There’s a marked change in how we look at a Mondrian painting if it’s titled Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue or Trafalgar Square. One refers explicitly to itself; the other, however obliquely, to the world outside. Words don’t necessarily explain (or justify) an accumulation of lines, squares, splatters or what-have-you, but they do affect, for good or ill, our response to it. (Representational art isn’t altogether immune from this tendency—it’s worth recalling Whistler’s portrait, Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother.)

Laurie Fendrich, whose recent canvases are on display at the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, paints heraldic shapes cobbled together from rectangles, squares and circular forms. In other words, she’s an abstract painter. Yet the titles of her paintings are adamantly referential, divulging an attraction to history, loss and groan-inducing puns: Marcus Aurelius, Go West, No One Waltzes Anymore, A Frame Around Dog and Time Wounds All Heels.

Ms. Fendrich’s investment in words comes as no surprise: In addition to painting, she writes about art. Her articles appearing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, particularly her nuanced response to 9/11 and her rueful appraisal of art education, demonstrate a breadth of knowledge uncommon in contemporary criticism. Her extended essay, “Why Painting Still Matters,” is a must-read for anyone who cares about the medium.

Her art boasts similar breadth and nuance. Though working in the tradition of geometric abstraction, Ms. Fendrich knows that utopian projects are folly and that to essentialize form is to deny life’s complexity. “The days of Kandinsky and Mondrian are over” is her blunt disavowal of the woozy spiritualism that served as inspiration—and, at times, an excuse—for the pioneers of abstraction. She’s less interested in theory than in what meets the eye.

Her paintings contain a multitude of allusions, even as those allusions are buried under veils of brilliant color and bopping, quirky shapes. We may not be able to pin down why a canvas is dubbed The Glasgow School of Art, but the specificity indicates a reason for being. The titles aren’t capricious or arbitrary. They restate and amplify the work’s puzzle-like intricacy. They fit.

Ms. Fendrich has stated that she’s inadvertently worked her way back to the 1930’s, to American painters like the Park Avenue Cubists. Anyone familiar with that informal group of well-heeled sophisticates knows that a revolutionary agenda wasn’t on their docket. Painters like Charles G. Shaw and Suzy Frelinghuysen took the advances of modernism and infused them with a character that is nothing if not American—bull-headed, proudly idiosyncratic and eccentric. Their efforts were powered by a certain kind of modesty: the belief that a particular mode, however revolutionary, need not persist in radical innovation in order to develop and thrive.

Following suit, Ms. Fendrich shows that the story of art has less to do with rupture than with continuity. Her paintings may have landed themselves in the 1930’s, but they aren’t marooned in history. If anything, she’s acutely aware of the extent to which abstraction’s historical moment is over. As such, she’s free to follow tangents that Mondrian and Malevich would have considered rank heresy.

Her pictures, which share constants in composition and form, achieve a broad range of characters and effects. There are subtle elisions of tone, space and shape. Large areas of color nudge and butt into each other; building-block accretions of small rectangles and squares snuggle up against them. Geometry and biomorphism share the same tilting and shifting space. Shapes verge on the cartoonish and the decorative, taking inspiration as much from Barney Google as from Art Deco ornamentation.

The craftsmanship of the paintings is impeccable. Putting brush to canvas, Ms. Fendrich doesn’t delineate forms so much as patiently caress them into being. The surfaces are lustrous and smooth. The edges of shapes quietly reveal underlying layers of color and disclose decisions made, altered, reconsidered and all but obscured. Softly scumbled outlines keep shapes in check. A “halo” of purple, icy blue and sharp lemony green surrounds a keyhole cluster of forms. No hard edges for Ms. Fendrich—her paintings disavow the absolute for a tenderly questioning give-and-take.

Willem de Kooning famously remarked that oil paint was invented to depict flesh. Ms. Fendrich reminds us that it was invented to capture light as well. Her colors are varied and rich, with sonorous tonalities. Whether glittering, earthy or approaching neon, her palette is held in balance even as it pops out at the eye. A measure of a colorist’s strength is her ability to use white as a color and not as the absence of color. Ms. Fendrich handily does just that with The Glasgow School of Art.

