In the current issue of The Nation, Barry Schwabsky reviews the Jeff Koons retrospective currently on exhibition at the Whitney. “The survey of his message of hope,” Schwabsky writes, “left me feeling hopeless. I’m just not good enough at being the disinterested viewer to find myself cheered by a cheerleader for the neoliberal economy, no matter how brilliantly inventive.”

Similarly, in a review of the 1989 Whitney Biennial, the late American philosopher and longtime Nation art critic Arthur Danto skewered a solo Koons exhibition of that year as “a vision of an aesthetic hell.” An excerpt from that essay is reprinted below.

In the waning weeks of 1988, it was impossible to meet an art-worlder who was not burning to know what one thought about IT. IT could refer to nothing but the Sonnabend Gallery exhibition of recent works by Jeff Koons, a young and fiercely entre­preneurial artist who stood, it was re­ported, to gross $5 million if, as seemed likely, he were to sell out that show and two others exactly like it being held con­currently in Cologne and Chicago. A fair amount of critical boilerplate had been generated in response to Koons, all of it of the tiresome order that speaks of commodification, simulacreation and late capitalism—categories that apply, unfor­tunately, to so many things that it would be difficult to explain on their basis the peculiar frisson felt by those who attend­ed this show. “A new low” is what Hilton Kramer of course wrote, but he writes in much the same way on just about every­thing (“depressing,” “distressing,” “ap­palling,” “sad!”), and like a broken clock whose hands point always to the same black hour, is irrelevantly predict­able and critically useless: You can always tell what time it says (“later) but never what time it is. But even those who are immeasurably more responsive to the serious issues posed by contempo­rary art were airing a question that I thought long dead: Is it (is IT) art? And it struck me that the one sure formula for artistic success in New York is to produce a body of work that causes those who think they have seen every­thing to wonder afresh whether some important boundary might not have been transgressed.

The boundary between art and nonart appeared to me sufficiently elastic that it could easily contain most of what I had seen up to then of Koons’s work. The 1987 Whitney Biennial, for example, displayed a fishtank in which two basketballs were immersed and a somewhat prophetic stainless steel replica of a plastic bunny. It was explained to me with great patience that it is exceedingly difficult to partially immerse basketballs as Koons had learned to do by consulting with engineers from M.I.T.; I had read of a collector who, having purchased one of these works, was thrilled that Koons had agreed to install it himself. But neither this misapplied technical virtuosity nor the vapid steel bunnikin would be enough, in 1988, to arouse a vexed query as to their arthood. It was plain that something more powerful, more threatening, even, was drawing the glazed and jaded of the art world, almost against their aesthetic will, to Sonnabend’s for a perverse flutter. In the Republic, Plato writes of Leontius, son of Aglion, who once glimpsed some corpses of executed men: “He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, ‘Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.” This earliest discussion of what the ancients termed akrasia, or weakness of will, fit the common conflicted attitude of the art world to perfection in the case of Koons. I knew I was in for something morbid when, out of a pretended sense of critical duty, I paid my visit to “the fair sight.” I found the things terrifying.

There is an order of imagery so far beyond the pale of good or even bad taste as to be aesthetically, and certainly artistically, disenfranchised. Objects that belong to it are too submerged even to be classed as kitsch, for kitsch believes itself to be the high taste it instead pathetically parodies. I am referring to such things as cute figurines in thruway gift shops; the plaster trophies one wins for knocking bottles over in cheap carnivals; marzipan mice; the dwarves and reindeer that appear at Christmastime on suburban laws or the crèche figures before firehouses in Patchogue and Mastic; bath toys; porcelain or plastic saints; what goes into Easter baskets; ornaments in fishbowls; comic heads attached to bottle-stoppers in home bars. Koons has claimed this imagery as his own, has taken over its colors, its cloying saccharinities, its gluey sentimentalities, its blank indifference to the existence and meaning of high art, and given it a monumentality that makes it flagrantly visible, a feast for appetites no one dreamt existed and which the art world hates itself for acknowledging. There was a figure of a man smiling with intolerable benignity at an armful of blue puppies that haunts me like a bad dream. The aggregation of rebarbative effigies at the Sonnabend Gallery was a vision of an aesthetic hell.

As it is the mission of the Whitney Biennial to display the leading artistic productions of the preceding two-year period, it was of course mandatory that this year’s show should include a representative sample of Koons’s latest work. There are three pieces: a porcelain girl, busty and lusty, smiling in rapture as she presses a Pink Panther toy to her bosom; a John the Baptist in a shaggy porcelain garment, smiling over a penguin and a piglet with gilded snout and trotters; and a stack of wooden barnyard animals in graduated sizes, with an immense simpering pig as anchor-brute. (Koons’s figures are executed for him by Italian craftsmen.) You will certainly want to see these preternatural vulgarities, if only for the pleasure of clucking over the state of an art world that hath such creatures in it. But their effect is somewhat muted by the circumstance of being shown with other things. Part of the aesthetic terrorism of the Sonnabend show lay in the fact that nothing was there except Koonses, so one had the scary sense that his killer chotchkes had taken over the world. Each augmented the presence of each and amplified its in­credibility. But at the Whitney, some­how, the objects have subsided into giant bric-a-brac, and this may be one of the costs of the necessary pluralism and the salon format imposed upon biennials, where Koons is just one among the main artists to have done something worth singling out over the past two years.

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Giorgio Morandi by SIAE 2008Natura morta, 1956

The paintings of Giorgio Morandi express an apparent humility of means underwritten by a life of seemingly total dedication to art. His works are searching, unassuming and small, 30 by 40 centimeters being the average dimensions of a canvas. They are imbued with a muted passion and appear to be unconcerned with anything beyond their manifest subject: simple houses set in dull landscapes or still lifes composed of the most ordinary household objects, bottles chiefly, but also nondescript boxes, carefully placed and painted with a diffident touch in matte pinks, pale yellows, pistachio and colors that have no name–the color of putty, say, or baked unglazed clay. Once he settled into his mature style, Morandi invariably titled his painting Natura morta if it was a still life or Paesaggio if it was a landscape. One irresistible Natura morta, painted in 1953, depicts five objects arranged in two rows. The front row contains a box painted with three wide horizontal stripes of white and muddy brown, a buttery yellow box and a grayish brown box, all rendered in slightly distorted perspective. The striped box and the yellow box occlude a black, handleless cup and an ornamental glass carafe with a wide lip and twisted neck. The group, which stands in a washed-out background of indeterminate color, casts a collective shadow to the right. The gray box seems almost to be shoving the yellow box at its side, exerting such a strong force that it distorts the edge where their tops meet.

Like this Natura morta, each of Morandi’s paintings suggests a fresh return to the basics of art, undistracted by passions, erotic or political. Born in 1890, Morandi spent most of his life in Bologna, Italy, where he taught art and lived as a bachelor in an apartment with his mother (she died in 1950) and his three unmarried sisters. In Janet Abramowicz’s essential book Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence, there is an exceedingly moving photograph of the artist’s bedroom, which doubled as his studio. A lumpy, skimpy bed is placed against a wall, and a few of Morandi’s small framed pictures are hung here and there above it. On the adjoining wall are some shelves holding flasks, compotes, jars, saucers, pitchers and boxes–the kind of bric-a-brac that one might find in this country at yard sales in tidy hardscrabble neighborhoods. Whatever there is to say about Morandi’s exemplary life can also be said about his paintings: they are honest, quiet and modest, a reproach to the distracted, uncertain lives of the rest of us. San Giorgio of the Table Top!

How can small paintings of a few simple bottles and boxes be so irresistible? Why did Morandi return to these objects over and over, and without the gloss of routine ever dulling his art? The literature about Morandi almost universally answers these questions with recourse to two metaphors: his pictures are poems in paint, or they are studies in stillness and silence. Painting is silent by default, but paintings of silence are another matter. Ut pictura poesis–“as is painting, so is poetry”–was a notion first articulated by Horace. But if poetry is what we adore in Morandi, what is the poetry specific to painting? If one were to subtract the meaning from poetry, leaving only the music, then that which corresponds to the music would be what remains when meaning is subtracted from painting. If the nature of that substance could be divined, then perhaps the mystery of Morandi’s work could be solved. Of course, we could set aside such conundrums and just enjoy the Morandi retrospective (the first in the United States) currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through December 14), especially the last, long part of it, where Morandi’s signature style quietly asserts itself and each work is a minor revelation. But a critic has certain responsibilities.

Peter Schjeldahl has written of how the painter Vija Celmins, upon first seeing a Morandi still life in 1961, was struck by the way the objects seemed to be fighting for one another’s space. For me, Morandi’s objects are like people squeezing between others in the subway, making room for themselves at their neighbors’ expense. Morandi’s still lifes are scenes of dampened violence, and the compositions closest to them, in terms of feeling and tone, are those dense groupings of abstract forms in Philip Guston’s paintings of the mid-1960s, where one too many objects are crowded into a clotted space when there is plenty of empty room elsewhere on the canvas, so that the array seems to quiver and dilate.

Morandi’s still lifes are not that still: they are not Platonic placements of rigid geometrical bodies. The components interact and jostle, exerting pressure on one another rather than sitting quietly at rest. One begins to wonder if an allegory is being enacted. The artist Robert Irwin speaks of Morandi as dealing with the “time and space relationships within the painting per se.” What can he mean by that? Where does time come into these paintings, and how? I have read that Morandi drew chalk circles around the bases of his objects, so that he would know where to place them, as if he were choreographing a sequence and the paintings implied internal narratives. I sometimes think that the same bottle may occupy two–or even three–spaces in a painting. Of course, there could be two bottles of the same shape and size. But what if there is one bottle that occupies two different spots in the same composition? Then the composition would have a history of displacement. Morandi’s compositions certainly have a history of simultaneity. It is striking that the shadows in his paintings go this way and that, as if there were different sources of light, or as though the bottles were sundials casting shadows made at the different times of day they were painted. In any case, Morandi’s compositions of humble household objects placed on a table are not dreamy. They are something more dynamic and aggressive; their physics and geometry are up for grabs.

Morandi was educated at the Accademia di Belle Arti in his native city. Its curriculum had changed little since it was established by the Carracci brothers, Agostino and Annibale, and their cousin Ludovico in the late sixteenth century. The Carraccis concentrated on life drawing, and they brought Italian painting out of the artificial and arch complexity of the high Mannerist style into what came to be known as the Baroque. It was a time of immense opportunity for artists who could create convincing narrative representations of the Christian epic featuring the suffering of Christ and his followers. The Bolognese School commanded a near monopoly over the images that decorated the Roman churches of the Counter-Reformation, which were expressly designed to strengthen the Catholic faith. In the Carracci atelier, painters were taught that their depictions of the human body wracked by pain and agony had to be so convincing that worshipers would bond with the martyrs they saw portrayed on the walls.

Morandi entered the Accademia in 1907, the year Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Two years later the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti hectored his Italian contemporaries in the pages of the French daily Le Figaro. “We want to demolish museums and libraries,” Marinetti shouted in his Futurist Manifesto. “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath…a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” In 1913, recently graduated from the Accademia, Morandi was curious enough about Futurism to travel to Florence to see the first exposition of Futurist painting (which had opened at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in February 1912). The paintings experimented with representing the speed and violence of modern life as simultaneously perceived and remembered. In his special theory of relativity, Einstein talked about a light flashing on a railroad car. How much more exciting for the Futurists if a revolver were fired from a passing train!

Like all painting academies since the seventeenth century, the Accademia enforced a hierarchy in which history painting was considered the most demanding and prestigious of genres. Still life was so off the scale of respectability that it was an act of insurrection to take it up. I would conjecture that Morandi gravitated to still life, in which he started to work regularly around 1915, because it was the genre in which he could experiment most freely, manipulating bottles and jars–the very bric-a-brac that the Futurists rejected as being “filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time”–to investigate the questions regarding time and space that the Futurists lobbed like so many bombs. Obviously, moving a bottle from one place to another in a small still life can scarcely be considered a militant act. Yet for all its modesty, the gesture introduces a certain dynamism into art. It’s telling that Morandi loathed the staid work of Baroque masters, most particularly Guido Reni, a painter of cloying saints, typically female, whose welling large eyes gazed raptly heavenward. Reni was the artistic counterpart to the syrupy liqueurs relished by Italians of an earlier generation. At the Met exhibition I bumped into Milton Glaser, who studied etching with Morandi. Glaser recalled looking at some Reni paintings with Morandi, who told him that Reni excelled at painting toes. It’s an intriguing remark, since it reveals an irony that the paintings would not have led one to expect: toes as the seat of the soul.

Morandi was drafted into the Italian infantry in 1915 but was soon discharged as being psychologically unfit for military service. During his convalescence he encountered the work of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, both of whom had turned their backs on Futurism and had begun to develop what they called pittura metafisica, which used ordinary objects as windows into dimensions of reality hidden from consciousness. Discarding Futurism’s speedolatry, de Chirico and Carrà made paintings of quiet, hauntingly vacant piazzas under relentless sunlight, creating a mood that would later be absorbed into Surrealism. The two men were inspired by Italian cities–in de Chirico’s case, Turin, with its arcaded streets and heavy shadows. (De Chirico studied philosophy, particularly Nietzsche, who had found Turin hospitable, though it was there, in the Piazza Carlo Alberto, that he suffered a complete nervous breakdown.) In pittura metafisica, Morandi encountered a vision in which disparate mundane objects in emptied spaces evoke something dreamlike and allusive.

Morandi’s Bottles and Fruit Dish [Still Life], 1916, features three banal objects–a fluted fruit dish and a carafe, both with helical patterns, and a tall, slender flask shaped like a truncated cone. All three objects seem to be made of opalescent glass; they are ghostly presences in a mysterious space. As a trio, they suggest a larger undisclosed meaning. The painting, which is considered an important contribution to pittura metafisica, today seems inconspicuous, a lesson in the way paintings that changed history fade into an exhibition when the history has been forgotten. Perhaps that’s a measure of how drastically our sense of the commonplace has been transfigured by a certain iconic array of thirty-two Campbell’s soup cans. Andy Warhol unveiled that work in 1962. Morandi died two years later.

Futurism and metaphysics are ideological antonyms to the whatness and whereness into which Morandi comfortably settled. Futuristic speed is hardly a value if what one needs for a human life is in the here and now; the emptiness of metaphysical painting is too thin for human habitation. In contemplating the achievement of Morandi’s paintings, I can’t help thinking of Jane Austen’s wry characterization of her novels in a letter to her nephew James Edward Austen, also a writer: “What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow?–How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?” The bombast and posturing of the Futurists could not elbow themselves into the fine, dynamic space that Morandi made his own–an adventure deeply different from what most still life aspires to.

Sheldan C. Cllins/Whitney MuseumAn installation view of Ruben Ochoa’s ‘Ideal Disjuncture’ (2008), left

There has been oddly little excitement, let alone controversy, surrounding the Whitney Biennial this year. No one told me that it must be seen, no one said how awful it was. People wondered if the show had become obsolete, especially in late March, when Europeans thronged to New York City to see the Armory show and its galaxy of satellite art fairs–Pulse, Red Dot, Bridge, Scope New York and the rest. Why would anyone leave the glitter of these seductive displays to visit what was generally understood to be a drab exhibition that billed itself as a survey of where American art stands today? In any case, there would be plenty of American artists at the fairs who had already made the cut at one commercial gallery or another. I knew but a small handful of the eighty-one artists listed in the Whitney’s press release, and few of those I did know were near the top of my list of favorites. (Some of them were near the top of my list of artists to be avoided when possible.) I could tell that this was mainly to be a show of “emerging artists”–the kind sought by enterprising collectors, funding agencies, younger curators and galleries out to make a name for themselves. Since the fairs were full of emerged, emerging and about to emerge artists, many just hatched from their MFA shows, it was hard to figure out what could be special or different about Biennial 2008.

Part of my indifference may have stemmed from the fact that the curators, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim Momin, had broken with tradition by not designing their Biennial as an exposition à thèse. In an interview in March, they emphasized that they had set out with no particular ax to grind, resolving just to “start with the art” and see how things fell out. In this they differed from the curators of Biennial 2006, who from the beginning were determined “to make a bold curatorial statement about the current zeitgeist.”

The current show certainly did not evoke in me the kind of negativity that the Whitney, not that many Biennials ago, decided was part of the territory, advertising that particular edition with the slogan “Love It, Hate It, Don’t Miss It”–based, I suppose, on the famously confrontational 1993 Biennial, which featured flat metal entry badges by Daniel Joseph Martinez that read, in whole or in part, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.” Martinez is among the established artists Whitney curators like to add each year to the mix of mostly younger and lesser-known artists on view. This year they’ve included one of his installations, Divine Violence. It consists of 125 painted memorial tablets, each with the name of an organization–like Al Qaeda, or somewhat more explosively, the CIA–dedicated to violence as a means to specific political goals. The panels, executed in gold-flake automobile paint, compose a kind of columbarium–a memorial to certain terrorist organizations, not all of which are, as we say, “history.” Does the format imply that they are destined to be history? The piece is ambiguous, but Martinez–whom I consider a friend–is a restlessly provocative activist artist who has stayed the course that nearly all of the Biennial-93-ards were on.

Thinking back on the Biennials I have seen since 1985, I cannot say that I have ever loved any of them. I cannot blame the artists, who make what they make. I expect that means the target of my loathing has really been the curators and their windy art-world prose. I don’t know the 2008 curators, but the show’s themelessness strikes me as successfully representative of the reality they were required to deal with. The art world is themeless today. It is heading in no direction to speak of. My guess is that Martinez embodies a direction many young curators–and some not so young–feel it should point to. But that is due to the chamber radicalism that continues to define art professionals as a class, dealing as it does with elitist matters.

I would not go so far as to say I liked the show, but I did like what I think of as the show’s mood. It reminded me of my first visit to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a gallery scene emerged in the 1990s concurrently with the gentrification of SoHo and the upscale art world’s colonization of Chelsea. Two German artists, Kirsten Roolfs and Wolfgang Petrick, had settled into Williamsburg and offered themselves as guides to the most interesting spaces. The art was not much, but compared with the messy art that I had encountered in the East Village in the mid ’80s, in the midst of the Neo-Expressionist bubble that everyone hoped (if they did not actually believe) was the miraculous return of Abstract Expressionism, it was thoughtful, even philosophical. What mainly impressed me, however, was the appearance, among the artists as well as the gallery personnel, of a new artistic culture: everyone wanted to be helpful; no one was in your face. I remember one gallery filled with colorful toy telephones, collected on the artist’s travels, presented as a single work. There was a spirit of play and innocence in every show I saw. Everyone was eager to please. Even the receptionists could not have been more receptive. I mentioned my observation to one of the gallery directors, who was not long out of college. “I guess,” he said, “that we all want to remain children down here.”

That remark captures the mood of the 2008 Biennial. I have to qualify this judgment, though, because on the fourth floor, just to the right of the elevator bank, I had a somewhat magical experience that may have colored the entirety of my visit. (In a way, it is unfair to include it in what means to be a review, since the likelihood of any of my readers having the same experience is almost nil.) There were four or five largish sculptures, the most interesting of which was an assemblage of urban fragments, mainly slabs of reinforced concrete and rebar, and a ragged piece of chain-link fencing. It was by Ruben Ochoa, born in 1974, who lives in Los Angeles. Reinforced concrete chunks make for a somewhat unusual medium, and it reminded me of the singular inappropriateness to today’s visual art of Clement Greenberg’s celebrated theory of medium specificity: each art must strive to determine and make work out of the essential qualities specific to its medium. How could an artist like Ochoa yield to such an injunction? Why should he?

I stopped at his piece An Ideal Disjuncture. It looks like bits of a wrecked building, picked over by the artist to make an ephemeral piece of art before it was all carted off to a landfill. As I was pondering its meaning, a troop of private school students, all girls, were led in by their teacher. They circled the piece and then, all in white blouses and black skirts, settled on the floor to discuss it. What could it be, and what was its meaning? Eavesdropping, I heard one of the girls answer that maybe it was a grasshopper. The teacher responded by repeating the word as a doubtful question: “A grasshopper?” I immediately saw what the girl meant: the chain-link fencing did look like a gauzy wing, the rebar like antennas, and another fragment took its place as the monumental insect’s thorax: a gigantic grasshopper made of urban detritus! What a lovely thought! It lifted my spirits immediately–here was art transfiguring commonplace junk into something rare and strange! And here was a young mind struggling to give form and meaning to unprepossessing matter. She somehow expressed the spirit of many of the artists in the show.

In the same gallery I saw Heather Rowe’s sculptures, which resemble sections of what one might call “housing starts”–beams supported by two-by-four studs, giving you the initial sense of a not-quite-finished partition. They mirror elements of the gallery’s architecture, but they’re not quite integrated into the rest of the space, and they’re ornamented in ways not altogether consistent with their being housing starts: Rowe has fitted the partition with odds and ends of Sheetrock, mirror fragments and scraps of shag carpet. So they occupy two worlds at once, contained and container–free-standing walls for the collector with plenty of space.

In the adjacent gallery were some attenuated sculptures by another Angelino, Charles Long, made from “scavenged river junk and silt, papier-mâché, and plaster over steel armatures,” which take their forms from blue herons’ droppings traced by the artist. They exemplify what the artist calls the “degraded sublime” and evoke Barnett Newman’s famous if mean-spirited 1952 put-down: aesthetics, in relationship to art, is, like ornithology, “for the birds.” The impulse, again, was to make art out of degraded matter, which struck me as promising to be something of a theme, given that so much of what I encountered was recycled vernacular material, made into art that sometimes bears affinities to paradigms of Modernist art–in the case of Long, according to the catalog text, “Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, or Theodore Roszak.” Art redeems nature at its basest.

It is in this spirit that another Californian, Jedediah Caesar, accumulated detritus from daily life–plywood scraps, pieces of paper and cloth, bottles and shards of china, worn garments–which he fused together with resin and cut into blocks. They are things of beauty, natural analogues to geodes or pieces of amber in which insects or bits of vegetable matter are encased. And they are artistic analogues to the sculptures of the Neo-Objectivist Arman, who made plastic replicas of objects from the real world–gears, for example, or pairs of glasses–and encased them in plastic. They are also something like the environments Louise Nevelson created out of discarded pieces of wood–spindles, paddles, finials, baseball bats–whose final form had a beauty that far surpassed that of the component parts.

Each of these scavenged pieces has some degree of craft, but there is also ready-made art worth considering. William E. Jones projects some found surveillance film, shot in 1962, of men fellating or masturbating one another in a public men’s room. It is unedited or barely edited found footage. In this respect, it is not unlike the Rodney King video that was shown in an earlier Biennial. Still, as Marcel Duchamp wrote in mock defense of his 1917 urinal under the name “R. Mutt,” Jones has “given a new thought” to footage originally made in the spirit of entrapment. As viewers, we are to infer the thought while watching men of an earlier era engage in somber furtive sex.

Huldisch’s catalog essay–Momin’s is unreadable–borrows its title from Samuel Beckett: “Lessness.” The subtitle is hers: “An Art of Smaller, Slower, and Less.” It is not a criticism of the art she and her colleague have found, but rather a characterization:

There is a sense of weariness of grand proclamations and braggadocio–a preference for the historical footnote, perhaps, rather than the totalizing story–that is unsurprising in an environment where, as of very recently, contemporary art no longer appears to have any enemies, and the oppositional gesture itself runs the risk of amounting to little more than a self-congratulatory pat on the back.

It sounds as if the artists compose a community of Prufrocks rather than of Lord Hamlets:

If we find ourselves in a scenario marked by the experience of loss, by doubt, or by a fundamental absence of certainty or meaning, it is not pessimism, detachment, or irony that defines the moment but persistence and belief–belief in staking out small areas of meaning and agency, however futile or absurd it may seem at times, and going on, for better rather than for worse.

This is well said and wise. It is not quite true of the established artists she and her colleague have selected, however: Matt Mullican constructs whole cosmologies; the late Jason Rhoades, featured on the ground floor, sought to fill all the space he could get with less than ideal disjunctions of disparate things and substances, in praise of impossible lubricities. And perhaps the work Huldisch and Momin encountered dates the larger-than-life productions of artists whose work is the cynosure of billionaire collectors, themselves out of phase with the times. Perhaps the “smaller, slower, lesser” art the curators have assembled explains why their show is finally so likable–or so unhateable–and how it may, in the end, even point a direction for the nation in its present straitened state, with a shambled economy and exhausted armies. Where our art stands today is not a bad way to think of where America might stand tomorrow: smaller, slower, lesser, with freedom and justice for all. Hey–it’s time for a change!

I had never, until quite recently, been able to work up much enthusiasm for Nicholas Poussin’s art, despite the fact that friends whose judgment I respect–David Carrier and the late Richard Wollheim, philosophers and art critics both–have esteemed no artist more highly. A few months ago, however, an invitation arrived to the press opening of an exhibition of Poussin’s landscapes, and it featured a reproduction of one of his late paintings, which struck me as so beautiful that I fell in love with it immediately–like Tamino with the portrait of Pamina in The Magic Flute. What could I have been using for eyes? The beauty was immediate and global. Nothing in the painting compelled me to love it, though its depiction of an immense field of golden grain illuminated by a dramatic sky was at once luminous and breathless. When I looked more closely, I found details that put me off, but they somehow didn’t diminish the work’s beauty.

Poussin, who died in 1665, is viewed as a difficult artist, mostly because of the dense screen of allusions that falls like a cataract between viewer and painting. How can one respond to his work without mastering the specialized literature on his sources, artistic and intellectual, and his subtexts? Recently, T.J. Clark, a formidable theorist of art, looked hard and long at two Poussins that were at the Getty when he was a resident fellow there, just to see what meanings the paintings alone might yield without benefit of scholarly glosses. The paintings, both of which are included, together with the one that so moved me, in the great exhibition “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (until May 11), pretty much declare their meaning at once. Poussin shared an impressive literary culture with his French and Roman patrons, yet to repeat Clark’s experiment and scan Landscape With a Calm and Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake for stubborn disclosures really obscures the experience, not to mention the pleasure, of looking at them. In Landscape With a Calm, a spirited horse is barreling out of a barn. Certain scholars cite Plato’s Phaedrus, in which the horse is a metaphor for the human soul, as a key to the painting. But why think there’s more than meets the eye here–an achingly beautiful day, in which life just goes peacefully on? Since Plato, in fact, spoke of two horses, isn’t there a problem of the missing horse in Poussin? If the horse stands for the soul, what do other things in the painting denote? There is a pendant to Landscape With a Calm, namely Landscape With a Storm, and it has no deeper message than what’s proffered by a boilerplate newspaper editorial after some fierce storm: we can’t take Mother Nature for granted. The sweetness of life under calm skies is certain to give way to thunderheads and high winds.

The painting that so moved me, that made me feel I must see it no matter what else I saw this season, is a set piece about summer in the Four Seasons, from late in Poussin’s career. Each season is a setting for a scene from the Old Testament. All four works are in the Louvre, Louis XIV having won them in a tennis match, but only Summer and Spring were, for physical reasons, able to travel to the Met. Autumn shows two men carrying an immense bunch of grapes meant to emblematize Canaan as the Promised Land. The grapes are as big as pumpkins, and hang from a stick like a slain boar. I still remember one of my children saying, “Surrealism, right, Dad?” during one of our ambles through the Louvre years ago. I was interested to learn from the catalog that Winter–a scene of people struggling in a deluge–was among the few paintings admired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a painting that must have left me cold, since I have no recollection of having seen it. Spring shows Adam and Eve in Paradise, and Summer shows Ruth and Boaz in what might be a duet, centered in an expansive and receding field of ripe grain; in the far distance are a castle surrounded by outbuildings, a mountain and backlit clouds in a dramatic sky.

Ruth and Boaz are not alone. A kind of three-way interchange is taking place between Boaz and (as the biblical text says) an overseer explaining to Boaz who Ruth is and why she’s there. Ruth is the daughter-in-law of Naomi, a distant relative of Boaz’s, and she had requested permission to glean in Boaz’s fields. She is now kneeling, in supplication and gratitude, while Boaz welcomes her, pointing to some reapers to indicate that she can glean next to them. On the ground, next to Ruth, are her earlier gleanings. The main figures are small relative to the dimensions of the canvas, which contributes to the expansiveness of the scene. If the three main figures were removed, the picture would be a harvest scene, more austere and tranquil than The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, one of the Met’s treasures. Were they removed, there would be no story, but everything else would remain the same.

Consider the women at the left of the picture, preparing a meal under the shade of a massive oak tree. In the biblical story, Boaz tells Ruth that she can partake of the repast with the others. The gesture indicates Boaz’s gratefulness to Ruth for her goodness to Naomi, whom she has followed to Judea rather than returning to her own people. If the main characters were taken away, the kitchen crew would still have a place in the picture: after all, harvesters have to be fed. There would still be puzzles in the picture, like why Poussin has placed a quadriga–a team of four prancing horses–in the upper right. A quadriga usually draws a chariot with a personage of high rank, such as an emperor. These horses are too fine for agricultural drudgery. Maybe Poussin wanted to show that Boaz was so rich that he could use racehorses to pull farm wagons. It’s either a joke or an unlikely mistake.

But when I think of removing Ruth and Boaz–and perhaps the overseer–from the painting, I have in mind a puzzle of a different order. Ruth seems to me appallingly painted, as if by some journeyman artist: her hands are too large, her facial expression unconvincing; and Boaz’s feet seem inexplicably huge. Compare them with the masterful way the great oak tree is rendered, leaf by leaf by leaf, or the wheat, stalk by stalk, grain by grain, as far into the distance as the eye can make out. I don’t know what sort of workshop Poussin ran, but painting in the oak leaves and wheat stalks would seem to be a task one might relegate to studio assistants. That would certainly not be true of Ruth, one of the most important figures in the composition. Poussin said of himself, in accounting for his high achievement, “Je n’ai rien négligé” (“I have overlooked nothing”). One might speculate that it was due to palsy, since at the time Poussin painted the Four Seasons, his hands shook uncontrollably, making it harder and harder for him to paint. Summer is still a beautiful painting, though in candor it would be more beautiful without the biblical couple, since Ruth’s awkwardness jars. In a famous essay on Poussin, William Hazlitt wrote, “the faces of Poussin want natural expression, as his figures want grace; but the backgrounds of his historical compositions can scarcely be surpassed.” It appears that the problem with the figures in these last great landscapes is, as it were, a signature eccentricity. They seem like Mannerist figures, whereas in the early 1660s, when they were painted, Rome, where Poussin lived, was in the High Baroque. Their awkwardness is willed.

Still, Ruth looks positively robust in contrast with the Eve in Spring, which shows Adam and his companion in the middle of a Paradise full of marvelous trees, including the fateful tree with fruit that would impart the knowledge of good and evil. Eve excitedly points at the apple as she places her right hand on Adam’s arm, unaware that God is hovering among the clouds. Again, the figures are relatively small amid the luxuriant foliage. Adam and Eve are as naked as worms, a state they will soon be ashamed of. Their crude nakedness is a witty touch, but in the great cavalcade of Adam and Eves–by Dürer, Cranach, Tintoretto, Michelangelo–
Poussin’s seem puny, boneless and weak. If they were removed, the painting would have been magnificent. As it is, the painting offers a collision in taste. Accepting Poussin’s small figures is the price one pays for the magnificence of his mise-en-scène. Or it may just be the case that Nature is the main character, with the humans placed here and there to amplify through their weakness a world that could rid itself of them–of us–with a shudder and a blast. Think of the Flood, in which God gave up on humanity. All but Noah–who ended up a drunken lout in the last scene Michelangelo painted on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, showing that even the best of men were a bad lot–were proof that humanity could be redeemed only by desperate measures.

I’ve always been unsure of how Poussin fit into the Baroque art of the Counter-Reformation, with its depictions of torture and martyrdom mandated by the Council of Trent. The strategy was to strengthen faith by enlisting human compassion for what Jesus and the suffering saints endured so that humanity would be saved. I once saw a painting Poussin had done for the basilica of St. Peter, early in his Roman sojourn. It is, unhappily, unforgettable: its subject is the martyrdom of St. Erasmus, which consisted of public disembowelment. The Mannerist human body was svelte and elegant: it was important that figures look good in clothes. But Baroque figures were muscular and as naked as taste would allow, in order to writhe heroically under torture for their faith. As the sinewy body of Erasmus in The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus shows, Poussin was entirely capable of this. Even Bernini praised the work. But Poussin’s heart was elsewhere, and he turned to landscapes, painted for a group of patrons, mainly French, that expressed an agenda entirely different from the flayings, grillings, amputations and corresponding miracles that animated the painting and sculpture of the Roman Baroque. Poussin’s taste was more literary and classical, and his temper more intellectual and poetic than that enjoined by the Council of Trent. Instead of arousing powerful feelings of pity for the sufferings of holy personages, Poussin’s paintings were intended to inspire detachment and Stoic fortitude.

The world’s beauty is correlative with its dangers–floods, eruptions and earthquakes, with death ever lurking, even in Arcadia, as Poussin’s most famous painting, Et in Arcadia Ego, shows. (It’s not in the exhibition, though Arcadian Shepherds, from the Chatsworth Collection, is.) In it, shepherds are scrutinizing the meaning of an inscription carved into a tombstone–“I too am in Arcadia”–a little reminder that even shepherds in a rustic refuge will die. I would surmise that the snakes that come from nowhere and take us unawares in Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake are meant to reinforce the same Stoic message. In the foreground of the painting a man has been crushed by a powerful serpent at the edge of a stream, and is now being eaten by it. A second man, who has seen the horror, is running away, while a woman with a bundle of washing extends her arms as if to ask the fleeing man what is wrong. The question of the crushed man’s identity is less important than the recognition that the snake could have crushed anyone. The woman could have been at the water’s edge, doing the laundry, when the snake struck. In the middle distance, some men are in a boat, unaware of the foreground ruckus. As one’s eyes move toward the horizon, they fall under the spell of the beauty and tranquillity of the landscape. The news will spread; soon the people in the distant city will be discussing it. The painting incorporates the two faces of reality that define Poussin’s world, and ours: beautiful and fatal.

Next to Summer, my favorite painting in the show is the Met’s own Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun. Orion, a giant made blind in punishment for having attempted to violate a queen, was told by an oracle that he would be cured by the sun. The giant, carrying a bow and arrows that in his present condition do him little good, is shown at the extreme right of the canvas, as if he is disoriented. A person sits on Orion’s shoulders, giving him directions–“A bit to the right, now straight ahead”–as the giant plods toward the east and the rising sun. The sky is filled with dark clouds, though, as if to prevent him from “seeing the light.” Orion was evidently not a subject frequently shown, so it’s difficult to know what Poussin’s sources were, if he had any. I think it is a very deep idea, and I shall be flagrantly anachronistic in seeking an interpretation.

Recently, British sculptor Antony Gormley exhibited a singular work at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City. Called Blind Light, it consists of a large square enclosure with a single opening. The enclosure is filled with a manufactured fog made by water particles shot into it through nozzles. One enters the fog and, without penetrating the space to any distance, can no longer locate oneself. One cannot even see one’s feet. There is a slightly terrifying feeling of disorientation. In a commentary on this work, the poet Susan Stewart invokes a late text of Immanuel Kant, What Is Orientation in Thinking? “To orientate oneself,” Kant writes, “in the proper sense of the word, means to use a given direction–and we divide the horizon into four of these–in order to find the others, and in particular that of sunrise.” As I see it, if we find the sunrise, we know where east is, and from that point on we refer to our body to know where west is. North is left, south is right. Our conception of space is constructed with reference to our body. Once Orion sees the sun, he knows how to situate himself. Kant is so unrelentingly abstract in his writing that it’s a discovery of sorts to find a work like Blind Orion to be a magnificent illustration of Kant’s idea of what it means to be lost and to find one’s way. It’s a surprise to realize how central the body is in Kant’s philosophy, but what he based his view on, everybody knows: find the sun, and everything falls into place relative to left and right, up and down, front and back. Indeed, by locating the sun in Blind Orion through Kant, I am, in the end, no different from Poussin’s commentators. It is, evidently, impossible just to look.

When the new MoMA building opened in 2004, one of its many peculiar features was a sixty-foot-tall atrium space rising from its second floor. It was thought of as an “indoor sculpture garden,” but it really served two functions: to be a piazza where those who survived the ticket lines could gather and gab, and to be a display space for some of MoMA’s largest pieces, including Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk and, against its east wall, one of Monet’s Water Lilies paintings. The space was designed so that visitors could look down on these works at sharper and sharper angles from each of the five gallery levels and, vertiginously, from an opening in the floor of the sixth level–a grand view to a space disposed only to demoralize whatever art was placed there.

At the new building’s opening, the atrium’s height–a mere eight inches lower than the Sistine Chapel–famously reduced Monet’s canvas to a shriveled painted rag. Since then, the atrium has given temporary residence to works by various artists that, while strong enough to hold the wall in most other spaces, are here somehow dwarfed by the weight of all that emptiness above them. One cannot but recall the dread with which the thought of infinite spaces filled Blaise Pascal. Quite the most exciting feature of the current MoMA retrospective exhibition of American sculptor Martin Puryear (on view through January 14) is the way he has used the unprecedented opportunity of having the entire atrium to himself to infuse bare height with meaningfulness and to turn this shaft of hostile emptiness into something aesthetically breathtaking.

The bulk of the show consists of about fifty works, from the mid-1970s to the present, artfully distributed to give each piece the room it needs. The main components of the atrium installation are built to a scale substantially larger than Puryear’s typical pieces and in a way that does not diminish but rather glorifies their virtues–craft, beauty, intelligence, invention, wit, depth, meaning and a spirit of lightness. Much of what Puryear made before the ’70s was destroyed in a studio fire, and everything he has made since fuses an unmistakably modernist vision with anthropological references to what one might call the aesthetics of everyday life in black Africa. Puryear, an African-American, spent time in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone in the ’60s. His materials, in the works on the sixth floor and in the atrium, are characteristically wood and fiber; but more than that, he makes a sophisticated use of what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls bricolage (“improvisation”) in his masterpiece, La Pensée sauvage. Like Robinson Crusoe, Puryear appropriates whatever objects come to hand.

The whole second floor of MoMA, including the atrium, was planned for and built in a misled effort to anticipate the future history of modern art, which MoMA’s curators believed was bent on the creation of ever larger works. That view was widely shared, though it has not exactly been borne out in the radical pluralism of twenty-first-century art, which comes in all sizes, including no size at all. It was also the justification for converting a complex of vacated factory buildings in North Adams, Massachusetts, into the huge gallery spaces of MASS MoCA, which had the benign consequence of turning a decaying mill town into the home of “America’s largest contemporary art center” (as the museum’s website puts it) in 1999. It had been the vision of curator Thomas Krens too, and it earned him the directorship of the Guggenheim Foundation in New York, which he has held since 1988. Krens found even greater success with essentially the same vision in Bilbao, where, with help from architect Frank Gehry, he transformed the drab industrial Basque city into a site of global aesthetic pilgrimage. Guggenheim Bilbao came equipped with an interior as capacious as a hangar and fulfilled its destiny with an exhibition of Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses in 2005–“Surely one of the most wonderful exhibitions of [Serra’s] work,” according to MoMA curator Kynaston McShine. So electrifying was Krens’s formula that I once heard a poignant lecture by an Ecuadorean curator asking whether a “Bilbao effect” was possible for Quito. The difference between the Guggenheim Bilbao and New York’s Museum of Modern Art is not just the difference between New York and Bilbao, however. It is that Bilbao has no collection to speak of, whereas MoMA’s collection has been traditionally committed to a philosophy of art history that presupposes an evolving canon, and hence an obligation that its architecture be able to hold the gigantesque works that the unfolding spirit of modernism was believed to promise.

In terms of MoMA’s collection, this more or less meant Richard Serra. The augmented galleries of the second floor seemed to have been created just for him. During his recent retrospective at the museum, three of his giant, multi-ton sculptures were raised to the second floor, which had been massively reinforced to keep them from crashing through. And yet no one asked what the aesthetic payoff was of lifting them from ground level–which seems, in Aristotelian terms, to be their natural entelechy–and transporting them one story up, in defiance of gravity, to the second-floor spaces surrounding the atrium. (They weren’t put in the atrium. Even Serra’s Band and Sequence would have been stunted by the immensity of the space, though in fairness, there are works of his that might have risen to the occasion.)

The result of the second-floor installation was a feeling of claustrophobia. “The space has no side entrances or exits,” Serra said in an interview. “If you want to experience the entire installation you have to walk the length of the space and back, but there is no prescribed way of seeing those pieces.” They all but touched the ceiling. Here is how Serra conceived the installation:

I decided to work out a coherent installation that would be representative of the body of work I’d done in the past seven or eight years. To bring that work together in one place would enable anyone going there to understand its evolution. Without knowing anything about sculpture you understand that the single and double ellipse, the spirals and the piece made up of torus and sphere sections share a language and a syntax. You become the reader of that language in your bodily movement. You can go anywhere you want, but…you are within the volume not only of the encapsulating architecture but of the field that unfolds as sculpture. The entire field becomes one of sculpture as you’re spun into and out of the different pieces.

Critics celebrated the shift from the visual to the bodily in experiencing Serra’s art, but what in fact was dramatic was the way he incorporated the compressed space of those galleries into his work, making space and sculpture a seamless totality. Now Puryear has achieved the same effect in the atrium, joining the architecture of the room with the objects within it.

There are three main pieces in Puryear’s installation, two of which particularly account for its success. One of them, nobly titled Ad Astra (2006) and made for this exhibition, consists of a sixty-three-foot-long sapling held in a base on caisson wheels. Exceeding the atrium’s height, the sapling is tilted, augmenting the impression that the ceiling is too low to hold it. The other vertical piece is Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), a thirty-five-foot ladder hung high against the west wall, so that its bottom rung is about ten feet above the floor. In contrast with Serra’s installation, meant to force upon the viewer a heightened bodily consciousness, here the body–stationary, gazing upward–is only involved in terms of scale. When I saw the show, the upper part of the atrium was in shadow, which engulfed the top parts of the ladder and the sapling, making it difficult to determine, by eyesight alone, whether the latter’s length has been added to or not. (It has.)

Ladder for Booker T. Washington, on loan from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is one of Puryear’s iconic pieces. The bottom rung is about two feet wide, while the top is, at most, a few inches wide. There are about a hundred rungs in all, set at roughly graduated intervals and designed to create the illusion of a vanishing point at the top. There is something organic about the work, an effect enhanced by the fact that the ladder’s uprights are wavy lengths of a single split ash trunk. It wiggles upward, like a runged serpent, against the wall. There is also something vaguely ghostly about the ladder as a whole, which seems to have been bleached or given a coat of whitish paint. Ladders are, of course, natural metaphors for human or spiritual ascent–or in the case of Booker T. Washington, of the ascent of African-Americans in society–step by step up narrower and narrower rungs. Puryear’s piece is like an abstract biography of Washington–whose journey, as described in his actual biography, grew more and more difficult–made vivid by the imagined ordeal of placing a foot on rungs that grow ever tinier and more precarious as one approaches the top. Suspended as it is from high on the wall, the ladder suggests how difficult it would be to put a foot on even the lowest rung.

Ad Astra plays a similar game; in its case, the irony is located in its heroic Latin title. The two pieces together express desire and hope. David Levi Strauss, a Brooklyn Rail editor, suggested in conversation with Puryear that the caisson gives Ad Astra a military aura, indicating that its role is to carry artillery shells. But for me, it brought to mind a phrase from a book by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?–a question he answers by saying, somewhat cryptically, that life is an aperiodic crystal. In fact, the base has just that form–its facets have different shapes, though they are composed of beautifully joined lengths of wood, screwed together with the authority of a master carpenter. That made it difficult for me to think of Ad Astra as associated with field artillery. Its wheels, in any case, are like those from the wagons of the Franco-Prussian War. But Puryear’s works do not dictate meaning; his titles, rarely as specific as Ladder, merely prompt the imagination. For me, Ad Astra is not so much a military installation as either a crude movable monument to life, wheeled into ceremonies by a tribe that practices phallus worship, or a push toy for a baby giant.

It is more than monumental–it is a monument. It reaches for the stars, expresses desire and–formalistically speaking–collaborates with Ladder to measure the height of the atrium, subduing the architectural oppressiveness of space upon art. The idea of a movable monument is also supported by a marvelous piece in the main exhibition called C.F.A.O. (2006-7), which consists of a cast of a giant African mask placed in an arbor fashioned from kindling perched, perilously, in or on an old-fashioned wooden wheelbarrow. C.F.A.O., which takes its name from the initials of a French trading company in Africa (Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale), could be a protest against the appropriation of cultural properties that also has the last laugh. At least moving what looks like an immense African mask on a primitive French wheelbarrow strikes me as pretty funny.

The title of the remaining large atrium sculpture is Desire (1981), licensing the thought that the three pieces are, in the aggregate, a tribute to yearning. A gift from Count Panza di Biumo, whose collection of Minimalist art is widely acknowledged as unparalleled, Desire was installed until recently in an eighteenth-century villa in the Italian province of Varese. Measuring thirty-two feet across, it consists of a single wheel of much larger circumference than those in Ad Astra, joined to an inverted conical basketlike object with a long horizontal pole. Weaving and basketry are signature Puryear features, perhaps inspired by the tools used by the people Puryear lived with in Sierra Leone–nets, cages, coops and traps. (On the back wall of the atrium hangs a work from the mid-’70s, when Puryear’s art took on the look of African tools and utensils, called Some Tales [1975-78]: yellow pine, ash and hickory carved into a long saw blade and what look like curvy sticks.) Desire has the appearance of one of those primitive grinding devices in which an ox or a horse is tied to a pole and walks in a circle around a rotating upright. What the object of desire might be is not obvious. Perhaps the wheel makes it easier for a person to apply energy to the device–not as easy as an ox would make it! But that is just an uninspired guess. The word “desire,” like the titles Ad Astra and Ladder for Booker T. Washington, slows the viewer down, causing us to play with plausible theories of any given work.

The allusions throughout this great show are too numerous, too arch, too knowing and too smart for me to spoil the fun. Once in a while, an artist appears whose work has high meaning and great craft but, most important, embodies what Kant, in the dense, sparse pages in which he advances his theory of art, called Spirit. “We say of certain products of which we expect that they should at least in part appear as beautiful art, they are without spirit, though we find nothing to blame in them on the score of taste,” Kant wrote. I’d like to revive the term for critical discourse. Not a single piece here is without spirit, which is in part what makes this exhibition almost uniquely exhilarating.

While there is little question that photography is the central medium in Jeff Wall’s arresting works, one would hardly consider him a photographer. For one thing, he makes use of certain strategies that derive from cinema, so that he describes his typical works explicitly as cinematographic, rather than documentary, photographs. For another, though the characters, as we may call the men and women he photographs, clearly belong to the same world his viewers do, their formal relationships to one another seem based on conventions of painting, especially nineteenth-century French painting. It is as if twenty-first-century men and women, wearing jeans and T-shirts and living in twenty-first-century rooms, are enacting, in tableaux vivants, scenes as they might have been composed by Degas or Manet. Wall, whose traveling retrospective was recently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is an art historian as well as an artist, who has been a painter, a photographer and a filmmaker. He is also steeped in contemporary theory, though it is not necessary either to know his history or to interpret his works in light of the theories that underpin them. Still, one cannot penetrate very deeply into an exhibition of his work without realizing that some more complex aesthetics are involved than apply to the separate media he brings together in constructing his images. In this respect, his art is very much of the present moment, not only in subject but in mode of representation.

Let’s consider the first work in the show (which reopens at the Art Institute of Chicago at the end of June), The Destroyed Room, roughly the size of a small billboard, and done in 1978. As a cinematographic photograph, it is intended to imply an interpretive narrative, by contrast with a “documentary photograph,” which records an independent reality. The room itself is entirely banal, in décor as well as cheap furniture–a chest of drawers, a bed and a bamboo table or chair. There is no ornamentation–no moldings, for example–and the walls are painted in the kind of color a paint manufacturer might call “fiesta red.” But the door is off its hinges, the curtain rods hang diagonally across the single square window. The floor is strewn with costume jewelry as well as shoes and garments that are clearly feminine. There are no “personal touches” like pictures or posters on the wall, apart from the figurine of a female dancer on the bureau, left undisturbed. The person symbolically expressed by the room is feminine, and the destruction is definitely the symbolic expression of a very different self, who has committed an act of aggression against the room’s tenant. It is not the outcome of a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a hurricane. The drawers have been pulled out, the mattress has been slashed, the garments have been flung, the bamboo chair or table has been smashed. The room has either been searched by spies or police who wanted the returning tenant to know that they had been there–or destroyed in an act of rage or frustration by an angry lover.

All these conjectures have to be put in parentheses when we realize that the photograph does not document an actual episode. It is a theater or, more likely, a movie set, fabricated to represent a scene of violent disarray. It is filled with signs of deliberate artificiality; indeed, artificiality is part of the work’s content. The Destroyed Room may look like a forensic shot, but in fact it merely mimics one. One quickly realizes that the artist has brought together various articles from daily life and composed them deliberately to look like the result of willed mayhem. It is a “destroyed room” only insofar as it makes us believe it is one. It tells the kind of story that a movie would tell. It mocks the somewhat discredited genre of “staged photography.”

Staged photography grew out of the polemical dialogue between photography and painting that continued well into our time. In 1839 the painter Paul Delaroche, learning that Louis Daguerre had invented a way of preserving photographic images on metal plates, declared that painting was dead. What was the point of learning manually to copy reality through drawing or painting when a perfect reproduction could now be achieved by mechanical means that anyone could master? Defending their suddenly embattled medium, painters replied that photographs could only reproduce the world passively, whereas paintings are uniquely able to show invented scenes and sights, through acts of creative imagination. Before long, however, photographers proved that they too could show imaginary events. The Victorian photographer Henry Peach Robinson used human models to enact sentimental scenes that he then photographed to create salon-type images in such cloying works as Fading Away, in which a young girl is shown dying in the presence of grieving family members. Robinson ought, Wall argues, to have used the best paintings of his day–by Degas, for example–instead of the “salon trash” he actually travestied. Film showed a way in which staged photography could be revived that would enable the photographer to create his or her own “perfect moment” instead of stalking the world in the hope that such a moment would materialize. Wall describes the quest that led to The Destroyed Room in an interview with James Rondeau included in the exhibition catalogue:

I had the feeling that it was possible to bring much of what I’d liked in the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s together with what I’d always liked about painting in a form of photography that, whatever faults it might have, would not start out accepting the existing canon. That was an intuition born out of seven or eight years of struggle, intellectual, emotional, artistic struggle, when I couldn’t find my own way and went through periods of real desperation.

I’d like to stress how decisively against the grain of Clement Greenberg’s characterization of the Modernist agenda this is. Greenberg contended that each of the arts should protect the boundaries of its medium, and exclude anything that belonged by rights to a different medium. Wall violated the boundaries of several different media (painting, photography and cinema) and even went back into the early Modernist painting of the nineteenth century–in order to find what he needed to address the subjects that concerned him. It is this, in my view, that makes him, along with William Kentridge, one of the paradigmatic artists of our age.

There is one further component in Wall’s fusion of heterogeneous media. It consists in a borrowing from commercial display art the kind of photograph we know from the glass-enclosed posters mounted on the sides of bus shelters. This recommended itself to him for two reasons–size and luminosity. The medium that enabled him to realize the large photographic works that define his vision is the color transparency, illuminated from behind by fluorescent bulbs. The translucency inherent in the nature of slide film enabled Wall to achieve a luminosity the old masters could only dream of.

This technique enabled him, in fact, to make works reminiscent of projected images familiar to us from art history lectures. Wall cannot but be aware, as an art historian, of the discrepancy between the magic lantern effect of slides shown in darkened rooms and the relatively drab surfaces of pigmented cloth, however highly varnished, on museum walls. Since Wall worked closely with MoMA curator of photography Peter Galassi to select the show, The Destroyed Room, as the earliest of his works to have been included, must have been the first or among the first works he regarded as successful in incorporating his demanding aesthetic. It was originally shown in the display window of an art gallery, transformed into a kind of light box, in Wall’s native city, Vancouver, where he still lives. There, passersby, completely ignorant of the theories that went into the work, would be able to give themselves over to interpreting the image seen through window glass. My sense–I can only speculate–is that they saw it, as I do, in terms of violence and transgressed privacy. The weight of abstract theory falls away, leaving a set of entirely human meanings, accessible to ordinary men and women witnessing, in a shop window, the cluttered spectacle of personal space invaded. The frilled intimate garments spilled out of rifled bureau drawers convey, immediately, the feeling of personal vulnerability. I would hate to think that the immediate response was that what the photograph showed was merely staged.

Later, Wall would use portable metal light boxes that, thanks to their scale and the intensity of their illumination, create an effect not unlike dioramas in the Museum of Natural History–only the re-enacted scenes are of human life. Interestingly, especially in the earlier pieces, the fraught concept of home and shelter plays a central role. An Eviction (1988/2004) shows just that: a man forcibly hustled out of his house by sheriffs, as a woman runs out of the house, her arms extended toward the struggling trio. The drama is seen from a distance, perhaps through a window on the second floor of a house down the block on the other side of the street in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, around noon on a sunny day in midsummer, with cars parked here and there and the neighbors going about their business. The tiny figures have the seeming defenselessness of snails removed from their shells. In Milk (1984), a homeless man, bearded and sockless, sits on the sidewalk, his back (literally) to a brick-faced wall, his jaw clenched, holding a container of milk in a paper sack with such tension that the milk is squeezed up and out in an angry, ejaculatory spurt.

There is not a lot to say about these simulated events. They speak for themselves. The couple under eviction is about to lose a home, the frustrated derelict has already lost his. Their worlds are empty and pitiless. In Doorpusher (1984) a man, shown from above, is pushing lethargically against a door. The window is boarded up, or perhaps covered in cardboard. He is, one supposes, looking for shelter, without much hope or conviction. In Trân Dúc Ván, a Vietnamese man leans against a tree, looking upward, next to a faceless wall, while a middle-aged woman walks past him, paying no heed. His homelessness is more diffuse, and more hopeless. In another work, The Storyteller (1986), a foreign-looking man sits alone on some rocks on an embankment in the shadow of an overpass, while at a distance a couple relaxes at the edge of the woods and a man sits on the ground, talking to two young people by a flickering bonfire. It is no Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The isolated seated figure is excluded from the spell of the story.

Wittgenstein imagined a book called The World as I Found It and wondered, philosophically, how it would describe the presence of the self in that world. The World as I Found It would be a good title for Wall’s work, since he is really present everywhere in it. For all his immersion in structuralist and poststructuralist theory, one feels–at least I do–that what he was searching for was a way of showing the world as he found it. No single existing medium would have done the trick. But he did not document the world, though some of his work, his so-called documentary photographs, certainly does that. For the cinematographic photographs, he created models of aspects of the world he found, and then photographed those. He was producer, director, writer, best boy and cameraman, who also handled the lighting and cast the actors and found the props and did the editing. He was in this respect like Cindy Sherman, though he rarely photographed himself. He didn’t need to. The world he shows is his vision objectified, even if he is literally outside it, as in a scene with well-behaved boys and girls at a birthday party, A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947, done in 1990 of something that would have taken place when he was barely a year old. The title is like one by Diane Arbus. Or the astonishing Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), done in 1992–a cinematographic photograph if ever there was one, in which, expert viewers will note, he takes advantage of digital montage.

The immense liberation granted by cinematographic photography is that it opens room for showing the imaginary as if it were real, which is what staged photography promised at its inception. One does not even require the artifice so palpable in The Destroyed Room, or the staginess of An Eviction or Doorpusher. One gives oneself license to create sets for photographs, the titles of which refer to scenes from famous novels, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow. These are often referred to as “illustrations” in the critical literature on Wall, but they are really stills from unmade movies, or movies one would have made only for the sake of the stills.

Somehow, my favorite work in the show is Restoration (1993). It is situated inside a panoramic diorama, in Lucerne. The panorama depicts French soldiers who have taken refuge in Switzerland at the time of the Franco-Prussian War. Wall’s extremely elongated image shows some restorers on a scaffolding. One of them is pasting scraps of paper on the surface of the curved painting, between, as it were, the world of the restorers in 1993 and the world of the exhausted troops in 1871. A pensive woman, standing on the scaffold, holding a pencil, daydreams in front of the soldiers filing through the snow, just where, in the photograph, it becomes impossible to distinguish what is indoors and outdoors, past and present, living and dead, art and life. She could stand for the artist himself, with the diorama representing the world as he found it. For what it is worth, Daguerre helped invent the diorama more than a decade before he invented photography.

On September 24, 1845, John Ruskin wrote an unguardedly rapturous letter to his father from Venice, describing the momentous impact onhim of the paintings he had seen earlier that day by Jacopo Tintoretto, at the Scuola di San Rocco:

I have had a draught of pictures today enough to drown me. I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today, before Tintoret. Just be so good as to take my list of painters, & put him in the school of Art at the top, top, top of everything, with a great big black line underneath him to stop him off from everybody–and put him in the school of Intellect, next after Michael Angelo. He took it so entirely out of me today that I could do nothing at last but lie on a bench & laugh…. M Angelo himself cannot hurl figures into space as he does, nor did M Angelo ever paint space itself which would not look like a nutshell beside Tintoret’s.

Tintoretto is hardly a household name, and it certainly holds little of the aura that Ruskin’s effusive language implies, especially not in comparison with that of Michelangelo. Part of the reason is that most of Tintoretto’s work is permanently installed on the walls and ceilings of Venice, where the artist spent his entire life. That is why no one would have been able to form much of a picture of his staggering artistic achievement unless they had spent some time in Venice. “I had always thought him a good & clever & forcible painter,” Ruskin wrote, “but I had not the smallest notion of his enormous powers…. It is marvelously lucky I came here, or I might have disgraced myself for ever by speaking slightly of Tintoret. I look upon him now, though as a less perfect painter, yet as a far greater man than Titian.” But Titian and Michelangelo, along with Leonardo and Raphael, are widely considered the first-magnitude stars of Italian art. Who other than Ruskin would have placed Tintoretto among or even above them?

One difficulty is that Tintoretto has no pivotal place in the grand art-historical narratives most of us carry with us when we visit museums. He was, unlike his fellow Venetian, Titian, not really part of the Renaissance; he belonged instead to the Mannerist era–a period still dimly understood–that came just after it, and that Tintoretto helped shape. Consider, for example, the Annunciation in San Rocco, which especially moved Ruskin. In Renaissance painting, the annunciate Virgin is depicted as receiving in sweet resignation the news of her tremendous fate, from an angel who acknowledges her purity by kneeling in her presence. That is how Fra Angelico, for example, painted the hushed scene. Tintoretto’s, by contrast, is pure noisy wildness, as the angel sweeps into the Virgin’s space with the force and clatter of a compact tornado. Ruskin’s description matches its intensity:

Not in the meek reception of the adoring messenger, but startled by the rush of his horizontal and rattling wings, the Virgin sits…not by the green pasture of the restored soul, but houseless, under the shelter of a palace vestibule ruined and abandoned, with the noise of the axe and the hammer in her ears, and the tumult of a city round about her desolation.

Nothing in Renaissance art would have prepared anyone for a work like this. No one in Italy would have imagined setting Mary in the midst of an urban ruin, of exposed brick and crumbling stucco, emblematizing a fallen world, with the messenger implicitly having to shout his message in order to be heard above the ruckus of his entry. Work after work in Tintoretto’s decorative program for the Scuola, which bears comparison in every respect with that of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, reinvents and refreshes stories that everyone in Venice knew, crowding them with details that amplify the joys and sufferings that had perhaps lost their edge through over-representation. Ruskin draws attention to the presence, within sight of the agony on the cross, of “an ass in the distance, feeding on the remains of strewed palm leaves.” When Auden wrote “About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters,” he was thinking of the Mannerists.

Tintoretto addresses each motif as if it had never been painted before. Yet for all his inventiveness, his unbridled fantasy and the fierce energy of his execution, he does not really anticipate the Baroque style, which emerged after his death. His work has an eccentricity and the arcane sophistication that is the signature of Mannerism. The purpose of Baroque was to restore faith and counter the Reformation. None of that belonged to the Mannerist agenda.

All this may help explain why there has not been a monograph exhibition of Tintoretto’s work since 1937, held at the Palazzo Pasaro in Venice–the one city in the world that has no need for such a show, because of its near monopoly of his prodigious output. A show of his work elsewhere seemed neither practical nor imperative. So the kind of experience Ruskin underwent has been among the unanticipated rewards of a trip to Venice. One of the main contributions of the inspired exhibition of his work at the Museo del Prado in Madrid (until May 13) is that it makes it clear that Tintoretto really is as exciting as Ruskin made him sound. It is a beautiful and unforgettable show, and a reason to visit Madrid this spring, in case you needed a reason.

The exhibition is installed in the long central gallery of the Prado’s upper floor, temporarily divided into a succession of spaces, each given over to a stage in the artist’s unfolding career. It is not a dauntingly large show but a selective one, with each painting given enough space so that one can, without exhaustion, look deeply at the work in each of the galleries. Just before entering the first of the spaces, we are confronted by a small, intense self-portrait of Tintoretto as a young man, in which the artist turns his head toward us. He looks as if distracted from a dream by our presence. In truth, of course, Tintoretto would have been studying his own features when he painted it, and there would have been no room in his field of sight for anything but himself. We thus see him as he saw himself, putting us inside and outside his gaze at once–so when we round the wall and enter the first gallery behind it, it is like entering into the artist’s mind and occupying his vision from within.

The first work we encounter, on the wall that faces us once inside, is itself like a dream. It shows Christ Among the Doctors–a picture in which ponderous books are being opened and pored over, as scholars hunt down the passages the youthful Jesus cites. It is a typical Mannerist composition in that the central figure–Jesus–is seated, almost enthroned, in the far distance, discoursing animatedly, sending the doctors back to their heavy volumes to check his references. They look over one another’s shoulders, pointing in excitement to this or that text. Jesus has caused, through his rabbinical erudition, an almost hallucinatory scene of bibliomania. The adolescent prophet displays knowledge beyond that commanded by the bearded Michelangelesque pundits. Whole choruses of readers spill up and down the stairs that lead up and back to Jesus, distinguished by a halo too big for his youthful head, and fill the podiums on either side of his chair. A woman standing at the left surveys the unbecoming tumult, and the whole scene is energized by Tintoretto’s typical raw and urgent brushwork, which initially put off his critics, who demanded greater finish.

Here, for example, is his Florentine contemporary Giorgio Vasari on Tintoretto’s Last Judgment:

As to the matter of painting, he may be said to possess the most singular, capricious, and determined hand, with the boldest, most extravagant, and obstinate brain, that has ever yet belonged to the domain of that art. Of this there is sufficient proof in his works, and in the fantastic composition of his stories, which are altogether different from and contrary to the usages of other painters; nay, he has been more extravagant in some of his more recent inventions, and in those strange caprices of his fancy, which he has executed almost by hap-hazard and without design; insomuch that one might suppose, he well nigh desired to show that the art is but a jest.

One is shocked to find so early an accusation that a piece of art must be a joke. The operative word is “design” (disegno), which was the mark of Florentine probity in painting. Since Vasari, an upholder of Florentine aesthetics, finds it lacking everywhere in Tintoretto, he cannot take this painting seriously. But it is inconceivable that an Italian artist of the era could have painted so “fearful and terrible” a subject, as Vasari described it, in jest. The likelier explanation is that Vasari was applying critical criteria appropriate to a style of painting that Tintoretto had already gone beyond. One of our own contemporaries has described him as a “slow starter,” but Christ Among the Doctors, painted around 1542, when Tintoretto was still in his 20s, had broken new artistic ground as part of a convulsion that was sweeping the European vanguard, from Bruegel, Cranach and Drer in the north to El Greco, late Raphael and Michelangelo, Pontormo and Bronzino in the south. It is to Ruskin’s credit that he caught on instantly, though Mannerism had not yet been identified by art historians:

Away he goes, heaping host on host, multitudes that no man can number–never pausing, never repeating himself–clouds & whirlwinds & fire & infinity of earth & sea, all alike to him–and then the noble fellow has put in Titian, on horseback at one side of one of his great pictures, and himself at the other.

In the same gallery as Christ Among the Doctors is Conversion of Saint Paul, which exemplifies the spirit that Ruskin succeeds in capturing. “Tintoretto raises the high drama of the episode to the level of pandemonium,” the catalogue entry reads, and one has the distinct impression that not only Paul but the world itself has been convulsed, with riders flung from their horses in every direction and the riderless horses sent flailing in surging waters, as Jesus opens the heavens and a single horseman gallops over a bridge and out of the picture under a fluttering pink banner, bearing the news to mankind. Paul, under the physical impact of his vision, lies writhing, like Laocon, amid stones on the ground, picked out by the uncanny light. There were many picturings of Paul’s conversion in the Renaissance, but Tintoretto translated inner turbulence into external chaos, much as he had externalized Mary’s trepidations as the shattering of reality itself.

As for pictorial jokes, the show has several of them, but we always know when we are looking at one, as in the raunchy Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan. Venus lies demurely in the love-tossed bedsheets, as her entirely unsuitable husband, Vulcan, lifts one of the corners, as if performing a gynecological inspection. The sight of his wife’s sex distracts him from the yipping of a tiny spaniel, barking at Mars, hiding under another bed, who must have worn his helmet even when making love. Venus’s child, Eros, snoozes through the chaos, holding a clutch of arrows. A slyer, subtler joke by far animates Saint George, Saint Louis, and the Princess. In the canonical representation of Saint George, he is shown, mounted and armored, slaying the dragon that terrorized a community that was required to sacrifice its members to the monster’s appetite. The saint appeared just in time to rescue the princess, whose turn it was to be eaten. There is in fact a wonderful painting in this show of this mythical triangle, in which the male protects the female from the monster. In the present painting, however, which has the edginess of a feminist joke, the princess has taken matters into her own hands. She is shown, with the dragon between her legs, gazing at her own lovely likeness in Saint George’s polished armor. The dragon lashes his scaly tail in pleasure as the princess rests one hand on its wing, holding a crop with the other. George spreads his arms in a gesture of male helplessness, as his lance lies broken on the ground. The princess and the dragon seem entirely happy with the arrangement, while Saint Louis casts his eyes demurely down at the shattered weapon and the smug reptile. It was obviously painted with a sophisticated Venetian audience in mind.

But Mannerism’s audience was sophisticated: It got the point, and the paintings are planted with clues that flattered its cognitive prowess. We, as part of that audience, know things to which the personages in the painting are blind, and comedy and tragedy get mixed. Judas sits at the table in two of the Last Suppers, his back to us, hiding a sack of coins behind him. Nobody seated at the table–only we outside the picture–is aware that he has been bribed. In the great Susannah and the Elders, the outstanding painting in the show, beautiful Susannah sits nude in the garden, gazing deeply at her image in the mirror propped up in front of her, while the whiskered elders, peering from both sides of a hedge of roses, gaze at her lush nakedness. We, hypocrite viewers, gaze at the gazers, condemning the prurient elders while relishing what they ravish with their eyes–until, in a sudden onset of consciousness, we realize that we have been trapped by the same delicious vision, enjoying what we condemn them for enjoying. Ruskin’s inclination to laugh was a visceral tribute not to humor but delight at the effortless excess of power and mastery, of impulse and improvisation, and the scintillation of Tintoretto’s pictorial invention. There is no artist like him!

GERALD FORD & THE SOUL TRAIN

Lowell, Mich.

Attention Alexander Cockburn: Don’t be crediting Karl Rove for the postal holiday for Gerald Ford [“Beat the Devil,” Jan. 22]. I’ve gotten a day off from being a postal clerk three times over the years (for Nixon, Reagan and now Ford). I’m surprised that we still get them, but I’m certainly not lobbying Congress to end it. There are two ex-Presidents in their 80s who may give me some days off before I retire. The real worry is which soul superstar is going to go when an ex-President goes. We lost Ray Charles with Reagan and James Brown with Ford. I don’t want to lose Chuck Berry or Little Richard just yet.

