A Bacon ballpoint at the Tate (Photo courtesy Mutualart.com)

Museum conservationists are breathless about a hot new method of preserving art! It's called anoxic, or oxygen-free, storage and a recent five-year study at the Tate Modern has shown it to be surprisingly effective in slowing the deterioration of works of art.

Earlier this week, conservation scientists met at the Tate for a symposium to discuss the findings, The Art Newspaper reports.

“It seems that, despite real questions about the relationship between real-time fade rates and microfading, we are on the cusp of a sea change in the way we think about lighting and light-sensitivity of works of art, and this could have a profound impact on how we manage collections,” said [Tate head of collection care research Pip] Laurenson.

The process was used at the recent Met exhibit on Alfred Stieglitz and, in the Tate study, was found to be particularly effective in preserving the Tate's collection of Francis Bacon ballpoint-pen drawings

Not what you think it is

The relationship between photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, one of American Modernism's greatest cheerleaders, and painter Georgia O'Keeffe, one of America's greatest Modernist painters, is one of the great love stories of our time,  one that was -- well, at least for this reader -- demystified a bit by the revelations in Deborah Solomon's review of a new volume of the couple's letters in the New York Times book review this past weekend. These revelations concern the innocuous-sounding word "fluff":

Some of the material in the book is unsettlingly intimate, and one reads with a mixture of avid curiosity and deepening concern that one will never be able to look at a Stieglitz photograph again without thinking of “Miss Fluffy” — his nickname for O’Keeffe’s genitalia. In the Stieglitz lexicon, the verb “to fluff” refers to sexual intercourse; a woman whose worth is believed to reside primarily in her sexual availability is a “fluffer.”

By the end of the ’20s, he had embarked on a love affair with a doe-eyed acolyte (Dorothy Norman), and O’Keeffe was spending months at a time among hospitable bohemians in New Mexico. “You see I cared for you as an artist,” Stieglitz writes in an unhinged moment. “No one else does. . . . I could have fluffed you to death — you were ready for it — Hadn’t I realized a greater value in you than fluffer! — I often told you so. — And I could have fluffed myself to death. — Maybe fluffing you to death and myself too might have been wiser.”

Why Stieglitz? Why? What the fluff? To say this is anti-feminist, or misogynistic, or whatever, seems off; it's just plain silly, and embarrassing. Now, how are we to think about this? Or -- ew, even worse -- this??

Once, we were intrigued enough by the torrid affair depicted in the Stieglitz-O'Keeffe correspondence to spend an evening listening to Sam Waterston and Joan Allen give a dramatic reading of them at Christie's. No more. We're sticking with fiction. We're going to go home right now and read Leonard Michaels' short stories. No more fluffing around.

He was born in Germany, where he was trained as an architect, and it was as an architect that he initially established himself in New York. In 1904, he designed the Bronx Borough Courthouse, but this remained his only major completed work in architecture, which he then abandoned in favor of painting.

In 1910, Bluemner met Stieglitz, whose 291 Gallery was already an established haven for the American avant-garde. Bluemner’s first solo exhibition at 291 came in 1915—a series of eight landscape paintings—and this further confirmed his commitment to painting. So, too, did his contributions to the prestigious Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters.

Yet a variety of vexations continued to make both art and life extremely difficult for Bluemner. Money had always been a problem for him, and it was a problem that became more acute over the course of his career. When he could no longer afford to live in New York, he settled in the New Jersey countryside; and when he could no longer afford the materials he needed for his oil paintings, he turned to watercolor as an alternative. Yet his slide into penury proved irreversible.

Then, too, there was the problem of Bluemner’s German identity. This became especially acute in 1917, when the United States declared war against Germany, which inevitably provoked a terrific wave of anti-German sentiment. This added considerably to Bluemner’s woes. In every respect but one—his painting—he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And even as a painter, he was in some respects ahead of his time. Had he come of age as an artist in the era of color-oriented abstraction, he would very likely have been acclaimed an avant-garde master. The series of paintings called “Suns and Moons,” which Bluemner created in 1926-27, are virtual prototypes for a kind of color abstraction that later became commonplace in American abstract painting.

The show that Barbara Haskell has organized in Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color thus has an interest for us that extends well beyond Bluemner’s personal misfortunes. It’s an exhibition that anyone curious about American modernism will want to see. And Ms. Haskell is to be congratulated, also, for the accompanying catalog. She has triumphantly succeeded in rescuing an ill-fated painter from the tragedies of his life in a way that will allow posterity to appreciate his accomplishments.

Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color remains on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb. 12, 2006.

In the paintings and watercolors of John Marin (1870-1953), everything derived from both nature and the man-made environment is transformed into vivid action, commotion and syncopation-a variety of lyric upheaval that is larger than life in its intensity of expression, while remaining firmly tethered to the lineaments of our earthbound experience. "Fast" was the key word used by Paul Rosenfeld to describe Marin in his classic study of the American avant-garde, Port of New York (1924), invoking at least two of this word's several meanings: speed, of course, but also what Rosenfeld characterized as "rooted in good ground."

The excesses of his overripe prose notwithstanding, Rosenfeld's description of Marin's painterly dynamism at the height of his powers has never been bettered. Marin, wrote Rosenfeld, was "restlessly, unconsciously busied transforming the materials amid which he stands, dayshine and moisture and minerals, pigment and water and white sheets of Watman paper, into the fresh, firm, savor some pulp of his art. Each year he gives himself anew in liberal windfalls, strewing on the soil about him his explosions of tart watercolor: slithering suns and racing seas of the coast of Maine; wet, fishy poems of headlands and pine-pinnacles and rain-gusts in which the rocky strength and almost Chinese delicacy of a sensitive and robust nature have been completely, miraculously, released."

With the photographs of Paul Strand (1890-1976), we encounter a very different sensibility. In this pictorial oeuvre , nature is devoid of disturbance, action is suspended in the interests of observation, and the man-made world is likewise made to conform to a certain order and etiquette-at times, indeed, a certain geometry. Even the sea is often becalmed, landscape acquires some of the attributes of still life, and every closely observed subject-whether a horizon-line dividing the sea from the sky or something as delicate as a cobweb in the rain-is rendered with a preternatural clarity and precision, enabling us to savor the clean contours and fine detailing of every object. This is equally true of Strand's iconic portraits, in which concentration and candor are given priority over intimacy and sentiment-a strategy that, in Strand's case, anyway, endows every portrait with the weight of a penetrating character study.

They belonged to different generations. Strand, the younger by 20 years, was closer in his generational affinities to precisionist masters like Morton Schamberg (1881-1918) and Charles Sheeler (1883-1965). When, as a young man, Strand first brought his photographs to Stieglitz for criticism, the master is said to have been so impressed by the abstract patterns to be seen in the pictures, whatever the subject, that he promptly gave the young photographer his first solo exhibition at "291." That element of precisionist abstraction remained a hallmark of Strand's style for many decades.

Marin, for his part, was by temperament a headlong expressionist-exuberant in invention, impatient with finish and indulgent of repetition and improvisation-but an expressionist held in check by a countervailing devotion to Cubist structure, which he blithely bent to his own purposes.

Call this confrontation of opposites a dialogue if you like. John Marin and Paul Strand: Friends in New England is a wonderful show-a show, really, of three major American artists, if you add the genius of Stieglitz's aesthetic perspicacity to the roster of talents on display. It remains on view at the Richard York Gallery, 21 East 65th Street, through Jan. 17, 2004.

These traditions are now thought to be obsolete in many quarters of the art world, both here and abroad, having been supplanted by a trendy menu of allegedly "postmodern" gimmicks and gamesmanship. Yet, when it comes to the task of making significant works of art intelligible to a broad public, there is finally no substitute for old-fashioned connoisseurship and scholarly research. Absent these disciplines, too many of our museum exhibitions have lately been left to the vagaries of unbridled curatorial improvisation and intellectual solipsism. Which is a little like being at sea without a compass or a seaworthy craft.

This is just as true for charting the course of art in the modern era as it is the art of any other historical period. And in any attempt to chart the course of modernist art in 20th-century America, the life and work of Alfred Stieglitz (1864 -1946) is the necessary starting point. This is one reason why Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries is such an important event. Another reason is that the exhibition itself proves to be a nearly perfect account of its many-sided subject–an account that allows the art to tell its own story without the intervention of fanciful "new narratives."

Alfred Stieglitz has long been a legend in the American art world, both as a master photographic artist in his own work and as the founder of the New York galleries which, beginning with the 291 Gallery in 1908, pioneered the exhibition and publication of European and American modernist art in this country. Legends serve a variety of functions in cultural life–as, indeed, they do in political life–but they are no substitute for the hard facts of history. They may even be an obstacle to our understanding of history, especially the history of art. That has certainly been true at times of Stieglitz's legend, which for many people today has more to do with his romantic devotion to Georgia O'Keeffe than with his specific accomplishments in introducing the modernist art of Europe to the American public and advancing the careers of the first generation of American modernists–among them John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth and Paul Strand, as well as O'Keeffe and Stieglitz himself.

