Our take: The collection itself appears fairly conservative (think nautical paintings by Samuel Walters and Thomas Luny). Too bad Fuld didn't donate any of his bank-robber art.

2. Dealer John Connelly to Lead Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
John Connelly will close his Chelsea gallery John Connelly Presents to become director of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, Lindsay Pollock reported. The Foundation is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery, where Connelly worked for eight years.

Our take: Connelly will be a good advocate for Gonzalez-Torres' work. We just hope all the artists in his stable are able to find new representation.
[Art Market Views]

3. Museum Directors' Free Housing: Revealed
Several of the city's most prominent museum directors live in astoundingly plush, tax-free housing provided by their employers. MoMA director Glenn Lowry lives in a $6 million condo above the museum; Met director Thomas Campbell shacks up in a $5 million co-op across the street from the Fifth Avenue institution. Some tax lawyers say the deals seem fishy.

Our take: And here we thought rent control was enviable.
[NYT]

4. Robert Goff Heads to Haunch
Robert Goff will become a director of the New York branch of Christie's Haunch of Venison Gallery, and he'll be bringing several of his artists with him. The gallery will also be moving from Christie's current home in Rockefeller Center to a new location in Chelsea.

Our take: In the face of rumors that the gallery is merely a front for the Christie's contemporary art division, a new director and location may give Haunch some much-needed distance. [Observer]

5. Trend Alert! Art Sneakers Attack
Art Fag City provides an exhaustive report on the latest art-meets-fashion trend: the art sneaker. From Jenny Holzer's truism-y Keds to Roy Lichtenstein's graphic Pumas to Terence Koh's pristine Converses, the kicks tread the line between charming and tacky.

Our take: Say what you will about artists selling out-everybody's gotta make a living. Plus, now you can finally make that joke about understanding Terence Koh because you've walked a mile in his shoes. [AFC]

6. Richard Price Doesn't Really Like LES' "Lush Life"
The New Yorker toured the LES gallery circuit with Richard Price, whose novel Lush Life inspired coordinated exhibitions at nine galleries, one for each chapter of his book. He doesn't seem to like the artwork very much. ("It's like that old phrase 'You don't bring a knife to a gunfight.' You don't bring a book to an art show," he said.)

Our take: The guy's got an unprecedented gallery collaboration, a screenplay in the works ("doing the book lite," he called it), and a Platinum American Express card. Why's he so darn grumpy?
[The New Yorker]

7. American Folk Art Museum Plagued By Debt
The Folk Art Museum isn't just losing one of its prized curators-it's also losing money. The museum's deficit almost doubled between 2008 and 2009, attendance is down substantially, and fundraising has stalled. MoMA's next-door neighbor also recently became the first institution to default on a loan from a city trust created in 1980 to aid cultural institutions.

Our take: It would be a drop in the bucket, but maybe Glenn Lowry could offer up that $6 million, tax-free condo to help out the Folk Art Museum. It would be a nice gesture.
[Bloomberg, NYT]

8. Back to the Drawing Board for Kapoor's Olympic Monument
Anish Kapoor's swirly, massive red tower for the 2012 London Olympics failed to get the green light from the government's architecture watchdog. The group said the current design does not appropriately incorporate sewage pipes or surrounding security checkpoints and ticket kiosks.

Our take: The report provides, mercifully, one last chance for Kapoor to change his mind about this red monstrosity. Beijing's Birdcage is a hard act to follow, but come on!
[The Independent]

9. Bill to Stop Certain Artwork Sales May Be Dead
A bill aimed at preventing art institutions from selling artwork to pay off internal debts has all but died in the New York State Legislature. Cultural heavyweights like the Met argued the bill was too broad, and the bill's sponsor subsequently withdrew his support.

Our take: As it is written, this particular bill would prevent zoos and aquariums from transferring animals. If that's not a tip-off that it might be too broad, we don't know what is.
[NYT]

10. Abu Dhabi Gunning for Largest Art Competition
Abu Dhabi is holding an art competition to raise awareness about traffic and road safety. The contest, open to participants across the globe, has received 134,583 entries since last February and aims to become the largest art competition in the world.

Our take: Does Abu Dhabi really want to steal a world record currently held by the children of India for an art contest about traffic?
[Observer, SIFY News]

Culled exclusively from the museum’s holdings, each piece a gift of the Ian Woodner Collection, this smartly appointed show is more a celebration of a benefactor’s generosity than a definitive accounting of the oeuvre. The basic trajectory of Redon’s development is touched upon—from the early forays in landscape to the nightmarish, Goya-inspired drawings and prints, to the gentle flurries of oil and pastel that characterize the late mythological fantasies—but not, as it turns out, to his benefit.

