Hans-Peter Feldmann's installation.

There is a room in the Guggenheim museum with a pervasive, musty smell that would be familiar to anyone in this country: The room is filled with tens of thousands of used dollar bills, some stained or wrinkled, others crossed with stray red or blue or black marks.
This is an art show, but it looks more like something you would take a Treasury Department employee to see. It’s also strangely lovely. When people walk in, their first reaction—it’s obvious from the looks on their faces—is wonder.

Few things are as inherently contradictory as money; its value is a mass delusion, yet every abstract swell and ebb of its worth has some real effect chronicled in the daily news. The German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann’s installation at the Guggenheim was created on the occasion of his winning the biennial $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize. Every dollar of his prize money is on display. Such a gesture initially might strike you as hollow or uninteresting—a case of the emperor’s new clothes. But upon closer examination, the show is moving.

Mr. Feldmann, a conceptual artist, has previously photographed parts that make a whole, documenting every strawberry in a pound of strawberries (One Pound of Strawberries, 2005) and every item of a woman’s wardrobe (All the Clothes of a Woman, 1973). In displaying a grid of 100,000 overlapping one-dollar bills, he is both engaging in a logical extension of his work and crossing through the picture plane dividing the represented from the real.

Nine walls and two columns in a windowless gallery are hung floor-to-ceiling with single dollar bills. The dollars dissolve from a distance into a nice, muted green; about half of them face forward, half backward, so Masonic pyramids and George Washingtons obliquely greet you. They are tucked in vertically, shingling the wall like the siding of a Cape Cod cottage.

When you check—by inspecting a part of the piece that runs along the edge of a doorway, or lifting the thicket of green with your hands as some visitors tried to do—you see that the bills are individually fixed to the wall with single finishing nails. Maybe because they already know what money feels like, visitors seem eager to touch this artwork. Every time the sole security guard turns her back, hands shoot out proprietarily to the wall.

In fact, Mr. Feldmann’s room at the Guggenheim has become a minor sociological experiment. Unlike other art about money (pieces by Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons come to mind), Mr. Feldmann’s effort doesn’t come off as aloof or stand-offish. During this summer of perpetual financial crises, his artwork has given New York an immersive environment in which to think about dollars, a place to talk about and reflect on these enchanted, and preoccupying, everyday objects.

While The Observer was in the gallery, a fleet of suited money managers entered. “Ah!” one of them said with a smile. “Money!” The group laughed. The room would appear to function as a spatialization of our collective desires. A man in a hat blew softly on the cash. A woman sat down cross-legged to write in her journal. High bills fluttered in the stray, climate-controlled breeze. Their scent was pronounced: “It reeks of culture,” someone joked.

There is something comforting in all these out-of-circulation bills, magical papers pinned down like a collection of butterflies. Watching people gaze at the walls from different angles, lingering and talking to strangers, it becomes apparent that Mr. Feldmann’s prize work, like a cathedral from another era, is a monument to an abstract obsession we share.

In its desire to make visible the financial underpinnings of an exhibition at the Guggenheim, the installation is initially reminiscent of Hans Haacke, the artist who famously, and in the same museum, tried to put on display, for his solo show, photographs of all 142 slum apartment buildings owned by a landlord who had personal and institutional connections to the museum. Mr. Haacke’s piece, Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), was never displayed, however, and the curator responsible was fired.

Mr. Feldmann’s is a softer-focus attempt than Mr. Haacke’s to confront the limits and economic conditions under which the exhibition is taking place. In this way it is more reminiscent of Urs Fischer’s 2007 installation at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, You, which excavated the gallery floor to a depth of eight feet. Both Mr. Feldmann’s and Mr. Fischer’s works aim at creating the visual effect of transparency; both ultimately do so not as a critique of the exhibition environment but to create a novel phenomenological viewing experience for the spectator.

Finally, like the late Sigmar Polke, Mr. Feldmann’s most obvious peer, Mr. Feldmann was born in Düsseldorf in 1941, and there is a taste of Kunstakademie Düsseldorf professor Joseph Beuys’s love for the magic of materials in this display of dollars. There is also some of the fascination Polke bore for Western capitalism.

What will happen to the piece? One guard thought Mr. Feldmann might donate it to the museum. Another guard said it was a loan from a bank that Hugo Boss helped the artist co-sign, and that the bills—each bearing a single nail hole—would go back to the bank and then into circulation after the installation came down. For some reason no one assumed Mr. Feldmann would keep the money, although a New York Times article specifies that the bills belong to the artist.

Assistant curator Katherine Brinson provides the usual explanatory apparatus to help us apprehend the work’s meaning: we are told that the artist was born in 1941, in Düsseldorf, that he often works in unlimited editions, that Mr. Feldmann resists the art world’s commercial structures and comments more generally on capitalism; that he didn’t make work at all in the 1980s.

But none of this background really explains the effect of the installation, or the reactions of the people who visit it, which—as worn as the phrase may be—are priceless.

editorial@observer.com

Blinky Palermo, Composition With 8 Red Rectangles (1964).

The original Blinky Palermo was a small-time American gangster and boxing manager. In 1964, a 21-year-old German art student named Peter Heisterkamp (sometimes also, depending on how you parse his paternity, Stolle, Schwartze or Eichelmann) took on the outlandish name. The act of changing his name could be considered the earliest artwork in the quirky show “Blinky Palermo,” the first North American retrospective of the artist, curated by Lynne Cooke.

The exhibition is, appropriately, twinned (Palermo himself was a twin and often doubled motifs in his artwork), co-hosted by the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Hessel Museum of Art and the Dia Art Foundation. While the Dia’s Palermo is more iconic, it is the Bard half of the show that shines. Featuring his funnier, messier juvenilia as well as a room full of works on paper, the exhibition is the best way to encounter Palermo’s primal quandaries.

From his birth in 1943 in East Germany to his untimely death in 1977, Palermo was a near-contemporary of Robert Smithson (1938-73) and Eva Hesse (1936-70). Like those artists, he took the forms of American Minimalism and rendered them eccentric, pulling political meanings and existential uncertainty from the confident geometric objects and shaped canvases of the 1960s. His was an ersatz Minimalism, and like the substitution of ground chicory for coffee or home-sewn jeans for Levis, his art spoke to the material conditions and aspirations of Germany in the postwar era.

Like his peers Sigmar Polke and Imi Knoebel, Palermo enrolled in Joseph Beuys’s Düsseldorf Academy in 1962. There, Anselm Kiefer did studio crits; Palermo collaborated with Gerhard Richter. These students longed to make painting—then an art form discredited as having no social relevance—new again.

The first few works in the show are a student’s homage to past masters. Palermo encountered paintings by Malevich and Mondrian in 1964 at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and Palermo’s Composition With 8 Red Rectangles (1964) borrows its flat reds and whites, as well as its title, from Malevich’s Suprematist Painting: 8 Red Rectangles (1915).

