when it sold for $5.7 million at Sotheby's five years ago.

Mr. Allen said his stepmother's will bequested all three paintings to his prep-school alma mater, Hackley School, in Tarrytown, N.Y.

-By Kelly Crow

LONDON—British authorities are searching for a man who took responsibility for defacing a valuable Mark Rothko canvas with black paint at the Tate Modern museum on Sunday afternoon.

The man walked up to one of Rothko's murals—an untitled 1958 painting often referred to as "Black on Maroon"—and tagged it with the words: "Vladimir Umanets '12, a potential piece of yellowism." The vandal then quickly left the building.

 

The incident was witnessed by Tim Wright, a 23-year-old marketing executive from Bristol, England, who said he "turned around and heard this scratching sound," only to see a young man finishing his letters on the Rothko painting.

"It was all very surreal," Mr. Wright said. "One minute he was sat down, and the next he had climbed over a little barrier and was knelt down doing his tag." Mr. Wright snapped a picture of the defaced painting—marked with the black letters in the bottom corner— and uploaded it to Twitter.

Vladimir Umanets, an artist working in London who has published a "Manifesto of Yellowism," claimed in several British media outlets on Monday, including ITV and the Guardian and Evening Standard newspapers, that he had defaced the painting, describing his act as art. Mr. Umanets told the Guardian that the incident would increase the value of the Rothko canvas.

"I don't want to spend a few months, even a few weeks, in jail." Mr. Umanets told ITV News. "But I do strongly believe in what I am doing, I have dedicated my life to this."

Mr. Umanets declined to comment to The Wall Street Journal.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said authorities are looking for a suspect described as a white man in his 20s and have taken note of reports in the British media naming the alleged suspect.

Rothko, a Russian-American painter known for his abstract color fields, painted the murals in the late 1950s for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York's Seagram Building. The artist's decision to accept the commission was subversive, according to a Harper's Magazine piece by the late editor John Fischer, who famously recounted Rothko's hope that the art would "ruin the appetite of every son of a b— who ever eats in that room."

The paintings were never exhibited in the New York restaurant because Rothko decided to keep them. He gave a set of the now-famous murals to the Tate in 1969, just before he committed suicide.

The murals are an important part of Rothko's oeuvre because they mark the first time he created multiple paintings designed to surround the viewer, according to David Anfam, a Rothko expert and commissioning editor of fine art at British publisher Phaidon. Mr. Anfam says he thinks conservators will be able to repair the Tate's damaged canvas, which he says is likely worth tens of millions of dollars. In May, Rothko's 1961 painting "Orange Red Yellow" was sold at Christie's in New York for $86.9 million, becoming the most expensive Rothko work ever sold.

The Tate declined to comment on potential restoration.

"With the Seagram Murals, this was Rothko's first and seminal bid to create an entire environment—which is absolutely key—rather than just isolated individual works on canvas," Mr. Anfam said.

The incident Sunday served as a reminder of how vulnerable prized paintings can be when on display in high-traffic museums.

At the Tate on Sunday, two staffers who had been manning the room ran to summon security, but the vandal had left by time the guards arrived, Mr. Wright said. He said the museum soon evacuated the entire building, located across the Thames River from St. Paul's Cathedral.

The Tate confirmed in a statement that a visitor defaced one of Rothko's Seagram murals "by applying a small area of black paint with a brush to the painting." The museum declined to comment further.

Rothko's children, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, also issued a statement, saying: "The Rothko family is greatly troubled by yesterday's occurrence but has full confidence that the Tate Gallery will do all in its power to remedy the situation."

The Rothko mural isn't the first work of art to be attacked in the name of art. In 2000, also at the Tate Modern, two performance artists urinated on Marcel Duchamp's sculpture "Fountain," itself a urinal. Four years earlier, Canadian artist Jubal Brown ate blue foods and purposefully vomited on a Piet Mondrian painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A few months before, he had vomited in red hues on a different painting in Toronto.