It is the great virtue of Modern Art and America that it re-assembles for us so many of the paintings, sculptures, photographs and collages that Stieglitz was the first to exhibit in this country–nearly 200 of them–and presents them to the public in a series of installations that attempt to approximate the simplicity and intimacy of Stieglitz's original exhibitions. In this respect, certainly, the design staff of the National Gallery is to be congratulated for remaining so faithful to Stieglitz's spirit and resisting every temptation to turn Modern Art and America into a blockbuster-type extravaganza.

As a direct consequence of this fidelity to simplicity and intimacy in the installations, we are given a more immediate sense of what it must have been like for a visitor to 291 to encounter the first Cézanne watercolors, the first Brancusi sculptures, the first Matisse drawings, the first Cubist pictures by Picasso and Braque, and the first abstract painting by Kandinsky to be seen in public on this side of the Atlantic–even the first African sculptures!–in the years preceding the 1913 Armory Show. What is even more amazing is that so many of these paintings and sculptures, which Stieglitz himself was seeing for the first time, are among those recognized today as the greatest masterworks of their kind.

The paradox of Stieglitz's genius, of course, is that he did not set out to become a dealer in paintings and sculpture. His primary vocation, after all, was that of a serious photographic artist. The Photo-Secession project that he initiated in 1905 was designed to advance an informed aesthetic understanding of photography. Yet when the opportunity presented itself to exhibit Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, et al., Stieglitz seems to have immediately understood their aesthetic significance.

From the outset, moreover, he combined this project of launching the European avant-garde in this country with a passion for nurturing an American avant-garde. Early on in Modern Art and America , Marin watercolors are exhibited in the company of Kandinsky's The Garden of Love (Improvisation Number 27) (1912) and a selection of Stieglitz photographs. The fifth room in the exhibition is devoted to 10 of Marsden Hartley's early abstract paintings and, in my view anyway, constitutes one of the most spectacular sections of the entire exhibition. Some of these paintings, especially the Portrait of a German Officer (1914), caused both Hartley and Stieglitz a good deal of grief when they were exhibited at 291 during World War I, while anti-German feeling was running pretty high in New York. Stieglitz well understood that such paintings would be impossible to sell at the time, but he showed them anyway and took the heat.

Inevitably, perhaps, Stieglitz's focus shifted in the aftermath of the Armory Show, which, by establishing the importance of the European avant-garde on a grand scale, left him free to concentrate on American art and photography. The galleries he presided over after 291 closed in 1917, and his subsequent galleries–the Anderson Galleries, founded in 1921, the Intimate Gallery, 1925, and An American Place, 1929–were entirely devoted to his established roster of American painters and photographers. It was in the 1920's, moreover, that Georgia O'Keeffe came to occupy an unrivaled place in Stieglitz's life and in his work, as an object of romantic passion and as an admired artist. This was the period in which he devoted no fewer than 330 photographs to the subject of O'Keeffe herself. (Mercifully, a mere five examples are included in Modern Art and America .) As a consequence of this romance, there are more examples of O'Keeffe's paintings in the exhibition than their aesthetic merits justify, but among them is a bold abstract painting I hadn't seen before– Black, White and Blue (1930)–which may be the best picture she ever painted.

In the galleries devoted to the later years of Stieglitz's career, his own work as a photographer looms larger–and justifiably so, since he was certainly a greater artist than O'Keeffe–and there are wonderful examples of the later work of Hartley and Marin, and a generous representation of the oeuvres of Dove and Demuth. Both in the scale of the exhibition and in its high level of quality, Modern Art and America does more to confirm the importance of this first generation of American modernists than any other single exhibition of their work I have seen–and I've pretty nearly seen all of them over a period of 50 years. I regret the omission of Alfred E. Maurer and certain other artists whose work Stieglitz exhibited, but there can be no doubt that the artists in this exhibition are the ones whose work meant the most to Stieglitz himself.

Owing both to its aesthetic quality and its intellectual probity, this is also an exhibition which effectively re-opens the subject of this first generation of American modernists to further study. So does the show's equally extraordinary 600-page catalog, which instantly becomes the most important study of its subject. All praise, then, to the exhibition's curator, Sarah Greenough, and to her research associate, Charles Brock, for their superb work on this exhibition and its catalog. It would be premature to suggest that this event signals a change in current museum practice, but it is a pleasure, all the same, to see what can happen when a project of this magnitude is organized by grown-ups for grown-ups–if I may so put it.

Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries remains on view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington through April 22, and will not travel.

Ansel Adams characterized Steichen's tenure at the Museum of Modern Art as a "body blow to the progress of creative photography," and there were many at the museum who agreed with that assessment. According to Barbara Haskell in the catalog for the current show at the Whitney, which she curated, "Even before [Steichen's] appointment was made official in July 1947, the department's longtime curator, Beaumont Newhall, had resigned in protest, along with all 30 members of the [museum's] Advisory Committee of Photography," which included some of the weightiest reputations in the field.

The fact is, critical opinion was often skeptical about Steichen's work almost from the outset of his career, and it was from the outset that his talents commanded attention. At the age of 20, Steichen–who had left school after the eighth grade–was working as a designer of stylish advertisements in a lithography firm in Milwaukee. (The catalog of the Whitney show reproduces an ad, featuring a voluptuous female in a negligee, for a candy laxative called Cascarets from an 1899 issue of Collier's Weekly Magazine .) At 23, however, he had already negotiated his first change of direction, from the world of advertising art to the creation of painting and photography in the reigning Aesthetic-Pictorial style. It was at that early age that Sadakichi Hartman, the most gifted critic of the period, praised Steichen as "thoroughly modern, the 'enfant terrible' of the American school," while at the same time observing that "he does not see his subjects with his own eyes.… The impress of absolute personality does not distinguish his work."

The "impress of absolute personality" is not, perhaps, to be expected in the work of a young artist–except, of course, in the case of real genius–yet about the young Steichen, Hartman's observation would prove to be prophetic. For at no time in his very long career would Steichen "see his subjects with his own eyes." He was, however, a masterly appropriator of other people's "eyes," and largely dependent upon them at virtually every turn in the development of his own work.

He was also a shrewd judge of where the currents of cultural fashion were heading, and quick to avail himself of the opportunities they offered. If an advantageous alliance with Stieglitz required a commitment to an extreme aestheticism, Steichen was eager to provide it–and no less eager to repudiate it when opportunity beckoned elsewhere. When ostentatious glamour was the ticket to fame and fortune in the 1920's, Steichen went for it, signing up with Condé Nast to meet monthly deadlines photographing celebrities for Vanity Fair and fashion models for Vogue . "He became America's most highly paid photographer," writes Ms. Haskell, "as celebrated as the people he photographed."

Ms. Haskell would have us believe that Steichen's photographs for Vogue "proposed a new prototype of female beauty" and "codified the image of the liberated woman that emerged after World War I." She even goes so far as to characterize the results of this descent into the realm of make-believe glamour as "inherently populist," forgetting perhaps what sort of market Steichen was serving in his Vogue and Vanity Fair pictures.

Still, when social conscience became the vogue in the 1930's, Steichen was more than ready to join that bandwagon, too. In 1929, he was already declaring that "art for art's sake was dead," but he still vigorously defended commercial photography, fatuously asserting that "there has never been a period when the best thing we had was not commercial art." Less than a decade later, he announced his retirement from commercial photography. The heightened political atmosphere of the Depression era had finally gotten to him, whetting his appetite for yet another change of direction–as propagandist for the "little guy."

In 1938, writes Ms. Haskell, "Steichen saw an exhibition that included photographs of rural poverty taken under the auspices of the federal government's Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA). In his report on the exhibition for U.S. Camera , he heralded these visual records of Depression-era America as 'the most memorable human documents that were ever rendered in pictures.'" If it was too late for Steichen to join this movement as a photographer, he nonetheless began to harbor an ambition to serve its political goals as an organizer of large-scale war-themed exhibitions.

It was World War II that provided Steichen with the opportunity to pursue this last and most successful of all his ambitions. In September 1941, he was asked by MoMA to organize an exhibition on the theme of national defense, to be called The Arsenal of Democracy . When the United States entered the war three months later, the project was re-named Road to Victory . It was his success with this project that led to his appointment as MoMA's photography czar when the war was over.

During the war, Steichen had also placed his vision of photography as "a medium of persuasion" at the service of the U.S. Navy, and the instructions he gave to the photographers under his command nicely sum up the spirit that governed all of his work as an organizer of big-theme shows. "Don't photograph the war," Steichen is reported to have said. "Photograph the man, the little guy, the struggle, the heartaches, plus the dreams of this guy." The transformation of the fickle aesthete and the eager huckster into a master purveyor of progressivist sentimentalities was complete, though Steichen would have to wait until a decade after the war before he could score his greatest triumph, The Family of Man exhibition at MoMA in 1955.