But something exciting happened when Palermo began imitating his American contemporaries. In the red painting Untitled (1965), the uneven metal frame, imperfectly spaced finishing nails, hand-painted fractured surface and a punched-in hole at the top become significant. Palermo was no longer making a mere tribute, as he was with the Malevich, but rather making something out of the impossibility of creating work as confident and perfect as that of Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Mangold. Palermo’s efforts at making American art were so full of unfulfilled desire, and the works themselves so hopelessly awkward and handmade, that they became something in their own right.

These are not slick paintings. They often appear incompetent or boring. The electric green Grünes Viereck (Green Quadrangle) (1967) has endearingly bumpy edges. The surface of another work has pink cotton stuck to it. Others reveal patched seams. What is typical about a Palermo is its lack of success. A good Palermo is not an altogether convincing object.

Palermo’s unique brand of Modernism is about how similar forms can have very different cultural meanings. His work simulates the forms and shapes— the very style—of triumphal American Minimalism, but without the swagger. Palermo’s wobbly edges and imprecise lines speak to the impossibility of escaping your origins. If coming of age in Paris during the 1960s meant New Wave style, and in America meant a Pop present, in Germany it meant nebulous responsibility for acts committed before you were born. Palermo’s paintings began around the same time Günther Grass published The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse.

Along with Polke and Richter, Palermo created a dialogue that linked German postwar experience with American painting and sculpture. The result is complex and, at times, humorous and touching: knockoffs that have much to tell the originals about confidence, capitalism and materials. Palermo’s early work, like his name, is a Cold War-era postcard to American swagger.

One room of the Bard show consists of Stoffbilder, or ready-made fabric paintings. Palermo and Sigmar Polke used to go together to buy fabric for paintings from department stores in West Germany; the economic conditions of Palermo’s Leipzig birthplace resonate in his use of store-bought cloth to make these paintings. Untitled (1968-69) is a sea-green approximation of a painting by Mark Rothko; it is made of low thread-count bed sheet material sewn and stretched over a frame.

There’s a Pop note in Palermo. While Americans were branding goods for sale, Palermo was branding geometric shapes. In Prototypen, four silk screens— a green triangle, a gray lozenge, a blue isosceles triangle and a small black square—represent Palermo’s brand. The isosceles triangle also comes as a kit, allowing a purchaser to paint his own Palermo. Palermo’s triangles may evoke work by his artistic contemporaries—Beuys’s Filter Fat Corner (1963) and also Robert Morris’s Corner Piece (1964)—but they also call to mind the 1960s logos of corporations from CBS to Sprite.

What happened when this German capitalist Minimalism emigrates to America? The Dia Foundation show opens in 1973 with Palermo newly arrived in New York. Like Mondrian before him, Palermo found himself at the epicenter of his desires. While his teacher Beuys’s famous show “I Like America and America Likes Me” (1974) celebrated the mythical America of Indians and coyotes, Palermo paid homage to a no less magical place: his most ambitious work was called To the People of New York City (1976) and he named other abstract paintings for Coney Island and Stevie Wonder.

Yet Palermo never acquired the scale and material confidence of American art. His paintings remained small. By the mid-’70s, he’d begun painting on aluminum, but instead of using smooth industrial enamel he chose gloppy acrylic applied with small brushes. Taxi-cab yellow, black and red predominate: the palette evokes New York, but also the colors of the German flag.

It’s worth asking why Palermo’s brand of indifferent, awkward objects looks so good to us today. The pieces from this show would look relevant in any contemporary art gallery on Orchard Street. He’s been influential to artists working now: Rirkrit Tiravanija invokes his name, Gareth James’s work echoes Palermo’s subtle architectural tracings, and his wobbly modernism is related to that of David Hammons and Franz West.

In a moment when America finds itself nostalgic for a powerful economic past and is increasingly unable to compete in a global economy, Palermo’s love of American style and his material meditations on the impossibility of living up to the task of being successfully American feel newly potent.

Palermo died at age 33 of a drug overdose. His work was largely unknown in this country until the late 1990s, despite the surge in popularity experienced by his peers, Sigmar Polke, who passed away last year, and Gerhard Richter. It reminds us from the vantage point of history that however much you may prefer the original, the homemade copy might ultimately be more a telling, more complex object, crystallizing a larger set of motivations and desires.

Save the Press.

In  1967, a striking yet slight work by a South African artist named Azaria Mbatha was donated to the Museum of Modern Art. The richly patterned black and white work on paper, printed from a simple sheet of cut linoleum, was made at a school called the Evangelical Lutheran Church and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift. This missionary center-turned-unlikely radical art school developed as one of the few institutions during apartheid-era South Africa to educate black art students, and linoleum prints were the medium of choice there because they were inexpensive to make.

Mr. Mbatha’s The Woman Who Loved and Was … /Innocent From Accusation (1965) not only is the earliest work in “Impressions From South Africa, 1965 to Now,” but it also illustrates succinctly the show’s twin themes of printmaking and protest. It’s a simple premise that a black and white linoleum print might be a cheap and graphic way to depict the struggle between blacks and whites in segregated South Africa. Yet the piece might have languished if the museum hadn’t given it context through the purchase between 2005 and 2010 of dozens of historical and contemporary South African prints. This exhibition, drawn entirely from the museum’s permanent collection demonstrates how Mr. Mbatha’s piece is now part of holdings that illustrate a rich and eclectic history, a print culture of protest.

The three-room exhibition brings together over 60 prints made in South Africa between 1965 and the present. It spans much of the apartheid era and provides a glimpse into how artists under extremely difficult conditions used an affordable medium as a tool for resistance. At a moment when it is easy to associate fine art with excesses in educational and monetary consumption, the show provides a D.I.Y. template for political art today.

The Rorke’s Drift artists turned to biblical allegories to depict apartheid’s injustices. John Muafangejo in Natal Where Art School Is (1974) shows Rorke’s Drift as rich with trees, oxen, farming, sheep and river: an Eden. The thickly patterned linoleum cut repeats figures and objects to decorative effect, rendering the black and white of the prints graphic but not stark. Charles Nkosi’s Submission to Death from his series “Black Crucifixion” (1976) parallels a black Christ’s sufferings on the cross with the plight of the subjugated under apartheid.

Another wall shows the offset posters and screenprints that disseminated the images and goals of political opposition. “Now you have touched the woman you have struck a rock you have dislodged a boulder; you will be crushed” is the message of You Have Struck a Rock by the Medu Art Ensemble (1981). More direct still is the text on a United Democratic Front poster from 1983: “We demand Houses, Security, and Comfort.”

These posters, in which monotone figures and waving flags often appear in silhouette, combine the style of early Soviet graphic design with American civil rights-era protest iconography and British punk posters. Raised fists and people breaking free of shackles predominate. Printed in small editions of 50, 300 or 400 by organizations with names like Save the Press Campaign, United Woman’s Organization, and Junction Avenue Theater, they testify to a galvanized 1980s culture of visual protest. This reliance on mechanical reproduction to disseminate messages of resistance now seems like the prelude to today’s digital methods, with Facebook walls serving as the notice boards of the Arab Spring.

