World War I traumatized Europe and changed life forever, but in its aftermath, 90 years ago, no cooperative effort was more inspiring than the will to improve humankind’s relation to the world by rethinking the conditions under which art comes into being. Testing this was the Bauhaus, in theory and practice. At first, as directed by Walter Gropius (1919-28) yet with strong mentoring by Johannes Itten, it was thought that guild practice might resurrect artisanal handicraft to harmonize the individual and society. A striking product of this thinking is a sculpture carved by a former soldier in 1919 from what was once a propeller blade, remarkable in that it sublimates an instrument of war by opening the surface to curve upon curve in an aesthetic of strong dynamical form.

Itten, judged too mystical by his peers, left the Bauhaus the legacy of his celebrated fundamentals course in form that carries over to the subsequent phases (and in adapted form, to many art schools today). A general expressionism under Itten disappears, and the lexicon of essential constructivist elements comes to inform all design. But again, this phase is less scripted than we had come to believe. Along with trials in stained glass by Josef Albers are fine furnishings, from cabinets to weavings that bring traditional techniques in line with modern technologies. Of the many wonderful pieces here is the ensemble of objectified geometrical eloquence in a coffee and tea service designed by Marianne Brandt, a student of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, head of the metal workshop. Although Brandt had developed her design to be mass-produced, here on view is the deluxe version in silver, ebony and glass that she had made especially for a friend in 1924. Featured by the curators to make their point about the aesthetic emphasis of the Bauhaus program under Gropius, the service also directs our attention to the group collaborations required to pool artisanal expertise to produce any object. The collaborative nature of much-authorship marks Bauhaus design and distinguishes its specific nexus of form through function. 

Meanwhile, and off to one side, the ludic principle that is hard-wired in the human species is represented by Paul Klee. Together with objects from the nursery, first-rate Klee paintings signal the respect with which the Bauhaus faculty treated imaginative play.

That, in the circumstances, painting represented only an avatar of design is obvious, from the way the technologies of industry find both functional and imaginative expression through photography, film and theater, under the influence of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, the conspicuous figure among the faculty who promoted the arts of light and motion as expressing the spirit of the modern age. Can you imagine that in this exhibition, Kandinsky makes only a cameo appearance!

The point in all this—a point extremely well finessed by the curators—is that design is a comprehensive term for the organizing forces informing art of all sorts. Nothing dramatizes this argument better than the conspicuous sight of furnishings now considered classic modernist and familiar to us through mass production. Marcel Breuer’s 1927-1928 cantilevered club chair in chrome-plated tubular steel and canvas sits right by the display of vintage promotional literature for the chair manufactured by Standard Möbel, Breuer’s own company. With profits going to his business and not to the Bauhaus, Breuer was effectively competing with Gropius and the institution, which included a conflict over intellectual property rights. The social forces configuring the Bauhaus’ successes may be only an undercurrent in this exhibition, but they are there for all to read: The laboratory of design ideas intended to change the world was before long a threat.

From without, the school’s innovative synthesis of art and technology drew fire from more and more hostilely conservative German governments. Readily affordable, well-designed furnishings from this period of the Bauhaus are on view to suggest that, had it been allowed to survive, this alembic for design might well have also demonstrated an ethics informed through social responsibility: All classes should be able to live in environments that work well and are beautiful because they are humanly fit for use.

A last attempt to sustain the Bauhaus occurred under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, from 1930 to 1933.

A final word apropos of post-pop museology: Although this show has just opened, the first edition of the exhibition catalog has already sold out, which proves that an historical show rich in cultural implication can draw people to its concerns. Indeed, the caliber of conversation overheard through eavesdropping on engaged visitors of all kinds has never been higher!

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 “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, from November 8, 2009, through January 25, 2010.

Dan Flavin’s sculptural installation is a surprise even for those viewers who know his work well, for to enter the galleries at David Zwirner is to be blown back by near blinding color-drenched light. Induced to see the source of the color reflected off the walls of farther-off rooms, the viewer is hooked; and by the time she encounters the mere industrial fluorescent lamps that are the source of illumination, it is too late to protest. For once, the seven outsize spaces comprising the Zwirner gallery help rather than hype the art on display, by providing a situated unfolding of fluorescent lamps in series, leaving one to discover why an art of arithmetic matters.

For all its spectacular qualities, the installation steers the viewer to pace himself, to reflect on the concept of number, as the broad spacing of the lamps compels one to swivel to see how combinations of one, two and three elements permute and progress within each room—whether these fluorescent tubes are fixed along the walls at their centers or their corners. There is nothing dry about Mr. Flavin’s Minimalism. Untitled (for John Heartfield) (1990), for instance, looks for all the world like modernist branding irons. Mounted vertically on the walls are red fluorescents punctuated with short, perpendicular elements, the entirety bathed in blue light—not red, owing to the reflected light from an adjacent barrierlike installation. Although the fluorescent barriers in the next room draw attention to the space they block off, they are not nearly as compelling as Mr. Flavin’s manipulation of the ambient color, turning architecture into painting by way of linear sculpture. From room to room, the Minimalism on display here is about economy of means but certainly not about poverty of means, as color makes arithmetic structure, well … vivid.

