Finally, the fact that most of the artists featured-painters like Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Friedel Dzubas and the sculptor Anthony Caro-are linked with the art critic Clement Greenberg is mildly off-putting. Don't get me wrong-my esteem for Greenberg's criticism is considerable. But these particular artists signal Greenberg's aesthetic petrification; they mark the point beyond which he would never venture, at least in print.

All in all, Summer in the City seemed a purely reflexive endeavor. Yet here I am, writing about it. Why? Because this is a summer show with purpose. At a time when most galleries trot out any old thing on the theory that no one's paying attention, Ameringer/Howard/Yohe offers a sense of vision . Looking at the two paintings by Ms. Frankenthaler, I was struck by their color and spaciousness, but I was most impressed by their grandeur. These aren't "watercolor[s] that ate the art world," as a critic of note dismissively put it; they are paintings with reach, momentum and optimism. Ms. Frankenthaler's canvases, in contrast to so much of what passes for art nowadays, acknowledge the world that exists beyond their borders. This philosophical openness-a kind of healthy engagement with experience in all of its varieties-is a bracing thing to behold.

A similar give-and-take weaves its way through Summer in the City , even among its lesser lights. For instance, I've never fathomed the appeal of Mr. Noland, and the jury's still out on Mr. Olitski. Flats (1964), a welded-steel sculpture by Mr. Caro, strikes me as a relatively pedestrian work from this artist's strongest period. Here, however, all three are buoyed by the show's expansive generosity. Dzubas is represented by a jolly gem of a picture. A glib canvas by Robert Motherwell is redeemed by a fine collage from 1984 (so much for the chronological coherence). The elegiac beauty of Louis' Italian Veil (1959) should be enough to silence this underrated painter's overheated detractors.

And let's not forget Hans Hofmann, in many ways the sine qua non of this show. His four ink-on-paper self-portraits and Olive Grove , a magisterial oil on canvas from 1960, radiate with his signature propulsive exuberance. The casual élan of Wolf Kahn's pastel landscapes, the subject of a concurrent exhibition in the side gallery, adds to the predominating spirit. Summer in the City is a vivifying antidote to the heat, humidity and humdrum art currently engulfing us.

Summer in the City: High in the 60's is at Ameringer/Howard/Yohe, 20 West 57th Street, until Sept. 14.

Gerardo Rueda's New York Debut

Until I visited Mono-chrome , a group show curated by the art historian Dr. Barbara Rose that closed last month at Paul Rodgers/9W in Chelsea, I'd never heard of the Spanish painter and sculptor Gerardo Rueda (1926-1996). There's a reason why I was in the dark about Rueda: His work had never been exhibited in New York. One of the pieces, a painted wall construction titled CHAVI (1976), announced itself forthrightly and withheld its secrets steadfastly; its rigor set it off from its neighbors. The other Ruedas in Mono-chrome didn't come up to that level, but all were marked by the same firm intelligence.

As it happens, the first New York exhibition of Rueda's work-or rather, one aspect of it-is currently on display at the Spanish Institute. Titled Gerardo Rueda: The Master of Silence , it's dedicated exclusively to Rueda's abstract collages. Like the Rodgers show, The Master of Silence was curated by Dr. Rose, who is, one gathers, a fan of the artist. (Her biography of Rueda is coming out next year.) The pieces on view at the Spanish Institute date from 1954 to 1993. In them, we see Rueda glance upon solid precedents-Cubism, Arp and Constructivism most notably; Surrealism and Dada less so; and Matisse here and there. The pieces are characterized by simple though not uncomplicated relationships, biomorphic shapes, crisp contours and soft rhythms.

The collages are whimsical and knotty by turns, and always received and recycled-Rueda didn't partake of Modernism so much as follow in its wake. Still, a curious quality-something absurdist, maybe, or a tad metaphysical-eventually comes to the fore. The best works date from the 1960's, when Rueda's elemental forms coalesce into amusing caprices. The weakest come at the end of his life, where we see design principles mask a lack of inspiration. Ultimately, the truncated nature of The Master of Silence frustrates. One's left to wonder: Would more Rueda be more-or less? A fuller accounting would help. Let's hope Ms. Rose will oblige.

Gerardo Rueda: The Master of Silence is at the Spanish Institute, 684 Park Avenue, until July 31.