You begin to question, in fact, whether an exhaustive overview of Redon’s art would be necessary—or welcome. For every Eye-Balloon (1878), Roger and Angelica (c. 1910) or The Centaur (c. 1895-1900)—that is to say, for every picture that makes something aesthetically compelling out of the apparitions flitting through the cobwebs of one man’s imagination—there are seven or eight pieces that are hermetic and clumsy or precious and silly.

An artist might find his own dreams infinitely fascinating; the challenge lies in eliciting a comparable fascination from others. (Try telling someone else about a recent dream you’ve had and count the seconds until his eyes begin to glaze over.) Too often Redon’s visions fail us, if not him. If anything, Beyond the Visible points up how circumscribed the human imagination can be—or, rather, how humdrum and pointless its products are when not heightened by a concomitant invention in craft.

In Redon’s hands, a chunk of charcoal, a lithographer’s crayon or oil paint was never a direct conduit from the unconscious mind. Notwithstanding a certain fluency, the expressive potential of each medium was muffled, rendered tepid and hesitant. Oils, in particular, became a stubborn and, at times, woefully greasy substance all but incapable of metaphorical flight. Material means were, more often than not, an impediment to Redon’s unfettered mental rush. Who can believe the dream if its embodiment is a burden on the artist’s capabilities?

Redon’s efforts in pastel deny this complaint magnificently. In them, an uncanny fluidity of touch brings to fruition the wildest workings of his imagination. Even then, it’s worth noting that the two finest pastels are dedicated to subjects that were right in front of Redon’s eyes. Woman with Flower Corsage (1912) and Vase of Flowers (c. 1912-14) evince an ease that is far more true and ravishing than the majority of Redon’s essays into unearthly realms. Here is one artist who would have been better off taking in the world around him than in devising worlds in which he, and only he, was a welcome participant.

Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon is at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, until Jan. 23.

Point Taken

Redon’s work in charcoal has long been championed by admirers as a gauge of his significance as a draftsman. My opinion—that he was expert and elegant in the medium, but nothing more—is in the minority, but not for long.

Or so I’d like to think after visiting Clouet to Seurat: French Drawings from the British Museum, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Toward the close of this stunning parade of almost 100 drawings, you’ll find Redon’s Christ Crowned with Thorns (1895) just a few feet away from two studies for La Grande Jatte (both 1884) by the Pointillist painter Georges Seurat.

Sticklers might cavil that there is, if not a world of difference, then difference enough between charcoal and conté crayon. Yet comparing the Redon charcoal and the Seurat studies in crayon only serves to highlight the distinction between proficiency and mastery, striving and attainment. Christ Crowned with Thorns, though certainly not negligible, is a struggle; the artist’s hand is constantly guiding events. Seurat’s studies, in contrast, are as natural, inevitable and necessary as breathing. Drawing, for Seurat, is a process in which the artist yields authority while bringing resolution to the inherently vexing marriage between artistic vision and material means.

It’s an impossible feat if you stop and think about it. Redon did; Seurat didn’t. That’s why he entrances while Redon merely diverts. There’s much more to French Drawings, but Seurat alone is enough to warrant a trip to the Met.

Clouet to Seurat: French Drawings from the British Museum is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 29.

Coping Mechanisms

If Beyond the Visible only intermittently gives life to the darkest corners of the imagination, Obsessive Drawing, an exhibition of contemporary art at the American Folk Art Museum, makes all too real the furthest reaches of desire. Each of the five featured artists engage in a “mind-bending process” wherein a “self-developed system for survival” aids in the negotiation of a world of “mindless distraction.”

As far as coping mechanisms go, pencil and paper pose less of a danger to the artist—and, for that matter, the rest of us—than drugs, alcohol, or a fascination with firearms or little girls. Better that Charles Benefiel should invent a “dumb language” as a defense against conformity, or Chris Hipkiss illustrate elaborately choreographed fantasies about war, menstruation and rocket ships, than to have to worry about how their preoccupations might translate into action in the public sphere.