Edmund Wilson once wrote that "one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg," and I harbor a similar tendency to feel that The Family of Man was the single worst thing ever to be inflicted upon the art of photography. (Sandburg, by the way, was Steichen's brother-in-law and sometime collaborator.) I loathed the exhibition at the time and wrote one of the few negative reviews of what remains, to this day, the single most widely seen photography exhibition in the history of the medium.

The fragments of The Family of Man that are included in the current show at the Whitney do nothing to persuade me otherwise. It still strikes me as progressivist cant from start to finish, with its phony parallels of "families" the world over and its reduction of all human life to a few simple-minded liberal formulas. This was an exhibition that corrupted the meaning of virtually every photographic image it embraced. No wonder so many serious photographers despised it.

As a historical account of one of the most overrated reputations in the annals of American photography, the current show at the Whitney is not without interest, to be sure; but for anyone with a serious grasp of photography as an art, this retrospective is a depressing experience. Steichen's work doesn't finally lend itself to a retrospective on this scale. And it suffers from the additional handicap of having been organized by a curator who does not seem to be at home in either the history or the aesthetics of photography. If Ms. Haskell really believes Walker Evans looked upon his "photographs as tools to effect social change," as she writes on this occasion, then she is definitely in the wrong field. But with the Giorgio Armani fashion show at the Guggenheim and the Open Ends show at MoMA, this Steichen retrospective doesn't even have the distinction of being the worst of the exhibitions on offer in the museums at the moment. It remains on view at the Whitney through Feb. 4.

For one thing, Painters in Paris is an exhibition of, and about, the art of painting. Remember painting? It used to occupy a

central place on the contemporary art scene. It was the primary medium of modern art, the medium from which virtually all modernist innovations–collage, constructed sculpture, much modern design and even certain styles of modern architecture–derived their esthetic imperatives. It was indeed the great medium of modern experience, a medium with an illustrious tradition that triumphantly met the challenge of accommodating itself to the complexities and contradictions of modernity itself. Which is why it remains, for many of us, the central medium of our art experience.

For another thing, Painters in Paris is an exhibition of, and about, the School of Paris. It was in Paris, after all, that modern painting was born and where it achieved its greatest glories. It was from the School of Paris that virtually every other "school" of modern painting derived its governing ideas, including the idea of rebelling against the authority of the School of Paris. No chapter in the history of modernist art, from Russia in the period of the 1917 Revolution to New York in the 1940's and 50's, is wholly intelligible without reference to the School of Paris. If, at the outset of the 21st century, we now look back on modernism as a tradition, it was by certain painters in Paris that this tradition was created in the last years of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. It remains to be seen whether or not New York will turn out to have been the place where that tradition met its inglorious demise–a consummation that so many of our museum curators are now so eager to hasten on its merry way.

To be reminded of the place which the School of Paris occupies in our thinking about painting is, of course, to be reminded of what we used to take for granted as commonplace knowledge of modern art history. But in today's amnesiac culture, nothing about the past–even the recent past–can any longer be taken for granted as common knowledge. So it is worth recalling on the occasion of this Painters in Paris exhibition just how important the School of Paris has been in setting the standards for the art of the modern era. Forget, if you can, the preposterous price tags that have lately been attached to paintings like these. Forget, too, the mythologies that have been circulated about the leading personalities of the show. All that belongs more to the history of publicity than to the history of the art. Remember instead that these pictures represent one of the great intellectual adventures in the history of our civilization.

As a guide to that adventure, Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 is anything but systematic, but with more than 100 paintings surveying a broad range of major and minor talents it gives us a rich and copious sampling of what the School of Paris consisted of in its heyday. The key figures–Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Bonnard, Vuillard, Léger, Gris, Soutine, Lipchitz, Giacometti–are all present, some more strongly represented than others, to be sure, and there are plenty of surprises, too, pictures that few of us have seen before. The School of Paris was never exclusively French, and its international character is also given a strong emphasis. We sometimes forget, for example, that Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, had once been a Cubist painter in Paris, and here he is with a wonderful still life, Table on a Cafe Terrace (1915), from the Met's Alfred Stieglitz Collection. From that collection, too, is another unfamiliar work of the same period: Gino Severini's Dancer-Airplane Propeller-Sea (also 1915). These are not the artists we usually associate with Stieglitz, the principal patron of the first generation of American modernists. But their presence in the Painters in Paris exhibition also raises a question: Why are there no American painters in this show?

