A revolution in art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art took an emphatic tone in titling “Revolution!,” an exhibit commemorating a 250th anniversary that I probably need not spell out, and the result is emphatically good.

The quality and range of items on display are uniformly high, even if the show is not technically all that large. They are a testament to a large museum’s ability to mount a grand exhibit merely by combining its archives. (A nameplate thanks the 1924 donations of Charles Allen Munn, then-editor and publisher of Scientific American, for a plurality of works in the exhibit, many of which have rarely been exhibited.) A central accomplishment here is providing a sort of throughline, a yarn knitting together pieces in its permanent collection that revolve around Revolutionary themes.