The remotest thing from the all-beige décor now often called minimal and meant to give no offense, Minimalism arose in the 1960s to shake sculpture loose from all the accretions of figure, anecdote and ornament. As theorized by Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Carl Andre, sculpture had lagged behind painting in this regard. In clarifying what was intrinsic to sculpture, they argued, sculpture could prove its own necessity. At its most rigorous, Minimalism shunned color to keep distant from painting, and refused even to consort with traditional sculptural materials and technologies, instead articulating sculptural volumes with aluminum grating, plywood, bricks and other materials swiped from basic household construction.

From this mandate of necessity comes Flavin’s definitive The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham) (1963), re-created for this show and essential viewing no matter what. Spaced out are vertically oriented daylight fluorescent lamps. Retrieved from their common utilitarian function of lighting rooms from overhead, these lamps become something else—way stations for the pilgrim to contemplate number. One, two, three—concepts neither mathematicians, philosophers nor theologians ever tire of contemplating. And for good reason.

“Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions” is on view at David Zwirner Gallery, 525 West 19th Street, through Dec. 19]

COUNT THEM: five small paintings occupying the large gallery at Peter Blum in Soho but spaced in such a way as to accord with a Fibonacci series—the number series describing a spiral. This is the decision of the Swiss-Austrian artist Helmut Federle, whose works are on view.

An installation so anomalous as this draws our attention to its cause, and points the way to interpreting the paintings for certain symbolic content. Even before we approach the works, we are prepared to read the visual appearance of their compositions through a law of form. Indeed, each of Mr. Federle’s small abstractions repeats the composition of a rotated plane of thinly applied sludge-colored paint, producing by degrees an angular spiral more and more dark and turgid as the layering builds up the surface. At the center is an illusion of a luminous oculus. The spiral construct is, of course, meant to conjoin the mathematical and the mystical, and, as Kandinsky might say, convey to us an inner resonance. 

Inspiring in the abstract, nonetheless this set of paintings seems constrained, perfectionist. This work is better understood as an aspect of Mr. Federle’s celebrated practice, dedicated as it is to working the primal matter of paint in different ways to reveal the potential form inherent in structure and series and yet also in chaos. This current show, called “Scratching Away at the Surface,” should be understood in light of an ongoing, open-ended embrace of the extremes, including disorder—at which Mr. Federle is brilliant.

“Scratching Away at the Surface,” now on view at Peter Blum Gallery, 99 Wooster Street, runs through Jan. 2, 2010.

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And yet this does not quite explain why the extreme art of William Blake looks as fresh as it does unless one takes into account the curatorial wisdom to invent a retrospective that itself passes from earthly struggles to otherworldly transfiguration. So in the single squarish gallery devoted to this show, one finds cardinal points of reference: to the south, engravings after Michelangelo, Watteau and Fuseli, showing the fundamental craft by which Blake was to be first known; to the east, friends and followers, where again Fuseli, yet also Flaxman and Palmer—all loose cannons, and each in his own way—embody the cohort of individuals in pursuit of personal expression as empires were cracking under revolutionary forces and neo-Classicism no longer bound the artist to its will; to the north, the rarely seen entirety of The Book of Job (1805-10), watercolors commissioned by the civil servant, Thomas Butts, who gave Blake the opportunity to manifest Job’s personal spiritual struggle as a proud pageant of the One against the Many; to the west from “Continental Prophesies” is the relief etching America: A Prophecy (1793), born of fiery revolution and a fledging experiment in liberty; at last returning south, for late watercolor illustrations again commissioned by Thomas Butts, for Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso (1816-20), to celebrate the variable states of spiritual indwelling, from melancholy to mirth, and under the presence of the transforming sun.

From this last series is The Sun at his Eastern Gate. An inspired composition, this shows a figure elevated in its mandorla of flame rising above the landscape it touches. Here, too, is the consequence of a lifelong love of Gothic art. Blake had drawn and redrawn Gothic art when it was still out of favor because he found organic life in its attenuated proportions, and here is his proof: a calligraphic grace that entwines the figure and field and gives all form buoyancy.

The many amazing drawings in this show are that much more vibrant, however, for being seen in the context of the series in which they were done and for being made available in the context of a lived life. Beyond this, it is helpful to remember that though exceptional in many ways, William Blake was living through some of the greatest tectonic shifts European culture has even seen: With each fresh avowal to revolution, peoples underwrote new apocalyptic visions and lurid aftermaths. In this sense, Blake’s extreme art tracks the story of his age.

NOT JUST A companion to the exhibition, then, is “Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings,” a show across the hall in the Morgan Library that gives Blake’s visionary art still further cultural context. The period’s intrigues are magnified, perhaps, by viewing the shows in reverse chronological order. What the cultural world in France was like before revolutions and liberties comes to seem both beautiful in itself and fascinating in its own visionary proposals for an urbane critical spirit enjoyed by an educated public.

Antoine Watteau’s extravagant natural talent allowed him to rise from obscurity to stardom very fast before he died young, in 1721, and here are several of the most luminous of his drawings, one redrawn emphatically to reinforce the structural relation of the shoulder to pelvis—a great moment to catch a glimpse of how the artist actually thinks proactively in his studio practice.

