Wretched Excess

Kids are greedy, too

It is the weekly "Parent-Child Workshop'' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This class, as the teacher explains, "will unlock the mysteries of art." This afternoon a group of threeI and four-year-olds gathers to hear the professor reveal these darkest secrets. The teacher is a brunette woman of uncertain age, very Fifth Avenue, very Metropolitan Museum, endowed with her own sense of specialness and authority. "Now, children," she begins, "this is a painting by a man called 'Mr. Matisse.' Mr. Matisse painted so many lovely pictures..." The teacher holds up a Matisse poster, a harmony in red and pink. The children study this poster with appropriate gravity, then suddenly from the back a tiny voice is heard: "We have Mr. Matisse in our living room."

The children paint, the mothers talk, and through the din a woman's voice, as insistent as an auctioneer's, describes the joys of Dalton, a private school in the neighborhood. "Dalton children are so clever," she says. "There was a second-grader who wrote an essay about his family that began, 'We live in a large apartment. We are very poor. My father is poor. My mother is poor. Our maid is poor, our cook is poor, and my father's driver doesn't have any money at all.' " Marooned in the art studio with mothers, children, and a teacher trying to lead them through the treacherous waters of the new-money society, I turn back to my tempera paints and try to obtain what the teacher calls "that halcyon state where we obtain true color." I am not successful. At the end of the class, as the children crush into their Benetton parkas, I overhear one child whining to his mother, "Mommy, why can't we have a Mr. Matisse in our living room too?"

Marie Brenner