-By Paul Sonne

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Ai Weiwei will probably be regarded as the most important artist of the past decade. He is certainly its most newsworthy and arguably its most inspiring. Over the repressions of Chinese authorities, he has used a wide range of resources to broadcast a message of freedom.

Through his art, he has spoken with a voice that also includes those who have been silenced. A dissident under a capricious regime, he has endured trials that have captivated world attention while galvanizing an underground culture at home.

The arrival this week of Mr. Ai's first North American retrospective, "Ai Weiwei: According to What?"—which begins at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and travels to three other cities, concluding at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014—is itself newsworthy. That this exhibition largely fails to inspire not only speaks to Mr. Ai's own limitations but also to the challenges and missteps in exhibiting this increasingly multifaceted artist.

It bears remembering that following his youth in a Chinese labor camp and his punk bohemian immersion in 1980s New York, for several years Mr. Ai, now 55, was a member of Beijing's cultural elite. A sly thinker and adept designer, he emerged in the late 1990s along with the booming market for contemporary Chinese art to become a sanctioned and profitable ambassador of the modernized socialist state. In 2008, he even served as the artistic consultant on National Stadium, the "Bird's Nest" centerpiece of the Beijing summer Olympics.

It was the Sichuan earthquake in May of that year that turned Mr. Ai from cultural purveyor to iconoclast. He rightly believed that the tragedy of this event, a thousand miles from Beijing in the heart of rural China, was magnified by the state's refusal to investigate its particularly tragic circumstances: the death of more than 5,000 children due to shoddy school construction.

In the years that followed, Mr. Ai put this belief into action. He visited the devastation, documenting the sites in photos and videos, and organized what he called a "citizens' investigation" to identify and memorialize each child killed in this disaster.

As he pursued this project, Mr. Ai increasingly faced off with the Communist state. He came under surveillance and sustained a beating at the hands of local police, a life-threatening brain injury, the destruction of his studio in Shanghai, 81 days of imprisonment and psychological torture, a state-driven campaign of intimidation, multimillion-dollar charges and fines, and the stripping of his freedom to leave the country—including his plans to attend this North American retrospective.

The Hirshhorn show is an update of the one at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum in 2009, which was organized largely before Mr. Ai's dissident chapter. While the current exhibition brings in some important new pieces, it still feels weighted toward the state-sanctioned years. Even the recent selection largely follows the earlier formula.

Much of this work falls under what I call the Salon style of contemporary Chinese art: Oriental idioms, passed through Pop-art sensibilities, processed into large works with a factorylike finish. Mr. Ai can be particularly taken with Western art's historical references. Several examples here are minimalist-inspired sculptures with flourishes of Chinoiserie. "Cube in Ebony" (2009), carved with a traditional rusticated surface, recalls Tony Smith's "Die." "Moon Chest" (2008), created through traditional cabinet-making techniques, riffs off Donald Judd's "specific objects." "Cube Light" (2008), which is a recent acquisition by the Hirshhorn and also the most oversized, underwhelming piece in the show, is minimalism transformed into a kitschy chandelier.

Too much real estate gets taken up by these large works. The Mori's Mami Kataoka, who also curated this show, calls the art a "warm" minimalism for existing "between formalist and contextual methodologies"—in other words, Western work with an Eastern twist.

It is true that Mr. Ai includes personal, social and political references in his sculptures. At times they can seem like the coded messages of a prisoner tapping on his cell wall. "Surveillance Camera" (2010), a marble sculpture that turns an object of oppression into a work of art, is ominous and poignant. But often the sculpture, outsourced to inexpensive Chinese artisans, is a lot of effort for not much return. Sculptures that require lengthy explanations—that one was inspired by a small wooden box left by the artist's dissident poet father, Ai Qing, or that one was inspired by the shaking of the chandelier in Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film "October"—are not so much "warm" as warmed over. One exception is "Straight" (2008-2012), a new floor installation made up of 38 tons of rebar recovered from Sichuan after the earthquake that is a rough and powerful work regardless of what else we know about it.