Of the several chalk drawings by Pierre-Palu Prud’hon, there is the much admired gravity of a portrait of Empress Joséphine, done in 1805, and another work drawn with blunt energy and depicting a cupid whose success in delivering an amorous blow dart to a now tearful victim registers in his own wry self-satisfaction.

All the heavyweights are here, from Boucher to David, represented with superb examples of their work in styles and with themes that convey the mentalities of an age, one not without its visionaries as well. A perennial favorite for the Enlightenment’s paper architecture is the proposal for a library by Étienne-Louis Boullée; in pen, ink and wash, the artist’s drawing has enclosed an outdoor space to create a vast barrel-vaulted hall lined with books and opened to light through an oblong oculus, to express the hope that through an educated public who can avail themselves of books, human discourse can occur and bring about a world of reasonable harmony. What a preposterous idea!

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“William Blake’s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun’” and “Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings,” are both on view at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, through Jan. 3, 2010.

A test of Abstract Expressionism has been how an artist can sustain an authentic painting practice long after his reputation is secure. After all, productivity in art is not the same as fecundity, as it often yields a recycling of skill and taste to formulaic styling. It is an open secret that the productivity weighing against greatness in the career of Abstract Expressionist Sam Francis makes it imperative to judge his work on a painting-by-painting basis.

That said, the singularity of several of his compositions on canvas and on paper make “Sam Francis: 1953-1959,” now at L& M Arts, a show decidedly worth a visit. Installed to advantage are early paintings that explore the possibility that Abstract Expressionism need not foreclose on joy nor put the kibosh on sensuality. Francis’ mark produces a sort of vermiculation with which he composes a surface, piece by piece. Starting loosely, then going back to tighten the composition from part to part, Francis sustains an overall organic growth. Black, 1955, is a firm example of this.

But the painting that will have you grateful for his talent is Red, 1955-56. Large and opulent yet also fluid, Red seems to have been one of those creative miracles that resolves before the artist had a chance to rehearse and micromanage the results.

“Sam Francis: 1953-1959” is on view at L & M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, from Oct. 15 to Dec. 12.

IF NOT Matisse, then the team of Picasso and Braque is evidently mentoring the proponents of New York School modernity, for the obligation to integrate an American idiom into the brilliant European avant-garde is very much on the minds of artists working in New York before and after World War II. The question is, is it possible to further the cause of collage without reiterating all that Picasso and Braque put in play? At his best, Conrad Marca-Relli shows that the collage, a technique to construct a painting using actual commonplace materials, can be enlisted for expressive eloquence as well.

A retrospective of sorts, “Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945-1967” begins with the figurative dreamscapes best considered to be informative of quasi-metaphysical tendencies in painting, as though Marca-Relli was trying to reinvest the aesthetics of de Chirico with existentialism. When, however, this artist embraces collage, something paradoxical results: The more he engages this art of surfaces, the more profound the expression.

Not that every work is good, but what is telling in this show is that strongly constructed paintings appear in each of several different approaches to the problem of collage. From 1962 are three ringers: The Samurai #2 L-3-62, an urgently intense yet offbeat compound of collage and mixed media that gets more interesting the closer you look; Project F L-14-62, an all-white surface built of tacked-on surfaces aged and yellowing, its patina and nails relieving a homogeneity that could be too placid otherwise; Cunard L-8-62, a bold red, white and blue work that despite all odds remains without cliché.

“Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945-1967” remains on view at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70 Street, through Nov. 14.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM CONTINUES to provide the idiom of choice for younger artists, one of whom is Mary MacDonnell. “Touch” is her aptly named show, comprised of drawn paintings on board and on paper that emphasize tactile, not optical, properties of paint.

Ms. MacDonnell has produced an ingratiating exhibition that proves her participation in the slipstream of process-oriented responses to Abstract Expressionism associated with post-Minimalism. A variety of gestural marks is evident; and in her favor is that, despite the assorted technical approaches, the work does not rely on novelty for its effect. But neither does the layering communicate process so much as a staging area for gesture.

“Touch” is on view at James Graham & Sons, 32 East 67 Street, through Nov. 7.

“THE LEGACY OF Jackson Pollock,” written by Allan Kaprow in 1958, two years after the artist’s death, proved Kaprow to be a kind of Virgil to the underground alternatives to Abstract Expressionism just when the style was at a dead end, or seemingly so. That and subsequent essays continue to demonstrate Kaprow’s value as an artist/theorist, and certain of his pieces remain vital after many years. Yard, originally done for the outside courtyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery (where Hauser & Wirth now stands), is one of them.

Yard is and isn’t a continuation of Abstract Expressionism. Now reinterpreted by three artists around the city—here and in two other boroughs—it reveals differing aspects of itself; in the rendering by William Pope L. inside Hauser & Wirth, tires pile up within the long, dark yet glaringly lit gallery where black plastic embalmed shapes can be almost seen, to cast the once matter-of-fact accumulation as a stagy, macabre reading of the original work.

Now, what is the etiquette for passing through the space as someone is coming at you from within the gallery? “Excuse me, Miss, I’d step aside but I’m about to be swallowed by a vortex of ghoulish inner tubes”?!?

