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When Japanese aestheticians spoke of the quality of things known as wabi, they had in mind something like this: the perfect nature of humble ordinary objects, seen for themselves, in a state of unfussed clarity. Chardin had this most of the time, and Vermeer nearly all of it; Manet and Georges Braque, in very different ways, understood it; and Morandi's entire life was predicated on the prolonged search for it. That is why the Guggenheim's show provides such a wonderful lesson in seeing, a metaphysical oasis in the ballyhoo and braggadocio of late modernism. —By Robert Hughes