You know you are in for a tour of high esthetic pleasure in this exhibition when upon entering the first room of the show you encounter an entire wall of paintings by Bonnard, and then across the room you are confronted with what must be the largest landscape painting Vuillard ever produced: the grand Place Vintimille, Paris (1916). More intimate paintings by Vuillard are also included, and in the end you may prefer them to the big landscape, but even so, the juxtaposition of scale leaves one with a greatly enhanced understanding of Vuillard's pictorial powers.

Léger is not as strongly represented, but his Woman With a Cat (1921) is nonetheless a masterpiece that almost makes up for the absence of a really big representation of the artist. Not surprisingly, Picasso gets the lion's share of attention–but that's an old story.

The only living artist in this exhibition is, inevitably, Balthus (born 1908). Opinions differ, of course, about whether the enormous painting called The Mountain (1937) really lives up to the scale of its ambition, but while that argument remains unresolved and unresolvable, there are two of the artist's undoubted masterpieces from the same period: Thérèse and Thérèse Dreaming (both 1938). And speaking of big pictures, the exhibition concludes with a painting by Jean Hélion of another ambitious urban subject: Grand Luxembourg Gardens, Indian Summer (1960-61), a picture that seems to have a certain kinship with the Place Vintimille, Paris by Vuillard, which we see in the first room. Hélion may well have been the last of the important School of Paris painters, and this Luxembourg Gardens painting is surely one of his masterpieces.

Just up the street from the Met there is a smaller exhibition of the School of Paris, called Paris in New York: French Jewish Artists in Private Collections , at the Jewish Museum. A number of works in this exhibition–Max Weber's painting of The Apollo in the Matisse Academy (1908) and the sculptures by Elie Nadelman–are a reminder of some of the American artists who are missing in the Painters in Paris show. An odd omission, don't you think? Still another candidate missing from Painters in Paris is the American painter Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952), whose work is currently the subject of a large exhibition at the Hollis Taggart Galleries. Carles produced his very best paintings in France in the halcyon years of the School of Paris, and he had an especially keen understanding of Fauvist color.

Still, whatever its incidental omissions may be, Painters in Paris , organized by William S. Lieberman, is an exhibition not to be missed. It remains on view at the Met through Dec. 31. Paris in New York , organized by Susan Chevlowe, remains on view at the Jewish Museum through June 25; and the Arthur B. Carnes exhibition remains on view at the Hollis Taggart Galleries, 48 East 73rd Street, through March 22.

As a personality O'Keeffe was, by all accounts, extraordinary. She certainly had little trouble captivating the attention of Alfred Stieglitz, who was not an easy mark-though he did, to be sure, have a thing about women much younger than himself. But as an artist? How much does O'Keeffe's current claim to fame owe to factors entirely extrinsic to her actual artistic accomplishment?

Or, to state the question even more invidiously: How much did O'Keeffe's initial reputation as an American modernist owe to her romance with Stieglitz in the earlier decades of this century, and how much does her current status as an American classic owe to the tidal wave of feminist politics and so-called gender studies that has lately engulfed the study of art history in the academy, the museums and the art press?

This is an admittedly provocative way of attempting a critical assessment of O'Keeffe's work. Yet confronted-as we are in O'Keeffe's case-with a reputation so woefully at odds with the artistic reality, drastic measures are called for. I have already had occasion to take note of the absurdly inflated place that has been accorded her work in the Whitney's current American Century blockbuster. Now, two other current exhibitions- Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe & American Modernism at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.-offer contrasting accounts of O'Keeffe's life and work. Taken together, you could hardly ask for a better demonstration of the equivocal character of O'Keeffe's artistic standing.

In the American Modernism exhibition in Hartford, O'Keeffe is mainly seen not as an artist but as a love object-as the object, that is, of Stieglitz's sexual passion and as a subject of his camera work. Much of the exhibition is indeed organized around the famous suite of photographs that Stieglitz devoted to O'Keeffe in the years 1918-1930. While there are also some examples of O'Keeffe's paintings in the show, they are relegated to an ancillary role. In this account of American modernism, photography dominates-as one would expect it to in an exhibition celebrating Stieglitz's accomplishments. Yet the photographs he devoted to O'Keeffe are by no means his own most important artistic contribution to modernism. That is to be found in the ambitious Equivalents series of photographs of skies and clouds that are Stieglitz's most distinctive attempt to make photography a medium of abstract art.