Yard (To Harrow), 1961/2000, at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69 Street, will close Oct. 24.

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For a start, his is a vision in which ideas are alive. As if to prove the point, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum had to have put all its resources into organizing this vital show, and indeed “Kandinsky” gathers into its own collection the dispersed paintings and drawings that otherwise would take extensive traveling to see. The Museum, now massively refurbished, has opened the interior to outside nature and light, and in so doing has induced some measure of architectural elasticity and new interior vistas within the exhibition space, which originally was conceived with Kandinsky in mind.

Mounting the spiral are about 100 paintings (with drawings in side galleries), the artist’s developing vision is proved to be subtly comprehensive and not nearly as dogmatic as it was intellectually intuitive in its quest toward abstract otherworldly worlds. Divesting himself of the visual equivalent of literal copies and empirical facts, Kandinsky rejected naturalism for fantasy, then rejected fantasy for the apocalyptic imagination, then rejected apocalypse.

The exhibition presses the case for Kandinsky’s rapid early progress. Sketch for Composition II, 1909-10, is a sort of Stravinskian Firebird spun out in space. Part folktale, part pageant, part imbricated landscape, it shows Kandinsky’s fluent mastery of European and non-European decorative arts entirely synthesized. Having traveled from Russia to study art in Munich, by now Kandinsky seemingly learned from the process of painting each painting, advancing quickly, not looking back.

On January 2, 1911 Kandinsky first heard Arnold Schoenberg’s music; elated, he produced Impression III (Concert), January 1911, a canvas in analogy with his experience. Blaring color in brushstrokes and spots done in a hurry are nonetheless inscribed by the incisive mentality of someone who has comprehended a significant idea. What Kandinsky comprehended was the art of composing abstractly, made possible by letting color stains and spots resonate optically through a space unspecified and therefore receptive to fluid conception. As he theorized in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912, compositions need no external justification. Tone color may have issued from Wagnerian chromaticism but it culminated in Schoenberg, whose music and paintings Kandinsky so admired that he translated his essays, wrote on his paintings and invited Schoenberg to contribute to the first issue of the Blue Rider Almanac, 1912, co-edited with the painter Franz Marc, which was to act as a kind of symposium for all the arts. (Recall the Jewish Museum’s scholarly “Schoenberg, Kandinsky and The Blue Rider,” in 2003, amply demonstrating the synergistic creativity and tensions conducted through this friendship.)

From the miraculous year of 1913 came the inspired Black Lines, December 1913: stain passing through plangent color struck by quick calligraphic lines that keep recharging this most revolutionary of centripetal visuality. Another canvas also painted in 1913 provoked this comment from the critic Roger Fry, who, at great critical risk, had just introduced the art of Cézanne to a hostile British public: …one finds that after a time, the improvisations become more definite, more logical, more closely knit in structure, more surprisingly beautiful in their color oppositions, more exact in their equilibrium.  They are pure visual music… Indeed, by now Kandinsky has done many an equivalent to free jazz compositions that dare to relate expressively elemental painterly materials to each other and each other alone.  Well, if not literally free jazz, then something of the sort, “Free music” (the title of an essay contributed by N. Kublin to the Blue Rider Almanac), already having advocated “New harmonies with new chords. New dissonances with new resolutions.”

In 1914, just days after the declaration of World War I, Kandinsky was expelled from Germany for being an enemy national. The Great War changed his life and art forever, as the retropective glance across futurity does demonstrate. For Kandinsky, the futurity of his own initiative ends and a collectively initiated futurity begins. Even though Kandinsky survived once back in Russia, and helped advance the new radical cause to which art was put, he soon came to be displaced by a productivist program tough on individual imagination, and for which art as such was suspect. Meanwhile there were other repercussions. Were it not for the efforts of the painter Gabriele Münter to preserve the art he created while they lived together in Munich and Murnau, the most significant phase of Kandinsky’s production might well have been lost

Art between the Wars is a touchy subject.  Since war is traumatic for everyone, event for those who survive, it is no wonder that the art of the modern masters reflect hesitancies and missteps as the artists sought at once to retain their avant-garde stature while adapting to permanently altered cultural circumstances. Like Matisse, Picasso and Braque, Kandinsky’s art after World War I is patchy, not only because his being an arts administrator disrupted creative life but because the new cultural outlook demanded a new objectivity and, so, new artistic adjustment. White Cross, January-June 1922, reflects a stylistic shift indebted to Malevich and Suprematism, as if to reintegrate into Russian modernity—perhaps to create a rapprochment among the modernities of post War Europe now that, ousted from his leadership in the U.S.S.R. he was now back in Germany to teach at the progressive Bauhaus. A product of his new situation, Point, Line and Plane, written in 1923, shows Kandinsky’s creative energy channeled into pedagogical thought, in diagrams meant to construct a rational basis for the expressive elements and their composition for art. In 1933 the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus: again Kandinsky was dislocated.