By organizing the show according to medium, curator Judith B. Hecker ties South African printmaking to a history of political prints by European artists including Käthe Kollwitz, Honoré Daumier and James Gillray. Intaglio, a technique used by artists like Goya and Otto Dix, creates a fluid and scratchy line made by etching on a metal plate; the result is often rich in political allusion and narrative. Diane Victor’s series based on Goya’s Disasters of War, 16 drypoint etchings called Disasters of Peace (2001-2003), show the complicated text-and-image combinations this medium affords.

The two artists in this exhibition whom you are most likely to have heard of are Sue Williamson and William Kentridge. Their work mines South Africa’s history through use of semiobsolete media and photographic images; while they share an interest in the documentary role political groups like Afropix advocated for “witness” photography, both artists play with the ways in which a print as an indexical medium is assumed to have a special relationship to the truth.

The show is buoyed by its four Kentridges. His engraving General (1993), made one year before South Africa’s first democratic election (in which Nelson Mandela was elected president), shows an aged and officious white military figure in profile, his glasses and medals signifiers of both the tools of oppression and the fragility of power. Walking Man (2000) is Mr. Kentridge at his most visually complex and subtle, a vertical print in which torsos turn into trees and power lines become ominous tangles.

Casspirs Full of Love (1989), a drypoint and engraving, shows one of the military vehicles deployed against townships, here full of decapitated heads. But perhaps the best of the group is Mr. Kentridge’s simple screenprinted poster Security (1980), in which a white man overfills his black suit. The poster promotes an eponymous theatrical performance; as such it demonstrates the meaningful ties between the visual arts and other creative arts in fighting totalitarian repression.

Sue Williamson’s For Thirty Years Next to His Heart (1990) consists of 49 color xeroxes in handmade frames. Simple, inexpensive and expressive, the work records a government-issued passbook page by page. Black South Africans had to carry such a book at all times. From its emergence from a polyester suit pocket to the monthly signature of an employer, the work becomes a record of the petty bureaucratic humiliations that went on for almost half a century under apartheid, between the years 1948 and 1994.

Paradoxically, one of the failings and pleasures of this show is its inability to unite a disparate group of images produced under different contexts and for diverse audiences under one coherent rubric. The exhibition encompasses the crafty, the popular and the cooly conceptual. Rather than having obvious connections with the often photo-based art going on in New York during this time—think Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems or Kiki Smith—it instead has connections with the history of the political cartoon, including those of Goya, Daumier, Hogarth, James Gillray and Dix, and it also has ties to the punk and craft movements. Both contexts are far from MoMA mainstays. This makes for an interesting presentation. Showing how these South African artists mined the archives of the art of protest—from biblical sources to colonial struggles and the American civil rights movement—to create allegorical images, the exhibition becomes an umbrella for ephemera rather than a series of canonical artistic statements and influences.

Modern work from the postapartheid era both looks back to the history of Rorke’s Drift and looks forward to an expanded definition of printmaking. Cameron Platter’s innovative The Battle of Rorke’s Drift at Club Dirty Den (2009) echoes the decorative style of the Rorke’s Drift lithographers in pencil on paper, its square shape and graphic, black and white, highly patterned composition referring to that school. Sandile Goje was only 21 when he made the linocut Meeting of Two Cultures (1993). It depicts a mud house with black bare legs shaking hands with a trousered and shod Western-style house, and was printed the year apartheid ended.

The youngest artist in the exhibition, Kudzanai Chiurai (b. 1981), is represented by Untitled (2008/2010), a piece spray painted on the wall with a stencil. His life-size figures, armed with baseball bats, call attention to South Africa’s present urban violence against immigrants from Zimbabwe.

The exhibition sets up the metaphor that the positive/negative lithographic process evokes the dichotomies of truth and politics, justice and sophistry, morality and oppression. It seems apt. But at the end of the show what is most impressive is that a simple object—effectively a piece of cut carpet back, pressed against paper to create an impression—has conjured such a rich history of both political printmaking and D.I.Y. protest.

editorial@observer.com

Ritual Card; Northwestern Yunnan Province, China; 18th-20th century; Ink and paint on paper; 6 x 8 5/8 in. (15 x 22 cm); Collection of Dr. John M. Lundquist

Just as you might own a favorite piece of furniture from your parents’ house, Quentin Roosevelt II (1919-1948), Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, first encountered the art of the “strange people known as Naxi,” as he later described them, around his family home in Oyster Bay; his father, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., and uncle, Theodore’s brother Kermit, had bought objects as souvenirs during a trip to the Himalayas. The younger Mr. Roosevelt, an art history major at Harvard, liked the stuff, so his family gave him a Naxi scroll for Christmas.

At age 19 Mr. Roosevelt wrote what remains the sole academic dissertation on Naxi art in Western scholarship. He went on to amass the most significant group of Naxi artifacts outside of China. His holdings, mainly those acquired on a 1939 trip through China’s Northwest Yunnan Province, make up this first-ever exhibition of the material.

Chances are you haven’t heard of the Naxi (pronounced NAH-shee), a group of 300,000 people living on the east end of the Himalayas at the boarder of Sichuan, Tibet and Burma. Their religion is a hybrid resulting from this crossroads: Dongba blends Buddhism, Tibetan Bon, Taoism, Confucianism, Mongolian shamanism and local cults.

Part of the reason for Mr. Roosevelt’s success in gathering their art was happenstance. Chinese communists destroyed much of Naxi culture after the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, making his loot a time capsule of a thousand-year old culture 10 years before it was nearly extinguished.

Mr. Roosevelt recorded his expedition with a fervor that was part ethnographic, part road trip. Traveling 30 miles a day, sometimes at an altitude of 12,000 feet, with “10 horses, 5 mules, 2 donkeys, 1 goat, 65 soldiers, 10 bodyguards, 3 officials, 12 coolies, 1 interpreter, 1 puppy, myself and three geese,” he ate locusts, grew a beard and slept among rats and lice. He “haggled with local living Buddhas and traded sunglasses, raincoats, compasses and a kitchen stove for ancient sculptures, paintings, scrolls.” Lively drawings of the bandits and soldiers he encountered accompany his notes. He also took lots of photographs.

His journey caused a stir at home: Life magazine covered the trip (“Another Roosevelt to Tibet”), as did various society columns. The five-month expedition was funded by Harvard, with Harvard-Yenching Library and the Library of Congress keeping most of the artifacts he collected.

At the Rubin Museum, 40-foot painted funeral scrolls reveal who the Naxi are and what they care about. Placed at the head of a dead body and unrolled during chanting to guide the deceased to the world of the gods, these “roads of the gods” roll out like film strips of the Naxi spiritual world, taking us through the nine black hills of hell (ruled by yellow and blue frolicking gods and chicken-headed demons) to the 33 gods of heaven.

Naxi art looks like a mash-up of Hieronymus Bosch paintings, Tarot cards and Dante. In one realm of hell, hungry ghosts with seven heads boil people and trample their entrails. (Naxi sins include adultery and, perhaps less predictably Leebu, pretending to be a shaman.) In heaven, things are happier but no less lively: people emerge from eggs, tigers frolic among the seven sacred mountains, and an elephant has sprouted 33 heads.

