We're unlikely to lift an eyebrow taking in botanical studies, penny picture postcards or a commercial sampling of hats; they have a period fascination. We're likely to be surprised in learning that ear identification was the precursor to fingerprinting-Alphonse Bertillon's photos will have you thinking about the quirks of your own features. The sardonic, knowing gaze of the title figure in Hugh Welch Diamond's Patient, Surrey County Lunatic Asylum (1850-58) will prompt despair over the standards of 19th-century medicine. As for Who Is an Aryan? , a 1933 picture by an unknown German photographer: It emphasizes how readily science can be hijacked to serve the most horrific of purposes.

There are items featured in Indexing the World that can be considered art, both good (photos by Walker Evans, Eugene Atget and Ed Ruscha) and bad (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's exegesis on the television program Starsky and Hutch ). But the show's main objective is to provide context, counterpoint and support to People of the Twentieth Century , August Sander's comprehensive photographic record of the German people. Indexing the World gently bolsters Sander's case by underscoring the connection (typology) and the difference (aesthetic worth). People of the Twentieth Century doesn't need much bolstering-it's one of the most ambitious undertakings within the modern canon. That it was also foolhardy and not a little obsessive, as well as incomplete, in no way diminishes its stature.

Sander photographed German citizens for 40 years, from the early 1920's up until his death in 1964. (He was born in 1876.) "I classified all the types I encountered," Sander stated, "in relation to one basic type who had all the characteristics of mankind in general." The exact count of citizens he caught on film is unknown-most of Sander's negatives were destroyed in a fire in 1942, the estimated loss numbering between 25,000 and 30,000. Taking into account the photographs and negatives that do exist-1,800-the mind boggles: Who didn't Sander photograph?

Sander was nothing if not democratic: Disabled miners, gypsies and "people who came to my door"-including the bailiff threatening eviction-were as vital to his undertaking as businessmen, doctors and attorneys. The Nazis saw fit to burn the plates of Face of Our Time , the first published version of People of the Twentieth Century . Sander's inclusive vision, wherein an "idiot" has as much validity as a member of the Hitler Youth, didn't sit well with a regime that had its own virulent ideal of German society.

Sander didn't probe the characteristics of type so much as scour them. His subjects, the majority of which acknowledge the viewer, seem pinned down by the intensity of Sander's eye. Accoutrements specific to certain types-clothing indicative of social standing, say, or tools-are the focus; individuals don't register. There are exceptions: A boxer with a goofy, ingratiating smile; an imperious baker; the Dadaist artist Raoul Hausmann affecting a mock aristocratic attitude-all fend off Sander's narrow pursuit with glimpses of personality. For the most part, the photos trade empathy for a relentless accounting of the facts.

People of the Twentieth Century is, in a sense, an essay in anti-portraiture-at least if we're expecting insight into the particulars of temperament. Sander himself remains a cipher, though his tenaciousness is impossible to ignore, and there's no doubting that the formality typical of the work owes to the conventions of early photographic portraiture. Yet the cumulative effect of the photographs is singular and intensely disinterested. (You could say that Sander was passionate about dispassion.)

Running roughshod over the distinctions between sociology, journalism, science and art, Sander aimed for an unflinching objectivity-and ended up with something close enough to it to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You'll walk out of the exhibition taking a closer, and perhaps less charitable, look at the pedestrians walking up the Met's grand staircase-testament to the pull of Sander's daunting achievement.

Indexing the World and August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century-A Photographic Portrait of Germany are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Oct. 17 and Sept. 19, respectively.

Earth Mother

However much she may be revered as a forebear of feminist art, however much her work is driven by a "passionate desire to connect with a wider, collective human heritage," however much space the Whitney Museum of American Art devotes to her oeuvre , Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) will forever be known as the woman who fell to her death from the 34th-floor window of the apartment belonging to her husband, the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. (Mr. Andre was charged with her murder and subsequently acquitted.)