Once in Paris, Kandinsky started painting again: but how to paint? Joining the charivari of postwar Dada disturbances was not an option, although the Dadaists had admired him; in any event, that moment had largely passed. Increasingly pronounced and in the spirit of the age, Kandinsky’s work from the 1920s on shows his tenacious research into signs and sign systems. Lines curvilinear or jagged, and horizontal, vertical or diagonal still carry differentiated expressive value when in conjunction with color, stained or daubed, brilliant or drab, nebulous or motley. These structural oppositions and conjunctions now welcome the iconic symbol into the mix, as though to reintegrate a sense of the semantic without reverting to the syntax of illustrative space. The example of his friend Paul Klee has left its mark. So has Surrealism, with its avidity for the leitmotif. Not like the Wagnerian love-death, the surrealist motifs that populate Kandinsky’s art toward the end of his life are ludic, absurdist and yet deliberatively elusive, so as to avoid being stigmatized by name.  Imaginary worlds have resurfaced, this time transmuted to image.

Still revolutionary, Kandinsky astonishes with an intelligence keen to reject the idiosyncratic and complacent solutions that tickle the surface of much art since. For his is a mentality at work, a mentality that is comprehensive in scope yet scruples to make every mark count as he accomplishes a fully sustained free fall in compositions improvisational and inevitable at once.

“Kandinsky,” is now on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, through January 13, 2010.

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“Getting a grip” is indeed the apt phrase for these assemblies of L-shaped panels, each placed as though to construct a painting that has the character of an inevitably set lattice. Part painting, part sculpture, the lattice serves the artist’s purpose well, for it emphasizes the palpable stuff of stretchers, canvas and pigment—materials from which a painting is built. Making a painting do the job of a wall was a legacy of the New York School’s color-field abstractions, and Mr. Novros “nails it.”

An untitled work from 1965-67 is definitive. Six panels configured stepwise comprise an open square painting, in earthy earth tones. Somber, decidedly making a point of avoiding an agreeable beauty, this work captures the attention and remains interesting long after the first glance because the syncopation of color against structure falls counter to our expectations. Playing structure against color is indeed Mr. Novros’ secret compositional tool. Perhaps that is why an untitled later sequence of panels lacquered in tints of green, blue and red does not read as trivially decorative against the vast gallery wall. In fact, the entire show succeeds where some other shows in the space have failed: Whether small, medium or large, Mr. Novros’ paintings are rhetorically scaled to their painting practice and not overstated by hanging in the gallery’s cathedral-like surrounds.

Quantity can effect a qualitative change, as it does with Mr. Novros’ decision to increase the number of artistic variables. Fifteen panels—some rectangular, some not—placed in a triple-tiered array distribute their color more freely, and yet, the more complicated the orchestration, the less intense the whole. As substantial as the more recent works are, the curious phenomenon is that they relinquish their grip on sequencing for structure and go for animating a wall with a syncopated effect that now does have the unintended consequence of looking like décor.  

“David Novros,” is on view at Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street, through September 26, 2009.   

BREAKING DOWN A painting into its components in order to build it again or build it differently may be something we take for granted, but in the ’60s this practice was a major force for refreshing the art. To celebrate its 35-year anniversary, Sperone Westwater has mounted “Zig Zag,” an international group of post-Minimal, Arte Povera, and a Conceptual art—the gang trespassing on the domain of painting and sculpture as we know it, and making wrong moves seem the right ones.

For some artists the issue was whether painting and sculpture could be brought together in the same object without compromising the independence of either medium. In Zig Zag (1966), a witty work that is “spot on,” Aligiero e Boetti proves it possible: dyed fabric, itself a surrogate for painting, zig-zags through a frame and so usurps the sculptural prerogative of occupying space. The question of whether sculpture can be made to issue from nature has yielded many works interesting in the way they elude form or design yet are compelling nonetheless. Especially important for this sort of sculpture are negative casts—that is to say, cast negative spaces, as Mario Merz had done, in an untitled work from 1968. Now displayed atop iron stands are wax chunks taken from the tree limbs’ in-between spaces. The point being: Don’t imitate nature; collect or gather nature. Or induce form from other people’s intentions. The conceptual artist Douglas Huebler created a hitchhiking project determined by the destinations of the drivers who stopped for him, the results of which he documented, as Alternative Piece #1 (1970). 

More singular and rarely seen works ranging from good to terrific, by Carl Andre, Jan Dibbets, Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman and Richard Tuttle, among others, celebrate this long-lived gallery that excels when it plays from strength.

Along with choice works gathered for “Heinz Mack: Paintings, 1957-1964,” “Zig-Zag” may be seen at Sperone Westwater, 415 West 13th Street, through Sept. 26, 2009.

AN ARTISAN IN everything he does, Jack Whitten’s love of craft is apparent in his current show at Alexander Gray Associates, with mixed results. In the main gallery are recent paintings. Colorfully striped panels painted in a variety of textured effects lack conviction, despite the claims made for them—indeed because the claims of being derived from military insignia seem frivolously realized. In the back gallery, however, is a knockout work, Zeitgeist Traps (for Mike Goldberg) (2009), in which all Whitten’s talent is mobilized in a memorial for a fellow painter.

“Jack Whitten” is on view at Alexander Gray Associates, 526 West 26th Street, through Oct. 17, 2009. 