Mr. Ai has always been a conceptual artist. The challenge of a conventional museum exhibition is that his output has become more and more immaterial. It could be that Mr. Ai is now best reflected in other ways—for example in Alison Klayman's inspiring documentary "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry." Blogging, Twitter and the Internet itself, to which Mr. Ai devotes eight hours a day, have become his genuine new media and his most consequential work. Unfortunately, this traditionally mounted show tells us little about that. Walls of photographs—with both wonderful snapshots from his New York years and thousands of digital images from his Internet feed—could offer extra context, but they are so poorly labeled and hung so high that they serve as little more than decoration.

For a retrospective, there is also regrettably little about his involvement in the Beijing avant-garde of the late 1970s—he was part of the "Stars" group during a brief thaw known as the "Beijing Spring." Nor are there examples of his underground books published in the mid-1990s.

A deep humanity runs through Mr. Ai's best work. "I've experienced dramatic changes in my living and working conditions over the past few years," he says in an interview with Hirshhorn curator Kerry Brougher reproduced in the exhibition catalog. But he resists being taken in by his own politics. "Maybe I'm just an undercover artist in the disguise of a dissident," he says. Believing in "freedom of speech, free expression, the value of life, and individual rights," he tempers his politics with empathy.

That's why his work on the "citizens' investigation" is so affecting and stands apart from the more ornamental aspects of this show. Alongside a wall-size spreadsheet listing all the child victims of the Sichuan quake, including their birthdays and schools, he presents a recording that reads off their names. In this stripped-down piece, we sense the full extent of the loss, a tragedy that is magnified for the victims' parents by China's one-child policy: "These people have cried a lifetime's worth of tears," says Mr. Ai. "In their hearts, they know that the precious lives they gave everything to protect are no longer." Beyond politics, the work strikes at the heart of death and remembrance. It also shows us how present this artist can be even in his absence—and just what is missing in so much else of this exhibition.

-By James Panero

JUST in time for Paris Fashion Week, the Musée d’Orsay opened “Impressionism and Fashion,” an expansive exhibition examining the depiction of contemporary dress in paintings and portraiture in the second half of the 19th century, when fashion here became both a booming industry and a leisure pursuit.

The show, a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, includes paintings and costumes and will travel stateside next year. But it is best seen here and now to spot unexpected parallels between the subject matter of the Impressionists, from roughly the 1860s to the 1880s, and that of the street-style photographers who document the exotically dressed creatures outside the fashion shows across the Seine in the Tuilleries.

It is the same as when Baudelaire described “the daily metamorphosis of exterior things,” only instead of the changing shape of bustle skirts, as the pouf derrière became wider in the 1870s and more decorative in the 1880s, the photographers document the exaggerated round shoulders of a Comme des Garçons coat in the 2010s. The thought occurs, while regarding a painting of a man holding an umbrella, standing just so in the bright daylight, that perhaps Claude Monet was The Sartorialist of 1868.

Visiting the exhibition with the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, we were fascinated by the clever staging of the show, with portraits arranged in galleries that are filled with gilded chairs, as if for a défilé. Place cards tied with tiny ribbons to each seat were inscribed with the names of guests. Charles Frederick Worth was seated between Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis and the Comtesse Clotilde Bonaparte.

The incorporation of fashion was thrilling, with a case of hats placed next to the millinery paintings of Degas, and a display of intimates laid out before “Rolla,” a painting by Henri Gervex that shows a naked woman asleep, observed by a man standing at a window.

As we entered the final gallery, designed to evoke Monet’s park settings with walls painted sky blue and the floor covered with a carpet of fake grass, Bill saw a group of children in schoolboy blazers sitting on the ground, and some tired tourists relaxing on a bench, and said, “Now that’s a picture.”

