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When Richard Serra died yesterday, I flashed back nearly 30 years to a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking with him and with his wife, the German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf, at Jackson Pollock’s splash and drip painting from 1950, “Autumn Rhythm.”

The first room houses some of the museum’s greatest knockout treasures, such as the 1949 Jackson Pollock drip painting “Number 1” and Robert Rauschenberg’s 1957 “Factum I” and “Factum II,” the almost-but-not-quite matched set of nearly identical, collaged Expressionist canvases.

But it is one of the best, in a medium that consistently gets art dead wrong, too often forsaking patience for the moviemaking shorthand of showing the flash of genius as, say, Jackson Pollock discovering drip painting literally overnight, in one alcohol-and-insomnia-fueled burst of discovery.

The moisture is slowly evaporating from the beads as the show continues, leaving intertwined bits of shifting sediment behind — a river-made Pollock drip painting, as it were.

“In the mid-20th century, when Wyeth was hitting his stride, the art world was drawn to abstraction, but he stayed his course,” said Mr. Brownawell, pointing out that “Christina’s World” was painted the same year Jackson Pollock made his iconic drip painting “No. 5, 1948.”