"The Factory becomes a kind of super discotheque where the worlds of art and fashion meet," she wrote. "There is a constant flow of young, beautiful, deranged creatures with glazed eyes, gyrating to records amplified to earsplitting loudness. Their lithe, skimpily clad bodies are showered with brilliant moving patterns of light reflected from the giant mirrored globe suspended from the ceiling. Poets and painters, models and millionaires twist, jerk, frug, shuffle, and boogaloo. A rock group called the Velvet Underground, after the title of a study in sadomasochistic practices, is installed in residence. Every night is Mardi Gras, Halloween, or Walpurgisnacht, depending on your point of view. The Factory is Bertolt Brecht's decadent Mahagonny –the 'City of Nets' located in the state of anomie –where flesh, whiskey, drugs, action are all available for the asking."

I recommend Ms. Rose's essay on Warhol–it can be found in her book Autocritique (1988)–to anyone planning to see the exhibition called Andy Warhol: Photography at the new International Center of Photography. It is certainly more readable than the show's bloated hardcover catalogue, which runs to some 400 pages, costs $75 plus tax and features, among much else, an essay by Mark Francis on "Still Life: Andy Warhol's Photography as a Form of Metaphysics." This remarkable text displays an intimate knowledge of the Warhol archives but not the slightest acquaintance with the arcana of metaphysics. But who cares? The title of the essay makes Warhol sound really deep, which is something his photographs were never meant to be. So does Mr. Francis' claim that "Warhol comes closest to the position of the French photographer Eugène Atget, as espoused by the critic Walter Benjamin," which is worse than nonsense. It amounts to a slander of Atget's greatness, and dropping Walter Benjamin's name into the discussion doesn't lessen the offense.

Warhol is said to have taken more than 100,000 photographs as well as thousands of Polaroids and photo-booth strips, and there are some weary moments in the Andy Warhol: Photography show when the visitor begins to wonder if he is going to have to look at every last one of these mostly very dreary pictures. This fear proves to be unfounded, however, for the show itself is limited to a mere 300 or so photographs and photo-based images by, of, or otherwise "about" the life and career and special interests of Andy himself.

If the show feels physically larger than it actually is, it is probably because the tedium of its unrelieved narcissism sets in early with a section devoted to "Warhol as Icon for the Camera," and you quickly come to understand that no other subject ever inspired as much tender feeling in Warhol as the fictional personae he invented for himself. Certainly the most poignant images in this exhibition are those of Warhol himself in drag as a Hollywood glamour girl.

What adds to the tedium, too, is the sheer junkiness of most of the pictures. Warhol took many of these pictures the way he tape-recorded other people's conversations–more or less at random. When he invited people to "sit" for their camera portraits, the point seems to have been to make them look as banal or as bemused as possible. There are exceptions, to be sure–mostly in the pictures of beautiful young men, where the sexual interest elicited a more concentrated attention. Warhol seems to have been especially enchanted by the body of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the big black-and-white silkscreen portrait of the artist in a jock strap– Jean-Michel Basquiat (1984)–was clearly a labor of love. For us today, it is also a reminder that Basquiat paid a high price for the attention he received from Warhol and his circle–an early death from an overdose of drugs. But then, Basquiat was scarcely the only casualty of the Factory saturnalia.

The overall impression that one carries away from Andy Warhol: Photography is that of a huge merchandise mart of souvenirs from a now-distant period of history. About that aspect of Warhol's work, Barbara Rose was also very shrewd. "The images he leaves," she wrote in 1971, "will be a permanent record of America in the sixties: mechanical, vulgar, violent, commercial, deadly." Unfortunately, it wasn't only a huge inventory of images that Warhol left us. His deadly influence on the art scene remains his most significant legacy–more significant, certainly, than his photographs–and with the debased and debasing consequences of that legacy we are still contending today.

Andy Warhol: Photography , organized by Christoph Heinrich at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, remains on view at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Sixth Avenue at 43rd Street, through March 18.

the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has now come to the Whitney Museum

of American Art, the first thing to consider is the artist's credo. For Mr.

LeWitt has never been shy about making his intentions explicit. The

bibliography of his writings and publications on this subject is, indeed, one

of the most extensive in recent history. While other hands have frequently been

enlisted to execute his paintings and drawings, it is in his writings that we

come closest to hearing the artist's own voice-the voice of a Minimalist who

found in the operational strategies of Conceptual art a perfect vehicle for the

creation of a copious production.