-By Eric Wilson

In June 2010, Apsara DiQuinzio, then a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (now at the Berkeley Art Museum), received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to travel around the world and find six relatively off-the-chart cities where significant new art institutions, movements and activity had taken root and flourished in the past 10 or 20 years. The cities she ended up with were Beirut, Lebanon; Cali, Colombia; Cluj, Romania (the Communist government added “Napoca” to its name in 1974, but no one ever uses it); Saigon, Vietnam (the Communist powers have renamed it Ho Chi Minh City, but no one except bureaucrats ever uses that name, either); Tangier, Morocco; and San Francisco.

The result is the eye-opening “Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geography in Contemporary Art,” which fills the top floor of SFMOMA. It contains 60 works in many media by 19 artists or art collectives from these cities, separated geographically by gallery.

San Francisco doesn’t belong on the list. As an art city, it’s not “marginal,” or “peripheral,” as the catalog authors define the other locales, and its significance as a creative center has long been acknowledged. Ms. DiQuinzio’s justification was that “this exhibition was about the importance of the local, and I had to include my own locality.” But what if she lived in New York?

Moreover, the San Francisco contribution, by an environmentalist, anticorporate group called Futurefarmers, is the weakest of the six: 10 audio recordings about the future, by experts (on ecology, planning, astronomy, physics, biology, etc.) from Berkeley, Harvard and other universities, that could have been PBS broadcasts.

The only other disappointing contribution from Ms. DiQuinzio’s six chosen cities is the sole one from Tangier. There is no question that Morocco’s colonialist past, and the two decades of repressive national government that came after independence, provide plenty of material. But in her photographs, posters and videos, Yto Barrada (director of the Cinémathèque de Tanger) focuses on the uglification of her native city since masses of impoverished new immigrants and wealthy tourists have led to the destruction of old quarters and the erection of banal hotels and apartment blocks. A good story, yielding grim, banal photographs.

Unlike the U.S. and Morocco, the other four countries have been through hell in the past 20 to 50 years. This goes a long way to explain why their suddenly released artistic energies—as they try to remember, rediscover and rewrite their tragic pasts—are so much more moving.

Lebanon has a 3,000-year-old history, perpetually cloven by religious and cultural divisions and invasions. Akram Zaatari tries to reconstruct this messy history through the archives of hundreds of thousands of photographs he discovered, all taken by a popular Beirut portrait photographer Hashem el Maadani since the 1940s; the exhibit includes a reconstruction of this photographer’s studio. Joana Hadjithomas has taken dozens of colorful “Welcome to Beirut” postcards of the good old days—the beaches, grand hotels, quasi-Parisian night life—and burned or smudged each one. (Museum visitors are invited to take copies home.) Lamia Joreige has composed a wall-filling “time line” of the history of Beirut, from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 2100—made up of 29 photos, drawings, reproduced paintings, maps, texts and video monitors—that would take a day or more to absorb.

Cluj, in Romania, is a city that not one museum visitor in a thousand is likely to have heard of. Yet it is that country’s second city, arguably its most active in terms of new art and intellectual activity, looked down on (like Saigon by Hanoi, Cali by Bogotá) by the more powerful capital city, Bucharest.

After serving as dictator of the country since 1967 (and after 1971, as the most repressive, neo-Stalinist dictator in Eastern Europe), Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, were seized by the army (which had joined forces with the revolutionaries, after four days of national mass demonstrations), given a brief show-trial, and almost instantly shot by a firing squad on Christmas Day 1989. The assassination was shown on national television and the Communist Party dissolved.

Cluj painter Adrian Ghenie’s large 2010 oil called “The Trial” depicts a blurred, freely painted image of the Ceaușescus sitting before an L-shaped judgment table—an image shown on TV—shortly before they were killed. Another, “Dada is Dead” (2009), shows a spot-lit, frightened and frightening gray wolf in a dark cellar. A third (“The Collector,” 2008) is a large, blood-red painting of Hermann Göring at his desk, surrounded by paintings he had looted from all over Europe. All three are museum worthy; “The Trial” belongs to SFMOMA.

Also from Cluj is Ciprian Muresan’s video of a gang of animated dog-puppets shouting out the oppressive evils of the world, tormenting a female member of the Eternal Republic of Dogmania with every kind of insulting accusation, and then torturing to death one of their members for being insufficiently dedicated to the ruling regime.

