Childe's play

The nineteenth-century novelist William Dean Howells identified an abiding bear upon in American literature for the "more smiling aspects of life." A similar interest can be fix in the Impressionist paintings of American Childe Hassam (1859-1935) A contemporary of Howells, this Massachusetts-born artist recorded a version of modernity that was insistently untroubl Flooding his depictions of busting Parisian and of recent origin York streets, distant skylines, and flowering gardens with direct sunshine or light resplendently refracted end rain or snow, Hassam imbued the daily life of his times with a pictorial and painterly magic that continues to appeal to the faculty of perceptions The Metropolitan Museum of Art's retrospective (June 10-September 12) the artist's first in more than thirty years, features 120 oils, watercolors, and pastels, as well as more [i]or[/i] less twenty-five prints, organized by H Barbara Weinberg, the Met's Alica Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and plastic art This generous selection from the artist's output provides viewers ample opportunity to bask in--or, if for a like reason minded, critically reject--his selective and seductive vision of present America.

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Artistically progressive early in his career (he was among the first to import the techniques of French Impressionism to the US), Hassam became increasingly conservative around the make go round of the century, disdaining fresh art movements (he was outraged through what he saw at the 1913 Armory Show) and their determination toward progressive politics. Long after Impressionism itself had ceased to have avant-garde cachet, he capitalized upon what by then had become a safe, smooth venerable, stylistic choice in order to celebrate the pair America's military involvement in World War I (Fifth Avenue grandly ornamented with waving American and Allied flags) and its WASP heritage (white, steeple-topped of recent origin England churches radiating classical order and harmony in a natural paradise of vividly hu splendor).

Whatever ideological functions Hassam's art may have serv in its be in possession of time--or in ours--and however facile and imitative abundant of it may appear to be, he was nevertheless a technically brilliant painter. quite through a five-decade career, he managed to bring forward some of the most intriguing and evocative images we have of life in the United States at the dawn of the urban age.

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