About this aspect of Stieglitz's work, the authors of the excellent catalogue of the Hartford show, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Amy Ellis, make an interesting observation. "Stieglitz's cloud series," they write, "resulted in pure abstraction and reflected his belief that abstraction was 'the true medium.'" Yet their further observation that the Equivalents pictures were "simultaneously abstract and representational" underscores something important not only about Stieglitz's own esthetic but that of the modernist artistic circle he gathered around him at his 291 Gallery. Their conception of abstraction was fundamentally an attempt to reconcile the conflicting interests of nature and abstraction. This put them very much at odds with the ideas of the pioneers of European abstraction-Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian-who conceived of abstract art as an escape from the observation of nature. To effect a total rejection of nature was not something that the modernists of the Stieglitz circle could ever bring themselves to do.

Which brings us back to the problematic character of the art of Georgia O'Keeffe, who, despite an alleged devotion to Kandinsky's treatise On the Spiritual in Art , never really had a clue as to what the esthetic of abstraction was about. In the O'Keeffe exhibition at the Phillips Collection, much attention is lavished on the influence of Arthur Wesley Dow-"Pa Dow," as O'Keeffe called him-on O'Keeffe's own version of modernism, and rightly so. Yet the conclusions to be drawn from that influence do a lot to explain O'Keeffe's artistic failures. For when you penetrate the mystical vapors surrounding Dow's ideas, what you find is a rather low-level version of 1890's estheticism and Art Nouveau, an esthetic in which nature, far from being rejected or transcended, is turned into something ornamental and decorative.

And sure enough, in the early (1915) charcoal drawings that are included in the O'Keeffe show at the Phillips Collection, what you find is an academic version of an Art Nouveau style that had already been consigned to oblivion by the modernist avant-garde. In the catalogue of the Phillips show, Elizabeth Hutton Turner writes of these quasi-abstract charcoal drawings, which O'Keeffe called Specials , that "they mark the start of something new," and that they "aligned

O'Keeffe's quest with that of the European avant-garde," but this is precisely what they are not. They are an attempt by a provincial talent to catch up with something the European avant-garde had already rejected. What in 1915 had captivated the interest of the European avant-garde-the legacy of Cézanne, the chromatic inventions of Matisse, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the Futurism of Marinetti and Boccioni and the early abstractions of Kandinsky-were all developments that O'Keeffe never really comprehended or acted upon in her art.

Whether this fundamental backwardness in her art, which found its principal expression in all those overscale flower illustrations, magnified clam shells, etc., all tricked out with smarmy suggestions of a kind of freeze-dried eroticism, is traceable to Dow's retardataire influence, who can say with any certainty? Whatever the cause, O'Keeffe remained a provincial talent, and she seems herself to have understood that this was the case when, in the end, she left Stieglitz, left New York, and re-established herself in the more comforting provinciality of New Mexico. That so failed a talent should now be treated as a major artist tells us a lot more about the sexual politics of the art world of the 1990's than it does about the art of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe & American Modernism runs until July 11 and Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things will be on view until July 18.

By the mid-1930's, Dove had for a quarter of a century been creating pictures that are both remarkably original and yet very much akin to the paintings of certain other modern masters. Yet pictures of the kind he favored, which were either completely abstract or tending toward abstraction even when openly addressed to subjects drawn from nature, were still regarded as an alien presence on the American art scene. There was not yet much of an awareness in the public mind that modernism, while still castigated by academic realists, social realists, regional muralists and sundry other champions of "tradition," was now itself a vital tradition that an artist like Dove could continue to draw upon for inspiration and support. For many benighted souls, modern art was still thought to be a hoax perpetrated by people who "had never seen another picture."

With what ardor, invention and lyric grace Dove did indeed continue to work in this modernist tradition in his later years is made wonderfully vivid for us in the superb retrospective of his work that has now been organized at the Phillips Collection in Washington. Arthur Dove: A Retrospective is quite the best exhibition of this artist's work I have ever seen-and I think I've seen all the major Dove shows of the last 40 years. Beginning with a Still Life Against Flowered Wallpaper (1909) and ending with Flat Surfaces (1946), his last major painting, this retrospective does full justice to every phase of Dove's development. There are things in this exhibition that I, at least, do not remember seeing before, and even the most familiar paintings and assemblages are seen in a new light in a survey that encompasses some 78 objects.