In other words, relief (mingled with a somewhat unseemly fascination) trumps aesthetic pleasure as a response to the disquietingly private worlds on view. The exception is Hiroyuki Doi, whose pencil conjures up pulsing, craggy forms from accumulations of painstakingly delineated circles. His drawings admit to a world—and an audience—that exists outside the boundaries of his own psyche.

Mr. Doi’s art merits further investigation; the rest of it you’ll want to keep at arm’s length. It’s worth remembering, after all, that obsession is inherently unhealthy, that it’s a hindrance to experience. This is at once a measure of the exhibition’s primary strength—and its defining liability.

Obsessive Drawing is at the American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street, until March 19.

Culled exclusively from the museum’s holdings, each piece a gift of the Ian Woodner Collection, this smartly appointed show is more a celebration of a benefactor’s generosity than a definitive accounting of the oeuvre. The basic trajectory of Redon’s development is touched upon—from the early forays in landscape to the nightmarish, Goya-inspired drawings and prints, to the gentle flurries of oil and pastel that characterize the late mythological fantasies—but not, as it turns out, to his benefit.

You begin to question, in fact, whether an exhaustive overview of Redon’s art would be necessary—or welcome. For every Eye-Balloon (1878), Roger and Angelica (c. 1910) or The Centaur (c. 1895-1900)—that is to say, for every picture that makes something aesthetically compelling out of the apparitions flitting through the cobwebs of one man’s imagination—there are seven or eight pieces that are hermetic and clumsy or precious and silly.

An artist might find his own dreams infinitely fascinating; the challenge lies in eliciting a comparable fascination from others. (Try telling someone else about a recent dream you’ve had and count the seconds until his eyes begin to glaze over.) Too often Redon’s visions fail us, if not him. If anything, Beyond the Visible points up how circumscribed the human imagination can be—or, rather, how humdrum and pointless its products are when not heightened by a concomitant invention in craft.

In Redon’s hands, a chunk of charcoal, a lithographer’s crayon or oil paint was never a direct conduit from the unconscious mind. Notwithstanding a certain fluency, the expressive potential of each medium was muffled, rendered tepid and hesitant. Oils, in particular, became a stubborn and, at times, woefully greasy substance all but incapable of metaphorical flight. Material means were, more often than not, an impediment to Redon’s unfettered mental rush. Who can believe the dream if its embodiment is a burden on the artist’s capabilities?

Redon’s efforts in pastel deny this complaint magnificently. In them, an uncanny fluidity of touch brings to fruition the wildest workings of his imagination. Even then, it’s worth noting that the two finest pastels are dedicated to subjects that were right in front of Redon’s eyes. Woman with Flower Corsage (1912) and Vase of Flowers (c. 1912-14) evince an ease that is far more true and ravishing than the majority of Redon’s essays into unearthly realms. Here is one artist who would have been better off taking in the world around him than in devising worlds in which he, and only he, was a welcome participant.

Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon is at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, until Jan. 23.

Point Taken

Redon’s work in charcoal has long been championed by admirers as a gauge of his significance as a draftsman. My opinion—that he was expert and elegant in the medium, but nothing more—is in the minority, but not for long.

Or so I’d like to think after visiting Clouet to Seurat: French Drawings from the British Museum, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Toward the close of this stunning parade of almost 100 drawings, you’ll find Redon’s Christ Crowned with Thorns (1895) just a few feet away from two studies for La Grande Jatte (both 1884) by the Pointillist painter Georges Seurat.

Sticklers might cavil that there is, if not a world of difference, then difference enough between charcoal and conté crayon. Yet comparing the Redon charcoal and the Seurat studies in crayon only serves to highlight the distinction between proficiency and mastery, striving and attainment. Christ Crowned with Thorns, though certainly not negligible, is a struggle; the artist’s hand is constantly guiding events. Seurat’s studies, in contrast, are as natural, inevitable and necessary as breathing. Drawing, for Seurat, is a process in which the artist yields authority while bringing resolution to the inherently vexing marriage between artistic vision and material means.

It’s an impossible feat if you stop and think about it. Redon did; Seurat didn’t. That’s why he entrances while Redon merely diverts. There’s much more to French Drawings, but Seurat alone is enough to warrant a trip to the Met.

Clouet to Seurat: French Drawings from the British Museum is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 29.

Coping Mechanisms

If Beyond the Visible only intermittently gives life to the darkest corners of the imagination, Obsessive Drawing, an exhibition of contemporary art at the American Folk Art Museum, makes all too real the furthest reaches of desire. Each of the five featured artists engage in a “mind-bending process” wherein a “self-developed system for survival” aids in the negotiation of a world of “mindless distraction.”