Here, then, is a paragraph from one of Mr. LeWitt's key

texts, his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," first published in Artforum in 1967: "I will refer to the

kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea

or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a

conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are

made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a

machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative

of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes

and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of

the artist as a craftsman. It is the objective of the artist who is concerned

with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and

therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry. There is no

reason to suppose, however, that the conceptual artist is out to bore the

viewer. It is only the expectation of an emotional kick, to which one

conditioned to expressionist art is accustomed, that would deter the viewer

from perceiving this art."

To which should be added the following passage from the same

text: "To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity.

It also obviates the necessity of designing each work in turn. The plan would

design the work."

For its current incarnation of the LeWitt retrospective, the

Whitney has supplied a text of its own, from which I shall quote only a single

sentence: "A key figure in the development of Conceptual art in [the 1960's],

LeWitt belongs to a generation of artists who, in their search for new

directions, found little promise in the hothouse emotionalism of the highly

venerated Abstract Expressionists of the New York School."

Now you may not have thought of the paintings of Mark Rothko

or Willem de Kooning or even Jackson Pollock-never mind those of Ad Reinhardt

or Barnett Newman-as examples of "hothouse emotionalism." And if, when you

visit the LeWitt retrospective, you take a look at the examples of Abstract

Expressionist painting from the Whitney's own collection that are also on view

at the moment, you will find little to support this theory of "hothouse

emotionalism." But never mind. This is what passes for deep thought at the

Whitney these days, and it is only meant to persuade us that Sol LeWitt has

never been guilty of such dreaded emotionalism, hothouse or otherwise. On this

point I am easily persuaded.

On another subject,

however-Mr. LeWitt's claim that there is no reason to suppose "that the

conceptual artist is out to bore the viewer"-something more needs to be said.

For there is an immense quantity of

work in this retrospective-rooms and rooms of it-that this viewer found to be

almost unendurably boring. I am not suggesting that Mr. LeWitt has set out to

bore us, but a large measure of boredom is built into his depersonalized

method. When "the plan" designs "the work" and "the execution is a perfunctory

affair," then boredom awaits us, whether or not the artist intends it.

It is worth recalling, in this connection, that back in

1967, when Mr. LeWitt published his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," boredom

was, so to speak, a hot issue in the art world. No less an eminence than Susan

Sontag had grandly proclaimed (in Against

Interpretation ) that "There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom." She

was writing in defense of what she called "the new languages which the

interesting art of our time speaks," which would then have included Minimalism

and Conceptual art.

It was left to Barbara Rose, however, to offer up the

grandest defense of boredom in art. In a widely read essay called "ABC Art,"

published in Art in America in 1965,

Ms. Rose wrote as follows: "If, on seeing some of the new paintings,

sculptures, dances or films, you are bored, probably you were intended to be.

Boring the public is one way of testing its commitment. The new artists seem to

be extremely chary; approval, they know, is easy to come by in this seller's

market for culture, but commitment is nearly impossible to elicit. So they make

their art as difficult, remote, aloof and indigestible as possible. One way to

achieve this is to make art boring. Some artists, often the most gifted, finally

end by finding art a bore. It is no coincidence that the last painting Duchamp

made, in 1918, was called Tu m' . The

title is short for tu m'ennuie -you

bore me."

As Ms. Rose was then married to Frank Stella, she brought a

special authority to this proposition. It was undoubtedly in response to this

defense of boredom that Mr. LeWitt felt obliged to deny that "the conceptual

artist is out to bore the viewer."

Still, as the viewer makes his way through this immense

retrospective, he may be persuaded that Mr. LeWitt was indeed one of the

artists who, at a certain point in his development, was "finding art a bore,"

and as a hedge against boredom-the viewer's, if not his own-began to embrace a

kind of razzle-dazzle brand of color design as a substitute for artistic

thought. So the monkish Minimalism of the 1960's was soon followed by the

atrociously vulgar color design that now covers so many of the walls of the

Whitney Museum, all of it executed by hired hands. "A perfunctory affair,"

indeed, and it remains on view at the Whitney through Feb. 25