It has become the custom in discussions of Dove's work, owing to the small oils he called Abstractions in 1910-11, to make much of his status as a pioneer of abstract painting-even, perhaps, the pioneer, superseding the claims made for Vasily Kandinsky, as Debra Bricker Balken puts it in the catalogue of this show, "by maybe a year." But as Ms. Balken also points out, the question of what Dove knew or did not know about Kandinsky at that early date remains unresolved and is probably unresolvable. It is exacerbated, moreover, by the attempt made by Dove's dealer and patron, Alfred Stieglitz-who really was familiar with Kandinsky's ideas-to capitalize on Dove's early abstractions in order, as Ms. Balken writes, "to buttress his [Stieglitz's] growing claims for America's artistic parity with Europe."

In my view, however, "America's artistic parity with Europe" did not then exist, and to claim otherwise places an esthetic and historical burden on those early abstractions of Dove's which the work itself cannot support. To my eyes, anyway, those pictures read more as symbolist paintings based on motifs drawn from nature than as abstract paintings that abjure all reference to recognizable objects. It is no insult to Dove, either, to be reminded that in 1910-11, he was not yet an artist in Kandinsky's league. Alfred Stieglitz had many admirable qualities, as we see illustrated in his early support of Dove, but it is worth remembering that as a dealer he was no stranger to what later came to be called hype. In the New York art world, he was indeed one of its pioneers.

It isn't, in any case, in the early work in this Dove retrospective that the artist's finest achievements are to be found. Dove doesn't really hit his stride as a modernist painter of remarkable originality until the 1920's when, for the first time, almost every object he produces-collage and assemblage as well as well as paintings-is wholly individual in conception and beautifully realized in the execution. Still largely based on nature, the paintings move in and out of the realm of abstraction so consistently that the distinction often made between abstraction and representation in his work hardly matters.

The most audacious of his pictures in the 1920's are undoubtedly the assemblages that make use of unconventional materials-which have, alas, become all too conventional in our own day-and the paintings that are similarly executed in mixed media. Rain (1924), for example, is an assemblage composed of twigs and rubber cement on metal and glass. Starry Heavens (also 1924) is a painting executed in oil and metallic paint on the reverse side of a glass plate backed with black paper. The most famous of the assemblages- Goin' Fishin' (1925)-uses bamboo and the sleeves and buttons of a blue denim shirt, while the extraordinary painting called Hand Sewing Machine (1927) applies oil pigment, cut and pasted linen, and graphite to a sheet of aluminum.

Oddly enough, it is in this period, too, that Dove produced his most Kandinskyish abstract painting- George Gershwin-"Rhapsody in Blue," Part II (1927), which has the look of the kind of "Improvisation" that Kandinsky himself had abandoned more than a decade earlier. The connection probably had more to do with the parallels both painters believed united abstract painting and classical music than with any conscious effort on Dove's part to imitate Kandinsky-but the resemblances are nonetheless striking.

By the 1930's, the assemblages and the unconventional materials are largely abandoned as Dove, whose health had begun to deteriorate, concentrates exclusively on the art of painting. In this retrospective, "late" Dove emerges as the primary Dove, for it was in his last years that he created his greatest abstract paintings- Naples Yellow Morning (1935), the three Sunrise paintings (1936), Flour Mill II (1938), Rain or Snow (1943), Sand and Sea (1943) Roof Tops (1943), That Red One (1944) and the final Flat Surfaces (1946).

What William Agee says about Flat Surfaces in the catalogue of this retrospective-"It is a singularly personal variant of abstract art of the time, while closely paralleling the work of Robert Motherwell, and within a few years, of David Smith and Ellsworth Kelly"-might also be said of certain other late abstractions in the exhibition. My own favorite is That Red One , which I think is a finer, deeper painting than anything I know of in the oeuvres of either Motherwell or Kelly.

The extent to which Dove was consciously working within the tradition of modernist abstraction during this late period is well documented for us by Mr. Agee in the catalogue. "In April 1936, while visiting New York," writes Mr. Agee, "Dove had seen and commented favorably on the landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art. A week later, on April 23, he visited A.E. Gallatin's Gallery of Living Art at New York University, where he would have seen a broad group of important abstract and nonobjective paintings, including work by Mondrian.… Two months later, Dove went to the trouble of translating an article by Mondrian, most likely Mondrian's response to an inquiry into the state of modern art published in a 1935 issue of Cahiers d'art. " And so on. Dove, who spent time in Paris before the First World War, knew what the standards of achievement were for the kind of art he aspired to create, and in the late work he met those standards more consistently than at any other time in his life. It was a considerable achievement, and it is our good luck that this retrospective does it such justice.

The exhibition remains at the Phillips Collection in Washington through Jan. 4, and will be coming to the Whitney Museum in New York, Jan. 15 to April 12, before traveling on to the Addison Gallery in Andover, Mass., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.