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The exciting and harrowing story of this initiative unfolds in “Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya,” organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and now on view at the Grey Art Gallery of N.Y.U. The cultural complexity is not lost—indeed, it is finely narrated through the paintings on view, through Bardon’s and others’ visual notes yet also through original footage of the artists working on site. The catalogue is definitive, if only for the reason that curator Roger Benjamin enlisted essays from specialists, especially that of anthropologist Fred Myers, who did his fieldwork in Papunya in the 1970s and has written two books on the Western Desert people. 

The art itself is immediately compelling and needs no apology. Ceremonial designs transposed to permanent portable surfaces may alter the look of designs meant for sand, rockface and human bodies, but the cosmology remains intact and its content uninhibited. The Pintupi people tend to bold symmetrically ordered designs that reflect their hierarchical society; the Anmatyerre tend to filigree and interlace—more individualistically, comments Fred Myers. He also explains that these groups differ in their mentality and so in their attitude toward art. The Pintupi “are phenomenological,” and after laying out the design do not explain anything, but expect you to experience it; the Warlpuri “are cerebral, they explain everything.” Beyond this, differing ceremonial traditions, says Myers, also issue in distinct stylistic traits and characteristics.

Differences aside, all these language groups share a visual vocabulary of elements adaptable to narrating stories and circumstances. Evident is a vocabulary of concentric circles that situates place: a water hole, a tree seen from above, a campfire, or the mouth of a cave. If the circles establish place, the “traveling lines,” as they are called, link circle to circle in a dynamic map of paths, creeks, fingers and dancing trajectories. Swarming dots—the familiar signature of Aboriginal art to even the most inexperienced viewer—create zones of sacred ground within which the story is consecrated. (A few sacred images, because restricted from being viewed by most Aborigines, are reserved for the Grey Gallery’s downstairs space and published in the catalog’s removable pamphlet.)

Dazzling topologies of the spirit, these paintings also put out unmistakable visceral force. With its red meanders and brilliant white dotted infill, Stars, Rain and Lightning, by Kingsley Tjunuerrayi of the Luritja, is proof of this charged expressivity; its intense skyscape is in dialogue with Van Gogh’s Starry Night—no doubt about it. Then there’s the cosmological layering and interlace typical of the Anmatyerre that give palpable presence to an idea, and for this, the excellent Women’s Dreaming about Bush Tucker, by Clifford Possum Tjapaljarri, would be proof enough; the artist upped the ante, however, by executing a montage of cosmological patterns! But for sheer power, the Pintupi artists, whose works are prevalent in this show, create arresting images time and again; an example is Mystery Sand Mosaic, by Shorty Lungkarta Tungurrayi. With many of the panels’ prepared grounds painted “blackboard color,” these images may seem too punchy, and yet the traditionally rendered sand paintings also give a vivid shout out.

The Papunya Tula Artists Company founded in 1981 by 20 or so of these artists now continues the artists’ collective whose genesis lay in the 750 works created in 1971-’72. This is the positive aftermath of a highly vexed backstory. It is to the credit of all who were involved in organizing “Icons of the Desert” that the art is respected and not treated as symptomatic of postcolonial trouble even as the postcolonial trouble is engaged as one of the strands in the true and present cultural interlace.

Can we really object to the shift from ephemeral to permanent medium and technique? A nagging thought, yes; but the cultural tremors seem much less than those that occurred when, say, European performance practice experienced the technological shift to valved brass instruments—the boom boxes of their times. And to object to preserving ritual is to forget the entire history of painting practice altogether. And for technological havoc, surely a far greater phenomenon is how the digital revolution has messed with our analog minds; so let’s get real.

 “Icons of the Desert,” may be seen at Grey Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, from Sept.1 through Dec. 5, 2009. Of related interested is a show of art representing the current Papunya Tula Artists cooperative, “We are Here  Sharing Our Dreaming,” at 80 Washington Square East, which runs from Sept. 12 through Sept. 26, 2009.

Art & Project, rather than any one artist, is the protagonist here. A permissive gallery program in Amsterdam that ran from 1969 to 2001, Art & Project offered possibilities for realizing proposals of all sorts yet favoring the post–Abstract Expressionist understatement that came and went in fugitive gestures. So rather than offering an arena in which to act (as art critic Harold Rosenberg would have put it), Art & Project created an area tolerant of activities and practices that barely impinge on one’s notice. Think of John Cage’s and Allan Kaprow’s sounds and activities sampled from the world as it is (for Cage and Kaprow remain tutelary spirits here). Down-home and unprepossessing graphics, snapshots, diagrams, albums and journals are the traces of work that appear only to disappear: to enter our field of vision but not to force themselves upon our attention. To change our way of thinking, perhaps, but not to mess with the environment.

Willfully noncommercial, the post-Minimal and conceptual reactions to heroics in art, at their best, were positive, redefining art as idea and purposeful activity. In a gesture of populist solidarity, doing graphics, taking snapshots, building installations utilizing cheap, readily available materials were ways of arguing that art resides not in craft but in creative schemes for a free society. Art & Project in Amsterdam was the permissive institutional framework for such an enterprise, and did indeed inspire some interesting works, but not always by artists best known to us.

THAT FAME is one thing but significance is something else again is one of the enduring lessons we take away from this world of ephemeral gestures. Fortunately for us, Mr. Cherix’s curatorial decision to level the playing field has given a few of these lesser-known artists the chance to prove the point that singular gestures may ultimately have more value than entire flashy careers.