The Dongba realms are organized according to numerology: valleys and rivers come in the feminine number seven; mountains and trees in the masculine number nine. In this cosmology, every compass point is associated not just with a color but also with a common item: trees, flowers, wombs and eggs.

Naxi tankas, paintings made from ground mineral pigments on cloth that are placed behind an altar, are composed like much Buddhist art: symmetrical and with a large central deity. A god is flanked by its entourage. Its teachers are shown above it, its protectors and offerings below. Most of these gods—often painted in blue, green or gold—are seated cross-legged like Buddhas on a lotus throne.

The Naxi propose a complex world full of smiling animals and monsters: trees adorned with red demons emerge from lotus flowers vomited up by leopard-spotted frogs; tigers and oxen scare ax-wielding monkeys and birds of prey. Animals are sorted into those with hooves, those with claws and those that fly. Along the intricate borders of the paintings, cuckoo birds, dragons, porcupines and elephants abound.

In a pictographic script that looks like a cross between Chinese and hieroglyphics, long manuscripts spell out formulas for things like exorcizing demons. This writing, found nowhere else in the world, may have been modeled on cave paintings; it is mixed with syllabic script in which you can make out the occasional Chinese character.

To the casual viewer, this language flickers on the edge of legibility, yet it contains metaphysical moments: the character representing time shows a growing flower. The manuscripts suggest why and when religion is needed: one ceremony resolves conflicts between two fighting men (this notebook shows two stick people in headdresses, swords crossed); another is for burying young people who commit suicide for love (apparently a widespread Naxi problem). Like the manuscripts, the ceremonial objects in this show attest to religious art’s functional, as well as decorative purposes: a brass bell adorned with a dried eagle claw (a zeba) and a conch shell trumpet (a fvsseimokua) have the patina not just of age but of heavy use. A set of divination cards is worn from years of handling by priests.

Curator Cindy Ho has been planning this exhibition for 16 years. She traveled to Lijiang, the Naxi capital, four times and worked extensively with the Roosevelt family. In a catalogue accompanying the exhibition she writes of her struggle: even among scholars of East Asian Studies, few had heard of the Naxi. The Rubin Museum, which had exhibited the art of the closely related and equally obscure Bon people, was the natural venue for the show.

Leaving China with 20 trunks full of scrolls, manuscripts and skins of exotic animals like golden monkeys, pandas and snow leopards was tricky for Mr. Roosevelt due to the war then being waged between China and Japan; his exit was made possible through a family connection to a certain W. Langhorne Bond, then vice president of the Chinese National Airline; Mr. Roosevelt flew disguised as a steward.

And a good thing, too: shortly after he did so, eccentric botanist-explorer Joseph Rock’s collection of Naxi art and objects was destroyed by Japanese torpedoes as he tried to leave China, leaving Mr. Roosevelt’s collection the largest in the Western world.

After returning with his findings, Mr. Roosevelt led an eventful, if brief, life. After graduation, he enlisted. He was wounded on the Tunisian front, stormed Normandy, won the Purple Heart, Silver Star, and Croix de Guerre, and served in the Office of Strategic Services. He married an American Red Cross worker in England, had three daughters, the oldest of whom was 4 when he died in a plane crash outside of Hong Kong, at just 29 years of age. By then he had taken over the helpful Mr. Bond’s job and was himself the vice-president of the Chinese National Airline.

After 1949, the Chinese communists began more rigorously enforcing the ban on religious activity in remote regions of China. Eventually, the People’s Liberation Army brought stringent reform to mountainous Lijian. Naxi openly practicing the Dongba religion were killed. Tankas and sutras not hidden were destroyed. The area was closed to foreign nationals.

While it’s entertaining to speculate about whether Roosevelt, in seeking out the Naxi, was indeed no more than a youthful scholar, or whether he was sent to the region as a spy, this exhibition proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the lasting effect of his studies. In recent years, elderly Dongba priests, who practiced for 40 or 50 years in secret, have started to emerge, but it is mainly due to the efforts of a 19-year-old kid from Long Island that we know about Naxi art today: because he sought out and preserved their extraordinary art, you can see it at the Rubin Museum.

editorial@observer.com

Donald Judd (2011) at David Zwirner.

While much of New York’s art world is away on a European grand tour—starting with the Venice Biennale, moving on to Art Basel, the annual art fair in Switzerland, which opens next week, and winding up in London for a round of auctions—a handful of museum-worthy exhibitions make this a good time to visit Chelsea’s galleries. Artists on view through June include both past masters (Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Tatlin, Donald Judd) and living legends (Jasper Johns, John Chamberlain).

If you are interested in the spectacle of powerful men having affairs—and judging from the recent media attention given to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Weiner, who isn’t?—it’s worth visiting Gagosian’s “Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou.”

This focused glimpse into the private lives of a famous man and his young, secret lover is curated by the couple’s granddaughter, the art historian Diana Widmaier Picasso (along with Picasso scholar John Richardson). It is a story of a very private arrangement told through 80 Picasso paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs.

The exhibition begins with photos of Marie-Thérèse Walter, a confident, sunny 17-year-old French girl. Picasso saw her on the street in 1927, when the already-famous artist was 45 and married to Ballets Russes star Olga Khokhlova. “I am Picasso,” he said to Marie-Thérèse. His name meant nothing to her, but she said later that she found him charming.

In snapshots of Marie-Thérèse taken in Monte Carlo and Chamonix, we recognize the blonde bob and Grecian nose of one of the great Picasso faces: the crescent profile of the women in Guernica, the female figure in many of his best works.

Their affair lasted for over a dozen years, with Picasso arranging for his lover to be near his family at all times. But it began as a secret even from their friends, and remained so, to a certain extent, even after Marie-Thérèse had their child in 1935. When people would catch a glimpse of the girl, he’d call her the gardener’s daughter.

In Nue endormie (1932) and Nu couché (1932), charcoal-on-canvas sketches of a sleeping Marie-Thérèse, undulating lines trace her body. In early paintings she is abstracted, her figure broken down into geometric shapes; in others she is shown with lips sewn shut, or reduced to a set of initials on a vase: a cryptic monogram hidden in plain view.

This show has a tension that derives from placing intimate matters on display. That their relationship was clandestine, that Gagosian keeps the lights so low, and that many of the works come from private collections creates a frisson of voyeurism: Picasso may have made these works to be seen, but seeing them in this context we feel we are getting a peek at something that wasn’t meant to be shown.

In paintings and drawings of Marie-Thérèse such as Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge (1932) and La sieste (1932), Picasso drew attention to her breasts and pudenda. Judging by the number of sculptures in this show, he clearly enjoyed representing her voluptuous body in three dimensions. (One  Picasso catalogue notes dryly that the artist’s wife, Olga, a dancer, was flat-chested). Yet in his work, Marie-Thérèse also becomes an allegory for eternal youth, her skin rendered in lilac and a range of pinks. She is girlish even when most womanly, e.g., even when pictured nursing their daughter, Maya: while her nipples are depicted protruding pertly from her swollen breasts, her daughter might be a toy in her arms.