"Forever" may be overstating the case, and callously so, yet the circumstances surrounding Mendieta's death continue to cast a sensationalistic pall over her art-a pall the curators at the Whitney studiously avoid. A "brief yet prolific career" is the lone allusion to be read on the wall labels accompanying the exhibition Ana Mendieta: Earth Body-Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985 . The curators want to redirect our attention from an untimely death to work that "has particular resonance in a global society struggling to grasp the overwhelming points of correspondences and differences between individual, nation, and culture."

Born in Cuba, Mendieta came to the U.S. in 1961, a 12-year-old fleeing Castro's revolution. She came of age during the artistic free-for-all that followed in the wake of Conceptualism. Photography, performance, film, sculpture, drawing, process art, earth art, body art, earth-body art-there wasn't a medium Mendieta didn't dabble in. Feminism and eco-politics are a constant in the work, as is the desire to tap into the symbolic archetypes of non-Western cultures. The prevailing attribute of Mendieta's art, however, is its narcissism.

Whether altering her face with cosmetics, lying naked in a stream, sweating blood in a video from 1973 or "intervening" in the landscape by creating primitivistic effigies within the earth, Mendieta never took into account that art is a matter of communication-with someone else. She operated under the misconception that arrant self-absorption is a viable form of artistic and political expression. The best thing you can say about her art is that its psychological desperation is real. The worst you can say is that it isn't real enough-you leave the Whitney with the nagging sense that Mendieta was something of a dilettante, playing the artist to lurid and often hyperbolic effect. That she's being lauded as a figure of contemporary relevance says as much about our culture's failings as it does of Mendieta's.

Ana Mendieta: Earth Body-Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985 is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, until Sept. 19.

In Art and Science of Classification

How do you know that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the best museum going? Check out the deft manner in which its curators have juxtaposed Indexing the World and August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century , two superb exhibitions of photography that close Oct. 17 and Sept. 19, respectively. Drawn from the Gilman Paper Company Collection and the Met's own holdings, Indexing the World focuses on photography as a tool for scientific, as well as pseudo-scientific, classification. It's a compendium of fascinating, if often troubling, artifacts.

We're unlikely to lift an eyebrow taking in botanical studies, penny picture postcards or a commercial sampling of hats; they have a period fascination. We're likely to be surprised in learning that ear identification was the precursor to fingerprinting-Alphonse Bertillon's photos will have you thinking about the quirks of your own features. The sardonic, knowing gaze of the title figure in Hugh Welch Diamond's Patient, Surrey County Lunatic Asylum (1850-58) will prompt despair over the standards of 19th-century medicine. As for Who Is an Aryan? , a 1933 picture by an unknown German photographer: It emphasizes how readily science can be hijacked to serve the most horrific of purposes.

There are items featured in Indexing the World that can be considered art, both good (photos by Walker Evans, Eugene Atget and Ed Ruscha) and bad (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's exegesis on the television program Starsky and Hutch ). But the show's main objective is to provide context, counterpoint and support to People of the Twentieth Century , August Sander's comprehensive photographic record of the German people. Indexing the World gently bolsters Sander's case by underscoring the connection (typology) and the difference (aesthetic worth). People of the Twentieth Century doesn't need much bolstering-it's one of the most ambitious undertakings within the modern canon. That it was also foolhardy and not a little obsessive, as well as incomplete, in no way diminishes its stature.

Sander photographed German citizens for 40 years, from the early 1920's up until his death in 1964. (He was born in 1876.) "I classified all the types I encountered," Sander stated, "in relation to one basic type who had all the characteristics of mankind in general." The exact count of citizens he caught on film is unknown-most of Sander's negatives were destroyed in a fire in 1942, the estimated loss numbering between 25,000 and 30,000. Taking into account the photographs and negatives that do exist-1,800-the mind boggles: Who didn't Sander photograph?

Sander was nothing if not democratic: Disabled miners, gypsies and "people who came to my door"-including the bailiff threatening eviction-were as vital to his undertaking as businessmen, doctors and attorneys. The Nazis saw fit to burn the plates of Face of Our Time , the first published version of People of the Twentieth Century . Sander's inclusive vision, wherein an "idiot" has as much validity as a member of the Hitler Youth, didn't sit well with a regime that had its own virulent ideal of German society.