BOB LEEMAN

TROOPS WHO SAY NO TO THE WAR

Phoenix

Marc Cooper’s “About Face: The Growing Antiwar Movement in the Military” [Jan. 8/15] recognizes a growing resistance within the military to America’s never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a resistance largely ignored by the mainstream media. Invoking “the troops” is a handy mantra for stifling debate about the war by insisting that we betray our soldiers if we question their mission.

Jonathan Hutto and other signers of the Appeal for Redress courageously remind us that they are already betrayed by their Commander in Chief. Cooper rightly notes the risks these servicemen and -women take in signing the Appeal, risks that no doubt keep others from speaking out against the war. We have a very diverse military, made up of many who do question their mission.

About Face is also the title of a radio program sponsored by the Phoenix Veterans for Peace (veteransforpeacephoenix.org) on KPHX-AM Sundays at 1 pm EST (aaphx.com). About Face is a live call-in program that addresses issues such as post-traumatic stress, inadequate VA funding and homelessness that confront service members, veterans and their families. The program hosts are all Vietnam combat veterans; guests include a wide range of local and national peace activists, veterans’ advocates and topical experts. We are looking for sponsors to keep the show on the air. We can continue for a few more weeks, but it’s getting tight.

Jonathan Hutto and several of his colleagues were on the January 14 program to talk about the Appeal for Redress and related events since Cooper’s article came out. A longer pre-recorded version of the program aired on the Progressive Radio Network (progressiveradionetwork.org) on Saturday, January 20.

MARK FLEMING,
co-host, About Face

G.I. MOM

Youngsville, Pa.

I find your publication very informative, unlike many mainstream sources. Your letters from military families [“Letters,” Oct. 16; Nov. 27] rang true. My son has enlisted and has re-enlisted. Our stretched Army and Marines have a hard time finding “suitable volunteers,” I guess. Maybe it’s due to the following: My son arrived in Iraq for an eight-month peacekeeping mission, which turned into a nearly fourteen-month ordeal. I would hear that he would be home soon, but months went by–and another and another. It is very agonizing waiting, hoping they will be healthy and safe.

Let’s hope those running this war, and those reaping the profits, listen to people who actually have to fight it, and their families, and take into account the deaths and injuries–which continue to mount.

BARBARA H.K. TRAVIS

TORTURE IN ART

Chicago

I’m always pleased to see Arthur C. Danto’s name in your pages and was enjoying his review of Botero’s grisly but affecting work on Abu Ghraib [“The Body in Pain,” Nov. 27] until, toward the end, I was surprised to realize that Danto was going to finish without referring readers to the paintings of the great American artist Leon Golub. Golub’s huge canvases depicting death squads, interrogations and mercenaries, most done in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in some instances predict many of the details in the horrific photos from Abu Ghraib, giving the lie to our leaders’ protests that we don’t believe in torture. Botero focuses on the pain of the victim, Golub on the pleasure or indifference of the victimizer. As Golub was fond of repeating, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

JERRY BLUMENTHAL

DANTO REPLIES

New York City

One of my earliest pieces in The Nation was devoted to Leon Golub’s paintings of mercenaries, many of which represented torturers in some presumably Third World country, interrogating hooded victims, naked and helplessly bound. They were great paintings, in my view Golub’s masterpieces, and incidentally among the first scenes in high art of torture since the Counter-Reformation, when graphic depictions of martyrdom became an important genre. The torturers themselves were, as the title entails, soldiers of fortune, of no identifiable nationality, who were clearly relishing their labor. In political truth, American “advisers” were involved in the practices, but Golub’s was a protest against the inhumanity of the dirty wars of modern times. The interrogators were generic.

For this reason, I did not mention him in my review of Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings, in which it was common knowledge that the perpetrators were American military personnel, possibly enacting official policy. In interviews, Botero explained that he was not anti-American; that he’d done the paintings because he had always regarded America as embodying the values of freedom and human rights. They were intended to hold the mirror up to our betrayal of these great virtues. Golub’s paintings were a cry of despair at a universal inhumanity. Botero’s were a lament that America was, after all, no exception.

ARTHUR C. DANTO

MOMMY WAS A COMMIE

New York City

Regarding “Decca: Still Raising a Ruckus” [“Exchange,” Jan. 22]: Jessica Mitford was not an ideologue (she did not do well with endless theoretical discussions); she was an activist who left the world of privilege at the age of 17. This was a woman who chose to alter her life irrevocably to fight the Fascists in Spain and Germany, to support the US government during World War II in battling war profiteering, to work for the Civil Rights Congress in the struggle against police brutality in Oakland and Mississippi, to engage in campaigns large and small against hypocrisy, prejudice and segregation every place she encountered them. She was above all an investigative journalist. She allied herself with each progressive youth movement that came across her path: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panther Party. Nation readers should rush out and get a copy of Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford to meet the witty, courageous, irreverent, infuriating Decca.

CONSTANCIA DINKY (DONK) ROMILLY

New York City

Your reviewer discovers proof of Decca’s innate snobbery and chauvinism when “a 1959 letter declares that you can tell that Germans, like Southerners, are bad by ‘the backs of their necks.'” Well, I was there (south of France, age 11). Here’s the actual story as told in Decca:

Germans abound here, I’m sorry to say. The Fr. say they got a taste for French cooking during the Occupation: whatever the cause, there are too many for my liking. There was a large group of them, guzzling champagne, at the 3-star place in Baux, middle-aged fatsoes, made one shudder to look at them. Benj gave the usual trouble, just as Dink and Nebby Lou did last time: “But how do you know they’re bad?” Trying not to get into a long argument, I said, “by the backs of their necks” (which were classic: huge and beefy). “Just like the guys down South,” Benj complained. “You shouldn’t be against someone just because of the color of his neck.” Hopeless child, I should never have let you inveigle him to that Unitarian Sunday School….

BENJAMIN TREUHAFT

DIDN’T MY LORD DELIVER DANIEL!

Bethesda, Md.

Daniel Lazare’s review [“God’s Willing Executioners,” Dec. 11] is a welcome corrective to the myths about the Crusades on which we were raised. I still own a few boyhood enameled lead knights. I will immediately melt them down and dispatch them to a hazardous waste facility. Lazare’s evenhandedness toward the butchery of both sides is especially appreciated. So is his portrayal of Christianity by the sword as a phenomenon of medieval Roman Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire.

But too many progressives use the sins of the past and a very broad, bristly brush to tar all forms of modern faith by allusions to “the Church,” “Christians” or “religious extremists.” I’m afraid that brother Daniel gets trapped in this lion’s den when he takes out after gentle Jesus and tries to paint him as a militant extremist whose teachings may have generated genocide. Those imperial Catholic armies were pumped up because Jesus opined that those who live by the sword die by the sword?

Lazare concludes by insulting those of us who think we can combine faith and reason. As a progressive Christian, I ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ’round, nor stand for intolerance dressed up in secular sackcloth! My faith, the United Church of Christ, boasts Howard Dean and Barack Obama among its faith-benighted members. It has given us New England colleges, the defense of the Amistad mutineers, abolition, feminism, gay rights (and ministers) and opposition to the Iraq War. I’ve protested and prayed in UCC pews alongside fellow nuts Bill Coffin, Bob Edgar and Bill Moyers. It’s time for Daniel to be delivered–to show more faith in his modern Christian allies.

BOB MUSIL

LAZARE REPLIES

New York City

I didn’t say Jesus was “a militant extremist whose teachings may have generated genocide.” To the contrary, I said it really doesn’t matter what he preached, since the real problem has to do with divine revelation, by definition an event of earth-shattering importance that cannot “be proven according to the normal rules of evidence” and instead “must be taken on faith.” There is no way to make someone believe in the Resurrection, the virgin birth or anything else for which there is neither logic nor evidence other than at the point of a sword, which is why even the gentlest religion winds up being violent and tyrannical.

I also said that “Christian pacifism reflects a kind of inward-directed violence that can all too easily be turned in the opposite direction.” Musil’s letter illustrates this perfectly since I detect a clear note of anger beneath its jolly tone. Why does he accuse me of “insulting” those who seek to combine reason and faith when all I said is that they are wrong?

DANIEL LAZARE

QUIVERFULL CONVICTION

Bayville, NJ

For the history-repeats-itself buff, there’s a disturbing similarity between the Quiverfull birth campaign [Kathryn Joyce, ” ‘Arrows for the War’,” Nov. 27] and the Nazi Mother’s Cross program, which encouraged German women to compete in a sort of fertility Olympics. The emphasis here, of course, is on religious rather than racial purity. But the call to populate the state with future “soldiers” is nearly identical.

MEGAN RUISCH

Meriden, Conn.

Why was no mention made of the origin of the word “Quiverfull”? It comes from Anthony Trollope’s wonderful novel Barchester Towers. Poor Reverend Quiverfull had all he could manage after he was presented by his loving wife with fourteen children. Find a copy. Happy reading!

KATHERINE DORSEY

“When philosophy paints its grey in grey,” Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of Right, “then has a shape of life grown old…. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” It is difficult not to think of Hegel’s elegiac reflection when one enters the first gallery of Brice Marden’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. It is hung with the signature gray canvases that Marden himself came to call “Brice Marden paintings” when he finally decided to stop painting them. What is striking is that they are not just gray monochrome rectangles. They are exactly gray in gray, with shadowy markings of darker gray that had served other painters, like Jasper Johns and Alberto Giacometti, as backgrounds for the objects or figures that carried the primary interest of their works. Marden seems to have brought them forward to coincide with the surfaces of his paintings, making his surfaces his subjects. In some of the early works, Marden left about an inch of raw canvas to catch the drips, which serve as a symbolic reference to the Abstract Expressionist movement that had inspired him and many other young painters of his generation. In the mid-’60s, when Abstract Expressionism was perceived as a finished movement, the drip remained an emblem of painterly legitimacy, evoking the physicality of pigment and the gestural sweep of the painter’s arm. Even as cool an artist as Andy Warhol retained the drips on the silk-screened sides of his Brillo boxes, as a way of claiming descent from the founding fathers.

What “shape of life,” then, to return to Hegel, has grown old in Marden’s early work? Modernist painting, obviously, as understood by its deepest theorist, Clement Greenberg. As Greenberg argued in his 1954 essay “Abstract and Representational”:

From Giotto to Courbet, the painter’s first task had been to hollow out an illusion of three-dimensional space. This illusion was conceived of more or less as a stage animated by visual incident, and the surface of the picture as the window through which one looked at the stage. But Manet began to pull the backdrop of the stage forward, and those who came after him…kept pulling it forward, until today it has come smack up against the window, or surface, blocking it up and hiding the stage. All the painter has left to work with now is, so to speak, a more or less opaque window pane.

Why then think of it as a window any longer? In Johns and Giacometti, the visual incident took place in an illusory space. The task of “Modernist Painting,” as Greenberg titled his essay of 1960, was to arrive at an understanding of what the defining features of the medium were and, in the interests of purity, to purge it of everything else. For Greenberg, that “everything else” included illusion, despite its history. Painting, he believed, was in its essence two-dimensional and flat. Modernist painting, accordingly, was “flatter than anything in Western art since before Giotto and Cimabue–so flat indeed that it could hardly contain recognizable images.” Now that space and surface coincide, there is no place left for painting to go. As the ’60s ended, artists and critics could be heard stridently declaring that painting was dead. The first paintings in Marden’s show date from the mid-’60s. The question they ask is: Where do we go from here? What is left after Modernism is over? It ended with the discovery of flatness. Now what?

That Abstract Expressionism was dead was the common wisdom in the art world by the mid-’60s. Marden was almost unique in realizing the deeper truth that Modernism was dead. But all around him exciting new things were happening in art, Pop most particularly, but also Minimalism, which was closer to his own impulses. The one painting that I believe signals an awareness of Pop (and my favorite painting in the show) is the wonderful down-to-earth rectangle Nebraska (1966), which approximates the shape that the state of Nebraska is represented as having in maps of the United States. The down-to-earthness is symbolized by its particular tone of gray, a kind of greenish dirtiness. But mostly Marden tried to find his way forward by joining his gray or grayish rectangles into diptychs or triptychs, as in For Helen (1967) or Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns (1970), a tribute to one of the great pioneers who, along with Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, led New York art away from Abstract Expressionism into unexplored territory. And Marden widened his range of grayish hues to include blues and reds. It was not until the early ’80s, however, that he felt compelled to change in a more radical way: “I got to a point where I could go on making ‘Brice Marden paintings’ and suffer that silent creative death…. You get to this point where you just have to make a decision to change things.”

I don’t think it is widely enough appreciated how much courage this kind of change takes. There is an overwhelming tendency in America to brand artists, so that the well informed can identify an example of an artist’s work in a single, simple act of instant recognition: That is a Pollock, a Kline, a Nevelson, a Shapiro, a Ryman, a Rothko, a Marden. Warhol is a counter-example. Not only do his paintings vary profoundly over the years but also he worked in a variety of media, including film and television, reinvented cabaret, wrote books, evolved a style of aphorism and became his own most famous product. In this respect, Warhol was more like the German masters Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, who have experimented liberally with different styles, including, in Richter’s case, abstraction as well as photographic realism. (As it happens, Polke and Richter came to prominence as practitioners of an East German school of Pop Art coyly known as “Capitalist Realism,” and deeply indebted to Warhol.) Perhaps branding is uncharacteristic of younger artists today, who express themselves through performance, installation and video, as well as the more traditional genres. Marden’s change was not as radical as that of Philip Guston, who in 1970 abandoned abstraction in favor of a kind of loutish political comic figuration. Marden only went from one abstract style to another. Quite apart from taking a commercial chance, moving to an abruptly different style raises questions of sincerity that are never easy to deal with.

The change paid off, and opened up possibilities beyond gray in gray. It was like raising a window shade, revealing new realities.

Marden changed to a style of as-it-were Oriental calligraphy–in other words, he appropriated the look but not the reality of writing. Writing in its nature is on the surface of silk or paper. There is no impulse to postulate an illusory space for it to occupy, as in a drawing. So it is “modern” by default. Mixing writing with drawing, as in the Japanese or Chinese tradition, insured that there would never be in either culture the kind of history of art that defined Western painting, with its conquest of visual appearances and such devices as perspective or chiaroscuro. This is why until the emergence of Modernism, there was a tendency to treat Oriental art either as decorative or inferior. Part of the reason the Impressionists may have been so taken with Japanese print, for example, was that its flattening of forms made the surface into something one was aware of rather than a transparency through which one looked into space. So even if Marden thought of his calligraphies as drawings or even paintings, they remained, as it were, on the page.

He is most successful, in my view, in the drawings, where the white of the paper contributes a certain sparkle, and livens the rather deadish colors he carried with him into this phase of his work. Marden appears in these to have hit on something like the “grass” writing of Oriental calligraphy, loopy and lyrical, in which the brush rarely leaves the surface, and the artist improvises to the point that one needs special skills to read it. But the grass-writer inscribes an actual text, whose meaning invariably inflects the work’s feeling. Marden’s calligraphy is entirely abstract–gibberish, in effect–yet the strange thing is that it is evocative of language; it seems to communicate meaning while remaining entirely uncommunicative. Han Shan Goes to the Tropics (1991) is a beautiful example of this. “Han Shan” is Chinese for “Cold Mountain,” though it designates a possibly mythical poet who wrote about Cold Mountain in a body of poetry from Tang times. Han Shan has the attributes of a Taoist hobo who lives in close communion with nature and has risen above material needs. It was in fact an edition of Cold Mountain’s poems that inspired Marden. For my taste, however, the painted calligraphic canvases are too pasty for the lyricism he sometimes achieves on paper–too angular, awkward and almost clumsy for the spirit I suppose they mean to convey. There is a limit to a Westerner’s capacity to internalize and realize an Asian sensibility.

In the latest works, Marden finds a way of working flat-on-flat, with colored ribbons interlacing one another on the kind of gray-in-gray surface he in a way had made his own. These really seem uninterestingly empty to me, vastly too large for the minimal meaning that is their reward. But then, in Dragons, working in colored ink on paper, he achieves something glorious, as if de Kooning had painted a Pollock. Brenda Richardson has written that “Pollock is a very real presence in Marden’s Cold Mountain work.” According to the show’s curator, Gary Garrels, Pollock’s influence “was one not simply of look and style but also of spirit.” I am glad to see the term “spirit” making an appearance in contemporary discourse. “Spirit,” Kant writes, “in an aesthetical sense, is the name given to the animating principle of the mind.” Spirit puts the material to which the mind applies itself “into swing.” Whether the same spirit that animated Pollock fifty years earlier animates Marden is an issue on which critics will differ. But the only piece in which I sensed the presence of Pollock’s spirit is Dragons, where it almost looks out of place. Marden may not see it this way, but I think it is kind of a compliment to say that the artist, in the crowning exhibition of his career, shows promise.

By a happy coincidence of scheduling, visitors to MoMA have the opportunity not only to see the end of Modernism, in Marden’s exhibition, but its beginning, which Clement Greenberg attributed to Édouard Manet. For students of Modernism, this offers a singular opportunity to examine Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian for signs of the great movement Manet opened up. Certainly, Manet could have had no idea that his innovations would lead, in the course of a century, to the gray-in-gray monochrome. He would have said that he was infusing French painting with what he had discovered in Spanish art, particularly in the work of Velázquez and Goya, which he probably saw on a trip to Madrid in 1865. But we, visitors from the future, as it were, can see what it was about Manet’s work that led Greenberg to think of him as the first Modernist.

The execution was the result of an ill-advised imperial adventure in 1862 by Napoleon III, seeking to establish a French-backed monarchy in Mexico, which had become an independent republic in 1823. Together with some Mexican conservatives, he persuaded Maximilian, a Habsburg, to accept the throne, promising him military support. There was considerable resistance, and when the United States, emerging from the Civil War, supported the Mexican republicans, Napoleon cut and ran, as we say these days, leaving Maximilian unprotected. He was captured and shot by a firing squad in 1867, despite widespread appeals that he be spared. Napoleon was blamed for Maximilian’s death, and it was perhaps because of Manet’s antimonarchical politics that he decided to paint the event. He produced three large paintings of Maximilian’s execution, as well as a smaller study and a lithograph, and it can be argued that the beginnings of a distinctively Modernist sensibility emerged in the course of this effort, though there were already indications, as Greenberg noted, of a new vision in his work as early as 1863.

Greenberg drew particular attention to the graphic flatness of the pantaloons in The Piper, and Courbet is said to have remarked that Olympia appeared “flat…like the Queen of Hearts coming out of a bath.” (Olympia‘s flatness may explain why it appeared to Manet’s contemporaries almost comically inept, and wound up in the Salon des Refusés.) This flatness was, for Greenberg, distinctively Modernist. In classical Modernism, he wrote, “Design of layout is almost always clear and explicit, drawing sharp and clean, shape or area geometrically simplified or at least faired and trued, color flat and bright or at least undifferentiated in value and texture within a given hue.” He might as well have been describing the Japanese prints that made such an impression on Manet and the Impressionists. Could the flattening out of forms be the result of bringing into Western art the idiom of the Japanese woodcut?

Along with flatness of composition, Manet introduced a flattening of affect, a new form of cool detachment. The Execution of Maximilian, whose final version was completed in 1869, is a perfect example of this, particularly when set against Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 (1814), which Manet presumably saw at the Prado. The Third of May also depicts an execution, an early event in the so-called Peninsular War between France and Spain. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain in 1808, capturing its royal family and replacing them with his brother, Joseph. The French were as unpopular in Spain as they later were in Mexico, and they encountered a fierce insurrection, which ultimately triumphed. The “Third of May” execution was an indiscriminate killing of civilians by French soldiers in reprisal for a guerrilla attack the previous day. Goya’s painting of the massacre, which shows terrified civilians facing a firing squad, was intended to arouse anger and hatred on the part of Spanish viewers. Goya’s is a highly romantic picture of a deeply emotional episode.

Manet’s painting, by contrast, could hardly be cooler. The three victims, holding hands, face the firing squad with fortitude. The officer standing apart loads his rifle dispassionately, in case any of the victims survives. We do not see the faces of the firing squad itself. The scene is treated dispassionately and journalistically. There was no photographic record of the event, since it was forbidden. Manet shows it the way a photograph would, which was not an option for Goya, since photography had not been invented in 1814.

Manet’s successive versions of Maximilian’s execution reflect an effort to visualize the story as it unfolded in dispatches by correspondents, which were eagerly read by Europeans, who had no clear picture of what Mexico or Mexican soldiers actually looked like. One wonders if what was to become a Modernist painting, according to Greenberg, was not initially an effort to emulate the camera and produce something like a photographic print. Manet showed it from the perspective of a near eyewitness–so everything was brought forward, and inevitably flattened, the way the camera lens of Manet’s time often flattened forms. It was as if photographs showed us with optical veracity how we actually see the world. In America, the photographs of Mathew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan visually defined the Civil War for distant viewers. Goya, by contrast, drew on the conventions of academic historical painting, however romanticized.

One cannot but wonder whether Modernism was not the combined result of two modes of printing–the woodblock print and the photograph, each of which involved a kind of flattening. There would be a further question of whether Greenberg did not make a mistake in transferring to his analysis of the essence of painting what really defined the medium of the print. Maybe illusion is not that alien to painting after all, and those who feared that the invention of the camera meant the death of painting were barking up the wrong tree! If the progressive flattening of the surface has been the great journey of Modernist painting, abstraction, it turns out, was only one of its destinations, especially in an age of photography.

Colombian artist Fernando Botero is famous for his depictions of blimpy figures that verge on the ludicrous. New Yorkers may recall the outdoor display of Botero’s bronze figures, many of them nude, in the central islands of Park Avenue in 1993. Their bodily proportions insured that their nakedness aroused little in the way of public indignation. They were about as sexy as the Macy’s balloons, and their seemingly inflated blandness lent them the cheerful and benign look one associates with upscale folk art. The sculptures were a shade less ingratiating, a shade more dangerous than one of Walt Disney’s creations, but in no way serious enough to call for critical scrutiny. Though transparently modern, Botero’s style is admired mainly by those outside the art world. Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.”

When it was announced not long ago that Botero had made a series of paintings and drawings inspired by the notorious photographs showing Iraqi captives, naked, degraded, tortured and humiliated by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it was easy to feel skeptical–wouldn’t Botero’s signature style humorize and cheapen this horror? And it was hard to imagine that paintings by anyone could convey the horrors of Abu Ghraib as well as–much less better than–the photographs themselves. These ghastly images of violence and humiliation, circulated on the Internet, on television and in newspapers throughout the world, were hardly in need of artistic amplification. And if any artist was to re-enact this theater of cruelty, Botero did not seem cut out for the job.

As it turns out, his images of torture, now on view at the Marlborough Gallery in midtown Manhattan and compiled in the book Botero Abu Ghraib, are masterpieces of what I have called disturbatory art–art whose point and purpose is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts. Botero’s astonishing works make us realize this: We knew that Abu Ghraib’s prisoners were suffering, but we did not feel that suffering as ours. When the photographs were released, the moral indignation of the West was focused on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of entertainment. But the photographs did not bring us closer to the agonies of the victims.

Botero’s images, by contrast, establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make vicariously our own. As Botero once remarked: “A painter can do things a photographer can’t do, because a painter can make the invisible visible.” What is invisible is the felt anguish of humiliation, and of pain. Photographs can only show what is visible; what Susan Sontag memorably called the “pain of others” lies outside their reach. But it can be conveyed in painting, as Botero’s Abu Ghraib series reminds us, for the limits of photography are not the limits of art. The mystery of painting, almost forgotten since the Counter-Reformation, lies in its power to generate a kind of illusion that has less to do with pictorial perception than it does with feeling.

The Catholic Church understood this well when, in the final session of the 1563 Council of Trent, it decided to use visual art as a weapon in its battle with the Reformation. One of the pillars of the Reformation’s agenda was its iconoclasm–its opposition to the use of religious imagery, over which the church enjoyed a virtual monopoly. The Reformation feared that images themselves would be worshiped, which was idolatry. The Catholic response was to harness the power of images in the service of faith. Artists were instructed to create images of clarity, simplicity, intelligibility and realism that would serve as an emotional stimulus to piety. As the great art historian Rudolph Wittkower observed:

Many of the stories of Christ and the saints deal with martyrdom, brutality, and horror and in contrast to Renaissance idealization, an unveiled display of truth was now deemed essential; even Christ must be shown “afflicted, bleeding, spat upon, with his skin torn, wounded, deformed, pale, and unsightly,” if the subject requires it. It is these “correct” images that are meant to appeal to the emotions of the faithful and support or even transcend the spoken word.

It took more than twenty years for artists to devise a style that executed these directives, and there can be little doubt that the art of the Baroque was successful in its mission. The art achieved extraordinary precision in the depiction of suffering and hence in the arousal of sympathetic identification. It is often noted that we live in an image-rich culture, and so we do. But most of the images we see are photographs, and their effect can be dulling, if not desensitizing. To elicit the kinds of feelings at which the Counter-Reformation aimed, photographs now often need to be enhanced. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is not realistic in the sense in which photography is realistic: It is enhanced and amplified, showing Jesus “afflicted, bleeding, spat upon, with his skin torn, wounded, deformed, pale and unsightly,” in a manner that would have pleased the Council of Trent. Sontag was right: Photography must be augmented–with text, she proposed–if we are to feel the pain it shows. A picture may be worth a thousand words, as the cliché goes, but a photograph does not speak for itself. At the least it requires the skilled augmentations of Photoshop–at which point, of course, visual truth is sacrificed on the altar of feeling.

The Abu Ghraib photographs are essentially snapshots, larky postcards of soldiers enjoying their power, as their implied message–“Having a wonderful time…. Wish you were here”–attests. The nude, bound bodies of the prisoners are heaped up like the bodies of tigers in Victorian photographs of smiling viceroys displaying the day’s hunt. There must be a quantitative impulse in the expression of gloating–think of the strings of fish held up in snapshots taken after fishing trips, yellowing on the walls of seafood stores. In another artistic response to Abu Ghraib, British painter Gerald Laing lifted the backdrop of Grant Wood’s American Gothic but replaced the two farmers with the American MPs Lynndie England and Charles Graner, signaling thumbs-up with their blue-rubber-gloved hands above a pile of bare-bottomed bodies. The Americans are in bright poster colors, while the bodies are gray and evidently cut from a newspaper photograph, reproduced with the dots of a coarse Benday screen. It is witty and a bit sickening, but it does not call up the feelings of a Baroque evocation of martyrdom.

Or, for that matter, of Botero’s Abu Ghraib series, which draws on his knowledge of the graphic, even lurid paintings of Christ’s martyrdom by Latin American Baroque artists, in which Jesus bleeds from the crown of thorns, or from the wounds left by lance points in his ravaged chest. Abu Ghraib, in Botero’s rendering, also evokes Baroque prisons, like those one sees in the paintings titled Roman Charity, where a visiting daughter breast-feeds her chained father in the gloomy light of his cell. Although the prisoners are painted in his signature style, his much-maligned mannerism intensifies our engagement with the pictures. This is partly because the prisoners’ heavy flesh–broken and bleeding from beatings–looks all the more vulnerable to the pain inflicted. While their faces are largely covered with hoods, blindfolds and women’s underpants, their mouths are twisted into expressions of pain or agony. Their arms and sometimes their legs are bound with thick rope, and sometimes a figure is suspended by his leg, or tethered by all four limbs to the criss-cross of bars that form a cell wall. Everyone is nude, except when wearing female underwear, which the Americans evidently considered the supreme form of humiliation. In some paintings, a prisoner is sprayed with urine by a guard who lies outside the frame. Broomsticks protrude from bleeding anuses; hooded men lie in their feces. Several of the paintings feature savage dogs that look like demons in medieval scenes of hell.

None of these works are for sale–Botero has said he has no interest in profiting from them. He has offered them as a collection to a number of American museums, but none have been willing to accept them, I dare say for the same reason that the Marlborough Gallery, when I visited the show, had someone searching bags and backpacks–not a common sight in commercial galleries.

Botero rather ingenuously suggested that, just as few would remember Guernica were it not for Picasso’s painting, Abu Ghraib might be forgotten if he did not make this series. But Abu Ghraib was a world event, rather than an incidental horror of war like Guernica. Yet unlike Picasso’s painting, a Cubist work that can serve a purely decorative function if one is unaware of its meaning, Botero’s Abu Ghraib series immerses us in the experience of suffering. The pain of others has seldom felt so close, or so shaming to its perpetrators.

Ric Burns’s four-hour documentary on Andy Warhol’s career, which aired on PBS’s American Masters Series and is now showing at New York’s Film Forum, opens with a priceless piece of footage. Andy, in sunglasses, is being interviewed in front of a few of his Brillo boxes by an earnest someone, while an insider in a business suit looks on, smirking.

“Andy,” she asks, “the Canadian government spokesman said that your art could not be described as original sculpture. Would you agree with that?” Warhol answers, “Yes.” “Why do you agree?” “Well, because it’s not original.” “You have just then copied a common item?” “Yes.” The interviewer gets exasperated. “Why have you bothered to do that? Why not create something new?” “Because it’s easier to do.” “Well, isn’t this sort of a joke then that you’re playing on the public?” “No. It gives me something to do.”

This riotous exchange must have taken place about a year after Warhol’s celebrated–but commercially not so successful–exhibition of what the film’s narrative calls “grocery boxes” at Manhattan’s Stable Gallery in April 1964. A Toronto dealer had attempted to import eighty of the boxes, each valued at $250. Canadian customs insisted that they were not original art but “merchandise,” and demanded 20 percent of their value as duty. The director of the National Gallery of Canada, consulted as an expert, examined some photographs of the boxes and said that he could see that they were not sculptures. At this point, I wished the film had dwelt on the historical importance of the “grocery box” show. There should have been someone to say that with these works, a new era of art had begun. That these works were blazingly original art in a new sense of the expression. That they raised the deep philosophical issue of what the difference was between art and reality when there was no perceptual difference.

Instead, the film segues into an uncharacteristically soupy verbal portrait of Andy Warhol as “the most American of artists and the most artistic of Americans”–praise ascribed to the flinty Las Vegas-based art critic Dave Hickey–while images of Warhol by Warhol slide by sideways on the screen and a screamingly monotonous background score goes loo loo, loo loo, loo loo, loo loo. It is a studied insult to speak of Warhol, the deepest philosophical artist of modern times, as “artistic.” He was “artistic” when he made shoe advertisements for I. Miller, or the effete books of pretty drawings of pussycats, butterflies and cupids for the gift shop crowd, using the broken line and luminous colors that had made him one of the most successful commercial artists in New York in the 1950s. He was artistic when he was called Andy Candy. But when he enlarged black and white images from cheap advertisements, or painted uninflected pictures of all the flavors of Campbell’s soup, or created 300 (or 400?) grocery boxes–art of a kind that had never been seen or thought of before–he was not being artistic. Nor was he especially American, except that he favored hot dogs, Coca-Cola and canned soup, and believed in hard work (even if it required amphetamines in the form of diet pills). He, more than Jackson Pollock, had “broken the ice.” He remade the world, as Hickey later redeems himself by saying. Nothing is served by calling him a genius as everyone in the film mechanically does. The point is to explain what kind of genius he was.

Later, in the second part of his film, Burns again shows the dialogue that serves his film as prologue. He does so this time after we have seen some footage of the opening at the Stable Gallery. We’re told that Warhol was “deeply wounded” by his show’s reception. Yet again, we have a portrait of the “misunderstood artist,” ahead of his time, when in truth he created the time. It is a piece of soap opera disguised as documentary truth. To be sure, people were baffled and uncertain about the grocery boxes. To this day, specialists are trying to figure out how they are art and what they were about. Warhol certainly wasn’t used to selling much. His show of Campbell’s soup cans “sold out” only because the gallerist, Irving Blum, bought the entire series for $1,000, which he paid out at $100 a month, the way people did in those days. The later show, also at his gallery, of Elvis and Liz, sold nothing. But shortly after the grocery box show, Warhol was taken on by Leo Castelli’s gallery, which was his dream. That was where his heroes, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns exhibited. It was the place to be if you were a Pop artist. And everyone in the art world was discussing his show.

Warhol had made the transition from a highly paid commercial artist to a poorly paid fine artist (he eventually became a highly paid one, too), but his reputation for greed notwithstanding, what he was really interested in, as the film makes amply clear, was fame. And there he would soon outshine everyone else. There was something about the soup cans and the Brillo boxes that, more than Lichtenstein’s appropriation of Mickey Mouse, more than Jasper Johns’s American flags, certainly more than Oldenburg’s giant hamburgers and slabs of painted pie, flouted what had traditionally been accepted as art. Never mind that something like it had been done fifty years earlier by Marcel Duchamp with his ready-mades. Nobody knew about that at the time. Warhol’s art captured the popular imagination in ways that nothing in the history of modern art had. He made his work out of what everyone knew and had believed was the absolute opposite of art. Exactly what, given his values, could have made Warhol unhappy about that?

The miracle years were 1961-1964, the years in which his astonishing output consisted in the kind of art that could not get through Canadian customs without being taxed, the most original art of its era that looked exactly like nothing but “copies of common items.” It began with Warhol’s first show at Bonwitt Teller in April 1961, which chiefly consisted of those enlarged crude black-and-white images taken from the back pages of blue-collar magazines, advertising remedies for what he agonized over–his awful complexion, his thinning hair, his unprepossessing physique–displayed as background for mannequins dressed in summery frocks. It ended in June 1964, with his monumental eight-hour film Empire, which showed the Empire State Building standing still. Between these extraordinary works came the images of stars; the soup cans; the portrait of Ethel Scull composed of thirty six dime-store photographs, suitably enlarged; the photographic silk-screens of disasters, messily reproduced from the front pages of tabloids; and the home movies in which nothing happens–a man sleeps, or gets a haircut, or eats a banana, or (though it is not evident) receives a blow job. Warhol had an eye for significant banality, and made the “artist’s hand” irrelevant to the making of art. He turned what everyone in the culture was familiar with into art. No one has to be told who Elvis was, or Marilyn, or Liz. No one needs to be told what a grocery box is, or a newspaper photograph. All they have to be told is why any of this is art. The explanation was up to the critics and the philosophers, who are still arguing over why and how.

By mid-1964, the breakthroughs had all taken place. Warhol left behind the small group of advisers who wanted a new kind of art and helped him produce it (the curator Henry Geldzahler, the documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio, the dealer Ivan Karp) and fell into the hands of the transvestites, the speed freaks, the slumming celebrities and the crazies who constituted the edgy population of the Factory–the studio Warhol found on East 47th Street in early 1964, and had lined with silver foil by a certain Billy Linich, aka Billy Name–where he began to make films in which something actually happened. Burns’s film comes to life in this phase, which culminates in the assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas in 1968, after which everything changed. In the final phase Warhol was taken over by a final group of managers (Fred Hughes, Bob Colacello, Vincent Fremont and Paul Morrisey)–educated, entrepreneurial and ambitious men who kept the underground at bay and rationalized Warhol’s artistic production. It was the period of celebrity portraits, print portfolios, what Saul Steinberg once called political still-lifes, like the great “hammer and sickle” pictures of 1977. It was the period when Andy was seen wherever there was glamour.

The narrative sequence, then, is: a childhood of illness and poverty in Pittsburgh; followed by a successful career as a commercial artist in New York (1929-59); the breakthrough period of creative genius, (1961-65); the Silver Factory period of sex, drugs and studio movies, culminating in The Chelsea Girls and the Solanas murder attempt (1964-68); the post-Solanas wind-down (1968-87). Despite Burns’s helpful experts–Dave Hickey, Donna de Salvo, Stephen Koch, Wayne Koestenbaum, John Richardson, Neil Prinz (who is doing the indispensable catalogue raisonné) and others–the segment that deals with the great artistic breakthrough is by far the least satisfactory. That period was really the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” to use Warhol’s name for his famous East Village nightclub–a condensed renaissance in which contemporary art was invented and the history of Western art up to that point definitively ended–and it calls for an equally innovative cinematic format. The rest of Burns’s documentary is fascinating, thanks to all the archival material he’s assembled. I watched it three times and expect to see it again, if only to marvel at the beauty of Edie Sedgwick, the paradigm Superstar who emblematized her era and died, tragically, at 28.

In a 1996 interview the sculptor Carl Andre remarked, “Perhaps I am the bones of the body of sculpture, and perhaps Richard Serra is the muscle, but Eva Hesse is the brain and nervous system extending far into the future.” Hesse died of a brain tumor in 1970, at the age of 34. I did not know her, but her personality so infuses her art that I have thought of her with a kind of love from the moment I encountered her work. There is a famous photograph of her standing in a polka-dotted dress before a large late work, Expanded Expansion, at the opening of the Whitney’s controversial 1969 exhibit “Anti-Illusion:Process/Materials.” She had arrived at the opening in a wheelchair, just after the first of three operations. Expanded Expansion is made of rubberized cheesecloth attached to reinforced fiberglass poles, and it forms a theatrical kind of curtain behind her. It consists of thirteen diaphanous bays, ten feet tall–slightly more than twice the artist’s height. At its fullest expansion, the work is thirty feet wide. This tiny, brave woman looks as if she is about to be enfolded in her work.

Like much of Hesse’s late work, Expanded Expansion was not made for the ages. Hesse was aware that latex is an unstable material, disposed to oxidize and turn brittle, and to discolor with the passage of time. According to her catalogue raisonné, she lectured those who sought to discourage her from using it:

She was very aware that it was temporary. She was not defensive about it; she was offensive about it. She would say that it was an attribute. Everything was for the process–a moment in time, not meant to last.

The fiberglass poles, reinforced by resin, on the other hand, could last indefinitely, and she was touched by the counterpoint between her two favorite materials during that final phase of her brief creative life. There is, moreover, in the contrast in the photograph between the fragile monumentality of the sculpture and the defiant resoluteness of its diminutive author, a further dialogue between what the catalogue describes as “absurdity and exaggeration.” I am haunted by the photograph and used it as an illustration in my book The Abuse of Beauty. It illuminates the wit and the intelligence that Andre ascribes to Hesse’s work through his anatomical metaphor. I would add to these intellectual attributes the poetic eroticism of Expanded Expansion, as well as of the contrast between elasticity and rigidity formed by the work’s two materials.

All these traits are exemplified in the works that were shown in Hesse’s only one-person show of her sculpture, “Chain Polymers” at the Fischbach Gallery on West 57th Street, in November 1968. It is in part reconstituted by the profoundly moving exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City until September 17. Given the uncertainty of latex as a material, it is a heroic exhibition. But as curator Elisabeth Sussman writes in her introduction:

Are the few surviving fragile works best left in storage to protect them from the effects of air and light? What are we to say about exposing the work to the natural process of aging? Is it prudent to show only the more secure work of 1968, the fiberglass pieces? Is it worth the risk to have the artworks travel so that they can be seen together? Allowing all aspects of this great year’s work to be seen together while letting the sculptures mature naturally would, one could speculate, most likely reflect the way Hesse herself was thinking about her work. She seems, in fact, to have been incorporating an anticipation of aging and, especially, the unknown into the creation of her art.

Hesse’s collectors must be an intrepid group. It had to have taken immense confidence to have bought work so little calculated to endure. Of course, the latex parts of a work could in principle be replaced. It must not be immensely difficult to replace the discolored and disintegrating latex sheeting of a work like Expanded Expansion and make it look as good as new. Sooner or later decisions like that will have to be faced. “At this point,” Hesse wrote, “I feel a little guilty when people want to buy it. I think they know but I want to write them a letter and say it’s not going to last. I am not sure what my stand on lasting really is. Part of me feels that it’s superfluous, and if I need to use rubber that is more important. Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last.”

If Hesse’s work is marked–indeed, transformed–by time, so is our perception of it. In part because of our awareness of her own premature death, no one can see the exhibition in the same way as it would have been seen in 1968. That show must have been a moment of triumph for Hesse, who by all accounts was an exceedingly ambitious, fiercely driven person. But one cannot erase from consciousness everything that has happened between then and now, including what nobody knew at the time: that she only had two years to live. So the discolorations, the slackness in the membrane-like latex, the palpable aging of the material, inflect the whole experience.

Yet somehow the work does not feel tragic. Instead it is full of life, of eros, even of comedy. In Schema, which looks like a tray of chocolate cupcakes laid out to cool, and in Sequel, in which what look like cracked spherical nuts have been tumbled on a crumpled latex tablecloth, there is an irrepressible feeling of mirth, so far in spirit from anything being shown by Hesse’s contemporaries. Nothing in the entire history of sculpture would have prepared anyone for the array of nineteen irregularly shaped fiberglass and polyester resin buckets without bottoms, each about nineteen inches high, that constitute Repetition Nineteen III. Each piece in the show vibrates with originality and mischief. Except with reference to the bake-shop orderliness of Schema, most of the sculptures embody the philosophy of “anti-form,” meaning they conform to no pre-established order. The components of many of the works are intended to be strewn, scattered or left to chance.

As the title of the 1969 Whitney show suggests, the concept of “anti-form” was much in the air. It communicated a certain resistance to the ideal of mechanical uniformity, emblematized in the concept of the grid or the regular series, as well as to anything connected with geometry, which, since Cubism, had played so prominent a role in the look of Modernism. “Anti-form” captured the idea of resistance to and overcoming of limits that was inherent in 1960s attitudes to boundary lines of any sort. Hesse had participated in an exhibition titled “Eccentric Abstraction” in 1966, where she showed a work that I greatly admire, Metronomic Irregularity II, the title of which is conspicuously absurdist, since it would defeat the point to have an irregular metronome. She used cloth-covered wire, which she wove back and forth into a loose sort of web work. This led critics, on the basis of superficial resemblance, to accuse her of attempting to translate Jackson Pollock into sculpture. In fact, Hesse’s attitude toward the ideas of Abstract Expressionism was ambiguous, as might be surmised from the title of another show in which she took part in 1966–“Abstract Inflationism and Stuffed Expressionism”–at the Graham Gallery in New York. Metronomic Irregularity, of which she made several versions, was in no sense “secondhand” (the charge of her critics) and certainly not an effort to apply to sculpture the effect of action or drip painting. That kind of critical gaffe was probably inevitable, given how some critics depend on their eyes alone when they enter a gallery. Hesse’s detractors revealed not only how little they understood the impulses behind her work but how little they knew of the ideas reshaping sculpture in the ’60s. The last thing an ambitious sculptor like Hesse would have wanted to do was emulate painting, which was widely considered to have had its day.

Hesse came into her own as a sculptor in the midst of a slump. It was 1965 and she was living with her husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle, in an abandoned factory in the Ruhr, which Doyle had been given as a studio in exchange for art by a German manufacturer and collector. Hesse was deeply unhappy being back in Germany, where she was born in 1936 into a family of observant Jews. Though the family managed to escape to England and ultimately New York, she grew up in an atmosphere defined by the Holocaust. Her mother succumbed to depression, abandoned family life and ultimately committed suicide. The father married a woman with no particular interest in children. Hesse’s own marriage was pretty rocky. The search for her artistic path was further complicated by the questions women were then beginning to ask about their identity, though feminism as a movement had not yet emerged.

Hesse’s breakthrough came after Doyle suggested that she use the materials that were lying around the factory. She began to work with cloth-covered cord, which she found in great abundance on the floor. It was an unusual material for sculpture. But, as Doyle put it, “It was the string that got her going.” Hesse began to produce a body of work that was entirely her own–a group of relief sculptures in which carefully wound electrical wire was glued around shapes attached to masonite panels and other sorts of surfaces.

The earliest work in the current show was in fact Hesse’s first relief sculpture, an impudent pair of breastlike hemispheres of different sizes, one atop the other, each ringed with a red circle and punctuated with a startlingly naturalistic pink nipple. It is called Ringaround Arosie. One can easily imagine what a psychotherapist would make of this antic confection, in which industrial leavings are transformed into something that looks like an erotic trophy. But what strikes me is the way adversity is trumped by absurdity. Hesse made fourteen of these marvelously ludic reliefs and, as if to make sure that critics did not make heavy hermeneutic weather of the work, she gave them preposterous titles: Eighter From Decatur, Oomamaboomba, C-Clamp Blues, Up the Down Road, Top Spot, Tomorrow’s Apples (5 in White) and the like. There is something utterly uplifting in the way this emotionally needful and fragile young woman coped with emotional chaos by reinventing sculpture through aesthetic insubordination, playing with worthless material amid the industrial ruins of a defeated nation that, only two decades earlier, would have murdered her without a second thought. By the time she returned to America, her marriage was over, but she had found herself as an artist.

Hesse was not included in the Jewish Museum’s important 1966 exhibition of contemporary sculpture, “Primary Structures,” which assembled a body of austere and reductivist works by the artists who were to define the aesthetic code of what Robert Smithson, one of the participants, called “a new kind of monumentality.” It was typically monochromatic, uningratiating, serial, boxy and bland. At the same time, it was felt to be underwritten by the intimidating arcana of mathematical ideas: set theory, symbolic logic, combinatorial algebra, systems analysis or, in Smithson’s view, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It seemed artistically invincible–just what the art world had coming to it, after the romantic excesses of Abstract Expressionism. What became known as Minimalism was one of the outgrowths of “Primary Structures,” and though not herself a Minimalist, Hesse discovered her mature vocabulary by pre-empting some of Minimalism’s formal devices–like repetition, for example. She was always on the lookout for titles she might use for sculptures.

“Chain Polymers” had just the right scientific ring to validate the work in her 1968 solo show as within the pale of primary structures. A chain polymer consists of a number of monomeric molecules chemically bonded together to form chain-like molecules. That suggests the kind of work she had assembled: iterated units loosely bonded. But only Hesse would have visualized this as a sequence of long, rigatoni-like fiberglass tubes leaned against a wall!

Viewers immediately recognized the importance of “Chain Polymers.” It looked suitably Minimalist, and the title could not have been improved upon, given the spirit of the times. The works gave the impression of seriality, and the pieces seemed abstract enough. But Hesse’s show was eccentric in a way that Minimalist doctrine could not countenance. It carried an air of mirth and jokiness, and an unmistakable whiff of eroticism. “Endless repetition can be considered erotic,” she wrote in one of her diaries.

Yes, one wants to say, as long as it is not mechanical, which is eros’s antithesis. Art in the age of mechanical repetition is like birdsong in the age of mechanical nightingales. One might say that nonmechanical repetition is one of Hesse’s many contributions to the language of sculpture, and my overall sense is that this is in part what accounts for the aura of eroticism that animates her works. There is a teasing unpredictability about the strokes, if one may call them that, in Accretion, a work composed of fifty fiberglass tubes leaning toward or away from one another in groups that may aspire to numerical orderliness but hardly live up to it. One work, Aught, consists of four large rectangular latex pockets hung by grommets and stuffed with whatever Hesse had on hand. The title Area promises geometricity, but this work looks like an irregularly corrugated chaise longue.

“Hesse,” according to the Grove Dictionary of Art, “was one of the first and most influential artists to question the austere, immobile exactitude of serial Minimalism.” So she was, but the works are more than art criticism in action. She brought what Yeats called “sensual music” into an art world that had been overtaken by what it thought were “monuments of unageing intellect.” Hers is an art, to return to Carl Andre’s dream of sculpture’s future, “of fierce delicacy and passionate fragility.” Fascinatingly, he compares Hesse’s sculptures to Cézanne’s late watercolors, with their pale, diaphanous planes. It is not the first comparison that would occur to anyone who enters the show, but the more one thinks about it, the more apt it becomes. “Chain Polymers” was a great exhibition in 1968 but it is even greater today, now that we have the forty-odd years of art history that have passed since then to appreciate the measure of her originality.

The Whitney Biennial 2006 draws its title, “Day for Night,” from François Truffaut’s 1973 film La Nuit Américaine, a celebration of making movies as a way of life. If Truffaut’s film did not appear under its French title in US theaters, it’s perhaps because neither the movie nor the film the characters are making has anything to do with America. It designates, rather, a device by means of which the camera can film night scenes in broad daylight. Truffaut’s “American night” is rapturous, evoking the magic of the cinema, its spellbinding power of illusion–its ability to turn day into night.

The Biennial’s view of the American night, which appears in French alongside Day for Night on Peter Doig’s poster for the exhibition, is almost the antithesis of Truffaut’s. Today’s art, the show suggests, provides a forceful reminder that it is not morning in America, as one famous American actor–and political magician–famously put it. With this exhibition, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, the curators, seek to make “a bold curatorial statement about the current zeitgeist.” The overall mood of the art on display, they argue, is characterized by “obfuscation, darkness, secrecy, and the irrational,” which can “also be said to reflect the mood in the larger world.” Doubtless these attributes reflect almost to perfection the Administration currently in power. But there is nothing dark, secret or irrational about the few pieces in “Day for Night” that attack the Bush Administration. Richard Serra’s powerful painting, which reproduces the notorious image of a hooded prisoner from Abu Ghraib beneath the message Stop Bush, could not be more straightforward. Nor could the 300 antiwar panels contributed to Rirkrit Tiravanija and Mark di Suvero’s reprise of the latter’s 1966 “Artists’ Tower for Peace” speak more clearly. True, if the rest of the art were saying obliquely the kind of thing Serra says directly, it would indeed be dark, secret and irrational. But that would make the art of our time hermetic and univocal to an incredible degree.

The Biennial 2006 is in one sense exemplary: It gives a very clear sense of what American art is in the early twenty-first century. American art has been increasingly autonomous in recent times, and in large part concerned with the nature of art as such. To be sure, it has explored issues of identity politics and multiculturalism, and sometimes worn its political virtues on its sleeve. But gestures like Serra’s reflect artistic decisions, not something in the culture that the art passively mirrors. Even at its most political, the art here does not project much beyond the conditions of its production.

It would thus be a mistake to look to “Day for Night” for a reflection of the spirit of our time, much less a critique of what is wrong with the state of the world. By raising such expectations, “Day for Night” sets itself up for failure–through no fault of the art on view. Much of the work is smart, innovative, pluralistic, cosmopolitan, self-critical, liberal and humane. It might not aspire to greatness, or take much interest in beauty or in joy. But in general, the art in the Biennial mirrors a better world than our own, assuming, that is, it mirrors anything at all. Indeed, if contemporary art were a mirror in which we could discern the zeitgeist, the overall culture would have a lot going for it. The art doesn’t tell us that it is not morning in America, and we don’t need it to. We know that by watching the evening news.

Some months ago at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, I saw an interesting show, “Uncertain States of America,” selected from the work of young American artists by three outstanding European curators, including the museum’s director. The art might have been made by young artists pretty much anywhere. There was nothing distinctively American about it. The work alluded to American art, music and movies, but these belong to global culture today, like bluejeans and Reeboks. The Americans in Oslo not only seemed to be having a great deal of fun making their art; their art did not seem to reflect a world out of joint. A visitor from another planet might get the impression that our world is fairly benign, a place where young people are allowed to devote their time to such antic pursuits.

I mention the Oslo show since at least three of the artists in it are also in “Day for Night.” One is Matthew Day Jackson, whose Chariot (The Day After the End of Days), an enormous installation of a covered wagon, fills the first room of the second floor. At Oslo, Jackson was represented by Eleanor, a large portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, in oval format. According to the Biennial catalogue, “Using yarn, stained wood, feathers, and tooled leather, Jackson depicts this twentieth century champion of social justice and humanitarian causes as a radiant being whose soul and ideals carry a lasting, regenerative power.” Eleanor has something of the quality of folk art, goofy but respectful of its exemplary subject. Showing Eleanor Roosevelt as a radiant being could be taken as a roundabout way of deprecating America’s leaders today–but it’s far from clear that this is what Jackson’s portrait is about.

Paul Chan’s meditative film 1st Light–a piece of digital animation–was as admired in Oslo as it is here. It has an affinity with Marcel Duchamp’s mysterious cast shadows of ready-mades, projected in trapezoidal format on the floor. Its silhouetted forms–vehicles, sunglasses, telephone poles tangled with wire–rise slowly upward, seemingly drawn by some irresistible force we do not understand. At certain moments human bodies start to hurtle downward, evoking, for most of us today, the desperate figures of 9/11. It is difficult to interpret what larger message unifies them with the ascending gear. Does the work imply that our rising level of consumption is to be blamed for 9/11? Or does it have, as the artist evidently believes, some larger religious message?

Hannah Greely, who in Oslo showed a fly buzzing around a Budweiser bottle–and an animal emerging from a kind of woven mat–is represented at the Biennial by a sculpture of a toddler in diapers, poking its head into the hood of a green nylon parka. The toddler is made of urethane rubber, and is eerily realistic in the manner of Duane Hanson’s figures. It is cute and, one feels, harmless. According to the catalogue, the work evokes “the anxiety that the coat might actually swallow the child, which is reinforced by the toddler’s bowed, kneeling, and seemingly defeated pose.” Though I have known the apprehensions of parenthood, this strikes me as an abuse of interpretative license.

None of these works support the subtext of the show. What they illustrate, rather, is the extreme pluralism of contemporary art–the sense that one can make art out of anything, looking any way one likes. To the degree that artistic pluralism mirrors the contemporary world, ours is an open world full of aesthetic opportunities, a condition that only an aesthetic monist would deplore. A certain price may be paid for this pluralism, in art as in life. In art the price is that often one does not know what one is looking at, or what a work means, or why it is there. The curators have acknowledged this by providing generous amounts of wall text, helping us understand what we are seeing.

Let’s consider Daytoday, an installation in the lobby by Carolina Caycedo. It’s a chalkboard on an easel, scrawled with such statements as Pick Up the Red Phone for a Personal Exchange. There is a red phone behind the board and next to a computer featuring her website. Pick up the phone, and you can set up an exchange with Caycedo, who offers you, among other things, a New York City tour, a haircut, a Spanish lesson or a video editing lesson in return for books, a surfboard, an astral chart, boots or plane tickets. Daytoday, according to her website, “is a public network of personalized exchanges that offers alternative ways of meeting business and personal needs without using money.” And in the catalogue we learn that the artist has operated such a network on the road, traveling about in a 1963 Ford van, offering “any number of goods or services…in exchange for food or a place to shower and cook.” Whether or not the installation constitutes a work of art, it’s obviously incidental to the larger project, which is the encounter between art and life. Most of the work in the show similarly achieves significance only by reference to its provenance and purpose. Caycedo’s work is far less about barter than it is about art, and how it has changed and transformed its institutions. Like most of the work in “Day for Night,” it is not, or not simply, about aesthetic contemplation.

Here is another case–an installation by Elaine Sturtevant, who prefers to be referred to simply as “Sturtevant”–that is in some degree about art and the history to which it belongs. Sturtevant is an “appropriation” artist, in the tradition of (albeit different from) Mike Bidlo, Richard Pettibone, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. Though she insists that her work “has nothing to do with ‘appropriation,'” it has typically consisted of work by other artists, usually famous artists like Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp (themselves specialists in appropriation). Here, in the installation Push & Shove, she presents, or re-presents, an ensemble of works that, whatever she may add to them, were originally by Duchamp: the notorious urinal, the bicycle wheel fixed to a stool, the row of coat hooks, the bottle rack, etc. Twelve hundred coal sacks hang from the ceiling, as they did in the International Exposition of Surrealism held in Paris in 1938, where they showered coal dust on visitors. Beneath them is a glowing brazier that, in Paris 1938, was said to represent the friendship of those who gathered around it. Here, of course, the brazier just represents that brazier. The appropriation of a ready-made does not inherit the ready-made’s meaning. “The push and shove of the work,” Sturtevant explains, “is the leap from image to concept.” The catalogue tells us the work provides “a space for critical reflection upon the various systems that convey meanings onto artworks.”

This is the kind of thing most of the works are said to do. They ask us to reflect, explore, question. The Peace Tower installed in the Whitney’s courtyard, for example, “provides an opportunity to step back momentarily from the bustle of the rest of the exhibition and to reflect on the wider social issues presented therein.” Surely that is not what di Suvero and Tiravanija intended. When Serra’s painting says Stop Bush, its aim is to stop Bush, not reflect on the messages of the other works with which it is exhibited. There is something strangely inert about the language of mirroring and reflecting in which “Day for Night” is framed. Somehow, one feels, the experience of a work of art ought to do something more robust than reflect on good causes. It is too much to ask that we feel the way Rilke did when he stood before an archaic torso of Apollo–that he must change his life. But there seems to be little place for passion, or pleasure, in the intellectually earnest work on display here. Sturtevant’s ideas should enrich one’s experience–and, dare I say, the pleasure of the work–not merely lead one to contemplate the concept of originality and the legalities of intellectual property.

There are two works one can enjoy without much secondary thought. One, by Francesco Vezzoli, is titled Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s “Caligula.” There was no remake of Vidal’s ill-conceived film. But the trailer has all the preposterous exaggerations of its genre, using, in this case, language and images of an improbable lubricity–nudity, perversity, orgies, sexual humiliation–to whet the viewers’ appetite for some ancient Roman pornography. But it packs so much of what it promises into itself that there is hardly much point in remaking the film. It is sublimely ridiculous, though I have just learned that in the spirit of worthiness, the artist has said that it reflects on government today. The other is the work of Dorothy Iannone, who fell madly in love with the proto-Fluxus master Dieter Roth. They evidently had a fabulous sex life, celebrated in Iannone’s marvelously decorative paintings, which look like neo-Art Deco valentines. So far no one has come forward with an edifying message in their carnal bliss.

Needless to say, none of these works tell us much about “the American night,” whatever their intentions. But while the curators’ search for the zeitgeist is ill advised, the show could not be more informative regarding the kind of art being made today. Indeed, the curators could have made a different show but not one more representative. From that perspective, it’s a good Biennial. At the press opening someone remarked that I must have seen a great many Biennials, which of course I have. Yet the only one I remember in any detail was the notorious 1993 Biennial, which was unrelievedly confrontational, starting with Daniel Martinez’s brilliant admission tags, which read, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.” People are still talking and thinking about that show, although the consensus at the time was that it was a bad Biennial. All the rest have been good in their kind. What I have been wondering since that encounter at the press opening is what a great Biennial would be like that was not a bad Biennial.

FRA ANGELICO: NOT A BASEBALL

New York City

In the rush to get my review of Fra Angelico out before the show closed, an embarrassing error crept in [“Soul Eyes,” Feb. 6]. During the editing process, the expression “autograph work” was replaced with “autographed work.” In the vocabulary of connoisseurship, an autograph work is one from the artist’s hand–an original. All the works in the show were auto graph, presumably. No one would speak of a signed work as “autographed,” as if it were a baseball. In any case, Fra Angelico did not sign his work, though there is a signature on the bridle of a horse in the early Christ of the Cross that may be his. If you find a Renaissance panel signed “Fra Angelico,” it has to be a fake. He did not acquire that name until after his death, as a way of putting him on the same level as his fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas, “The Angelic Doctor.”

ARTHUR C. DANTO

FLAME OUT

San Francisco

We believe the editors of The Nation are quite justified in publishing an explanation as to why they run our (FLAME’s) messages in their publication [“In Fact…,” Jan. 23]. But we don’t believe it is correct to describe us as an anti-Palestinian group. We are not that. We are “Israel advocatory” and are distressed that despite the many attempts made over the dec ades it has been so far impossible for Israel to come to peace terms with the Palestinians. The only agreement they seem to be willing to enter would be one that would involve the disappearance of the state of Israel. Also, we must reject being classified as “mendacious.” And, of course, we deplore that our views are “repugnant” to Nation editors.

What is a source of never-ending puzzlement to us is why “liberals,” such as the readers of The Nation, seem to feel so hostile toward the state of Israel, the only democratic state, mirroring American values, in the Middle East and a steadfast friend of our country. The Muslims/Arabs, including the Palestinians, on the other hand, seem to violate personally and in their governance everything that we hold dear. Conservatives, prominently including evangelical Christians, are staunch supporters of the Jewish state. It’s really difficult to understand.

We publish our hasbarah (educating and clarifying) messages monthly in more than a dozen major magazines, in about the same number of metropolitan newspapers and in small newspapers all across the country. The response we get is overwhelmingly supportive and positive. We are glad to be able to publish our messages in The Nation and hope that we shall, in time, be able to persuade at least some readers of the righteousness of Israel’s cause.

GERARDO JOFFE
President, FLAME

Washington, DC

As president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the largest grassroots civil rights organization for Arab Americans, I thank you for your candid editorial, which openly denounces the misleading and factually incorrect FLAME advertisement. However, crucially omitted from the editorial is the clear discrepancy between your advertising policy and the FLAME ad.

While ADC strongly respects the advertiser’s First Amendment rights (ADC is, after all, a civil rights organization), The Nation also has a responsibility to its readers not to print advertisements that are bigoted and may contribute to the problem of prejudice toward any ethnic group or minority, including Palestinians.

Especially troubling is that The Nation published the FLAME ad despite its policy to bar “false, lurid or patently fraudulent, illegal or libelous” advertisements. FLAME claims that “Palestinians are a fundamental myth,” and that “Palestinian Arabs were in Berlin hatching plans with Adolf Hitler for world conquest and how to kill all the Jews,” which is not only false but a blatant lie. Ads and rhetoric like this condition people to resent and be frightened of Palestinians and to believe that there can be no peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

ADC also understands the need for a magazine to generate income. But this so-called “advertisement” is not only prejudiced and intolerant; it also does a great disservice to all people working to bring about a just and lasting peace.

HON. MARY ROSE OAKAR
President, ADC

Thetford Center, Vt.

Though I am a supporter of the ADC and have followed its suggestions for actions in the past, I disagree with their current “action alert” with regard to the FLAME ad that ran in The Nation. I support The Nation‘s free-speech advertising policy. My support for your policy continues despite my diametric opposition to the politics espoused by FLAME and its ilk.

JONATHAN TELLER-ELSBERG

Brooklyn, NY

I commend you for publishing that FLAME ad. I’m sure you were well aware of the negative letters you would receive. There are petitions on the Internet to hold The Nation “to account,” but despite these attempts to curb free speech you refused to pull the ad. That took courage. It’s good to know that there are still democratic leftists in the United States who will not waver in the face of totalitarianism.

EVAN M. DANIEL

I am Muslim by religion and Indian by citizenship. I want to convey my strong displeasure at that utterly racist “advertisement” about Palestinians. My heart trembled when they were called “a myth.” It seems that the people involved in financing and printing this have lost their conscience. I never expected this from you.

MOHAMMED ASHFAQUE, MD

Los Angeles

The Nation has always been one of the few progressive voices in the United States, a magazine that I looked forward to reading for a breath of fresh air and a glimpse of the truth. Alas, you have been corrupted by running a terrible ad from FLAME, an organization that denies the existence of Palestinians.

Believe me, my Palestinian-American children are pretty surprised that they don’t exist. Their father, a 1948 refugee who fled the Israeli war machine and certain death had he stayed, is also quite shocked to realize your magazine would take money from FLAME.

So, does your weak response that you run even ads that are repugnant mean we can run an ad that denies the Holocaust? How about running a white supremacist ad? You seem to have forgotten what your mission is, or perhaps you’ve simply sold out.

GRETA BERLIN
Volunteer, International Solidarity Movement

New York City

We were considering placing a large ad in The Nation dealing with myths about Jews, i.e., their Arabophobia. To insure that our message about Jewish bigotry has the desired associations, the copy will begin with a quote from Goebbels like this:

“Jewish Fables: How the Jews soften up world opinion with fanciful myths. Josef Goeb bels, the infamous propaganda minister of the Nazis, had it right. Just tell people big lies often enough and they will believe them. The Jews have learned that lesson well. They have swayed world opinion by endlessly repeating myths and lies that have no basis in fact. What are some of these myths? The ‘Israelis’–that is the fundamental myth. In reality the concept of ‘Israelis’ is one that did not exist until 1948, when the UN, influenced by Jewish global capital, allowed the Jewish colonists…”

You get the drift. We are sure your respect for freedom of speech will not interfere with this ad, even if you disagree with the content.

MIRIAM M. REIK

Philadelphia

I was surprised that the FLAME ad passed review at The Nation. The ad uses techniques common among those committing hate speech, like linking a few individuals with an entire people, so that a few Arabs in Berlin aligned with Britain’s enemies become the Arab residents of Palestine plotting to eliminate the Jews.

The ad may reflect your commitment to free speech, but I hope you would not have allowed, during the 1960s, an ad using a photo of a prominent American antiwar activist sitting on an antiaircraft gun to link the antiwar movement with the North Vietnamese Communist Party; or, now, an ad by a Rove-fronted 503(c) that connects opposition to the Iraq occupation with support for Al Qaeda. I still remain a devoted Nation reader.

BRUCE KINOSIAN, MD

Brooklyn, NY

Your editorial claims that you bar “false” ads, and admits that the FLAME ad you published “is, we believe, historically inaccurate.” As the poet J.V. Cunningham wrote, “This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained /Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.”

MARK DOW

We have received much commentary on our policy of accepting ads from organizations with which we are in political disagreement (see our policy at www.thenation.com/mediakit/policy). Since we consider ad submissions case by case and reserve the right to turn down ads we feel go over the line, we understand that not all readers will agree with our decisions. This is clearly the case with the FLAME ad, as these letters attest. We will revisit this issue on the Letters page and editorially in the months ahead.   –The Editors

EMENDATION/CORRECTIONS

Katha Pollitt refers to Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article as revealing “the shocking role of doctors and psychologists” in torture at the US prison at Guantánamo [“Subject to Debate,” Jan. 9/16]. Earlier reports on this subject by M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

In Pollitt’s January 30 column, the author of Watership Down should have been given as Richard (not Robert) Adams.

Because of an editing error in Sam Graham-Felsen’s “The New Face of the Campus Left” in last week’s issue, Matt Singer’s blog, Left in the West, was misidentified as right-wing. As its name implies, it is quite the opposite.

Fra Angelico and the prodigy Masaccio are considered the major artists of their time–the second quarter of the fifteenth century–but their contributions were entirely distinct from each other. Of the two, Masaccio’s impact is easier to identify: He more or less laid the foundations for High Renaissance painting. His fresco cycle in the Brancacci Chapel has been described as the “school of Florentine painting” by the formidable sixteenth-century art writer Giorgio Vasari, since everyone who was anyone learned from his example, including Fra Angelico himself. Masaccio was the first to apply to painting the principles of perspective (discovered by the architect Brunelleschi), as well as the first to imbue his figures with roundness through the use of light and shade. It was from Masaccio that Leonardo learned chiaroscuro, the way bodies are defined by light and shadows from a single source of illumination. And everyone learned from Masaccio’s compositions how to group figures together in a natural way. When Vasari divided the Renaissance into three periods, he named one after Masaccio.

No period in art is named after Fra Angelico, but his achievement is arguably more profound–albeit more elusive–than Masaccio’s. The difference between the two quattrocento masters is essentially the difference between two kinds of illusion. Masaccio discovered how convincingly to make a two-dimensional figure on a flat plane look like a three-dimensional object in real space. Fra Angelico discovered how convincingly to create the illusion of a living figure whose exterior features express an inner spiritual state–the look of love, a state of devotion or one of anguish.

Contrasting the two artists in his great work on aesthetics, Hegel praised Fra Angelico for his invention of what the philosopher called “interiority”–“the investigation of inner coordination, the indwelling meaning of facial expressions.” Fra Angelico’s work is infused, Hegel writes, “with the fervor of a religious love remote from the world, with a conventual purity of disposition, elevation, and sanctity of soul.” He was not called Fra Angelico for nothing. But who would expect an exhibition of works by so pure a spirit, so naïve a faith, so innocent a vision to be the hottest show of the season? No one would say that the remarkable exhibition of Fra Angelico at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through January 29) is likely to be the school for contemporary New York artists. But it is the show to which artists tell me they keep going back.