Most of all, Marie-Thérèse provided an endless site of experimentation for Picasso: sometimes she appears in electric, fauvist colors; other times the palette is muted; sometimes her figure is painted thickly and sometimes she is rendered by a single line; sometimes she is dressed up as the bride she would never become, Sleeping, thinking, reading, playing with dolls, nursing, Marie-Thérèse is a paradise of seemingly uncomplicated sexual and artistic fulfillment.

Some might consider Picasso a pederast for taking up with a girl not yet of the French age of consent. Yet he paints himself as the wounded minotaur. In Minotaure blessé et Naîade (1938), he is a love-sick boy or Humbert Humbert, the victim of his passion for a young girl. And yet, to hear him tell it, this passion is what restored him: he said at one point that meeting Marie-Thérèse saved his life.

In a film loop composed of old photographs, she seems happy, entertained by the adoration of Picasso’s camera, a model for only one pair of eyes.

The Gagosian exhibition is tightly focused: it omits Dora Maar, whom Picasso was seeing concurrently with Marie-Thérèse, as well as Françoise Gilot, his much-younger mistress through much of the 1940’s. Also missing is the postscript: his marriage to Jacqueline Roque in the 1960’s after his divorce from Olga in the 1950’s. (Roque, like Marie-Thérèse, took her own life after Picasso died.) It’s a show of strategic omissions and extraordinary visceral pleasures—a fitting framework for an affair.

It was not Picasso’s dreamy Marie-Thérèse paintings, but his cubist guitars that inspired the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin when Tatlin encountered them in Paris in 1914.

Shafrazi gallery’s exhibition of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1915-20) is dedicated to the dynamic architectural model of one of the most famous unbuilt buildings of the 20th century, on view for the first time in the United States.

Tatlin’s original 16-foot model was destroyed in 1932. The electric-powered piece at Shafrazi is a (rather disappointing) Swedish 1960’s scale reconstruction, albeit one with an impressive pedigree: it was built under the supervision of Tatlin’s original collaborator.

The 1,300-foot-tall behemoth this lost Constructivist curiosity anticipated ran into engineering problems and steel shortages and was never realized. Yet the utopian piece loomed large in the collective imagination of American artists of the 1960’s: during his lifetime the minimalist Dan Flavin, known for his fluorescent light tube sculptures, assembled 39 homages to Tatlin’s tower.

At Shafrazi, gears grind wearily, turning stacked geometric shapes intended to house branches of the Communist government. (The original model was operated by a small boy, hidden from view, turning a hand-crank.) The surrounding scaffolding is one part Eiffel tower and two parts vintage roller coaster. The structure is set at an improbable angle corresponding to the axis of the earth’s tilt.

Accompanying the Tatlin replica is a side exhibition, “Revolutionary Film Posters: Aesthetic Experiments of Russian Constructivism, 1920-1933,” consisting of two rooms of terrific vintage Soviet film posters shown to a blaring soundtrack of music from Sergei Eisenstein’s films. It is entertaining, but ultimately slight.

Tatlin’s notion of truth to materials—his belief that wood, metal and glass impose different necessary conditions on the art object—and his interest in the fusion of art and technology are one of the precursors of Donald Judd’s Minimalism, currently on view at David Zwirner.

Zwirner’s gallery, which recently began representing the Donald Judd foundation, reunites 12 works that figured in a 1989 Judd exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden. For obsessive enthusiasts of Judd’s work—and there are many—this chance to observe the first time Judd used colored anodized aluminum in such a large, floor-mounted format, as the gallery’s literature puts it, is cause for excitement.

For those not enticed by this formal description, however, there is the overall appearance of the exhibition. Light falls from the Zwirner skylights, catching each of the regal open aluminum boxes, hitting the orange and turquoise plexi interior panels and radiating onto the walls of the gray aluminum cubes. A subtle effect is produced that is both atmospheric and antiseptic.

From drawings on display we glean the logic of the show: large, open aluminum boxes with black, blue or orange inserts configured systematically; the dozen boxes together create a set of repeated forms.

Judd famously defined his works as “specific objects”—neither painting nor sculpture. He jettisoned most of the qualities that people associate with art (representation, flatness, composition) while retaining others (rectangularity, space, form and color). Judd’s objects are simple forms that employ new industrial materials like formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglass and brass.

As usual, Judd’s claim to the pure logic and compositional order seems suspect, and what you experience here is the beauty of the color and texture of these supposedly banal materials, and the eccentricities of what he proposed were systematic compositions.

As New York’s museums battle for visitors and put on exhibitions that sometimes seem safe or uninspired, commercial galleries are increasingly filling in the gaps. Dealers hire guards, pay commercial rents and manage block-long lines. Sure, these shows may be ways for galleries to advertise their clout to prospective clients, but they display remarkable artwork at no charge to the viewer, so, in the end, we all profit.

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Schwitters's bottle-green and brick-red assemblages and collages, their tram-tickets, cotton balls and newsprint showing through under diamonds of blue paint, are now on view in Princeton, in an exhibition organized by Josef Helfenstein of the Menil Collection and Isabel Schulz of the Kurt Schwitters Archive in Hannover. It's a sustained look at Schwitters's eccentric and immensely influential practice, and also something of an event: the only full-scale retrospective of his work in the U.S. was back in 1985, at MoMA.

The show starts with tiny, lapidary collages, like Merzz 53 Red Bon Bon (1920), a symphony of luminous reds and pinks set off by yellow and turquoise paper squares. Some, like MZ 163 Mit Frau, Spritzend (1920) echo the portraits Schwitters's academic training prepared him to paint, but most, like Merz 601 (Shifted Planes) (1923), are pure arrangements of shapes in a frame; all emphasize color, texture and material.

Schwitters wrote, too, and his irreverent 1919 poem "An Anna Blume" made him infamous. As nonsensical and colorful as as one of his collages--"Blue is the color of your golden hairs/Red is the color of your green birds" are some of its lines--he saw it as his ticket into the antiart group known as Dada; in an aspirational gesture, he emblazoned the word "dada" on the cover of the self-printed pamphlet containing the poem. Despite his overtures, however, the Dadaists rejected Schwitters, burning his "Blume" pamphlet at the 1920 Berlin Dada Fair. Too iconoclastic for more conventional artistic movements, Schwitters was too painterly and sentimental for Dadaism. Denied entry by the club he desperately wanted to join, he slapped stickers that said "Anna Blume" wherever he went; he interrupted other artists' talks by barking like a dog. And yet he was as energetic in his artistic activities proper as he was in his provocations, alternating between painting, printmaking, collage, stage design, poetry, and sculpture, all while collaborating with artists Hans Arp, Théo Van Doesburg and El Lissitzky on a periodical. These encounters with his peers led Schwitters to make work like the experimental Merz Portfolio (1923). Comprising six orange, gray, blue, and brown prints full of geometric shapes, it shows the influence of Russian Constructivism.

No purist, Schwitters readily blurred boundaries between the mediums of sculpture, painting, and even architecture. The surface of Picture With Spatial Growths/Picture With 2 Little Dogs (1920/39) features wooden knobs, lace and hair; stuck into a niche cut into the top right of the canvas are two plastic toy dogs.