Sander didn't probe the characteristics of type so much as scour them. His subjects, the majority of which acknowledge the viewer, seem pinned down by the intensity of Sander's eye. Accoutrements specific to certain types-clothing indicative of social standing, say, or tools-are the focus; individuals don't register. There are exceptions: A boxer with a goofy, ingratiating smile; an imperious baker; the Dadaist artist Raoul Hausmann affecting a mock aristocratic attitude-all fend off Sander's narrow pursuit with glimpses of personality. For the most part, the photos trade empathy for a relentless accounting of the facts.

People of the Twentieth Century is, in a sense, an essay in anti-portraiture-at least if we're expecting insight into the particulars of temperament. Sander himself remains a cipher, though his tenaciousness is impossible to ignore, and there's no doubting that the formality typical of the work owes to the conventions of early photographic portraiture. Yet the cumulative effect of the photographs is singular and intensely disinterested. (You could say that Sander was passionate about dispassion.)

Running roughshod over the distinctions between sociology, journalism, science and art, Sander aimed for an unflinching objectivity-and ended up with something close enough to it to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You'll walk out of the exhibition taking a closer, and perhaps less charitable, look at the pedestrians walking up the Met's grand staircase-testament to the pull of Sander's daunting achievement.

Indexing the World and August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century-A Photographic Portrait of Germany are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Oct. 17 and Sept. 19, respectively.

Earth Mother

However much she may be revered as a forebear of feminist art, however much her work is driven by a "passionate desire to connect with a wider, collective human heritage," however much space the Whitney Museum of American Art devotes to her oeuvre , Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) will forever be known as the woman who fell to her death from the 34th-floor window of the apartment belonging to her husband, the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. (Mr. Andre was charged with her murder and subsequently acquitted.)

"Forever" may be overstating the case, and callously so, yet the circumstances surrounding Mendieta's death continue to cast a sensationalistic pall over her art-a pall the curators at the Whitney studiously avoid. A "brief yet prolific career" is the lone allusion to be read on the wall labels accompanying the exhibition Ana Mendieta: Earth Body-Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985 . The curators want to redirect our attention from an untimely death to work that "has particular resonance in a global society struggling to grasp the overwhelming points of correspondences and differences between individual, nation, and culture."

Born in Cuba, Mendieta came to the U.S. in 1961, a 12-year-old fleeing Castro's revolution. She came of age during the artistic free-for-all that followed in the wake of Conceptualism. Photography, performance, film, sculpture, drawing, process art, earth art, body art, earth-body art-there wasn't a medium Mendieta didn't dabble in. Feminism and eco-politics are a constant in the work, as is the desire to tap into the symbolic archetypes of non-Western cultures. The prevailing attribute of Mendieta's art, however, is its narcissism.

Whether altering her face with cosmetics, lying naked in a stream, sweating blood in a video from 1973 or "intervening" in the landscape by creating primitivistic effigies within the earth, Mendieta never took into account that art is a matter of communication-with someone else. She operated under the misconception that arrant self-absorption is a viable form of artistic and political expression. The best thing you can say about her art is that its psychological desperation is real. The worst you can say is that it isn't real enough-you leave the Whitney with the nagging sense that Mendieta was something of a dilettante, playing the artist to lurid and often hyperbolic effect. That she's being lauded as a figure of contemporary relevance says as much about our culture's failings as it does of Mendieta's.

Ana Mendieta: Earth Body-Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985 is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, until Sept. 19.

But then, of course, Mr. Stella's amazing career has often proved to be of more interest than his work. It might even be said that his career, rather than the art on which it is based, is his real achievement. Unhandicapped by any art-school training in the rudiments of drawing and painting, he began making abstract pictures in prep school at Phillips Academy, and, both there and at Princeton University, he promptly established the kind of art-world connections that proved useful in launching a meteoric rise to fame and fortune that remains unparalleled in the annals of abstract art. At the age of 23, he enjoyed a scale of commercial success and critical acclaim that had eluded Piet Mondrian, for example, for his lifetime, and that came to Jackson Pollock only upon his violent death in a car crash.

