“Picasso and American Art,” which opens today at the Whitney Museum, is brimming with great Picassos — nearly 40 of them — but it is an infuriating exhibition for anyone who really cares about painting and sculpture. Like the Museum of Modern Art’s recent “Matisse Picasso” and “Cézanne and Pissarro,” two shows that were also conceived and installed in terms of the pairings of artworks by different artists, “Picasso and American Art” does more harm than good for both Picasso and American art. Guest-curated by Michael FitzGerald, in association with the Whitney’s Dana Miller, “Picasso and American Art,” because of its myopic view of the trajectory of 20th-century art in this country, is a curatorial low. The show is an insult not only to Picasso, but to the ongoing traditions of painting and sculpture.

Mr. FitzGerald, an associate professor in the department of fine arts at Trinity college in Hartford, Conn., also curated the exhibition “Picasso: The Artist’s Studio” at the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. He contributed to MoMA’s “Picasso and Portraiture” and the Guggenheim’s “Picasso: The War Years.” All of these, as I recall, were very fine exhibitions. But “Picasso and American Art,” which purports to examine “the fundamental role that Picasso played in the development of American art during the last century,” is so weighed down by predictability and by the status quo of the Whitney’s limited American canon, that the show’s curatorial mission and visual outcome amount to a disappointment and a sham.

When, I wonder, will museum curators emerge who have enough vision and guts to stand up to the postmodern academy and admit that there are still painters and sculptors out there who do not buy into the death of art and Modernism; that there are still American artists who believe in the School of Paris — Matisse, Picasso, Dufy, Mondrian, Klee, Giacometti, Hélion, and Balthus; that hundreds if not thousands of American painters and sculptors over the last century have not only been nurtured by those artists, they continue to be — they are, in fact, furthering those traditions.

It will not be done by museum curators today — certainly not in “Picasso and American Art,” a show that touches upon and then conveniently ignores the course of Picasso’s true living legacy in America.

First, let’s begin by stating what, exactly, is going on here: “Picasso and American Art” begins with the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and ends with the American Pop artist Jasper Johns. Not only are these elder statesmen two of the most overrated contemporary American artists, they are also artists who, though they began under his shadow, really couldn’t give a damn about Picasso or painting and sculpture. Pop artists’ mission was to ridicule, undermine, and question the very notion of high art and its inherent value and validity to society. After Picasso, they are the two most represented artists in “Picasso and American Art.”

This is not to suggest that everything in the exhibition is bad: far from it. A wide range of masterpieces by Picasso fills out the show. Some, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Three Musicians” (1923) and MoMA’s “The Studio” (1927–28) will be familiar; but many other artworks in the show come from private collections and are rarely seen.

A few great works by artists other than Picasso are also on view. A couple of Pollocks, a de Kooning “Woman,”and three David Smith sculptures, one of which, “The Hero” (1951–52) — an amalgam of frame, pedestal, pillar, shield, weapon, moon, and a radar on a modern warship — all come to mind. There are also worthwhile works by Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, John Graham, Morgan Russell, Arthur Dove, and Max Webber, as well as photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Charles Sheeler. Yet none of the works are served by their pairings. Picasso, across the board, blows the other artists away; if not, the American artworks, some of which are certainly worth looking at, come off as having come directly out of single Picassos or looking like Picasso pastiches. At times the pairings give the impression that an artwork came only out of Picasso, which is almost never the case. Worse yet, they focus the attention on the superficial connections the curators are stressing between works, rather than on the individuality of the works themselves.

Between the exhibition’s inauspicious beginning and end, we find artists, some of whom, though possibly originally inspired by Picasso, eventually chose to parody or ridicule him and everything he stood for. Typical of the last gallery of “Picasso and American Art,” are Oldenburg’s limp canvas caricature of a sculpture Picasso made in 1965; lifeless Warhol copies after Picasso drawings; Tom Wesselmann’s “Still Life #30” (1963), a horrible Pop art bas-relief of a kitchen with a small Picasso reproduction on the wall; and worthless rip-offs of Picasso by Lichtenstein and Mr. Johns. Mr. Johns’s nearly ready-made, cast-bronze and painted sculpture of two Ballantine Ale beer cans, “Painted Bronze” (1960), is paired with Picasso’s beautiful Cubist sculpture “Absinthe Glass” (1914). “Absinthe Glass” — a magical conflation of bottle, glass, figure, column, arrow/leaf-spoon, mouth, and tongue — is a surreal meditation on the hallucinatory experience of absinthe; Mr. Johns’s smug “Painted Bronze” is so reductive that it actually amounts to less than two beer cans.

Beginning and ending with Pop art and Pop artists,”Picasso and American Art” says as much by what it includes as by what it leaves out. What, then, does “Picasso and American Art” tell us? It tells us that the story of 20th-century American art begins with artists grappling with Picasso — because Picasso, though he never set foot on American soil, is a force to be reckoned with. He is a last visage of the Old World dominated by artists on the other side of the Atlantic, a European giant that must be slain.

The course of Picasso’s influence — and of that of American art — as told in the Whitney’s exhibition, reads like a tidy textbook entry: First came Picasso. Picasso influenced all worthwhile American artists in the first decades of the 20th century. After World War II, the Abstract Expressionist giants Pollock, Gorky, and de Kooning, to find their own voices and to reclaim American art, had to fight against the influence of Europe and especially that of Picasso. Rejection of the past then became an American tradition in and of itself. Robert Rauschenberg, the father of American Pop art (through the act of erasing a de Kooning drawing), rejected de Kooning, slaying the heroic ideas of “art” and of the “artist” altogether. This led to the rise of Pop art and, later, to the birth and ascension of post-modernism — which reigns at the Whitney and elsewhere today.

Picasso, as presented in “Picasso and American Art,” is reduced to an unwitting progenitor of Pop art and of postmodernism. Wrapping up, the show makes a very weak case that Mr. Johns’s recent horrible paintings actually “put Picasso to rest,” as they also take him seriously. Yet the American art after Abstract Expressionism in “Picasso and American Art” never suggests that Picasso served as anything more than the butt of a joke or an artist to refute, make fun of, or plunder. Not only does this exhibition cheapen, rather than enliven, the prolific art of Picasso and his ongoing influence on American art; its confused, canned premise distorts the true nature of artistic influence and of the dialogue between artist and artist; between artist and art.

Until January 28 (945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, 212-570-3600).