As far as coping mechanisms go, pencil and paper pose less of a danger to the artist—and, for that matter, the rest of us—than drugs, alcohol, or a fascination with firearms or little girls. Better that Charles Benefiel should invent a “dumb language” as a defense against conformity, or Chris Hipkiss illustrate elaborately choreographed fantasies about war, menstruation and rocket ships, than to have to worry about how their preoccupations might translate into action in the public sphere.

In other words, relief (mingled with a somewhat unseemly fascination) trumps aesthetic pleasure as a response to the disquietingly private worlds on view. The exception is Hiroyuki Doi, whose pencil conjures up pulsing, craggy forms from accumulations of painstakingly delineated circles. His drawings admit to a world—and an audience—that exists outside the boundaries of his own psyche.

Mr. Doi’s art merits further investigation; the rest of it you’ll want to keep at arm’s length. It’s worth remembering, after all, that obsession is inherently unhealthy, that it’s a hindrance to experience. This is at once a measure of the exhibition’s primary strength—and its defining liability.

Obsessive Drawing is at the American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street, until March 19.

Tide Table and Learning the Flute are narratives in the sense that they document the evolution of drawn images. We register Mr. Kentridge's distinctive, ham-handed touch as his unseen hand sets down, alters and erases myriad scenarios. Unapologetically low-tech, the films stutter, flicker and twitch. In contrast, the images themselves-Egyptian temples, the oncoming tide and a trio of dictators looking through binoculars at the rabble below their balcony-evolve and flow with an uncanny lyricism, their transmutations suggesting history's unpredictable march. Politics continue to haunt Mr. Kentridge's vision-he touches on race, capitalism and poverty-but they're only one subtext among many. It's as if he had realized how stunting polemics can be to the life of art. In the process, the work gains in grit, scope and poetry without sacrificing an iota of moral purpose. I don't think Mr. Kentridge is the best artist working-but that the thought should even cross my mind speaks to his singular achievement.

William Kentridge: Tide Table (2003) and Learning the Flute (2003) are at the Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, until April 10.

Sister's Got Soul

Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan , an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, has been mounted with consummate care and precision. So I almost hate to mention that the most compelling thing about it isn't a piece of visual art. Go to the listening station on the fourth floor and sample the gospel music of the self-appointed "soldier in the army of the Lord." Accompanied only by a tambourine and a rock-solid faith in God's "great strong Voice," this New Orleans street missionary sang and improvised hymns to the beat of spare, trance-like rhythms. (Sister Morgan died in 1980 at the age of 80.) Her pictures of New Jerusalem, Jesus piloting an airplane and St. John the Divine are just as insistent as her music, but seldom as riveting. Instead, they make us take a step back: Whether transforming angels into agents of oppression or the written word in to a maelstrom of marks, Sister Morgan is forbidding in her fervor.

Her pictures are too self-enclosed, too obdurate and claustrophobic, to stir religious feeling. The homely charms of Rose Hill Memorial Baptist Church (undated) are more inviting-and considerably rarer-than the scary intensity of There's a Bright Crown Waitang for Me (undated). Solace can be taken in unexpected materials (neither lamp shades or styrofoam platters were too humble a surface for Sister Morgan's visions) and eccentricities of incident (lawn furniture would seem to be an integral part of heaven's décor). Less distinctive is the pictorial ingenuity-the imperatives of vision aren't amplified by artistic invention. Compare Sister Morgan's work to that of Bill Traylor, Morris Hirschfeld or Martin Ramirez, and you'll glean the difference between run-of-the-mill and exceptional folk art. Authenticity is never in doubt. If all you require is proof of one woman's unrelenting faith, then this show will fit the bill.

Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan is at the American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street, until Sept. 26.

Artistic Freedom

How good are the paintings of the American artist Ray Parker (1922-1990), on display at Washburn Gallery? Good enough that I don't fret over the answer. Here's a more pressing question: What happened to the sense of possibility that brings such paintings into being? Listen to this: "Quitting the myth that a painter must be innocent of the artifice of art freed me of the … (limits and) rules I had made for myself." Parker continues: "Now I could make a screwy shape, even a line! Color, yes! Field, yes! ... Yes, anything, yes!" You could short-circuit your cerebral cortex trying to imagine the current crop of culture starlets mustering a similar optimism. If Parker's stream-of-consciousness riffs on the biomorphism of Hans Arp and the cut-outs of Henri Matisse don't necessitate historical revision, they do provide exultant color, effortless equipoise and a temporary reprieve from gravity. Aren't those things we all need from time to time? Yes, and that's what the paintings deliver.