He continued experimenting with writing. A recording of Schwitters reading his poem "Ursonate" (1922-32) reminds us of how alien his work must have seemed to its original audiences. The poem is pure sound (one passage reads: "zee tee wee bee/ zee tee wee bee/ zee tee wee bee/ zee tee wee bee/ zee tee wee bee/ zee tee wee bee Fümms"). It seems to echo the beeping of streetcars and machines. A friend recalls that at one reading: "the whole audience ... exploded in an orgy of laughter. The dignified old ladies, the stiff generals, shrieked with laughter, gasped for breath, slapped their thighs, choked themselves."

To describe his art, Schwitters invented the term "Merz." A bastardization of the German commerz (commerce), its meaning was elastic, and he incorporated it into the titles of most of his 300 early collages, as well as his DIY magazine, which ran from 1923 to 1932. "Merz" would end up being equal parts romantic self-invention and proto-pop branding.

He merged his nonsense word with Bauhaus, the name of the Modernist architecture and design school, to come up with Merzbau, the name he gave to a sprawling site-specific installation he began creating in his parents' Hannover home in 1927. A sprawling accumulation of found objects, Merzbau gradually spread through multiple rooms and floors, to the balconies and the attic, transforming these spaces into caves complete with stalactites and stalagmites of collaged elements. Reconstructed in this show from photographs taken before it was destroyed, Merzbau looks like a teenager's chaotically messy bedroom transformed by some chemical into a self-replicating, swift-spreading crystalline structure that has turned everything it's touched into pure, mad Merz.

The party ended. Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, and by 1934 Schwitters' advertising firm, Merzwerbe, had lost its contract with the city of Hannover. In 1936 he hid photographic negatives depicting conditions in Germany in an album cover and mailed them to Tzara in Paris. In 1937 the Nazis included his artworks in their exhibition of "degenerate" art, and sought Schwitters out for questioning. He fled to Norway with his son, leaving his wife behind in Hannover; she died of cancer in 1946, before they could reunite. From Norway, Schwitters went to Ambleside, in Northern England, where, living in exile in 1940, he tried to build another Merzbau, in a barn. He also made collages, and they look nostalgic: one late work of cut-up French airmail envelopes and letters suggests how much he likely missed his artistic contemporaries, living as he did in near-isolation in a country where he barely knew the language. He died, aged 60, in 1948, the day after he became a British citizen; his Merzbau in Hannover had been obliterated by bombs.

The Princeton exhibition emphasizes the postscript to this sad story--Schwitters's towering influence on post-war American art. The late Robert Rauschenberg began work on his iconic Combines in 1954, after encountering Schwitters's work at New York's Sidney Janis gallery in 1953. A Marcel Duchamp-designed poster for that exhibition is on display here, as are Schwitters collages from the collections of today's most prominent living artists: Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns, the last of whose well-known Target With Four Faces (1955) emerges directly from Schwitters's assemblages. Musicians too took notice: Schwitters imagined a score in which the tones would be produced by "violin, drum, trombone, sewing machine, grandfather clock, steam of water, etc.," 40 years before John Cage composed pieces using a watering can, a iron pipe, a bottle of wine, a grand piano, five radios and an electric mixer.

The extraordinary work on view in Princeton shows just how forward-looking Schwitters was, when he demonstrated that painting could extend forward from a flat plane and become objectlike; that environments filling a room could be called art (we now know this as installation art); that there could be a loose interplay between artistic mediums. Here's hoping a new generation of New York artists makes the trip to see it.

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Claribel was a doctor 20 years before American women could vote; she wrote passionately about the beauty to be found under a microscope. Etta, six years younger, had high school French and a taste for painting. Both favored black dresses worn with chunky pins and Belgian lace collars, the sensible garb of women who traveled easily between the laboratory and the salon. Stein wrote the poem "Two Women" about the Cones: "There were two of them, they were sisters, they were large women, they were rich."

These women arrived in Paris in time for the 1905 art exhibition the Salon d'Automne. They rented an apartment around the corner from Stein and her brother Leo, who were family friends, and accompanied the poet to Matisse's studio, where Stein bought his Woman With a Hat. Much ridiculed at the Salon, it was one of the pictures that got Matisse dubbed a "fauve," or wild colorist. (Etta chose his more traditional still life Yellow Pottery From Provence.) They followed Stein to portrait sittings at Picasso's Montmartre studio.

At 41 and 35, the sisters were just beginning their lives abroad when Baltimore society might have considered them spinsters. Receipts show money spent on cabs, Cézanne lithographs, and flowers for Stein. There were personal intrigues: that Stein dumped Etta to take up with Alice B. Toklas seems likely.

From Paris, they made a trip around the world--Budapest, Athens, Cairo, Shanghai--collecting ivory bangles, Buddhist figurines, Turkish mosque tiles and Indian silk scarves. Such items were not the finest of the Cone purchases, but they added notes of exoticism to art-filled apartments.

On their second trip to Paris, in 1922, the Cones had greater buying power. Their brothers' cotton mills made cloth for the U.S. military during the First World War and became the largest supplier of denim to Levi Strauss. Such was their wealth that when they went to the opera, they bought an extra seat on which to rest that day's purchases. They shipped home seven crates of art, and Claribel hired three staterooms for herself and her luggage. Upon her arrival in Baltimore, she was forced to take on a second apartment; her art had literally crowded her out.

If their taste was decorative--Etta's favorite of her Matisses was Interior, Flowers and Parakeets, a lushly patterned interior--and sometimes slight, it had the key qualities of deep pockets and unflinching commitment to the right artists. Between them, the Cones eventually acquired 500 works by Matisse and over 100 by Picasso. And they took risks: at a time when women collectors favored still lifes and landscapes, they didn't shy away from sensual nudes. The best of these are by Matisse: Standing Odalisque Reflected in a Mirror, Two Negresses (their arms intertwined) and the bronze Reclining Nude III. Delacroix's painting Perseus and Andromeda, purchased from the Steins, is typical of the Cones' unconventional eroticism, the naked princess chained to a rock being one of the racier subjects in Greek mythology.

Etta became the keeper of the sisters' treasures after Claribel died in Lausanne at age 64--not before buying a Courbet landscape earlier that day. Their art was beginning to gain institutional acceptance: this was 1929, the year the Museum of Modern Art was founded. For the next 20 years, Etta maintained Claribel's apartment and one of America's finest collections of modern art. Her fortune grew through the Great Depression, and Etta's purchases after 1930 were made with the idea that the collection would ultimately become a gift to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Accordingly, her taste became bolder. Among her acquisitions were Women of the Mango (Vahine no te vi), an iconic 1892 Gauguin, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude of 1935. The nude's body is a smooth melon-pink against a background of blue tiles; the painting points to a geometric abstraction the sisters never fully embraced.

We now see the Cones above all as prescient collectors, but you get the sense that they were searching, in their travels, for freedom from the narrow roles they might have inhabited back home. Collecting transformed the Cone women from mothers and wives manquée to connoisseurs of radical art; they remade themselves as patrons who found meaning and left a legacy in their relationships with Matisse and Stein. From Baltimore to the Bateau-Lavoir, the Cone sisters found an exhilarating escape; we're lucky to have their souvenirs.