It was in the depiction of interiority that Hegel believed painting had found its highest vocation, one that, moreover, distinguished the art of the Christian era from that of the classical era, whose defining medium was sculpture. A Greek statue of Aphrodite embodies the idea of erotic love but tells us nothing about what is going on inside her mind. What Hegel describes as “the spiritual depth of feeling, the bliss and grief of the heart” would not have been in the Greek repertory. It would simply have been taken for granted that mothers and their offspring are bonded through love. Christianity demanded that paintings of the Madonna visually depict this love. Thus Hegel contrasts those pictures with an Egyptian image of Isis holding her child, Horus, on her knees:

In a general way the subject here is the same as it is in Christian pictures of the Madonna: a divine mother with her child. But the difference in the treatment and portrayal of this subject is enormous. In this pose…there is nothing maternal in [Isis], no tenderness, no trait of that soul and feeling which is not entirely missing even in the stiffer Byzantine pictures of the Madonna. What has Raphael, or indeed any other of the great Italian masters not made of the Madonna and the Christ-child! What depth of feeling, what spiritual life, what inner wealth of profound emotion, what sublimity and charm…does not speak to us out of every line of these pictures!

Fra Angelico’s masterpiece is the complex of frescoes he produced between 1440 and 1445, in the common spaces and cells of the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence. As far as I know, Hegel never traveled to Italy. His knowledge of Fra Angelico was in all likelihood based on engravings of some of the more famous San Marco frescoes–The Annunciation, say, or The Coronation of the Virgin. Yet he must have recognized through these works that however much the Renaissance based itself on classical models, a face like that of the Annunciate Virgin would have been unthinkable in classical representation. The Greek sculptors were well in advance of quattrocento painters in handling human anatomy. The latter excelled in showing through facial expression and body language how a figure like Mary would respond to the astonishing revelation that she would give birth to an incarnate god. She bends forward, holding her hands to her middle, as if protecting the life that is already within while her face shows her contemplating the meaning of her new role. The angel genuflects, acknowledging the difference in their stations. The drama of disclosure is enacted within a loggia, in the execution of which Fra Angelico demonstrates how much he has learned from Masaccio. The perspective is impeccable. The rational order of the architecture contrasts with the cosmic disruption of the historical order. A new era has begun.

Fra Angelico was at the height of his powers in the San Marco frescoes. Several of these wonders appear in beautiful reproductions on the upper level of the show at the Metropolitan. By contrast, many of the works on the lower level of the Lehman Wing are primarily of an art-historical interest. The paintings here merely reflect the gloriousness of Fra Angelico’s vision, which comes through even in the reproductions on the upper level. The lower level shows the present state of art-historical scholarship: Several works now attributed to him were once thought to be by different artists. We must take the word of the scholars that these are autographed, or mostly autographed works. Despite their attribution, however, they have very little of the exalted interiority of the San Marco frescoes that so inspired Hegel. The Lehman Wing thus has something of the structure of Plato’s allegory of the cave. How, then, did Fra Angelico become the artist whose work is a place of pilgrimage, the man whose name was given to him only after his death in 1455?

Fra Angelico was born Guido di Pietro; he became Fra Giovanni when he entered the Dominican order. In his early paintings, the Renaissance hardly appears to have begun. Paintings like the early Crucifixion–which shows a semicircle of Roman cavalrymen and foot soldiers standing at the base of the cross and looking coolly upward as if waiting for Christ to die, while four holy figures in front of the cross support the Virgin, who has fainted–is a powerfully condensed demonstration of Auden’s observation about how well the old masters understood the meaning of suffering. But it feels like a Gothic painting, giving no hint that the Renaissance is about to dawn. It is difficult to know how to respond to the Penitent Saint Jerome, in a panel from Princeton University, since Fra Angelico merely restored parts of it. The small, circular depictions of saints from the predella of an altarpiece said to date from 1417 are exciting only because we now know them to be the work of the young Fra Angelico.

On the other hand, it is difficult not to be touched by The Nativity, from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, or the tiny Virgin and Child With Four Angels, from the Detroit Institute of Art, whatever their art-historical significance may be. In The Nativity Mary and Joseph, as well as the ox and the mule, kneel in adoration of the luminous baby lying on a mat of golden rays. A quintet of angels has settled on the thatched roof, and the gold leaf of the sky conveys the sense of a new kind of dawn. It is a celebration of the divine and at the same time entirely human. In Virgin and Child Jesus looks like a fifth angel, and the Virgin’s star-spangled mantle looks like a piece of the night sky. Her face displays the dreamy expression one sees on new mothers everywhere. From the perspective of the stone bench she is seated on, and the way the side walls of the manger converge toward a vanishing point, one can tell that the Renaissance has arrived. Space is now naturalistic; these scenes of holiness take place in the same world we live in.

Upon entering the upper level of the Lehman Wing, one faces a greatly enlarged panel from an altarpiece that still remains to be identified. The original can be seen on the lower level, together with several other panels that belonged with it. The catalogue essay devoted to this altarpiece–which tells when it was painted, for what site it was painted, what the subject of the main panels might have been–is a serious piece of scholarly detective work. The panel that has been reproduced and enlarged for the upper level serves another purpose. It helps define precisely at what point Fra Angelico emerged as the master of his period. And it inadvertently provides a test for determining which works belong to the period that made his name. The test: Any work that would be at home in San Marco belongs to Fra Angelico’s prime. None of the paintings thus far discussed from the exhibition would pass that test, however engaging they may be. But this painting does pass the test. Any work that can stand up to the great Annunciation is Fra Angelico in his prime, if not at his peak.

The painting is called The Naming of Saint John the Baptist. An elderly man at the panel’s left is seated in a walled garden, writing with great concentration. He is Zacharias, father of John the Baptist. There are six lovely women, wearing opulent gowns picked out in gold. One of them is Saint Elizabeth, holding the child destined to be John the Baptist, in a very different kind of garment than the shaggy skin in which he is conventionally portrayed. The biblical story partly illustrated by this scene, which viewers in Fra Angelico’s time would have known, is that Zacharias has expressed doubts about his son’s role, revealed by an angel, and has been struck dumb. His speech is restored when he writes: “John is his name.” The little panel has the poetry of Botticelli’s Primavera–beautiful women, beautifully dressed, are gathered in the open air in a flowered landscape under a blue sky. The work is luminous, and we can see what a remarkable colorist Fra Angelico was, something Hegel could not have gleaned from the engravings. All the panels that allegedly belong with The Naming of Saint John the Baptist show the same almost translucent robes. There is something of the Middle Ages in the enclosed garden, carpeted with flowers. But the organization of space, especially in the wall’s perspective, implies the innovations of Masaccio and the spirit of the Renaissance. Two great periods in the history of art thus overlap in The Naming of Saint John the Baptist.

As, in fact, they do in much of Fra Angelico’s work. Consider, for instance, the left panel of his Last Judgment, which shows a number of the saved dancing to Paradise in the company of angels. It is a vision of life as fine as could have been imagined. Men, women and angels are dressed exquisitely, their hair done up in elegant coiffures, wearing garlands as well as the nimbuses they deserve as tiaras of sorts, tracing the figure of a courtly dance, tripping across a flower-strewn park, indifferent to the torments of the damned on the facing panel, as they move in rhythmic circles toward eternal bliss. At the top of the panel, figures board a flight of clouds and move into a new and unimaginable state expressed by an expanse of golden emptiness. The physical beauty of the dancers, human or angelic, may be metaphorical, but it is a compelling advertisement for the rewards that await the faithful, and as art it is the high point of this show. As for their expressions, they do not look happy. They look appropriately solemn, perhaps reflecting on the test they have passed in life below, and relieved to have earned the glory they share with the angels.

When Egon Schiele died on All Hallows’ Eve in 1918, a victim of the Spanish influenza pandemic that killed 40 million people–including his pregnant wife, who had died three days before him–he was 28. Schiele had been poised to assume the position of Vienna’s leading artist, having abruptly arrived at his signature style in 1910, at the age of 20. The change was more like a metamorphosis than a transformation. Schiele had been a precocious student, but nothing he did before 1910 would have prepared anyone for the singular artist he all at once became. The only parallel case that comes to mind is that of Arthur Rimbaud, writing urgent and unprecedented verse while still a schoolboy. Rimbaud and Schiele were comparable geniuses, and Schiele was in a way a vilain bonhomme, as Rimbaud and his drinking buddies called themselves. But Schiele’s rebelliousness was part of the overall secessionist spirit that possessed twentieth-century artists impatient for official academic art to be junked and Modernism to begin.

There was nothing criminal in his character, as there had been with Rimbaud, but the extreme eroticism that marked his work–and his use of very young models–raised suspicions that he was capable of transgressive sexual acts. Indeed, he was jailed in 1912, accused of abducting and sexually abusing an underage female, while he was living in a small village outside Vienna with his long-term lover and model, Wally. At the trial the charges were refuted, but one can easily understand, on the evidence of his art, how he could be believed capable of sexual delinquency. The authorities found pinned to his studio wall an evidently salacious drawing of a young woman, naked from the waist down. He was sentenced to an extra three days in prison–his incarceration lasted twenty-four days in all–on the ground that he displayed an indecent picture where it could be seen by innocent eyes. The offending image was subjected to judicial destruction. Interestingly, the fact that the authorities found drawers full of similarly “indecent” images did not count against him. The offense was showing, not making, dirty pictures.

Eroticism and pictorial representation have coexisted since the beginning of art, and many great artists have a few erotic images in their “X Portfolios” (to use Robert Mapplethorpe’s term). But Schiele was unique in making eroticism the defining motif of his impressive if circumscribed oeuvre. He was also unique in that drawing was his chief medium. Willem de Kooning said that flesh was the reason oil painting was invented, but Schiele demonstrated how remarkably fleshly thin transparent washes of pale color can be. Consider the iconic self-portrait of 1910, in which the naked artist is gazing–or glowering–at himself in a mirror, over his left shoulder. The right arm is bent around his head, which he grasps with his hand. The fingers are abnormally long, and his face is focused in a look of intense concentration: One eyebrow is raised, the mouth is pursed in a sullen grimace. The left arm, all bone and stringy muscles, falls straight down from shoulder to a flared elbow. Whatever he is looking for in the mirror, the artist is as confident as the drawing of his arm, his outthrust rib cage, his curved back, his narrow waist. Lines of tension give definition to his body, matching the ferocity of his look. Two features call for specific comment: the wiry thatch of hair beneath his right arm–echoed by a curl of pubic hair at the bottom of the sheet–and his right nipple, red almost to the point of blackness. These express not so much the gender as the sexuality of the body. The hair is not indicated but drawn, and the nipple suggests a target. There is a touch of red on the elbow so sure in its execution as to take one’s breath away. The same red is on the cheekbones and on the finger clasped around the artist’s head. There is nothing else in the self-portrait besides Schiele and the signature initial S in the lower right corner. The paper is yellowish. The figure is cropped, which heightens the intensity both of the posture and the execution. The accuracy of the drawing is confirmed by several photographs, in which Schiele contemplates himself in the mirror, clearly proud of his looks, his elegant figure, his leonine head of hair. Unquestionably, this is a vain young man.

Schiele was 20 when he drew his self-portrait. Compare it with any of the earlier drawings of nudes in the exhibition of Schiele’s art on view at the Neue Galerie in New York City through February 20, and you will see instantly what I mean by the abruptness of his style. All of a sudden, and until the end of his pathetically brief career, everything is mobilized to express the sexuality of the human body. Schiele inevitably drew many naked figures in the course of his academic education. The sexual attributes are all shown. But in his final style, the whole body expresses its sexuality. If I can put it somewhat paradoxically, he has found a style that sexualizes eroticism. In Schiele’s work the human body expresses its sexuality as artistic truth.

In art history textbooks, Schiele is often and carelessly labeled an Expressionist, a description intended to distinguish his eroticism from the decorative eroticism of his mentor, Gustav Klimt. Klimt, of course, depicted lovers clasped to each other in intense erotic embrace. There is nevertheless something operatic about Klimt’s lovers, as if they were figures in a myth. Like Tristan and Isolde they are caught up in the sweep of passion as the music swells around them. Sex is somehow meant to be transfigurative, a way of transcending the sweaty realities of the flesh depicted. Schiele’s figures, by contrast, are raw, hairy and bony, their young bodies marked by erotic zones like maps of where to touch each other. Sex is what they live for, the essence of their lives. It is an end in itself, not a means for transfiguration. They can’t keep their hands to themselves when they are together, and they can’t keep their hands off themselves when they are alone. Masturbation is their default state.

In their leanness, Schiele’s figures might be said to resemble those of Picasso’s Blue Period. But Picasso’s figures are gaunt because they are poor and needy, whereas Schiele’s have no thought for eating, as their only hunger is for sex. They are like illustrations of a thesis of Sigmund Freud, Schiele’s fellow Viennese, that human reality is essentially sexual. What I mean to say is that there is no art-historical explanation of Schiele’s vision. Expressionism was certainly in the air in Mitteleuropa in those years. But his drawings look like nothing one would see by artists who belong to movements like Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) or Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”). The German Expressionists used heavy black outlines and were inspired by a vision of primitivism. My own view, hardly inspired, is that Schiele expressed what Freud describes in his central thesis about human nature and conduct–that from infancy on, sex relentlessly holds us in its grip. In Schiele’s work we see what we know is repressed in the men and women painted by Edvard Munch, the artist I think Schiele is closest to in terms of achievement.

The reference to Freud is not an appeal to a Viennese zeitgeist by which Schiele’s work might be unpacked, although I think it says something about Vienna before World War I that eroticism was the main artistic achievement of the Austrian capital’s most original artist at the time. Rather, I mean to suggest that Schiele is likely to have known about Freud’s views, whose Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex was published in 1905. Consider Schiele’s extraordinary Mother and Child, another drawing from 1910. The theme of mother and child has a considerable history in Western art, from Venus and Eros to the Madonna and the Christ Child, but there is nothing to compare with Schiele’s study. The mother is shown from behind, looking over her shoulder, gazing back with a flirtatious glance. Her body is curved in a particularly sexy way, giving a thrust to her hips and a saucy swing to her generous buttocks. She is nude except for her black stockings, and we can see the tip of one breast from the side. The child is sitting next to her, on the arm of the chair the mother leans into. One of his hands is pressed against her waist, which he appears to be kissing with the intense fervor with which he would be sucking at the breast, if that were anatomically possible. The other hand conveys the child’s total absorption in the mother’s flesh. It is very much as if they are lovers–hardly a posture that would have occurred to anyone had the idea of infantile sexuality not been in the air. Schiele had drawn pregnant females at a clinic with a certain obstetrical precision. But Mother and Child has a moral daring, and it expresses a psychological truth. Interestingly, the pair is surrounded by a kind of white aura, scrubbed onto the yellow of the paper, and the flesh itself is given life by the way the paint is swirled on, as in finger painting. The space where the buttocks join the thighs is punctuated by a dark cross as black as the mother’s eye or hair.

Kneeling Semi-Nude, done in 1917, shows how little Schiele’s style and vision had evolved over seven years. The naked upper body of the kneeling woman emerges from a voluminous frilled undergarment. She is intensely involved in palpating her left breast, holding it in her right hand while she probes above the nipple with the other hand. The round red nipple is fully exposed, and the woman is peering at it with such intensity that the celebrated male gaze of contemporary feminist theory appears by contrast to be a passing glance. Like all of Schiele’s women, she is slender and beautiful, and her face is framed marvelously by tangled black curls. Lips, cheek and nipple are the only touches of red in the otherwise neutrally painted body.

With their audacious use of female underwear, boots and dark stockings, Schiele’s drawings express erotic fantasies that would not have been out of place in underground postcards of the era. They are transcriptions of how Schiele and his patrons imagined sex, and they belong to the edge between pornography and art that Mapplethorpe would also explore. The images of men and women masturbating, or making love–and especially the pictures of lesbian couples–suggest to me that there was a demand for such representations, just as there was a demand for fleshy, dissolute boys in Caravaggio’s Rome. That too tells us something about Schiele’s Vienna, and about those who collected his work and showed it to others–and something perhaps about Freud’s patients, if one insists upon a Viennese zeitgeist. What Schiele’s provocations imply in terms of his own life, on the other hand, remains a mystery.

Schiele made more self-portraits than Rembrandt, and a great many pictures and portraits in the exhibition at the Neue Galerie are not overtly sexual. But the erotic work inflects everything else, as if everyone depicted ne pensent qu’à ça–“thinks only about that”–as the French like to say. The Neue Galerie show is, in essence, an intimate one, almost a family album, with photographs, juvenilia and toys from the artist’s cabinets, and there is enough of the work that made Schiele a great artist to make us feel as if we have gotten to know him and the world to which he and his subjects belonged. Still, the title of the show, “Egon Schiele: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections,” makes clear that it is a double celebration. Lauder and Sabarsky founded the museum as a venue for German and Austrian art of the early twentieth century, and both were devoted to Schiele at a time when his work was widely scorned. Because it is partly about two collections, and in a way about Schiele’s American reception, the show has limits that one devoted solely to the artist, borrowing from various collections here and abroad, would not have had.

There is, for example, only one of the drawings made by Schiele when he was in jail, awaiting trial and uncertain of his fate. It shows him with a beard and shaven head, leaning back on his prison pallet, wrapped in a reddish greatcoat to keep himself warm. It has the title, probably added later, I love Antitheses (1912). He is suffused with self-pity, and we know from his writing that he was profoundly demoralized by his prison experience. Schiele’s prison images have the quality of Japanese drawings–single skinny unwavering lines define the cell doors and the prison corridor, with brooms, mops and washtubs piled in a corner and spindly branches visible through a window. This is, after all, not Sing Sing but rather a poky provincial jailhouse in Austria. If I were curating a Schiele blockbuster, I would show all the prison drawings I could lay my hands on. And I would display Schiele’s extraordinary painting of his bedroom in Neulengbach, the town where he was arrested, a place almost as monastic as Vincent’s bedroom in Arles. Instead of these arresting images of confinement, the Neue Galerie exhibition gives us Schiele’s landscapes, which to my mind seem too opaque, lacking the transparency of his best work, his scenes of the body in its fleshly joys and torments.

It was, after all, the reinvention of men and women as sexual beings that accounts for Schiele’s greatness. As Sabarsky said, “At last, Schiele is becoming contemporary,” by which he meant that in terms of the representation of sexuality, the times have caught up with and almost overtaken him. Mapplethorpe is in the museums, even if our government keeps its distance from him, and frontal nudity has become commonplace on gallery walls. Yet there is no body of work anywhere that shows the sexuality of human flesh as truthfully as Schiele’s, with the vulnerability and burden of our appetites and imaginations drawn so clearly and with such passion. Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents that “the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are hardly ever regarded as beautiful.” It is the excitement of the erogenous zones in otherwise beautiful people that makes Schiele’s work so true.

THE MAORI STILL FIGHT FOR JUSTICE

Somerville, Mass.

Anatol Lieven [“Frontier Injustice,” Oct. 31] paints a totally different view of the Maori from that of many New Zealand historians (Ranganui Walker, Struggle Without End; Alan Ward, Unsettled History; Claudia Orange, An Illustrated History of the Waitangi Treaty; Michael King, Being Pakeha Now).

The colonial government did not honor the Waitangi Treaty of 1840. The treaty allowed the pakeha (white settlers) use of the land in return for helping the Maori develop economically. But that didn’t happen. Instead the Maori had to go to war for almost thirty years to protect themselves. The colonial government pointed its guns at the Maori rather than protecting them, as Lieven claims, from English settlers. When the Maori organized and named Te Wherowhero their king in 1858, the government seized more land from them.

With hardly any fertile land left, the Maori were in an impoverished state by the 1930s. Many sought jobs in urban areas where the white population was. Their educated children have continued their ancestors’ fight to make the pakeha honor the Treaty of Waitangi. The road to where the Maori are today was not as smooth as Lieven painted it. It is true that the Maori are “a powerful, growing…section of New Zealand society.” But this is due not to British benevolence but to the fighting spirit of the Maori people for justice.

MADGE KHO

LIEVEN REPLIES

Washington, DC

I certainly wouldn’t suggest that the treatment of the Maori was just or generous–far from it. It was, however, vastly more so than the treatment of the Cherokee and the other “civilized tribes”–and this is demonstrated by the relative positions of the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and of the American South today.

ANATOL LIEVEN

THE STONES SPEAK THEIR NAMES

Berlin

I recently had the same experience here in Berlin that Arthur Danto had in Cologne [“Mute Point,” Oct. 17]. Walking in my neighborhood, I noticed two 10×10 cm brass plaques embedded in the cobblestone sidewalk in front of Landauer Str. 3, engraved with the information that Paul and Minna Grünfeld had lived there and that they were deported and murdered by the Nazis in 1941. Interested to learn more, I Googled their names and quickly found the locations of about forty more memorial plaques in my area and a link to www.stolpersteine.com, the website for Stolpersteine (“stumbling blocks”). I learned that this admirable project was begun by artist Günter Demnig in 1996 and that he has so far placed some 5,500 plaques in ninety-seven German municipalities. The sites are self-selected; current residents can memorialize their victimized predecessors for 95 euros.

Danto is right that names speak volumes, as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial has eloquently demonstrated. As the Stolpersteine website asserts, “If the name is forgotten, so is the person.” Stolpersteine is decentralized, locally funded, continually expanding and is not limited to Jewish victims–additional points of contrast to Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the stark visual, physical and visceral vocabulary of which still owes much to his original collaborator, Richard Serra. It’s also a legible retort to Jochen Gerz’s Invisible Monument in Saarbrücken, in which the names of German-Jewish cemeteries are inscribed where they can’t be read, on the underside of the castle square’s cobblestones. Unfortunately, though, while I now know quite a bit about Stolpersteine and can make these comparisons to other memorials, I still don’t know anything more about the Grünfelds.

PETER CHAMETZKY

St. Petersburg, Fla.

Among the items Arthur Danto describes as “drenched in symbolism” associated with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, he neglected to mention that the slabs are covered with an anti-grafitti substance made by Degussa, the same company that produced the Zyklon B poison used in the gas chambers. (I discovered this nasty fact at en.wikipedia.org.) How did this happen?

NINA RAMOS

DANTO REPLIES

New York City

The claim is true. It was mentioned by various critics of the memorial. I think the cement used was made by the people who made bunkers. I didn’t think this especially figured in a critical analysis of the work, so I didn’t mention it.

ARTHUR C. DANTO

OTHER VOICES, OTHER VICTIMS

Sussex, NJ

I was moved by Mark Anderson’s “Crime and Punishment” [Oct. 17]. I am one of those Germans whose grandfather got killed on the Eastern Front, who lost three uncles, whose father was driven out with his parents of what is Poland today and who has two uncles who fought on the Eastern Front and in Africa and came back messed up in their heads, messed up by the terrifying war memories. None of them were party members. They were ordinary people.

I grew up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany with the understanding that German suffering didn’t exist. Acknowledging it, mentioning it, seemed to equal denying the Holocaust and other German war crimes. But somebody like my grandfather, an ordinary man, was no criminal. He didn’t have a choice: He was drafted, and that was it. Only in recent years can one mention somebody like him as a victim without being accused of denying German responsibility for the war and crimes committed by the Germans. Thank you.

ULF KINTZEL

GRIP OF THE GRAMOPHONES

New York City

One thing unmentioned in Russell Platt’s review of Joseph Horowitz’s Classical Music in America [“New World Symphony,” Oct. 3] was the role of recordings in destroying a musical culture that produced great musicians. As soon as the first primitive recordings appeared, as scratchy as they sounded, many musicians realized their ability to earn a living would be adversely affected. Just one example: In New York City of 1900 many “classy” restaurants had live bands. In New York City of 2005 almost no restaurant, classy or otherwise, features live music. They still think music enhances the eating of food, but it is so easy to provide canned music of innumerable varieties that the expense and fuss of live music, not to mention the dining space it takes up, seems wasteful.

Recording also created a class of canonical performers. Of course, there were legendary performers before records. But when records came along, all of a sudden every new virtuoso had to compete with every previously recorded one, and music became consumed with imitating the past. Music, an art form that depends on re-creation of the printed page, was suddenly an art form of artifacts, like the fine arts.

These two factors–the lack of status of or need for the ordinary musician, along with the celebrity status of certain ones of extraordinary talent, and the accretion over time of an immense and overwhelming heritage–sapped the vitality of music. And not just classical music. If you ask any devotee of the myriad subgenres of popular music, they will tell you that it’s not real, because everything is driven by marketing. There is one 50 Cent where there used to be hundreds of kids doing improvised raps on the subway.

BILL HALSEY

MASTERPIECE OR MESS?

Boston

William Deresiewicz’s review [“On Everything,” Oct. 3] of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty offers some candid observations about the advancement to fame of “beautiful young women novelists with Commonwealth roots.” Apparently we should stop gushing over Smith’s “dubious” gifts of beauty and “facility” and realize that her “mind that teems with characters, plots, situations, ideas” does not necessarily produce restrained, formally coherent fiction. Then we could decide whether a novel deserves the judgment of “undoubted masterpiece” (Roy’s God of Small Things) or “gigantic mess” (Smith’s White Teeth).

Or, we could resist rendering decisions based upon whether authors deserve their “billing.” Instead, we could criticize because we have a kind of disinterested public service to provide–a restrained attentiveness that we rightly feel authors and readers need. Deresiewicz’s complaints ironically yield a noticeably unrestrained, and often frankly ranting, review of Smith’s “dommage” to E.M. Forster’s Howards End. On Beauty‘s legacy of a painting–and of “beauty”–rather than a house, emphasizes the ways Howards End also addresses the desires for “beauty and adventure” that often spring up in those, like Leonard Bast, whose lives are conspicuously classed as sordid and boring. Forster’s troublesome resolution of this difficulty is: “Let Squalor be turned into Tragedy,” in that Bast’s child will, one hopes, inherit the “beauty and adventure that the world offers.”

One could argue that Forster’s formal economy is overly tidy here; Leonard Bast’s death-by-bookshelf-and-sword is darkly, unfairly, funny–an impatient dismissal of his tiresome, inappropriate insistence on beauty and adventure. I personally prefer Smith’s proliferation of Leonards. There’s just no killing Leonard Bast in On Beauty–another always pops in, eager for opportunity, refreshingly ungrateful and refusing adherence to the expectations of those who intervened on his behalf. Forster’s discrete characters get broken down and messily spread out over several of Smith’s, who seem like palimpsests of free-floating attributes: Jerome is both Helen Schlegel (early love affair, subsequent belief in things unseen) and Paul Wilcox (absent most of the action); Vee Kipps echoes both Evie Wilcox and, intriguingly, Jacky Bast; art historian Howard Belsey evokes Schlegel culture (theory-driven liberalism), Henry Wilcox (infidelities) and, finally, Leonard Bast–who now gets to close the novel. This is certainly confusing, but it also goes someplace Forster does not: the space between Squalor and Tragedy termed “Involvement,” in Smith’s White Teeth, the “tired, inevitable” realization that we are all simply too connected to deserve comfortably distinct lives.

LISA FLUET

FLATTENED BY FLATTERY

Brooklyn, NY

I don’t expect a critic with no feel for popular culture to appreciate an analysis of its mechanisms–or to recognize a parody of its gestures. But I do expect him to read my book, which Russell Jacoby evidently failed to do when he reviewed Mediated [“Game Theory,” June 27]. After saying that it “consists of loosely connected vignettes and observations,” Jacoby adds, “To the extent he has an argument, his best chapter, on ‘The Cult of the Child,’ bears little relationship to it, which de Zengotita coolly admits. The sanctification of children seems ‘to sit strangely’ amid a society of mediation.”

Ah, the convenient quote excerpt. What I actually “admitted” (!) was that it “seems to sit strangely alongside all that ironic parenting,” the very specific topic of a previous section– and even then the clear emphasis is on “seems,” and reconciliation follows.

One of the book’s basic arguments, reiterated throughout, involves the “flattery of representation”–meaning the effect media have simply by virtue of addressing us. The book is an account of how that flattery intensifies as media multiply. The introduction focuses on the “God’s eye view” contemporary media provide. The concluding chapter (Jedermensch ein Ubermensch) ends with a riff on cloning, the ultimate self-flattering representation of a God-like self-maker. Other chapters and sections show how performers (who flatter us) replaced heroes (who challenged us), how a “virtual revolution” of reality shows and blogs enable flattered fans to displace celebrities, how nature became a setting for our performances–and the chapter on children shows how modernist child-centeredness (Dewey, Piaget) gave way to postmodern child-centeredness as we educated generations of more flattered (=mediated) youngsters.

This fundamental argument, impossible to miss if you read the book, eluded Jacoby. And then he says I don’t have one. “Loosely connected vignettes and observations” is right–but that’s a description of his review, not my book.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA

JACOBY REPLIES

Venice, Calif.

Thomas de Zengotita’s book is a half-written grab bag of half-interesting observations on popular culture; the mantra of “flattery of representation” does not save it. What does the “cult of the child” or Bush’s foreign policy have to do with media flattery? De Zengotita gives it a try, but turns flip or trite. He dubs “Justin’s Helmet Principle” the belief of anxious parents that their little Justin should sport a gargantuan helmet while tricycling. Why are they so obsessed? Media flattery? Unlikely. Is this the “ironic parenting” that de Zengotita believes dominates society? Doubtful. Unfortunately, he can’t figure it out. Why does society sanctify children? “Another ironic doubling is at work, get used to it.” The only thing we have to get used to is de Zengotita’s general befuddlement. In his riff on the twenty-four-hour Weather Channel (“Hey, if weather is your thing you have such access!”), de Zengotita allows that he keeps it on while he writes. A message from someone who lacks the “feel” for popular culture to Mr. Plugged-In: Consider clicking off the set the next time you write a book.

RUSSELL JACOBY

BRRRRR

Peterborough, Ontario

In his review of The Power of Nightmares [“Beware the Holy War,” June 20], Peter Bergen reports that Sayyid Qutb was shocked to hear “a secular love song”–“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”–played at a dance in the local church hall. But that doesn’t tell the half of it. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was considered quite risqué when it came out, and radio stations were at first hesitant to play it. Many Americans would have shared Qutb’s reaction.

MICHAEL NEUMANN

ROSE ANN & GETúLIO, WE’RE SORRY

In Marc Cooper’s “Arnold Show: Canceled” [Nov. 28], the name of Rose Ann DeMoro, head of the California Nurses Association, was misspelled. (This in no way reduces the majesty of the nurses’ total victory.)

In Hilary Wainright’s “Corruption of Hope in Brazil” [Nov. 14], an editing error placed Getúlio Vargas of Brazil in Colombia.

Memory is not the same as history. –Peter Eisenman

On a recent trip to Germany, I came across a number of small brass memorial markers, set into the pavement in front of a house on the Richard Wagner Strasse, just around the corner from my hotel in Cologne. There were twenty-two in all, each with the name of a person who had lived in the house and been deported in 1941 to Riga, to die in a concentration camp. “Hier wohnte,” each one said–“Here lived”–followed by the name and birth date of the deportee. The memorials to Eva, Ludwig, Kurt and Louis Meyer formed a square, set apart. Else Meyerhof and her sister–or daughter–Eva were together in a cluster of their neighbors. I wondered why I had not noticed the markers before, since I had walked past that house several times, and concluded that I may have been sensitized by the total anonymity of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which I had visited over the weekend in Berlin. Once I noticed them, though, I began to find others, all over the quarter where I was staying, one of the few to have survived the bombings in World War II.

It was perhaps the expression Hier wohnte, identifying the building as a Wohnung, or home, that imbued the markers with an aura of loss and desolation. Each tells the same story: a dweller hauled from his or her home and carted away to die. That specificity of location would be diluted if the immense plaza where Eisenman’s memorial is installed were instead paved with 6 million brass markers, like the ones in Cologne, each with the name of an individual Jew known to have been evicted, deported and murdered. Hier would instead acquire a wider, more diffuse reference, applying not to the Jews of Berlin and even Germany but throughout Europe. One can imagine such a monument being almost blindingly bright on sunny days, polished by the incessant shuffle of tourists’ feet. Survivors could be escorted to the name of someone killed, as they are led to the name of the person they have come to grieve over at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. There is something achingly moving about the simple markers in Cologne, reminiscent of the vernacular shrines that appeared like wildflowers all over New York after 9/11, often with a photograph of a victim.

The ground where the memorial stands, not long ago a no man’s land, could not be more central–it is the heart of the heart of the country, to use William Gass’s expression. It is separated by a single row of official buildings from the Brandenburg Gate, the symbolic entryway into the city, and the western boundary of Unter den Linden, like the Champs-Elysées or Fifth Avenue the parade route of the nation. Sir Norman Foster’s dome for the Reichstag can be seen nearby, as well as the newly constructed chancellor’s office. In the opposite direction rises Potsdamer Platz, symbol of contemporary Berlin and a unified Germany, with its malls and jubilant glass towers. Across some undistinguished ground, not so long ago patrolled by police dogs and tripwires for machine gun emplacements, rise some very imposing “slab” housing in the dreary style of the former Communist East Germany. The southern edge of the memorial is bounded by a street named after Hannah Arendt. This is real estate drenched in symbolism, and since unification it has become very valuable property as well. That the German Parliament held the developers at bay while debating the installation of a memorial to the victims of an acknowledged national crime is little short of astonishing.

Debate on the principle of such a monument began before the site itself was available. After two competitions, one open and the other between invited contenders of considerable prominence, the commission went in 1998 to the team of architect Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra. Serra quit the project early on, unwilling to accept the kinds of compromises that architects are accustomed to making.

The designated area is sometimes said to be the size of two football fields–a better guide to visualizing its scale than measurements in square feet or meters. It is not an even playing field, to continue with the image–it dips down to a considerable depth in one direction, and then rises up. A grid of regular walkways is imposed on this irregular surface, not quite wide enough to accommodate two people. Between the walkways are more than 2,000 rectangular steles, in gray concrete, each just under a meter wide by 2.38 meters in length. A mapping of the field, drawn from above, would be a grid of rectangles, separated from one another by the walkways. Each walkway is an entrance and an exit–one can enter the memorial anywhere, follow any path and exit wherever one wishes. There is no fence. The memorial is entirely open to the city. You can use any of its paths as a shortcut to get to the other side. Nothing especially distinguishes one stele from another, so there is no special reason to head for one stele in particular. With two exceptions, the steles are all alike. They differ in height, and they differ in the degree to which the upper surface slants.

There are 303 steles more than four meters high, 569 steles from three to four meters high, 491 steles from two to three meters high, 869 steles from one to two meters high, 367 steles from zero to one meter high–and there are 112 flat platforms without steles. None of these figures carries any symbolic meaning, nor does the total number–2,711 steles–have any special significance. There is no code–nothing like the rather grating number of 1,776 that Daniel Libeskind seems proud to have selected as the height, in feet, of the Freedom Tower projected for Ground Zero. The difference in height is due to the unevenness of the ground: It enables the top surfaces of the steles roughly to line up with one another, forming a unified surface. If one follows a pathway that dips to the field’s lowest point, the steles on either side are among the highest in the whole complex, so one can feel somewhat lost. But this difference in elevation is not registered in the overall surface of the field of steles, which, because of the variation in slant, creates the sense of a gentle wave, like the surface of a body of water or, to use an example from Eisenman himself, like the surface of a field of grain. (There is also an incongruous stand of forty-one trees on the side facing the Tiergarten park, mandated by the overseer of the commission.) The result is a late Minimalist masterpiece of monoliths with variously slanting tops, together forming an undulating surface.

Viewed as a work of art, the memorial is impressive. Eisenman’s work is not beautiful, but it would, I think, have been an artistic defect had it been beautiful in the Kantian sense of yielding a certain disinterested pleasure. A memorial is not intended to be an object of aesthetic gratification but a reminder of something in danger of being forgotten. As Eisenman himself has admitted: “I think it’s a little too aesthetic. It’s a little too good-looking. It’s not that I wanted something bad-looking, but I didn’t want it to seem designed. I wanted the ordinary, the banal.” One is reminded of what Marcel Duchamp said of his ready-mades: “The choice of these ready-mades was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste.” The difference, of course, is that, unlike Duchamp’s toilet, Eisenman’s banal, concrete slabs are not a subversive commentary on the nature of art but rather an attempt to honor the victims of an immense historical catastrophe. The spirit of the memorial is solemn rather than insouciant.

Because the aims of a memorial are by definition distinct from those of a work of art, the question naturally arises as to whether Eisenman’s Minimalist, mute creation succeeds in evoking a historical tragedy as vast in scale as the Holocaust. History tells us how many Jews, from how many places and under what circumstances, were casualties of the Holocaust. But who remembers the Holocaust as a series of names, places and statistics? Holocaust memories are specific, ineradicable images of people being hauled out of houses, forced into inhuman conditions and treated with the terrible, deliberate cruelty of which only human beings are capable. A representation of the Holocaust would arguably have to build into the image not merely the number of lives extinguished or ruined but the evil implied in its conception and execution.

The opacity of Eisenman’s memorial is a conscious choice, rooted in his sense of the enormity of the Holocaust, and of his suspicion of, as it were, graven images. As he has said, “The Holocaust is of such magnitude that it cannot be represented without such representation becoming kitsch, sentimental and hollow.” It’s almost as if he made a work that defies visual representation precisely in order to avoid such pitfalls. And since the memorial embodies nothing that belongs to what is conventionally understood to be the imagery of the Holocaust, it is radically abstract–a regimented complex of Minimalist monoliths that refuse to name what they are intended to commemorate.

The problem with making a work out of laterally uniform monoliths and arranging them in regular rows is that the result is likely to evoke a graveyard–something that obviously troubles Eisenman, who has alternately conceded and denied the resemblance when it has been pointed out to him. “The space isn’t a graveyard,” he has insisted. “I didn’t want names. It should be absent of meaning.” It is, of course, true that a field of monoliths cannot embody any specific meaning, and that the meaning is filled, or at least completed, by the viewer. But the title of the memorial clearly designates a set of individuals–the murdered Jews of Europe–and connotes a concept, that of genocide. So there is something troubling about the fact that nothing in the monument informs the visitor of either dimension of its meaning. No wonder it can so easily be mistaken for a graveyard or, as is often the case with young children, for a funhouse or playground.

Eisenman has an explanation for the absence of any visual cues, and it is one for which I have some sympathy. As he explains it, he was seeking not so much to represent the Holocaust–an impossibility–as to create a certain experience, an experience of nothingness and disorientation: “I was thinking about a field of corn that I was lost in in Iowa when I did it. I was trying to do something that had no center, had no edge, had no meaning, that was dumb.” Abstractly, this is a brilliant idea. Here, in the middle of things dense with information–the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Unter den Linden, the Academy of Art, the ghost of the Berlin wall, the no man’s land divided by the wall–is this black hole, a place intended to embody meaninglessness. It is as if he wanted to say to the German people that the Holocaust cannot be accounted for, that it is not part of the meaning of German history and yet it happened. It is an impossibility that actually took place. It is brilliant but too much to ask of anyone that they should say: This is what he is getting at, this is what the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is about! The experience is like being lost in a cornfield!

After all, nobody thinks of a cornfield in the middle of Eisenman’s memorial. True, nobody pauses to interpret the undulations, or to ask why the gravestones should undulate. So what do they do instead? They walk back and forth, talking on their cell phones. Or they photograph one another over the tops of the steles. Girls shriek with laughter and wave to one another–I thought of Valéry’s line “les cris aiguës des filles chatouillées“–“the sharp cries of tickled girls”–in his masterpiece, Marine Cemetery. Someone laid two yellow roses on top of a stele, someone else a basket with two plants. Some people place a single stone atop a stele. But boys still jump from stele to stele. It is a kind of formal stone garden, with custodians picking up debris.

Underneath the memorial there is a Center of Information, where visitors can learn about the Holocaust. Like the trees, the center wasn’t part of the original plan, but Eisenman resigned himself to it. “As an architect,” he said, “you win some and you lose some.” Still, though the center has the quality of an afterthought, I can appreciate the bureaucratic frustration that led to its creation, given the memorial’s failure to convey the appropriate kind of feeling. Great memorials are not mute. Unlike the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Eisenman’s work will not help heal the gap between German generations, or between Germany and the Jews, to the extent those gaps still exist.

Kant thought of works of art as “aesthetic ideas”–as meaningful without implying any specific meaning. They prompt the imagination to range over possible interpretations without foreclosing any. “If one person says it looks like a graveyard,” Eisenman says, “and the next says it looks like a ruined city, and then someone says it looks like it is from Mars–everybody needs to make it look like something they know.” Yet the issue isn’t what the memorial looks like but how one is supposed to feel about what it designates. Imagination is not the same as history. Memorials are tied to what happened.

One of the most famous works of art in America, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty transcends the “earth art” genre to which critics have consigned it, and has become an emblem of the American sublime. It is made of black basalt boulders, bulldozed into a straight line that stretches, jetty-like, 1,500 feet from the eastern shore in the upper reaches of the Great Salt Lake, terminating in a spiral with three whorls. From the air it has the look of a bishop’s crosier with an unusually ornamental crook. It has a way of disappearing and reappearing, which somehow gives it a touch of magic. Soon after it was made, it was submerged beneath the saline water that gives the lake its name, and on re-emerging at a later time, when the water-level fell, it was covered with a dense patina of salt crystals. It is reached with difficulty, requiring a trek over rutted roads, and there is no guarantee that it will be visible when one gets there; I failed to see it on the two occasions I made the attempt. So the work is as elusive as it is compelling, and though it belongs to its moment in history, it also has the timeless air of some ancient monument left behind by a vanished civilization.

Smithson’s intentions remain difficult to discern. He appears to have been interested in Great Salt Lake at first because he’d been told that the water was the color of tomato soup. “That was enough of a reason to go out there and have a look,” he writes. Recalling his first visit, he wrote as if the site itself implied the work:

As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. The site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence.

Reading these lines, one has the impression that Smithson is resorting to a kind of logical stammering–“immobile cyclone,” “dormant earthquake,” “fluttering stillness”–to convey a reality that transcends the limits of rational thought. And the work he made from this site has a similar effect on critics, whom it ultimately leaves speechless, as befits the sublime. Spiral Jetty fits Kant’s notion of meaningfulness without any specific meaning. Its closest artistic kin in North America is the great Serpent Mound outside Cincinnati, about which nothing is really understood.

Still, like everything else he did, Spiral Jetty had a polemical subtext. Smithson writes:

Logical purity suddenly finds itself in a bog, and welcomes the unexpected event…. In the Spiral Jetty the surd takes over and leads one into a world that cannot be expressed by number or rationality. Ambiguities are admitted rather than rejected, contradictions are increased rather than decreased–the alogos undermines the logos. Purity is put in jeopardy.

In 1970, when Smithson made Spiral Jetty, these were fighting words. For purity had been a defining criterion for New York artists and art critics in the orbit of Clement Greenberg. In his 1960 paper “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg argued that aesthetic purity required the elimination from any art of whatever does not belong to the medium that defines it. Painting, for example, had to become flat and abandon figuration, which suggested a relationship to the three-dimensional reality beyond it, while sculpture had to reject any painterly qualities. “Thus would each art be rendered ‘pure,’ and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standard of quality.” But purity seemed entirely beside the point of Spiral Jetty. Hence the wry joke contained in Mark Tansey’s 1982 painting Purity Test. Painted in his characteristically uninflected illustrational style, Tansey’s work shows a group of four American Indians depicted in the late-nineteenth-century style of Frederick Remington, mounted on horses, gazing downward from a rise in the land onto Spiral Jetty extending into the lake below them.

Comically impossible though such an encounter is, it raises an interesting question: Presumably innocent of the history of art, and certainly of the art history of the future, what would Remington’s Indians have made of Smithson’s work? Would they have regarded it as a celebration of, as it were, the rockiness of rocks–would Spiral Jetty have passed their purity test, if they had one? From their look of awe, it would seem that the work is fraught with meaning of a deeper kind, as it is for us, and as it was for Smithson himself. Whatever he may have set out to make, Spiral Jetty rose above its critical context. The truth is, we probably know as little about how to interpret it as Tansey’s Utes would have.

Though he studied painting at the Art Students League, Smithson found his calling as a sculptor in the 1960s, when that medium was undergoing an immense transformation. He was included in the exhibition “Primary Structures,” which took place in April 1966 at the Jewish Museum on upper Fifth Avenue. Curated by Kynaston McShine, the show gave the larger art world its first real glimpse of what was happening in sculpture as it began to replace painting as the defining medium of artistic experiment.

The paradigmatic “primary structure”–the term was controversial at the time–was drab, monolithic, industrial, repetitive, empty and monumental. Smithson showed a set of six “cryomorphic” hexagons, arrayed in a single row, based on the geometry of ice crystals. That year he published a stunning essay in Artforum, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” which connected the Second Law of Thermodynamics with “primary structures,” explaining the latter’s Minimalist aesthetics in terms of civilization running down.

An autodidact, widely read in science fiction, amateur geology and crystallography, Smithson was a singularly original thinker who brought to bear in his art and writing as many of his intellectual pursuits as he could. His master concept was entropy–a statistical measure of energy disorder or randomness–which gripped him much as the concept of blind will gripped Arthur Schopenhauer, as the ultimate reality against which form and order crumple and collapse. He connected the coolness of contemporary sculpture with the inevitable cooling down of physical systems. Thus, he suggested, the most important new works in American sculpture “bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age”–an allusion that suddenly vests his abstract ice crystals with a certain prophetic meaning. The new sculptors, in Smithson’s view, “provided a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness.” The “cold glass boxes” of contemporary architecture have “helped to foster the entropic mood…free from the general claims of ‘purity and idealism.'” We are left with “the flat surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, bland after blank; in other words, that infinitesimal condition known as entropy.” One is reminded here of Warhol’s aesthetics of boredom, as exemplified in his marathon films in which nothing happens.

It is difficult to imagine any art magazine–any magazine at all today–printing an essay like this, or like Smithson’s marvelous “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” which appeared in Artforum the following year. In the essay he explores, like a travel writer, the monumental ruins of Passaic–six large pipes out of which water gushed like “liquid smoke,” parking lots, rusting machinery and “the houses mirror[ing] themselves into colorlessness.” And he asks with delicious irony, “Has Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?” Passaic is eternal in the sense that it is Everywhereville. All cities are on the downward entropic path of the center city parking lot. “Primary Structures,” in his view, captured the direction of contemporary life to perfection.

Smithson’s conception of contemporary sculpture was striking, but it’s not clear the sculptors in question would have recognized their work in it. Many of these artists–Carl André, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin–went on to become Minimalists, and their philosophy of art was far closer to Greenberg’s than to his. Their work often stressed purity of form and belonged to the museum, an institution about which Smithson had the deepest reservations. “Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void,” he wrote in 1967. “Hallways lead the viewer to things once called ‘pictures’ and ‘statues.’… Painting, sculpture, and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues. Art settles into a stupendous inertia.”

How to break this inertia? In a dialogue held later that year with Allan Kaprow titled “What Is a Museum?” Kaprow suggested an answer to Smithson: “You mentioned building your own monument, up in Alaska, perhaps, or Canada. The more remote it would be, the more inaccessible, perhaps the more satisfactory. Is that true?” Smithson replied: “I think ultimately it would be disappointing for everybody, including myself.” Still, there can be little question, judging from the ecstatic language of his writing about Spiral Jetty, that in Great Salt Lake he found something more primordial than primary structures, something more rawly connected to the energies of nature.

The museum world of 2005, alas, is no better prepared than it would have been in the 1970s to find an exhibitional format commensurate with Smithson’s stature and adequate to his achievement, although he is recognized as one of the most important artists of his time. After all, Smithson’s mature work was never intended to be shown in a museum, and indeed much of it is impossible to be shown there except in the form of documentation. What is described as the “first comprehensive American retrospective of Robert Smithson’s complex and highly influential body of work,” on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 23, is inevitably a fairly entropic aggregation of sculptures in the “primary structures” mode; of juvenilia; of projects sketched out on graph paper, with cryptic notations like pirate maps; of documentary photographs and films of what I will designate his “unmuseumable” works; and examples of what Smithson called “non-sites”–sculptures that sought to overcome the distinction between indoors and outdoors, by bringing what Smithson calls the “focal point” of a site indoors. This meant bringing indoors a group of stones, or some seashells, or even what looks like gravel, and regimenting it by means of shaped containers in various configurations. Often the containers make use of mirrors, so that we see the shells or whatever reflected, giving the viewer some sense of the site from which they have been abstracted. Sometimes the non-site has the look of a gravel pile regularly punctuated with mirrors.

The film Smithson made of Spiral Jetty, projected in one of the galleries, is well worth watching. A critic once wrote that Spiral Jetty was the film, as if the truckloads of boulders were pushed into Great Salt Lake for the sake of being filmed. But films are easy to see. It is, I think, built into Smithson’s concept that his monument should be difficult to access–that it would require something of an ordeal to reach Rozel Point and look out over the salt-clad boulders, like the Indians in Mark Tansey’s painting.

The show’s catalogue makes few concessions to readers unfamiliar with the extensive art-historical literature devoted to the artist. The papers are by members of the A-list of Smithson specialists, writing chiefly if not exclusively for one another. I have no objections to such publications, which are contributions to scholarship of a kind the museum has a duty to support. But they leave the ordinary visitor high and dry. Visitors wander among the non-sites, peer at the drawings, point out doodled spirals to one another, puzzle over the maps, sit on benches in darkened galleries to see the films and wonder what anything has to do with anything else. In my view, Spiral Jetty was the breakthrough work in the epic that was Smithson’s journey as an artist. That is why his writing about it is so ecstatic. Everything before it was a kind of search.

The Whitney show succeeds, I think, in projecting a portrait of the artist as a restless demiurge whose basic genre was the monument, though none of his monuments can fit the space at the disposal of curators. The museum ought to be saluted for celebrating a figure who sought to invalidate the premises on which the idea of that institution rests. I would add that Smithson has become the beau idéal of young artists, more than Picasso, more than Duchamp the kind of figure they aspire to be–anti-institutional, in touch with the environment, hospitable to myth and ritual, alive to the poetry of the wilderness, ambitious in his desire to touch the public through a vision of monumentality that throws the world of the shopping mall and the parking lot into a moral perspective. In that respect the show tells us something about where we are. Spiral Jetty is a critique of modern life as entropy. The rest belongs to the scholars.

It is difficult not to wonder how Mayor Giuliani’s decency committee might have dealt with Max Ernst’s The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E. and the Artist, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Ernst retrospective through July 10, had some whistleblower from the Christian Coalition solicited the mayor’s opinion of the painting. The enthroned Virgin has been spanking the Holy Boy’s bare bottom vigorously enough to have knocked His halo to the ground, while three avant-gardists–the writer and theorist André Breton, the poet Paul Éluard and Ernst himself–coolly avert their eyes from the scene, which somehow has not been depicted in canonical narratives of Jesus’s childhood. New York has been spared the all-too-familiar scenario of pious poster bearers, outraged politicians, defenders of artistic freedom citing the First Amendment, and the learned presence of art historians, theologians and perhaps psychologists explaining to viewers of The Charlie Rose Show that the Holy Boy, in the nature of His humanity, must more than once have tried his Mom’s patience. But I doubt Ernst would have been pleased by the somber spirit of cultural duty and aesthetic appraisal with which his art is being approached at the Met. No one loved a good public dust-up more than Ernst and his Dadaist comrades, who used art to assail a society they held responsible for the pointless slaughter of millions in World War I.

In his Notes pour une biographie, Ernst wrote:

The Dadas shared the desire to denounce mercilessly the infernal conditions which idiotic patriotism, supported by human stupidity, had imposed upon the era in which they were condemned to live. France’s military victory was as odious to the Dadas of Paris as Germany’s military defeat was warmly cheered by Dadas on either side of the Rhine.

Ernst had served in the German artillery on both fronts; immediately after the Armistice, he made contact with subversive artistic circles in Berlin and Zurich and organized a Dadaist group of his own in Cologne, where he participated in inflammatory exhibitions. “To us,” he said in a 1958 interview, “Dada was above all a moral reaction”:

Our rage aimed at total subversion. A horrible futile war had robbed us of five years of our existence. We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract but to make people scream.

Only viewers who subscribed to the highest aesthetic principles would have found anything in Ernst’s work to scream at, but “aesthetic delectation,” to borrow a phrase from Marcel Duchamp, was certainly beside the point. The work was not meant to be visually ingratiating, so it is sheer historical misjudgment to dismiss Ernst as “the worst leading painter in the twentieth century’s most visually miserable major artistic movement,” as one of my fellow critics recently put it. Artistic injury may not have been the most effective device for pricking the consciousness of patriots, but for the Dadaists creating works of conventional beauty amounted to aesthetic collaboration with the bourgeois enemy, and they were not about to betray their principles.

One of Cologne Dada’s exhibitions was held in a space that could only be entered through a men’s lavatory. It was promptly closed as an outrage against public morality on the grounds that one of the works–a 1920 Ernst collage titled The Word/She Bird–was pornographic. Ironically, the offending nude was the figure of Eve lifted directly from a 1504 print by Albrecht Dürer. How could a work by Dürer be considered pornographic? The show was allowed to reopen. Ernst and his fellow agitator Johannes Baargeld printed an incendiary poster proclaiming Dada’s victory–“Dada siegt!” But the poster had to be withdrawn because it attracted furious mobs, who destroyed much of the work inside.

The Word/She Bird survived the ruckus and can be seen in the current retrospective–Ernst’s first in New York in thirty years. It would hardly prompt anyone to riot today. But neither should the work be written off as bad, or even quaint, art. Ernst’s great contribution to Modernism lay as much in the medium of collage as in that of provocation. In The Word/She Bird, Ernst uses gouache–opaque watercolor–to screen out the crowded detail in Dürer’s image of Adam and Eve, leaving only Eve’s body, which has been set into what looks like an engraving of a sea urchin shell, doubtless cut from some cheap natural history publication. This creates an allusion to the birth of Venus, and Eve’s head has been cropped, as has her right arm at the elbow, converting her into something akin to the Venus de Milo. A segment of her right leg has been replaced with a fragment from an anatomical print, showing the circulatory system. To complete Eve’s paganization, the fig leaf that hides her shame has been carefully replaced with a pubic mons from somewhere. Headless Venus wears a dog collar; and two birds, one beneath her left arm, the other between her legs, transform her into a “she bird.” The birds, of course, are taken from a plate of ornithological illustrations. Ernst’s Venus stands in a room rather than in the Garden of Eden, marked by the kind of deep perspective that was to become one of the signature effects of Surrealism. She shares the space with an anatomical male figure, with a sort of meter stick that may or may not be an erection. The left side of the room holds what looks like a wall of curved timbers that form a ship’s hull. The whole is hand tinted. The little collage had a subsequent history. It was used by Éluard as an illustration for his 1921 book of verse, Répétitions, and it helped earn Ernst a welcome from his co-conspirators in Paris, who soon formed the cadre of the French Surrealist movement, in which the German artist became a star.

French Dadaists were wild about Ernst’s early collages, and I myself cannot resist describing another, constructed on the same principles as Word/She Bird. It is called The Master’s Bedroom, and again its base is a printed reproduction from a natural history publication, in which everything has been painted over with gouache, except for a whale and several fish that appear in the foreground. The room is once more in deep perspective, evoking a sense of great emptiness, with a sheep and a bear standing by the rear wall. It’s hard to tell whether the animals in the back of the room were part of the original print or were cut and pasted from another source. Ernst has carefully pasted in some disproportionately small furniture–a bed with a comfy quilt, a table set with a bottle of wine and a tureen, and an armoire with a tree growing up through it. The paint is applied thinly enough that one can see some submarine creatures that have been painted over. Since Ernst had studied psychoanalysis at the university in Bonn, it is tempting to view the space below the floor as a kind of unconscious–or preconscious, since the bedroom is the site of dreams, and dreams, Freud argued, were the royal road to the unconscious. It is a small, haunting work with two inscriptions, one in German and one in French, each identifying the space as Max Ernst’s bedroom, where “it is worth one’s while to spend a night.” I cannot help but think that the work alludes to Vincent’s painting of his bedroom in Arles, since van Gogh was one of Dada’s heroes.

Surrealism was still busy being born in the early 1920s, when these collages were made, but one feels that Ernst has already crossed over into Surrealism in these works, with their layered associations, Freudian overtones and sublime mysteriousness. Nothing like them had existed before. Collage, of course, had been developed by Picasso and Braque, but the difference between Cubist and (if I may use the term) Ernstian collage is stark. The Cubist collage employed an object or a fragment of a picture that fit smoothly into the picture onto which it was pasted. Braque, for example, used sheets of faux bois paper to represent the texture and color of wood. Picasso soaked the label from a bottle of Suze and pasted it onto a drawing of a bottle exactly where he would otherwise have painted a label. The Cubist collage plays with the philosophical distinction between reality and representation, using the reality to represent itself. The pictorial order is left more or less undisturbed. But so is the order of reality. There is a commonplace reality that corresponds to the Cubist still life, whether painted or collaged. Whatever liberties Picasso may have taken in representing, say, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, his classic portrait of Kahnweiler corresponds to a real person. By contrast, if there is a reality corresponding to an Ernstian collage, it is not commonplace. It is really uncanny to find fish swimming on, or just beneath, the bedroom floor. The Surrealists were fond of citing a line from Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), whom they regarded as a literary ancestor: “The chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” What Ernst achieved, according to Breton, was the possibility of new relations between “distant realities” and their “rapprochement.” It would explode our normal conception of reality to imagine that the floor of the bedroom is the surface of the sea. Only in dreams–in what the critic Rosalind Krauss has suggestively described as the “optical unconscious”–would this become possible.

Since Ernst also experimented with photomontage, the major achievement of the Berlin Dadaists, it is not entirely a digression to describe the relationship between collage and montage, a medium with revolutionary implications for the avant-garde. The high point of the Berlin Dada exhibition of 1920 was Hannah Hoch’s strident collage Sliced With the Dada Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beerbelly Cultural Epoch. It is shown in one of the installation shots of the 1920 exhibit, next to the artist, demurely swinging a golf club, and her lover, Raoul Hausmann, who claimed to have invented photomontage in 1918. He had noticed that several German households displayed lithographs of a grenadier standing in front of his barracks. Certain families had pasted in the face, taken from a photograph, of their own soldier. In a flash, Hausmann wrote, he realized that one could make pictures “entirely composed of cutout photographs.” That’s exactly what he and several of his friends–George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader and of course Hoch–did. Through photomontage, they were able to overcome their aversion to “playing the artist,” a Dadaist theme most closely associated with Duchamp. All of a sudden, one could make art without possessing traditional artistic skills. It was this discovery that partly underlay the Duchamp “readymades” of 1913 to 1917.

The same ethos informs the poster that Heartfield and Grosz designed, proclaiming “Art Is Dead” (Die Kunst ist tot). The poster also says, “Long live the new machine art of Tatlin,” an allusion to the great Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. The Dadaists, Hausmann said, preferred to consider themselves engineers rather than artists–“hence our preference for working clothes, for overalls.” Among the other posters in the 1920 show, one read, “Dada is the voluntary decay of the world of bourgeois concepts…. One day photography will supplant and replace the whole of pictorial art.” I have little doubt that this is the inspiration behind Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”–the death of the hand.

Ernst’s contribution to this fascinating history was to eliminate painting from his collages and instead make them entirely out of cut fragments of wood engravings, which had preceded photogravure in illustrating nineteenth-century books, magazines and newspapers. He then bound these together into graphic novels, which he published as books. These collages were Surrealist in spirit–enigmatic, irrational, violent and erotic, as if they were visual transcriptions of dreams. The engravings, cut into the end-grain of woodblocks and printed in black and white on cheap paper, were, for Ernst, what Japanese prints had been for the Impressionists–depictions in a now alien mode of representation of alien forms of life. They belonged to an earlier moment in history, with men and women wearing clothing long out of fashion, and–since many of the engravings had illustrated works of fiction–people addressed one another with exaggerated, melodramatic gestures, with hands to the brow or to the heart, heads thrown back in transports of feeling. All of this had been executed with skillful crosshatching by journeyman engravers, though the drawings may have been made by Gustave Doré, or whoever illustrated the stories of Jules Verne. The pictures were of sailing ships, balloons, cannibals, monsters, icebergs, lovers. Ernst also used illustrations from scientific catalogues, showing tools, machines and specimens. In the late 1920s or early ’30s, when Ernst used these engravings, they were pictures, to use a phrase from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of a gone world. Ernst cut and pasted, fitting images together to achieve improbable effects. They were then reproduced photographically, so that the joins are all but invisible. The two main novels are La Femme cent têtes (“The Woman a Hundred Heads,” which, pronounced in French, is phonically indistinguishable from “The Woman Without a Head”–La Femme sans tête); and Une Semaine de bonté (“A Week of Kindness”).

These singular works are antithetical to the format of a large exhibition of Ernst’s work because they are small, intimate, meant to be read rather than viewed from a distance. When they are hung on the wall, as they are in the large darkened galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, the effect is simply lost. But one can now buy reprints of Une Semaine de bonté and peruse them at home with no loss of aura, contrary to Benjamin’s dour prediction that mechanical reproduction would rob art of this quality. Moreover, in looking at the books page by page, one is not only seeing the images as Ernst intended them to be seen–you are looking at them as they were meant to be looked at. The “original” collages on view in the museum show us what we were not meant to see or be distracted by–the actual scraps of paper Ernst used. Since the reproduced collages are the most engaging and fascinating works in any representative show of Ernst’s art, it is a curatorial challenge to present the rest of his oeuvre with anything like the visual excitement of the novels. Since this is all but impossible, one can hardly criticize the Metropolitan show for failing to rise to this challenge. The exhibition is an internal critique of its own limitations. By all means pay it a visit, though you can buy Une Semaine de bonté on Amazon for about the same price.

I can safely say that Jean scoffed at the term graffiti when applied to himself.   –Rene Ricard

The creative period of New York graffiti art lasted for about a decade, beginning with the appearance all over Upper West Side walls and sidewalks of "TAKI 183" in 1971 and culminating, around 1980, in the realization of spectacular works by individual masters that covered the sides of subway cars. The artists called themselves "writers," and their primary works were alphanumeric signatures, or "tags," executed in fonts of singular originality, occasionally illuminated with vernacular images poached from comics or from recent art history. I suppose the closest analogy would be the creation of intricate capital letters by Celtic scribes in such works as the Book of Kells. Seldom has a movement gone so far so fast. The illustrations in a book like The Faith of Graffiti, published in 1974, show tags that have evolved well beyond TAKI 183, but scarcely prepare one for the baroque splendor of those in Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant's 1984 edited collection Subway Art, most of which were executed around 1980. Subway Art ends with an inscribed rap epitaph by the writer Lee Quinones in relatively straightforward lettering: "There was once a time when the Lexington was a beautiful line/When children of the ghetto expressed with art, not with crime…."

The centrality of the signature is easily grasped, since the primary goal of graffiti was "getting fame," and the subway car–or "burner"–offered a billboard-size surface with the added advantage of mobility. Glory consisted in the abrupt emergence of one's freshly painted tag from a tunnel's darkness onto a viaduct, like the one across 125th Street. The primary audience consisted of other writers, who knew one's identity, appreciated the dangers involved in "getting up" and admired the artistry and originality of one's achievement. In a recent letter, Tony Silver–who made a wonderful documentary with Chalfant, Style Wars–wrote, "I liked the idea that the transgressive writers with no consciousness of the art world had taken over public space as vandals with their tags and burners, and discovered they could be artists, creating their own canon."

When I asked Silver why Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was something of a graffitero in the early 1980s, was not included among the writers in his film, he said that he could not fit him in. Despite the fact that Basquiat worked as a street artist for a time and even had a tag–SAMO–he viewed himself, from the outset, as a fine artist, and the unprecedented art world of the 1980s rightly accepted him on his own terms, though the outlaw aura of graffiti probably abetted his meteoric ascent. By 1984 some of the writers were trying to cross over into the gallery scene, but it proved impossible to sustain the energy that had made them underground stars. Basquiat, however, flourished in the downtown art world. In May of that same year, he had his first one-person show at Mary Boone, one of the hottest galleries of that moment, and was included in "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture," with which the Museum of Modern Art inaugurated its 1984 reopening. He had re-created on canvas the visceral excitement other writers achieved only in the rail yards of the MTA.

Though writing was an important feature of Basquiat's art, he is closer to Cy Twombly than to CRASH or DAZE, who showed at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1984. Graffiti, even at its most inspired, really belongs to the visual culture of the early 1980s, whereas Basquiat's work, for all its graffiti gestures, belongs with the art of that decade. And while he sought fame as eagerly as the uptown writers, he was after the kind of recognition that the establishment alone confers, not the ephemeral celebration of co-conspirators in an underground network. Moreover, fame was not the substance of his art, as it was in the art of the writers. Like artists in any period, he was concerned with what Hegel would call the highest needs of the spirit. Basquiat's painting was close to the best the art world had to offer in his day, and his achievement only grows more impressive with time, as is evident in the powerful retrospective of his work at the Brooklyn Museum, a short walk from where he grew up. The show is up through June 5, after which it goes to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (July 17-October 10) and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (November 18-February 12, 2006).

Contrary to popular legend, Basquiat was anything but an outsider artist, and indeed much of what was most distinctive in his work came from the recent avant-garde rather than from the streets. Among his most important influences was Cy Twombly, whose work on paper, still on view at the Whitney Museum, I addressed in my last column ["American Graffiti," March 21]. As Richard Marshall observed in the catalogue to the exhibition of Basquiat's work he organized for the Whitney in 1992, "From Cy Twombly, Basquiat took license and instruction on how to draw, scribble, write, collage, and paint simultaneously."

In a conversation for Interview with the late Henry Geldzahler, former curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum, Basquiat identified as his "favorite Twombly" the 1975 Apollo and the Artist, which features a big "Apollo" written across it. Apollo and the Artist is in the Whitney show, and it is interesting to compare it with Basquiat's CPRKR in the Brooklyn show. Where Twombly wrote "Apollo" in large letters in blue wax crayon across the top of his piece, Basquiat drew "CPRKR" in big, loose letters with black paint stick across the top of his. Twombly's piece has the feeling of an elegy, with a crude flower drawn at the base. Basquiat's is a memorial tablet for one of his greatest heroes, Charlie Parker. Beneath the name he drew a three-point crown, a frequent symbol in his work, flanked with two black smears. Below that he wrote STANHOPE HOTEL/APRIL SECOND/NINETEEN FIFTY THREE FIVE–an allusion to the hotel where Parker would die on March 12, 1955. (As Basquiat explained, "I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.") There is a simple cross under that, above the inscription CHARLES THE FIRST. And across the bottom several bold black swipes of paint, which almost certainly evoke Franz Kline, also "one of my favorites," he told Geldzahler.

I have no great interest in the idea of influence, which is, as Michael Baxandall wrote, the "curse of art criticism." I emphasize the way in which Basquiat broadly "took license and instruction" from Twombly (and Kline), less as an exercise in what Baxandall calls "inferential art criticism" than to modulate the temptation to situate his work in black vernacular culture. It was characteristic of Basquiat not merely to think of Parker in terms of Apollo–the god of music and poetry (Twombly wrote "poetry music" under Apollo's name)–but also in terms of history, calling him Charles the First. He uses that as the title of a companion work, made when he was 22. In the lower left corner of Charles the First and across two of its three panels he wrote MOST YOUNG KINGS Get THIER HEAD Cut OFF. In the upper part of the central panel, the cross appears beneath some dates, again alluding to Parker's death. But certain motifs (the crown, crudely drawn hands) and certain words (among others, HALOES, FEET, THOR, OPERA, CHEROKEE) are loosely inscribed, together with some numbers and the word COPYRIGHT and the symbol ©, over the three panels. Despite the scribbling, the scrawling, the smearing and the playful misspellings, the overall feeling of Charles the First is the certainty, authority, boldness and graphic confidence that, more than any particular set of images or symbols, mark Basquiat's art. And while I would not attempt to work out the iconography of the piece, it bears out Basquiat's claim that his subject was "royalty, heroism and the streets." It is a tribute to a hero, a king of jazz, in a constellation of symbols that evokes a schoolyard wall on which different hands have drawn or written different things.