She’s an unapologetic advocate of beauty over “meaning.” Her jewel-like cosmos aims high, but her feet stay humbly on the ground. Utter seriousness and profound whimsy make an unlikely combination. Ms. Fendrich pulls it off with a fetching élan.

Laurie Fendrich: Recent Paintings is at the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, until Jan. 6.

It needs to be recalled, perhaps, that in the 1930's and early 40's, when these painters were in their prime, modernists of almost every persuasion were at a considerable disadvantage on the New York art scene. In an era of severe economic depression and widespread political upheaval, the arts tended to favor more popular styles. This was, after all, the heyday of Social Realism, Regionalism, the W.P.A. mural project and other philistine developments designed to promote a radical political agenda. Hard as it may now be to understand, the Soviet Union-where modernism was officially denounced by Stalin himself as "bourgeoisformalism"-was nonetheless widely regarded by artists and intellectuals as a model to be emulated, in art as well as social thought.

It was in tacit opposition to this cataract of philistine art in the service of social consciousness that the painters in The Park Avenue Cubists emerged as articulate and well-informed champions of modernist painting. All four came from wealthy, patrician family backgrounds, hence the "Park Avenue" label, but they were anything but social or cultural conservatives.

A.E. Gallatin (1881-1952) was the great-grandson of the Gallatin who had been Secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson and Madison and the founder of New York University. In 1927, two years before the founding of the Museum of Modern Art and four years before the opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art, A.E. Gallatin created New York's first modern art museum-the Gallery of Living Art, later called the Museum of Living Art, in the space now occupied by the Grey Art Gallery. Gallatin turned to painting in the early 1920's. and he went on to produce some of the most austere abstractions of his day.

George L.K. Morris (1905-1975), a painter, critic and collector, provided the funds that made it possible for the Partisan Review , which had been founded as an organ of the American Communist Party, to break with the Party line and become an independent literary journal. While remaining Marxist in its political outlook, Partisan Review embarked on a program that combined modernism in the arts with a vehement rejection of Stalinism-a program in which Morris was closely involved as an editor as well as the magazine's first art critic, a role that was reluctantly ceded to Clement Greenberg in the early 1940's. He also served as the curator of the Gallery of Living Art.

Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911-1988), Morris' wife, is the least-known of this quartet. She enjoyed a double career as a highly accomplished painter and a professional opera singer. She was certainly one of the best American painters of her generation, and her work is likely to be the principal "discovery" for the younger viewers of The Park Avenue Cubists exhibition.

Charles G. Shaw (1892-1974) began his career as a writer and caricaturist, contributing to the Smart Set, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair before turning to painting. His Self-Portrait drawing, circa 1935, in the current show is at once a caricature of both the artist and the Cubist style, and is quite the wittiest thing in the exhibition. The geometrical "Skyscraper" abstractions he produced in the 1930's are some of the most original abstract paintings of the period-and in one of them, Wrigleys (1937), which depicts an oversized package of Wrigley's Spearmint Chewing Gum suspended in space against a geometricized version of the Manhattan skyline, gives us a preview of what many years later came to be called Pop Art.

It was the principal liability of the Park Avenue Cubists that they remained so closely identified-both personally, in the friendships they established, and in their own paintings-with the Cubist masters of the School of Paris, whose works they admired, collected and sometimes wrote about. To emulate the Cubist masterpieces of Picasso, Braque, Gris, Léger et al. was indeed their avowed ambition. In the 1930's, this allegiance to the School of Paris made them look like artistic revolutionaries, but by the 1940's, when the Abstract Expressionist movement emerged with a more radical variety of abstract painting, the Park Avenue Cubists could no longer be regarded as avant-garde. With the arrival of Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell et al., Cubism was looked upon as démodé . In the influential critical writing of Clement Greenberg, for example, "late Cubism" was a term of contempt.