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The setting of "America" is appropriate, as Ligon, now fifty years old, came of age in the Whitney Museum of American art. Born in the Bronx, he was trained as an artist at the Whitney's theory-driven Independent Study Program, and was a star of the 1991 and "identity-politics" 1993 Whitney Biennials (surveys of new American art).

The chronological survey begins with small, relatively unassured abstract paintings from the 80s that feature grey-pink passages reminiscent of Philip Guston. Scratched into their surfaces is illegible hand-written text, giving the impression that Ligon was trying to inscribe personal meaning onto abstract painting. From here, Ligon moves to stenciling letters on the paintings à la Jasper Johns, and his juvenalia suddenly coalesces in the placard-size oil on enamel painting UNTITLED (I AM A MAN) (1988). The words in this affecting piece, and its scale, derive from signs carried by striking black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968. In it, you can see the 28-year-old artist discovering that stenciled letters are more searing than cursive script, and transforming the personal and diaristic into the political and public.

This discovery would become the basis of his first mature body of work, exhibited in 1989 in Brooklyn. Smeared and impastoed oil stick, gesso and graphite stenciled text paintings made on wooden doors reproduce quotations about being black in America. Sources range from Zora Neale Hurston ("How it feels to be colored me") to Ice Cube ("Wrong Nigga to Fuck With"). Ten of these works are on view at the Whitney: in each, the text starts out fully legible, but appears increasingly blurred and darker as repetitions of the quotation progress towards the bottom of the painting. With each successive reiteration, Ligon implies, crisp declarations about race get more muddled, to the point of becoming indecipherable echoes.

One of Ligon's prints from this period is a devastating self-portrait in words: "Ran away, Glenn. Medium height, 5'8", male. Closely cut hair, almost shaved. Mild-looking, with oval shaped, black-rimmed glasses that are somewhat conservative... Full-lipped. He's black. Very warm and sincere, mild-mannered and laughs often." This description and others--written by friends about Ligon--replicate the missing-person reports posted by slave owners, while also evoking newspaper personals ads. Combining the horror of turning a person into an possession with the pain of objectifying your self in search of love, the series reveals a nerdy, shy, smart Ligon; also, a gay Ligon. Other prints take the form of frontispieces to fictional slave narratives: "the life and uncommon sufferings of Glenn Ligon, a colored man, who at a tender age discovered his affection for the bodies of other men, and has endured scorn and tribulations ever since ..."

Another room shows Ligon thinking through Robert Mapplethorpe's The Black Book (1986), an erotic series of photographs that fetishizes the black male nude. Ligon's 1991 response was Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, which put on view the Mapplethorpe photos plus a talmudic host of commentary annotating the images with quotes from critics, politicians, friends, and men at the gay bookstore where The Black Book was sold. The piece succeeds because it isn't didactic. Instead, it is a demonstration of one artist sorting out his reaction to another; Ligon lets us see himself befuddled, questioning, turned on, self-loathing, and lets you draw your own conclusions.

It's worth remembering what it was like to be gay before Google, when you had to physically find the bookstores and mix tapes that gave give you a sense of community; it was a time when the mainstream was perhaps more blatantly hegemonic than it is now and the alternatives more tantalizingly elusive. In Ligon's work, borrowing snippets of text and music and images feels more personal than the 1970s media appropriations of Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. Ligon invokes literature's power to introduce you to new ways of understanding yourself.

Two penultimate rooms bring together text paintings made from coal dust and black paint (their glistening letters evoke Andy Warhol's diamond dust silkscreens), and silkscreens of figures like Malcolm X and Harriet Tubman on canvas and paper printed over with discordant blocks of color. The latter works also reprise Warhol, although Ligon's imagery here derives from recreations of 1960s Black Pride coloring books, which he had children at Minneapolis's Walker Arts Center color with crayon in 2000. Large, modern takes on a 1960s iconography of racial pride, these pieces are some of Ligon's best work, and it's buoying to encounter them so late in the show. A final gallery displays Ligon's most recent strong installation work: pale thin neon tubing with black paint slightly obscuring the glow spelling out words like "Negro Sunshine," and, of course, "America."

This retrospective, organized by Scott Rothkopf, could benefit from a curatorial edit. In its fear of an inch of empty white wall, it is laid out more like a magazine article than an art show. The focus is on Ligon the painter, yet his prints, public projects and photographic works are often more arresting and memorable.

Still, the show is welcome, not least because it's timely. Ligon came of age artistically in the 1990s, as part of a generation of American artists including Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson whose work dealt explicitly with race, gender and sexual identity. As art moved on from identity politics, their work of that era began to look dated. These days, however, with young artists like K8 Hardy and Rashid Johnson taking new approaches to the politics of identity, this work from the 1990s and its strategies are increasingly relevant.

More relevant than ever, in fact. The call for the President's birth certificate reminded us that there are still people for whom blackness and Americanness are incommensurate. It's a reductive and disenfranchising line of thought, the continued existence of which is an argument for ceasing to think of Ligon's identity politics art as a 1990's phenomenon and starting to think of it as deeply germane to the present moment. President Obama already has: he added Ligon's Black Like Me No. 2 (1992) to the White House collection when he took office. Whether or not you see something of yourself in Ligon, it's hard not to see something of Ligon's dilemma in our political world as you take in this thoughtful survey.

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With 43 drawings and 28 sketchbooks tracing his work from the 1970s to the present, this is a drawing show where you don't need reading glasses. A few early works in the first room map in charcoal on paper something Serra drew, but soon giant oily shapes take over. Triangle affixes a 6-foot triangle to the wall. It's solid black, sculptural, smearily gestalt. The drawing is not about how your eye sees line, but how your body reacts to its massive shape. A number of pieces have been remade for the exhibition; the galleries smell like fresh oil paint, like newly cut hay to an art viewer. Black paintstick--an oil-based, oversize crayon--is Mr. Serra's medium of choice. This is the ideal art exhibit for someone who is color blind. Every piece is black.

Donald Judd wrote in 1965 that "half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture," and you get the sense that Mr. Serra got the memo. In the late '60s, he made up a list of verbs on a sketchbook page. which is on view: "to roll," "to crease," "to fold," "to time," "to laminate," "to scatter," "to grasp," "to knot," "to cut," "to curve," "to remove." "To draw," and "to paint" were not among them.

Mr. Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939. A muscular man with an M.F.A. from Yale and two years of looking at art in Paris and Italy under his belt, he was 28 living in New York in a loft on Greenwich Street, supporting himself by moving furniture. He had just started to work in lead, fiberglass and rubber. At about this time Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Sol Lewitt had been in the 1966 Primary Structures show at the Jewish Museum; their move to make impersonal, reconstructable work and use the gallery as an installation environment is evident. But Mr. Serra's real community is Robert Smithson, Eve Hesse, Yvonne Rainer and Bruce Nauman--people who politicized and eroticized Minimalism, who above all brought it back to the body. Mr. Serra's brother is the counterculture San Francisco trial lawyer Tony Serra ("More freedom for more people through law is a beautiful concept"), and both Messrs. Serras may err on the side of defiant anti-institutional idealism.