Basquiat's heroes were black sports stars such as Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali, and jazz musicians like Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, though in terms of the number of works dedicated to him, Charles the First reigns supreme. These range from the stark Now's the Time–in the form of a black phonograph record, ninety-two and a half inches in diameter, with Parker's tune "Now's the Time" scribbled in white paint over "PRKR"–to works consisting largely of lists, like Discography, written in white against a black background, with the names of Parker's fellow bebop revolutionaries (Miles Davis, Max Roach and the others) as well as the names of pieces recorded on "NOV. 26, 1945." The use of lists is another Twomblyism. A wonderful example is Jawbone of an Ass, in which what may be a crude self-portrait as Rodin's Thinker occupies a space in the upper left corner and surveys a scroll of historical names, including Achilles, Sappho, Cleopatra, Anaxagoras, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Socrates, Alexander the Great, down to Harrison, Tyler, Transcendentalism and Perry–with, again, a crude drawing in the lower right corner of a black figure saying "Yup!" and hitting ("Bip") a white figure with "Grrr" in a thought balloon over his head. It is, in my view, less a cartoon of racial strife, or even of the black specter haunting the white imagination, than a symbol of history as a pageant of war, since the scroll lists so many ancient battles and famous heroes–Hannibal, Hamilcar, Scipio, Alexander the Great, Spartacus, Julius Caesar. These are not the kinds of names that turn up on burners.

"If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption," Rene Ricard quipped, "it would be Jean-Michel." What this omits is the place of blackness in Basquiat's art, as well as in his life, and in the complex relationship between the two. Basquiat himself did not shy away from the subject of race. In a 1985 profile for The New York Times Magazine published under the title "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist," Basquiat said that he included so many people of color in his paintings because "I didn't see many paintings with black people in them." His father, Gérard Basquiat, an accountant, was Haitian, and his mother, Matilde, who had an interest in fashion design, was Puerto Rican. The family lived a middle-class life in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where, for a time, Jean-Michel attended St. Ann's, a private Catholic school with a progressive curriculum. His early interest in drawing was encouraged at home. When he was recovering from an accident, Matilde gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy, which became the source for the anatomical drawings that were so much a part of his artistic vocabulary. Thanks to Matilde, who often took him to the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, he had an unusually rich museum background. "The art," he said, "came from her."

Yet he never traveled in an exclusively black world, and his introduction to art does not seem to have come through black painters like Jacob Lawrence or Romare Bearden. His downtown milieu was chiefly white, and though he resented the scarcity of blacks and the art world's subtle undercurrents of racism (one painting on display is entitled Obnoxious Liberals), he seems to have flourished in the scene–the galleries, the clubs, the parties. He had a band called Gray, which played at the Mudd Club and CBGB, he was a great dancer and he had many white girlfriends, including Madonna. Lizzie Himmel's photograph of him for the cover of The New York Times Magazine shows him barefoot, in a paint-stained Armani suit and necktie, peering out with sulky curiosity. There is a black figure in the painting next to him, somewhat fetal in shape, with two long rows of many white teeth. In the eyes of New York's mostly white art world, Basquiat was exotically handsome, a black bohemian prince.

The downtown art world of the 1980s had undergone a dramatic reconfiguration by the time Basquiat arrived on the scene. Painting, which had been marginalized in the 1970s, had enjoyed a resurgence as part of a world movement then known as Neo-Expressionism. Neo- Expressionist paintings were brushy, urgent, figurative and, not least, very large. Since the immense demand for the Abstract Expressionist canvases of the New York School was raising prices to unprecedented heights, the very size of the paintings of Julian Schnabel, David Salle and others enhanced their value to collectors. Artists who painted big canvases began to live suitably big, opulent lives. Basquiat's brilliantly splashy work merged perfectly with the new ethos, and the fact that he painted in designer suits, rather than the working-class bluejeans and flannel shirts of an earlier generation, embodied the shift in self-perception. Basquiat became typical of the spoiled American artist that Tama Janowitz wrote about in Slaves of New York. His pals were Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and especially Andy Warhol, who became his mentor. There is a wonderful double portrait of himself with Warhol, Dos Cabezas–another painting from 1982, perhaps his best year. The two artists are shown side by side, but in different spaces. Warhol cuts a meditative profile in his white wig, looking out through one green eye. Basquiat shows himself like a golliwog, with wild black hair. Interestingly, there is no lettering.

Whether because of Basquiat's race or the uncertainty of his association with graffiti, the official art establishment was leery of him. Relatively few of his works are in public collections. Critics in the 1980s generated rarified theories to deal with Salle's disjunctive canvases, which were believed to express something about the fractured reality of the external world. Or they speculated that Julian Schnabel's fragmented, sharded compositions expressed something deep about the mind and the world's disorder. Basquiat ended up being critically ghettoized, discussed in ethnic rather than philosophical terms. To some extent this is still true today. I had not, I must confess, especially gone out of my way to see his work until after his death in 1988, when I finally went down to see a show assembled by his first dealer, Anina Nosei. It then struck me that nobody had really looked at the work. Basquiat's gift, I realized, was like Pollock's–brilliant, daring, impulsive. None of the hot artists of his moment in the 1980s could touch him. He alone transcended the fevered period he epitomized.

He did not survive his decade. He made a lot of money, which he spent lavishly on drugs. He had a terrible heroin addiction. One of his last works, on brown canvas, is called Riding With Death. A brown and black equestrian figure sits astride a horse skeleton. There are crosses in the eyeholes of the horse's skull. "Horse," of course, is slang for heroin, which transports the rider out of the world, with his arms spread out in a gesture of helplessness. Basquiat was 27 when he died.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
   –T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

In the works that made him famous, Jasper Johns realized an ancient dream by painting things that overcame the distinction between reality and representation–numerals, for example, or targets. Thus a painting of the numeral 2 is at once the numeral 2 and its representation; the same is true of a painting of a target, or of the American flag. This was not quite the achievement the sculptor Pygmalion had in mind when he carved a woman in marble that metamorphosed into a woman of flesh and blood. Still, with its mischievous approach to the seemingly intractable divide between reality and representation, Johns’s work acquired a remarkable philosophical interest. Like his friend Robert Rauschenberg, Johns mined what Rauschenberg called “the gap between art and life.” Both Johns and Rauschenberg explored as well the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop, its cool successor and ostensible antithesis.

Rauschenberg’s friend Cy Twombly was the third member of this remarkable cohort, united by personal bonds and comparable aesthetic ambitions, but his work stands apart from that of his more famous peers. Twombly’s relationship to the New York School was closer; the signature feature of his work is the scribble, which has an affinity with Pollock’s drips. Whereas Johns carefully drew or printed numerals and stencil-like letters, Twombly scrawled lines that were barely legible. Twombly had fewer qualms about being overtly representational, and he didn’t seem to worry much whether his scribbles were read as imitations of scribbling or as the thing itself. Even so, his art was very much in harmony with that of the Pop generation and beyond, based as it was on loosely written texts.

Take, for instance, the painting on the cover of the catalogue for the celebratory exhibition “Cy Twombly: 50 Years of Works on Paper,” on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 8 (after which it travels to the Menil Collection in Houston). The painting features a variation on the show’s title, “Cy Twombly: 50 Years of Drawing,” in three nearly unreadable lines of script. It has a feeling of urgency and almost looks as if it were written by a finger dipped in blood. Yet it appears to have been first written tentatively and then painstakingly overwritten, as if to make sure the message got through. Which it barely does: The two layers of writing bleed into each other, obscuring the words and suggesting a nearly hopeless struggle to communicate. Twombly’s work draws its power from this struggle with words and inscriptions, not from their meaning, in striking contrast to Johns, who never allows the bravura of his painting to obscure the transparency of his forms. Twombly has turned hermeticism into a strangely stirring form of expression.

The show begins with an arresting pair of nearly matching works, which raise all the questions of Twombly’s art, as well as a certain number of questions all their own. Both paintings are dominated by an array of black and scarlet daubs on white surfaces, but Twombly is not really an abstract painter, and the daubs irresistibly become objects in pictorial space, and convey a sense of floating on water. They could be flowers on the surface of a pond, like Monet’s waterlilies, but another reading is just as possible. In the 2001Venice Biennial, Twombly was awarded the Leone d’Oro prize for twelve panels showing a historic sea battle–the Battle of Lepanto of 1571–and the black-and-scarlet daubs could be ships aflame, seen from a distant shore, which might explain the serenity of the scene. Both works have the same title–Petals of Fire–but we don’t know if this is a poetic image or a botanical designation. There is writing on each sheet, as there often is in Twombly’s work, in a distinctively loose calligraphy, but the writing characteristically fails to clarify what we are looking at. The writing is in pencil, urgently overwritten with red oil stick. In one, in tiny script, there is an almost legible text that seems to say, “Awake a moment/Mind dreams again/Red rose black edged.” This same text seems to appear at the bottom of the other painting, but part of it disappears under a reddish smear. The end of the line is difficult to make out and perhaps was not meant to be read by anyone anyway, since the writer, painting for himself, knew what it said. In one painting there is also writing at the top. It feels like a letter (“As long as you have…”), which then fades out, though the last word is “love.” Part of the text is occluded by the word “Petals” in large script.

The combination of writing with image suggests an affinity with Chinese paintings, with calligraphy on the surfaces and images that belong in pictorial space. But I am unable to connect the writing and image in a coherent interpretation. I don’t think it would greatly enhance these works if the difficulties of reading and interpreting were removed, and if we knew just what the writing says and the images show–quite the contrary, in fact. The charm, the energy, the power of these works are connected with the revisions, the shifts in direction and meaning, the smudges, the erasures, the indeterminacies. We feel, rather, that the artist is disclosing something about his own processes of thought, as if his work is the labor of helping something come into being, a complex of words and images that might pin down an ephemeral experience or dream. I am unable to determine whether the words are transcriptions of someone else’s text or something Twombly came upon while doing one of the paintings and then copied in the other. In the lines of penciled writing at the bottom of each work, I can only make out “dark purple” and “of the.” It remains to be said that the works are extremely beautiful, for all their tentativeness, and that whatever vision they seek to capture on paper–a sea battle or a garden–it must have been powerful, since Twombly tried to get it down twice. I cannot imagine getting tired of looking at them.

In his 1975 work Adonais, Twombly’s words are transcribed from Shelley’s eponymous poem. Adonais is a somewhat minimal collage–a piece of paper shaped like a draftsman’s square is pasted onto a large sheet of tan paper. Something was written beneath the square, but it is impossible to read it, since it has been scumbled over with opaque paint or crayon. The word “Adonais” is awkwardly penciled in large letters on the bottom leg of the square, continuing onto the paper. It overwrites the same word, partially written, which has been erased. Beneath that the date and the artist’s initials are scrawled. As we know, “Adonais” is a name Shelley gave Keats and used as the title of the great elegy he wrote shortly after Keats’s death in 1821, which Shelley and others ascribed to a heart broken by bad reviews. A line from the elegy, “He has outsoared the shadow of our night,” is neatly written, like an epitaph, below the square. On the vertical leg of the square, Twombly has written out the opening verse of the elegy: “I weep for Adonais–he is dead!/O, weep for Adonais! though our tears/Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!” This is written very faintly, as if it’s a graphic whisper; and he has “Oh” where Shelley has “O,” which suggests that he was writing from memory. Finally in an angle formed by the legs of the square, we read (barely): “He is a portion of the loveliness/Which once he made more lovely.”

Is this work meant as a visual equivalent of the poem, an artist’s interpretation of the spirit of elegy? Or is it itself an elegy for someone dear to the artist–a mourning picture in its own right? Somehow the innocence of the script, the utter simplicity of the means, conveys a sense of sincerity.

What, then, is the meaning of the draftsman’s square? A half-remembered Masonic emblem? In some way, Twombly’s work conveys a feeling of improvisation and bricolage, in which art is made out of scraps and fragments, whether of language or material, recycled into something of great meaning without losing its original identity. I became enchanted a few years ago by Twombly’s sculptures, in which he reassembled found objects–a few scraps of wood, a palm leaf, a nail, a broken wheel from a discarded toy–into effigies that often conveyed a sentiment of elegy or loss. On these works, whether drawings or sculptures, there is always an overlay of allusion and reference that derives from Twombly’s exceptionally wide reading of Greek and Roman classics, Russian literature and English poetry.

Consider a drawing in oil stick, paint and pencil from 1983, titled Anabasis. Like Petals of Fire, it is a composite of writing and image. At the top, in red quasi-Greek letters, is “Anabasis.” Just below that, barely visible, is “Xenophon.” And beneath that, the date and his initials. The lower part of the sheet consists of a crudely drawn wheel, over which Twombly has fiercely scribbled back and forth in a gesture of vehement obliteration. As often in his work, the wheel and the scribble could have been made by a child. But the juxtaposition of the overscribbled wheel and the classical inscription imbue the form with a kind of memorial meaning. Xenophon was a disciple of Socrates, and indeed one of the main sources for our knowledge of the philosopher. Anabasis (The March Up Country) is a historical account of a march into Persia by the Spartans, who were allies of Cyrus in his effort to seize the throne. Xenophon led the retreat. By association, I imagine that the overscribbled wheel is an emblem of a broken chariot–in Virginia, where Twombly was raised, it could have been the wheel of a cannon. There is a mark that suggests a flame. The picture is like a memorial drawn by an infant with a classical education who can barely write–and since that is not a possible description, it could be a letter home by an illiterate soldier bearing eloquent testimony of something having gone terribly wrong. What is intoxicating in Twombly’s work is the combination of an almost regressive primitiveness with a level of humanistic cultivation matched in American art only by Robert Motherwell. Imagine Jean Dubuffet as an elegant Southern gentleman, and you’ll have an idea of Twombly’s persona.

The scribbling in Twombly’s work began quite early, and soon became his signature mode. It may have been an outgrowth of Pollock’s work, or of automatic writing, which the Surrealists brought to New York, and which some Abstract Expressionists–notably Pollock and Motherwell–explored under the tutelage of the renegade Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta. Twombly studied at Black Mountain College, the legendary avant-garde outpost in North Carolina where Motherwell and Franz Kline were in residence, and where Rauschenberg made his seminal all-white paintings. The scribble, in which the hand moves almost without direction, may also owe something to certain Zen ideas that John Cage, another Black Mountain figure, had adopted. And yet there is an eroticism in Twombly’s work that is not especially Zen. In an untitled drawing of 1954, for example, Twombly bears down on an impulsive dark line in a tangle of pencil lines to evoke what looks like a vaginal opening, thus turning a scribble into a pubic thatch and giving the work the timelessly raw look of something scrawled on a lavatory wall. In 1961 the critic Pierre Restany wrote:

Twombly occupies a unique position at the centre of the young generation of American artists. He is a lone wolf who left New York to settle in Rome, a person apart, a “character.” His graphic language is poetry and reporting, furtive gesture and écriture automatique, sexual catharsis and both affirmation and negation of the self. As full of ambiguity as life itself, it appears on corners of walls, in schoolyards and on the fronts of monuments. Twombly’s “writing”–and this is the miracle–has neither syntax nor logic, but quivers with life…. The graphic language of Twombly remains at all times inimitable.

There are two drawings in the show, made the year Restany wrote this, in colored pencil and ballpoint pen, that seem like pages of doodles by someone with sex on the brain–pairs of breasts, orifices, squiggles and squoggles, some numerals, a mysterious tabular formation that looks like a calendar, some rows of numerals crossed out. And there are four drawings, done on brown paper at the end of the 1960s, that resemble worksheets for a construction project, showing doors and windows, together with their dimensions, interspersed with random pencil marks, points of emphasis that seem to be intended for the builders. The numeral 69 appears frequently, whether as a date or an erotic notation. Each of the marks is set down without reference to the rest, so there is nothing like composition or organization. The drawings look found, like paper tablecloths in a working-class restaurant on which a foreman has given instructions to the crew.

But then we come upon a drawing that, though it seems to refer to a construction site–with numbers and words like “wall” and “green”–is titled Study for “Treatise of the Veil.” It bears the legend “Treatise of the Veil,” as well as a sheet of paper, pasted on, labeled “Veil.” What is “The Treatise of the Veil”? I searched the Library of Congress and the Columbia University Library catalogues for a work with that title, and got no result. It is an extremely poetic reference, a title one might have come across in a novel by Muriel Spark. There are four works with the title Scenes From an Ideal Marriage, which seemed to allude to a classic, but none of the literary scholars I asked had heard of such a book, nor could I locate it in any catalogue. But such titles, together with the classical allusions–Plato, for example, or Archilochus, not to mention Venus and Apollo and Pan–reveal a mind comfortable on both the levels that Nietzsche believed defined classical culture: Apollonian and Dionysian, civilized and down-and-dirty. Consider Pan, from 1975. A dirty sheet of paper is pasted onto a clean one. Above the dirty sheet, with its smudges and finger marks, Twombly has pasted two leaves, cut, one supposes, from an old album of botanical prints. On the dirty sheet, he has written “Pan”–and below that “(Panic)” next to what looks like a fecal smear.

And yet the overall feeling of this show is one of great beauty. Twombly has spent much of his life in Italy, both in Rome, where he has a studio, and in Gaeta, where he has a home. For all the scrawls and scribbles, the atmosphere of the show is one of gardens, of ruins, fertility, desire, myth and the memory of ancient gods and warm winds from the coast of Africa. The magic of Twombly’s art lies in the way he is able to evoke the poetry of his vision by the unlikely means of smudges, smears of paint, scraps of paper, notations, penciled fractions, scatological doodles, lines of writing, crude diagrams, awkward drawings, found bits and pieces from the life world, shreds of nothing.

In Hegel’s formidable system of aesthetics, fine art fulfills its highest calling when “it has placed itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy.” Philosophy, religion and fine art are modes of what Hegel called Absolute Spirit, by which he meant that each in its different way is capable of expressing “the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit.” Despite his exalted view of art, Hegel felt that humankind had begun to outgrow it, and that it no longer provided “that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it.” Thus he spoke grandly of the End of Art, which meant, in the long history of antagonism between philosophy and art, that a philosopher had once again found a way of putting art out of the way. Plato notoriously consigned art to the realm of shadows and illusions, and found no place for artists in the ideal society. Hegel, for his part, thought art belonged in the museum, where it would do no harm and function as an object for historical research. Since it is limited to the senses, Hegel argued, art is philosophy’s inferior when it comes to addressing the ultimate issues of being.

Much the same iconophobia inflected religion’s attitude toward art in the West, beginning with the Second Commandment, which assumes that we are unable to visualize things without worshiping the images. It was the genius of Catholicism to find a way of incorporating the impulse to visualize by monopolizing the production and use of images, which then made images natural targets for that religion’s critics. Iconoclasm–literally, the destruction of images–was a natural first impulse of church reform. “Church pictures,” Joseph Leo Koerner writes, “were accused of exciting idolatry, breaking the biblical law against graven images and ignoring the early Christian martyrs’ repudiation of pagan effigies.” Koerner’s subject, in this remarkable study, is “the reformation of the image”–how the artists of the Reformation, working closely with its thinkers, managed to reconfigure the devotional image to suit the needs of their religion, when the initial impulse was simply to cleanse the churches of painting and sculpture. They did this by effectively turning religious images into “visual equivalents of confessional texts.” The history of art in sixteenth-century Germany could have become “a story of the image’s annihilation.” Instead it became the story of the image’s transformation into something that did exactly what Hegel prescribed for art “in its highest vocation,” namely to situate art in “the same sphere as religion and philosophy.” Far from being limited to the senses, the art of the Reformation probed the deepest questions of human life. The art was intended to be read, one might say, rather than merely looked at or worshiped. It showed what the reformers, and most particularly Martin Luther, said. It mirrored devotional practice.

Koerner concentrates on two Reformation altarpieces. One is by Lucas Cranach the Elder in Wittenberg, which commemorates and portrays Luther twice, as he would still have been remembered by the congregation that worshiped in his church. The other is Heinrich Göding’s Mühlberg Altarpiece of 1568. Both of these extraordinary works were unknown to me, as I dare say they will be to most readers of this book. I knew of Cranach, but mostly from his earlier paintings of luminous undulating goddesses, whose luscious bodies are revealed through diaphanous garments fluttering against black Mannerist backgrounds. These hardly prepared me for a work as complex as his Wittenberg Altarpiece, let alone the Mühlberg Altarpiece, one of the most amazing works I have ever encountered. It is amazing because it manages to be art, philosophy and religion all at once. It fuses verbal and pictorial meaning in such a way that members of the congregation would be able to grasp, in a single visual experience, what they needed to know in order to see what they believed and understand what they saw.

Reading Koerner’s singular and compelling analyses, I felt that I could catch something of the atmosphere that Hegel must have breathed, sitting in the Lutheran church interiors of his native Saxony two and a half centuries later. It was as if that powerful metaphysician had somehow transformed that atmosphere into a speculative system in which art, philosophy and religion coexist in a unity as intricate as that of the Trinity. In a way, the Reformation altarpiece could be seen as the end of art, just as Hegel claimed. But in another way it is the beginning of art as we know it today, less an occasion for aesthetic delectation than of philosophical interpretation and understanding. Koerner writes that Hegel’s was the first aesthetic theory to be “based on meanings rather than forms.” But that is what the “reformation of the image” amounted to in practice.

Let us focus on the predella of Lucas Cranach’s altarpiece. A predella is a picture, or set of pictures, that rests on the altar itself and supports the altarpiece. It mediates, so to speak, between the physical space of the church and the pictorial space in which the persons of the altarpiece are seen. In Cranach’s case, the predella is a long rectangle that has the shape of a sepulcher, in which Luther is depicted at the right, preaching across a wide space to the congregation seated at the left. In the empty space between preacher and congregants there is an image of Christ crucified. Christ’s agony on the cross is the subject of the sermon, and Cranach has made this visible. But he has also made visible the fact that the Crucifixion is the meaning of the service, that it stands in the space in which the religion is practiced. This is not merely a vision shared by Luther and his congregants, for the Crucifixion is shown casting a shadow on the church floor, as if it were real. This situates it both in the hearts of the faithful and in the physical space they occupy. It relates the congregation to the altar and to the ritual mysteries that transpire there, as well as to the scenes depicted in the altarpiece itself, pre-eminently the Last Supper, in which Christ reveals that the bread and wine are his body and blood, and that he and his followers are one substance, as celebrated in the mass. In a stunning analysis of the painting, Koerner powerfully illuminates the complex of beliefs–theological, social and political–defining the religious practices that evolved through Luther’s teaching.

The predella of Heinrich Göding’s Mühlberg Altarpiece is, if anything, even more intricate. Seated before it, the congregation was able to see portraits, on either side, of the two patrons who commissioned the altarpiece. The predella itself shows them taking communion in front of the same altarpiece on which the predella rests. Since the predella shows the very altarpiece on which it rests, it shows itself in the picture. In this picture within the picture, there is therefore another picture of the predella, and within that yet another, in a diminishing series that in principle extends to infinity. By the time the Mühlberg Altarpiece was completed, Göding’s patrons had died. Yet the predella shows them in the same posture, partaking of the host over and over again, throughout eternity. It is as if the scene is reflected, re-reflected and re-re-reflected again and again, in what art historians call a mise en abyme–a kind of infinite regression in which a picture contains a picture of itself, which in turn contains a picture of itself. The most familiar example of this is the Quaker Oats box that shows a picture of a man holding a box of Quaker Oats with a picture of himself holding the same box, with a picture of himself holding the box, and so on forever. By depicting the pious couple in eternal communion with Jesus, The Mühlberg predella implies that those who take communion have already entered eternity. Nietzsche developed the idea of an Eternal Recurrence, which he claimed to be the most scientific of hypotheses. He believed that it would have an impact even greater than the doctrine of the soul’s immortality. Through repeating images of itself, the Mühlberg predella renders this highly abstract concept in strikingly visual terms.

The Reformation of the Image is the most exciting book of art history I have read since Hans Belting’s magisterial 1993 study of religious icons in European culture, Likeness and Presence. Both books not only introduce us to works of art of a kind with which we are likely to be unfamiliar but to ways of relating to art that are very different from those we take for granted. In both cases, the importance of the art in question does not depend on aesthetic merit. The devotional image, as Belting described it, was supposed to perform miracles if prayed to in the right way, not to gratify the eye. Only with the Renaissance did pictorial art make aesthetic gratification its central aim. The Reformation altarpiece found ways of picturing invisible things, the understanding of which was believed to be essential to salvation. Both authors draw liberally on philosophy to clarify the way these works functioned in venues very different from the museum and the art gallery. At the same time, these forgotten or little-known works reveal dimensions of artistic achievement that widen our understanding of art well beyond aesthetic contemplation.

With The Reformation of the Image, Joseph Leo Koerner has completed a three-volume study of German art that began with his earlier study of Caspar David Friedrich. Indeed, this volume opens with Friedrich’s 1807-08 painting, The Cross in the Mountains, which, like Cranach’s Wittenberg Altarpiece, leaves it unclear whether there is an actual crucifixion in the mountains or whether it is a vision of the Crucifixion in a wild landscape. The volume ends with an 1810 sketch by Friedrich of a ruined choir, a powerfully evocative Romantic image. Koerner interprets Friedrich’s drawing as “an allegory of how art arises from the ruins of religion.” What he has accomplished in this marvelous book is to bring that religion to life again, and in the process make vivid the art that emerged from the critique of images that launched the Reformation.

The letterhead of Columbia University, where I taught for four decades, reads in full “Columbia University in the City of New York,” not because there is much likelihood that anyone will wonder which Columbia University the letter comes from but because its location is part of its identity. I have always felt the same thing should be true of the Museum of Modern Art and the City of New York, since they together embody the spirit of modernity. “The Modern,” as those of my generation referred to the museum, exemplified modernity through the late Art Deco style of the original 1939 Goodwin and Stone building. As a piece of architecture, it mirrored those parts of the collection that were moderne in the strictest aesthetic sense: as heady, clear and swanky as a gin martini. Its emblematic work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with its jazzy art nègre figures–like African fetishes in the salon of a Parisian couturier–had found the museum and the metropolis to which it really belonged. Nothing like this could be said for the 1984 reconstruction by Cesar Pelli, which was modern not in terms of style but only in being of its moment, and which expressed MoMA’s uncertainty about its artistic direction. It was, moreover, a defensive piece of architecture, which closed itself off from the city, drawing walls around its collection, as if to preserve Modernism’s embattled purity. Only its bookstore windows opened onto the city. When Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik installed their vilified exhibition “High & Low” in 1990, it was barely noticed that they had uncovered one of the windows that had been walled up, enabling passers-by to see the art that Claes Oldenberg had shown in the display window of his “Store” on East 2nd Street in 1962. Those inside the exhibit could see the street life of the city–taxis, trucks, dog-walkers, people pushing strollers–and for a brief moment the barrier between the art and the city all but vanished.

What immediately strikes a visitor to the 2004 museum, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of MoMA, is the way in which the museum is now literally open to the city. The lobby is, in a qualified sense, a pedestrian passage, which one can freely enter and exit; and the upper galleries allow views of New York to enter through generously proportioned windows, as well as the glass-curtain wall facing east. It is as if New York were, as the engine of modernity, acknowledged as an integral part of what the museum exists to show. But one is made conscious of art even if one merely traverses the lobby from one cross street to the other. Upon entering the walkway from 54th Street, one sees Barnett Newman’s great sculpture Broken Obelisk, designed as a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., standing on the second floor of the immense atrium and rising to a skylight four floors up. Ordinarily, one encounters this deeply moving work standing on the same level. Seen from below, the inverted shaft of the obelisk seems to descend to earth like a stalactite–or to point downward like a stylized index finger–rather than rising upward from the point on which it is balanced. The shaft thus acquires an astounding weightlessness, as if it were floating in air.

The people standing around Broken Obelisk are dwarfed both by it and by the engulfing space. The disproportion between the sculpture and the human throng reminded me of a device employed by Piranesi in his engravings of ancient Rome. Seeking to bestow the ruins with even more grandeur than they possessed, he reduced the scale of the human figures that stood about them. This is the effect of seeing Broken Obelisk together with its viewers. And yet, paradoxically, one does not feel diminished but rather exalted by the space when one ascends into the atrium and becomes a part of it. When Jean-Paul Sartre visited New York City in the mid-1940s, he was overwhelmed by the feeling of great space, which reminded him of the American West. Taniguchi has somehow brought that spatial feeling into the museum, as part of the project of integrating the building with the city.

Thanks to its location in Taniguchi’s design, Newman’s sculpture stands poised to become one of MoMA’s emblematic works–a bit ironic in view of his well-known put-down of sculpture as something you bump into when backing up to get a better look at a painting. Another emblematic sculpture is Rodin’s looming figure of Balzac, familiar to most of those who have seen it as an outdoor sculpture, either in the Sculpture Garden of MoMA or in the center of Boulevard Raspail, just before it intersects Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris. Balzac has been brought indoors, where it faces the entryway to the collections, with its back to the Sculpture Garden, seen through the glass wall behind it. One of The Nation‘s critics, Elizabeth Robin Pennell, reviewed this work for the magazine in 1898, when it was, as she archly put it, “a standing joke in Paris.” Today we are blind to Modernism’s scandalousness, and I admire Pennell for not writing it off, though she was uncertain how it could be considered a finished work. A talisman of Modernism’s struggle for acceptance, Balzac is just the right work to mark the beginning of one’s visit. Aesthetically, the burnished bronze looks radiant in the natural light of day and luminous at night. Posted at the base of the grand staircase to the collection whose spirit it encapsulates, Balzac is to the new MoMA what the Nike of Samothrace is to the Louvre: a symbol of the triumphant history the museum itself enshrines.

Mounting Taniguchi’s staircase, one is conscious of the helicopter, suspended above one’s head like a menacing mobile, not only proclaiming the museum’s interest in modern industrial design but making a punning reference to the Calder mobile that used to hang above the Bauhaus staircase in the Goodwin and Stone building. In fact, Taniguchi has re-created the brilliant black-trimmed Bauhaus staircase, now between the second and third floors. There indeed is a Calder mobile, as well as a Mondrian painting, both of which, together with the staircase, evoke the Modernist aesthetic of the original museum. The wonderful Oskar Schlemmer painting of Bauhaus students on the stairway–which used to hang where the Mondrian is now–has regrettably been transferred to one of the galleries on the fourth floor, deprived of its earlier meaning. There is one other referential staircase, between the fourth and fifth floors, both of which are given over to painting and sculpture. It alludes to the staircase of the Shchuchin mansion in Moscow, on the landing of which Matisse’s La Danse once hung. Shchuchin was one of Matisse’s early patrons, and his collection one of the few sites where Russian avant-garde artists could study the kind of modern art that they aspired to create. Each of the staircases in the new building, functional and evocative, thus reflects the aesthetic and historical intentions of MoMA at their best, when architecture and art act as one in imparting Modernism’s lessons. The escalators, which dominated the Pelli building’s lobby, have been discreetly set to one side.

One also sees La Danse through an opening high in the atrium wall. Indeed, there are balcony-like openings at each level onto the atrium floor, through each of which one sees across to La Danse, with more and more of the gallery stairway revealed the higher you ascend. The museum is a cat’s cradle of crossing sight-lines, so one keeps seeing what I think of as the defining works from various angles. When one stands on the level with the helicopter, one can see Balzac below. And of course from one opening onto the atrium, one can see across to the others, as well as people looking over the barriers. As with the view from the lobby into the atrium, other viewers are always part of the scene, which gives the place a tremendous sense of animation. I have never been in a building with so optical an essence, and in which other people by their very presence contribute to its aesthetic impact. In most museums I think of Sartre’s famous line from No Exit: “Hell is other people.” In MoMA, the consciousness of others moving from stage to stage and space to space is so much a part of the experience that one feels one is always part of a constantly changing work of art. That too makes it feel like New York.

The atrium is clearly the spiritual core of the building, and its floor a kind of piazza, with Broken Obelisk destined to become a meeting point, the way Picasso’s Guernica used to be. But what works for monumental sculpture works less well for the paintings, however large they are. The fact that one is always aware of people on every level somewhat reduces the unequal struggle in scale between the immense height of the atrium’s walls and the paintings hung at viewing height from the atrium’s floor. It was a huge mistake to hang Monet’s Nympheas in this space. Even though Monet lived and painted into the 1920s, even though the great paintings of his lily pond, with clouds and their reflections interacting with the floating flowers, influenced–or at least had some affinity in their all-over composition with–Abstract Expressionism, the painting is out of place as well as out of scale. Monet’s water-lily paintings were designed for a circular, relatively low-ceilinged room in the Orangerie, as a kind of diorama; and though any one of them is a great treasure, treasures have to be treasured, and not abused. I am sure the wall display is temporary, but space must be found for this work that is consistent with the mission of aesthetic education that La Danse serves, and in which the work can yield a meaning without losing a fight with scale. None of the paintings currently on view there really stand up to the pressure the atrium exerts, even if they fare better than the Monet. Brice Marden’s calligraphy and Jasper Johns’s Untitled look drab and drained by all that space and light, and Willem de Kooning’s Pirate, for all its bright hues, is outmatched by the architecture. Even worse, they become reduced to rectangular patches when seen from the upper openings.

The theory, as I understand it, is that the high ceilings of the museum’s second floor were dictated by the anticipated scale of the contemporary work the museum expects to acquire, as it copes with the future of modern art. But very little now displayed, either in the atrium or the side galleries, justifies the height of the spaces. In one of the side galleries off the atrium, there is a marvelous work by the late Felix Gonzales-Torres, called Perfect Lovers. It consists of two quite ordinary kitchen clocks, set at the same hour and keeping the same time. One of them will finally stop–will metaphorically die–before the other. Contemporary work like Gonzales-Torres’s is capable of dealing with the greatest of themes–love and death–without requiring immense space. Perfect Lovers, a physically small work, is exhibited in a space designed for something as imposing as one or more of Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipse series.

It is extremely chancy, moreover, to anticipate the future of art architecturally, or to presuppose that modern art will continue to be shaped principally by painting and sculpture, albeit on a larger scale. Performance, installation and video don’t necessarily call for the kinds of spaces required bythe classical Modernism so successfully displayed on MoMA’s fourth and fifth floors. This is even more true of computer art, which is almost certain to play a significant role in the future. An artist I admire, for the moment without a gallery, makes his work on a laptop, which he recently carried with him to the Art Basel fair in Miami to show to potential collectors. The high ceilings on the second floor boldly project a future that may never come to pass.

The artistic core of the new MoMA consists of the galleries on the fourth and especially the fifth floor, which display the works everyone missed while the museum was undergoing reconstruction: Starry Night, Sleeping Gypsy, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, La Danse, White on White and the many others that define Modernist sensibility. The openings I attended were like family reunions– everyone was moved by these familiar and deeply loved pieces, and the meaning of MoMA for New York was palpable in the joy expressed in seeing them again. When I revisited the museum as part of the throng, I was impressed that clusters of people gathered spontaneously in front of certain early Modernist favorites, as they do in front of the Mona Lisa or The Raft of the Medusa. This did not quite happen on the fourth floor, where the art still raises the questions that Modernism always raised, even if everyone knows them. Warhol, Johns, Twombly and Rauschenberg have entered the canon, and from college courses in “Art Since 1945,” everyone is familiar with the late Modernist movements–Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism. Of course, this art can be seen everywhere now, but its presence at MoMA means that it has become part of a canonical history and taken its place in a narrative of Modernism. Modern art goes on being made, of course, but the story of Modernism as a period has come to an end.

What has not yet come to an end (or so it would seem) is the idea of a canon, so central to the histories of Modernism and MoMA under Alfred Barr and William Rubin. When Barr purchased one of de Kooning’s “Black” paintings in 1948, the message was not only that de Kooning had entered the canon but that the canon had been opened up to American art. Until this acquisition Barr, who personified MoMA, tended to identify Modernism with European art, with rare exceptions like Calder. De Kooning, a Dutch-born American, broke the ice. Even Pollock, whose art Barr at first disliked, was accepted into the canon and now has a gallery to himself on the fourth floor, an entryway to which frames one of Newman’s largest paintings, Vir Heroicus Sublimus. The South African artist William Kentridge told me that one of the high points of his career was seeing his prints displayed at MoMA with those of the German Expressionists who inspired him. Being in MoMA has really meant something to artists sensitive to their place in history, and one can see why the museum would want to give its authoritative vision of Modernism’s narrative an architectural embodiment. But as that vision of art history loses some of its authority, younger artists may no longer feel anointed when their work is acquired by MoMA. If this is true, the galleries devoted to contemporary art would no longer carry the meaning of the upper galleries. The concept of a canon may itself be dated as an art historical reality.

Meanwhile, the light and amplitude of the museum’s first five floors establish an aura for the modern art that has made it into its privileged precincts. For whatever reason, Taniguchi’s vision deserted him in creating the sixth floor, which is to house temporary exhibitions. The space is wide, low and graceless, and one appreciates by its absence how important to the overall feeling of the museum the atrium is. The glass-curtain wall is blocked by the elevator bank, so one appreciates that it does more than flood our consciousness with the surrounding city. There is some compensation for the space’s soullessness in the fact that the panels of James Rosenquist’s gigantesque F-111 can be displayed all on the same wall, the way one now realizes must have been the work’s original intention. (Usually it is bent into angles to fit spaces too small for it.) The sixth-floor gallery perhaps communicates the feeling that what will be shown is really not part of what Hegel would call the idea of the modern embodied in the grand architecture below. The five and a half stars it merits make the building well worth a visit in anyone’s architectural Michelin. There are not enough stars in the critic’s firmament for the art. That is one more thing the Museum of Modern Art has in common with the City of New York.

Crossing from the first to the second room of the generous retrospective of Romare Bearden’s art, on view through January 9, 2005, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is not simply to move from one phase to another in Bearden’s development; it is to leave one art historical period for another. Bearden was successful in both periods–in the 1940s of the first room, he showed with Samuel Kootz, whose gallery was dedicated to advanced art of the time; and in the 1960s of the second room, he was one of the stars of the important gallery Cordier and Ekstrom. But his work of the two periods was deeply different. In a way, Bearden was beached by the end of the 1940s, as American art moved in a direction that left him behind. It was as if he was then swept up by a different wave altogether, which made it possible for him to become the remarkable artist the show really celebrates. So the art of the second room, and indeed of the remainder of the show, is not an internal evolution out of the art of the first room. It is an art there would have been no way of imagining on the basis of what preceded it, for it is the result of political and artistic forces Bearden did not control. These forces account for the cultural turbulence of the 1960s. Bearden responded to these forces creatively, transforming himself as an artist into something altogether original. The art of the long final phase of Bearden’s life and career has to be explained through this creative response. There is no better way to appreciate this than by asking what happened to Bearden in the intervening decade. The 1950s is an essentially missing decade in this show. The 1960s rescued him from failure. That missing decade gives the show a drama that cannot be grasped if we simply think of the art of the second room as what he did next. In the 1950s Bearden was a kind of lost soul.

Bearden abruptly became Bearden around 1964–a miraculous year for him as an artist, when he broke through into a mode of representation distinctively his own and entered the calm waters of a marvelously personal style that was never again challenged, from without or within. It enabled him, over the remaining twenty-four years of his life, to evoke, in his words, “a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.” By “validity,” Bearden meant, I think, that his experience as an African-American was not ruled out as a “subject of the artist,” to use an expression that was current in Abstract Expressionist discourse. And by “its own logic,” he meant that the experience would determine the form through which it was expressed. The breakthrough, however, has to be understood through the collusion of two moments, one art-historical and the other political. In 1964 Pop art freed artists to draw on imagery from ordinary life. That April, Andy Warhol displayed supermarket cartons, including the Brillo box, that brashly defied the imperatives of aesthetic purity that had defined Modernist art. And a few months later came Freedom Summer, in which Southern blacks waged a concerted campaign to demand their civil rights. Bearden was liberated by Pop to find his own language, and the urgency of black liberation gave him his subject. He became a leading artist of the black experience. In the 1940s he had been a gifted cosmopolitan who simply happened to be black.

The Kootz gallery was one of the centers in which what came to be known as Abstract Expressionism was taking form. Kootz showed the work of Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes, who were part of the emerging movement. Bearden belonged to the figurative wing of Kootz’s stable, along with Carl Holty and Byron Browne. I think it’s fair to say that the work of these figurative artists was in some significant measure European in inspiration. Bearden’s work was in the modified Cubist style that had become a sort of lingua franca of Modernism. Always a person of deep culture and wide reading, he struggled in the 1940s to give visual embodiment to texts by Homer and García Lorca, as well as the Bible. The paintings from the Kootz period are quite rewarding and worth looking at closely. The underdrawing is in fact entirely in the Abstract Expressionist mode: It is made up of the swift, whiplike arabesques, with sudden jazzy reversals, that one sees in Pollock or de Kooning. The images that overlay them are constructed of Cubist panes of color, and feel, especially in the García Lorca series, as if they have been inspired by Guernica. But Kootz closed the gallery in 1948, and when he reopened it the following year the figurative contingent was no longer part of it.

1949 marked the beginning of what Mark Tansey, in a brilliant allegory, calls The Triumph of the New York School. Bearden, Browne and Holty belonged, one might say, to the American wing of the defeated School of Paris. And Bearden strove in the decade that followed, part of which he spent in Paris, to turn himself into an abstract artist. It was an extremely difficult period for him. He supported himself as a caseworker for the New York City Department of Social Services. For a time he turned his back on painting altogether and became a songwriter. He joined ASCAP, and one of his songs, “Seabreeze,” recorded by Billy Eckstein, was a hit. Interestingly, he was encouraged by Hannah Arendt and her husband, the philosopher Heinrich Blücher, to persevere as a painter. But it is one thing to return to painting, another to know what kind of painting to return to. In the culture of the 1950s, abstraction seemed to be the only option for a serious painter, but Bearden ultimately realized that he was not cut out for it. There was accordingly no clear path before him. He was not alone in his frustrations, and though I cannot say that he and Philip Guston were part of one another’s lives, they both went through the same sort of crisis. At a panel on the future of abstraction, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, Guston said:

There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art: that painting is autonomous, pure, and for itself–therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is “impure.” It is the adjustment of “impurities” which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden.

Guston’s 1970 show at Marlborough made a radical break with the abstract painting in which, unlike Bearden, he had achieved considerable success. By then Bearden had found his way. Both derived their new language from vernacular imagery–Guston from the comics, Bearden from photographs in magazines like Life and Ebony. Bearden’s liberation came through a medium that combined collage and photomontage. The deep biographical question, to which I have no answer, is how he found this medium and made it his own.

Consider, for example, his 1964 work Evening. It is a scene of three black figures–two men and a woman–enjoying a game of cards under lamplight. It is 9:10, according to the clock in the lower right corner, which Bearden had cut and pasted from a magazine. Someone is snoozing on the daybed, which has a broken spring. The card players’ heads have been cut and pieced together from magazine photographs, as have the cards they are playing with. So has the woman’s dress, as well as the buildings we see through a window in the upper left. The table has the feeling of a Cubist still life. There is a banjo in the lower left corner. It is a small, dense work, and signature Bearden. What is striking about it is the way the two sides of his work intersect and overlap–his commitment to depicting the “Negro experience” and his great knowledge of modern art. This overlap defines his work from this point on, a powerful outpouring of creative energy in which Bearden produced masterpiece after masterpiece. It is positively thrilling to experience this in the second room of the show.

Look at the wonderful Watching the Good Trains Go By. A group of black figures are lined up as a train approaches from the right. Their faces and garments are collaged from scraps scissored from magazines. A figure in a cloth cap plays a guitar. If Evening refers to Bearden’s Harlem experience, Watching the Good Trains Go By perhaps refers to North Carolina, where he was born and spent parts of his youth. It is a rural scene, with barns and paper hills. The train is a recurring symbol in Bearden’s art, perhaps because it was a central symbol of the black migration, carrying people between North and South, city and country, as in August Wilson’s great play The Piano Lesson, whose title is drawn from one of Bearden’s paintings. Bearden’s father was a railroad man, like the character Doaker in Wilson’s play, who articulates the meaning of trains in black American mythology–“Now, I’ll tell you something about the railroad…” There is a train in the background of Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings, which is an Annunciation, with a scary angel, looking like a tribal fetish, next to a demure young black woman with downcast eyes, cut from a magazine. One wonders if the train is Bearden’s way of showing the Holy Spirit.

Photomontage flourished in the German Dada movement of the early 1920s, where it became a powerful vehicle for political commentary. I suspect that Bearden learned about it through the German refugee artist George Grosz, with whom he studied at the Art Students League in the 1930s. Grosz had exhibited in the 1921 Dada Exhibition in Berlin, along with the great montagists Hannah Höch and John Heartfield. Bearden’s ambitious montage, Sermons: The Walls of Jericho, uses photographs of Benin heads, together with fragments of Roman architecture, to convey a feeling of walls tumbling down. Of his 1964 works, it is closest, I think, to Hannah Hoch’s angry 1920 masterpiece, Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, in which cut-out newspaper images of German political figures and entertainers are pasted together with machine parts and headlines to form a sour indictment of Hoch’s times. Bearden is almost never polemical in this manner. Sermons–reproduced in the catalogue but not included in the present venue–is atypical. For the most part, his imagery is amused and affectionate. These are the people, these are the forms of life, he loved.

Interspersed with the photomontages in the second room are larger photostats of the same works, which Bearden called “Projections.” It was these that first caught the eye of the gallerist Arne Ekstrom, who presented the first show of his new work. So far as I can tell, it consisted of twenty-one photostatic enlargements of his montages, which I find somewhat baffling. The photostats are monochrome, of course, and the figures seem to float in a kind of brown twilight. I don’t know if the montages existed for the sake of the photostats, which have an entirely different aesthetic. Seeing a photostat next to its corresponding montage feels like an allegory of Walter Benjamin’s juxtaposition of the art of mechanical reproduction alongside an artwork with aura. I don’t think the role of photostat was documentary, as a wall text somewhat lamely suggests, but what Bearden was getting at remains an unsolved issue in interpreting his work. In any case, the “Projections” seem to drop out of the picture after 1964. In my judgment they lack the charm and energy of the montage/collages they reproduce.

Near the end of the show there is a wonderful 1981 self-portrait–the only one Bearden is known to have done–that shows the artist on one side of a framed painting on an easel, with a black model, her back to us, standing on the other side. It is called Profile/Part II, The Thirties: Artist With Painting and Model. It is a kind of history of his development as an artist. The painting on the easel is a version in bright, clear colors, of an early painting, The Visitation, which you can see, in far muddier colors, near the beginning of the show. Not only have Bearden’s forms become more clarified and his colors more intense in this 1981 reworking of a 1941 painting, but Profile uses cut paper as the studio floor covering: a plaid rug for the model to stand on, and a neatly cut piece of gift wrapping for the rest. There is a drawing of the model on the floor, and a cup of brushes on the left–in the 1930s, Bearden had not yet discovered cut paper as medium. The model is wearing a piece of African textile around her middle, which is painted rather than collaged, as are the painter’s own garments. Bearden has not given himself much by way of facial features; it’s as if he were saying that his work is his portrait. On the wall behind him is a reproduction of a work by Duccio, part of his great Maestà, which Bearden had closely studied. I suspect the Duccio gives the work its title–it refers to the time when Bearden was studying the old masters, under the guidance of Grosz.

There is a superb essay on Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell in the catalogue for his 1991 memorial show (he died in 1988) at the Studio Museum in Harlem, “Memory and Metaphor.” In it she asks an interesting question: “What is Bearden’s role in the history of American art? Will Romare Bearden appear to be an anachronism in American art, his new forms an aberration, exotic and interesting, but ultimately not part of the central story of the art of the [twentieth] century?” I would like to address this question here. I don’t think Bearden shaped the direction art took in the 1960s; we cannot imagine the 1960s without Warhol, but we can without Bearden. It was the 1960s that made him possible, rather than the reverse. And yet Bearden was among the great beneficiaries of the period, and ultimately became an innovator in his own right. He was able to make art out of his own reality, and to find, in the history of Modernism, the formal means of doing this. Through this, he became a paradigm of what happened to art history through the 1960s and into the present. He turned his life into art, using what he had learned from Duccio, Giotto and Dada, as well as from Benin and Baoulé. But the art he created is for everyone. I think that is the kind of achievement artists today aspire to.

The remarkably gifted artist Francesca Woodman abruptly ended her brief life and career on January 19, 1981, leaping to her death from a window in her New York studio. Francesca was 22 years old. The work of her eight productive years, to which a small show at the Marian Goodman Gallery on West 57th Street is currently paying tribute, would have been magical and enigmatic whatever her fate, but the suicide caused viewers to wonder if it was foreshadowed in her images, which were mostly of herself. The relationship between an artist’s life and work is always tentative, even when the life seems obviously to have been the subject of the work, as in the case of Marcel Proust. The best reason for reading his biography is to learn how different the life and the great novel are, despite the internal relationship between the two. The difference between the author and the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past is a matter of intricate interpretation, though both are named Marcel. And, of course, the novel does not end with the death of its narrator; it ends, rather, with his resolution to begin to write it. “Death is not an event in life,” Wittgenstein said. “Death is not lived through.”

Whether or not Francesca’s suicide is projected in her art, the work seems revelatory of her inner life, not only because she is typically the model for the photographs of which it is made up but because of the way she pictures herself. The photographs are of a young woman, often nude, often wearing the kinds of vintage clothes or intimate garments that Francesca’s friends say she wore. They typically show her alone in the largely empty rooms, with stained, peeling walls and the odd piece of secondhand furniture, that she used as studios or living spaces or both. So people have pored over the prints with forensic eyes, looking for diagnostic clues. I must say the “evidence” strikes me as pretty crude. In one she shows herself in a bathtub, which a hermeneutical sleuth pounces on as metaphorically–a coffin! But models have been shown in bathtubs from Degas through Toulouse-Lautrec to Bonnard, without anyone thinking that mortality is a subtext. Or did the critic have in mind the fact that Seneca committed suicide in his bathtub, fearing a worse end at the hands of his dangerous disciple, the Emperor Nero? In fact, there is very little evidence in the photographs of one of the most important truths of Francesca’s life: that she was a photographer, and indeed the very photographer who took the pictures. In a portrait taken in her studio in Providence, Rhode Island, she sits behind a large, boxy camera on a tripod. But it is by a friend, George Lange. The camera, so far as I have been able to discover, is never a prop in any of her sparsely furnished spaces. There are not even overlooked signs, like a telltale cable, except in the very early picture Self-Portrait at Thirteen, taken when she could have been as old as 17, judging by the date. It is a self-portrait as a 13-year-old girl, whose chief feature is her hair, which covers all her other features, and whose most conspicuous garment is a cable-knit sweater. It is a cable-knit image: The cable is deliberately left in the print to make the pun. Francesca was as fastidious about planting signs and meaning as a Flemish master. If there were so much as the shadow of a camera, it reflected an artistic decision. As it is, the photographic apparatus is always external to the image, though certainly internal to her life.

I have referred to Francesca by her first name, though I never knew her personally. I did get to know her parents, George and Betty Woodman, both of them important artists in their own right. Betty is one of the major ceramists of our time, and I have written about her work on several occasions. George had been part of the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the late 1970s, but is today best known for his own frequently exhibited photographs. By 1986, Francesca’s work had become very widely known, with major exhibitions everywhere. She was the subject of studies by major critics, European and American. Her work, which seemed almost obsessively addressed to her gender and sexuality, coincided with the intense intellectual preoccupation these themes had awakened throughout the art world. The circumstances of her death gave her life an almost Rimbaldian aura. It is impossible to view her work without being drawn into the vast questions it raises about life, art and the meaning and embodiment of sex.

The Woodmans have assumed the responsibilities associated with shepherding their daughter’s artistic estate as her fame has spread and, alas, have had to deal with the inevitable myths that attach to artists whose work cries out for–yet also suffers from–biographical explanation. I have never discussed their views on Francesca’s death with them, but I have a pretty vivid sense of her life. She was born in Colorado, where her parents taught art at the university in Boulder. It was and is an artistic household–her brother Charlie is also an artist–and Francesca grew up artistically literate, to the point that one need hardly seek outside the culture of her home to find such influences as may have inflected her imagery. The family is Italophile–hence her name–and in 1969 purchased a house near Florence, where they continue to spend part of each year. Francesca attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, spent a year in Rome and finally moved to New York. She made her first photographs when she was at boarding school, and seems to me to have been instantly an artist. In that respect she reminds me of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose first photographs have an immediate authority, though he was suspicious of the importance of photography as a medium. Their somewhat cognate visions were already present at the beginning. Francesca’s vision always informs her work, in Boulder, Providence, Rome and New York. It is like a personal signature. One has the sense that she could have done nothing but what she did do. Her work unfolds over time like the oeuvre of a brilliant and precocious poet, like Keats or Rimbaud, whose voice is present in every line.

The photographers of Francesca’s generation–Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin come to mind especially–all used themselves as subjects, in varying ways. Like Francesca, Sherman used herself almost exclusively as her model, but her photographs are in no sense self-portraits, and are importantly not of her. Particularly in the Untitled Film Stills of the late 1970s, Sherman’s photographs are of the different personas she assumed as masks (which is what “persona” originally meant): young girl mooning over a letter, jaded housewife, young dancer, nurse, vagrant, office worker, vamp, aging glamour girl and so forth. By contrast, Nan Goldin has never portrayed herself as anyone but herself in what is often referred to as “Nan’s world.” Thus she shows herself with a black eye, hung on her by her boyfriend, Brian; or in a train going someplace for rehabilitation; or making love. Even when Goldin appears in the costume of a dominatrix, it’s a picture of herself dressed up, not standing in for a dominatrix, the way Sarah Siddons stands in for the Tragic Muse in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait. The same rule applies to Mapplethorpe, who, even when he portrays himself as a faun or as a young girl, is always recognizable as himself. Francesca is closer to Sherman, it seems to me, in that she never shows herself as herself. The difference is that she always shows herself as the same character–the character of a young woman in various mise-en-scènes. The work, in other words, has a subtle fictive dimension, which is all too easily overlooked by those in search of biographical clues about her tragic end. We have to distinguish between Francesca the artist and “Francesca” her character, as we do between Marcel Proust and the narrator “Marcel”–or between Franz Kafka and the protagonist of The Trial, “Josef K.”

Why, then, did Francesca always photograph herself, if not to reveal herself? Asked this question, she replied that she was always available; it was easier for her to show what she had in mind than to try to get a model to do it. But my conjecture is that she invented a character, whose fictive life was in many ways a metaphor for her own inner life. She adored the novels of Colette, who published a series of largely autobiographical works in which the central character is named Claudine: Claudine à l’école, Claudine à Paris, Claudine en ménage, Claudine s’en va. I have given Francesca’s character the name “Francesca” just to underscore the problem of sorting out what pertains to the artist and the young woman in the photographs. Let’s then say that there are four short pictorial novels–Francesca in Boulder, Francesca in Providence, Francesca in Rome, Francesca in New York. Interestingly, Francesca rarely if ever shows “Francesca” as an artist. It’s not clear what exactly “Francesca” does, in fact. The picture could almost be seen as dreams that “Francesca” has, or as symbolic enactments of her inner thoughts and feelings. She is nearly always by herself.

The gelatin silver prints are quite small, which goes with the extreme intimacy they establish with the viewer, implying that they could be printed as illustrations in a book and held in the hand. They are characteristically in sepia or silver tones, which give them a slightly dated, almost Victorian feeling, as if to establish the fictive “once upon a time” framework of a fairy tale. I love one of the Providence images, done sometime between 1975 and 1978, where “Francesca” is shown at the extreme right, wearing what looks like a short robe–it may be a dress–over a nightgown. She is looking out of the photograph at us, but her arms are extended toward the dark corner of the room, where there are two doors, one of which opens onto darkness. Her expression, slightly triumphant, is like that of a magician, opening a door by an act of telekinesis. Her cheek is illuminated by a light behind her, but the light seems to be dissolving the hems of her garments, as if she is disappearing–or is somehow only partially materialized. She looks like a child, with long blond hair, on the cusp of adolescence. It is an exceedingly magical image.

In another print her legs, arm and belly–which is all that we see of her–are naked. She seems to be emerging from the wall, tearing the flowered wallpaper into large, uneven pieces as she achieves embodiment. In yet another, she is lying on the floor next to a window, dissolved in light, with only her legs fully emerged into actuality. It is like the portrait described by Balzac in The Unknown Masterpiece, in which only a single foot is legible.

Francesca was at home in the darkroom, unlike her peers among the 1970s photographers. Mapplethorpe was successful enough to have his own darkroom technician, though he was fastidious about his prints. He was a collector of vintage photographs, with a keen sense for the aesthetics of surface. So far as I know, Sherman and Goldin always had their work developed and printed, though they naturally were concerned with controlling how the prints came out. But Francesca needed to intervene in order to find ways of representing the spiritual state of her character. The final effect is that of a photograph taken in the parlor of a medium, in the midst of a séance. Whether Francesca Woodman explicitly entertained such beliefs is something I cannot speak to.

What I think it safe to say is that a recurring motif is “Francesca” undergoing some form of metamorphosis, from one state of being into another. In a set of images made when she was resident at the MacDowell Colony, she pictures herself in a stand of birch trees. Sometimes she appears nude, with strips of birch bark around her arms. At other times she is wearing a dress, but without arms–already a trunk. In other images she wears the dress and displays her arms encased in birch bark. It feels as if she is enacting the myth of Daphne being transformed into a tree. In one image, she shows herself holding a small cylinder of birch, the way a saint is shown with the attribute of her martyrdom. One could not have spent much time in Rome without soaking up such ideas. In one of her Roman images, she stands, with only her parted bare legs showing, with her feet planted at the ends of two roughly dug trenches, which reflect the legs, as if she has risen from the ground. I am deeply moved by an image in which she has flattened herself, nude, against a wall, with dirt on her legs, as if she has undergone resurrection. The expression on her face is almost beatific.

This beautiful, haunting installation at the Marian Goodman Gallery will be on view only until November 13. But her images are not difficult to find on the Internet. In the gallery’s catalogue, Francesca Woodman: Photographs 1975-1980, the photographs are, unless otherwise indicated, reproduced at their exact size. This will give you enough visual information to see what she was getting at, though of course it is difficult to reproduce the exquisite surfaces of the photographs themselves. In 1980 she began to work in a larger, even a much larger format. The catalogue reproduces Girl With Weed, printed on blue-print paper. It seems to be a narrative, told in three sequential images, in the last of which The Girl, naked and triumphant, holds the weed up, like Salomé holding the head of John the Baptist by his hair. The intimacy has, of course, been forfeited. It is impossible to say whether its sacrifice was leading to something greater.

Walking through the retrospective exhibition of Lee Bontecou, on view at MoMA-Queens, is uncannily like visiting an out-of-the-way museum of natural history, as if her entire work to date had been dedicated to the creation of a single work of installation art: a musée imaginaire. It begins with some animal sculptures and continues through what look like scientific instruments–cameras and other devices for the observation and recording of nature. These evolve into larger and larger structures, made of wire armatures covered with scraps of used fabric, each with one or two dark holes; like tribal masks, they convey an air of menace and mystery. One could construct a speculative anthropology for these extraordinary structures–what they mean, and how they function. We could imagine an entire culture, a cargo cult, as it were, dedicated to their fabrication out of salvaged metal and found cloth. Next, one passes vitrines displaying translucent flora, or perhaps insects or even enlarged marine creatures midway between animalcules and vegetation. Then, suddenly, one encounters forms that are immediately recognized as fish, with spiky fins, goggle eyes and dangerous teeth, which evoke corresponding features in what, for want of a better term, I have been calling masks. There are some drawings, quite beautiful, of flowers or flowerlike forms, and of fish. A large fish, seemingly clad with natural armor, is suspended from the ceiling. Now we encounter some mollusklike shapes on pedestals, some drawings of waves, reminiscent of exquisite drawings of waves by Leonardo. In the final galleries are models for visionary spacecraft, with propellers and sails–or they could be large models of mosquitolike bugs–and then some suspended galaxies, imaginary planetary systems of exceptional delicacy containing bodies that have the appearance of eyeballs. And there are sheets on which eyes–human, animal, bird, insect, fish–are finely drawn. Taken as a whole, the installation is like a cabinet of wonders.

Bontecou is 73, and the show provides a chronological survey of nearly half a century of artistic production. Since she has not exhibited in New York for more than thirty years, the exhibition also offers an answer to a question not infrequently asked in the art world: Whatever happened to Lee Bontecou? Her considerable reputation rests on the large metal-and-fabric objects first shown in Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1960. These seemed to belong with the most advanced art of the era, and at the same time to carry an aura of scary otherness. In a critical essay published in 1965, Donald Judd paid tribute to both aspects of these works. “Lee Bontecou was one of the first to use a three-dimensional form that was neither painting nor sculpture,” he wrote, giving her credit for overcoming the sharp division between different media that critics like Clement Greenberg had insisted upon, in favor of what Judd designated as “specific objects.” But Judd went on to say, “The image cannot be contemplated; it has to be dealt with as an object, at least viewed with puzzlement and wariness, as would be any strange object, and at most seen with terror, as would be a beached mine or a well hidden in the grass. The image extends from something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other.” Bontecou’s objects lent themselves to the most rarefied speculations on the ontology of the artwork, and at the same time confronted the viewer with something almost frighteningly aggressive, like the effigies of protective monsters guarding sacred sites. Nothing like that had existed, as austere as geometry and as terrifying as Minotaurs.

Though her pieces are three-dimensional, they are all frontal and are intended to hang at eye level. And each is organized around an orifice, rather than simply a hole, which has a depth and blackness. The menace of the pieces is conveyed by this opening. Bontecou interestingly refers to the mouth in the celebrated Bocca della Verità–“the Mouth of Truth”–which she must have gotten to know while a Fulbright scholar in Rome in the late 1950s. It is a large circular carving of a bearded face with an open mouth from ancient Roman times, now part of the facade of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. The face has other openings–eyes and nostrils–and is said to have been a sewer cover in ancient Rome. The legend is that if one tells a lie and then puts one’s hand into the “Mouth of Truth,” it will be bitten off. The defining orifices of Bontecou’s work imply the sudden violence of a stone mouth. Or it could be the empty eye-socket of a cyclopean presence that still manages to hold us in its baleful stare. It signals the vaginal opening to many and, when fitted with points or industrial zippers, one or another mode of female fearfulness to others. Whatever interpretation one draws, it has the primordial fascination of a dark opening into an alien interior, which we penetrate at our own risk.

The metal armature is designed with reference to the opening. In a typical piece, there are concentric metal rings around the opening, with rods radiating further back from the opening, like rays. In a way, one could think of the metal pieces as mullions in a stained-glass structure, with the spaces filled in with fitted scraps of fabric rather than glass. The fabric patches, in various shades of brown or tan, are held in place with twists of wire. In photographs they look like pieces of intarsia–those works made of pieces of shaped and colored wood that became a genre of art in the Renaissance, esteemed as highly as painting because of the geometrical knowledge that went into their design as well as the woodworker’s skills. (There is an entire room made of intarsia at the Metropolitan Museum–the Studiolo of the Ducal Palace in Gubbio.) Bontecou’s geometry is intuitive and irregular, of course, and the objects more abstract. She fits into the surface found objects that augment their threat– saw blades, metal cages, industrial zippers–and often auxiliary openings. They are works of inspired bricolage, to borrow the word used by Claude Lévi-Strauss to characterize the logic of primitive thought. But everything is calculated to emphasize the opening, which grips the fascinated viewer like a potential victim.

That the creator of such work was a slight young woman with a Joan-of-Arc haircut may have contributed to the tremendous acclaim it enjoyed in the 1960s. Back then, the photographs of Bontecou standing next to her fierce creations nearly made her an icon. One still sees pieces from that period in collections of twentieth-century American art, and there is a very large piece in the State Theater at Lincoln Center, commissioned by the architect Philip Johnson. But as the years passed without showings of new work, the question of what happened to so striking an artist could not but arise. Two enterprising curators–Elizabeth Smith of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art and Ann Philbin of the UCLA Hammer Museum–set out to solve the mystery. They discovered Bontecou in rural Pennsylvania, where, after teaching art at Brooklyn College, she had retired into a life of quiet obscurity. Yet Bontecou hadn’t stopped making art. She had simply withdrawn from an art world somewhat demoralizingly encapsulated in the banner of a recent print by Barbara Kruger: “Another artist/Another exhibition/Another gallery/Another magazine/Another review/Another career/Another life,” blazoned across the image of a growling leopard with Bontecou-style fangs. Plenty of artists vanish from the art world, some more willingly than others. But leaving it without fanfare, at the height of one’s powers and reputation, as Bontecou did–just slipping away–had no precedent. Duchamp pretended to have given up art in favor of chess for twenty-five years, though he never entirely exited the scene and was secretly working on his enigmatic masterpiece, Étant données. I suppose the closest parallel would be J.D. Salinger, who turned his back on a success that any writer might envy for the reclusive existence of a literary hermit. Fortunately, Bontecou consented to the idea of a full retrospective of her work, which ends its tour at MoMA-Queens on September 27.

Taken all together, Bontecou’s oeuvre is like that of no other artist I know. There is a distant affinity with the engravings that illustrate a famous book of 1665–Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. Hooke was curator of experiments at the Royal Society of London, with the boundless curiosity of a seventeenth-century natural philosopher–interested in flight and the design of clocks and, as he belonged to the first generation of microscopists, in revealing the minute structures of things up to then invisible or barely visible. Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses is the book’s subtitle. With the aid of the recently invented microscope, Hooke examined the structure of feathers, the stinger of bees, the “tongue” of mollusks and the feet and mandibles of insects. He coined the word “cell” and speculated on cellular function in plants. Hooke’s text is accompanied by a series of extraordinary engravings, said to be by the architect Christopher Wren, that vividly illustrate the writer’s observations, especially those of familiar insects (the flea, the fly, the ant, the gnat, the wood louse), creatures that would be terrifying if they shared our scale. Greatly magnified by Hooke’s lenses, the insects are as mysterious and as menacing as Bontecou’s wire-and-fabric structures, built around black holes. Hooke’s wood louse is shown erect, holding a single hair like a spear in one of its six arms. It looks like a heavily armed warrior, with a horned helmet and a vicious forked tail. Hooke’s flea is a creature as ornamental and intimidating as a warhorse in Nuremberg armor–or a futuristic war vehicle, the mere sight of which, if we could imagine a company of them in a science-fiction movie, enhanced through special effects, would cause an audience to scream. Bontecou’s structures, executed in the early 1960s, lie at the intersection of magnified insects, battle masks and armored chariots, with the hole at once an aperture for looking through and a port for delivering missiles. It somehow diminishes them to call them sculptures.

Where do Bontecou’s pieces stand in relation to the discourses that defined the art world of the 1960s? It was hard to say then, and it’s no easier today. The originality and visceral force of Bontecou’s work led many of her contemporaries–Judd, for instance–to try to assimilate it to their vision of what art should be. But, as we saw, Judd was sensitive to aspects of her work that had little to do with the philosophical project of redefining the art object; hence his untypical reference to terror, war and sex. “She emerged too late for abstract expressionism,” Donna De Salvo writes in her catalogue essay, “and too early for pop art or minimalism, raising a question that has followed throughout her career: where does her work belong?” In his contribution Robert Storr links her with European artists like Alberto Burri (whose works were made of burlap sacking) and Lucio Fontana (best known for his slashed canvases), without really suggesting that these affinities have much by way of explanatory power. There is always a curatorial impulse to absorb art into the narratives of art history. The immense advantage of seeing those works of the 1960s in the retrospective context of what preceded them and what she went on to do is that it demonstrates that Bontecou was in no primary way in dialogue with her contemporaries. One feels that she was somehow in touch with the background violence of the decade, far more so than any of the movements that constitute its art history, which was caught up with the question of defining art and achieving aesthetic purity. If she has a peer in that period, it would be Eva Hesse, another maverick sculptor, who died at more or less the same time that Bontecou left the scene. Both of them were eccentric originals, portending the radical pluralism that overtook the art world in the next generation.