Particularly impressive are the contributions of new Cali artists, after 21 years of rule by a brutal drug cartel often in collusion with a corrupt government. Wilson Diaz’s video of a Colombian pop group (in military fatigues and bearing rifles) singing and playing jauntily about the recent atrocities of life in Cali is no joke. Oscar Muñoz’s gradually fading images of his own face and of significant moments in recent Colombian history remind us of how quickly the present disappears into the past. Most powerful of all is Luis Ospina’s 28-minute mockumentary (“The Vampires of Poverty”) about the poor people of Cali, with paid actors, written lines and a borrowed set. Just before the end, the gaunt, dreadlocked, gap-toothed owner of the shack breaks in, curses the film crew as exploiters (what Latin Americans call purveyors of “pornomiseria” for the middle class), chases them out, and ruins their film.

We know something of Vietnam’s historical horror story, because we had something to do with it, during what the Vietnamese now call “the American War” of 1965-75. It is against this background that the art on display from Saigon—the former capital of the U.S.-allied South, still regarded with suspicion and disdain by Hanoi—must be seen.

The Propellor group—two returned Vietnamese and one American—made a slow-motion video of an underground North Vietnamese tunnel near Hanoi (one of the thousands that were a major weapon in the Communist victory) that has been excavated and converted into a shooting gallery for tourists, mainly Americans, who pay to aim at a target with AK-47s. The ironies involved are almost stifling. Dinh Q. Lê’s video contrasts a stiff, perfunctory daily assembly of Vietnamese soldiers in front of the huge white mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi with exuberant scenes of hundreds of gleaming motorcycles racing at night (sometimes upside-down) through the jovial chaos of still-Westernized Saigon.

Tiffany Chung’s exquisitely drawn, colored and embroidered maps of each of the six cities (commissioned by SFMOMA) turn cartography into art overlaid with social commentary. Her precise, beautiful maps depict cities expanding through increased population growth (Cali, Cluj); past earthquakes and predicted floods (San Francisco, Saigon); major political events (Tangier); and total social chaos (Beirut).

I can’t say that “Six Lines of Flight” totally won me over to its premise: that the relatively new, “peripheral” art cities of the world may now have as much to offer the “center” (New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles) as they once drew from these art-world capitals. But, thanks to Ms. DiQuinzio and SFMOMA, I feel a slightly better-informed citizen of the world.

-By David Littlejohn

 

Every once in a while a major museum mounts what might be called a “Well, duh” exhibition, lavishly demonstrating something everybody pretty much already knows. That Rembrandt was a genius or that the Impressionists were inspired by sunlight fall into this category. So does Andy Warhol being a pervasive influence—probably the pervasive influence—on contemporary art. The most shrewd and sophisticated faux-naïf the world has ever known, Warhol may or may not have had his tongue planted in one of his sallow cheeks with each and every item in his massive oeuvre, but practically every artist who worked in his wake during the past half-century succumbed to at least a mild bout of irony influenza.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, choosing about 100 works by artists influenced by Warhol, along with about half that number made by the doyen of detachment himself, endeavors to illustrate this obvious fact in “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years.”

The show is a breeze. Walking leisurely through a gentle maze of galleries with your head on a swivel, you can take in the whole thing in about half an hour, with a little extra time allowed for the crowds—it’s a popular show—and possibly pausing in front of a video or two. (The grainy black-and-white head-shot “screen tests” of Lou Reed and Nico are strangely fascinating, while the truly awful 1968 Warhol feature “Lonesome Cowboys” is only slightly less odious on a small screen than it was in theaters.) A quick pan of the final gallery, wallpapered with Warhol’s famously garish cow heads and garnished with those floating silver pillows (which constituted his second solo at Leo Castelli, in 1966), and you’re ready, as the British street artist Banksy would have it, to exit through the gift shop. The exhibition contains little, if anything, you need to see close up or to linger over. The audio guide doesn’t whisper, “Andy would have wanted it this way,” but it should.

“Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” really didn’t need much organization in the galleries. Random copses of parent-and-sibling work would have done the didactic trick: Andy did a portrait of Marilyn Monroe this way, while Luc Tuymans paints Condoleezza Rice that way and Julian Schnabel painted Barbara Walters still another way. But see how they’re all kind of similar because they’re anything but honorific? The Met groups the exhibition into five convenient categories which, with their subtitles (and like Warhol’s collection of flea-market kitsch), embrace just about everything under the sun: “Daily News: From Banality to Disaster”; “Portraiture: Celebrity and Power”; “Queer Studies: Camouflage and Shifting Identities”; “Consuming Images: Appropriation, Abstraction and Seriality”; and “No Boundaries: Collaboration, and Spectacle.” The wall texts aren’t awful, but they’re a far cry from “Eureka!” For example, this from the portraiture section: “Power and fame in their countless manifestations have held a strong appeal for many artists beyond Warhol. The artists in this section, nearly all of whom depend on the photograph in some way, build on the Warholian model and replenish the art of portraiture in their own unique fashion.” It’s hard to image anybody who sees “Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” not knowing this beforehand, or not being able to see the point just from the pictures on the walls.

What’s good about the show? A lot. This is the Met, after all, and it either owns or can borrow excellent and salient works by Ed Ruscha, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vija Celmins, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and the rest of the no-surprises supporting cast. The installation is first rate. (It’s not the designer’s fault that nothing beckons you to stop for a moment of contemplation.) The catalog—an ample but concise bit of one-stop shopping for Everything Andy—boasts a long, cohesive, and nicely written essay by the show’s co-curator Mark Rosenthal. It also includes a superb chronology of “moments” in Warhol’s career, from his initial rejection by Castelli in 1961 to his cameo in the movie “Tootsie” and hilarious Braniff Airlines ad campaign with Sonny Liston, to his near-murder in 1968, to highlights from Warhol’s even more influential posthumous quarter-century (for example, Rob Pruitt’s “The Andy Monument” statue recently on view on a street corner in New York’s Union Square.)

Still, there’s something dishearteningly lightweight about “Sixty Years, Fifty Artists.” It may be that the august Met, straining against type as it does to hold little contemporary art circuses (e.g., Koons, the Starn Twins) on its roof, isn’t really comfortable with an artist as nearly omniscient, yet will-o’-the-wisp, as Warhol. In one of the catalog’s interviews with several artists influenced by Warhol, co-curator Marla Prather blunders. She says to California artist John Baldessari, “As you no doubt know, Warhol’s first solo show was at the Ferus Gallery [in Los Angeles], in 1962.” If she isn’t somehow referring to his first show in California, that isn’t the case. In 1952, Warhol had a one-person exhibition, “Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote” in New York. He also enjoyed at least a couple more solo outings prior to showing his Campbell’s soup can paintings at Irving Blum’s emporium.

It’s not usually a critic’s place to tell a great museum what it should have done, but the disappointing superficiality of “Sixty Years, Fifty Artists” bids me step over the line. We all know the breadth of Warhol’s influence; a peek into the first 10 Chelsea galleries you happen across will tell you that. What the Met should have plumbed is the depth of Warhol’s influence, by taking, say, 10 artists (I’ll nominate Ms. Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton, Messrs. Koons and Baldessari, and Robert Gober to get the squeegee moving), first noting the affinity between an early work and a relevant Warhol, and then documenting how, and to where, those artists ran with it. The Met could have escorted the viewer beyond Pop’s chic ennui and into Warhol’s profundity as an artist, as evidenced in the “Disaster” paintings, the Jackies and early films like “Empire.”

That, however, would have required the influencees to admit the extent of their debt to Warhol, and big-time contemporary artists are often too career-savvy for such modesty. Pushing them out of their necessary professional conceit is the task, nevertheless, of a premier museum if it wants to get beyond an E-ZPass version of Warhol’s legacy.

By PETER PLAGENS