As it happens, some of the better works are by Dutch-born artists Bas Jan Ader, Stanley Brouwn and the moving force behind Art & Project, Jan Dibbets. In a post–Abstract Expressionist climate, Ader performed himself falling—falling off a roof, bicycling and then falling into a canal—actions comic rather than existentially desperate. The filmed footage of his tumbles in 1970 records this gesture as mere actual occurrence. Stanley Brouwn’s Steps of Pedestrians on Paper (1960) shows that Brouwn may have been aware of Tire Print, the brilliant piece of Americana contrived by Robert Rauschenberg with Cage in 1951: At that time, with Rauschenberg guiding him, Cage redid “action painting” as he drove a car along a scroll of paper laid on the ground, leaving tracks, and so making a print. At least as significant, This Way Brouwn (1962) initiates an ongoing project of requesting drawn street directions from passersby, diagrams that remain definitive of conceptual art’s pragmatic and urban ethics and practice.

Along with diagrams, photography of a documentary nature marks the shift to objective conditions and purpose: and so it has with photographer Jan Dibbets, as a moving force behind the Art & Project gallery. Working in series had already become a trademark of Minimal Art’s will to objectivity by the time Dibbets came to it; but even so, his The Shortest Day at My House in Amsterdam (1970), an array of 80 color prints, encapsulates diurnal time as eloquently as one would wish, and meanwhile pointedly defeats any representation of picturesque scenery sought by eager tourists. A self-conscious use of the camera marks Dibbets’ art. Hyper-aware of the cultural cliché that the history of optics created of 17th-century Netherlandish painting, Dibbets became a specialist in using the camera against itself: showing the artifice in focal points, perspective corrections and other conventions we mistakenly call natural.

Sharing the spotlight with these native-born Netherlanders, however, is the German artist Charlotte Posenenske. The first to exhibit at Art & Project in 1968, she proposed that her modular sculpture made of industrial ducts be composed by the collector who might acquire it. In a way that Duchamp would have appreciated, Posenenske scripted an aesthetic indifference to composition and to her own taste, and Art & Project loved the idea.

What these artists endorsed by Art & Project share is an understated detachment from the international culture of Abstract Expressionism, engaged, as it were, from the sidelines. Another point in common: They are peripatetic, or, at least, accustomed to leaving home to seek their fortunes abroad, and perhaps returning again. And indeed, the point Mr. Cherix tries to make with this show is that travel is inherent in the generation of artists who do projects rather than make things. They are on the go: in and out of Amsterdam.

“In & Out of Amsterdam” also includes better-known artists in their early years: Hanna Darboven, Gilbert & George, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner.

Is this the best exhibition of conceptual art since sliced bread? No. The crucial show “Op Losse Schroeven: situaties en cryptostructurenm” [“When attitude Becomes Form”], organized by Wim Beeren in 1970 for the Stedelijlk Museum, remains a hallmark on the international scene. Close to home, a significant show was the tough, smart and prescient “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects,” organized in 1970 by Donald Karshan, then director of—believe it or not—the New York Cultural Center (a.k.a., Huntington Hartford Museum). In the United States, the best museum show to date may well be “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s,” at the Queens Museum of Art in 1999, where co-curators Jane Farver and Luis Camnitzer also delegated authority to more than a dozen specialists from around the world to give focused regional accounts of this international phenomenon. This is the way shows of major cultural ambition ought to be done.

editorial@observer.com

“In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976” remains on view at the Museum of Modern Art through Oct. 5.

Postminimalism is the zone here, and its major issue is to explore the social space that people inhabit wherever confronted by obstacles, whether constructed by artists or not.

So when the elevator doors open to the exhibition of Dan Graham’s work, do not be surprised when you see not very much of anything except for pavilions—transparent and/or reflective—and catch glimpses of yourself in their mirrored surfaces. These pavilions are to be approached. And entered? Yes, insofar as the pavilions are actual spaces; no, insofar as reflections thrown this way and that as you move defeat the sense of a fixed orientation.

A highlight of this show is the re-created pavilion Public Space/ Two Audiences (1976) that Mr. Graham made for the 37th Venice Biennale. An enclosed room to be entered, it is a succinct proposal about the discrepancy between the objective space and the subjective perception of such spaces.

Other works are not so strong. For instance, of the several pavilions treated in a video presentation, there is a promo for Yin/ Yang Pavilion (2003)—obviously not the same thing as the experience of it, nor how it evolved.

At a planning meeting a few years ago, architect Steven Holl had invited Mr. Graham to contribute a pavilion to the Simmons Hall dormitory being built for M.I.T. and suggested that it might be set immediately in the path of students’ cross traffic. What finally did occur was quite different: a small modish afterthought set upon a roof off one of the dormitory’s upper floors. A better survivor of the working process is the rooftop pavilion installed in 1989 at the Dia Foundation, when its location on 22nd Street was a constant reminder of postminimal and conceptual projects that required of the viewer only goodwill and curiosity about what is possible in light and sound installations. It was from the rooftop cafe designed by Mr. Graham that sitting for 20 minutes over cappuccino or Orangina offered the possibility of observing how others coped with the viewing pavilion just beyond the glass-walled café. And that was the point.