In the Artist’s Statement with which the catalogue properly begins, Bontecou writes:

Since my early years until now, the natural world and its visual wonders and horrors–man-made devices with their mind-boggling engineering feats and destructive abominations, elusive human nature and its multiple ramifications from the sublime to unbelievable abhorrences–to me are all one.

And she adds: “We were all lucky to be working in art at such an exciting time of exploration.” The 1960s made her possible without in any serious way accounting for what she achieved. From what I can tell, Bontecou abandoned the kinds of objects with which she will always be identified before she abandoned the art world itself–gave up making these “destructive abominations” and “unbelievable abhorrences”–in favor of objects of transparent fragility, evoking the wonders of the natural world. There is certainly the kind of continuity with the early work that justifies her saying that “it is all one” to her. She still uses welded armatures, to which pieces of fabric are fastened with twisted wire. There is always the acid taste of edginess. But the fearsomeness has more or less vanished or been naturalized, as in the armored fish she makes. Had she done everything in the show except those early objects of otherworldly monstrosity, she would certainly have been a wonderful artist. But would anyone have wondered whatever happened to her had she stopped showing them, even if she continued to make more of them for her own sake or theirs?

In the 1960s, the New York Jewish Museum became the unlikely leading venue for contemporary avant-garde art in America. It was there, in the former Warburg mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, that enthusiasts for innovative art were able to study, in some depth, the second generation of the New York School, as well as those artists who had already gone well beyond it–Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, George Segal, Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt and others. In 1963 Alan Solomon put together the exhibition “Toward a New Abstraction,” with work by, among others, Ellsworth Kelly and Leon Polk Smith, marked by the hard-edged clarity of its forms and colors, and the use of canvases shaped in nontraditional ways. The following year the museum gave most New Yorkers their first understanding of Minimalist painting and sculpture when Kynaston McShine organized the epochal exhibition “Primary Structures.” It would have been difficult to tell from what was on view in the other museums in the city that New York was the most exciting center of artistic innovation in the world, and there can be little question that the extraordinary popularity and prestige of the Jewish Museum’s shows put pressure on its peers to rethink their responsibilities to contemporary art.

At the same time, however, the success of those shows created considerable tensions between the museum and its parent institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary, not to mention the more conservative elements in New York’s Jewish community. The museum was originally intended to house and study ritual and ceremonial objects the seminary had acquired. It had never been intended as a hot spot for non-Jewish artists to display their work for a cosmopolitan audience. My own view was that nothing could be more Jewish than supporting advanced art, and that a European tradition of Jewish patronage, disrupted by fascism, had been taken up by American collectors like Vera List, who had become powers on the museum’s board of directors. In the end, conservatism triumphed, and the Jewish Museum disappeared from the “What’s Going on in New York” pages of magazines. Unless you had a passion for Jewish artifacts and their historical significance, there was no reason to set foot in what for a decade had been the improbable site of radical artistic exploration.

In recent years the Jewish Museum has been pursuing a program that again appeals to a wider and more urbane audience, while remaining faithful to the mission of promoting an awareness of Jewish culture. It has mounted shows of Jewish artists whose work is of compelling interest to anyone concerned with art, whether or not they take a further interest in the ethnic or religious identity of those who made it. As one part of this agenda, it has paid particular attention to Jewish artists drawn to Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century, when it was the beacon for those with advanced artistic ambitions–Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Sonia Delaunay, Chaim Soutine and now Amedeo Modigliani, figures that any museum anywhere would take pride in presenting. As a Jewish venue, however, the museum feels bound by responsibilities other museums need not share. It cannot rest satisfied with letting the work stand on its artistic merits alone. It must make an effort to explain in what special ways the Jewishness of the artists contributes to the significance of the art. It is thus under the kind of obligation that museums with dedicated constituencies generally feel bound by–to explain, for example, how a peculiarly feminine sensibility inflects the art in a museum devoted to work made by women, or how the blackness of the artists in museums restricted to black artists contributes to the interest and importance of their art.

There are many sound reasons–political, moral, educational and psychological–for the existence of what we might call identity art museums: museums whose visitors are, in a sense, split between those whose identity is an important reason for going to see an exhibit, and those who go primarily for the art irrespective of the artists’ race, nationality or gender. As a rule the artists don’t need such museums. It is, rather, the other way around. There is currently on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum a superb painting of chess players by Sofonisba Anguissola, in a show of artists from Lombardy. Anguissola was one of the wonders of her age: Vasari visited Cremona to see her work, and Michelangelo held her in highest esteem. The Chess Players, almost certainly her masterpiece, is difficult for most of us to see, since it is located in Poznan, Poland. I went down to Washington especially to write about the wonderful show of her work a few years ago, which, for reasons of museum politics, was shown in the National Museum of Women in the Arts. But it would have been no less at home in the National Gallery or, for that matter, the Metropolitan Museum. The Jewish Museum had an incentive to put together the superb and very moving show of Modigliani–a Sephardic Jew born in Livorno in 1884–now on view in its second-floor galleries (until September 19, after which it travels to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Phillips Collection in Washington). But because of Modigliani’s stature, and his nearly unparalleled popularity, lines at least as long as those at the Jewish Museum would form wherever such a show were held today.

As a Sephardic Jew myself, I might, if I were given to such allegiances, take satisfaction that one of our own had achieved such eminence as an artist. But I find it extremely difficult to see how Modigliani’s Sephardic identity has any bearing on his art. As a person and an artist, Modigliani personified the values and aesthetics of the School of Paris in the years before World War I. He immediately grasped that a new era had opened in art, and that to achieve the artistic greatness to which he aspired, he had to find his way as a Modernist. He very quickly began appropriating non-European stylistic devices that had become marks of Modernism–from Africa, Oceania and elsewhere. He saw Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon in the artist’s studio in 1907, and soon began carving heads with elongated faces, long thin noses, slitty eyes and tiny mouths. Modigliani’s style had certain affinities to German Expressionist art, not as a matter of direct influence but of an interest in non-European forms shared by advanced artists throughout Europe. The impact on Modigliani of the aesthetic strategies of l’art negre defined his entire generation. He would almost certainly never have become the Modernist he was had he remained in Italy. So it is difficult to swallow the argument of the show’s curator that “far from being rooted in aesthetics and the history of art, his art and portraiture originate elsewhere”–namely in the political and religious reality of a Jew in Modigliani’s Italy, and especially “his Sephardic understanding of the indelibility of his Jewishness, regardless of acculturation.”

How does that “understanding” show up in his art? “Mirroring his own experience of racial anonymity, Modigliani’s abstracting pictorial terms confer on his sitters an enigmatic quality.” At best, this would explain the “enigmatic quality” of Modigliani’s sitters. In fact, the portraits are so transparent that if one of them had an enigmatic quality, it would be because he or she was an enigmatic person. The curator goes on: “What are we to make of an artist whose scrutiny of the individual gradually becomes so stylized as to effect a succession of seemingly indifferent faces echoed in the impassive expression of his stone caryatids?” My response to this is: What are we to make of a curator who sees Modigliani’s portraits as “a succession of seemingly indifferent faces”?

The mystery of Modigliani is that each of his portraits embodies his own unmistakable style while at the same time showing a face with an expression of its own and a personality one is certain is precisely that of the sitter before him. The early sculptured heads admittedly have a kind of hieratic sameness, but it may have been this that caused him to give up sculpture in 1915–not merely because of his exceedingly fragile health, as is sometimes argued, or because the stone he needed was difficult to come by during the war, but because he realized that sculpture was the wrong medium for an artist whose true gifts coincided with his profound interest in the individual soul that each human face reveals. The paintings that captivate the throngs waiting outside to see them were all done in the last five years of his tragically short life, when portraying those who meant the most to him–artists, lovers, patrons–must have had an urgency that accounts for their poignant intensity.

What calls for explanation is that Modigliani’s signature work is almost entirely restricted to portraits–even the spectacularly erotic and profoundly moving suite of nudes he painted late in his life are individuated portraits of women looked at through longing eyes. If one did not know they were models, hired by one of his patrons so that Modigliani might paint something salable–his show of nudes at the Berthe Weill Gallery in December 1917 was his only one-person exhibition in a commercial gallery–one would suppose they must be of women with whom he had made love. They are among the most erotic nudes in history, the heat and softness of their bodies made magically visual. Each is an incarnation in visual terms of tenderness and desire, and each, at the same time, is an individual woman, passionately aware. Matisse’s Blue Nude, even his Pink Nude, is an exercise in expressive abstraction. We are conscious of them as paintings, and only secondarily as women. Only rarely with Picasso, as in some of his portraits of Marie Therèse Walther, does the sexed being of a woman become palpable. But Modigliani loses himself in the women he paints, accenting their nipples and pubic hair. Small wonder the police closed the show down!

It is often observed that Modigliani remained independent of the two powerful styles that defined the Paris art world before World War I–Cubism and Fauvism. That is because he had no interest in reducing objects to geometrical elements, with Picasso and Braque, or in submerging visual reality to arbitrary colors in the interest of abstract design, as with Matisse and Dérain. His subject was the human being, body and soul. The drive to put that meaning onto canvas entailed that the only format available to him as an artist was the intimate portrait. The freedom with which Cubism and Fauvism broke up the human form gave him a lexicon of notations with which to render features in a way that borders on caricature. It made it possible for him to reinvent the face before him, depicting expressively, through curves and angles, the way the subject felt to him. That made him a modern artist, but free of Modernist dogmas. Characteristically, an oval head is tilted on a long neck, with the body quickly brushed in. He did a few landscapes, and no still lifes that I know of. What interest could he have had in mere things and places?

Like Tosca, Modigliani lived for art and for love–Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore. He had a knack for living likenesses, but an interest only in people for whom he had a bond of feeling. This guaranteed a life of poverty, for he could hardly charge fees when his subjects were primarily chums and sweethearts, themselves as poor as he was. So he lived on handouts, petty loans, small charities. A man that impractical was hardly likely to live a prudent life. He formed terrible habits and became a legendary drunk and pothead. His friends called him “Modi,” which sounds close enough to maudit–“cursed”–to summon up the image of the outcast poet portrayed in Baudelaire’s Fleurs de Mal, were it not for the affection with which it must have been pronounced. As he was blazingly handsome, there was always someone happy to take care of him. Luckily for us, he was too driven by a belief in his ultimate greatness to settle for the passive life of a spoiled beauty.

Modigliani not only underwent a true academic training in Florence, Venice, Rome and Livorno but continued to believe in the virtues of traditional painting. Unlike his compatriots the Futurists, he was in no hurry to jettison the past. It was for the same reason he held himself apart from the Cubists and the Fauvists. He meant to be a Modernist, but he wanted at the same time to achieve work that had the weight, the clarity, even the beauty of traditional Italian art. Though indisputably modern, particularly in their use of African forms, the great portraits of the last five years of Modigliani’s life have the transparency of a Renaissance portrait. But this is to look at him too much from an art-historical perspective. I would not want someone to take away the idea that what made him an important artist was a sort of fusion of Siena and the Congo.

What made Modigliani important altogether transcends the question of influence, though I am unsure that I am able to explain it. I found it extremely moving to walk past those paintings of slender, luminous beings with their blank eyes and pursed lips, an experience I can only compare to looking at old photographs of people I don’t know but whom somebody once knew, who had a real existence–a life–in a certain place and time. There is that extraordinary patina of their having been some particular person. Which is not to say that the images are in any sense photographic. We see them through the medium of Modigliani’s consciousness, which is dense with effects entirely his own. The image is the intersection of two consciousnesses–the artist’s and the subject’s–and some of the feelings of both are transmitted in ways it is impossible to explain, but that make us feel we are in the presence not primarily of a painting but of a person. I think of them as having the power of icons, in which the subjects–traditionally Jesus or Mary or one of the saints–made themselves mystically present. It was not necessary for the icon to resemble its subject. What mattered was that the subject was somehow present, and could be engaged with. I was overwhelmed by the reality of these presences–of Moise Kisling, or Max Jacob, or Jean Cocteau. And I could not think of another artist who achieved such an illusion, unless Vermeer or perhaps Egon Schiele, although by very different means.

I think Modigliani addresses each of his viewers in these terms. The most important thing about him is what also explains his popularity. What those who line up to see a show of his work know is really all that needs to be known, the rest being art history and gossip. What they know is that they have fallen in love with a tawny nude, or a beautiful long-necked woman with eyes like blue almonds and a mouth that looks as if it were kissed onto the canvas. They don’t come because they have studied Modigliani in art history courses, since he is no longer part of the great canonical narrative of Modernism. His absence from the art history textbooks must have something to do with the fact that there has not been a show of his work here for more than fifty years. But I imagine that reproductions of his paintings continue to sell very well. So in the end I am grateful that Modigliani’s Sephardism gave the Jewish Museum a pretext to give us this wonderful show. Don’t let the crowds keep you away! And if you come up with a better account of his power, I’d like to know about it. I am sure it has to do with light, love and beauty. But my analytical powers carry me only so far.

Three years ago I saw a work by the late Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth that so captivated me that I am determined to write a book just to be able to reproduce it on the jacket. It consists of twenty sausages in assorted sizes, hanging, as in a German butcher shop, in two rows, and is titled Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Works in Twenty Volumes. Roth had removed the labels from the individual volumes in a matched set of Hegel’s Werke, and pasted them onto corresponding Würste. Much as I admire Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, it was delicious to see its two volumes chopped into bits, stuffed into casings and displayed as what Roth called “literature wurst.” It was a witty critique of metaphysics that might have caused even those of my professors who were logical positivists to break into thin, sarcastic smiles.

The only piece by Roth I recall having previously encountered was a cheese book–part of a Fluxus collection that had been acquired by the Getty Foundation from the estate of Jean Brown, an avid enthusiast. A Getty official ushered me into a roomful of largely unclassifiable objects, randomly placed on steel shelving. It is a tribute to Roth that his is the only piece I remember. He had flattened a lump of blue cheese in a plastic folder, clasped in a simple cheap binder. I regret never having seen Roth’s legendary 1970 exhibition at the Eugenia Butler Gallery in Los Angeles, which consisted of thirty-seven suitcases in assorted shapes, stuffed with various cheeses, and called Staple Cheese–a play on “steeple chase” to which Roth added “(A Race)” in case someone missed the point. In the nature of things, the art was attacked by flies and maggots, and the stench is reported to have been unendurable. I only read about it in Artforum, after Roth’s death in 1998.

None of these avant-garde creations prepared me for the impressiveness of Roth’s oeuvre as a whole, on view at MoMA-Queens and PS 1 through June 7. If I’d been asked to imagine what an exhibition of Roth’s work would look like, I would have supposed something like that room at the Getty–a jumble of eccentric odds and ends, very few of which would have been seen as works of art before 1960. To my surprise and delight, the author of the cheese book turns out to have been one of the masters of twentieth-century art.

Specialists have employed a German term–entgrenzen–to describe Roth’s procedure as an artist. It means, roughly, to overcome boundaries. Roth’s personality was such that if he encountered a boundary, he would find ways of eliminating it. Fortunately, he came of age in the 1960s, when the spirit of Entgrenzung flourished as never before. Later in the decade Entgrenzung would spread from art to politics, with the rise of movements challenging boundaries of race, gender and sexuality. But its initial impulses were artistic, and can be traced to Marcel Duchamp, whose “ready-mades” blurred the boundary between works of art and commonplace objects like snow shovels, bottle racks, metal grooming combs and urinals. The next important figure in the history of Entgrenzung was John Cage, whose project was erasing the boundary between music, as traditionally defined, and the racket of ordinary life: sirens, coughs, static, whispers, farts. Cage’s composition students at the New School–the cadre of the Fluxus movement, led by Cage’s visionary protégé George Maciunas–went a step further, seeking to erase the boundary between life and art. By the end of that revolutionary decade, there were few if any boundaries left to overcome in art, or for that matter in life.

I have tended to regard boundary erasure in art as largely a Manhattan contribution–downtown through Cage and uptown through Dr. Suzuki’s seminar in Zen at Columbia–but I now see that it was part of the spirit of the times. Roth was a gifted designer with advanced tastes, dedicated at first to Constructivist graphics and concrete poetry, but he had a need for something even more radical, which he found in the work of Jean Tinguely, a fellow Swiss. It has been said that the decade was dramatically inaugurated when, at the opening of Tinguely’s exhibition at MoMA in 1960, his construction, Hommage à New York, self-destructed in the museum’s garden with a lot of smoke and clatter. Roth met Tinguely later that year in Basel. “Everything was so rusty and broken and made so much noise,” he said of Tinguely’s work, likening it to “a paradise that I’d lost.”

It’s tempting to see Roth’s mature work as an effort to re-create that lost infantile paradise by way of detritus, noises and noxious smells. “Paradise Regained” would have been a fitting title for the Roth retrospective in Queens. What one feels is that he turned his entire life into art and created, through his unmatched ludic power, a world of amazing compilations that, like a natural wonder, takes one’s breath away.

Like his peers in Fluxus (a term coined by Maciunas), Roth was reacting against the repressive aesthetics of Modernism, a project that received its clearest formulation in Clement Greenberg’s 1960 essay “Modernist Painting.” Greenberg’s view was that each art is defined through the medium specific to its practices, and that under Modernism each art is obliged to purge itself of everything alien to its essence. In painting, this meant the elimination of illusion, since the painted surface is essentially flat. The ultimate aim was to achieve purity. In a sense, Roth’s Constructivist works were thoroughly Modernist in impulse, exhibiting the clarity of pure design. What Tinguely opened for him was a paradise of impurity, a world of infinite mess–just what he needed to break out of the ascetic order of Modernism.

In 1967 Roth began to craft what he called “Islands,” made out of kitchen scraps, which he nailed to panels painted blue. He was living in Reykjavík at the time, and his inspiration was evidently the Westman Islands–a group of islands off the southern coast of Iceland. Just a few years earlier, the world’s newest island, Surtsey, had emerged abruptly in the Westman configuration and become a kind of natural laboratory, in which the coming of life could be observed taking place. Roth doused the food scraps with sour milk or yogurt and poured plaster over the whole. In no time at all, mold formed, decay set in, and the insects that Roth called his “collaborators” arrived. One might say that “Islands” embodied the spirit of Fluxus in visibly decaying into pools and puddles of slime. And for some years thereafter, Roth experimented with use of food as his medium, making prints out of squashed bananas and exploiting milk, sausage, cheese, of course, and above all chocolate, counting in each case on the processes of rot and decay to help life turn into art–and vice versa.

With his renunciation of beauty as an aesthetic goal, Roth exemplifies what I call the Intractable Avant-Garde. It was one of the marks of Modernist aesthetics to believe that however difficult, however ugly, a work of art will in the end come to be seen as beautiful. The Intractable Avant-Garde rejects this consoling wisdom. Roth once said that the moment something threatens to become beautiful, he stops. He was after a different aesthetic altogether, in Staple Cheese (A Race). Or take his Tibidabo–24 Hours of Dog Barking, a recording of a dog pound on Monte Tibidabo in Barcelona. It’s hard to imagine anything more obnoxious than the uninterrupted barking of dogs, and sustained exposure does not make it more beautiful. What, then, is the work about? In my view it is about freedom, and the cruelty of keeping dogs penned up.

Decay appears to be a major theme in Roth’s work, but he professed to have little interest in it, except insofar as it enabled him to render “the processes of change visible.” Consider, for instance, his innovative use of chocolate. Other artists have been interested in chocolate as a subject. Joseph Beuys’s first multiple was a block of chocolate evoking the privations of World War II, when chocolate carried the meaning of warmth and subsistence: The US Army D ration was a block of chocolate much like his. In her 1992 work Gnaw Janine Antoni used chocolate as a visual metaphor for love. For Roth, by contrast, chocolate was both a subject and a medium in its own right. It connoted mess, and he was not indifferent to its resemblance to excrement (another of his materials), much in the way that Karen Finley smeared herself with chocolate as an emblem of female degradation. His signature work is a bust of himself cast in chocolate. Sometimes he mixed the chocolate with birdseed, so that it might enter the food chain when pecked to nothingness. More spectacularly, he built towers of these chocolate busts, placing five of them at the corners and center of a pane of glass, laying another pane on top of these, placing five more busts on this, until a tower of chocolate heads would reach a certain height. The work is titled Self Tower (Selbstturm). In one of the inner galleries of the MoMA show, the sweet smell of chocolate forms an olfactory aura around a Self Tower built for the occasion. (There is also a tower of self-portraits as lions, also in chocolate.) Inevitably, the weight of the upper shelves pressing down would crush the heads on lower shelves. The glass itself might shatter. “Fluctuations in room temperature, insect activity, and changes in humidity expose the sculptures to a steady process of decay,” the catalogue states. “The ravages of time should not be arrested. The towers are left to deteriorate at the artist’s own wish.”

Readers might jump to the conclusion that the exhibit at MoMA and PS 1 is a depressing affair, a riot of disgusting sensations, not for the faint of heart. In fact, the show is absolutely exhilarating, so full of exuberance, antic invention and the joy of unhampered creativity that it lifts the spirit like little else in recent memory. The first work one encounters at MoMA is a late tapestry portrait of Roth, seated in his studio. He’s wearing a cloth cap and jacket and what looks like a neckpiece in the form of a lobster, and seems engaged in a piece of embroidery himself, spread across his knees. He’s surrounded by the jumble of his studio, which increasingly became the motif of his art. The critic Alfred MacAdam said that Roth’s work reminded him of Courbet’s masterpiece, The Artist’s Studio, in which the artist portrays himself, seated at the easel, while a model looks over his shoulders and all his subjects surround him.

A collaboration between Roth and the weaver Ingrid Wiener, Large Tapestry is a brilliant example of the principle of overcoming the gap between life and art. Tapestry is inherently a collaborative enterprise. As a general rule, the weaver is seated before an upright frame, strung with the vertical warp threads. The artist first prepares a so-called cartoon–a drawing the size of the intended work. This is placed behind the warp, and the artisan, who sees through the warp threads, reproduces the cartoon by means of the colored woof-threads. Instead of drawing a cartoon for Large Tapestry, Roth sat behind the threads, in effect turning himself into the cartoon.

Wiener worked on Large Tapestry from 1984 to 1986. Needless to say, Roth could not have sat still for two years. This left a great deal up to Wiener, who had to keep changing the tapestry to reflect the changes in her subject. Roth compared her work to that of Homer’s Penelope, who unwove the day’s work every night. Roth and Wiener did not so much unweave the tapestry as unweave and reweave life, accommodating the changes in the work.

As Roth’s life and art became increasingly intertwined, the studio became medium and subject. Behind the Large Tapestry, one sees some of his late work, which, whether standing on the floor as sculpture or hanging on the wall as painting, are composites of paint boxes, brushes, cans, bottles, pictures, scraps of writing, drawings, crayons, pencils, frames, a toy ukulele, drafting tools, rulers, smears and slathers of pigment. They are made of what they are about, with little reference to the world outside the studio. It is difficult to think of another oeuvre centered quite so solipsistically on the materials and processes of its own production. Cellar Duet, for example, is an assemblage of tapes, with music by Roth and his son Björn, together with keyboards, players, recorders, amplifiers, toys, wires, again painted into a messy unity with artists’ materials and whatever odds and ends lay ready to hand. In their clotted heterogeneity, these resemble Robert Rauschenberg’s work of the 1950s, but obviously the impulses differ.

At PS 1 there is an even more startling example of Roth’s transformation of life into art. His studio floor, one of the five large sculptures on display, has been turned on edge and placed against the wall. It becomes, in effect, an immense mural, self-mapping Roth’s working space, the varying density of the drips and splatters documenting where the activity of painting was at its most and least intense. In Solo Scenes–an installation of 131 stacked video monitors–we see the artist at work, asleep, on the john–a fly’s-eye view of Roth padding back and forth, drawing, shaping, going about his life over a period of six months. Another work consists of eight projectors continuously showing slides of houses in Reykjavík, 30,000 in all, each with a different building. Image rapidly succeeds image, the carousels clacking away; and though one could, in a sense, see the whole of Reykjavík if one remained in the room long enough, it would be a curiously empty and even dispiriting experience. The capital is shown without inhabitants, and it is ambiguous as to whether its meaning is that the populace turned its collective back on Roth or Roth simply excluded them from his vision. It is in any case a detached portrait of a city, one building at a time, made by someone who shows no sign of being part of the place–though one of the houses must be where he himself worked and lived, and raised his children with a woman he loved.

PS 1 is also exhibiting what must be Roth’s masterpiece–his Garden Sculpture, on which he worked off and on from 1968 until 1996. It is a kind of folie, which may have begun as a platform, a place to sit outdoors beneath the stars, to which disparate parts were added–ladders, wheels, window panes, lengths of dressed lumber, a whirligig, video monitors, potted plants–in a whole of rickety monumentality. It comes with its own workshop, including power tools and rows of electrical cords, as if Roth had become obsessed by a project whose purpose he had long ago forgotten. It feels like a three-dimensional realization of one of Leonardo’s unfathomable drawings–or an outdoor model cobbled up out of scavenged fragments. Kant speaks of art as implying purposefulness without any specific purpose, and this characterizes Garden Sculpture to perfection. For some reason, Bosch’s title–Garden of Earthly Delights–crossed my mind.

Several of the recent Whitney Biennials have aspired to something more than a display of "the latest in American Art," to cite the phrase used to advertise the current show. They have advanced various theses on the state of American art, and of the American soul, so to speak, so far as that can be inferred from changes in artistic practice during the previous two-year period. This can really be the only justification these days for restricting a show to American artists. For there is otherwise not a lot today to distinguish between the art made by Americans and the art made by anyone anywhere else. The art world has been globalized like the rest of life, and the kinds of things one sees at the great international exhibitions seldom divide along national lines. This year, the opening of the Whitney Biennial co-incided with the so-called Armory Show, installed on two long West Side piers–a kind of mall where upscale galleries from various countries displayed the artists they represent. The artists came from Germany, Scandinavia, China, South Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, as well as from the United States, but their work was on view primarily for purposes of acquisition. The Biennial seeks, by contrast, to spotlight talent, especially the sort of talent that has yet to achieve recognition, and so only a few of the artists in Biennial 2004 were in the Armory Show (which closed on March 16). The Biennial artists of today are the Armory Show artists of tomorrow. The current Biennial, however, sees itself as "reflecting what may be seen as a reinvigoration of contemporary American art at a moment of profound change in our cultural landscape," according to the museum’s press release–and for that one must confine oneself to American artists, who in every other respect are part of the global scene, and whose work fits seamlessly into art fairs like the Armory Show, as well as into biennials in Venice and Istanbul, Johannesburg and Havana, São Paulo, Sydney, Shanghai and beyond.

Let me briefly review some recent Whitney Biennials. The 1993 Biennial is the paradigmatic case of a show that engaged the moral consciousness of its visitors by emphasizing art that challenged it. The show offered a scathing depiction of American society, singling out for attack the injustices of class, race and gender. The most memorable display was the already famous tape of Rodney King being beaten by members of the LAPD, and the spirit of the show was embodied in the controversial admission tags designed by Daniel Martinez, which bore all or part of the message, "I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white."

Since the brave though flawed 1993 show, the Whitney has advanced its arguments less stridently. The 1995 Biennial was noted for a heavy representation of works exploring sexuality and the body, implying, again, that these reflected preoccupations in American society as a whole. The 1997 Biennial was far less monolithic and far more cosmopolitan than its two predecessors, and conveyed no message about America that I recall. The defining work of the 2000 Biennial was a somewhat heavy-handed installation by Hans Haacke that assailed Rudolph Giuliani for attacking the Brooklyn Museum, and compared him to Hitler. But the revelatory piece in the show was by Thornton Dial, a widely respected African-American "outsider artist" from Alabama, who was represented by part of a large multimedia work called The Death of Princess Di. What was interesting was less the fact that an outsider artist was included in the show than that no one would have known that The Death of Princess Di was by an outsider artist. It was perfectly imaginable that the same work could have been executed by an MFA candidate from Yale or RISD–not because it was so polished but because a lot of contemporary art had the raw, obsessive quality of outsider art. Since art schools no longer teach skills and MFA candidates have the option of making art any way they choose, the boundary between the self-taught and the highly taught artist has all but evaporated. And so there was little reason for the show’s curators to call attention to the fact that Dial was an outsider. The 2002 Biennial, for its part, was largely composed of little-known artists, selected because they were engaged in one or another quest for spiritual meaning, which reflected the mood of the nation after 9/11. Taken together, Whitney Biennials have not merely shown the latest in American art but provided a register of changes in American attitudes over the past decade, as seen through our art.

The curators of the 2004 Biennial do have a thesis about at least the younger generation of American artists–namely, that they are in some respect interested in artists of earlier generations. This could imply a general thesis about American culture today, though the curators make no effort to draw this out. But it did lead them to design a show that they regard as intergenerational. "What conversation did you have about your conception of the Biennial before you began traveling around the country to visit artists’ studios?" Tim Griffin, editor in chief of Artforum, asked the show’s three curators–Shamim Momin, Chrissie Iles and Debora Singer–in a recent interview. "One thing we discussed from the beginning," Momin replied, "was that we wanted an intergenerational exhibition." The press release makes this intention explicit: "The exhibition [aims] to present prominent artistic trends in new intergenerational work," it states, stressing that "the intergenerational premise of the show is evident throughout."

Is this such a revelatory or even novel premise? The Armory Show displays artists from different generations as a matter of course. After all, earlier artists like Warhol and Mapplethorpe are greatly in demand. And most past Biennials showed work by artists of different generations as well, without this having been highlighted as a theme. What makes the "intergenerational" aspects of the 2004 Biennial special?

I suppose the argument here is that there is some kind of an internal relationship between the generations shown. "We all noted that younger artists are very interested in the work of older artists from the ’60s and the ’70s. There is also renewed interest in the ’80s," says Chrissie Iles. The intergenerational character of the show could be achieved by showing, alongside the younger artists, the older artists in whom they have an interest. And indeed this Biennial includes 1960s and ’70s luminaries like David Hockney, Robert Mangold, Mel Bochner and Yayoi Kusama, along with 1980s stars such as Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Richard Prince and Mary Kelly. But the work of these veteran artists is not represented, as it would have been in past Biennials, to show what they have recently been up to, but rather to illustrate the ostensible interests of the younger generation, the real subject of the show.

The approach might truly be intergenerational if these interests were somehow manifest in their work. I can see how there is what curators like to call an "affinity" between Hockney as a portraitist and Elizabeth Peyton, whose work so far consists exclusively of portraits of pretty boys and girls. The drawings by Sam Durant (born 1960) of Black Panther demonstrations and protests at Columbia in 1968 can be explained through nostalgia for 1960s radicalism–but that is not the kind of intergenerationalism at issue. I’m not suggesting there is no evidence in the work of such artists of what their elders have done, but it does not exactly hit you in the eye. The work shows all kinds of interest on their part, save for the kind of interest the concept of intergenerationality would lead one to expect.

Griffin asks some hard questions in his Artforum interview. "Is it somewhat unique that a younger generation interested in art, culture, and politics would turn to previous decades instead of dealing directly with the here and now?" And: "Given this kind of looking back, what would you say this show is articulating about today?" The curators answered: "It’s specific threads coming together as a response to a moment in contemporary society marked by turbulent international politics and an economic downturn. But one critical aspect of that pervasive intensity, even anxiety, felt in the work is that there is a sense of the necessity of renewal and purpose in the work right now." Hence–I guess–looking back.

This is the kind of talk by art experts that makes ordinary people feel as if they know nothing about art. And there is scant evidence that this is what the art is about. Debora Singer concedes that "there isn’t so much work within the exhibition with direct political commentary, but, especially among younger artists, you see different rhetorical strategies–more masked and coded. Things are not so issue-based on the surface." Momin states that "the engagement is weirdly distant and yet simultaneously more immediate." I don’t believe this for a minute, and the older artists they are said to admire don’t take up politics in their work, even in a coded fashion. This isn’t an intergenerational show at all. Still, the premise did give the curators a reason to include some wonderful work by older artists.

Jack Goldstein’s film Under Water Sea Fantasy, which he began working on in 1983 and finished just before his suicide last year, is six and a half minutes of pure beauty. Richard Hertz recently published transcripts of Goldstein’s unhappy recollections of his life in the art world of the 1980s, along with interviews with many who knew him, in a sobering book, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia. The film is a visual poem of fire, water, sea life and light, and I sat through it three times, trying to reconcile its vision with the whining self-pity that comes through in Hertz’s text, and marveling at the disconnect between artists’ lives and their works. I have twice written about Robert Mangold’s brilliant Column Paintings, in which two or more sine curves enact a dance that integrates into their movement the edges of the sharply vertical panels in which the action takes place. Mel Bochner’s new works, which I like to refer to as "thesaurus paintings," consist in synonyms of the word that gives them their title, like Nothing, Mistake, Meaningless and others, all of which appear to belong to a philosophical, not to say metaphysical, vocabulary, whereas their vernacular synonyms can get pretty down and dirty. The words, separated by commas, are painted in neat capital letters, each in a different color, in rows across black canvas, which progressively empty the initial word of its portent while saying the same thing in more down-to-earth terms. In the painting called Nothing, the word NOTHING gives way to NEGATION, NONEXISTENCE, NOT-BEING and NONE–and the vocabulary gets slangier and more vulgar–ZIP, ZILCH, NIX, SQUAT, DIDDLYSHIT, GOOSE EGG, BUBKES–ending with PFFFT. The terminal comma hints that the list can go on. Nothing should be made into posters for your favorite existentialist’s study, and Meaningless would be just the thing for a logical positivist. Nobody–NOBODY–in any generation is in Bochner’s league when it comes to playing what logicians call use against mention in logical tableaux.

It’s not easy to generalize about the younger artists, in large part because it’s not easy to discern what they are getting at as individuals. I often accept invitations as visiting critic to one or another graduate school of art, mainly in order to find out what those about to enter the art world are thinking about. This varies from year to year, but it also varies from student to student. The students know a lot about what is going on in the art world, visiting shows, reading the art magazines, listening to talks by the artists who get invited to address them. Mainly they have their own ideas, and are finding ways to express them in visual terms. They read a lot, but often selectively–their bibliographies are defined by what they are looking for. Their knowledge tends to be extremely esoteric, making it difficult to know what thoughts are embodied in their work–much less to address their work critically–unless you spend some time with them, and learn what they are trying to do. They’re informed about the art of others, but they’re less inclined to appropriation than to allusion, as in literature, where part of understanding the text consists in understanding what the allusions mean. There is a lot of "intertextuality," as a literary critic would say, but not all of it is "dialogue" and not much of it is significantly "intergenerational." That means that viewing the work of young artists is like trying to project some hypothesis as to what it’s about: one must infer the best explanation of what one is looking at, and then do one’s best to confirm it by looking closely. No one should be required to read an exhibition catalogue, but clearly written wall texts, decoding and unmasking, are these days as indispensable as subtitles for films in languages one does not understand. And, contrary to Singer, the meaning of the work in the current Biennial is usually harder to pin down than "issues of civil activism or issues of sexuality or critiques of mainstream American cultural conservatism." To be seriously interested in such issues is inconsistent with concealing them by way of Aesopian strategies. If the work is so transgressive, it’s been masked so successfully that the Biennial has received high praise from critics who attacked previous Biennials for being mired in politics rather than aesthetics.

Although a handsome production, the Biennial catalogue is a glaring example of the inflation that has overtaken that genre of publication. It is more a souvenir of the occasion than anything of great use to the viewer, and the editors have chosen to include in it an anthology of writings by Borges, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Delany and others who may have inspired the curators but are of little use to anyone else. With the accompanying box of ephemeral works by the exhibitors, it must have been extremely costly to produce for something of so little utility. Ideally, catalogues should aspire to the utility of guidebooks–something one can carry through the show, giving visitors what they need to know, with small illustrations for identification and mnemonic purposes. At the Armory Show there is always somebody watching the shop at each of the galleries, someone who can answer questions and talk with you about the work if things aren’t too busy. The art at the Biennial is generally less familiar and often more difficult than what you would have seen on the piers. The 2004 Biennial is more opaque than its recent predecessors, and that opacity is reflected in the thought behind the catalogue. The art is pretty interesting, though usually for reasons other than those the curators would have us believe.

It’s my lot to be abused and I take it philosophically.
   –Édouard Manet to Antonin Proust, May 1880

Toward the end of January, I received an invitation to a press opening for “Manet and the Sea,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It reproduced a painting of people on a beach, taking the sea air. The scene was as fresh as the air itself, bringing a virtual whiff of saltwater, a feeling of sunshine and physical happiness, and of the freedom and adventure the mere thought of the ocean awakens. In part because of the harsh cold we had all been enduring, in part because of the surge of pleasure French painting of that era always induces, I simply forgave the phrase in the press release (“The artist and 8 contemporaries chart a new course toward pure painting”) and resolved to fuir là-bas–“flee down there,” to cite Mallarmé’s great poem “Sea Breeze”–even if là-bas was Philadelphia in February rather than Boulogne-sur-Mer in August.

The chief problem of the press description is that it invites us to view the show as pointing the way to pure painting, whatever that is, instead of situating the works in the art world of their time. Manet’s 1868 Beach at Boulogne, with the lightness, the clarity, the sense of life at its best, conveyed by the loosely sketched disjunction of holidaymakers surrendering to simple summer enjoyments more than a century ago–promenading under parasols, peering at seashells, wading, gazing at the passing boats, riding a docile donkey, playing in the sand–is a wonderful work in itself. It is not a finished tableau but preserves the quality of a sketch, however intensely Manet may have worked on it; it is clear, just from looking at it, that he transcribed onto the canvas pictorial notations from his sketchbooks, drawn on the spot. It resembles a horizontal scroll, with the kind of spontaneously drawn figures the Japanese master Hokusai distributed across a sheet for one of his booklets. The figures have little to do with one another, without that implying, as a wall text suggests, a proposition regarding the loneliness of modern life. Who really cares what in the twentieth century it heralds? Who really cares about pure paintingwhen one stands in front of it?

Writing of one of Manet’s masterpieces, Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a hostile critic once observed that his paintings had the quality of rebuses. A rebus is a kind of puzzle in which pictures are juxtaposed that have nothing obvious to do with one another. One solves a rebus by pronouncing the names of the objects the pictures show, producing a coherent message. Freud thought the images in a dream have the apparent dislogic of a rebus, and there is a sense in which The Beach at Boulogne has the quality of a dream, with the difference that there is no organizing interpretation to seek. The beach and the sea beyond it have an essential emptiness, with people dotted here and there on the one and boats dashed here and there on the other. It is not a Salon picture, like most of the paintings most of us know by Manet. It feels as if it were made for pleasure and to give pleasure, rather than for the heroic purpose of creating Modernism.

The year it was painted, Manet wrote to the painter Henri Fantin-Latour that he had no intention of getting involved in large-scale works and that he simply wanted to make some money. It is nice to know there was a market for what one might think of as anti-Salon paintings in France at the time. Perhaps this explains why most of us know so little of Manet as a painter of marines. They do not really belong to the canonical narrative of struggle between him and the juries of the official Salon, which defined him as the pivotal painter of his time. Yet according to curator Joseph Rishel, speaking for the show’s organizers, about forty of Manet’s 400 or so paintings can loosely be classed as seascapes–a figure that is all the more remarkable considering Manet’s indifference to landscape, the preferred genre of his Impressionist peers. (The Philadelphia show includes thirty-three of his seascapes, along with works on paper.) So what accounts for the fact that he painted enough seascapes to justify a major exhibition?

The reason 10 percent of Manet’s oeuvre has to do with the sea may simply be that his family spent its holidays at the shore rather than in the mountains. That they are for the most part holiday paintings filled with the expansive spirit of time off accounts, I think, for the pleasure that is generally objectified in this body of work. It is not, I may add, quite so palpable in the “8 contemporaries” whose sea paintings are shown alongside Manet’s. Their marines suggest quite different agendas from his, though they are no more concerned than he is with charting a “new course toward pure painting.” Manet’s defining agenda derives from the perspective of reinventing painting and at the same time achieving success in the Salon, which meant that his work was destined for scandal. None of this affects his paintings of the sea, which means that the show in Philadelphia brings us an artist very different from the one we learned about in Art History 101.

Manet knew a great deal about the ocean, having taken a six-month voyage to Rio de Janeiro at age 17 as a kind of cram course for the French Naval Academy, whose entrance examination he twice failed. Becoming a naval officer was an acceptable way of not following in his father’s footsteps, but since he was hopeless at passing examinations, the failures freed him to become an artist. Manet recalled an episode in which the captain ordered him to repaint some Dutch cheeses that had been discolored by seawater, providing him with a pot of red lead and some brushes. “The cheeses glistened like tomatoes,” he told his friend Antonin Proust: “The natives devoured them down to the rind.” There was an outbreak of stomach disorders in the populace, which nobody diagnosed as lead poisoning. “In business discretion is essential,” Manet said. “I didn’t say a word and…from then on the captain treated me with exceptional consideration and he for one was convinced of my talent.” Not even painting the outside of cheeses to make them look delicious can be counted an example of pure painting.

Manet’s first known seascape was painted in a rush in 1864. It depicts a battle that took place on June 19 off the coast of Cherbourg between the USS Kearsarge and the Confederate battleship CSS Alabama–a decisive naval engagement of the American Civil War, since the marauding Alabama had single-handedly disrupted commerce between France and the Union. Exhibited about a month later, it is a brilliantly imagined painting, whose dramatic subject is reinforced by the urgency of its execution. Manet was an alla prima painter: He did not build an image up through glazes but worked directly on the canvas with the same hues the finished canvas would have, so the final stages of the work would preserve the vivacity it had in the beginning. The painting was, like most of his work, done in his studio; he was not, that is, standing behind his easel on the Norman coast when the Alabama’s engines exploded, as in one of Mark Tansey’s spoofs. He read about the battle in the morning papers, and based his composition on Dutch paintings of sea battles. Manet characteristically made use of art-historical models. Déjeuner sur l’herbe notoriously exploits Giorgione’s Fête Champêtre in the Louvre, as well as a lost Judgment of Paris by Raphael, known through a famous engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi. His Olympia appropriates Titian’s Venus of Urbino. No stigma attached to these borrowings–it was standard artistic practice. The Louvre was essentially a research facility for French painters, and, if anything, the ability to recognize allusions was part of the pleasure of looking at art. Originality lay elsewhere. “Manet and the Sea” displays some early Dutch and French marines that Manet could have used as paradigms. Ludolf Backhuysen’s 1690 Dutch Vessels on a Stormy Sea may well have helped Manet visualize the action in the battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama.

Manet underwent a singular humiliation at the hands of the Salon judges in 1863. That year, the number of rejections amounted to a scandal, and Louis Napoleon himself decreed that the now legendary Salon des Réfusés should be set up, a few weeks after the official opening of the Salon, so that people could judge the paintings for themselves. It says a great deal about Manet that he decided to show his three rejected pieces there rather than withdraw them with dignity–better the Salon des Réfusés than no Salon at all. So he exposed his spurned submissions, including his masterpiece, Déjeuner sur l’herbe, to critical and popular ridicule. My sense is that he saw his sea battle as a winner, which explains his haste to get it done and up, even if too late for the 1864 Salon–he showed it in the window of a print shop. It could well have been the success of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa that inspired the decision.

In any case, The Battle of the U.S.S. “Kearsarge” and the C.S.S. “Alabama” was a triumph, as exciting today as the day it was finished. In the middle distance, the stern of the Alabama, black smoke billowing from its engines, is already sinking, as crew members board a lowered lifeboat. The Kearsarge, its hull partly screened by white gunsmoke, is just behind it. In the lower left, a pilot boat cuts through the surf on a rescue mission, toward seamen clinging to a spar (the figure in the stern wears the shirtsleeves and top hat of a surgeon). In the upper right, a British steamer waits for survivors in the pale morning light. How much Manet remembered from his sailing days, how much from seascapes studied in the museum, is impossible to determine. What is unmistakably his are the black shapes of the boats and curls of white paint that bring the surf to life–and the way the Alabama’s bow thrusts into the air like the nose of a proud, dying beast whose rear legs have been shattered.

The Battle of the U.S.S. “Kearsarge” and the C.S.S. “Alabama” is every inch a tableau du Salon, and indeed it was shown in that format, which defined success as Manet conceived it, in 1872. The Beach at Boulogne breathes another spirit entirely, but it is still Manet. “What I’ve always longed to do,” he said to Méry Laurent, a friend of his and of Mallarmé, “would be to place women like you in green outdoor settings, among flowers, on beaches, where contours are eaten away in the open air, and everything melts and mingles in the bright light of day, because I can assure you I’m not just an insensitive brute. Only a fool could think I’m out to create a sensation.” Laurent had been admiring Le Linge–a surprisingly sentimental painting, now at the Barnes, of a woman in a pretty bonnet being helped by her little girl to put away laundry. It looks, untypically, like an Impressionist canvas. Today, we might say Manet was allowing his feminine side to show. But the “contours are eaten away” in the seascapes as well as the beach scenes. The magnificent Moonlight, Boulogne shows a group of shawled women, featureless in the shadows created by the same intense moonlight that silhouettes the ships docked alongside the jetty, under a starlit sky. The scandals were caused as much by Manet’s style as by his subjects. “I don’t know where Manet is going,” a critic wrote about Manet’s contributions to the Salon des Réfusés, “and if I’m not mistaken I don’t think he does either.” This is astute. The conflict, which is all too easy to simplify, was part of who he was and what makes him so fascinating an artist to those of us who have learned to live with pluralism and accept the fact that artists may pursue several directions at once.

Though it was his first seascape, Manet’s success with The Battle of the U.S.S. “Kearsarge” and the C.S.S. “Alabama” established his reputation in that genre, so much so that when Claude Monet made his Salon debut in 1865 with some very ambitious seascapes, a good many visitors misread his signature as “Manet.” The 1865 Salon was a debacle for Manet: Olympia and Christ Mocked by Soldiers were widely ridiculed, and it chafed him that Monet’s paintings were admired while his own work was denounced. “Who is this Monet?” he asked, believing, whoever the artist was, that he was benefiting from Manet’s notoriety and his manner, using a misleading name. It was an inauspicious beginning for a relationship that came to mean a great deal to both artists, and the exhibition has a very generous display of Monet’s marines, which gives us a chance to appreciate how he pointed a direction to Manet that helped loosen him up. The relationship is almost dialectical: The Manet-Monet confusions of the 1865 Salon helped get Monet started on his career, which in turn opened possibilities for Manet that he would not have found for himself. Manet’s 1874 Venetian seascape, The Grand Canal (Blue Venice), is simply an Impressionist painting–a study of light, broken and reflected by the movement of water, with a gondola bobbing alongside blue-striped poles, as in a souvenir postcard. Two paintings, one by Monet of his wife, Camille, on the beach at Trouville, the other by Manet of his wife, Suzanne, sitting next to his brother Eugène on the beach at Berck, show how close to one another the orbits of the two painters came at a certain moment. Because of Monet, Manet became an outdoor painter for a time. Impressionism was a seductive style, but it would not finally satisfy the fierce ambitions that exposed him to the shattering defeats he suffered in Salon after Salon. It is one of the great continuing confrontations in the history of art.

Exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum are always, somehow, celebratory. The gallery is painted in Manet colors for the occasion–blue and gray. The “8 contemporaries” pursue pure painting along the side walls. At the entrance, the organizers have placed a still life with a marvelous fish lying on a tablecloth next to a polished copper casserole, along with a handful of oysters, an eel, a lemon and one of those odd red creatures one sees in baskets at fish markets in France. It stretches the concept of a seascape to open a show of marines with a painting that proclaims the pleasures of French cuisine–but the wit of placing it there brings out the wit of the painting itself, and is a tribute to Manet himself, who might have submitted it to a show of marines with the same impishness in which he replaced a goddess with a cocotte and sardonically called her Olympia. His wit thoroughly inflected his work and his life. I think it is what he meant by reacting philosophically to his ordeals.

Few of the good things that reward the rising–or risen–young artist have not fallen to John Currin in recent days. He is the subject of a widely celebrated midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ecstatic “I told you so” reviews appeared in the New York Times and in The New Yorker, the latter accompanied by a portrait of the artist by Richard Avedon. According to a headline in the Times, he has “startled” the art world by switching dealers, from Andrea Rosen to Gagosian, one of the toniest galleries in the hierarchy. In 2002 a 1995 painting, of the sort that once provoked critical rants, went for $427,000 at Sotheby’s; on the private resale market, his prices have shot up to $600,000. And he has achieved all this as much in spite of his work as because of it. Over the past decade, Currin’s paintings of startlingly busty young women in mini-skirts and tight blouses have aroused the ire of a dour and censorious art establishment, which had marginalized painting as a medium, vilified the “male gaze” and monitored political incorrectness with a near-Victorian zealousness. His earlier detractors have now joined the chorus of his admirers. But what particularly impresses me is that he has evolved from the role of Bad Boy of the art world into what very few contemporary painters have the gift, let alone the taste, to aspire to–a master of high Mannerist aesthetics. At a time when most of his contemporaries would cite Warhol, Duchamp and Nauman among their influences, Currin invokes Bruegel, Cranach and Parmigianino.

“Mannerist” has typically been used as a pejorative, ever since Mannerism was accepted as a genuine art-historical period of the sixteenth century, covering the art and architecture produced mainly in Italy from the High Renaissance till the advent of the Baroque. It is, according to The Grove Dictionary of Art, “the most willful and perverse of stylistic periods.” What I find astounding is that in little more than a decade, Currin should have outgrown the aggressive thrift-shop style of his early portraits to become a virtuoso of a style and manner that would have been admired in Ferrara or Parma in the 1550s–and that Mannerism, with its artifice and virtuosity, should of all things define one of the brightest art stars of the early twenty-first century!

Being photographed by Avedon is one of the ordeals of celebrity, but the portrait by Todd Eberle, which the Times, in announcing his ascension to the Gagosian Gallery, reprinted from Vanity Fair, is a wonderful study of the Mannerist in his studio, rather than a mere demonstration, as in Avedon’s case, of the photographer’s will to power. It was taken in 2000, and as it is almost a key to reading Currin’s pictures, the artist must have had a say in how he was to be shown. He stands between two easels, on one of which is a painting–the haunting Sno-Bo of 1999–and on the other is a mirror, which shows the artist from behind. The facial resemblance between Currin, with his boyish good looks and longish hair, and the delectable young woman in the painting, is remarkable. It confirms his claim, often made in interviews, that he uses his own face as a model. That does not mean that the painting is a Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman–but his placement between mirror and painting is certainly an allegory of painting as he conceives it. On the ledge of the easel that holds the mirror, Currin has placed the open-toed red platform shoe with rope soles and long laces that Sno-Bo is wearing in the painting–and the puddle of reddish pigment on the glass palette is meant to tell us that he has been at work. The floor is strewn with the carefully placed magazines that Currin uses for models when he does not resort to his own features–Cosmopolitan, a girlie magazine and two others I am unable to identify. Like everything in the photograph, they serve as signs. Currin’s pants are smeared with white paint, which could be explained with reference to the fat snowflakes in the painting. But Currin cannot be a sloppy painter, and the snowflakes are carefully dotted across the surface.

We know, moreover, that he wore paint-smeared pants on his first date with the artist Rachel Feinstein, whom he was to marry. “Whatever I wore,” he says in an interview, “I am sure it was calculated…. As the pretext of meeting her was that I was going to paint her, then that was the message.” Everything in the photograph–like everything in the paintings–is calculated. Standing in the studio, Currin points, like a figure in an allegory by Bronzino, to a clue. In this case, the clue is his wedding band. The photograph tells a story. The painting is to be explained with reference to his marriage.

Let’s leave the photograph, which you can find on the Internet, and pay attention to the painting, which I adore. Sno-Bo is a pendant to Currin’s Hobo, the difference being mainly that in Sno-Bo, the charming vagrant stands daydreaming in the snow, her left foot resting on what would be a fork in a branch, except that it belongs to a shepherd’s crook, which Sno-Bo uses as a staff to help her over her life’s path. Her left elbow rests on her raised knee. Like her counterpart in Hobo, Sno-Bo is carrying a sack with what we presume are her worldly belongings. She is bent forward and to one side, so that her defenseless breasts hang softly down, above her vulnerable little belly. Despite the snow, she does not seem to suffer from the cold. She wears a bright smile, and her pensive eyes sparkle. She is clothed in the sheerest of pink intimate garments, something ordinarily to be worn in warm bedrooms. A tiny kerchief is tucked into a gold chain about her waist. Her sister figure Hobo also has a gold chain, with jewels, a blue ribbon tied gaily to her wrist, and her purse hangs from the fork in her walking stick. She wears a sheer sleeved blouse and panties so transparent that her pubic hair can plainly be seen.

The two figures are exceedingly mysterious. “I was interested in the silvers, the silvery-ness, and the see-through clothes,” Currin says. “That was the big joke: It’s a homeless person with beautiful see-through lingerie and bedecked in jewels.”Hobo and Sno-Bo could be panels–say summer and winter–in a Mannerist boudoir, the way Boucher’s paintings of the seasons decorate Madame Pompadour’s boudoir, now in the Frick. They are erotic paintings that imply larger meanings. The women are protected by their beauty against the harshness of the world. The images imply the world’s harshness by indirection. As paintings they have the power to hold us in front of them, contemplating meanings too fragile and remote for application to life, like the kinds of visions a wizard in Shakespeare is capable of summoning into momentary being for someone’s entertainment–interludes in life. There are certain things that belong to art alone.

One of Currin’s earlier paintings is called The Wizard. A man with cartoon features, looking something like a ventriloquist’s dummy with thick lips and false eyelashes, palpates a young woman’s immense breasts, wearing what look like tight black rubber gloves. His eyes are closed, her eyes are either downcast or gaze downward at her extraordinary bosom. It is difficult to tell whether the man is kneeling or the woman herself is gigantesque. There is a lingering question as to what exactly explains the title of the work, but I can think of a way of reading the work that does. If he is a wizard, then he has worked his magic on the woman, making her dream of large breasts come true. It may seem presumptuous, if not offensive to certain sensibilities, to suggest that it is her dream, not the Wizard’s. Yet the picture is part of a body of works that project a world where women are proud of such breasts, measure them, and admire other women who have them. After The Wizard, men all but disappear from this world.

The Wizard was painted in 1994. Within just a few years, Currin began showing the paintings that won him notoriety–The Bra Shop and Jaunty and Mame, both of 1997, show women with breasts like beach balls, which stretch their sweaters or blouses past the point of safety. The women measure one another’s bosoms or purchase the heavy-duty bras their amplitude demands. They look demurely pleased with the bodies nature bestowed upon them, but their faces are coarse and silly. It is a Mannerist touch that the paired females evoke a Visitation, a painting where two women–actually Mary and Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist–are shown meeting. It is easy to see how these paintings gave Currin a sexist reputation, and seemed in general misogynistic and meanspirited. They are aggressive paintings, and women often felt infuriated upon seeing them. Perhaps they were intended polemically, as a defense through offense against the charge that painting as such is sexist, and the province of machismo. They certainly could not be simple fantasies of a male fetishistically fixated on big boobs. Currin could not have been turned on by the women in his paintings. He is someone with a singularly refined sensibility, as is clear from his more recent work. But I am struck by the fact that his critics and commentators alike have used these grotesqueries, rather than the silvery Mannerist paintings, to define his project as an artist. That blurs the amazing shift in direction that his work took around 1999. The earlier work required a suppression of the painterly impulses that have emerged. To use a distinction framed by Hilton Kramer in deprecating Philip Guston, it is far easier for a mandarin to become a stumblebum than the other way around. Anyone can go to seed–but one cannot become a Mannerist as a matter of stylistic decision. One has to allow talents to show that have been held in check all along.

The catalogue places an exquisite portrait that Currin painted of his wife in 2002 as a marker, dividing the plates into two sets that could for the most part have been done by two different artists, so far at least as painterly touch and pictorial manner are concerned. It is called Rachel in Fur, and it has an almost porcelain translucency. Rachel looks calmly out from behind huge hexagonal sunglasses, her pale lips composed in a quiet smile. The fur looks deep, opulent and luxurious: One sees its warmth and softness. The proportions of the face have an ethereal oddness–the forehead is high and wide, the chin small, and the neck has been borrowed from Parmigianino. The plates that follow, though for the most part they reproduce paintings done slightly earlier, use another species of woman altogether, Mannerist creatures all, sprung from painting rather than copied from life, undeniably erotic, but made of something beyond flesh, and looking, as painting, more as if their habitat were the Wunderkammer–the cabinet of wonders where sixteenth-century princes displayed strange, rare and beautiful objects–than the museum of fine arts. They embody the aesthetics of miniatures, executed with the finest brushes on the smoothest surfaces.

A case in point is the astonishing Pink Tree of 1999. Two golden nude women are painted against a pair of bare trees, whose branches have been sawed short, as if pollarded. The background itself is black, as in a painting by Cranach of goddesses; and the blackness transforms the flesh into something effulgent with its own light, like a celestial substance. The Mannerist body was typically elongated, with unusually small heads. Currin’s women have these elongated figures, but he has given them disproportionately large heads on thin necks. They have luminous blond coiffures, and strange yet perfect features. The woman on the right is smiling, and has an ampler body than her partner. The two women touch, and there is in effect a choreography of hand gestures, but what is going on between them is anybody’s guess. It could be a lady and her handmaiden or confidante–Phaedra and her attendant, say. (If it were a real Mannerist work, it might be Electra and Clytemnestra.) Who would have expected to see artifice like this in an age like ours? Such painting implies a court, the murmur of poetry, the sound of lutes, the discourse of fine ladies and chivalric suitors.

Stamford After-Brunch, probably Currin’s masterpiece, brings us abruptly back to where we live. Three spoiled young women sit in their snug suburban living room, merrily clinking martini glasses and smoking big cigars. A wintry landscape, seen through the window, underscores the security of their lives. They have wonderful animated expressions, as if they have been sharing gossip or revealing naughty secrets. There is something comically wrong in the drawing of the figure to the right–the chief conspirator, one feels. Her butt goes back and back, straight out of the picture. It could make an erudite allusion to a Venus Callipygus–Venus with enlarged buttocks. Or it could mean something else. “The distortions of my figures do not originate from illustration. They come from my first drawing attempts whose inherent flaws and rhythms I try not to correct,” Currin once explained. “My main concern is shaped from, partly, an abstract point of view while keeping it believable and keeping the graphic rhythm. I also find it intriguing and humorous.” I don’t think the bosoms are believable in the controversial paintings of 1997, nor are they flaws in draftsmanship. They were willed. But here, the elongated butt serves as counterweight to the girl’s large head, enabling her to bend forward, toward her pals, without falling over, though it could, if intentional, make a moral comment. With her cigar, martini glass and head cloth covering her rollers, one supposes the young lady thinks she is pretty hot stuff. That tail carries away part of her sophistication while it enables her to keep her balance.

Currin is often compared to Norman Rockwell by critics who consider this the supreme put-down. I to the contrary think it shows how good Rockwell really was. But there is an edge to such paintings as Stamford After-Brunch that would be entirely foreign to Rockwell. This is nowhere more evident than in the strange Thanksgiving of 2003. Three festively dressed women are gathered around a table like a coven of witches, with some pieces of fruit, a few roses in a glass pitcher and an immense uncooked turkey. The turkey appears to be thawing–it sits in a puddle of pink juice. One of the women offers a spoonful of this exudate to another, whose mouth is wide open, as if about to receive the sacrament. The scene is set in a dark and opulent room, with columns, beams and an unlit chandelier. The two younger women are sisters, so to speak, of Parmigianino’s The Madonna of the Long Neck. The older woman has exactly the coiffure of the heroine in Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, which may be a clue to its meaning. The painting cries out for the kind of interpretation that Erwin Panofsky once gave of Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time. It is an optimistic work in the sense that the artist evidently believes there exists an audience out there of the kind Bronzino could count on to enjoy unriddling allegories while admiring the craft. I find this confidence in the collaborative intelligence of the art world inspiring, if utopian.

I have always marveled at the way in which Abstract Expressionism was able to transform a disparate group of painters, none of whom had shown any particular promise of artistic greatness, into figures of stunning originality. It was as if the movement opened up possibilities for paint never before exploited, and

the artists were lifted by what they discovered onto an entirely new plane of expression. It was a convulsive moment in the history of art, and by the time it was finished, not only was there a new pantheon of artistic heroes but a reconfiguration of the entire complex of practices that defined painting. The Abstract Expressionist canvas had become what Robert Motherwell characterized as “plastic, mysterious, and sublime.” There was even a new style of talking–impulsive, confessional, oracular and grandiose–in which artists attempted to re-enact, on the verbal level, what was taking place on the surface of their canvases. Words like “The Absolute,” not to mention “Nothingness,” “Anxiety,” “Dread” and “Despair,” rose like speech balloons through the smoke-filled air of the Cedar Bar and the Artist’s Club on Eighth Street.

As tightknit as the movement was, Philip Guston was, even then, a figure apart. When he turned to abstraction in the early 1950s, he had achieved considerably greater recognition as an artist than any of his peers. He had won the Prix de Rome in 1948 and, four years earlier, the first prize in “Painting in the United States,” an exhibit sponsored by the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, for a painting called Sentimental Moment, a study of a young woman caught in an introspective mood, holding a locket. That painting made him famous, and was widely reproduced. And when Guston did go abstract, his distinctive abstract style differed from that of any of his peers more widely than any of them differed from one another. His way of laying down paint was not fluid and urgent, like Pollock. It was not slashed and brushy, like de Kooning, or sweeping and calligraphic, like Kline. It did not float translucently, like Rothko. Guston’s strokes fell like short, clustered dabs of pigment into nests and networks of closely harmonized hues, which resembled passages in Impressionist landscapes. The question was even raised whether it was expressionist at all–whether Guston had not originated instead a form of Abstract Impressionism. The distance between what Guston had been, and what he became through Abstract Expressionism, was thus shorter than that traversed by any of the others. There was a certain shimmering quality, a master’s touch, that, if my memory serves me well, Sentimental Moment shared with his great abstractions of the early 1950s.

I have to confess that I had been profoundly affected by Sentimental Moment when I first came across it as a young man; and for a time I kept a picture of it pinned to my wall like an icon, though I never saw the painting itself. So I was disappointed that it was not included in the retrospective exhibition of Guston’s work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (until January 4, 2004), even if it is easy enough to understand why. It really was a sentimental painting, which does not quite go with the edgy image of Guston that the show seeks to project. And beyond that, a retrospective aspires to be a narrative rather than a chronicle of an artist’s life, so far as this is attainable. With that narrative, considerations of whether a piece or even a body of work fits with the story one wants to tell govern one’s choice of what to show. The great dramatic moment of Guston’s career was his return to figuration in the late 1960s, and the debacle exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970. But the figuration to which he returned was at least as dissonant with that of Sentimental Moment as with the vibrant abstractions. So Sentimental Moment was in effect twice repudiated by the artist himself. It would be difficult to imagine a more shocking juxtaposition than setting that soulful young woman, in her nuanced pink blouse, in a roomful of the raucous cartoons through which Guston shocked the sensibilities of the art world in 1970.

Becoming an abstract painter was not, so far as I can tell, a momentous choice for Guston in the 1950s. He was part of a New York art world in which it was a natural next move for a gifted and ambitious artist; and the particular style that suited Guston drew upon his personal interests in East Asian philosophy. Along with John Cage and the composer Morton Feldman (of whom there is a remarkable portrait in the Metropolitan show), he attended Dr. Suzuki’s lectures on Zen Buddhism at Columbia, and he evolved his abstract forms out of the calligraphic doodles he made with quill pen and ink. “My greatest ideal is Chinese painting,” he wrote in 1978, “especially Sung painting dating from the tenth or eleventh century.” There is a Sung feeling in the quivering abstractions of the 1950s, as if of natural forms shrouded in mist. The decision to abandon abstraction in the late 1960s was of another order altogether, and it went completely against the grain of Guston’s art world. Figuration was bad enough, but to paint in the coarse comic-strip style that Guston appropriated for his 1970 show was more than bedding down with the enemy. It was seen as a betrayal of the values of high art with which the New York School identified itself. It was an aesthetic scandal.

True, Abstract Expressionism was petering out as a movement. And there was an exciting alternative to it in Pop Art, which challenged the distinction between high and low art, borrowing its images from advertisements and the comics. But no one would have expected a prince of contemporary abstraction to cross over into a style that even the enthusiasts for Pop would have found raw and smeary, like something splashed on the side of a subway car. The images of Pop belonged to the vocabulary of commercial art. They were sharp and clear and attractive. Guston’s belonged to the vocabulary of delinquency. They really were expressions of contempt and rebellion toward what his peers regarded as holy. “Abstract art,” he wrote in a notebook at the time, “is an escape from the true feelings we have, from the ‘raw’ primitive feelings about the world–and us in it.”

Guston’s transit from abstraction to cartoon was cruelly portrayed by Hilton Kramer in a widely cited review as a passage from “mandarin” to “stumblebum.” The term “mandarin” was intended to diminish what had set Guston apart as an abstractionist. The paintings were too dainty, too delicate, too light and airy by contrast with the heavy pigment of the true expressionist to be considered authentic. The new paintings were then seen as an opportunistic bid for that missed authenticity. They were coarse, juvenile and demotic.

I sometimes wonder if Guston himself did not see his previous achievements as “mandarin.” The new work was deliberately bad painting, and to this day I am not sure that anyone understands what motivated him to abuse what passed for good taste, both in substance and in style, in what he had to have known would be perceived as an act of aesthetic aggression. Only someone able to paint as exquisitely as Guston could will to paint like a “stumblebum,” which falls under a distinction of the kind Plato canvassed in Lesser Hippias. So it was a kind of reverse–or perverse–mandarinism. He once quoted a speech that Isaac Babel, one of the writers he admired most, gave to the Soviet Writers Union in 1934. Babel said: A very important privilege, comrades, has been taken away from you. That of writing badly. Guston added: Doesn’t anyone want to paint badly? It was as if he were reclaiming a forfeited privilege in 1970. The freedom to throw aesthetics to the wind. The only painter to recognize this at the Marlborough opening was de Kooning. For the rest of the art world, it was, Guston said, “as though I had left the Church: I was excommunicated for a while.”

In any case, it was not simply a matter of reclaiming the right to produce images. Nor was it, I think, an oblique way of protesting the Vietnam War, though he was troubled by “the brutality of the world” and though his images expressed a concern with political evil, particularly the broadly rendered Ku Klux Klan figures, tooting through empty urban streets like Mutt and Jeff in open jalopies, wearing patched hoods, carrying spiked two-by-fours. Guston had, in fact, painted Klan figures in the 1930s, when he was a teenage labor activist involved in a strike. The Klan had been used by the police as strikebreakers, and they even removed Guston’s paintings from a show he held in a bookstore. One of these paintings, Drawing for Conspirators, is in the Metropolitan show, and one can understand its presence there: It contributes to an image of a politically engaged artist, as does the scary painting of Richard Nixon with a swollen leg in a painting Guston did in 1975, San Clemente. That work goes with the brilliant series of Guston’s Nixon caricatures that were assembled by Debra Bricker-Balken in her book Poor Richard and exhibited at the David McKee Gallery in September of 2001. These demonstrate the way a great painter can create powerful images by “painting badly.”