Taking his cue from Jasper Johns' first Flag paintings even before they were publicly familiar, Mr. Stella created a sensation with his black-stripe abstractions in the 1959-60 Sixteen Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. A mere decade later he was given his first retrospective at MoMA; in 1987 he was given a second. It was on the latter occasion that William Rubin, the organizer of both retrospectives, invoked the names of Dante, Shakespeare and Picasso as appropriate comparisons for "the spirit of genius to be found in Mr. Stella's abstractions." Promiscuous praise doesn't get much more promiscuous than that. Needless to say, from his very first exhibition at–where else?–the Leo Castelli Gallery, Mr. Stella's work sold like proverbial hot cakes, and there was no shortage of critical praise to add to the sizzle, even prior to Mr. Rubin's flight into the critical stratosphere.

In those early days, of course, the work itself was ultra-cool. Anything remotely suggestive of Abstract Expressionist bravura or improvisation–anything, indeed, that alluded to an overt expression of emotion–was categorically disallowed. Minimalist orthodoxy was stern in its prohibition of discernible feeling. Overnight, what Mr. Stella's fellow Minimalist Carl Andre called "the necessities of painting" were radically abridged, and what remained, in Mr. Stella's work, were pictorial compositions based on strict geometrical symmetry.

In retrospect, it is hardly a wonder that Mr. Stella soon tired of this infertile formula. Even its many admirers were obliged to acknowledge the large element of boredom it was generating. (Susan Sontag and Barbara Rose wrote essays that attempted to defend the moral and aesthetic necessity of such boredom.) What supplanted this Minimalist orthodoxy in Mr. Stella's case was nonetheless something of a shock. He had, after all, been very explicit in consigning the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic to a past that was over. "It's not a question of destroying anything," he said. "If something's used up, something's done, something's over with, what's the point of getting involved with it?"

Yet in his initial post-Minimalist pictures he was openly producing a kind of mimicry or parody of Abstract Expressionist clichés. It wasn't exactly painting, to be sure. Most of the work was mixed-media pictorial/relief on its way to becoming polychrome constructed sculpture. For a while, Mr. Stella persisted in calling it painting. He even had an exhibition of metal wall constructions in a London gallery which he entitled Easel Paintings . But despite all the blather about Caravaggio and deep pictorial space, Mr. Stella had pretty much abandoned the art of painting for sculpture.

The few paintings to be seen in the current Recent Work show are, in any case, overshadowed by the gigantic polychrome constructed sculpture and a mural-scale collage, which measures 95 x 328 inches, called The Duel (1999). The sculptures, if they can still be called sculpture, are certainly the worst and the silliest I have seen in nearly 50 years of reviewing exhibitions. The materials are, among other industrial products, cast aluminum, aluminum pipe and plywood with ceramic and steel components and with some or all of their surfaces randomly decorated with polyurethane, acrylic and less identifiable pigments. Ugly is hardly a sufficient word to describe the resulting oversize mess that it all amounts to.

In the heyday of Mr. Stella's Minimalist paintings, it could hardly have been suspected that he had all along been secretly harboring an appetite for–of all things–the kind of graffiti that was then defacing so many public spaces in New York and other cities. It was only when he came to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1983-84–another amazing chapter in this amazing career–that he revealed that he was suffering from a bad case of graffiti-envy, an affliction (it will be recalled) that he shared with another failed eminence, Norman Mailer. It is this unbridled appetite for the sheer mindlessness of graffiti that is projected on a mammoth scale in this Recent Work exhibition. You can forget about Caravaggio. You can forget about Herman Melville, Heinrich von Kleist and the other literary stars Mr. Stella claims have inspired him. Mr. Stella's gold-plated journey from Minimalism and a mimicry of Abstract Expressionist sculpture has lately culminated in this riot of imitation graffiti. As I say, it is a career that remains unparalleled in the annals of abstract art.

Frank Stella: Recent Work remains on view in the Paul Kasmin Gallery garage, 289 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street, through Jan. 31. Be sure to wear a warm coat.