Most of Graham’s works, actual or virtual, are about observing and being observed in social spaces. This extends to his use of media, print and film—both. Early video pieces specifically remain definitive. Yet a more recent piece, Cinema (1981), is also worthwhile because as a model of a building into which a movie projection is inserted, Cinema induces an imaginary spectacle more complex than the movie theater it proposes to face onto a street.

Media is the point of origin and background for Dan Graham, and the Whitney Museum devotes its smaller galleries to filling us in on the skittish productivity of Mr. Graham’s early years, ranging from concrete poetry to punk rock criticism. After a year of co-directing the John Daniels Gallery in 1964-65—where he showed Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light sculptures and Sol LeWitt’s three-dimensional grids, and had planned to exhibit work by Robert Smithson—he had the luck to be heard giving a slide lecture by an editor of Arts Magazine, who offered to print some of the slides and text as a magazine spread. The result, “Homes for America” (1966), Graham’s countercultural intervention against mainstream suburban success, reveals Mr. Graham to have entered the art world as a drop-out with resentments against societal expectations of him, but now armed with the way to express that resentment. He has been building alternative spaces ever since.

[“Dan Graham: Beyond,” co-organized by Bennett Simpson of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Feb. 15–May 25, 2009), and Chrissie Isles of the Whitney Museum of American Art (June 25–Oct. 11, 2009)]

It is in this spirit that the Brooklyn Museum’s reinstallation of its Islamic art collection puts on view an exhibition within an exhibition: the small, pitch-perfect “Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam.” 

Imagine a display that creates an inviting context for manuscript pages and decorative objects ranging from the 10th to early 21st centuries to indicate how mystical lucidity and fervor is not to be possessed so much as … well, treasured. Wouldn’t you want to go and see? Reinstalling the Islamic galleries has provided Ladan Akbarnia, the Hagop Kervorkian associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, who organized this show, with the opportunity to rethink how knowledge of the Islamic world is represented.

Sufism would show that the beauty that is nature is a manifestation of God’s presence, to which we are to respond. Going further, ever seeking the beauty that makes ordinary nature extraordinary, we are to be more and more sustained by God’s presence in the natural world, whether as found in gardens that render paradise on earth or enjoyed in the light of the nighttime sky. Indeed, Koranic scripture honors the sky and the earth, both, in objects on view. 

For instance, light made palpable and analogous with the heavens may be sought in the gold and silver calligraphic verses extolling women in paradise on dyed-blue parchment from the folio of the celebrated “Blue” Koran, circa 10th century, from North Africa or Western Islamic lands. It’s intense. You stare at it, it stares back. You are the one that blinks.

Beauty, then, is the hint of the spiritual presence to be sought in all things, with a fervor usually reserved for the beloved. And the more caught up in this fervor, the more we forget ourselves, as the Sufis believe.

The dervish, unattached to food, remains identified by his beggar’s bowl as permanent symbol of devotion to otherworldly things—although we in the here and now succumb to the art of the shell’s carved sculptural form.

Unlike gratifying desires, seeking beauty through love becomes the goad to love as the universal transformative principle for all existence. In the Sufi version of Neo-Platonism, whether found in nature or cultivated in humans, love will transform poverty into riches, war into peace. For God loves beauty and the making of beauty.

A sample of Persian calligraphy from a Mughal album—a 16th-century Iranian work mounted on 17th-century Indian floral paper—inscribes romantic poetry that compares the flushed face of the beloved to the moon of which cypresses are envious. Innovative here is the album, a form that testifies to the love of the calligraphic treasure and the wish to preserve it, by Indian people of Iranian descent. In a splendid illustrated manuscript, Dervishes Reading, Dervishes Contemplating Love, from India, circa 1690, the subject of love must inspire interesting debates: Is the spiritual coextensive with life, or behind and beyond it? What relation does the extraordinary have to the ordinary? An aspect? A manifestation? A realization, rejecting corporeal nature, but requiring a person to transform it into embodied spirit? All of the above, yet not so easily settled.

That Sufism is a widespread force throughout Southeast Asia is apparent in the changing styles from object to object, indicating where and when Sufism took root. Given this, I wondered: What is uniquely Sufi in the art here?

Ms. Akbarnia answered this question. Apart from “specific Sufi elements, such as recognizable costumes, attributes known to identify various Sufi orders (axe, hat, robe, alms, bowl),” what identifies the Sufi presence are the known texts of “the mystical overtones.”

“Many of the themes that exist in Sufism have parallels in other faiths and cultural and intellectual traditions, and the same goes for their arts,” Ms. Akbarnia continues. “What makes them Sufi rather than simply mystical in nature is that they rest on the foundation of Orthodox Islam.”

Most of her attention was put to writing the text that accompanies the pieces to reflect contemporary knowledge of the history and culture there represented. Yet it is an immediate aesthetic privilege to see the restored painting of the martyrdom of Muhammad’s grandson Hyysan and to listen on audio to the chanting of the story, as it would have been sung in passion plays.

editorial@observer.com

 [“Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam” on view at the Brooklyn Museum through Sept. 6, 2009]