But the Klan figures of 1970 were allegorical self-portraits. “I perceive myself as being behind a hood…. The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel, who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot?” Kramer’s review was illustrated with The Studio, in which a Klan figure is executing a self-portrait, holding a brush in one hand and a stogie in the other, looking at his picture of himself through eye-slits in his hood. The room is lit with a bare bulb, a clock with one hand hangs on the wall. Like all the Klan paintings, it is an exercise in moral as well as artistic transvestism. Only a good man could wonder what it was like to be evil, just as only a good painter could paint badly on purpose. But there was something deeply satisfying in this new style, and Guston made it his own for the remainder of his life. It turned out to be the ideal means to paint what concerned him as a man. The great comic-strip artists had evolved a vocabulary for treating things everybody knew about in ways that everybody could understand.

Interestingly, something like the transit from mandarin to stumblebum was enacted by Andy Warhol a decade earlier. Warhol’s early art, apart from his commercial work, at which he was singularly successful, embodied the aesthetics of swish valentines. He did cute tinted drawings of pussycats, cupids, flowers and ladies’ boots, with texts in a kind of ornamental handwriting. For private consumption, he did drawings of very pretty boys with good-looking cocks. And then, for reasons that have never been explained, he began, in 1960, to make his own the kind of boilerplate advertising images that everyone in the culture is familiar with. They were vernacular, familiar and anonymous, drawn from the back pages of blue-collar newspapers, the inside covers of sensationalist tabloids, pulp comics, fan magazines, junk mail, publicity glossies and throwaway advertisements. In 1961, it would have been almost impossible to believe one was looking at art when one saw them. His first show was in April of that year, in the 57th Street windows of Bonwit Teller. One of the works was called Advertisement, a montage of black-and-white newspaper ads: for hair tinting, for acquiring strong arms and broad shoulders, for nose reshaping, for prosthetic aids for rupture and for (“No Finer Drink”) Pepsi-Cola. Bonwit’s window also included Before and After, advertising the nose you are ashamed of transformed into the nose of your dreams. The remaining paintings are of Superman, the Little King (on an easel) and Popeye. Displayed with the frocks the store was carrying that season, the images would have been thought clever background by such passers-by as noticed them.

Abstract Expressionism revolutionized painting, but what Guston and Warhol did revolutionized art. Their transits were part of a migration of artists that began in the 1960s to cross the bridge that separated art and life. It is one thing to aspire to the sublime. It is another to bring into art the preoccupations of a man with ordinary appetites, who worries about love and eating too much, and how to give up smoking, and not just about being evil but being bad. I love Guston’s Painter’s Table of 1973. There is the ubiquitous bare light bulb–the window with the green window shade tells us that it is night. Smoke rises from a lit cigarette at the edge of the table. One cannot tell if something is a dish with paint tubes or an ashtray with crushed-out butts. There are a few books and some old shoes, soles up. Are the old-fashioned flatirons improvised paperweights? There is a red painting on the table of a single eye in profile, surely the artist’s own. Are the two spikes leftovers from the Ku Klux Klan paintings?

In a painting that one assumes is the head of Guston’s wife with big eyes, peers up over the edge of an ambiguous blue shape–is it the edge of a table? Or a blanket? Or the sea? It carries the exceedingly sentimental title Source. The painting could be Sentimental Moment in the style of the 1970s, when Guston did a number of exceedingly intimate paintings, alluding to his marriage and to his concern over his wife’s health. Couple in Bed is a marriage portrait with a sick wife. The artist brings his brushes into bed with him, and sleeps with his shoes and wristwatch on. Nothing matches the tenderness of the final small paintings of domestic objects, through which he celebrates the intimacy of the household in a way that bears comparison with Chardin. An artist who leaves us with a painting of a thick salami and cheese sandwich on seeded rye as one of his last works cannot be reduced to a single narrative theme, political or poetic. It wouldn’t have hurt to have had Sentimental Moment in the mixture. He was a sentimental man, somewhat given to self-pity, to worry and gluttony, plagued by weakness of will and the need for love, and his last great oeuvre, like Joyce’s Ulysses, monumentalizes the wry comedy of everyday feelings.

While filming in Western Australia in May 1999, the critic Robert Hughes survived–barely–a head-on collision with another car. The details of the accident are obscure, but Hughes credits the disaster with having unblocked the book he had hoped to write on Francisco Goya, an artist in whom he had a long interest. As a high-school student in Sydney, he had even purchased a “poor second state” of one of Goya’s etchings–El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (“The sleep of reason produces monsters”)–from the dark series Los Caprichos. The print shows the artist asleep over his drawing table, with a wide-awake lynx as mascot, and the surrounding darkness filled with flying creatures–bats and owls–one of which offers him a brush. It was originally intended as a frontispiece to a portfolio of eighty etchings, which constitutes a sardonic and allegorical depiction of the moral and sexual monstrosities men and women turn into when reason dozes. For what it is worth, Goya finally chose a different self-portrait as frontispiece, in which, beneath a dandy’s hat, the artist wears an expression that his contemporaries read as satirical, contemptuous and in bad humor, which pretty much sums up Hughes’s sour attitude toward his homeland after the accident (“West Australian justice is to justice what West Australian culture is to culture”), which took place exactly two centuries after the first edition of Goya’s great work. His film, touted as a “frank opinionated look at Australia today,” was poorly received by the nation that had, until the smash-up and subsequent trial, considered Hughes a national hero. He is still, as far as I know, under indictment for reckless driving, though in fact he did go back when his only son, a sculptor, committed suicide in April 2002, at the age of 33. He has been through a terrible period of his life.

In his new book, Goya, Hughes says he frequently dreamt about the Spanish painter during his seven-month hospitalization, during which he underwent a dozen operations and experienced “more pain than I had imagined possible.” Goya himself appeared, one might say, as one of the monsters produced by the drug-induced sleep of reason while the critic was under intensive care. “In my dream narrative he was young and something of a street tough–a majo, dressed, I later realized, in the bullfighter’s jacket of his 1794-95 self-portrait. He had a gang of friends around him, scornful fellow majos, and they all judged me to be a ridiculous intruder, so far out of his depth as to be a clown.” I know the gang of toughs Hughes dreamt of. They appear in Caprichos, Plate 11, titled Muchachos al avio–“Boys getting ready”–and they are certainly up to no good. Goya shows them sitting on rocks under a bare tree, cutting plugs of contraband tobacco, with a coil of rope on the ground, handy for tying up victims. Goya painted such highwaymen stripping women, or robbing stagecoaches, with kneeling figures pleading for their lives. The muchachos were ace marksmen, like Goya himself.

“Boys getting ready,” as well as the portrait of the artist that Hughes hallucinated, was shown in 1989 in a wonderful exhibition called “Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment,” with venues in Boston and New York, where Hughes must have seen it–his review appeared at the end of January of that year in Time. The self-portrait, with Goya wearing the torero jacket, almost puns on the exhibition’s title. The artist stands in front of an immense canvas like Velázquez, half-silhouetted against the light from his studio window. His unmistakable mug, with its snub nose, glowers at us from beneath the brim of a curious hat, which has candles clipped to the hatband (he liked to touch up his canvases at night). He presents himself as, literally, a bearer of light–an ilustrado. The Enlightenment is also highlighted in Caprichos, Plate 71, in which one of a small assembly of misshapen night creatures points to the night sky, and the caption reads Si amanece, nos vamos–“If they wake, we’re out of here!” Los Caprichos was what we would now call a wake-up call. It was not a great success.

Many of the work’s allusions, which we assume were clear to Goya’s contemporaries, are matters of scholarly speculation today, but there is also a universality, an all-too-human truth to the moral reality Goya satirized. Los Caprichos is a dialogue in oppressions, lived out between generations, between classes, between the sexes and, above all, between the Inquisition and the superstitious on whom it preyed. It must especially be these images that Hughes was recalling when he wrote in his 1989 review that “we see his face pressed to the glass of our terrible century, mouthing to make his warnings understood.” My sense is that he resolved to write a book about Goya that would help a modern audience grasp these messages, but getting to know what Goya actually meant turned out to be a greater challenge than he anticipated. It was, he now believes, only through the automobile accident and his “extreme pain, fear, and despair” that he was finally able to complete the task. “It may be that the writer who does not know fear, despair, and pain cannot fully know Goya.”

So far as Hughes’s life in these past few years allows itself to be fitted into the good news/bad news format, the good news is that the book is now here. “Perhaps,” Hughes writes philosophically, “if life is fully experienced, there is no waste.” It would be grotesque to say, however good the book, that it was worth the pain that made it finally possible. So how good a book is it? Are the muchachos right that the critic is so far out of his depth to have become a clown? Or was that just a tormenting dream-thought?

I do not know that it is possible to “fully know” Goya, however much one has suffered. But Hughes’s book probably brings us as close to this inscrutable artist as we are likely to get. “What was he ‘really’ like? We do not know and never will. No diaries, no letters, no self-disclosure: a seamless, expressionless, and polished mask that gives us virtually no grip on the paintings he made.” Beyond that, “the last half of his life was lived out under the shadow of a crippling disability…the dreadful and unconditional loneliness of the deaf man.” Inevitably, there is a thick accretion of myth, which Hughes has had to dismantle. There was, it turns out, no torrid romance between the artist and the Duchess of Alba, however Goya’s portrait of her, in which she points to “Solo Goya” written in the sand at her feet, is to be interpreted. The Naked Maja, popularly believed to be a portrait of her, is of a different woman altogether.

Nothing can be taken for granted with Goya’s work. Consider a painting of 1791, one of many designs Goya did for the royal tapestry looms. It shows four amused young women in prim lacy aprons, holding the corners of a cloth while tossing a straw dummy in the air at their whim. Hughes writes that it is “Goya’s acid comment on the power of women over men, and on what seemed to him the waning of traditional Spanish masculinity.” I see no independent evidence that masculinity was waning–just think of los muchachos. The power of women over men is a universal theme: In Los Caprichos, the same little smiles of erotic gratification reappear on the faces of courtesans pulling the guts out through the anus of plucked males, as tiny as chickens. Goya’s men and women re-enact the same comedies of sexual politics that still animate Sex and the City.

But Hughes is particularly good on the political reality of being a court painter in Goya’s time. “One of the abiding mysteries of Goya seems to be that so fiery a spirit…could ever have adapted not just occasionally but consistently, for more than forty years, to the conditions of working for the successive Bourbon courts.” It is exceedingly difficult, for example, for viewers today not to believe that Goya is winking at us from around the edges of his canvas, standing behind the family of Carlos IV in the famous portrait of 1800, as if enlisting our sympathy for the plight of the court painter, having to paint such ninnies. Few visitors to the Prado can forbear wondering how the artist was able to “get away with” showing the “royals” as so coarsely human. It is hard not to see the great painting as a piece of satire and social criticism, and in the spirit of Los Caprichos, done the year before. But “there isn’t the slightest evidence in the painting of any satirical intent,” Hughes writes, pointing out that “if it had contained any detectable barbs, Goya’s career as first painter portraitist would have been finished there and then.”

But this makes it almost impossible to imagine how the painting would have been seen two centuries ago. Or, for that matter, how anything by Goya would have been seen if the visual evidence is so dissonant with what we would suppose it to be, seeing the work as we do. This makes the body of Goya’s work an intelligence test for art critics. In my view, Hughes had to overcome his characteristic impulses as writer and move with a far more measured tread than that upon which his immense reputation as a writer has rested. I think that explains why the book was so hard for him to write. In his dream, Goya had fastened a prosthetic device to Hughes’s leg like an instrument of torture. “I had hoped to ‘capture’ Goya in writing, and he instead imprisoned me. My ignorant enthusiasm had dragged me into a trap from which there was no evident escape.”

Goya was an ilustrado in a world in desperate need of light. Part of his work cast light on victims of the dark–the insane, the tortured, the ignorant, the disenfranchised. That does not mean Goya had contempt for the monarchy, which took its privileges as underwritten by God. He was a patriot as well as a critic, and genuinely torn when the French, bearers of Enlightenment as well as of imperialist values, invaded Spain in 1808. In this, the Peninsular War resembles the war in Iraq today. Goya’s harrowing suite of etchings, Disastres de la guerra, unpublished in his lifetime, is unparalleled as a monument to inhumanity. Hughes has composed a picture of art and agony, and cleared away much that impedes our understanding of a great artist. However “modern,” Goya still escapes our grasp. Not all of the monstrosities that haunted his dreams haunt ours. Still, this is an impressive achievement.

One of the great benefits conferred by Modernism on our appreciation of traditional painting is that there is little inclination any longer to ascribe optical abnormalities to artists whose representations of the human form depart from accepted norms. No one, for example, thinks for a moment that the attenuated figures of Giacometti are the result of deficits in the sculptor’s eyesight, having learned in Modern Art 101 that his elongated figures symbolize the existentialist despair that inflected European consciousness at the time of World War II. The danger of Modernism is that we often look at what would have been perceived as distortions in traditional art simply as cases where the artists were ahead of their time–if we notice them at all. What appeared, before Modernism, as abnormal elongations in the paintings of El Greco were perceived after Modernism as the kind of expressive gestures viewers had learned to take in stride. El Greco, whose extravagant distortions made him seem beyond the pale before Modernism, appeared to Modernists as one of their own, and modern artists often found in him what they were seeking to achieve in their own art.

We no longer think El Greco must have been astigmatic, any more than that the early Modernists such as Matisse and Derain had to have been mad to paint as they did, unless they were having a joke at everyone’s expense. But Modernism has perhaps overcompensated by suggesting that what our grandparents would have seen as abnormalities were merely, if we are formalists, determined by the exigencies of design, or else just had to do with the artist expressing the way he felt. This approach may blind us to meanings in the work to which the artist’s contemporaries responded, and that shaped the works’ reception in its own time. The chief critical challenge in addressing El Greco is to find a way of addressing him on his own terms.

Years ago I learned an argument from the cagey philosopher Nelson Goodman called the El Greco Paradox, which could perhaps be generalized to deflect any effort at explaining away deviations from presumed norms as the result of ophthalmic disorder. Goodman argued that if El Greco painted normally proportioned figures as elongated because he saw them that way, then we would see his painted figures as normally proportioned–and there will thus be no evidence in his paintings of abnormal vision. Some alternative account must accordingly be given for the elongations that are features of his mature style. I’m not sure the “paradox” was original with Goodman, but empirical psychology and art history tend to corroborate this conclusion. In a recent experiment (published in the journal Leonardo, under the headline “Was El Greco Astigmatic?”) the psychologist Stuart Anstis transformed normally sighted observers into “artificial El Grecos” by having them look through a modified cylindrical telescope that stretched their images horizontally by 30 percent. When, with the other eye covered, his subjects tried to draw a freehand square from memory, they “drew a tall, thin rectangle elongated vertically by 35 percent.” Instructed to copy actual squares, both original and copy looked to them like squat, wide rectangles. When one subject wore the El Greco telescope over one eye for two days with the other eye covered, her first drawn squares were 50 percent too tall, but she rapidly adjusted to optical distortion, and after two days she drew as if she had normal vision. So, Anstis concludes, might El Greco have adjusted, even if he was born astigmatic.

There is, in fact, no evidence of elongation in El Greco’s early work at all, and while this is hardly the main thing to look for in the magnificent exhibition of his work on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 11, the signature elongations begin to appear only when the artist was well along in his career and in his 40s. El Greco began as an icon painter in Crete, which at the time was under Venetian domination; and among the great surprises of the show are two recently identified paintings by him, one of the Dormition of the Virgin, the other of Saint Luke painting the Virgin and Child, both from the 1560s, and executed in Post-Byzantine style, under which optical abnormalities could scarcely be perceived. The Madonna and Child on St. Luke’s easel has the look of an immemorial Greek Orthodox icon; the spatial placement of the easel shows that perspective was a distant rumor for the artist; draperies in both paintings are schematic and conventional. There would have been no way of identifying these works as his on stylistic grounds, and certainly no basis in them for predicting the course of El Greco’s artistic odyssey. When these paintings were executed, the Renaissance in Italy had peaked, and its towering figures–Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo–had been dead for several decades. Italian art had entered its Mannerist phase, which was to last until nearly the end of the century, and the beginning of the Baroque. Relative to the extreme sophistication of what we may think of as mainland art, El Greco was a pretty backward artist, but with ambitions fueled by the presence in Crete of Venetian tastes and values. He traveled to Venice sometime after the putative date of the Cretan icons, and not long after that traveled to Rome, probably stopping in such towns as Parma and Verona en route, where Mannerism was in full flower.

I have always wondered why El Greco is not considered a Mannerist painter, for he took certain of the defining attributes of that movement to the point of extremity. Mannerism was a reaction against idealized naturalism, the glory of the High Renaissance. It created a style of elegant artificiality, embodied in the strange elongations we find, for example, in the figures of Parmigianino and Rosso Fiorentino. Heads were disproportionately small, faces stylized, pictorial space reinvented, and an overall imperative of refined exaggeration governed artistic invention. It was as if there was an agenda of deconstruction, in which the discoveries of the Renaissance were reconfigured to create pictorial fantasies rather than painstaking transcriptions of visual reality.

To get some sense of what could have caused so monumental a transformation in painting, we have to look beyond the frame of art history. Clearly, the cause of this astonishing rebellion in figuration was the trauma Catholicism had suffered in the wake of the Reformation. The reaction took the form, in art, of spiritualizing the depiction of human flesh. The values aimed at in depicting the human body entailed replacing anatomical correctness with spiritual truth. Imagine painting the narrative episodes of the Christian epic–the Annunciation, the Adoration, the Last Supper, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment–using figures whose proportions were met at best by Vogue models, instead of the solid peasant types who had given Renaissance art its reassuring familiarity. The story no longer seemed as if it had taken place in a world just like ours, but rather in a visionary atmosphere resembling an image of our world seen in a convex mirror. Mannerism was a first stage in the Counter-Reformation, which became full-blooded in the Baroque at the end of the century, when Rome became the center of artistic patronage, and all the previous centers were transformed into cultural provinces.

El Greco turned himself into a Mannerist in the course of his Italian sojourn. One can study this transitional period in his evolution in the Metropolitan’s own Christ Healing the Blind, of about 1565. So little is it in the distinctive style El Greco was to achieve, that it was attributed to Tintoretto and, as late as 1958, to Veronese. Such works demonstrate that whatever refractive errors may have troubled him, nothing in the painting would have encouraged an inference of astigmatism. But the painting is full of early Mannerist eccentricities. It is almost choreographed, with two groups of figures on either side of the stage. A “backdrop” shows an immense piazza in deep spatial recession, lined by arcaded buildings in flawless perspective. One group surrounds a quite normally proportioned Jesus, touching the eyes of a kneeling blind man. The other group shows figures responding to the miracle with the extreme melodramatic gestures that were to become the body language of the Baroque–the pictorial sign of personages witnessing miraculous events. One man points to Jesus’ intervention as if to say, Behold!–while another, still doubting Jesus’ claim to divine powers, holds his hands out as if to repel the sight. There is an anomalous figure, tentatively identified as a second blind man just restored to sight, shown from behind pointing upward. How, after all, does one represent someone who sees for the first time? But he may not be a cured blind man at all–Mannerist art often included figures that added to the dramatic excitement without being part of the narrative. In a second version, a witness looks upward at what the figure is pointing to, as if something astonishing were taking place offstage.

El Greco did not become “El Greco” until he moved to Spain, sometime before October 1576, nor did he use that mongrel nickname–a Spanish prefix and the Italian word for “Greek”–as his signature. He always signed his paintings with his Greek name, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, using Greek characters. But he also became El Greco, in the sense that he became an artist whose affinities to Mannerism are merely external, since his elongations came to express meanings internal to a vision that he could at that date have acquired only in Spain. They were no longer, to use the term in its slightly pejorative sense, mannerisms. In my view, the Italian period was one of learning how to paint in the advanced style of the era. He mastered perspective, anatomy, chiaroscuro and a kind of pictorial chic. But nothing especially set him apart from the pack, and though he had backers and patrons, and received portrait commissions in Rome, he was not a huge success there. Paintings such as The Purification of the Temple, from the same period as Christ Healing the Blind, show the sort of ambition that drove him, but they were never underwritten by important commissions. The Purification shows an irascible Jesus, driving not just money-lenders but courtesans and other vessels of impurity out of holy precincts with a knotted flogger. (There is even a traif still life in the foreground, consisting of oysters and rabbits.) I was interested to read that one of El Greco’s patrons told him of the success Sofonisba Anguissola–the female prodigy from Cremona–had had in Spain as tutor to the queen. In any case, his work was not a hit in Madrid, but he was commissioned to execute an altarpiece in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, where he was to spend the remainder of his life, becoming, as they say in New Age psychology, who he was. It was through finding an artistic product that satisfied the spiritual needs of this community that this came about.

I say “needs” rather than “tastes,” for it was not a simple matter of aesthetic preferences that gave him an advantage in Toledo. Toledo was at the center of the Counter-Reformation in Spain, and my sense is that El Greco invented a visual language that suited this spirit in a way that no one else had imagined. Mannerism was wedded to a kind of mysticism in his work, and rather than creating simply an alternative naturalism, he created a vision of a supernatural universe in which the Christian narrative was presented as visually momentous. Consider the extraordinary The Crucifixion With Two Donors of 1580. The donors–a priest with his palms pressed together and a nobleman with his right hand pressed to his heart–are cropped at the waist by the lower edge of the canvas. The cross, bearing Christ crucified, rises, or rather soars upward between them, so their eyes are at the same level as Christ’s feet. Christ is elongated and slender, and depicted almost in the pose of a dancer, his perfect body, barely wounded, made luminous by a light from above. It is as though the agony that Christ should be feeling has been transferred to the world through the drama of heavy, backlit clouds: There seems no boundary between earth and sky, which express the kind of crashing upheaval of a storm at sea. The donors’ faces express wonderment and awe.

I have borrowed these last two terms from Kant, who uses them to describe the experience of the sublime. Sublimity was not to figure in the vocabulary of aesthetics or art criticism until the latter part of the eighteenth century, but whether or not there was a word for it in El Greco’s Spain, it was what the spiritual appetite of the artist’s patrons demanded. Ecstasy is the condition of being moved by powers too great for the mind to contain, and Christ’s body in El Greco’s Crucifixion expresses the order of ecstasy to which Counter-Reformation Catholicism aspired in Toledo. It is ecstasy that Saint Teresa of Ávila–El Greco’s contemporary–sought in her devotions and described in her writing. One might say that El Greco invented the sublime in advance of the concept, and his elongations were among his means. They serve, or rather extend, the standards of sense to activate the faculty of mind in his viewers that his saints express in their bodies.

This, it seems to me, is the way to think about the masterpieces you will see in this great exhibition–about The Opening of the Fifth Seal, about the astonishing Laocoön, about The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and certainly about the ecstatic landscape of Toledo itself. Toledo, indeed, figures in both these latter paintings, as if to imply that the city is internally related to the immense spiritual convulsions that take place in the sky above it or, in the case of Laocoön, writhing with his sons in the grip of two serpents on the slopes outside its walls. Once one sees the logic in El Greco’s representations relative to the anticipated mood of his primary viewers, everything else falls into place: palette, pigment, brushwork, proportion, the dimensions of his canvas, the size of the eyes, the direction of gaze, the twist of the body, the ferocity of gesture.

The sublime was something that before El Greco belonged to poetry and to music in their highest expressions, and ecstasy to dance and tragic performances. It was his achievement to bring it into the visual arts. But his genius was made possible by the histories of painting and of religion flowing into each other. When, by the time of Kant, the sublime emerged as a conscious aesthetic goal, everything had become finally too secular for it to get off the ground as an artistic reality. It was only with Abstract Expressionism that, in Barnett Newman’s phrase, the sublime was “now” once more. It was a clever thought of the exhibition’s organizers to install some studies after El Greco by Jackson Pollock at the entrance to their exhibition. Pollock copied them from plates in art books, but he knew they held something that New York Modernism thirsted for–an abstraction beyond geometry, transcending the bounds of taste.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates illustrates his theory of the parts of the soul with the story of Leontius, who saw some corpses rotting outside the walls of Athens and was torn between revulsion and the desire to gaze at them. Leontius covered his eyes, but the desire was overpowering. “Look for yourselves, you evil things,” he scolded his eyes, “get your fill of the beautiful sight!” This was an early example of what the ancients called akrasia, or weakness of will, where we find ourselves doing what we know we shouldn’t. But the example illuminates an uncomfortable truth in the psychology of moral perception: Human beings derive pleasure from seeing what disgusts them; hence there is a pornography of torn and bloodied bodies, as well as of buff and sexy ones. This explains why viewers, rather than being simply revolted by depictions of martyrdoms and crucifixions, are instead drawn to them–a truth that underscores the Counter-Reformation’s belief that the church might strengthen people’s faith by increasing the luridness with which Christ’s tormented flesh was represented. It explains an aspect of the power of images. It also helps explain why art that undertakes to show the horrifying truth of war is so often counterproductive. It serves to attract viewers precisely by repelling them.

Consider Max Beckmann’s The Way Home, the first plate in Hell (1919), a portfolio of ten large black and white lithographs that can be seen in New York at the extraordinary exhibition of his work at MoMA-Queens (until September 29). Two figures face each other beneath a street lamp, one the artist himself in suit and bowler, the other a grossly disfigured veteran, wearing the familiar brimless cap of the German enlisted man at the time of World War I. Half his face has been blown off, he is noseless and almost eyeless, and the stump of an arm protrudes, like a stick, from his sleeve, which Beckmann grips with one hand while he points “the way home” with the other. A shadowy pair of crippled veterans are further up the street, behind a woman, from whose boots and jutting hips one infers that the street is her milieu. It is not entirely clear that the soldier can see which way the finger points. But Beckmann can see: Like Leontius, he cannot take his eyes off the veteran’s ghastly, skull-like head. And neither can we.

There is visual evidence that Beckmann actually saw such a head when he was a medical orderly in Flanders in 1915. A drypoint, The Grenade, shows wounded soldiers in the foreground, one of whom has lost part of his face. We can see the teeth through the hole. The scene of the explosion is imagined: Several panicked figures flee the bursting shell. But the cheekless man must have been drawn from life; Beckmann made many sketches of the maimed and dead, and throughout his work he called upon his knowledge of what human beings actually look like, dead or barely alive, on the field of battle. But his time as a field medic did more than provide opportunities for life (or death) studies. Beckmann, who lived in an apartment above the morgue, and once dreamed that dead bodies invaded his room, was left with traumatic memories that he struggled in vain to master, and that ultimately led, in 1915, to a severe breakdown. Counting on art to help him through his ordeal, he managed to visit the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, where he came to admire the so-called Flemish primitives, including especially Rogier van der Weyden. They were to help frame his vision of reality when he returned to his career as a painter after the war, but looking at art did him little good in keeping despair at bay.

Beckmann started to paint again while still in uniform, during his slow recovery behind the lines in Germany. In a haunting self-portrait as a medical orderly, which is not, unfortunately, in the MoMA show, he appears in his green uniform, with the Red Cross insignia attached to his collar, presumably in the act of painting the picture of himself that we see. It’s as if he were bringing himself back to life by painting: He shows himself closely studying his still frightened expression, getting outside himself, as it were, away from the images that trouble his dreams. Beckmann’s output of self-portraits is matched only by Rembrandt’s, but this is one of the few in which he actually depicts himself as an artist, perhaps because painting, just after his time in the field hospital, was his particular “way home.” Typically, Beckmann shows himself as part of the life he depicts. In his 1918 artistic statement, “A Confession,” he wrote: “I need to be with people. In the city. That is just where we belong these days. We must be part of the misery that is coming.”

The shattering truth was that, as the title of his portfolio implies, life in postwar Germany had itself become hell, the fabric of civilian life having been torn to shreds. A lot of the painting made by German artists who did military service was angry and accusatory. The Dadaist George Grosz had also undergone severe breakdown, and even tried to drown himself in a latrine in order not to be sent back to the trenches. Otto Dix, a machine-gunner throughout the war, published his brutal War Portfolio afterward. Gruesomely wounded veterans stumble through their postwar pictures. Max Ernst, another Dadaist who had served as an artilleryman, later wrote: “A horrible futile war had robbed us of five years of our existence. We had the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to make people scream.” It was an art of shock and disillusionment, a mirror of what Germany had done to itself.

Beckmann’s initial impulse, by contrast, appears to have been to use his art to help heal German society. In a letter to his wife in 1915, he had written, “What would we poor mortals do if we didn’t continually equip ourselves with ideas about God and country, love and art, in an attempt to hide that sinister black hole?” He rarely painted the war as he knew it, at least as such, but his medical observations gave him a vocabulary for dealing with damaged bodies in scenes of biblical enactment, especially so in his exceedingly ambitious if somewhat embarrassing Descent From the Cross of 1917. A patron, with whom he had been looking at a Gothic woodcarving of a Pietà, challenged the artist to make a modern painting as powerful as it. The immense, awkward Descent From the Cross is unmistakably a modern work, with art-historical allusions to Rogier and Matthias Grünewald, and with irresistible metaphorical associations for a shattered nation hoping for resurrection. Beckmann brought the knowledge he had acquired in observing dead bodies to his depiction of Christ’s body, which is very much that of a cadaver. It could not easily fit into a coffin without breaking its arms, which, because of rigor mortis, are stiffly extended from the time on the Cross. Christ’s drawn, emaciated body is lacerated and bruised, and the soles of his feet are turned upward in pronate position, showing the nail-holes.

Descent From the Cross is an ugly painting, and it is difficult to know what consolation it or its pendants–Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, or Adam and Eve of that same year–might have brought to viewers. The figures are as dispiriting as the landscape is bleak: a jeering figure, pointing at the Adulteress, is straight out of Bosch, while Adam and Eve look as if they had spent their lives in, respectively, a coal mine and a beer house, rather than in the Garden of Eden. Beckmann’s Gothic borrowings enabled him to show human beings as morally disfigured as the world the war had left them with.

Berlin after the war was an exceptionally violent city, torn by revolution and beset by crime–a site of cold, hunger, epidemic disease, demoralization and radical disorder, of rape, torture, murder. These are the subjects of Hell, which shows how cruelly men and women can treat one another when the social structures that underwrite daily life unravel. Beckmann prefaces his portfolio with a portrait of himself as a circus barker, beneath which he wrote the following sardonic caption:

Honored ladies and gentlemen of the public, pray step up. We can offer you the pleasant prospect of ten minutes or so in which you will not be bored. Full satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.

It is difficult to resist the thought that Beckmann’s model for Hell was Goya’s suite of etchings, Los Caprichos, which also has a self-portrait at the beginning, and the slogan “The sleep of Reason produces monsters.” Goya’s images are moral allegories, which refer partly to the comédie humaine, and partly to the inhumanities of politics and religion in the Spain of his time. So far as I know, Goya does not show himself as part of that world. But Beckmann is outside the world of Hell as barker, and inside it as witness and commentator. Hell is like Los Caprichos fused with The Disasters of War, comic and gruesome at once.

Plate 6 of Hell is titled The Night, which Beckmann worked up into one of his most famous paintings, bearing the same title. It depicts a scene of brutality that could as easily have taken place during the Thirty Years’ War, which had been a high point, until the twentieth century, of the suffering war can inflict on human beings, with the difference that Night‘s agony takes place after hostilities have ceased. Vicious intruders terrorize a household. The woman of the house is shown from behind, tied by her wrists to a window frame. Her legs are spread, her buttocks are exposed, her corset has been opened and her garments lie torn about her. A lit candle sits on the floor behind her, and it seems clear that she has been raped and tortured. Her husband is now being tortured on the dinner table: A man is tightening an improvised noose around his neck; another, with a bandaged head, smokes a pipe while twisting the householder’s arm. The victim’s left leg sticks rigidly out, the sole of his foot is blackened. A third hoodlum is holding the comically angelic, fair-haired daughter, wrapped in a red curtain, under his arm, who gazes tearfully at her mother’s face, which we cannot see. A dog howls from beneath the tablecloth. Beckmann employs a kind of soft Cubism to evoke the spaces in this nightmare scene, and to insinuate, perhaps, the shattering of a world. It is often classed as an allegorical painting, scholars poring over it to find local allusions, but I think it was just current events, like so much else in Hell.

Martyrdom (Plate 3) is a portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, her arms outstretched as if crucified, her eyes rolled upward in death, as stiff as a Romanesque Jesus. Her body is being pulled from an automobile by a grinning banker in tailcoat and checked trousers, while coarse militiamen beat her with rifle butts. The Last Ones (Plate 9) shows a firefight of bitter-end Spartacists, one of whom grimaces with pain as his guts spill out like curly worms, while figures fall this way or that, as in a comic drawing of slapstick performers. A starving family sits before empty dishes, a porcine man carries a skeletal corpse, gasbags harangue the crowds, suave dancers two-step to string players and drunks sing a patriotic song to the wheezing of an accordion. In the last plate, The Family, a young boy gleefully plays soldier, with toy grenades and helmet. His severe-looking grandmother protects tomorrow’s grenadier, as Beckmann, pointing with one hand, as he did in the first plate, holds his head in the other hand. Nothing has been learned.

In The Night, Beckmann discovered his artistic vocation. He was never quite so topical or political again. The thought that The Night is allegorical is a retrospective judgment, since his most distinctive work is increasingly allegorical and symbolic. He portrayed himself as a clown the following year, wearing the same clown’s traditional collar of points he wore in the frontispiece to Hell. He is holding a slapstick and a mask in his left hand while extending his right hand in pronate position, as if displaying stigmata. A horn is in his lap. Later he did two paintings, which seem pendants, Carnival and The Dream. Each is filled with symbols: musical instruments, masks, clown paraphernalia, candles. In The Dream, a mustached man with bandaged, perhaps amputated hands, climbs a ladder, carrying a large fish–a symbol that often recurs. An organ grinder, perhaps blind, blows a horn, and a clown (judging by his collar) pulls himself along on cut-off crutches, as his legs have been amputated at the knee. A blond girl displays a palm, as if soliciting coins for the organ grinder, while holding a Punchinello doll with the other. A girl in carnival costume lies on the floor, her skirts flying, playing a kind of viola. A mandolin lies beside her. The interpretation of dreams is always intricate, and so far as I have been able to read in the Beckmann literature, we are more or less on our own to say what it all means, here and elsewhere, in these strong, handsomely painted, unsettling works, including the nine triptychs upon which Beckmann’s greatest reputation rests. He painted magnificently in the thirty years that remained to him, but it is impossible, because of the complexity of the individual works, to discuss in suitable detail the remarkable art he left us, so much of which is shown in what is, after all, a retrospective exhibition.

I shall, however, offer an interpretive conjecture regarding Departure, the great triptych Beckmann finished in 1935, with which visitors to MoMA have been long familiar. The central panel shows three figures in a boat: a mother and child, a king fishing with a net and a mysterious personage wearing a strange headdress. There is a Fisher King in Arthurian legend, a maimed figure who lives in a bleak castle set in a wasteland, and I believe him to be the subject of this work. The Grail quester, Perceval, witnesses a strange procession in the Fisher King’s castle: Young people carry a bleeding lance and a golden chalice that the knight later realizes was the Holy Grail, which could have healed the Fisher King–if only Perceval had asked what it was–while restoring the wasteland to fertility. The left panel shows, among others, a brutally wounded figure, with bleeding arm-stumps tied together above his head. The right panel shows a blindfolded figure carrying a fish, and a couple bound together, one upside down. A passing musician beats a drum. Germany had been a wasteland in 1918; it was about to be a wasteland again. Two years after finishing Departure, Beckmann had the supreme honor of having his work displayed in the notorious “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich. The day after it opened, he and his wife left Germany forever, spending the war years in Amsterdam before coming to America. His art is the mythography of wounds.

If the idea of monochrome painting occurred to anyone before the twentieth century, it would have been understood as a picture of a monochrome reality, and probably taken as a joke. Hegel likened the Absolute in Schelling to a dark night in which all cows are black, so a clever student in Jena might have had the bright idea of painting an all-black picture titled Absolute With Cows–witty or profound depending upon one’s metaphysics. In 1882 the Exposition des Arts Incohérents in Paris featured a black painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud titled Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit, which was appropriated in 1887 by the French humorist Alphonse Allais, in an album of monochrome pictures of various colors, with uniformly ornamental frames, each bearing a comical title. Allais called his all-red painting Tomato Harvest by Apoplectic Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea.

Only in the most external and superficial respect does Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 black square painted on a white ground belong to this history. For one thing, Black Square is not a picture; it does not, in other words, depict a black square outside the frame. One of its immense contributions to the concept of visual art lies in the fact that it liberated the concept of painting from that of picturing, and thus opened up a new era in the history of art. “All paintings are pictures” would have been a strong candidate for a necessary truth until Malevich proved it false. But it was not a difference that met the eye. Had Bilhaud’s all-black painting of 1882 been square, it might have looked exactly like Malevich’s Black Square.

Black Square‘s radical difference from everything before it does not end there. Malevich’s disciple, El Lissitzky, declared in 1922 that Black Square was “opposed to everything that was understood by ‘pictures’ or ‘paintings’ or ‘art.’ Its creator intended to reduce all forms, all painting, to zero.” I think by its opposition to painting, El Lissitzky is saying that the fact that the square is painted is incidental to the work’s meaning. Malevich himself said later, “It is not painting; it is something else.” And so far as its opposition to art goes, well, you don’t have to study art to be able to paint a black square. Anybody could do it. So though it was almost certainly Malevich’s most important work, and inaugurated a new era in the history of art, it hardly seems appropriate to call it his masterpiece, just because the factors that make for something being a masterpiece don’t really apply to it. It would be curious to think of it exhibited alongside Mona Lisa in a show called “Two Masterpieces.” We marvel at its originality, not its painterly brilliance.

The idea behind what Malevich called Suprematism is that you cannot carry things beyond Black Square. It is as far as you can go: You have reached a point of absolute zero. Which isn’t to say that Black Square is empty–there is, after all, a difference between not being a picture and being a picture of nothing! Calling an empty rectangle a picture of nothing would be a Lewis Carroll-like joke, whereas everything connected with Black Square underscores its seriousness.

Consider, for example, the way Malevich first showed it in the 1915 show “0.10. The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings,” to which he contributed thirty-nine Suprematist works. An installation photograph shows Black Square mounted in an upper corner of the gallery, diagonally connecting two walls. This was evidently the position occupied by an icon in Russia: not hung on a wall or propped on a shelf, but in an upper corner. I think the reason would be as follows: Icons were never considered mere pictures of saints, the Madonna or Jesus himself, so they did not aspire to create an illusion, as in Renaissance art. They were not, as Alberti said, a kind of window, through which one would believe one was seeing an external reality. What one believed instead was that holy beings would actually make themselves present in their images. Theoreticians spoke of the mystical presence of the saint in the icon. And its placement near the ceiling was an obvious metaphorical entry point for beings that existed on a higher plane. A picture could be a decoration, but icons were fraught with magic. Through icons, the holy being was in our very presence, where it could be prayed to or honored. Trivially, a square is a square, not a picture of one. Malevich created reality, rather than merely depicting it. And that in a sense is what the figure in an icon was believed to be–a reality rather than a picture.

After Malevich’s death, when he lay in state, a black square hung above his head. There was a black square on his tomb. As a kind of icon, it carried a religious power. In 1920, he wrote, “I had an idea that were humanity to draw an image of the Divinity after its own image, perhaps the black square is the image of God as the essence of his perfection on a new path for today’s fresh beginning.” He clearly identified himself with the black square: It served him as a kind of signature, appearing in the lower right-hand corner of his last painting, a self-portrait. In any case, it was not a proto-Dadaist hoot.

The original Black Square is perhaps the pièce de résistance in an elegant exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum given over entirely to Malevich’s Suprematist phase (until September 14; Menil Collection, Houston, October 3-January 11, 2004). It is the first time it has been allowed to travel, and one can see why. It’s in terrible shape, so blemished by cracks and fissures that one would give it a pass at a yard sale. Its ravaged condition conveys a sense of touching vulnerability, like a martyr’s relic. In fact, Malevich painted at least four Black Squares, and it occurs as a motif throughout his oeuvre, making its first appearance in 1913, in a small pencil study for the décor of the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, two years before he invented–or discovered–Suprematism.

There are several of these studies in the Guggenheim show, in deference to Malevich’s belief that they are proto-Suprematist works, though at the time he considered himself a Cubo-Futurist. After Cubo-Futurism, he went through a related style, making what he described as “alogical” or “transrational” works, hardly a year before the great breakthrough that Black Square represents. I wish I knew more about the moment when Malevich decided to paint a large black square, and realized that he had hit upon something that changed the meaning of art forever, not merely purging it of any pictorial elements but stultifying the impulse to see it as a picture of unrelieved blackness. Given the momentousness he ascribed to Suprematism, one can appreciate that Malevich looked for intimations of it in his earlier work, much in the way in which scholars pore over Pollock’s pre-1945 work in search of the drip.

Victory Over the Sun was a collaborative effort by three avant-garde figures, all friends–the composer Matiushin, the poet Kruchenykh and Malevich himself. It was given only two performances, at Luna Park in St. Petersburg. There were two acts. In Act I, the sun is captured and locked up in a concrete box. In Act II, the Strong Men of the Future produce a new social order, no longer dependent on the primitive source of light that had been worshiped for centuries. Music, words and of course the sets and costumes were radical and cutting-edge: The music was dissonant, the lyrics were basic sounds in an experimental discourse called Zaum. Only fragments of the music and language survive, but Malevich’s sketches for the costumes exist (you can see them on the Internet), and there are, as well, his set designs. The set that he later singled out as Black Square‘s first appearance in his work is, according to the Guggenheim catalogue, for Act II, Scene 5. Indeed, it shows a square, divided by a diagonal into two areas, one black, the other light.

The truth is that the drawing in question has the look of something seen through a square opening in some sort of optical instrument, like a segment of the sun against a dark sky. It really looks like a picture.

Here is a better way to look at the question. In one of Malevich’s studies for the opera’s décor, there is a black square and a number of black rectangles–a large vertical one, and then two sets of three black rectangles at various angles to one another on either side of it. But in the same drawing there are a number of other components–some large letters, some numerals, a foot, a hand holding what looks like a bomb, a cigarette with smoke–and a number of mere marks–circles, waves, hooks, indications of the edges of overlapping planes. It is an example of an “alogical” or “transrational” drawing, a drawing whose various components (some abstract, others representational) don’t cohere as a composition. The alogical drawings have something of the disorder of dreams, as Freud attempted to characterize them when he suggested that we approach them like rebus puzzles–concatenations of pictures that seem to have no rational connection with one another.

Now imagine laying a piece of transparent paper over Malevich’s drawing and simply tracing the black geometrical components, disregarding all the rest. The result will look like a Suprematist drawing of 1915, consisting of a number of free-floating rectangles together with a square. It is as though Malevich’s drawing had a Suprematist drawing inscribed within itself. But this would have been invisible until Suprematism was invented two years later. Suprematism consists in getting rid of all the objects other than the geometrical ones. When that has been done, one is left with a nonobjectivist work, and Suprematism is virtually synonymous with what came to be called Non-Objective art.

The term was first used by Rodchenko in connection with his Black on Black Painting (1918), but Malevich made the concept his own, and published a book, The Non-Objective World, in 1927. It is worth mentioning that the Guggenheim Museum was originally called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting when it was located on East 54th Street in Manhattan, and one really felt as if one were entering a nonobjective world when one visited it. Most of the paintings consisted of shapes floating in empty space, many of them by Rudolph Bauer, the lover of the director, the Baroness Hilla Rebay, who used to sit at the reception desk, eagerly discussing the philosophy of nonobjectivity with anyone interested. There were a lot of Kandinskys and perhaps some Mirós and Mondrians. I don’t know if there was anything by Malevich, but there were some at the Museum of Modern Art, including the famous White on White. It was a great place to take someone one felt moony about, and hold hands on the round gray velvet settees.

Very little of Malevich’s Cubo-Futurist work of 1914, with which the Guggenheim show begins, or the alogical drawings and paintings of the following year, is especially rewarding unless you think of Suprematism as struggling to emerge from the early avant-garde clutter. But when one enters the gallery of 1915 masterpieces, there is a sense of liberation that must, one is certain, recapture Malevich’s own feeling when he broke free and entered what he regarded as unoccupied territory. The paintings convey a feeling of utter glee. One feels as if one were witnessing the beginning a new era, where the history of art has been left behind forever. The Russian avant-garde was obsessed with the idea of the fourth dimension, which its members read about in the mystical writings of Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky. The fourth dimension was not an extra parameter in some dry equations but rather a living reality that one could hope to enter, like a new world. Ouspensky, a Theosophist, believed that artists were uniquely capable of making the fourth dimension vivid for individuals who are otherwise locked in their three-dimensional perception of the world. That is what the great Suprematist paintings convey–the optimism and generosity that defined the art of the Russian avant-garde at the dawn of Modernism, when it saw its mission as bringing art into life, and contributing, through art, to the creation of a new social reality, a vision initially embraced by the Russian Revolution before the perversions of Stalinism.

The smooth geometries and whitish spaces of Suprematist painting, using brilliant colors and jaunty compositions, were a vocabulary of hope and idealism. They could symbolize all the bright modernities for which the art stood–syncopated rhythms; the fourth dimension as a field of infinite explorations; the radical redesign of contemporary clothing, housing and cities–and above all, they could express speed and flight. “I have torn through the blue lampshade of color limitations,” Malevich wrote in 1919, “and come into the white. After me, comrade aviators sail into the chasm–I have set up the semaphores of Suprematism!”

All the Suprematist compositions lift the spirit. Let’s just consider Airplane Flying. It is, of course, not a picture, so don’t bother to look for the airplane. What it captures, rather, is the feeling of flight. The flight begins at the bottom-right corner, with a tilted black square. Along the diagonal that its angle defines are two black rectangles, one larger than the other, with two thin whiz lines on either side, marked by thin black rectangles. At the upper edge of the largest black rectangle, direction changes–we get a flight of yellow rectangles, heading for the upper-right corner, crossing a long, nearly horizontal thin red rectangle as it goes. “My new painting does not belong to the earth exclusively,” Malevich said in 1916. “The earth has been abandoned like a house eaten up with worms. And in fact in man and his consciousness there lies the aspiration toward space, the inclination to ‘reject the earthly globe.'”

This is how the future used to look. Then came the Depression, Stalinism, fascism, the two world wars, the cold war. The poor mangled Black Square shows how that once-bright future looks now. It is like the ashes of hope, and in its way a memorial to Malevich himself, as the future collapsed around him. He died a poor man, disgraced and erased from the history of art according to the Soviet Union.

In 1900 Maurice Denis painted a large canvas titled Hommage à Cézanne, which shows the esteemed master next to one of his paintings and surrounded by a crowd of admiring younger artists. The scene is set in the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, in which Cézanne had attained instant celebrity through a in style than the painting by Cézanne that it depicts, which is marked by certain stylistic eccentricities that divided the Parisian art world into two camps–those who found his work crazily inept, and those who found it stunningly original. Cézanne’s Nature Morte au Compotier is a still life featuring a fruit dish–a compotier–with a circular lip. The lip does not look the way a circular form would appear in normal perspective. Cézanne shows it instead as a kind of compressed, awkward ellipse. And Denis, in picturing a painting by an artist other than himself, needed to show it the way it really looked. So his painting had to be academically impeccable. It was crucial that he demonstrate that he was accurately depicting a painting that was awkward and “wrong.” It was precisely because of the compotier‘s eccentricity that the important and advanced artists in Hommage à Cézanne were showing their respect. Denis’s painting shows why Cézanne, in his advanced years, had become the hottest artist in Paris.

Not everyone who first saw Denis’s tribute to Cézanne would have understood why the artists–Bonnard, Vuillard, Redon and others, including Denis himself–found Cézanne someone to admire. In the early phases of Modernism, viewers were hard-pressed to decide whether paintings that departed from accepted academic standards were innovative or simply incompetent. Were the artists in Denis’s painting sincere in their praise of Cézanne, or were they secretly mocking him? (Think of the ambiguity of a famous dinner party, a few years later, that Picasso and his pals threw for Henri Rousseau, the great primitivist.) But even if one were prepared to accept Cézanne’s seeming idiosyncrasies as innovative, the question remained of why his style was admired. It is the great merit of this fascinating book that it explains what the figures in Denis’s painting, including the dealer Ambroise Vollard himself, appreciated Cézanne for. Their reasons, it turns out, were strikingly different from our own. In her deeply researched and utterly convincing study Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture, Nina M. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer argues that what gave Cézanne’s work its great éclat was connected with the prevailing politics of taste. Cézanne and his work were believed to embody values and virtues antithetical to those for which Paris stood. He was believed to be, borrowing a title from Louis Aragon, Un paysan à Paris–a defiantly regionalist artist. The Cézanne portrayed in her book is almost the antithesis of the Cézanne upon whom the whole spirit and logic of Modernist painting was erected:

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, symbolist critics in the capital had already begun setting the foundation of…a portrait of Cézanne as barbaric, naïve, unsophisticated, and “primitive,” in a word, as the opposite of everything civilized and Parisian. His paintings were exalted for their naïveté, simplicity, severity, and lack of naturalism (such as realistic rendering of proportions, perspective, or color).

The notorious lip of the compotier would have been a case in point.

Like Gauguin, the author writes, Cézanne was “possessed of an ambiguous identity–part modern master, part primitive eccentric, insider and outsider all in one, known to some but a mystery to most–his persona as much as his works were surrounded by an aura of outlandishness.” In France at the time, as indeed today, there were deep tensions between Paris and the provinces, many of whose inhabitants resented the prevailing policy of cultural centralization, which treated Paris as the luminous capital and everyplace else as more or less the sticks. Thus, when the Universal Exposition of 1900 was conceived as a showcase for France’s industrial and cultural achievements, the decision to hold it in Paris wounded provincial pride. “Paris absorbs everything, Paris confiscates everything,” an editorialist complained. As Athanassoglou-Kallmyer observes, “The times were well primed for the promotion of a regional artist in the capital. It was primarily because Vollard saw Cézanne in these terms that he gave him the exhibition that made both their reputations. “Vollard sensed the timeliness and advantage of a show that would bring a rustic artist from the provinces into the orbit of the capital while regionalist debate over the Universal Exposition raged.”

The critical response to Cézanne’s 1895 exhibition is an object lesson in the optics of art appreciation: the marked eccentricities, epitomized by the lip of the compotier, were seen as evidence of Cézanne’s Provençal authenticity.

The singularly overlapping vocabulary of the critics generates a portrait of Cézanne as a genuine cultural outsider, unpolished and savage (“fruste et sauvage”); suspicious, restless, and self-taught (“méfiant,” “inquiet,” “autodidacte”); naïve and ignorant (“naïf et ignorant tout”); conscientious, simple, honest, and clumsy (“conscientieux, simple, franc mais lourd”). His paintings were described as the products of a peasant (“production paysanne”) characterized by “roughness,” “rusticity,” “awkwardness” (“gaucherie”), coarsely brushed surfaces, and “robust” colors.

To realize that this was the language of critical praise opens a window into the temper of the Parisian art world of 1895, part of which saw Cézanne in much the same way that a corresponding segment of the New York art world nearly a century later viewed the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Cézanne’s peasant authenticity was even interpreted as a sign of virility–his apparently rude and coarse paintings were those of a “real man,” as against the effeminacy of academic art!

Needless to say, these are very different reasons for admiring Cézanne’s painting than we are given today, when we see his work under the influence of the modernisms for which it is almost certainly responsible. “He is the father of us all,” Picasso was to say, early and often. But the praise certainly corresponded to an aspect of Cézanne’s personality. Cézanne spoke with a heavy Provençal accent, and probably flaunted his provincial identity in his manners, values and attitudes, notwithstanding the fact that, whatever his affectations and regional loyalties, he was an exceedingly sophisticated and cultivated man, whose correspondence is filled with Latin phrases and classical allusions. As his late letters show, he was considerably closer to the kind of artist that we now take him to have been, though it is of the greatest value to perceive him in the otherness of his own times, when it was impossible to see his art within the framework of a revolution in artistic understanding that had not yet been grasped. Cézanne’s childhood friend Émile Zola saw him as an aborted genius, and based the central character of his 1886 novel L’Oeuvre on Cézanne, whom he depicts as a madman and a failure, who finally takes his own life. There really was no way, even for his most ardent and devoted admirers, to understand his work other than as that of a gifted bumpkin.

Prizing Cézanne as an authentic specimen of Provençal culture was part of a larger movement of cultural criticism to which, undoubtedly, we owe one important aspect of Modernism in art. It is impossible to downplay the degree to which the perception of Jackson Pollock as a redneck contributed to his breakthrough. The European avant-garde was united in its view that the West was washed up, and that art needed to be refreshed by an inflow from other traditions. Gauguin found inspiration in Breton folk art before he embarked for the South Seas. Van Gogh left Paris for Arles to become the Hokusai of French painting. Cézanne did not have to go native–he was the real thing. And the upswelling of regionalism inflected his deviation from academic norms with an aura of delicious rusticity.

There is little doubt that setting Cézanne in his culture explains a great deal about his work. I learned many surprising and illuminating things about him from Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s scholarly investigations. I had, for example, always been puzzled by Cézanne’s Three Skulls of 1898-1900 in the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was intoxicating to observe how the artist painted the skulls in the same way that he painted his celebrated apples, marking the planes with those wonderful and unmistakable brush strokes. But why skulls? And why three? No explanation would be needed had Cézanne painted three apples on a table. An artist might happen to have a single human skull in his studio, as a prop. But three of them?

As it turns out, the three skulls derive from an archeological display. One of Cézanne’s closest Provençal friends was a world-class scientist, Antoine-Fortuné Marion, a geologist and paleontologist who discovered the remains of an entire Neolithic culture beneath the soil of Provence. For Cézanne it was irresistible to see in the skulls Marion excavated the predecessors of Provençals. Cézanne’s painting of skulls was thus more than an exercise in facture and more than a modern vanitas: It was a celebration of his local world.

Before reading this study, I had always found Cézanne’s bathers difficult to explain. So it was truly illuminating to discover their Arcadian origins: Athanassoglou-Kallmyer argues that Cézanne was a passionate reader of Virgil from his youth, and that the bathers embody the pastoral reality underneath the encroaching industrialization of Provence, which Cézanne found revolting. As he wrote his goddaughter in 1902: “Unfortunately, what we call progress is nothing but the invasion of bipeds who do not rest until they have transformed everything into hideous quais with gas lamps–and, what is still worse–with electric illumination. What times we live in!”

The book is rich in such insights. The problem is that nearly all of them concern Cézanne’s choice of motifs, rather than his manner of depiction. Nothing in Cézanne’s culture explains the lip of the compotier, or the brush strokes, or the astonishing space, or the way forms tilt toward the viewer. The explanations that Cézanne’s enthusiasts gave for his distinctive art were wrong. What can be said is this: The factors that made Cézanne a celebrity made him a figure of great interest to young painters, who visited and wrote the master, and who discovered that the reasons for his greatness had to be sought elsewhere. “I think the young painters much more intelligent than the others,” he wrote his son in 1906, the year of his death. To Emile Bernard, he famously wrote, “See in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.” To a German collector, he said, “I try to render perspective solely by means of color.” And he pointed to patches of color that were only patches of color, without as yet conveying distance.

This is not the discourse of the Provençal chauvinist. This is the discourse of the father of modern art. Color as form, reality as geometry–hommage à Cézanne!

From the mid to the late 1920s, the German painter Christian Schad produced a group of paintings like little else in modern art. Possessing the translucent clarity of Renaissance portraits, they project a nighttown vision of Mitteleuropa worldlings, bathed in a mood of obsessive eroticism. The oeuvre of a great many artists contains an X portfolio, so to speak, of erotic images. But I can think of no painter of Schad’s stature whose work, in the few years in which he touched greatness, was so totally given over to erotomania that everything associated with the personages he portrays–a flower, an accessory, a human companion–seems to signal preferences in some exotic code of sexual specialization.

Some ten years earlier, as a member of the Dada movement, Schad attracted a certain notice through a body of work that could not contrast more vividly with the extraordinary paintings of the 1920s. It consisted of small experimental photograms in which bits of fabric and scraps of paper were arranged in abstract compositions on photosensitive paper that was then exposed to light. Through one of the vagaries of art history, the Museum of Modern Art acquired several of the “Schadographs,” as Schad’s photograms were dubbed by the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, and the artist’s reputation has rested almost entirely on these early avant-garde efforts. The paintings, meanwhile, have until now remained almost totally unknown. This gives a particular excitement to the exhibition “Christian Schad and the Neue Sachlichkeit,” at the Neue Galerie in New York City, where they are being shown for the first time in America.

Neue Sachlichkeit means “new objectivity,” and it designates an art movement that took place mainly in Germany and Italy in the mid-1920s. The term entered the discourse of art writing in 1925, in connection with a famous exhibition organized in Mannheim, Germany, by Gustav Hartlaub, a curator of some note. The title was originally to have been “Post Expressionism.” Sachlichkeit, or objectivity, contrasts fairly exactly with “subjectivity,” which everyone would have associated with Expressionism, an art of inner feeling. German Expressionism was one of the great Modernist movements, and Schad himself belonged to it before he converted to Dada. The term “objectivity” suggests that the artists involved were bent on representing things as they really appear, but there is more–and less–to the movement than that. Schad’s paintings, for example, seem to be objective transcriptions of actual persons in real settings–bedrooms and cafes. They have an almost clinically photographic truth, which can easily mislead us into thinking that that is all they are.

In fact, the heavy spice of sexual obsession in Schad’s paintings is almost like the aura of religious devotion that Renaissance painters used to transform their models into saints and martyrs, rather than an atmosphere that he actually encountered in the cabaret precincts of Berlin and Vienna. The people he portrayed, often from memory, were vehicles for metaphoric transformation. “My pictures are never illustrative,” he wrote in a caption for his 1927 masterpiece, Self-Portrait With Model. “If anything, they are symbolic.” That symbolism gives these works the uncanniness of things dreamt. There are three mysteries connected with these extraordinary works: how anyone who made the photograms could have made them; why, after the brief period in which he achieved greatness in the late 1920s, Schad did nothing of significance for the remainder of his long life; and, finally and most important, the mystery of these amazing pictures themselves. To explain that, we need to relate them somewhat to the Schadographs, which belong to an earlier moment of Schad’s life.

As a young man, Schad left Germany for Switzerland in 1915, ostensibly for reasons of health, but mainly in order not to be called up as part of Germany’s war effort. There he fell in with the Zurich Dadaists. Little of his art from the Dada years survives, apart from the Schadographs, some woodcut prints and a few posters, but Dada art was in its nature fairly ephemeral and deliberately minor, which has in part to do with the movement’s refusal to make aesthetically ingratiating art. Dada’s aim was indeed the suppression of beauty, since beauty was among the values venerated by the class responsible for the so-called Great War. Why should we make beauty for a society capable of that? The repudiation of beauty was thus a form of moral protest, not unlike the decision by the women in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to politicize sex by withholding it until their men stopped making war. So while the cannons pounded and millions of young men died elsewhere in Europe, Dada indulged in willful buffoonery. By turning themselves into artist-clowns, they rejected the role of artist-heroes, refusing to be complicit in the value scheme of the warmakers. I regard this as having had the incidental consequence of a major philosophical contribution–perhaps the main philosophical contribution made by art in the twentieth century. Dada demonstrated that something can be art without being beautiful, a notion that would at the turn of the century have been considered philosophically incoherent. And it had the consequence of politicizing beauty, which made Dada the forerunner of the anti-aesthetic tendency of so much of contemporary art, with its implied edge of political critique. The Schadographs are almost paradigms of anti-aestheticism, whatever further interest they may have for the history of photography or, for the matter, of abstraction.

The contempt that Zurich Dada displayed toward the society that had produced the wholesale slaughter of the Great War continued after the Armistice, as members of the movement sought to involve themselves in a form of art that might help effect political change. Dada also challenged the tendency of German culture to elevate the artist–The Artist–to the status of a quasi-divine hero, and perhaps it was this cultural disposition that explains why Dada was essentially a German phenomenon, even though not all its members were German nationals. Posters in the First International Dada Exhibition in Berlin (1920) proclaim the death of art, but what they meant was that art as it had been exalted by German culture was dead.

The most distinctive art form of Berlin Dada was photomontage, which became in their hands a vehicle of social and political critique well into the Nazi era. But initially, I think, photomontage was a corollary to Dada’s anti-aestheticism. Its critical subtext was that art can be made with scissors and paste, using newspaper and magazine boilerplate as its material. Its spirit could not have been more different from the earlier collage work of Picasso and Braque in Paris. It was sarcastic rather than witty. Berlin Dada made art out of images that had no redeeming aesthetic value–just what its society deserved.

Schad, by contrast, underwent a certain crise de conscience when he came down, so to speak, from the magic mountain of the Dadaist interlude in Switzerland, and encountered the reality of the human suffering left in the war’s wake. This was translated into a change in style: The jokiness of Dada seemed no longer a suitable option. Even though Dada’s vision was never less than moralistic, its anti-aestheticism appears to have struck Schad as having outlived its occasion. He was not part of Berlin Dada. Like several of its members, he found his way to a certain kind of realism, but in a spirit entirely his own. And he pursued beauty as well, almost as if, since banishing beauty was a way of hurting the society that made the war, creating beauty was a way of healing it.

One reason for realism was as old as Shakespeare’s Hamlet: to use art as a mirror “to show…the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,” and in which society would see its moral face reflected. In order for that to happen, viewers must not merely recognize what they see, but see themselves reflected in it. And for some painters, this was to be the role for art in the disarray of postwar Germany.

Consider the painter George Grosz. Grosz participated in the International Dada Exhibition in Berlin in 1920, but felt the need to do something more than express his overall disgust with Germany by way of pranks. He wanted Germans to feel disgust with themselves, and so he set out to show them to themselves in an exaggerated mirror, as a means to their moral self-transformation. Grosz explicitly invoked Hamlet’s metaphor: The artist, he said, “holds up a mirror to his contemporaries’ mugs. I drew and painted out of a spirit of contradiction, trying in my works to convince the world that it was ugly, sick, and mendacious.” His work really did show his sick society to itself. There is little question that our picture of Weimar society is the one that Grosz has left us: porcine men, rolls of neck fat beneath their tight bowlers, flouncy whores in skimpy dresses hanging on their arms, walking past emaciated veterans on crutches begging for Groschen.

It has evidently not been difficult for art scholars to see Schad’s work in terms of Grosz’s model. The article on him in Grove’s Dictionary of Art reads as follows: “Unlike…Grosz, Schad did not employ caricature. Instead he criticized the structures of society by coolly and uncompromisingly depicting every detail of his subjects and their surroundings and by revealing the distance and emptiness between them.” The article goes on to interpret various paintings by Schad along these lines, as depictions of a decadent and dissolute society. The portrait of the Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt, for example, is described this way: “Two prostitutes in transparent dresses vie for the count’s attention, while he turns his back to them and stares rigidly out of the picture.” Or again, “The exposing, ugly portrait of Countess Triglion is another critical comment on the moral decay behind the bourgeois façade.”

But did Schad in fact depict the details of the world of his subjects? Did women in fact wear transparent gowns as they are shown in the painting of Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt? That is to suppose that the New Objectivity was objective in a literal photographic sense. Schad wrote: “Count St. Genois was the sort of person who can only live in a city, with all its freedoms and social constraints. So I painted him in a dinner jacket against the skyline of Montmartre, between an older, and rather masculine woman and a well-known transvestite from the Eldorado in Berlin–the latter are both wearing see-through dresses.” The dinner jacket is symbolic rather than illustrative, to use his distinction, as are the skyline and the dresses. It is as if he painted the Count in a world that suited his fantasy, like a gift from the artist. But surely the see-through gowns and Montmartre itself were the stuff through which Schad gave objective embodiment to dreams. The painting is not a condemnation of society, except perhaps of the way society falls short of our fantasies. Schad’s realism had nothing in common with George Grosz’s, which really was polemical in spirit. It was hardly a mirror at all, unless a magic mirror, in which we don’t see ourselves as we are but as we wish in our secret heart to be. The paintings are a form of wish-fulfillment, as Freud tells us that our dreams are.

Let’s look at Schad’s great 1927 Self-Portrait With Model. An oil painting on wooden panel, this picture has the inner light of a Flemish masterpiece from the time of Jan van Eyck. Nothing about the picture, other than its title, tells us that it is of an artist and a model: It could, for all the internal evidence one might cite, be a pair of lovers or, for that matter, a prostitute and a client. There are no attributes of the artist’s studio–no easel or palette–except the large window and a single enlarged narcissus, which is there not as a decorative touch but as a symbolic emblem. The two figures are narcissists. They do not look at each other, but within. Their expressions evoke an extreme self-preoccupation. The most striking attribute in the painting is the artist’s transparent shirt, fastened with an ornamental tie with tassels. It would be what we call an intimate garment, if men wore intimate garments. It reveals his chest hair and the hair under his arm, but also his fleshy, almost feminine nipples. Schad tells us he really painted himself in a see-through shirt in order to show his naked body without showing himself naked. It makes for a more interesting picture. But it is unclear that it was a garment he actually possessed: It is “a shirt of the kind woven in ancient times on the Island of Kos.”

Painting a transparent garment like that is an act of virtuosity, almost an advertisement for his virtuosity as an artist. But it is not the picture’s only boast. The woman’s face is marked with a scar–a sfregio, Schad tells us, having learned the word in Naples, where he lived after the war, and where he married an Italian woman. A sfregio “was always inflicted by a jealous husband or lover, and displayed with great pride by a woman as a visible sign of the passion she inspired.” So like the shirt, the scar is a boast. The narcissus is thus symbolic of how each of the lovers love themselves. They are proud of their beauty, and of their sexual power. Schad has neatly lettered his signature on the crumpled bed-sheet. The cityscape silhouetted through the curtain represents “a vague longing for Paris,” the city of erotic fulfillment. The model’s hand, according to his caption, belonged to a woman who ran a shooting gallery at an amusement park in Vienna. The painting is an assemblage of disparate realities fused into a symbolic whole. It was not posed for and painted from life.

So what does objectivity mean in Schad’s case? I again turn to Shakespeare for guidance. In characterizing the imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus describes its power as, among other things, giving “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Schad paints, as if it were an objective reality, a sexualized fantasy that is symbolically equivalent to that reality. He showed himself and the “model” as narcissists, in order to bring out what one might call a truth of character. This is the way it is with us, he is saying; there is narcissism in each of us. We only have eyes for ourselves. For a moment we escaped from our narcissism in the act of love–but this is the moment après. Now we wish we were somewhere else–in Paris, for example.

The two girls, in the most explicitly erotic of the paintings in the show, are each pleasuring themselves rather than each other. One is nude, the other wears a lacy slip with one strap down, revealing a breast. Neither is an object for the other’s eyes. What could they be thinking about? What is the content of their respective fantasies? Whatever it is, what more vivid way can we express the truth that we all live in our heads than by autoerotic performances in one another’s company? How better to express our apartness? That is the objective truth about human beings. The Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt stands with his hands in the pockets of his tuxedo. He is interested neither in the man who looks like a woman nor the woman who looks like a man, each of whom eyes the other, wishing he/she had something the other one has. The transparency of the garments means that we can see through to this truth.

Schad’s distinction between illustrative and symbolic is nowhere better displayed than in two portraits he did of his girlfriend, Maika. Maika looks more erotic when we see her dressed than undressed, and on an imagined rooftop with the longed-for Montmartre behind her than in a real hotel room in Paris. The beautiful half-length nude, by contrast with the model in the self-portrait, was actually painted in Paris, in a hot hotel room on the Boulevard Raspail, and really is “illustrative”–that is how this lovely girl looked, with her skin “like mother-of-pearl.” But the painting of Maika on the roof is “symbolic.” Schad has inscribed his signature on the skin of her left arm, which is one of the few art-historical references I have discerned in Schad’s work. Raphael painted his signature on a band his girlfriend, known as La Fornarina, wears on that same arm. La Fornarina points to Raphael’s name with a certain pride–he is the one who did the painting that shows her beauty, and he is the one to whom she belongs in life. Maika does not perform this gesture. She is her own woman. But the two flowers, the one that she wears on her bosom, and one that sticks out on her other side, could hardly be more explicitly sexual. And the landscape behind her is Montmartre, not visible from the Boulevard Raspail. Even if she and Schad are in Paris, it is the Paris of our dreams that matters, not the real city. One can be in Paris and still long to be in Paris.