In Blank, two giant facing rectangles press on either side of the narrow walls of gallery. Walking through the show you realize Mr. Serra's work is not compositional. It doesn't have parts or bases. When you get close, you see his infinitely dense shapes are held in place with tiny black staples pushed directly into the wall. If the show is not about painting, or even drawing, it is about scale, mass and the way planes pull at you. It's like meditation: You start to notice how you stand on the balls of your feet, the way certain things attract you or repel you.

The 1970s drawings are also often funny, even endearing. In Institutionalized Abstract Art, a black circle with a 90-inch diameter has been paintsticked directly on the wall about 7 feet up. The black registers as absence, a hole in the white wall, and the piece looks like a giant cartoon mouse hole. Mr. Serra knows that black empties out the steel shapes in Forged Drawing, so that rather than massive, these paintsticked sculptures look hollow, like pipes. It wasn't clear to me that laughter would be a welcome response, though, and the glee the works elicited seemed a little out of place, so I stifled it.

It was the 1980s when Mr. Serra was at his best. Pittsburgh has slightly Guston-y radiant shapes, and time has haloed the paper with oil around the two barely touching paintstick squares. He was ticked off at the government the year he made No Mandatory Patriotism, two rectangles just touching at top with a wedge of white showing through their lower facing edges. (Tilted Arc, that 1981 debacle of site-specificity once installed at the Jacob K. Javits federal building, was removed in 1989 after much public debate; another drawing from the same year is titled The United States Government Destroys Art). This is the best room in the show, where Mr. Serra wields with delicacy the powerful relationships of form to form and artwork to viewer.

In the 1990s, the scale of the work grows smaller. These more picturelike drawings recap earlier breakthroughs. Their size and framing seems to retreat from the kind of engagement with the viewer and the walls that made the earlier rooms thrilling. In the late 1990s and 2000s, square-framed circles like Robert Frank and out-of-round X swirl paintstick into what looks like black radiant suns with a centrifugal velocity. They aren't resolved and seem on the verge of proposing a problem that other artists will have to solve.

The show's final room puts on display 28 of Serra's never-before-exhibited notebooks. Almost jarringly representational after the exhibition's insistence on pure form, these drawings are like postcards from places you'd want to see Mr. Serra sketching: the Giza Pyramids, the Guggenheim museum, the Le Corbusier Chapel in Ronchamp, Machu Picchu. Four videos, among them the literal Hand Catching Lead, round out the show's generous definition of drawing.

The artist is now 72 years old. He spent three weeks at the Met installing his retrospective, and the staff there seemed proud and almost proprietary of his presence, as if the artist himself were an artifact on loan. Mr. Serra at the opening pointed out that the Met was exhibiting his work simultaneous to Cézanne's Card Player series; Serra's One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) suggests another way to view the mass and weight of the planes of paint in Cézanne.

Speaking with Michelle White, associate curator at the Menil, I was told that the Met's galleries were remodeled to accommodate Mr. Serra: The continuous decorative molding along the base of the walls had been taken out to install his often floor-to-ceiling works. (You can spot the remains of wainscoting along one stubborn wall.) The museum's molding is gone for good, and this is fitting--if works in the Met have influenced Mr. Serra, this exhibition has in turn definitively made the Met more modern.

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Sonia Delaunay's life spanned nearly a century (1885-1979), and she worked in textiles, theater, film, fashion, interiors, drawing, ceramic, neon, posters and painting. "Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay," at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, shows 300 pieces, highlighting her influential textiles, thanks in part to the recent discovery of her fabric swatch books, found above the family washing machine by an heir to the department store that commissioned Delaunay's textiles designs. Experiencing her oeuvre in this show is like finding an artifact in the laundry room--the life of an innovative 20th-century modernist in a pile of fabrics, blouses, dresses, hats and bathing suits.

Born in Ukraine and raised by her uncle in St. Petersburg, Sonia Terk went to study art in Paris. To remain in Paris against the wishes of her family, she married her openly gay gallerist; shortly after, she met the painter Robert Delaunay. "You don't want her--I do," is what one friend recalls he told her husband. Sonia and Robert married in 1910, two months before the birth of their son, and were partners and creative conspirators until Robert's death, in 1941.

The Delaunays in the 1910s were interested in the perception of color. The simultaneous contrast of colors--the idea that color placement was responsible for seemingly duller or brighter colors, a concept introduced by chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul in the 19th century--influenced French painters from Delacroix to Seurat. Simultanéisme, the Delaunays' take on Chevreul, looks like vivid, often circular abstract color combinations and is as visionary as it is scientific.

Delaunay's patchwork dresses are abstract paintings for the body. Worn for dance performances and films, her early garments explore how colors intensify with motion. In 1925, Delaunay showed her experimental fashions in the Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. She put her work in a Paris storefront, the Boutique Simultané. Orders came, and her label, Maison Delaunay, employed seamstresses and embroiderers. They made clothes for the newly modern woman who swam, drove and went to parties in dresses made of poems and paintings. This woman might have worn Delaunay's Driving Cap (1924-8), which takes the Chevreul color circle and turns it into a silk-and-wool-embroidery-on-cotton-canvas target for the head in motion; or the blue, pink, gray and yellow halter knitted wool Bathing Suit (1928), which renders the body an abstract canvas diving into the ocean.

After 1925, Delaunay's clothing makes you want to be the woman who wears it: bold ikat-y stripes, hand embroidery, jewel tones, inventive design. Shawl (1925-30), an interlocking two-tone, hand-knitted wool blouse, had several viewers of this exhibition ready to walk out in it. Her initiated clients included the wives of Modernist architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Delaunay's contemporary artistic inheritors might be Sara Lucas and Tracey Emin with the 1993 London Shop; Andrea Zittel and her utopian smocks; or Polly Apfelbaum, who works with abstract color installations and textiles. This period of Maison Delauney's innovative and beautifully made clothing experiments would close with the stock market crash of 1929.

Delaunay found work designing textile patterns from the 1930s through the 1960s for Metz & Co., the Dutch department store. Gerrit Rietveld also designed for the firm--his iconic painted wood Red and Blue Chair (1917) and the oak and brass Zig Zag Chair (1932-4) are on display. Today, the angular lines and primary-color facings of this furniture and of Delaunay's geometric patterns look as IKEA as they do De Stijl or Orphist; their radical forms became standard stuff. Delauney lived on Rue St. Simon in a white-painted, light-filled studio with a high sleeping loft, an apartment unusual for a 50- and 60-year-old woman to inhabit in the 1940s that, like her textiles, looks normal to us today. Designers like Rietveld and Delaunay subtly and thoroughly altered the details of our daily lives; this is their lasting legacy.

Today, on the Metz & Co Web site the denim brands bear utopian names--True Religion, 7 for All Mankind--but aspire to do nothing more than put you in a pair of pricey pants. It is worth remembering a time when a designer and painter like Delaunay worked to conflate the spheres of art and life, and conspired to change the world.

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