Ray Parker: Paintings from the 1970s is at the Joan T. Washburn Gallery, 20 West 57th Street, until May 17.

William Kentridge's Animated Film

A good indicator of whether or not a work of visual art succeeds on its own terms is its ability to resist literary explanation. By this measure, my notes for Tide Table and Learning the Flute (both 2003), black-and-white animated films by the South African artist William Kentridge, on view at Marian Goodman Gallery, should serve as evidence of the works' success. The best I could come up with was a hasty inventory of pictorial motifs, a by-the-book description of cinematic methodology and an attempt at divining political intent (the legacy of apartheid spurred Mr. Kentridge's best-known films). Given how deeply Mr. Kentridge is involved with transformation as a formal and thematic conceit, it makes sense that his work should elude concrete description. I'm not suggesting that art criticism is a futile pursuit: God created metaphors for a reason. Yet Mr. Kentridge's art only goes to prove how wanting, even silly, words can be.

Tide Table and Learning the Flute are narratives in the sense that they document the evolution of drawn images. We register Mr. Kentridge's distinctive, ham-handed touch as his unseen hand sets down, alters and erases myriad scenarios. Unapologetically low-tech, the films stutter, flicker and twitch. In contrast, the images themselves-Egyptian temples,theoncoming tide and a trio of dictators looking through binoculars at the rabble below their balcony-evolve and flow with an uncanny lyricism, their transmutations suggesting history's unpredictable march. Politics continue to haunt Mr. Kentridge's vision-he touchesonrace,capitalismand poverty-but they're only one subtext among many. It's as if he had realized how stunting polemics can be to the life of art. In the process, the work gains in grit, scope and poetry without sacrificing an iota of moral purpose. I don't think Mr. Kentridge is the best artist working-but that the thought should even cross my mind speaks to his singular achievement.

William Kentridge: Tide Table (2003) and Learning the Flute (2003) are at the Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, until April 10.

Sister's Got Soul

Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan , an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, has been mounted with consummate care and precision. So I almost hate to mention that the most compelling thing about it isn't a piece of visual art. Go to the listening station on the fourth floor and sample the gospel music of the self-appointed "soldier in the army of the Lord." Accompanied only by a tambourine and a rock-solid faith in God's "great strong Voice," this New Orleans street missionary sang and improvised hymns to the beat of spare, trance-like rhythms. (Sister Morgan died in 1980 at the age of 80.) Her pictures of New Jerusalem, Jesus piloting an airplane and St. John the Divine are just as insistent as her music, but seldom as riveting. Instead, they make us take a step back: Whether transforming angels into agents of oppression or the written word in to a maelstrom of marks, Sister Morgan is forbidding in her fervor.

Her pictures are too self-enclosed, too obdurate and claustrophobic, to stir religious feeling. The homely charms of Rose Hill Memorial Baptist Church (undated) are more inviting-and considerably rarer-than the scary intensity of There's a Bright Crown Waitang for Me (undated). Solace can be taken in unexpected materials (neither lamp shades or styrofoam platters were too humble a surface for Sister Morgan's visions) and eccentricities of incident (lawn furniture would seem to be an integral part of heaven's décor). Less distinctive is the pictorial ingenuity-the imperatives of vision aren't amplified by artistic invention. Compare Sister Morgan's work to that of Bill Traylor, Morris Hirschfeld or Martin Ramirez, and you'll glean the difference between run-of-the-mill and exceptional folk art. Authenticity is never in doubt. If all you require is proof of one woman's unrelenting faith, then this show will fit the bill.

Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan is at the American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street, until Sept. 26.

Artistic Freedom

How good are the paintings of the American artist Ray Parker (1922-1990), on display at Washburn Gallery? Good enough that I don't fret over the answer. Here's a more pressing question: What happened to the sense of possibility that brings such paintings into being? Listen to this: "Quitting the myth that a painter must be innocent of the artifice of art freed me of the … (limits and) rules I had made for myself." Parker continues: "Now I could make a screwy shape, even a line! Color, yes! Field, yes! ... Yes, anything, yes!" You could short-circuit your cerebral cortex trying to imagine the current crop of culture starlets mustering a similar optimism. If Parker's stream-of-consciousness riffs on the biomorphism of Hans Arp and the cut-outs of Henri Matisse don't necessitate historical revision, they do provide exultant color, effortless equipoise and a temporary reprieve from gravity. Aren't those things we all need from time to time? Yes, and that's what the paintings deliver.