At this point I cannot resist citing the scholar in Grove, who possesses whatever eye it is that corresponds to a tin ear in music. She is describing what Schad tells us is the skyline in Montmartre in the portrait of Count St. Genois: “Through the window of the almost airless space one can see the grey houses of a working-class district: the contrast between the group and the background hints at the class divisions and inequalities in society.” No: The contrast is between things as they are and things as they are imagined. Consider the woman in Lotte. It is “a portrait of the little milliner in the hat shop on the ground floor of the building that also contained the Pension Schlesinger, where I lived until I found a studio.” He has imagined her as a demimondaine, wearing a blouse that came from the same imaginary boutique in which he found the green shirt in his self-portrait, and shown in complete self-possession seated in a cafe. The power of Schad’s paintings is the power of fantasy. We return to them compulsively. If they stop compelling us, something within us will have died. This leaves the mystery of why these paintings came to an end. What was it that died in Schad, since he went on living for nearly half a century more?

For Art Winslow

Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle consists of five thematically interrelated films, much as Wagner’s Ring cycle is made up of four distinct but narratively interlinked operas. But Barney has also designed a number of sculptural objects for the work’s elaborate mise en scène, and it is these that make up the bulk of the exhibition to which the Guggenheim Museum in New York has been given over nearly in its entirety until June 11. Moreover, the museum is internally related to the work, not only because a substantial sequence in one of the films uses its interior space as a setting but because a symbolic correspondence is supposed to exist between the five films and the five ascending curves of the museum’s helical architecture. The objects displayed on each of the museum’s ramps were in effect props in the corresponding film. Not only do these objects derive their meaning from the films, but the order in which they are experienced, as one ascends from ramp to ramp, reflects the overall narrative of the work.

Wagner designed the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth as the canonical theater for presenting his oeuvre, and it is widely appreciated that seeing the Ring cycle performed in Bayreuth is a unique and indispensable part of experiencing it. The Guggenheim was of course designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but Barney has exploited and modified its architecture for the key episode of the work as a whole. So unlike the Festspielhaus, which is not part of the Ring‘s narrative, the Guggenheim really is part of Cremaster‘s. This has given Barney’s many European enthusiasts a special reason to make a pilgrimage to New York, even if they may already have seen the exhibition in Cologne or Paris, for only here will they have been able to experience the Guggenheim as a work of installation art that belongs to the Cremaster endeavor. This makes it, by general consent, far and away the most impressive of the three venues. The question for Barney’s admirers, expressed by one of my Northern European correspondents, is whether Matthew Barney is the Picasso of our time, or the Leonardo.

I think it enough that he should be the Matthew Barney of the present age, using artistic resources that would have been unavailable to his predecessors, as well as a conception of visual art that is entirely of our time. Cremaster is a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk that uses performance art, music, film, dance, installation, sculpture and photography. Barney himself is the work’s author and dramaturge, as well as an actor in possession of the exceptional athletic powers his successive roles demand. And his art embodies preoccupations that are distinctive to our era. In Cremaster, these have largely to do with issues of what one might call the metaphysics of gender, and the use of the term “cremaster” implies as much. The term has existed in English since the seventeenth century, almost exclusively as part of the descriptive anatomy of the male reproductive system: It refers in its primary sense to the muscle of the spermatic cord by which the testes are suspended in the scrotum. But Barney has given it a somewhat allegorical spin, in much the way, I suppose, that Descartes did with the pineal gland, which, because it is situated between the hemispheres of the brain, impressed him as being the seat of the soul. No one to this day quite understands the pineal gland’s function, but the cremaster is associated with the descent of the testes into the scrotum in the seventh month after conception, at which point the gender of the fetus is definitively male.

There is a point in embryonic development when matters are less clear-cut. Two genital swellings known as labioscrota separate, in the female, to become the labia majora, and in the male unite to form the scrotum. But in the labioscrotal phase of our development, we are male and female at once, so to speak, and this condition of gender indeterminacy speaks with particular eloquence to a generation that, especially under the influence of feminist theory, postulates a condition beyond the male-female disjunction. After sexual differentiation is established, the chief function of the cremaster is to raise the testes when the scrotum is chilled.

Why Barney should have singled out this particular muscle, rather than the spermatic cord or, for that matter, the testes themselves, is doubtless connected with the poetics of ascent and descent, which figure as metaphorical actions in the four Cremaster films in which Barney himself performs. He does not appear in Cremaster 1, in which two Goodyear blimps may be taken as symbolic embodiments of the genital swellings of the labioscrotal moment of our sexual development. In Cremaster 3, the character played by Barney climbs up and down an elevator shaft in the Chrysler Building; in Cremaster 5, he climbs around the proscenium arch in the Opera House in Budapest; and in Cremaster 4, the character burrows through an underground channel fraught with symbolic meaning.

The spiraling interior architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim lends itself to ascent and descent, and becomes a second site for the character’s upward itinerary in Cremaster 3. Because of its role in the Cremaster cycle, the building overcomes the commonplace distinction between exhibiting space and exhibited content. But neither it nor the profusion of objects and images that make up the show as a whole can be grasped as art without reference to the films that are Cremaster‘s core. The Guggenheim accordingly holds daily screenings of its various parts in its Peter Lewis Auditorium, and on each Friday, those with the required stamina can see the work in its entirety. It is a remarkable experience, and a remarkable if not altogether successful work. I have to say that I lost patience with Cremaster 3, the last installment of the cycle to have been made, and three grueling hours long. But I am haunted by certain of its sequences, even if I remain unclear what the point is of the ordeal that it, and the cycle as a whole, depict.

The films in the cycle, as a useful handout claims, “represent a condition of pure potentiality,” by which I imagine is meant the labioscrotal phase of genital development, before we are definitively male or female. In fact, Cremaster I glorifies femininity. It has two protagonists–a female performer and then a chorus of females who dance, so to speak, as one. The action is dreamlike, and it reminded me, as do many of the Cremaster sequences, of the Surrealist films of Maya Deren. The female heroine is situated under a table, laden with grapes, in the cabin of the blimp, seemingly guarded by women of an almost forbidding beauty, wearing smart military uniforms. She succeeds, after some effort, in making an opening in the cloth above her head, through which she pulls down clusters of the perhaps forbidden fruit. The performer’s name is Marti Domination, a real personage, I discovered through the Internet, where she is identified as belonging to The House of Domination. And though Marti Domination looks thoroughly feminine, in a white intimate garment, high heels and an extravagant coiffure, the web page leaves the matter of her actual gender somewhat ambiguous. My sense is that Marti Domination portrays a woman, whatever the reality, and that the aura of sexual indeterminacy accounts in part for her having been cast in the role.

The action of Cremaster 1 is split in two: As Marti Domination arranges the grapes in logographic patterns on the floor, the chorus executes isomorphic Busby Berkeley-like patterns in a football stadium on the ground below: The gridiron is covered in blue Astroturf. Their movements are cadenced to swelling cascades of deliberately gorgeous music, as in a musical from the 1930s. There is an exalting moment when one of the chorines–Marti Domination herself–runs across the field with two balloons, shaped like the Goodyear blimps. Not much else happens. The action goes back and forth between grapes and girls, cabin and football field, and then comes to an end. The entire review flirts outrageously with kitsch, which gives it, one might say, its authenticity.

If Cremaster 1 is an ode to a certain idealized femininity–to beauty, music, dancing, fantastic gowns and pumps by Manolo Blahnik–Cremaster 2 is a stylized ballad to violent masculinity. The hero is Gary Gilmore, portrayed by Barney wearing a full beard. Again, the action is dreamlike. The robbery and murder in the gas station (the Goodyear logo can be glimpsed through its window as the attendant, shot through the back of the head, bleeds to death on the floor) mainly unfurl in silence. The execution of Gilmore, wearing convict stripes, is symbolically enacted as a rodeo act–he dies subduing a bucking bull–and his afterlife is fantasized as a Texas two-step, danced by a cowboy and cowgirl. These images are poetic and powerful, as is the mysterious flashback scene near the end of the film, in which Gilmore’s grandmother, as an Edwardian belle with an impossibly narrow waist, speaks in a vast exhibition hall of that era with Harry Houdini. In a brilliant piece of casting, Houdini is played by Norman Mailer, the author, not in-cidentally, of The Executioner’s Song. Mailer-Houdini delivers a speech–a rare occurrence in the cycle–poetically describing his escape from the submerged box in which he has been chained. He tells how he becomes one with the lock, how “a real transformation takes place.” Escape through transformation is somehow the motif of the entire work, though the nature of our captive condition naturally remains somewhat indeterminate.

Cremaster 2 is, in my view, the most fully realized of the five segments of the cycle. But I have to say that I found Cremaster 3 a mess. Calvin Tomkins wrote in The New Yorker that “a film like this may be one that only a Dick Cheney could walk out on without a frisson of self-doubt,” but that walking out should have occurred to him at all speaks volumes about the film’s shortcomings. Nothing but a cold sense of duty was able to keep me in my seat. The film exemplifies the flaw of hubris it is intended to portray, but one cannot really believe that it is any the less a flaw if it was made intentionally boring and preposterous. It is not my responsibility to moralize, but my conjecture is that Barney has attained the kind of artistic eminence that makes those who work with him reluctant to be critical. If this should be true, then it is a good thing that Cremaster 4 and 5 were made before hubris on this scale kicked in. Cremaster 3 is not redeemed by its unquestioned high points, any more than 4 and 5 are seriously compromised by their ennuis. It is a piece of bad art by a good and unquestionably important artist.

Disregarding Cremaster 3‘s mythological prelude, the action of what one might consider its first act is split, somewhat like that of Cremaster 1, between two planes. On the upper plane–the suspended elevator cabin, the Cloud Club bar and indeed the glorious roof of the Chrysler Building–the performance is enacted by a single character, identified as the Entered Apprentice, played by Barney himself. On the lower plane–the Chrysler Building’s elevator lobby–the performance is by a chorus of five 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperials, engaged in demolishing what I surmise is a vintage black Chrysler. The demolition derby goes on interminably as, with screeching tires, the five Imperials crash into their victim, go into reverse, and crash again, and again, and again, finally dragging or pushing the shattered heap from their midst. The prolonged mayhem alternates with the action on the higher plane, where the Entered Apprentice muddles through the process of mixing mortar, using the elegant Art Deco interior of one of the Chrysler Building’s elevators as a vessel.

There is something wanton and willful about the way in which both enactments take place. I somehow feel that Barney, who seems to lack a real sense of humor, intended all this as some kind of comedy. As the Entered Apprentice, he is dressed in vintage 1930s working clothes, including a fedora, and wearing a small mustache. Perhaps he is supposed to be suggesting the ineptitude of the Chaplin character in Modern Times. The slapstick routine with the bartender in the Cloud Club, who improvises a stepstool to fetch a glass, only to bring a whole cupboard of glassware crashing on top of him as he falls to the floor, is roughly as funny as the automobile massacre in the lobby below. The entire sequence is malevolently inane.

The Guggenheim Museum is introduced as a symbolic setting in Cremaster 3, where the Entered Apprentice makes his graded way upward through a sequence of degrees based on the rites of the Masonic Order. There is a genuine piece of wit in associating the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with the legendary Temple of Solomon, which is an important mythic site on which Masonic rites and beliefs are based. My grandfather and father were dedicated Masons, so Masonic appurtenances–the compass and square, the trowel and the apron, not to mention references to initiations and sworn secrecies–inflected the atmosphere of my childhood. Masonry really was their religion, but I could never bring myself to follow them, since even as a youth my temperament was too positivistic to believe in occult teaching of any sort. I nevertheless picked up a certain amount of Masonic lore, which helped somewhat to clarify what takes place at successive stages of the Guggenheim’s involuted ramp, as imaginatively transformed by Barney.

“Entered Apprentice” is a term in Masonic nomenclature, referring to the lowest degree in the Order. The highest standard degree is that of Master Mason. Masonic myth traces the origins of the fra-ternity to the Phoenician masons who worked on Solomon’s Temple, as the Hebrews lacked the knowledge necessary to realize the king’s architectural vision. The Master Mason was named Hiram Abiff, who possessed not merely the practical knowledge of shaping matter into usable forms but the greatest Masonic secret of all, the “ineffable name” of God. I know by hearsay of a ritual enactment in which various Hebrew ruffians try to wrest the knowledge, and hence the power, from Hiram Abiff, who was finally killed–or sacrificed–only to be resurrected by King Solomon himself, using the Masonic Grip.

Barney has cast the sculptor Richard Serra to play the part of the Master Mason, or Architect, whom the Entered Apprentice finally murders. The main action of the Guggenheim interlude, however, requires the Entering Apprentice to pass a series of tests, which must be done in the time it takes for melted Vaseline to spiral its way to the museum’s lobby. The molten Vaseline is flung against the para-pet by the Architect, which reenacts one of Serra’s most famous sculptures, and indeed one of the signature works of the late 1960s. In 1969, Serra flung molten lead into the angle where wall and floor met in Leo Castelli’s warehouse, using the architecture as a kind of ready-made mold. In a photograph of the time, Serra looks like a warrior hero, using the ladle as a weapon, and there is little question but that his act was perceived at the time as inaugurating a new moment in the history of sculpture. It is difficult not to see the demotion of lead to Vaseline as an emblematic degradation of that heroic moment to the present moment of postmodern art. The fact that the Entered Apprentice is himself killed in Cremaster 3 is nevertheless a declaration that an artist of our day will achieve the status attained by Serra: Every member of the Masonic Order impersonates Hiram Abiff when initiated as a Master Mason. I have, meanwhile, nothing to say about the significance that Vaseline evidently has in Matthew Barney’s vocabulary of symbols. Its cultural meaning is that of a lubricant, which can perhaps be connected to the two phallic columns erected by Hiram Abiff in the courtyard of the Temple. Someone once told me that in the night table next to his bed, all that was found after Auden’s death was a large, economy-size jar of Vaseline and two pairs of castanets.

I must leave readers to their own resources in dealing with Cremaster 4 and 5. I think they are both quite magical. Barney is at his best in the role of The Candidate–a dandified tap-dancer, half man and half sheep, with red spit curls–in Cremaster 4, which takes place on the Isle of Man. The “Three Faeries”–personages of genuine sexual ambiguity who serve as benign intercessors–are among Barney’s most compelling inventions. In both these films, I thought of The Magic Flute–especially so in Cremaster 5, in which Ursula Andress plays the role of “the Queen of Chain,” in the sequence that takes place in the Hungarian State Opera House in Budapest. As everyone knows, the narrative of Mozart’s masterpiece is also based on Masonic ritual. One cannot, meanwhile, praise too highly the musical scores for the whole cycle, composed by Jonathan Bepler.

Since objects and images relating to the different parts of the Cremaster cycle are arrayed on successive stages of the Guggenheim, the intention is that we shall imagine a mapping through which the exhibition replicates the cycle in another modality–in space, so to speak, in contrast with time. But the experience is totally different, and unless one has internalized the films and something of the ideas that animate them, what one encounters as one ascends or descends the ramp is more or less just art-stuff. It does not on its own make an enchanting show. But the cycle has moments of great enchantment. It is an uncertain achievement, but one with which everyone interested in contemporary art must deal.

In 1906, the French savant Pierre Duhem published a three-volume work on Leonardo as scientist under the innocuous title Études sur Leonard de Vinci. It was the work’s subtitle that struck a note of novelty: Ceux qu’il a lus et ceux qui l’ont lu (“Those he read and those who read him”). Leonardo, then as now, was celebrated as an artist, an inventor, an engineer, a universal wizard and, to appropriate the title of the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (until March 30), a master draftsman. One would take it for granted that he was literate, but how interesting could it be to know what his reading list was, or on whose list of required reading his writings appeared? Duhem’s book, however, was really a profound contribution to the history of science. It analyzed Leonardo’s debts to medieval scientists like John Buridan, Albert of Saxony and Nicolas Oresme, and then went on to the scientific impact of Leonardo’s writings on subsequent investigators. It was no part of Duhem’s intention to diminish Leonardo’s originality as a scientist but rather to redeem the Middle Ages as a chapter in the history of scientific thought. It had been a historical commonplace to view the long interval between Archimedes and Galileo as a period of unrelieved ignorance and superstition. Duhem, a distinguished physicist and a great philosopher of science, was also a believing Catholic, and it was his aim to prove that Catholicism had played an importantly supportive role in the development of knowledge. He showed that Leonardo was carrying forward programs of research in mathematics, mechanics and biological science that had a long and remarkable medieval development. And he demonstrated that Leonardo, far from jotting down his observations on whatever came along, had a systematic scientific agenda that bears comparison with that of such later thinkers as Descartes, and that his various treatises contributed to research carried on well after his death.

The rebirth implied by the concept of the Renaissance had reference to classical learning. It was more or less self-promotion that demanded an interval of darkness between the fall of Rome and the rebirth of its culture in Tuscany. What Duhem established was that Leonardo mediated between the great investigators of the medieval period and those that were to come after him. And to a very large extent, one can construct a Duhemian picture of Leonardo’s place in the history of art–a parallel narrative which shows that even where Leonardo was most original, he was also in effect in conversation with his predecessors, and his successors in conversation with him. Like Duhem’s, this would not have the aim of diminishing his achievement as an artist but, since art comes from art as much as science comes from science, explaining it historically. Indeed, the Met’s exhibition has exactly this format. One could almost paraphrase Duhem’s subtitle: Ceux qu’il a vus, et ceux qui l’ont vu. The show begins with those whom Leonardo learned from, and ends with those who learned from him.

There is little doubt that it is valuable to situate Leonardo in the history of art in this way. Consider the article on Leonardo in the celebrated eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, by then-Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge, Sidney Colvin. “By his own instincts he was an exclusive student of nature…. He was the first painter to recognize the play of light and shade as among the most significant and attractive of the world’s appearances.” But just as many of Leonardo’s observations were intended to confirm ideas he acquired from Albert of Saxony and others, the “play of light and shade” that he made his own was taught him by Andrea del Verrocchio, to whom he was apprenticed. So it is entirely appropriate that the exhibition begin with a drawing of Verrocchio’s, which shows that sfumato–a technique for depicting the way light and dark softly and almost indiscernibly grade into each other, convey the roundedness of a form–was already a matter of studio practice when Leonardo was in his teens. It was thus not something he learned by studying nature but that he acquired from his master. It could be true that the way it was used by Leonardo stamped him as a pupil of Verrocchio. But sfumato was not a workshop mannerism–it was a discovery, like perspective. It was a way of showing the shape in three dimensions of volumes through light and shadow, just as perspective is a way of showing how objects recede in space. The decision to present things in these terms was one of the marks of the Renaissance. To show things the way the eye sees them defined the artistic culture in which Leonardo worked. But it is not a matter of culture that the eye sees the world the way it does. That, as we say, is hard-wired. Because it was a cultural agenda to “conquer appearance,” the history of art in the Renaissance is like the history of science when viewed as a progress. “In early modern Europe,” the philosophical historian of science Thomas Kuhn wrote, “painting was regarded as the cumulative discipline.” That medieval art did not conform to this agenda was counted by Renaissance writers like Vasari as palpable evidence that it belonged to the Dark Ages.

Instructive as it is to weaken the myth that Leonardo was the first artist to see nature as it looks, a certain price is paid. It is, we might say, unfair at once to Verrocchio and to us to see his magnificent drawing as a paradigm from which Leonardo learned the art of chiaroscuro. Verrocchio’s drawing is of a young woman, shown at bust length, facing to the left. It is, to use an unfashionable word, a beautiful drawing of a beautiful woman, so much so that it is hard to tear one’s eyes away from it and from her. The drawing is done in charcoal or in black chalk, and with a tenderness that matches the tenderness that it shows. The term sfumato derives from the word for smoke, and the areas of gray look as if they were breathed onto the woman’s cheek and neck. There is a firmness in the drawing of the underlip, and in tracing the curve of the chin until it fades into shadow. There is a delicacy and certitude in forming the curls that define the ornamental hairdo and the diaphanousness of the woman’s garment. It would be worth dwelling on Verrocchio’s famous drawing, even had the Met borrowed it from Christ Church, Oxford, and displayed it in a gallery by itself, just to provide pleasure to its viewers, without using it to teach anything whatever.

But it could also be used to teach a stronger and more difficult lesson by displaying it alongside what the catalogue describes as Leonardo’s “hauntingly beautiful” drawing of the head of the Virgin, which is also in the present show. Next to Leonardo’s drawing, Verrocchio’s looks almost abstract and schematic. Still, there is nothing that belongs to the progressive history of Renaissance drawing that Leonardo did not find in Verrocchio, though one might say that in it he has perfected the art of sfumato. On the other hand, there is something magical in the way in which Leonardo evoked the Virgin’s head out of marks and smudges. And beyond that, Leonardo has imbued her with an expression of love and meditation. She is looking at something and is feeling something powerful about what she sees. Her smile is gentle. My sense is that those who look at her for very long will insensibly reproduce her expression on their own faces. Verrocchio’s work could be used to teach the meaning of what great drawing is. Leonardo’s could teach the meaning of great art. How he does it defies analysis, but it goes beyond being a master draftsman.

As it happens, we know a great deal about what the Virgin is looking at, since the head is a preparatory study for one of Leonardo’s most mysterious paintings–the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, in the Louvre. The Virgin is sitting on Saint Anne’s knee, and the Child, holding a lamb, looks back over his shoulder at her from between her knees. Saint Anne looks at the Virgin looking at the Child; the Virgin holds the Child as the Child holds the lamb. The scene is set in a strange rocky landscape. The arrangement of the figures is like a mystical knot. I can appreciate that the Louvre would be unwilling to lend the painting under any circumstances, but it would be worth having a reproduction of it near the drawing, so that we could see what the object and meaning of the Virgin’s look is. In another of the sketches for the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, on loan from the British Museum, the figures are clotted together in a tangle of lines and washes. Saint Anne is an older woman, and the Virgin looks at her. They are given a sort of frame, to give Leonardo a sense of how they might fill a panel later on. It is a dense, vigorous drawing, but it is also a path not taken–something we would not know from the drawing seen on its own.

Many of the drawings in the show refer to known works, and viewers might achieve a deeper understanding of Leonardo’s creative processes by seeing the drawings as stages in a process, and not simply in their own terms. There is, for example, an exceedingly energetic study for the Uffizi’s Adoration of the Magi, a work so strange that it could be the transcription of a dream. The painting, in yellow ochre and brown ink, is so close to a drawing in its own right that scholars have wondered whether it is finished or not. In it, the Virgin and Child are in space of their own, surrounded by a crowd of adorers, astounded by the wonder of the event. The Child reaches out to accept a gift from a kneeling magus with one hand, while his other hand is raised as if he were making a Talmudic point. In the piazza behind the company, horsemen rear wildly in front of a visionary ruin with a double staircase. Things are a great deal more confused in the drawing we are shown at the Met, where adorers invade the Virgin’s space. In the painting, the architecture has been clarified. One still has to interpret what connection there is between the horsemen and the holy pair. No one in the history of art drew horses with the truth and passion of Leonardo. They gallop through the entire show, and one cannot help but wonder what Eadweard Muybridge thought he could discover by his battery of cameras set up to photograph a horse at gallop that he could not better learn from Leonardo’s drawings. Horses do not pause in mid-charge to pose for an artist. In some way Leonardo had stored a complete knowledge of how horses look from every angle and in every gait, with or without riders, and could transcribe that knowledge as easily as we write our names.

Horses figure centrally in two works we cannot, alas, compare with their preparatory drawings in the show, since they were never completed: Leonardo’s career was punctuated with aborted masterpieces. One was the great equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, commissioned by his son Ludovico. Leonardo worked on this colossal sculpture on and off for about sixteen years. A contemporary writer described it as “the most gigantic, stupendous and glorious work ever made by the hands of man.” By contrast with Verrocchio’s famous equestrian statue of Colleoni in Venice, Leonardo was to have depicted Francesco on a rearing horse. It was to have stood, even without its rider, over thirty-one feet from the ground. Something like seventy tons of bronze was set aside for casting it, but it was never cast. The bronze was melted down for cannons, and the clay model for the “Sforza Horse” was used for target practice by Gascon bowmen after the French stormed the city of Milan, and Ludovico was forced to flee. We have only the drawings left, and some uncertainty whether they were done for the Sforza monument, The Adoration of the Magi or The Battle of Anghiari.

When the French occupied Milan, Leonardo slipped back to Florence by way of Venice, where he paused to advise the Venetians on fortifications. His counsel to artists was to “flee before the storm.” In Florence he was given an extraordinary commission, to paint a colossal fresco in the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo della Signoria. The subject selected was a battle scene, showing a victory of Florence over Milan. Michelangelo was commissioned to do a facing mural. Neither work was completed, but Leonardo’s was a spectacular failure: Because of his impetuosity, the plaster did not dry and the pigment ran to form an incoherent muddle–something, one imagines, like the painting Balzac describes in his Chef d’oeuvre inconnu. It is a sad truth that Leonardo’s genius outran his patience: He was not a perfectionist, as the material history of the Last Supper, already a preservationist’s nightmare in his lifetime, shows. But the drawings for The Battle of Anghiari are among his great achievements, and for me they are the glory of the show.

Here is Leonardo’s description of what he aimed at in the great fresco:

First you will have the smoke of the artillery, mixed in the air with the dust raised by the movements of horses and troops…. This mixture of air, smoke, and dust will be lighter on the opposite side; and as the combatants advance into this vortex, they will become less and less visible, and there will be less difference between their lit and shaded parts…. The musketeers, as well as their neighbors, will be reddish. And this redness will diminish in proportion to the distance from its cause…. You will have different sorts of weapons between the feet of the combatants, such as splintered shields, spears, broken swords, etc. You will have dead bodies, some half covered with dust….

From this account, the work sounds like a monumental drawing in red and black chalk, which lends itself, through smudging, to the atmospheric effects of mingled battle smoke and dust, and visual correlatives of clashing bodies, of shouts and screams, swords clanging against swords, the cries of horses and exploding ordnance. The actual cartoon–the full-scale working drawing Leonardo was to have found means to transfer to the wall–was lost or destroyed in his lifetime (the same is true of Michelangelo’s cartoon for his companion fresco, The Battle of Cascina). It is one of the insoluble puzzles of art history to reconstruct what the work would have looked like as a whole.

Leonardo is said to have painted a central episode of The Battle of Anghiari, of which a copy was made, and this is exhibited in the present show. The copy has a certain interest in that Rubens is associated with it. This is a matter for experts in connoisseurship to determine. It is entirely credible that Rubens, in his own depictions of battles and hunting scenes, was inspired by Leonardo’s example–that Rubens should be included in a Duhemian narrative of those whose work owes something to Leonardo’s example. But there is not the slightest chance, based on Leonardo’s words and the preparatory drawings in the show, that The Battle of Anghiari would have looked like this. It almost looks like a “cartoon”–not in the sense of a working drawing but of lampoon–by Leonardo of a group of grimacing warriors, engaged in mounted combat. But the small preparatory drawings themselves are just astonishing. They represent, as the titles given them in the catalogue state, a “skirmish between horsemen and foot soldiers,” “foot soldiers wielding long weapons” and a “fight for the standard at the bridge.” These are in brown ink and black chalk and are about six inches long and between four and six inches high. Men and horses hurl themselves at one another under clouds of dust. Weapons fly through the air. Bodies and heads emerge out of urgent tangles of ink. A man’s arm holds some sort of hammer, a horse rears, a figure lies on the ground. It is inconceivable that in the final result, every contour would be carefully traced as in the almost hateful copy. There is not a single other case in which drawing and work are so incommensurable. The sole value of the copy lies in the way it makes this incommensurability palpable.

That is the one dissonance in an exhibition the like of which has never been attempted. This is the largest collection of Leonardo’s drawings ever to have been shown together. I spoke briefly with designer Milton Glaser at the press opening, standing in awe in front of a depiction of mortar fire. Milton told me that he had never expected to see a show like this in his lifetime. We are all in debt to the audacity of its organizers and sponsors. However much or little any of us knows about Leonardo, we cannot but be overwhelmed by the unfurling from sheet to sheet of his graphic imagination, whether he is studying the fall of draperies or registering the grotesqueness or beauty of the human face, or simply the way the body is twisted in the show of love or anger. Reviewers have suggested that by contrast with Verrocchio, there is something cold and indifferent in Leonardo’s personality. But that assessment is impossible to sustain the moment one sees the drawings in which the Virgin holds the Child, who hugs a cat, or in which the Child awkwardly attempts to feed his mother with something he has taken out of a bowl with his pudgy fist. There is a drawing by Verrocchio of a horse literally made out of numbers, which show the proportions from point to point. Leonardo did not need diagrams to help him draw horses with truth and passion. When he drew a horse, he was a horse, drawing its form from what it felt like to be one.

The Grey Art Gallery, which occupies the former site of the Museum of Living Art in the main building of New York University on Washington Square, is celebrating its legendary predecessor with an exhibition of work by the so-called Park Avenue Cubists, who embody the spirit of Modernism for which the earlier museum stood. The very conception of a “museum for living art” must have sounded discordant in 1927, when the institution was founded by Albert Eugene Gallatin, himself one of the “indivisible four” Park Avenue Cubists, as they were called, somewhat resentfully, by fellow members of the American Abstract Artists. There had of course been galleries given over to modern and contemporary art, but the concept of a museum implied that its holdings belonged to the past. Gallatin’s collection of “living art” was selected to express the same present to which his museum belonged, and those with an appetite for modernity could for the first time in New York experience the advanced art of their time in a museum setting: Picasso’s Three Musicians, Mondrian’s Composition in Blue and Yellow, as well as work by Arp, Léger, Míro, Braque and other Modernists, and ultimately the work of the Park Avenue Cubists themselves. Their paintings were executed to be perceived as living art, and it is that dimension of their self-aware contemporaneity that still conveys a certain excitement. Part of what defines modern art is the fact that it was created for persons who conceived of themselves as modern, the art contributing to that identity through the fact of its difference from the art of the past.

The NYU art historian Robert Rosenblum visited the Gallatin Collection when he was a boy, and I find his recollection particularly affecting. “Here was the future in flat planes and clean colors, with lucid arcs and angles replacing old-fashioned realist imagery, and all laws of gravity repealed in favor of the aerial freedom appropriate to the new century of speed and flight.” What is moving about the art of the Park Avenue Cubists is that it belonged to the dark reality of the Depression by expressing the same bright dream of the future that the 1939 New York World’s Fair conveyed. The design language of the World’s Fair was “modernistic,” to use a term of the time; and though there was no gallery of Modernist art in the visionary city erected in Flushing Meadows, the fair’s famous emblem–the Trylon and Perisphere–monumentalized forms from the vocabulary of Modernistic painting. The World’s Fair complex of buildings and avenues was intended to be the future made present, and its visitors left their bleak world behind when they passed through its gates. It was a future in which everything, even domestic appliances, looked as if it were in a state of infinite velocity. Very little “living art” actually figured in the fair’s iconography, though one of its most popular emblems was a sculpture by Joseph Renier called Speed, representing a kind of aerodynamic horse with the streamlined look of a Futurist radiator ornament on a colossal scale. The paintings of the Park Avenue Cubists by rights belonged on the walls of the Home of Tomorrow, even if they were still lifes. They embody the fair’s optimism, which is why they still manage to lift the spirits, though they belong to what the historian Reinhart Koselleck calls a vergangene Zukunft–a future that belongs to the past.

In their own time they were felt to belong to a past that was past. Their work was criticized as “derivative.” So much of contemporary art since the 1960s has been taken up with the appropriation of past forms that we are far less concerned with repetition than the 1930s or ’40s were, when the Park Avenue Cubists had to defend their originality. One of their number, George L.K. Morris, argued wittily enough that it is “as though a Sixteenth Century critic, after examining a fresco of Raphael, could think of nothing to say but that he detected the influence of Perugino.” But obviously something more was at issue than influence. Cubism was really more like a language than a style, and from the moment that it began to shard forms into arrangements of “lucid arcs and angles,” it became one of the chief dialects of modern art, and it means Modernism whenever one sees it. Even so, it underwent stylistic changes. A 1908 review described Braque as having “reduced everything, sites and figures and houses, to geometrical schemata–to cubes.” But early Cubist colors were drab and neutral–ochres and grays–by contrast with the pure, slangy colors of Park Avenue Cubism. And its forms look like slabs of clay by contrast with the latter’s urbanity, which reflected the svelte architectures of Manhattan. Duchamp got into hot water with his fellow Cubists in 1913 when he tried to depict movement in Nude Descending a Staircase, probably because their rivals, the Futurists, made movement and speed the substance of their contribution. But Futurism was in effect Cubism with whiz-lines and nested angles or curves to show “speed and flight.” Morris’s paintings feel as if he was trying to depict the images left on the retina by the way the eye performs saccades from point to point of the visual field. The wheel segments in his 1935 New England Church imply that one is riding past a church that one has to synthesize in order to recover its identity. The rest of the painting shows syncopated glimpses of a church through fragments of its architectural parts, distributed across the canvas. Instead of reconstructing the visual world, as the classical Cubists did, he is trying to show the process through which we construct the world visually and cinematically. His paintings, like those of his wife, Suzy Frelinghuysen, are like colorful diagrams of vigorous eye movements. What could have been more “living”?

In his catalogue essay for the 1939 exhibition of the American Abstract Artists–an organization that he helped found–Morris wrote that “it is on its quality that an abstract work must stand, yet people persist in looking for everything except quality.” The paintings on view at the Grey Gallery look better than they could have when they were first shown, just because so much of the ideology that defined the atmosphere of their art world has vanished, and we are able to look at the work without the prejudices that impeded its reception in its own era. Before World War II, for example, it was an a priori attitude that simply by virtue of being American, their painting would have to be inferior. It was widely accepted that European painting in its nature was superior to anything American painters were capable of, almost as if just being an American meant that one was culturally disabled. Alfred Barr, the celebrated director of the Museum of Modern Art, which opened two years after the Museum of Living Art, was candid in saying that he had no interest in American art. The Park Avenue Cubists were disappointed that only one American–Alexander Calder–was included in MoMA’s 1936 exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art.” The official reason was that it was the responsibility of the Whitney to show American art, but when the Whitney did mount a show of abstract work by Americans in 1935, Morris complained that it was simply halfhearted: The art selected might well have confirmed the prejudice that Americans were just not up to the level of European Modernists. Robert Motherwell was still bitter about this years later. In an interview with Paul Cummings in 1971, he said, “The position in the 1930s and 1940s was that if you were a modern artist and any good, you were by definition a European…. It was like wine. If wine is any good, it’s French. Or if cooking is any good, it’s French. It’s inconceivable that an American can make a masterpiece.” Against this wall of Eurocentrism, it meant much to American artists that the Museum of Living Art showed their work alongside the Europeans.

There was, moreover, an overall prejudice against abstract art as such in the thirties. This came from three directions: regionalism, Socialist Realism and the art establishment. The regionalists declared abstraction to be European, and accordingly irrelevant to American life. Artists like Thomas Hart Benton, or Grant Wood, took it as their duty, so to speak, to paint America first. Socialist Realism was the pictorial language of class struggle. Artists should see themselves as “cultural workers,” and make art with which working people could identify. They should be represented in overalls and cloth caps, creating surplus value by manipulating heavy machinery or driving tractors. Abstract art, if not unpatriotic, was counterrevolutionary. So the Park Avenue Cubists found themselves the target of artistic imperatives to paint America–since they were Americans–or to join forces with the working class if their art was to have any relevance. Finally, the art establishment itself was hostile to abstraction, which it saw as decorative at its best. Despite being eulogized in her recent obituaries as a staunch supporter of avant-garde art, the newspaper critic Emily Genauer was an unrelenting opponent of abstraction. Writing for World Telegram, she dismissed the paintings of Mondrian and Moholy-Nagy as “so many simple commonplace patterns for bathroom tiles.”

Against the background of the fierce polemics of 1930s art discourse, one can sense the defiance in the very wording of the title given to the organization the Park Avenue Cubists helped found to promote the art in which they believed–“American Abstract Artists.” And one can see why Morris felt it important to distribute a questionnaire to those who visited its first exhibition in 1936, to see what “the people” actually thought about abstraction. He took great satisfaction in the results, which showed, in the words he quotes from the New York Times, that “in view of the fact that the official spokesmen for art have consistently preached against abstract art as ‘un-American’ the results of this inquiry show that the American public is far more interested, and would like to see more of it, than any one had hitherto suspected.” But Times critic Edward Allen Jewell remained unrelentingly hostile to abstraction throughout his tenure.

Beyond that, calling them “Park Avenue Cubists” must have been an expression of ressentiment, even among their allies in the American Abstract Artists: It was a way of writing them off because of their wealth and social standing. They all had impressive pedigrees. Gallatin’s great-grandfather was the Unites States Treasurer under Jefferson and Madison, as well as an ambassador to France and England–and he founded New York University because, according to the show’s curator, Deborah Bricker Balken, he believed Columbia to be too Calvinist. Morris was descended from one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and was the first art critic for Partisan Review, which he supported financially when its editors broke with the John Reed Society and began turning it into America’s leading intellectual and literary journal. Frelinghuysen came from a patrician Dutch family in New Jersey–her grandfather had been Secretary of State under Chester Arthur–and she enjoyed successful careers both as an opera singer and a painter. She sang the role of Ariadne in Ariadne auf Naxos to rave reviews, and was selected by a jury that included Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and André Breton for inclusion in “31 Women” at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1943. Charles Shaw was a socialite and a man about town. Clearly they were a classy bunch. Morris designed a Modernistic house for himself and Frelinghuysen to paint in when they left their penthouse for the summer. They traveled back and forth to Europe, and of course Gallatin collected modern art. Even if it weren’t the Depression, their charmed lives made it easy for their work to be dismissed as elitist–still a powerful epithet in critical politics.

These were the things that stood in the way of appreciating the art of the Park Avenue Cubists in their time. Most of the ideology that bedeviled them has lost its power to intimidate. The School of Paris declined precipitously after World War II, so being American stopped being a cultural stigma. New York really did become the capital of world art. Abstraction has become a genre, like portraiture and landscape, as can be seen in the oeuvre of Gerhard Richter, and the conflict between it and “the figure” has become irrelevant, since painters of all persuasions have drawn closer to one another under the radical charge that painting as such is dead. Artists in Eastern Europe who were tyrannized by the imperatives of Socialist Realism have all become postmodernists in the 1980s, and have found their way into the international art world. There is always a certain ressentiment against privilege, but it is hard to think of a group of artists quite as elite as Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen and Shaw when they were in their prime.

What chiefly stands between us and their work today is something they could not have defended themselves against, since it lay in their actual future, namely the emergence of the New York School, with its daunting artistic achievements. I have the most vivid recollection of seeing an exhibition of abstract painting at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s, and wondering why I should take seriously the brightly painted pictures of circles and bars and squiggles when, moving dutifully along the wall of a gallery, I came suddenly upon Jackson Pollock’s painting The She-Wolf and was knocked off my horse. I saw immediately that abstraction was capable of an undreamt-of greatness that nothing I had ever seen in the exhibitions of American Abstract Artists at the Riverside Museum so much as hinted at. In the light of Rothko, Kline, Newman, de Kooning and Pollock, it would have been easy to concur with the judgment stated by Robert Lubar, one of the authors of the Grey Gallery catalogue, that the Park Avenue Cubists are “little more than a quaint reminder of tentative and failed initiatives in the struggle to transplant the lessons of European modernism to American soil.” If there is a criticism to be made of the Park Avenue Cubists, it is that they seemed content, to use Morris’s phrases, to work at solidly grounding “the traditions of the future” and “the endless problems of form in design.” They lacked the larger visions of their tremendous successors.

Notwithstanding all that, the work today looks marvelous–“delicious” is really the word–when we see it hung together where the masterpieces assembled by Albert Gallatin were once shown, and the show (until March 29) is an absolute treat in these bleak times. This is the first time in more than sixty years that all four artists have been shown just with one another, and I was impressed with the amount of pleasure the work evoked in the dense crowd that showed up at the opening. The jazzy, shaped canvases of Charles Shaw show that Manhattan and Cubism were made for each other. Gallatin, who took up painting at the age of 55, turns out to have been the strongest of the four. But they are all worth thinking about. Now that history has wiped the ideological fingerprints from our glasses, we can enjoy the art as it could never have been before. It restores, to be sure, a piece of American art history. But Gallatin’s intention was that the art in his space should be living art–and what Debra Balken and the Grey Art Gallery have done is to bring the art back to life. That should be the goal of all art museums everywhere.

The idea of craft is an unanticipated product of the Industrial Revolution. Since everything humans made before that time was craft in one way or another, involving hand and eye, the concept had nothing to contrast with. But the Industrial Revolution robbed the hand of all its skills, building them instead into machines, leaving the hand to perform basic repetitive actions–turning a knob, tightening a nut, pressing a button. Everything that distinguished handed beings was appropriated by the machinery that turned out uniform products in quantities limited only by the capacity of society to consume bicycle wheels, grooming combs, snow shovels, bottle racks and urinals, all in profitable numbers. Craft emerged as a concept in the late nineteenth century as an anti-industrial ideology, which advocated returning skills to the hand and aestheticizing the autographic quality of nonuniform products–the handmade, the handwrought, the handsewn, the handspun, the handwoven, the handpainted. To choose the often rough and uneven craft-object over the smooth and uniform industrial object was to declare one’s preference for a society radically different from the one industrialization generated. It was to will a more elemental and allegedly a more fulfilling form of life. “I still find it amazing,” the artist Tim Rollins wrote, “that the greatest indictment of capitalism can be found in but a yard of [William] Morris’s perfect, beautiful materials.” Morris undertook to re-enfranchise the hand in the age of mechanical production. The hand, of course, had never disappeared from art. The Arts and Crafts movement, with which Morris’s name is associated, accordingly treated art as the paradigm through which to understand what craft should be. The artist’s touch became the basis of aesthetics and connoisseurship.

“My hand,” Marcel Duchamp said in a late interview, “became my enemy in 1912. I wanted to get away from the palette. This chapter of my life was over and immediately I thought of inventing a new way to go about painting. That came with the Large Glass.” The Large Glass is a paralyzingly complex work, on which Duchamp labored from 1915 until 1923, when he more or less abandoned it. But he had begun to compile ideas for the work as early as 1912, using whatever scrap of paper was at hand and throwing the notes together in a box. It is widely assumed among Duchampians that the notes, with their cryptic references, their calculations and diagrams, hold the key to the hermetic Large Glass, a work at once scientistic and erotic. Like Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon–the only twentieth-century work with which it can be compared–it is something of a comic masterpiece. The full title of the work is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même). The prurience aroused by the title is not readily gratified by looking at the work, least of all the Bride herself, who scarcely looks naked and hardly looks female. She is suspended in the upper left corner of the glass, like the Sibyl of Cumae, which Petronius’s narrator claims to have seen, hanging in a bottle (ampulla), with his own eyes.

Fascinated as I have always been with Duchamp as an artist, I have been content to learn what I could from those who sought to glean meaning from the notes, as the art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson has done in a remarkable new study, Duchamp in Context. “The complex iconography of the Large Glass,” Henderson writes, “can be fathomed only with reference to the multitude of notes Duchamp began to make in 1912, in preparation for the work.” Duchamp himself characterized the notes as “somewhat like a Sears Roebuck catalogue,” meant “to accompany the glass and be quite as important as the visual material.” Henderson, however, has gone further: She has undertaken to set Notes and Glass together, as her subtitle announces (Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works), in the context of early twentieth-century science and technology. It is not Henderson’s claim that tracking down scientific references is “the whole story,” and of course it is not (there may not be a “whole story”). But she captures enough of the science to make clear that much of the inspiration for the Glass derives from what, to us, is a fairly remote period of scientific discovery. Consider the discovery of X-rays. The X-ray is so common a diagnostic instrument that it is difficult to imagine anyone today as thrilled by X-rays as Flammarion, the French science writer, was: “To see through opaque substances! to look inside a closed box! to see the bones of an arm, a leg, a body, through flesh and clothing!” Fearing that they might be “stripped bare” by X-rays, Henderson tells us, women could avail themselves of lead undergarments as modesty shields; and she quotes a scrap of contemporary doggerel: “I hear they’ll gaze/thro’ cloak and gown–and even stays/These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays.” It somewhat confirms the lubricity of the male gaze feminists have made so central to their reflections on gender, that one of the first applications to occur to anyone was a new way of peering up skirts. It also alerts us to an irresistible connection between erotic humor and scientific concepts, which played so large a role in Duchamp’s sensibility. Alas, if the Bachelors should have used X-rays to strip the Bride, they would have gone too far, for they would also have stripped her of her nakedness. I cannot imagine the prurient readers of men’s magazines being aroused by X-ray photographs of famous models.

I greatly recommend Henderson’s book as an exciting exploration of the borders between art and science, as they were traced at the dawn of Modernism by an elliptical genius. But my immediate interest in it lies in the connections she implies between the Large Glass and a body of work produced at around the same time, and perhaps more notorious than the Glass itself. These were the so-called ready-mades–the industrial products of which I gave a partial listing in my lead paragraph: bicycle wheels, grooming combs, snow shovels, bottle racks and urinals. (Talk about the Sears Roebuck catalogue!) Both the ready-mades and the Large Glass were responses to Duchamp’s disillusionment with painting in 1912, leading him to say, in a famous episode, that painting is “washed up.” In part, one feels enough confidence in Henderson’s account to suppose that Duchamp, like many other artists of the time, had learned enough about reality as understood by science to believe that painting as traditionally conceived was inadequate to represent it. Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism were among the many avant-garde programs dedicated to finding ways of representing reality not as we actually see it but as it is. Since the Renaissance, painting had been tethered to the way the world presents itself to the eye, so all at once the eye became–paradoxically, since we are talking about the visual arts–villainized. Duchamp was of his moment in history through his attitude toward the eye and, incidentally, the hand. “I was so conscious of the retinal aspect of painting,” Duchamp later said, “that I personally wanted to find another vein of exploration.” To the US critic Walter Pach, Duchamp said, “I want something where the eye and the hand count for nothing.”

The ready-made is not a “found object,” or not entirely. Found objects have been selected by artists and others because they have enough visual interest that they can be treated as if they were works of art. By contrast, the ready-mades were selected because of their complete absence of aesthetic interest. “A point which I want very much to establish,” Duchamp said in 1961, “is that the choice of these ready-mades was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste…in fact a complete anesthesia.” No one can differentiate one metal grooming comb from another by aesthetic criteria–they are all alike. So no one can have good or bad taste in grooming combs. And this will be true of the ready-mades as a class. There can, one feels, have been no concept of ready-mades before the advent of mass production, so the ready-made falls outside the scope of craft. Industrial production minimized difference and maximized efficiency. (Duchamp famously said that modern plumbing was America’s greatest contribution to human happiness.) Much of what we are surrounded by is ready-made, like nails and screws, coat hangers and toothpicks, any one of which could have been a ready-made, given the criterion of aesthetic indifference. Duchamp’s brilliance lay in putting the question of why not ready-made art–art that could be picked up at the supermarket, costing no more than an accessory for dog owners or home brewers?

With this, Duchamp closed the gap between art and craft, for he demonstrated that painting and sculpture, through their handedness, were in the end examples of craft, exactly like pottery or basketwork. We respond, among other things, to the artist’s touch. The real contrast puts handedness on one side and intellect on the other. Duchamp spoke with contempt of “olfactory artists,” in love with the smell of paint. Little matter if they were in love with the smell of sawdust or of wet clay. For him, the work of art was an embodied idea. He envisioned an art into the making of which neither eye nor hand played any role, but only the operation of principled choice.

Duchamp proclaimed the end of painting when he visited an aeronautical exhibition with Léger and Brancusi in 1912. They were admiring an airplane propeller. How could painting hope to rival an object as elegant as it was powerful? Before 1920, shaped hardwood was the standard material for propellers, and this would almost certainly have been a matter of handwork, hence craft. So propellers would have made poor examples of ready-mades. They looked like abstract sculptures. The hero of Antonioni’s Blow-Up bought just such a propeller as a “found” decorative object for his flat. This would not have happened to a true ready-made. It ought, if true to type, never to acquire any aesthetic interest whatever. Its interest would be exclusively philosophical.

There is some controversy as to the correct inventory of Duchamp’s ready-mades, but the majority belong to the period 1913 through 1917, when he made his notorious effort to exhibit a urinal with the Society of Independent Artists in New York, using the assumed name of R. Mutt. Even though there was no jury, Fountain, as he titled it, was turned down by the hanging committee on the grounds that, while any work of art was welcome to be shown, this was not a work of art. Having provoked that distinction was in some ways Duchamp’s greatest contribution to twentieth-century art and the ultimate vindication of the ready-made. It made the problem of defining art a part of every piece of art made since then. “A ready-made is a work of art without an artist to make it,” Duchamp said. At the very least, the philosophical definition of art can eliminate, along with aesthetics (what meets the eye), the necessity of being made by an artist (the presence of the hand).

How the nullification of the artist’s hand and eye is to be reconciled with La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, widely considered Duchamp’s masterpiece, has never been entirely clear. The work seems labor-intensive in a way quite at odds with the no-eye/no-hand philosophy of the ready-made. In 1915, the year he began the laborious execution of the Large Glass, Duchamp bought an ordinary snow shovel, which he titled In Advance of the Broken Arm. So the Glass and the ready-mades were pretty much contemporary with one another. But the Glass appears to contradict the spirit of the ready-made. Its execution, for example, was painstaking: Like a tapestry-maker, Duchamp used a cartoon–a full-scale drawing–fixed to the face of a pane of glass, which he worked on from behind. Henderson suggests that Duchamp might have preferred to think of himself as an engineer, working from a blueprint, constructing some kind of scientific apparatus. Whatever the case, he “drew” the outlines with lead wire, attached to the glass by drops of varnish. And he filled them in with metal foil. It was, Calvin Tomkins writes, “a slow tedious process, and after two hours of it he was usually ready to quit for the day.” It is recorded that Duchamp often stepped back to eyeball his handiwork. Questions of interpretation aside, the Large Glass seems all hand and eye. It is dense with the attributes of craft. It could hardly be an object of aesthetic indifference, though Duchamp claimed that “the glass in the end was not made to be looked at (with ‘aesthetic eyes’).” So what was Duchamp’s overall philosophical view of art in the period that saw both the Large Glass and most of the ready-mades?

It might be a good idea at this point to describe the Large Glass a bit further. It consists of two panes of glass, about nine feet tall and five and a half feet wide, partitioned into two fairly equal spaces. The upper space is the chamber of the Bride, the lower space the domain of the Bride’s Bachelors. This space is shared by nine “malic” figures, a large chocolate grinder and what appear to be some pieces of optical apparatus. The notes provide an imperfect guide to the Bride’s components. In Henderson’s number diagram of the Bride, #10 identifies the “probable location of ‘Reservoir of love gasoline'” and #8 the “General Area of ‘Desire Magneto.'” These are Duchamp’s terms–like “Sex cylinder” or “Desire gear”–and hardly exhibit gynecological exactitude. They are rather intended to get us to see the Bride as some kind of eroticized machine. Small wonder, then, that the Glass “must be accompanied by a text of literature, as amorphous as possible, which never takes form.” And small wonder that the anatomy of the Bride, like that of the Glass itself, is likely to remain forever unachievable.

I am greatly interested in Henderson’s observation that in connection with the Glass, Duchamp was “to find a model for a depersonalized expression, free of ‘taste,’ in the techniques of mechanical drawing or scientific illustration.” But freedom from taste, hence freedom from hand and eye, was the basis for the ready-mades. “I wanted to be intelligent,” Duchamp said. He wanted to discover how one can be intelligent and an artist at the same time. (The French have an expression, bête comme un peintre). “I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art…. And the mechanical drawing was for me the best form of that dry conception of art…. A mechanical drawing has no taste in it.” That might explain his decision to draw with lead wire. There is nothing to appreciate, as there is in brush or pencil lines. Large Glass, in Duchamp’s own words, is the “renunciation of all aesthetics.” Since this is precisely the case with the ready-mades, both exemplify a new kind of art, a new conception of the artist and a new kind of responsibility on the part of the viewer.

The overall importance of seeing the Glass and the ready-mades as alternative ways of making the same general point in regard to the relationship between art and aesthetics is that we have to think of Duchamp systematically. Lately a considerable stir has been made about the ready-madeness of the (so-called) ready-mades. That is not a controversy I am eager to enter. But if the connection between the ready-mades and the Large Glass is as systematic as Henderson’s exposition suggests, we have to think of his work as a unified whole, each part supporting the rest, so that we cannot finally think of the Bride and, say, the bottle rack as entirely separate conceptions.

There is an uncanny relationship between the handlessness Duchamp sought in his art and a very old conception of what makes images genuine. The art historian Hans Belting has written a great book, Likeness and Presence, on the images worshiped in the period between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance. It was important that the images not be the product of an artist’s hand. Thus, Christ’s face was miraculously imprinted on the veil of Saint Veronica. The Virgin and Child allegedly painted by Saint Luke in fact materialized magically on a panel because Luke was not that good a painter. If it were definitely discovered that the Shroud of Turin was in fact done by an artist, it would become a mere work of art and lose significance as a devotional image. When looking at and admiring images–aesthetics, in short–became the point of art in the Renaissance, the age of the devotional image was all but over. The artist became a more and more exalted being. In erasing the relevance of hand and eye, Duchamp was attempting to deconstruct the idea of the artist and replace it with something more technological and impersonal. But, as Jean-Jacques Lebel recently reminded me, “Marcel was after all a chess player. He set traps within traps within traps.” My advice is to enter the jungle of the Notes only if you are confident of finding your way out.

This essay has been stimulated by a book rather than an exhibition. But the Large Glass is on permanent view in the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it is surrounded by the ready-mades. It is worth a pilgrimage. While you stand in front of the Glass, trying to remember which is the Sex cylinder and which the Reservoir of love gasoline, you are certain to hear whoops and shrieks nearby. They come from visitors unable to resist looking through the peepholes at Etant donnés, a work Duchamp secretly devoted himself to for the last twenty-five years of his life, pretending that he had given up art in favor of chess. As an incentive to your visit, I won’t disclose what meets the eye, but, as a hint, it will not be all that different from what those with lewd imaginations hoped that X-rays would expose. For all the complexity of his philosophy, Duchamp also had a one-track mind.

A t one time I became interested in a certain sort of sentence that occurs very naturally in historical texts. Historians will say, for example, that the Thirty Years’ War began in 1618, or that Petrarch opened the Renaissance. I call these “narrative sentences,” since they serve to connect events into stories, and relate beginnings to endings. We use them all the time. A woman might say that she and her husband first met in 1980. What is interesting about these sentences is that nobody could have known they were true at the time to which they refer–nobody could have known in 1618 that the Thirty Years’ War had begun, since no one could have known that the war would last thirty years. No one could have known that Petrarch was opening the Renaissance, since most of the great writers and artists whose work defined that era were not even born yet. And who could really describe the man she just met as her husband–except as a romantic hope–since their marriage lay in the future? The future is something to which we are inherently blind. So although I can now say that Judy Chicago exhibited a piece in the famous “Primary Structures” exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1966, I could not have known this then, since she was showing under her married name, Gerowitz, and was not to take the name “Chicago,” as a political act, for some years. Though art historians can say that one of the founders of the Feminist Art Movement was included in “Primary Structures,” that movement was not really to begin until after Gerowitz became Chicago.

One can see Chicago’s piece in one of the grainy black-and-white installation shots of “Primary Structures,” reproduced in an important book by James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. The work consisted of six wooden planks in graduated lengths and graded colors–pastel green, pink, lemon and blue–leaning in an ordered sequence against the wall. It was called Rainbow Pickets, and it occupied the same gallery as a wall piece by Robert Smithson. Most of the advanced sculptors of the 1960s were in that show, including many who went on to achieve major reputations, like Donald Judd, Richard Artschwager, Anthony Caro, Carl Andre, Tony Smith, Dan Flavin, Ellsworth Kelly and Anne Truitt, as well as Judy Chicago herself. And of course several of the artists have been forgotten. Gerowitz, one might say, is forgotten–Chicago destroyed most of her Minimalist work. But no one who saw the show, myself included, would have been able to tell, in 1966, who would become what, and least of all that Judy Chicago would become the artist we know her as.

Chicago has written, “When I was a young artist in the burgeoning Los Angeles scene, I wanted, above all, to be taken seriously in an art world that had no conception of or room for feminine sensibility. In an effort to fit in, I accommodated my esthetic impulses to the prevailing modernist style.” Her inclusion in “Primary Structures” is evidence that she was taken seriously. One might have inferred a certain feminine sensibility from the colors of Rainbow Pickets, but at the time the use of such colors was attributed to the fact that she was a California artist. “The bright hues favored by the Los Angeles contingent,” Meyer writes, “were an antidote to the sober tones of New Yorkers.” But Richard Artschwager, a New Yorker, showed Pink Tablecloth–a geometrized effigy in pink Formica of a blocky table neatly covered with a piece of domestic linen–without anyone making an inference to femininity on his part, then or since.

Chicago remembers with some bitterness the difficulties she faced as a woman artist in California–how one of the leading male figures in the Los Angeles scene would not even look at Rainbow Pickets when he visited her studio, as if it were a cultural a priori that women were not capable of making serious art. Still, inclusion in “Primary Structures” could hardly have been a greater acknowledgment, whatever the gender of the artist. In an interview with Lucy Lippard, Chicago concedes that she did not appreciate what it meant to be in that show, which was just where the mainstream was at that moment of art history. “I should have gotten on the plane and gone to New York and gotten a gallery,” she remarks. One cannot but wonder what her career would have been had she done so. She might, like Truitt, have gone on to be part of the Minimalist movement, caught up in its controversies and triumphs. When I pointed out to her in a recent conversation that a lot of men have a hard time making it as artists, she admitted that she did have a tendency when younger to explain her difficulties through the fact that she was a woman. But she also wonders why it is that men or women should think themselves successful when they get a half-column review and maybe an illustration in some major art publication. When she was young she believed that art should change the world and that artists should not simply fit into the pre-existing structure of galleries, reviews, collections and the like.

This visionary, almost Ruskinian view, could hardly have been more out of phase with prevailing attitudes. Most theorists in the 1960s still framed their views in Marxist terms, and saw art as peripheral to the main causal energies of history, belonging to the “superstructure” rather than to the “base” of a society, fit only for the “arts and leisure” section of the newspaper rather than the front pages–unless it was creating scandals. Such is the irony of history that Chicago’s larger vision, together with her sense of having been discriminated against, explains the fact that instead of merely fitting in, she invented a whole new history, something entirely unexpected, in which she transformed resentments into a movement of art by, for and of women, and was carried into fame through historical urgencies themselves barely visible in the later 1960s.

Initially, this took the form of introducing a certain feminine content into her art. Perceiving a work under the perspective of gender is hardly as fraught with the kind of impediment that prevents us from seeing under future perspectives, but there are problems even so. We tend to look at things under prevailing aesthetic categories, whatever an artist’s intentions. A case in point is Chicago’s Pasadena Lifesavers-Red Series # 4 of 1969-70, which is an array of torus-like forms with octagonal outer and circular inner perimeters, each evenly divided into eight segments, painted in a spectrum of pastel tones. The circular openings were intended to be read as vaginal openings, but viewers might have been forgiven for seeing them instead in formalist terms, and simply as circles. For one thing, formalism was, and for a long time remained, the prescribed way of looking at art, especially art that, like Pasadena Lifesavers, seemed largely driven by abstractionist considerations. For another, viewers were unused to seeing sexual orifices represented in art, even when they were far less coded than mere circular openings. Hannah Wilke once exhibited foam-rubber sculptures that, hanging on gallery walls, could hardly have been mistaken for anything other than vaginal forms. Her dealer, Ronald Feldman, told me that the first person to purchase one of these works was Willem de Kooning, who felt that Wilke had succeeded in achieving Abstract Expressionism in a sculptural medium! And de Kooning certainly knew a thing or two about female anatomy.

Chicago was intent upon creating art from “the center of female experience,” which is her formulation of feminist art. But she explains that this did not necessarily mean “from the cunt.” After all, she was working out the elements of a feminist philosophy at the time. “I was never thinking about the cunt as only the vulva. I was thinking about the cunt in a metaphysical way…. Like what does it mean to be organized around a center core? How does that change your experience?… [Women are] used to the fact that their bodies are not a total boundary. That dramatically changes your relationship to the world, your relationship to other people…. Being female dramatically shapes and often limits their experience.” In any case, Chicago’s defining imperative has been to make feminine content central to her art. Feminist art is not a movement defined by a single style, as most movements have been, but by a philosophy of what it means to be in the world as a woman.

A handsomely installed survey of Judy Chicago’s work has just opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington (until January 5), and I was particularly eager to get a clearer sense of her achievement. Apart from The Dinner Party–which has just been acquired for the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum and is currently on view there–I had seen relatively little of her work other than through reproductions. The Dinner Party had considerable meaning for my overall conception of art when I first saw it in Brooklyn in 1980. For one thing, it meant a great deal to the feminists I knew at the time, for whom viewing it became a matter of pilgrimage. But I was also instructed by the rather fierce opposition the work generated in the critical establishment. It was a more commonplace response then than now to say of something that could not easily be thought of except as art, that it was not really art at all. I was working out my own philosophical views about art at the time, and it was clear to me that there were no criteria that could justifiably be appealed to for excluding as art something that embodied the kinds of meanings The Dinner Party carried. Needless to say, the interesting questions have less to do with its status as art than its standing in art, and it has become increasingly clear that it really is one of the major artistic monuments of the second half of the twentieth century. But my main interest in seeing the show in Washington was learning more about what led up to The Dinner Party, and what it led to in turn.

I was particularly interested in the pre-feminist phase of Chicago’s work, when she was struggling, as it were, to be one of the guys and at the same time to express herself as a woman, a conflict, if one wants to see it in those terms, embodied in Rainbow Pickets, in which the austerity of those wooden forms was tempered by the rainbow colors. My sense is that Minimalist criticism would have disdained decorativity as such, which Gerowitz, as she then was, took as a criticism of the fact that she was a woman. The conflict was only resolved when she broke through to her conception of feminist art, but it is interesting to experience the works where the two impulses exist side by side. At one point, Chicago decided to learn how to paint automobiles, by convention an entirely masculine skill–she was the only woman in a class of more than 200. There is a striking work of 1964 called Car Hood, which is exactly that–a symmetrical painting on a steel automobile hood, almost like a shield ornamented with symbols that evoke the Southwest–a band of ivory on either side, embellished with green undulating forms that resemble Brancusi’s Endless Column; and a brilliant red capelike shape, with what looks like an encircled Greek cross. The piece is vertically bisected by what can be read as a vaginal slit if one is so minded, but it may simply refer to the place where the two sides of the hood are hinged together.

Chicago’s mastery of the technique of lacquering, with its smooth gradations from light into dark tones, inflects all of her work. This essentially masculinist way of laying on pigment has entered her style, one might say, however distinctively feminist the iconography becomes. This is markedly the case in the stylized vaginalistic forms that culminate in Through the Flower of 1973. A circular opening in a square space is surrounded by a ring of delicate petal-like pink forms, each with white highlights that change smoothly into green shadows. The central core too is shaded to give the sense of a cool, sunlike disk with a scalloped rim. I suppose Through the Flower represents Everywoman, but pretty much the same impulse enters into the series of portraits of the “great ladies” who were to take their places at The Dinner Party: Queen Christina of Sweden consists of nested squares of yellow and blue, fibrillated with undulating rays from a central point; and Elizabeth, again a square space, in an intense, sunlike core, radiates outward through pinks to purples like an idealized sunrise. There is a very delicate piece called Butterfly Vagina Erotica of 1975, in which the petals of a vagina operate separately to grasp the head and trunk of a penis, like an animated flower. It is a quite beautiful image of sexual intimacy from an internal point of view.

I am somewhat less convinced by a later work, called The Powerplay Series, an effort to represent the male in the way Chicago would like men to be. For what it is worth, she had depicted women in terms of their genital identities, allegorically represented as flowers or sunbursts; this is true with the notorious plates in The Dinner Party, whereas men are shown more or less as whole humans, with faces and bodies, in no sense reduced to their sexual parts. They are shown as aggressive but also as vulnerable, chiefly through physiognomy. Physiognomy became a representational strategy in the seventeenth century, primarily as an aid to historical painting, regarded, in the hierarchies of the academy, as art’s most esteemed genre. It was important to show what the main players in historical events (mostly men) were feeling: triumph, anger, hatred, fear. The degree to which aggressiveness is somehow a male rather than a human attribute is open to question, but my concern is that aggression and vulnerability constitute too narrow a set of emotional modalities to capture the male psyche. And vulnerability is an insufficient adjunct to aggressivity to capture masculine identity, though it sometimes appears to be a genuine discovery on the part of women that men are open to as wide, if sometimes a different, range of feelings as they.

The same mode of using paint–thinly, in characteristic pastel tones, with smoothly rounded forms–is taken over in Chicago’s confrontation with the Holocaust, in a project that occupied her after The Dinner Party, from 1985-93. I have often been struck by the overall distance mainstream art, especially in America, put between itself and the historical reality of its time. Perhaps this distance was the only way art could deal with the main cultural product of the twentieth century, which was human suffering on the greatest scale in the whole of history–but if future historians had only our high artistic culture as evidence for the history humanity had lived through, it would be valid to infer that ours had been on the whole a golden age.

When Philip Guston gave up painting his beautiful abstractions at the time of the Vietnam War in favor of allegories of evil, there was a huge outcry against his work in the art world, even though it was largely allegorical and used the language of cartoons. The Holocaust Project was worked on too much later than the catastrophe it enshrines for anything like this to have happened to Chicago, and perhaps she would in any case have been perceived as too marginal to mainstream expression to have aroused much critical comment one way or another. There has been, to be sure, a certain diffidence in regard to addressing the Holocaust in art, apart from memorialization, unless the art was produced from within the experience by those who underwent it. There is in fact a whole body of literature addressed to the Holocaust and artistic representation, some of the best of it by the philosopher Berel Lang.

The Holocaust Project was a collaboration between Chicago and her husband, Donald Woodman, a photographer, and it uses images from the photographic record, together with the symbolistically painted representations, which have something of the quality of an Egyptian frieze. At the same time, there is the undeniable sight of naked figures being shoved into ovens or gas chambers, processed like animals through mechanized abattoirs. It is difficult not to avert one’s eyes–“Nobody knows what to do with content-based art,” as Chicago says. But “there’s no way to deal with art on the Holocaust without confronting the content.” There can be no ambiguity about the horror the images show, but the painting itself is schematized and cool. Ours remains an art world uneasy with content, and uncertain about how extreme content is to be addressed, in terms either of figuration or aesthetics. But there is no question that what Chicago and Woodman have attempted is continuous with the great project of much of Western art, which has taken on the responsibility of coming to terms with suffering and martyrdom. What they have achieved is decidedly uncomfortable, but it is true to that history of art and it is true to the history of humanity. The effort to bring these together is something that has to be saluted. Squeamishness is no basis for shunning the agony of inhumanity in one of its most flagrant modern exemplifications.

Recall that after Schubert’s death, his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into small pieces, and gave each piece, consisting of a few bars, to his favorite pupils. And this act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. And if Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as an act of piety.
   –Ludwig Wittgenstein

Announcements have begun to come in of exhibitions of art dedicated to the memory of 9/11. One of them, to be called “Elegy,” had a September 3 opening at the Viridian Gallery in Chelsea, and its card in particular caught my eye. It displays a photograph by someone named N’Cognita, which embodies a mood of elegy with a remarkable specificity. It is a view down an unmistakable but anonymous New York street, taken in sharp perspective, with the buildings, most of their details obliterated, silhouetted darkly against an orange and lavender sky. They are vintage tenements, of the kind we all know, with heavy cornices and water towers, and the melancholy of the image is heightened by the absence of towers at the end of the street.

“We” refers, of course, to New Yorkers, for whom the view of emptiness at the ends of streets and avenues has been the nagging reminder of what we had more or less taken for granted as always there. No one loved the towers as much as everyone missed them–but it was not so much the erasure of the landmarks that tore at the heart as it was the inerasable memory of how they fell. That memory, however, belonged to the whole world, to viewers everywhere, who kept seeing, over and over, as in a nightmare, the planes, the black smoke, the flames, the falling bodies, unforgettable against the brilliant blue Manhattan sky. But it is the rubbed-out skyline, framed by the distinctive New York buildings, that is the constant reminder for those who lived the experience by being in New York when it happened, and whose visual habits keep it vivid through being thwarted. I was recently in Berlin, and I was struck by how my friends there keep seeing the absence of the Wall, drawing my attention to blanknesses that I, as an outsider, would otherwise never see as such. Those blanknesses now define the soul of Berlin, as these define that of New York.

I somewhat resist the idea of the anniversary, but at the same time acknowledge a deep wisdom in the way an anniversary marks a symbolic ending. The art that belonged to the experience of September 11 now constitutes a body of work that differs from the art that will undertake to memorialize it. The difference in part is this: One need not have shared the experience to memorialize it. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was designed by Maya Lin with supreme memorialist intuition, though she had no experience of the Vietnam conflict, having been too young when it tore the nation to bits, nor had she lost anyone who meant something to her in the war. But the art I have in mind could only have come from having experienced the event. Jan Scruggs, the infantryman who made it his mission to bring a Vietnam memorial into being, titled his book To Heal a Nation. That is what memorials should do, hateful as the events memorialized may be. That is the function of elegies as well. They use art as a means of transforming pain into beauty.

That already began, on September 11 itself, with the moving, extemporaneous shrines that appeared spontaneously all over New York, and became inseparable from the experience, so much so that, appropriate as they were at the time, it would be a bad idea to re-create one as a memorial, say in a vitrine. There is nothing about Maya Lin’s masterpiece that itself belongs to the event, the way, say, a helicopter would, or a mortar that had actually been used there–though the artist Robert Irwin once told me that sometimes a cannon on a lawn can be exactly the right solution, and I think I understand why. It is the grass that makes it right, which builds an image of peace into the emblem of war: “Green grows the grass on the infantry/at Malplaquet and Waterloo.” I thought that artists could have done nothing better than the anonymous shrine-makers, who knew intuitively that the shrines should consist in flags, flowers, candles, scraps of poetry or prayer and photographs. But I have since thought about some of the things artists in fact did at the time, which came from the same impulse as the shrines–and this work has a certain interest through the ways it, like the shrines, caught something of the experience it responded to.

An artist I am close to wrote me, some weeks after the event, “I am fine, though it is hard to think about what kind of work to make at this point, other than decorative, escapist, or abstract. I suppose I’ll explore one or all of these things.” The work for which she is deservedly famous is so different from what it now occurred to her to explore, that it seemed clear to me that she was seeking something with the symbolic weight that the shrines had had, as signs and acts of what Wittgenstein speaks of as piety. A very deep piece of art history remains to be written about what New York artists did in those months when we thought or talked about nothing else, and the enormity of our shared experience flooded consciousness fully.

I single out “New York artists” mainly because I have the sense that the intensity of the experience depended very greatly upon whether one was here or elsewhere. A former student, at the time teaching in California, told me that he felt “impotent” in being away. He realized that so far as helping clear the rubble, search for bodies, bring in the supplies, he would have been redundant. The city had all the help it needed. But he felt, having lived and studied here for several years, that he had been injured in a way someone who was not a New Yorker had not been–and he felt the need to be here to share the grief. Not being here was internal to his impotence, if that makes sense, not that it would have made the slightest practical difference whether he were here or not. And I think being here meant that this grief was palpable, that it was like something one breathed. One mark of that feeling was the way everyone became very considerate of everyone else, as if each of us was due a measure of moral sympathy. The kind of art that began to be made was another mark, special to the feeling.

Lucio Pozzi, a performance artist who really cannot properly be described quite that narrowly, tells how a European friend, who managed to get a call through, said, “At this point one cannot carry on making art.” Pozzi answered, “Today I have painted a little watercolor, and I shall paint another one tomorrow.” He had painted a copy in watercolor of a watercolor of his own, from a photograph of it in one of his catalogues. It is of yellow fields. He did this three times. On the following day, he stood outside his downtown studio and photographed the smoke as it lay in the street where his studio is located. He took several shots quite rapidly, just seconds apart, and turned the images into Xeroxes, which he stapled together into pamphlets, to be mailed to friends. Someone might have thought the pictures so alike that they could have been the same shot, reproduced ten or twelve times. I have seen such sets of images used in psychological experiments, mainly to demonstrate how pigeons, whose visual acuity is far sharper than ours, are able to distinguish between pictures that humans tell apart only with great difficulty. In my view, the images did two things: They showed what everyone downtown would have recognized as how their streets looked, and they did this with the zero degree of art. The other thing was to show how it felt to be there, engulfed in a cloud of sadness that would not lift.

I was struck by the fact that as with the photographs, Pozzi’s watercolors looked alike. If I were to curate a show about how New York artists responded to 9/11, I would certainly include his series of photographs, and all three copies of the watercolor. And I would include several of the watercolors I mentioned in an earlier column, by Audrey Flack, who felt the despair of impotence my student spoke of, and went out to Montauk to paint the sunlight on fishing boats. Audrey does monumental sculptures. I have greatly admired her immense figures of powerful females, for the feminist symbolism of course, but also for their masterful execution. She had been at work on a new colossus, intended to stand in the water off Queens. It was to have been of Queen Catherine of Braganza, after whom the borough of Queens was named. It was a brilliant concept, brilliantly executed, and Audrey modeled two airplanes, one for each of Catherine’s pockets, standing for the borough’s two airports. The reason the work was never completed belongs to the unedifying story of racial politics, but I mention her colossi here for the vivid contrast they point to between her sculptural ambitions and the water-and-sunlight aquarelles that met her needs after the terrible event. They are not in the least monumental. They are daringly ordinary, like skillful enough paintings by a conventional watercolorist, with nothing on her mind except to register how the world looked. The real world needed to be affirmed, and these are perfect examples for the art history of 9/11.

Had Queen Catherine stood, like the Statue of Liberty, when 9/11 took place, the two airplanes would certainly have been read as portents. But I cannot imagine airplanes in my 9/11 show. Tom Kotek, a graduate student in fine arts at Hunter College, told me how he and some fellow students visited an art school somewhere in New England not long after the event. They saw a work consisting of some cardboard towers and a toy plastic airplane. Wittgenstein tells of ways of expressing grief symbolically that we all understand and accept, even if it would not have occurred to us to do things that way. But there are certainly ways that would strike us as wrong or odd. Kotek and his friends thought that the installation they saw was not at all like something they would have made, having been in New York when it happened, and still tasting the grief. In fact, none of them had done anything they would consider 9/11 art yet, and weren’t sure they would. There was nothing exactly wrong about the little plastic-and-paper crash-site. It was the kind of thing that might naturally have occurred to artists who had not been in New York, and were given an assignment. But genuine 9/11 art, as my examples suggest, had to find ways of embodying the feeling rather than depicting the event, and is inevitably oblique. An artist I spoke to who happened to have been in Australia on 9/11 showed a drawing she had done of the Sydney Opera House. Her thought was that the terrorists would have taken out the most important building in whatever city they struck. So the Sydney Opera House symbolized the World Trade Center towers, like a substitution in the language of a dream. But I cannot imagine a 9/11 New York artist drawing the great opera house as a way of conveying what it felt like to have lived through the event.

I have been gathering ideas for my imagined 9/11 show, and asking artists whether they have done anything in particular that might be included if I were to have gone forward with it. Here are a few more examples of what I consider true 9/11 art.

I spoke with Robert Zakanitch a week or so after 9/11, and he told me he was painting lace. Readers may recall an essay I devoted to an ensemble of huge paintings by Zakanitch a few years ago, which he called the Big Bungalow Suite. He had made his first reputation as an Abstract Expressionist, but like many, including Audrey Flack, felt that he wanted to produce something more meaningful, having to do with life. He became part of a movement in the late 1970s called Pattern and Decoration–“P and D”–which attracted a number of artists disaffected with mainstream art. Big Bungalow Suite refers to the wallpaper and slipcover designs of his Mitteleuropa grandmother’s house in New Jersey, where his family worked in factories. He associated that profusion of decorative motifs with the comforting femininity present in what was a sanctuary for him. Lace made a lot of sense, given this background, even if he might have painted lace if 9/11 had not happened. But it had a particular meaning for him because 9/11 had happened.

The sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard was born to peasant parents in a labor camp in Germany, and her work is an effort to create a world she never really knew. Her immense wooden sculptures refer to a primitive form of life in primordial worlds. One of her main forms is that of the bowl–she did a huge bowl for her last show at the Neuberger Museum, in Purchase, New York, which was eighteen feet across. They are made of milled cedar beams, stacked, glued and shaped with power tools. They feel as if they were made with giants in mind. Interestingly, von Rydingsvard sometimes carves lace. But her first work after 9/11 was a crisscross, fencelike structure that she titled mama, build me a fence! A fence, like lace, is, as Wittgenstein would say, understandable.

The idea of an edge or a boundary also suggested itself to Mary Miss, whose studio is situated just north of Ground Zero. Miss is sometimes referred to as a “land artist,” and her work is public through and through. Her most recent installation is a kind of “acupunctural” transformation of the Union Square subway station: Various points and fixtures throughout the space have been neatly painted a uniform red. She and her assistants conceived the idea of a “moving perimeter” around Ground Zero, which would in the course of the work take on the form of a wreath–and indeed the title of the piece is A Wreath for Ground Zero. It would have the form of a figure eight, with reference to the two linked areas where the towers stood, or of the infinity sign, symbolizing the “endless knot” of mourners. The “wreath” would allow visual access to the site as the rebuilding took place, and it would also “make a place for the flowers, flags, candles and notes that have appeared throughout the city.” Miss’s idea got the backing of various public arts agencies, but inevitably ran into resistance with the bureaucracy and business interests of the city. One bureaucrat rudely asked who the hell she thought she was, coming forward like that when there were so many who had just as great a right as she. Her response was that everyone should be called to come forward with their ideas. Nothing immediate came of her project, but on her webpage she has issued a call for ideas, in a way modeled on the shrines that appeared everywhere, for memorial sites throughout the city, recognizing that New York as a whole was and is a mourning site. We should all be memorial artists.

I would certainly want to include in my exhibition an example of a post-9/11 shrine (attributing it, perhaps, to N’Onymous). But I might also include some art that somehow belongs to the experience, but only, in a way, after the fact. Let me explain. There is an artist-in-residence program sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which had used the ninety-second floor in tower one as studio space. The artists, whose work had been destroyed (and one of whom was killed), were given a chance to show their work at a special exhibition given by the New Museum of Contemporary Art after 9/11. I had the sense that many of them were in a way continuing what they had been doing during their residency, which is certainly the sort of thing many New York artists did, however deeply affected they were by the circumstances. A lot of the best artists I know would either have continued along their trajectories or simply stopped working. As part of his residency in 1999, however, Stephen Vitiello, impressed by the silence within the tower in contrast to the vitality of the city outside, placed two contact microphones against the glass to record external sounds. He called these “World Trade Center Recordings,” and one of them, Winds After Hurricane Floyd, 1999-2001, was included in the Whitney Biennial of 2002. It became a very affecting work, in part because of the metaphor that powerful and destructive winds generate, in part because of the fact that no such sounds will ever again be made. And in part because the sounds are the noises of a building far more vulnerable than it looked, or than the interior silences due to the thick glass walls would have led one to suppose. Like all the 9/11 art in my imagined exhibition, it tells us something profound about art, and about ourselves.

I have not made an especially systematic effort to track down further examples of 9/11 art. I really lack the curatorial impulse. And it would be a very strange exhibition were it all brought together, since the work would have very little in common other than the experience that occasioned it. I don’t think 9/11 art will stop being made just because the anniversary is at hand. Who knows when an experience will need to be expressed in art? But because of the conditions on its authenticity, it will differ from memorial art, which must be public and take on the responsibility of putting the event at a distance, and must negotiate the controversies such memorials generate. The 9/11 art was private and personal, and dealt with the mitigation of grief.

In Empire Falls, Richard Russo’s neo-Dickensian novel of a dying mill-town in central Maine, the high school art teacher is portrayed as something of a soul-killer. Indifferent if not hostile to signs of true creativity in her students, she encourages them to admire, for bad aesthetic reasons, what the author regards as bad art. Her favorite painter, for example, specializes in old rowboats and the rocky Maine shoreline, and on his local-access show, Painting for Relaxation, he executes a painting in exactly one hour, start to finish. Entirely aware of her teacher’s impaired taste, the best student in the class still cannot but admire the TV painter’s way of attacking the canvas: It is as though his arm, wrist, hand, fingers and brush are an extension of his eye, or perhaps his will. It comes as something of a surprise that teacher and student have this admiration in common with Joan Mitchell (1926-92), one of the great if underappreciated Abstract Expressionist painters of the New York School, whose luminous achievement is honored with a celebratory exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art through September 29. Every morning, according to Kenneth Tyler, in whose graphics workshop in Mount Kisco Mitchell frequently worked on prints when she was in this country, she would watch a public television show whose host was a landscape painter with a Southern drawl; in each episode a painting would be created, from primed canvas to the emergence of a mountain scene or a seascape. Tyler says that Mitchell adored that show, and she’d be in a good mood when she came down to the studio from the apartment, just after a shower.

Mitchell must have found especially appealing the swift, sure, dancelike way the TV painter dashed his brush across the canvas, just as so-called action painters were supposed to do, but left, at the same time, a recognizable image behind. Despite her abstractionist credentials, she saw herself as a landscape artist–what’s so interesting about a square, circle and triangle? And just as the TV painter was able to create an outdoor scene within the windowless space of a television studio, she evoked trees, bridges or beaches in a downtown Manhattan studio that looked out on a brick wall. “I carry my landscapes around with me,” she told Irving Sandler when he interviewed her for “Mitchell Paints a Picture,” one of a famous series that appeared on and off in ArtNews in the 1950s. She seems to have been remarkably tolerant for someone as strongly opinionated as she typically was. “There is no one way to paint,” she said to Sandler. “There is no single answer.” She characterized herself as something of a conservative.

The picture that Mitchell painted for Sandler’s 1957 article referred to a remembered moment in East Hampton some years earlier, when a legendarily undisciplined poodle she owned went swimming. She called the picture George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold, and it typifies her extraordinary work of the middle 1950s, when she seemed to paint only masterpieces. The implied narrative of the title refers to the course the painting took, rather than an actual change of temperature on that memorable day. The yellows, which emblematized the warm light of a summer afternoon, gave way, for reasons internal to the painting, to areas of white and hence, wittily, to winter. It is hardly the kind of landscape a TV painter would have ended his hour with. There is a thick tangle of heavy, largely horizontal brush strokes about a third of the way up the canvas–black-blues, ochres, paler greens and a surprising passage of cadmium red. A patch of grays and pale blues in the upper right corner feels like winter sky, while a spread of strongly swept blues and purples at the bottom of the canvas must be a reminiscence of water. The feeling of cold is mostly achieved through white and whitish spaces, climbing like broken ice from bottom to top, punctuated by slashes and lashes of fluid pigment that the clever student in Empire Falls High School would recognize as the artist’s attack. The painting manages to meld ferocity and tranquillity into a single stunning image that is Mitchell at the height of her powers.

The first painting of Mitchell’s that I recall seeing had an immense impact on me. Since I followed the Abstract Expressionist scene, I may have seen her work earlier without, so to speak, encountering it. What I knew absolutely was that this was a great painting, that I would wish to have painted it more than any other, and that it was entirely beyond me. By contrast with this artist, everyone I knew of was comparatively tentative and fearful, as the young student in Empire Falls felt her work to be. It was somewhat chastening, in those sexist days, to realize that it had been painted by a woman. Possibly it could only have been painted by a woman; but in any case a stereotype had been shattered. The painting was called Hemlock, and it hung by itself in the first room of the Martha Jackson Gallery, on East 66th Street. It seemed to me that Abstract Expression had found a new direction and that its methods could now be used almost like poetry, to capture and communicate real experience. In the interview with Sandler, Mitchell said, “The painting has to work, but it has to say something more than that the painting works.” It had been enough, in those days, that a painting should work. There was little beyond that one could say. But with Hemlock, as with so many of the pieces Mitchell did around the same time, it went beyond what Duchamp dismissed as that “retinal shudder”: She brought the world as she lived it into her art, and as advanced as her work of the 1950s was, experiencing it was like experiencing nature in an intense, revelatory moment. No one else I knew of had managed that.

Hemlock is a tree composed as an ascending set of horizontal sweeps of green and black against a white winter sky. The bands seem hung like branches on a trunk, explicit in certain passages, whited out but implied in others, and it feels constructed, like a complex Chinese character that could have been an ideogram for hemlock, built stroke by parallel stroke up the left side of the canvas. But it is not static. Some of the branches seem to be whipped into movement, on the canvas’s right side, as if they were feeling their way into emptiness at the edge of a cliff, like a heroic oak tree once painted by the Norwegian artist Dahl, which his nation adopted as the symbol of its toughness in an adverse world. Whipped loops of black paint animate the air, and cascades of drips rain down. The whole image has the quality of a great drawing, except, of course, that the white is not the background of white paper but is itself painted in such a way as to interanimate the thrashing branches and the vividness of the void. Only de Kooning could have come close to Hemlock. Kline was never able to solve the problem of adding color to his black-and-white canvases without diluting them.

Mitchell was as much one with the art world of her time as the tree in Hemlock is with the paint it is made of. Had that world perdured, she would have been one of the most celebrated artists of our time. The fact that she has instead been neglected lies, I think, not in the circumstances of her gender–as Jane Livingston, the curator, to whom we must all be grateful for this wonderful show, alleges in her catalogue essay–but in the fact that she painted for the rest of her life as if she were drawing sustenance from an art world that had in truth vanished. She was like a fragment of a planet that had broken off and followed an independent orbit, after the planet itself had crumbled to bits.

The direction of art changed radically and irrevocably a very few years after my encounter with Hemlock. In 1961, Allan Kaprow, chief author if not the inventor of “Happenings,” installed Yard in the courtyard of Martha Jackson’s new gallery on East 69th Street. It consisted in a disordered heap of used automobile tires. Kaprow, who wrote his master’s thesis (studying with the art critic Meyer Schapiro at Columbia) on Mondrian, worked with John Cage at the New School for Social Research in the years Mitchell was establishing her name (1956-58). He shortly gave up painting for assemblage and made chance and indeterminacy the principles of his work. Kaprow’s epochal Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts took place at the Reuben Gallery in 1959. Hemlock and Yard reflect different moments of the pervasive influence of Zen on New York art in the 1950s. Hemlock belongs to the impulse of haiku and Zen watercolors. The pile of tires belongs to what I was later to call the transfiguration of the commonplace. Its impact on me, though I hardly recognized its meaning in 1961, was largely philosophical. It consisted in the question that now seems to me to have defined the 1960s, namely, Why was a pile of worthless rubber tires a work of art and not simply a pile of worthless rubber tires? Clement Greenberg was to call this novelty art. Mitchell, open as she may have been about painting, dismissed what was happening as “pop, slop, and plop.” It was not a transient phenomenon but a revolution in the production of art that remains with us forty years later.

Mitchell began to work in Paris intermittently in the 1950s, but she carried her inner landscapes with her as well, for a while at least, as her unmistakable style. In a sense, she was a New York School painter working in the fifteenth arrondissement; and though she gave her pictures French titles in the 1960s, one does not feel that they had as yet any French references. Grandes Carrières is a densely crowded thicket of pigment in the middle of a horizontal canvas, which could have an autumnal reference, with red and brown branches, and could even be read as a wildly brushed still life poised before a window, though the title means “large quarries.” Abstract Expressionism was a world movement, but it assumed different identities from nation to nation: French Abstract Expressionism was unmistakably School of Paris through its irrepressible tastefulness, and Japanese Abstract Expressionism had a reckless scariness that New York was not ready for. The beautiful Untitled (1963), with its airy lightness, its lyrical scaffold of olive-green strokes and touches, continues to have a New York feeling. But with Blue Tree, and particularly Calvi, both done in 1964, Mitchell begins to respond to European, one even feels to Mediterranean, motifs. Calvi is a green, thick island of paint, almost scrubbed into or onto an otherwise nearly empty expanse sparsely enlivened by running calligraphic strokes. And then, perhaps in My Landscape II, 1967, and especially in Low Water, 1969, some deep change, inner or outer, has taken place, and she becomes a different painter from what she’d been, one about whom I have mixed feelings. She has become somehow more European.

In 1988–I had by then begun to write this column–I traveled down to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington to see a retrospective show of Joan Mitchell’s work. I had been caught up in the way the art world had gone in the early 1960s, and had more or less lost touch with Mitchell’s work. But since it was something like having been in love to have been affected once by her paintings, I wanted to know what the artist had been doing over the intervening years. She was 62 years old, and she’d had a long, tempestuous relationship with the French-Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, whose memorial show (he died this year) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts ends the same day as Mitchell’s. She had come into money and purchased a property in Vetheuil, on the banks of the Seine north of Paris, where Monet had painted before he moved to Giverny in 1881, after the death of his wife, Camille. In fact, Mitchell lived at 12 rue Claude Monet, and I wondered to what degree she had internalized the spirit of the site, or had, in her own way, taken on something of Monet’s aura. A Dutch museum director recently complained to me that Mitchell had tried too hard to be like Monet. He compared her unfavorably with Ellsworth Kelly, who had gone to Paris and encountered Matisse, and then turned what he admired into something altogether American. But the relationship between Monet and Abstract Expressionism is more complex than that. Through Abstract Expressionism, Monet belonged to the spirit of American art.

Many of the great pieces from the 1950s were on view at the Corcoran, including Hemlock, which seems by general consensus to be her chef-d’oeuvre. But in the main, I was disappointed in the show, and I felt confirmed in my somewhat sour negativity by the fact that Livingston, who installed it, felt much the same way. “I was disturbed,” she writes, “by what I thought was an uneven show. It was far too big, with too much emphasis on recent work. I learned that the artist herself had a hand in its selection, and as is not unusual in such circumstances, she simply could not edit out the works that had most recently come out of the studio.” I had a somewhat different explanation. I thought the exhibition showed what happens when an artist, whose greatness owed so much to the discoveries of the movement she belonged with, outlives the movement. Individual achievement depends upon the criticism and applause of those who share one’s language and values as an artist. It was an immense privilege to belong to a movement like Abstract Expressionism. Everyone who was part of it was greater through that fact than he or she would have been alone.

In any case, I did not write about the show. The happy ending to this is that Livingston has now used her great curatorial intuitions to put together the kind of show the artist herself would have been incapable of. It is chronological, but somehow orchestrated, and marked by a kind of phrasing, so that one is able to live Mitchell’s life through her paintings. The issue of reference is less important than the recognition that the work is referential. No one can tell from the painting where George went swimming nearly half a century ago on Long Island, or which particular hemlock, now grown venerable and great, captured the artist’s memory until it was delivered magnificently into art. But there is, in addition to reference, the mood and feeling that make the transformation of it into art memorable and urgent. More is happening in Calvi than fixing something visually compelling. One is not surprised to read that when she painted it, Mitchell was going through a serious emotional crisis. When the Japanese Abstract Expressionist Jiro Yoshihara did a memorial painting for Martha Jackson, who died in 1969, he was asked why it consisted of a simple white-on-black circle. He gave a Zen answer: “Since I did not have time, this was the best way I could do at the moment.” That is how I feel about Calvi.

The show is so intense that when one turns a corner and comes upon Clearing, 1973, it really feels like a clearing. It is restful and calm, despite or perhaps because of the wavy black uneven oblongs in two of its three panels, but mainly because of its beautiful lavender rings, which to me felt like dreamy echoes of Yoshihara’s image. There is something Japanese about it, with its loose arabesques and drips coming down like the rain in a print by Hiroshige. No one would know that La Vie en Rose was painted in 1979 to mark the end of Mitchell’s long relationship with Jean-Paul Riopelle. Mitchell, in a film I saw recently, put it this way: He ran off “with the dogsitter.” The work expresses sadness, even grief, but also relief and a kind of resignation. Her polyptychs are extraordinarily personal, despite their scale and ambition, and often they are salutes to her peers. Wet Orange feels like a belle époque interior, and pays tribute to the oranges and blues Bonnard and Vuillard made their own. No Birds makes a wry reference to Van Gogh’s late painting of crows in a golden two-panel cornfield, except–no birds. Instead the sky is clouded with blackish sweeps of dark menace, and one does not have to be told that the artist was going through terrible pain. I leave La Grande Vallée for you to put in your own words.

There has not been this much wonderful painting on view all at once for a very long time, and fascinating as art has been since the time when painting was the great bearer of its history, one cannot but be nostalgic walking these galleries, tracing this life through woods, clearings, fields, vales, masses of flowers, wet skies. What luck for Birmingham, Alabama, that the show will travel to its art museum from June 27 until August 31, 2003; for Fort Worth, Texas, where it will be on view at the Modern Art Museum, September 21, 2003-January 7, 2004; and Washington, DC, at The Phillips Collection, where it belongs by aesthetic affinity, from February 14-May 16, 2004.

Henry James could not resist giving the hero of his 1877 novel The American the allegorical name “Newman,” but he went out of his way to describe him as a muscular Christian, to deflect the suggestion that Newman might be Jewish, as the name would otherwise imply. He is, as an American, a New Man, who has come to the Old World on a cultural pilgrimage in 1868, having made his fortune manufacturing washtubs; and James has a bit of fun at his hero’s expense by inflicting him with an aesthetic headache in the Louvre, where his story begins. “I know very little about pictures or how they are painted,” Newman concedes; and as evidence, James has him ordering, as if buying shirts, half a dozen copies of assorted Old Masters from a pretty young copyist who thinks he is crazy, since, as she puts it, “I paint like a cat.”

By a delicious historical coincidence, another New Man, this time unequivocally Jewish–the Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman–visits the Louvre for the first time in 1968, exactly a century later. By contrast with his fellow noble savage, this Newman has had the benefit of reading Clement Greenberg and working through Surrealism. So he is able to tell his somewhat patronizing guide, the French critic Pierre Schneider, to see Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano as a modern painting, a flat painting, and to explain why Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian bleeds no more than a piece of wood despite being pierced with arrows. He sees Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as tipped up like one of Cézanne’s tables. “It has the kind of modern space you wouldn’t expect with that kind of rhetoric.” And in general the new New Man is able to show European aesthetes a thing or two about how to talk about the Old Masters, and incidentally how to look at his own work, which so many of his contemporaries found intractable. In Rembrandt, for example, Newman sees “all that brown, with a streak of light coming down the middle…as in my own painting.”

“All that brown, with a streak of light coming down the middle” could be taken as a description of the first of Newman’s paintings with which the artist felt he could identify himself, done exactly two decades earlier than the Louvre visit, and retroactively titled by him Onement 1. Most would have described it as a messy brown painting with an uneven red stripe down the middle, and nobody but Newman himself would have tolerated a comparison with Rembrandt. But Newman told Pierre Schneider, “I feel related to this, to the past. If I am talking to anyone, I am talking to Michelangelo. The great guys are concerned with the same problems.” We must not allow it to go unnoticed that Newman counted himself as among the great guys, though it is something of a hoot to imagine trying to convince Henry James, were he resurrected, that the works that make up the wonderful Newman exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (until July 7, when they travel to the Tate Modern) are concerned with the same issues as the Louvre masterworks that gave his protagonist Newman a headache and eyestrain. Even critics otherwise sympathetic to advanced painting in the 1950s were made apoplectic by Newman’s huge, minimally inflected canvases–fields of monochromatic paint with a vertical stripe or two–and they have provoked vandalism from the time of his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950. As we shall see, Newman thought he had resolved the problems that concerned the great guys who preceded him. They had been struggling to make beautiful pictures, whereas he considered himself as having transcended beauty and picturing alike. His achievement was to capture the sublime in painting.

Newman regarded Onement 1 as marking a breakthrough for his work, and a new beginning. The installation in Philadelphia dramatizes this by framing the piece by means of a doorway leading from one gallery into another. While standing in a gallery hung with pictures done by Newman before the breakthrough, one glimpses a new order of painting in the room beyond. Like all the great first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Newman seems to have passed abruptly from mediocrity to mastery with the invention of a new style–like the flung paint of Pollock, the heavy brush-strokes of de Kooning, Kline’s timberlike black sweeps against white, Rothko’s translucent rectangles of floating color. The pre-Onement paintings may seem somehow to point toward it, in the sense that there is in most of them a bandlike element that aspires, one might say, to become the commanding vertical streak. But in them, the streak (or band, or bar) shares space with other elements, splotches and squiggles and smears that are tentative and uninspired. The vertical streak alone survives a kind of Darwinian struggle for existence, to become the exclusive and definitive element in Newman’s vision, from Onement 1 onward. The basic format of Newman’s work for the remainder of his career is that of one or more vertical bands, which run from the top to the bottom of the panel, in colors that contrast with a more or less undifferentiated surrounding field. Sometimes the bands will be of differing widths in the same painting, and sometimes, again, they will differ from one another in hue. But there will no longer be the variety of forms he used in the pre-Onement period of his work. It is as if he understood that with Onement 1, he had entered a newfound land rich enough in expressive possibilities that he need seek for nothing further by way of elementary forms. Onement 1 is planted like a flag at the threshold, and when one crosses over it, one is in a very different world from that marked by the uncertain pictures that preceded it.

I have followed Newman in respecting a distinction between pictures and paintings. Onement 1 was a painting, whereas what he had done before were merely pictures. How are we to understand the difference? My own sense is that a picture creates an illusory space, within which various objects are represented. The viewer, as it were, looks through the surface of a picture, as if through a window, into a virtual space, in which various objects are deployed and composed: the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints in an adoration; stripes surrounded by squiggles in an abstraction. In the Renaissance, a picture was regarded as transparent, so to speak, the way the front of the stage is, through which we see men and women caught up in actions that we know are not occurring in the space we ourselves occupy. In a painting, by contrast, the surface is opaque, like a wall. We are not supposed to see through it. We stand in a real relationship with it, rather than in an illusory relationship with what it represents. I expect that this is the distinction Newman is eager to make. His paintings are objects in their own right. A picture represents something other than itself; a painting presents itself. A picture mediates between a viewer and an object in pictorial space; a painting is an object to which the viewer relates without mediation. An early work that externally resembles Onement 1 is Moment, done in 1946. A widish yellow stripe bisects a brownish space. Newman said of it, “The streak was always going through an atmosphere; I was trying to create a world around it.” The streak in Onement 1 is not in an atmosphere of its own, namely pictorial space. It is on the surface and in the same space as we are. Painting and viewer coexist in the same reality.

At the same time, a painting is not just so much pigment laid across a surface. It has, or we might say it embodies, a meaning. Newman did not give Onement 1 a title when it was first exhibited, but it is reasonable to suppose that the meaning the work embodied was somehow connected with this strange and exalted term. In general, the suffix “-ment” is attached to a verb like “atone” or “endow” or “command,” where it designates a state–the state of atoning, for example–or a product. So what does “onement” mean? My own sense is that it means the condition of being one, as in the incantation “God is one.” It refers, one might say, to the oneness of God. And this might help us better understand the difference between a picture and a painting. Since Newman thinks of himself and Michelangelo as concerned with the same kinds of problems, consider the Sistine ceiling, where Michelangelo produces a number of pictures of God. Great as these are, they are constrained by the limitation that pictures can show only what is visible, and decisions have to be made regarding what God looks like. How would one picture the fact that God is one? Since Onement 1 is not a picture, it does not inherit the limitations inherent in picturing. The catalogue text says that Onement 1 represents nothing but itself and that it is about itself as a painting. I can’t believe, though, that what Newman regarded in such momentous terms was simply a painting about painting. It is about something that can be said but cannot be shown, at least not pictorially. Abstract painting is not without content. Rather, it enables the presentation of content without pictorial limits. That is why, from the beginning, abstraction was believed by its inventors to be invested with a spiritual reality. It was as though Newman had hit upon a way of being a painter without violating the Second Commandment, which prohibits images.

Kant wrote in the Critique of Judgment that “perhaps the most sublime passage in Jewish Law is the commandment Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth,” etc. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people felt for their religion when compared with that of other peoples, or can explain the pride that Islam inspires. But this in effect prohibited Jews from being artists, since, until Modernism, there was no way of being a painter without making pictures and hence violating the prohibition against images! Paintings that are not pictures would have been a contradiction in terms. But this in effect ruled out the possibility of making paintings that were sublime, an aesthetic category to which Kant dedicated a fascinating and extended analysis. And while one cannot be certain how important the possibility of Jewish art was to Newman, there can be little question not only that the sublime figured centrally in his conception of his art but that it was part of what made the difference in his mind between American and European art. Indeed, sublimity figured prominently in the way the Abstract Expressionists conceived of their difference from European artists. Robert Motherwell characterized American painting as “plastic, mysterious, and sublime,” adding, “No Parisian is a sublime painter.” In the same year that Newman broke through with Onement 1, he published an important article, “The Sublime Is Now,” in the avant-garde magazine Tiger’s Eye. And my sense is that in his view, there could not be a sublime picture–that sublimity became available to visual artists only when they stopped making pictures and started making paintings.

Peter Schjeldahl recently dismissed the sublime as a hopelessly jumbled philosophical notion that has had more than two centuries to start meaning something cogent and has not succeeded yet. But the term had definite cogency in the eighteenth century, when philosophers of art were seeking an aesthetics of nature that went beyond the concept of beauty. Beauty for them meant taste and form, whereas the sublime concerned feeling and formlessness. Kant wrote that “nature excites the ideas of the sublime in its chaos or in its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation, provided size and might are perceived,” and he cited, as illustrations,

Bold overhanging and as it were threatening rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might.

Since Kant was constrained to think of art in terms of pictures as mimetic representations, there was no way in which painting could be sublime. It could only consist in pictures of sublime natural things, like waterfalls or volcanoes. While these might indeed be sublime, pictures of them could at most be beautiful. Kant does consider architecture capable of producing the feeling of sublimity. He cites Saint Peter’s Basilica as a case in point because it makes us feel small and insignificant relative to its scale.

What recommended the sublime to Newman is that it meant a liberation from beauty, and hence a liberation from an essentially European aesthetic in favor of an American one. The European artist, Newman wrote,

has been continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for the sublime…. The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty. Meanwhile, I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it. The question that now arises is how can we be creating an art that is sublime?

There can be little doubt that in Newman’s sense of his own achievement, he had solved this problem with Onement 1. It is certainly not a beautiful painting, and one would miss its point entirely if one supposed that sooner or later, through close looking, the painting would disclose its beauty as a reward. There was a standing argument, often enlisted in defense of Modernism, that the reason we were unable to see modern art as beautiful was because it was difficult. Roger Fry had written, early in the twentieth century, that “every new work of creative design is ugly until it becomes beautiful; that we usually apply the word beautiful to those works of art in which familiarity has enabled us to grasp the unity easily, and that we find ugly those works in which we still perceive only by an effort.” Newman’s response to this would have been that he had achieved a liberation from what feminism would later call the beauty trap. He had achieved something grander and more exalted, a new art for new men and women.

Newman used the term “sublime” in the title of his Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51). It is a tremendous canvas, nearly eight feet high and eighteen feet wide, a vast cascade of red paint punctuated by five vertical stripes of varying widths, set at varying intervals. Newman discussed this work (which the critic for The New Republic called asinine) in an interview with the British art critic David Sylvester in 1965.

One thing that I am involved in about painting is that the painting should give a man a sense of place: that he knows he’s there, so he’s aware of himself. In that sense he related to me when I made the painting because in that sense I was there. Standing in front of my paintings you had a sense of your own scale. The onlooker in front of my painting knows that he’s there. To me, the sense of place not only has a mystery but has that sense of metaphysical fact.

Newman studied philosophy at City College, and Kant sprang to his lips almost as a reflex when he discussed art. But it is difficult not to invoke the central idea of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in connection with his comment to Sylvester. Heidegger speaks of human beings as Dasein, as “being there,” and it is part of the intended experience of Newman’s paintings that our thereness is implied by the scale of the paintings themselves. In his 1950 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, he put up a notice that while there is a tendency to look at large paintings from a distance, these works were intended to be seen from close up. One should feel oneself there, in relationship to the work, like someone standing by a waterfall. The title of the painting meant, he told Sylvester, “that man can be or is sublime in his relation to his sense of being aware.” The paintings, one might say, are about us as self-aware beings.

A high point of the Philadelphia show is Newman’s The Stations of the Cross, a series of fourteen paintings that is certainly one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century art. As a spiritual testament, it bears comparison with the Rothko Chapel in Houston. I have the most vivid recollection of being quite overcome when I first experienced The Stations of the Cross in the Guggenheim Museum in 1966. Newman used as subtitle the Hebrew words Lema Sabachthani–Christ’s human cry on the Cross. The means could not be more simple: black and white paint on raw canvas, which he used as a third color. The fourteen paintings do not map onto corresponding points on the road to Calvary. But Newman seems to use black to represent a profound change of state.

The first several paintings have black as well as white stripes (or “zips,” as he came to call them, referring perhaps to the sound that masking tape makes when it is pulled away). Black entirely disappears in the Ninth Station, in which a stripe of white paint runs up the left edge, and two thin parallel white stripes are placed near the right edge. The rest is raw canvas. The Tenth and Eleventh stations resemble it, through the fact that they too are composed of white stripes placed on raw canvas. Then, all at once, Twelfth Station is dramatically black, as is the Thirteenth Station. And then, in the Fourteenth Station, black again abruptly disappears. There is a strip of raw canvas at the left, and the rest is white, as if Christ yielded up the ghost as St. Matthew narrates it. The work demonstrates how it is possible for essentially abstract paintings to create a religious narrative.

No one today, I suppose, would hold painting in the same exalted state that seemed possible in the 1950s. Newman became a hero to the younger generation of the 1960s, when the history of art that he climaxed gave way to a very different era. He triumphed over his savage critics, as great artists always do; and all who are interested in the spiritual ambitions of painting at its most sublime owe themselves a trip to Philadelphia to see one of the last of the great guys in this thoughtful and inspired exhibition, the first to be devoted to his work in more than thirty years.

Love’s Labour’s Lost
by William Shakespeare

I have been on something of a Shakespeare comedy jag over the past months; I laughed all the way from Columbus, Ohio, to New York a few weeks ago, reading Love’s Labor’s Lost. I had read As You Like It just before 9/11, and had a dream one night after that day that I was in the Forest of Arden with its population of clowns and witty young women picking cowslips. I felt entirely exalted until I woke up with the memory of the smoke and horror of the terrorist attack, and the sense that the comedy somehow distilled the world we had lost. So I read it again to keep the joy of the dream alive. And since then I have been going through the comedies whenever I need a happiness fix. I would love to have been part of the audience Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote Love’s Labor’s Lost. There are, in effect, two teams of extravagant talkers–the King of Navarre and his courtiers on one side, the Princess of France with her ladies on the other. The King and his followers have just taken an oath to forswear contact with women for three years when the Princess comes on some diplomatic mission; the four males fall immediately in love with the four females, for whom they are no match in the game of zinging witticisms past one another’s ears.

Shakespeare’s audience had to be able to disentangle quadruple puns as the lines flew back and forth. It is a comedy in which, as one of the male characters remarks, “Jack does not get his Jill.” Everyone has to take a respite of a year and a day before they will be ready to face one another again.

I met a real life Jill not long ago–Jill Davis–who has just published a comic novel called Girl’s Poker Night. Her book too has a team of daunting women, pessimistically looking for love. Her heroine, Ruby Capote, might well have made good material for the Princess of France’s team of ladies who use language as a blood sport, though mostly she talks to the reader, since the males are more or less hopeless. In the end she opts for happiness with a man who is far from good enough for her. But–as she observes–“Happy endings are not for cowards.”

Here, for those who frown on such light reading for these heavy times, is a word from Hegel:

“The modern world has developed a type of comedy which is truly comical and truly poetic. The keynote is good humor, assured and careless gaiety, despite all failure and misfortune, exuberance and the audacity of a fundamentally happy craziness, folly, and idiosyncrasy in general.”

It seems scarcely to have required a great philosophical mind to come up with the observation that each of us is the child of our times, but that thought must have been received as thrillingly novel when Hegel wrote it in 1821. For it implied that human nature is not a timeless essence but penetrated through and through by our historical situation. Philosophers, he went on to say, grasp their times in thought, and he might as a corollary have said that artists grasp their times in images. For Hegel was the father of art history as the discipline through which we become conscious of the way art expresses the uniqueness of the time in which it is made. It is rare, however, that grasping his or her own historical moment becomes an artist’s subject. It was particularly rare in American art of the second half of the twentieth century, for though the art inevitably belonged to its historical moment, that was seldom what it set out to represent. It strikes me, for example, that Andy Warhol was exceptional in seeking to make the reality of his era conscious of itself through his art.

German artists of the same period, by contrast, seem to have treated the historical situation of art in Germany as their primary preoccupation. How to be an artist in postwar Germany was part of the burden of being a German artist in that time, and this had no analogy in artistic self-consciousness anywhere else in the West. Especially those in the first generation after Nazism had to find ways of reconnecting with Modernism while still remaining German. And beyond that they had to deal with the harsh and total political divisions of the cold war, which cut their country in two like a mortal wound. Gerhard Richter was a product of these various tensions. But like Warhol, whom he resembles in profound ways, he evolved a kind of self-protective cool that enabled him and his viewers to experience historical reality as if at a distance. There is something unsettlingly mysterious about his art. Looking at any significant portion of it is like experiencing late Roman history through some Stoic sensibility. One often has to look outside his images to realize the violence to which they refer.

Richter grew up in East Germany, where he completed the traditional curriculum at the Dresden Academy of Art, executing a mural for a hygiene museum in 1956 as a kind of senior thesis. Since the institution was dedicated to health, it was perhaps politically innocuous that the imagery Richter employed owed considerably more to the joy-through-health style of representing the human figure at play, which continued to exemplify Hitler’s aesthetic well after Nazism’s collapse, than to the celebration of proletarian industriousness mandated by Socialist Realism under Stalin. This implies that East German artistic culture had not been Sovietized at this early date. The real style wars were taking place in West Germany and surfaced especially in the epochal first Documenta exhibition of 1955. Documenta, which usually takes place every five years in Kassel, is a major site for experiencing contemporary art on the international circuit today. But at its inception, it carried an immense political significance for German art. It explicitly marked the official acceptance by Germany of the kind of art that had been stigmatized as degenerate by the Nazis and was thus a bid by Germany for reacceptance into the culture it had set out to destroy. The content of Documenta 1–Modernism of the twentieth century before fascism–could not possibly carry the same meaning were it shown today in the modern art galleries of a fortunate museum. But Modernism, and particularly abstraction, had become a crux for West German artists at the time of Documenta 1, as if figuration as such were politically dangerous. It was not until Richter received permission to visit Documenta 2 in 1959, where he first encountered the art of the New York School–Abstract Expressionism–that some internal pressure began to build in him to engage in the most advanced artistic dialogues of the time. The fact that he fled East Germany in 1961 exemplifies the way an artistic decision entailed a political choice in the German Democratic Republic.

It was always a momentous choice when an artist decided to go abstract–or to return to the figure after having been an abstractionist, the way the California painter Richard Diebenkorn was to do. But to identify oneself with Art Informel–the European counterpart of the loosely painted abstractions of the New York School–as many German artists did, was to make a political declaration as well as to take an artistic stand. Richter was to move back and forth between realism and abstraction, but these were not and, at least in his early years in the West, could not have been politically innocent decisions. Neither was the choice to go on painting when painting as such, invariantly as to any distinction between abstraction and realism, became a political matter in the 1970s. If ignorant of the political background of such choices, visitors to the magnificent Museum of Modern Art retrospective of Richter’s work since 1962–the year after his momentous move from East to West–are certain to be baffled by the fact that he seems to vacillate between realism and abstraction, or even between various styles of abstraction, often at the same time. These vacillations seemed to me so extreme when I first saw a retrospective of Richter’s work in Chicago in 1987, that it looked like I was seeing some kind of group show. “How can you say any style is better than another?” Warhol asked with his characteristic faux innocence in a 1963 interview. “You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling that you have given up something.” For most artists in America, it is important that they be stylistically identifiable, as if their style is their brand. To change styles too often inevitably would have been read as a lack of conviction. But what the show at MoMA somehow makes clear is that there finally is a single personal signature in Richter’s work, whatever his subject, and whether the work is abstract or representational. It comes, it seems to me, from the protective cool to which I referred–a certain internal distance between the artist and his work, as well as between the work and the world, when the work itself is about reality. It is not irony. It is not exactly detachment. It expresses the spirit of an artist who has found a kind of above-the-battle tranquility that comes when one has decided that one can paint anything one wants to in any way one likes without feeling that something is given up. That cool is invariant to all the paintings, whatever their content. As a viewer one has to realize that abstraction is the content of one genre of his painting, while the content of the other genres of his painting is…well…not abstraction. They consist of pictures of the world. So in a sense the show has an almost amazing consistency from beginning to end. It is as though what Richter conveys is a content that belongs to the mood or tone, and that comes through the way the quality of a great voice does, whatever its owner sings.

Before talking about individual works, let me register another peculiarity of Richter’s work. He paints photographs. A lot of artists use photography as an aid. A portraitist, for example, will take Polaroids of her subject to use as references. The photographs are like auxiliary memories. With Richter, by contrast, it is as if photographs are his reality. He is not indifferent to what a photograph is of, but the subject of the photograph will often not be something that he has experienced independently. In 1964 Richter began to arrange photographs on panels–snapshots, often banal, clippings from newspapers and magazines, even some pornographic pictures. These panels became a work in their own right, to which Richter gave the title Atlas. Atlas has been exhibited at various intervals, most recently in 1995 at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, at which venue there were already 600 panels and something like 5,000 photographs. These photographs are Richter’s reality as an artist. When I think of Atlas, I think of the human condition as described by Plato in the famous passage in The Republic where Socrates says that the world is a cave, on the wall of which shadows are cast. They are cast by real objects to which we have no immediate access, and about which, save for the interventions of philosophy, we would have no inkling. But there is an obvious sense in which most of what we know about, we never experience as such. Think of what the experience of the World Trade Center attack was for most of us on September 11 and afterward. We were held transfixed by the images of broken walls and burning towers, to use Yeats’s language, and fleeing, frightened people.

The first work in the exhibition is titled Table, done in 1962. Richter considers it the first work in his catalogue raisonné, which means that he assigns it a significance considerably beyond whatever merits it may possess as a painting. It means in particular that nothing he did before it is part of his acknowledged oeuvre. Barnett Newman felt that way about a 1948 work he named Onement. He considered it, to vary a sentimental commonplace, the first work of the rest of his artistic life. Next to Table, one notices two photographs of a modern extension table, clipped from an Italian magazine, on which Richter puddled a brushful of gray glaze. Table itself is an enlarged and simplified painting of the table in the photographs, over which Richter has painted an energetic swirl of gray paint. It is easy to see why it is so emblematic a work in his artistic scheme. Whatever the merits of the depicted table may have been as an object of furniture design, such tables were commonplace articles of furniture in middle-class domestic interiors in the late fifties. In 1962 it was becoming an artistic option to do paintings of ordinary, everyday objects. We are in the early days of the Pop movement. The overlaid brushy smear, meanwhile, has exactly the gestural urgency of Art Informel. So Table is at the intersection of two major art movements of the sixties: It is representational and abstract at once. Warhol in that period was painting comic-strip figures like Dick Tracy–but was dripping wet paint over his images, not yet able to relinquish the talismanic drip of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, in 1960 he painted a Coca-Cola bottle with Abstract Expressionist mannerisms–a work I consider Table‘s unknown artistic sibling. Richter gave up Art Informel in 1962, just as Warhol dropped Abstract Expressionist brushiness in favor of the uninflected sharpness and clarity of his Pop images. By 1963 Richter had begun painting the blurred but precise images that became his trademark. Richter’s marvelously exact Administrative Building of 1964 captures the dispiriting official architecture of German postwar reconstruction, especially in the industrial Rhineland. And his wonderful Kitchen Chair of 1965 is a prime example of Capitalist Realism, the version of Pop developed by Richter and his colleague, Sigmar Polke, in the mid-sixties. Richter and Warhol had fascinatingly parallel careers.

The deep interpretative question in Richter’s art concerns less the fact that he worked with photographs than why he selected the photographs he did for Atlas, and what governed his decision to translate certain of them into paintings. There are, for example, photographs of American airplanes–Mustang Squadrons, Bombers and Phantom Interceptor planes in ghostly gray-in-gray formations. Richter was an adolescent in 1945, and lived with his family within earshot of Dresden at the time of the massive firebombings of that year. The photograph from which Bombers was made had to have been taken as a documentary image by some official Air Force photographer, whether over Dresden or some other city. The cool of that photograph, compounded by the cool with which that image is painted–even to the hit plane near the bottom of the image and what must be the smoke trailing from another–cannot but seem as in a kind of existential contrast with the panic of someone on the ground under those explosives falling in slow fatal series from open bays. But what were Richter’s feelings? What was he saying in these images?

And what of the 1965 painting of the family snapshot of the SS officer–Richter’s Uncle Rudi–proudly smiling for the camera, which must have been taken more than twenty years earlier, shortly before its subject was killed in action? Tables and chairs are tables and chairs. But warplanes and officers emblematize war, suffering and violent death. And this was not simply the history of the mid-twentieth century. This was the artist’s life, something he lived through. We each must deal with these questions as we can, I think. The evasiveness of the artist, in the fascinating interview with Robert Storr–who curated this show and wrote the catalogue–is a kind of shrug in the face of the unanswerability of the question. What we can say is that photographs have their acknowledged forensic dimension; they imply that their subjects were there, constituted reality and that the artist himself is no more responsible than we are, either for the reality or the photography. The reality and the records are what others have done. He has only made the art. And the blurredness with which the artist has instilled his images is a way of saying that it was twenty years ago–that it is not now. Some other horrors are now.

The flat, impassive transcriptions of Richter’s paintings are correlative with the frequent violence implied by what they depict. That makes the parallels with Warhol particularly vivid. It is easy to repress, in view of the glamour and celebrity associated with Warhol’s life and work, the series of disasters he depicted–plane crashes, automobile accidents, suicides, poisonings and the shattering images of electric chairs, let alone Jackie (The Week That Was), which memorializes Kennedy’s funeral. Or the startlingly anticelebratory Thirteen Most Wanted Men that he executed for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. Compare these with Richter’s 1966 Eight Student Nurses, in which the bland, smiling, youthful faces look as if taken from the class book of a nursing school–but which we know were of victims of a senseless crime. Warhol’s works, like Richter’s, are photography-based. The pictures came from vernacular picture media–the front page of the Daily News, or the most-wanted pictures on posters offering rewards, which are perhaps still tacked up in post offices. These were transferred to stencils and silk-screened, and have a double graininess–the graininess of newspaper reproduction and of the silk-screen process itself. And like Richter’s blurring, this serves to distance the reality by several stages–as if it is only through distancing that we can deal with horror. I tend to think that part of what made us all feel as if we were actually part of the World Trade Center disaster was the clarity of the television images and the brightness of the day that came into our living rooms.

Whatever our attitude toward the prison deaths of the Baader-Meinhof gang members in 1977, I think everyone must feel that if Richter is capable of a masterpiece, it is his October 18, 1977 suite of thirteen paintings, done in 1988 and based on aspects of that reality. These deaths define a moral allegory in which the state, as the guarantor of law and order, and the revolution, as enacted by utopian and idealist youths, stand in stark opposition, and in which both sides are responsible for crimes that are the dark obverses of their values. But how fragile and pathetic these enemies of the state look in paintings that make the photographs from which they were taken more affecting than they would seem as parts, say, of Atlas. Who knows whether Richter chose the images because they were affecting, or made them so, or if we make them so because of the hopelessness of a reality that has the quality of the last act of an opera, in which the chorus punctuates the tragedy in music? There are three paintings, in graded sizes, of the same image of Ulrike Meinhof, who was hanged–or hanged herself–in her cell. The paintings do not resolve the question of whether she was killed or committed suicide. They simply register the finality of her death–Dead. Dead. Dead. (Tote. Tote. Tote.)–in a repetition of an image, vanishing toward a point, of a thin dead young woman, her stretched neck circled by the rope or by the burn left by the rope. That is what art does, or part of what it does. It transforms violence into myth and deals with death by beauty. There was a lot of political anger when these paintings were shown in 1988, but there was no anger in the gallery on the occasions when I have visited it in the past several weeks.

By comparison with the ferocity of human engagements in the real world, the art wars of the mid-twentieth century seem pretty thin and petty. But it says something about human passion that the distinction between figuration and abstraction was so vehement that, in my memory, people would have been glad to hang or shoot one another, or burn their stylistic opponents at the stake, as if it were a religious controversy and salvation were at risk. It perhaps says something deep about the spirit of our present times that the decisions whether to paint abstractly or realistically can be as lightly made as whether to paint a landscape or still life–or a figure study–was for a traditional artist. Or for a young contemporary artist to decide whether to do some piece of conceptual art or a performance. Four decades of art history have borne us into calm aesthetic waters. But this narrative does not convey the almost palpable sense in which Richter has grasped his times through his art. One almost feels that he became a painter in order to engage not just with how to be an artist but how, as an artist, to deal with the terribleness of history.

There is an overall disposition to approach each Whitney Biennial as a State of the Art World Address in the form of an exhibition, organized by a curatorial directorate, presenting us with a reading, more or less objective, of what visual culture has been up to in the preceding two years. It is widely appreciated that on any given occasion, the directorate will be driven by enthusiasms and agendas that compromise objectivity. So there has sprung up a genre of what we might call Biennial Criticism, in which the organizers are taken to task for various distortions, and when these have been flagrant, as in the 1993 or, to a lesser degree, the 1995 Biennial, the critics almost speak as one. Everyone knew, in 1993, that a lot of art was being made that took the form of aggressively politicized cultural criticism, but the Biennial made it appear that there was very little else, and it had the effect of alienating the viewers by treating them as enemies. Again, everyone recognized in 1995 that artists were exploring issues of gender identity–but there was a question of whether these preoccupations were not overrepresented in what was shown. Anticipating the barrage of critical dissent, the Whitney pre-emptively advertised the 2000 Biennial as the exhibition you love to hate, making a virtue of adversity. But Biennials and Biennial Criticism must be taken as a single complex, which together provide, in the best way that has so far evolved, as adequate a picture as we are likely to get of where American artistic culture is at the moment. The Whitney deserves considerable credit for exposing itself to critical onslaughts from various directions in this periodic effort to bring the present art world to consciousness. Art really is a mirror in which the culture gets to see itself reflected, but it requires a fair amount of risk and bickering to get that image to emerge with any degree of clarity.

As it happens, my own sense of the state of the art world is reasonably congruent with that of Lawrence Rinder, who bears chief responsibility for Biennial 2002, though I have to admit that I was unfamiliar with a good many of the artists whose work has been selected. This unfamiliarity can even be taken as evidence that Rinder’s selection corresponds to the general profile of art-making today.

It is almost as though any sample drawn from the art world would yield much the same profile of artistic production, so long as it consisted mainly of artists in their 30s and early 40s who have been formed in one or another of the main art schools and keep up with the main art periodicals. A great Biennial could have been put together using older artists with international reputations, but somehow emphasizing the young does not seem a curatorial caprice. It is increasingly an art-world premise that what is really happening is to be found among the young or very young, whose reputations have not as yet emerged. A painter who taught in California told me that he was constantly pressed, by dealers and collectors, to tell them who among the students was hot. So as long as it resembles a fairly large show of MFA students graduating from a major art school–as Biennial 2002 mostly does–a quite representative Biennial can be put together of artists whose work is hardly known at all. Somehow, if it were widely known, it would not have been representative.

Art today is pretty largely conceptual. It is not Conceptual Art in the narrow sense the term acquired when it designated one of the last true movements of late Modernism, in which the objects were often negligible or even nonexistent, but rather in the sense that being an artist today consists in having an idea and then using whatever means are necessary to realize it. Advanced art schools do not primarily teach skills but serve as institutes through which students are given critical support in finding their own way to whatever it takes to make their ideas come to something. This has been the case since the early 1970s.

It is amazing how many young people want to be artists today. I was told that there are about 600 art majors in a state university in Utah–and there will be at least that many applicants for perhaps twenty places in any one of the major MFA programs, despite a tuition equal to that for law or business school. Few will find teaching positions, but their main impulse is to make art, taking advantage of today’s extreme pluralism, which entails that there are no antecedent prohibitions on how their art has to be. Every artist can use any technology or every technology at once–photography, video, sound, language, imagery in all possible media, not to mention that indeterminate range of activities that constitute performances, working alone or in collaboratives on subjects that can be extremely arcane.

Omer Fast shows a two-channel video installation with surround sound about Glendive, Montana, selected because it is the nation’s smallest self-contained television market. Who would know about this? Or about Sarah Winchester, who kept changing the architecture of her house in San Jose, California, because she felt she was being pursued by victims of the Winchester rifle, which her late husband manufactured, which Jeremy Blake chose as the subject of a 16-millimeter film, augmented by drawings and digital artworks transferred to DVD? I pick these out not as criticism but as observations. They exemplify where visual culture is today.

Initially I felt that painting was somewhat underrepresented, but on reflection I realize that there is not much of the kind of easel painting done now that makes up one’s composite memory of Biennials past. What I had to accept was that artists today appropriate vernacular styles and images–graffiti, cartoons, circus posters and crude demotic drawing. Artists use whatever kinds of images they like. Much as one dog tells another in a New Yorker cartoon that once you’re online, no one can tell you’re a dog, it is less and less easy to infer much about an artist’s identity from the work.

At least three graduate students in a leading art school I visited not long ago choose to paint like self-taught artists. The self-taught artist Thornton Dial Senior appeared in Biennial 2000, but his contribution did not look like anyone’s paradigm of outsider art, so no one could have known that it was not by an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design or CalArts. There are some quilts in Biennial 2002 by Rosie Lee Tomkins, who is Afro-American, as we can tell from items in her bibliography (Redesigning Cultural Roots: Diversity in African-American Quilts). Since this year’s catalogue does not identify artists with reference to their education, we don’t know–nor does it matter–whether Tomkins is self-taught. But it is entirely open to white male graduate students to practice quilt-making as their art if they choose to.

Whether someone can paint or draw is no more relevant than whether they can sew or cook. Everything is available to everyone–the distinctions between insider and outsider, art and craft, fine art and illustration, have altogether vanished. I have not yet seen a Biennial with the work of Sophie Matisse or George Deem in it, both of whom appropriate the painting styles of Vermeer and other Old Masters, but they express the contemporary moment as well as would an artist who drew Superman or The Silver Surfer. Mike Bidlo–also not included–has been painting Jackson Pollocks over the past few years. In a way I rather admire, Biennial 2002 presents us with a picture not just of the art world but of American society today, in an ideal form in which identities are as fluid and boundaries as permeable as lifestyles in general.

The openness to media outside the traditional ones of painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and sculpture has made it increasingly difficult to see everything on a single visit in the recent Biennials, and this is particularly so in Biennial 2002. But just seeing the things that can be taken in on such a visit may not give the best idea of what is really happening in the art world. Biennial 2002 includes the work of eight performance artists or teams of performance artists, for example, and theirs may be among the most revealing work being done today; but you will have to read about their work in the catalogue, since the performances themselves do not take place on the premises of the museum. I’ll describe three artists whose most striking work is performance, since together they give a deeper sense of visual culture than we might easily get by looking at the objects and installations in the museum’s galleries.

Let’s begin with Praxis–a performance collaborative formed in 1999 that consists of a young married couple, Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey. On any given Saturday afternoon, Praxis opens the East Village storefront that is its studio and home to passers-by. The ongoing performance, which they title The New Economy, consists in offering visitors any of four meaningful but undemanding services from the artists: a hug, a footbath, a dollar or a Band-Aid, which comes with the kind of kiss a mommy gives to make it all better. Praxis draws upon a fairly rich art history. Its services are good examples of what were considered actions by Fluxus, an art movement that has frequently figured in this column. Fluxus originated in the early 1960s as a loose collective of artists-performers-composers who were dedicated, among other things, to overcoming the gap between art and life. The movement drew its inspiration from Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Zen–and from the visionary figure George Maciunas, who gave it its name. It is a matter for philosophers to determine when giving someone a hug is a piece of art–but an important consideration is that as art it has no particular connection to the art market, nor is it the sort of thing that is easily collected. And it requires no special training to know how to do it.

There is something tender and affecting in Praxis’s ministrations, which connects it to a second art-historical tradition. It has, for example, a certain affinity to Felix Gonzales-Torres, who piled up candies in the corner of a gallery for people to help themselves to, or to the art of Rirkrit Tiravanija, which largely consists in feeding people fairly simple dishes, which he cooks for whoever comes along. Praxis’s art is comforting, in much the way that Tiravanija’s work is nurturing. The people who enter Praxis’s storefront are not necessarily, as the artists explain, seeking an art experience. Neither are those who eat Tiravanija’s green curry in quest of gastronomic excitement. The artists set themselves up as healers or comfort-givers, and the art aims at infusing an increment of human warmth into daily life. There was not a lot of that in Fluxus, but it has become very much a part of art today, especially among younger artists. The moral quality of Praxis belongs to the overall spirit of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, which recently emerged as an art scene. On one of my visits there, a gallerist asked me what I thought of the scene and I told him I found it “lite,” not intending that as a criticism. “We want to remain children,” he told me. The artists there could not have been nicer, and this seems generally the feeling evoked by Biennial 2002. It is the least confrontational Biennial of recent years.

There is, for example, not much by way of nudity, though that is integral to the performances of the remarkable artist Zhang Huan, which stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Praxis. Zhang Huan was expelled from China in 1998. His work fuses certain Asiatic disciplines laced with appropriations from various Western avant-gardes. In each of his performances, Zhang Huan’s shaved head and bare, wiry body is put through trials in which, like a saint or shaman, the performer displays his indifference to injury. His nakedness becomes a universal emblem of human vulnerability. There is a remarkable, even stunning, poetry in these performances, and they feel in fact like religious ordeals, like fasting or mortification, undertaken for the larger welfare. I have seen the film of an amazing performance, Dream of the Dragon, in which Zhang Huan is carried by assistants into the performance space on a large forked branch of a tree, like an improvised cross. The assistants cover his body with a kind of soup they coat with flour. A number of leashed family dogs are then allowed to lick this off with sometimes snarling canine voracity.

The performances of William Pope.L, which involve great physical and, I imagine, psychological stress, stand to Zhang Huan’s as West stands to East. His crawl pieces, of which he has done perhaps forty since 1978, perform social struggle, as he puts it. His contribution to Biennial 2002, titled The Great White Way, will involve a twenty-two-mile crawl up Broadway, from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx, and will take five years. In a film excerpt, Pope.L is seen in a padded Superman suit and ski hat, a skateboard strapped to his back, negotiating a segment of the crawl. Sometimes he uses the skateboard as a dolly, but that seems hardly less strenuous than actual crawling. Pope.L is African-American, and somehow one feels that crawling up the Great White Way has to be seen as a symbolic as well as an actual struggle. But it also has the aura of certain ritual enactments that require worshipers to climb some sacred stairway on their knees, or to achieve a required pilgrimage by crawling great distances to a shrine.

Since foot-washing, which is one of Praxis’s actions, is widely recognized as a gesture of humility as well as hospitality in many religious cultures, the three performance pieces bear out one of Rinder’s observations that a great many artists today are interested in religious subjects. He and I participated in a conversation organized by Simona Vendrame, the editor of Tema Celeste, and published in that magazine under the title New York, November 8, 2001. We were to discuss the impact of September 11 on American art. With few exceptions, the art in Biennial 2002 was selected before the horror, though it is inevitable that it colors how we look at the exhibits.

In a wonderful departure, five commissioned Biennial works are on view in Central Park, including an assemblage of sculptures in darkly patinated bronze by Kiki Smith, of harpies and sirens. These figures have human heads on birds’ bodies, and as they are exhibited near the Central Park zoo, they suggest evolutionary possibilities that were never realized. When I saw pictures of them, however, I could not help thinking they memorialized those who threw themselves out of the upper windows of the World Trade Center rather than endure incineration. I had read that one of the nearby schoolchildren pointed to the falling bodies and said, “Look, the birds are on fire!”

I don’t really yet know what effect on art September 11 actually had, and it might not be obvious even when one sees it. The artist Audrey Flack, whose work is in the Biennial, told me that as soon as she could get away from the television screen, she wanted only to paint fishing boats at Montauk. A good bit of what Rinder has selected could as easily as not have been done in response to the terrible events, but he said that he had sensed some sort of change taking place in artists’ attitudes well before September 11: “What I was finding over and over again was artists saying things to me like ‘Well, to be honest, what I’m really doing is searching for the truth’ or ‘What matters the most to me is to make the most honest statement I possibly can.'” I don’t think one can easily tell from looking at the art that it embodies these virtues, any more than one could tell from Flack’s watercolors that they constituted acts of healing for her. But that is what they mean and are.

One consequence of art’s having taken the direction it has is that there is not always a lot to be gained from what one sees without benefit of a fair amount of explanation. Biennial 2002 has been very generous in supplying interpretive help. Some people have complained that the wall labels go too far in inflecting the way one is supposed to react to the work, but I am grateful for any help I can get; I found the wall texts, like the catalogue, indispensable. And beyond that, you can hear what the artists thought they were doing by listening to recorded comments on the rented electronic guides. I cannot see enough of the work of Kim Sooja, a Korean artist who works with traditional fabrics from her culture. But her statements contribute to the metaphysics of fabric–to what Kierkegaard calls the meaning of the cloth–and are worth thinking about in their own right.

You will encounter Kim Sooja’s Deductive Object, consisting of Korean bedcovers placed over tables at the zoo cafe in Central Park, just north of Kiki Smith’s mythological animals and just south of a towering steel tree by Roxy Paine. Since Central Park has been opened up to temporary exhibitions, I would like to urge a longstanding agenda of my own. I cannot think of anything better capable of raising the spirits of New York than installing a beautiful projected piece by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which, as always with their work, will not cost the city a nickel. They envision a series of tall gates, posted at regular intervals all along the main walkway of the park. Hanging from each will be saffron-colored strips of cloth that will float above us as we follow the path for as long as we care to–an undulating roof, since the strips are just long enough to cover the distance between the gates. The whole world will look with exaltation upon this work, which will express the same spirituality and truth that today’s artists, if Lawrence Rinder is right, have aspired to in their work. And billions of dollars will flow into our economy as they pilgrim to our city.

I think the art world is going to be the way it is now for a very long time, even if it is strictly unimaginable how artworks themselves will look in 2004. Meanwhile, I think well of Biennial 2002, though I can have written of only a few of the 113 artists that make it up. You’ll have to find your own way, like the artists themselves. Take my word that it is worth the effort. That’s the best Biennial Criticism is able do in the present state of things.