Ray Parker: Paintings from the 1970s is at the Joan T. Washburn Gallery, 20 West 57th Street, until May 17.

With the opening of its big and rather bizarre new building, however, the American Folk Art Museum has at last made a serious bid for the big time. Whether or not it succeeds in this ambition remains to be seen. A great deal will depend on how the public responds to the new building, which is anything but folksy. After two visits, I have to confess I find it somewhat daunting. It is certainly unlike any other museum building that I've seen, either here or abroad. It is going to take some getting used to. The building's designers, the New York firm of Tod Williams, Billie Tsien Architects, have given us an edifice that is, in effect, a sort of vertical maze or labyrinth–a fusion, if you will, of Bauhaus geometry, English brutalism and Piranesi. If this makes it sound like an improbable exercise in architectural incongruities, so be it.

Its 30,000-square-foot structure is divided into eight levels and features great geometrical slabs of gray stone, gray concrete and gray steel enclosing many narrow passageways, shadowy catwalks and charmless stairwells. (The eight levels are serviced by a single public elevator, by the way, so recourse to the uninviting stairways is all but mandatory for the able-bodied.) The interior contains a great deal of glass but few brightly lit areas, the principal one being the white-walled main-floor atrium. Owing, perhaps, to the many objects on view that are works on paper, the light levels tend to be unusually low.

Another of the museum's eccentricities is its signage. The wall labels, too, are often an exercise in incongruity. Some are situated at knee-level and can scarcely be read without getting down on hands and knees; others are so distant from the objects they identify that they're hardly worth bothering with. Only the major works are provided with wall texts. One has the impression that design has been given priority not only over readability but over basic information as well.

But then, this is a building that at every turn–and it is a building of a great many turns–calls insistent attention to itself rather than to the objects on exhibition. Many of the smaller objects are crammed into insufficient exhibition space, and the framed works on paper are similarly crowded into storage-like inventories. The paintings, especially the many portraits, fare better, but the overall impression we're left with is of a building that is already too cramped to accommodate the scale of the exhibitions the museum aspires to.

I say all this with considerable regret, for I have a keen interest in American folk art, and I think it ought to have been given a more viewer-friendly building. This is trophy architecture of a kind that artists have every reason to despise, for it inevitably has the effect of aggrandizing the architecture at the expense of the art it's supposed to be serving. In some respects, to be sure, this is a brilliantly conceived building, but every aspect of it is wildly at odds with the spirit of the art that it houses and is expected to house in the future.

My own standards in this matter are derived, in large part, from the dazzling–and dazzlingly intelligent–exhibitions of American folk art that the late Jean Lipman organized years ago at the Whitney Museum of American Art, especially the great exhibition called The Flowering of American Folk Art . The Whitney is no architectural masterpiece, either, and it's certainly not lacking a certain brutalism of its own. Yet owing to the consistently high quality of the objects that Jean Lipman selected for the Flowering exhibition and the genius of its installation, that show did more to advance the aesthetic appreciation of American folk art than any other in my lifetime, and it won over a new public for the art. For many of us, it was a revelation. It tells us something about the new quarters for the American Folk Art Museum that there isn't a single space under its roof where the Flowering exhibition could have been accommodated.

(Jean Lipman was herself a great collector of American folk art as well as a great scholar in this field, and her role as a benefactor resulted in the Whitney's acquisition of many masterpieces of American folk art for its so-called permanent collection. Yet as soon as Mrs. Lipman was dead, the museum sent off its entire folk art to be auctioned at Sotheby's. Of course, earlier on it had done more or less the same thing with its collection of 19th-century American paintings.)

There are many wonderful things to be seen at the new American Folk Art Museum, especially in the show Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum . But this, too, is so cramped for space in the new building that it's going to take a while to figure out what is of permanent aesthetic interest and what is merely an object of historical curiosity. Folk art, like any other field of artistic endeavor, calls for connoisseurship. For that matter, so does architecture. And one feels the absence of a governing connoisseurship very keenly in the crowded collections that dominate this opening installation of the American Folk Art Museum. These collections, like the building itself, are going to take some getting used to. They remain on view at the museum through June 2, 2002.