That's not the way we see these things today, for the passage of time has emptied the old orthodoxies of their authority. At least in the work of Suzy Frelinghuysen and Charles Shaw, I believe we're seeing an aesthetic quality that places their accomplishments well beyond that of mere imitators, and in Shaw's case I think his work would merit a full retrospective.

It remains to be said that the exhibition Ms. Balken has organized in The Park Avenue Cubists is exemplary in every respect, and so is the fine catalog that accompanies it. The show remains on view at the Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, through March 29.

From a distance, the pictures have a hard-edged look; upon closer examination, the edges turn out to be softer and more delicate than we expect, and are usually outlined with a halo of still another color to mark a transition and illuminate another current of feeling. Is there also an undercurrent of humor in the sometimes carnival exuberance of these paintings? One almost hesitates to suggest the presence of a comic impulse in paintings so seriously engaged in the aesthetics of abstraction. But the fact is that Ms. Fendrich's pictures do, at times, bring out a smile when we look at them-a smile of pleasure and release. At the very least, this is abstraction devoid of solemnity, dogmatism and existential angst.

It's also devoid of utopian aspiration. This is another of the things that separate Ms. Fendrich's paintings from the Constructivist tradition of geometrical abstraction with which they otherwise have so many aesthetic affinities: They embrace rather than reject the world they inhabit. As Karen Wilkin shrewdly observes in her essay for the exhibition's catalog: "Pop culture echoes begin to declare themselves, without obscuring Fendrich's allegiance to high modernism. A strange, latent anthropormorphism begins to animate her severe geometric shapes. Occasional ovals and curves acquire enormous importance, suggesting schematic references to the body. But it's fleeting. The pictures settle into abstractness again …. "

All of this suggests to me that we may be in the presence of a development that doesn't yet have a name. Call it, if you like, post-Minimalist abstraction. Whatever we call it, it's likely to have as one of its defining characteristics a determination to renegotiate the symbiotic relationship that once crucially obtained between abstraction and representation in modernist painting.

In the heyday of Minimalist orthodoxy in the 1960's and 70's, this was an all-but-forbidden subject. Minimalism was absolutist in its program and ideology; Frank Stella had declared war on "drawing with a brush." Sol LeWitt, having failed to create anything of artistic distinction as a representational painter, turned painting itself into a Tom Sawyer decorative project that employed teams of anonymous hands to produce a kind of bureaucratic abstraction on a gigantic scale. But it was the most radical of the Minimalists-Donald Judd, another failed painter-who went further than anyone else, consigning not just European modernism but the entire tradition of Western painting to the ash heap of history as he embarked upon a utopian project in the closest thing to "nowhere" he could find on the North American continent: Marfa, Texas. ("Nowhere" is, of course, what the word utopia means.) It was in Marfa-where he bought up most of the available real estate, including a bank and an abandoned army base, all of which he turned into a Minimalist compound-that Judd achieved his ultimate goal of removing himself and his work from the contamination of what he called "the salient and most objectionable relics of European art." (There's apparently no danger of such contamination in Marfa.)

We are clearly in a very different period today, and Ms. Fendrich's engaging exhibition is by no means the only sign of the changes that are occurring. Some of the absolutes that governed Minimalism-and, for that matter, some that were advanced by the more doctrinaire champions of Abstract Expressionism-are no longer as persuasive or as intimidating as they once were. "Late Cubism," for instance, is not now the negative critical epithet it used to be. We are all pluralists today, and what looks more and more to be a rejection of sectarian aesthetics is also altering our views on some of the earlier developments in American abstract and abstract-related art that were unjustly marginalized when first Abstract Expressionism, and then Minimalism and Pop Art, captured the limelight.

Accompanying the Laurie Fendrich exhibition at Gary Snyder Fine Art, for example, there's another show, New York Abstraction 1930-1945 , that's likely to be a pleasant surprise for visitors unfamiliar with the works on view, especially the paintings by Carl Holty and Charles Shaw. There was a superb painting by Shaw, Kite Abstraction (1942), in a splendid recent show at the Richard York Gallery called "Great Planes": Planar Surfaces in American Cubism and Abstraction , and Shaw is also one of the featured painters in the upcoming exhibition at N.Y.U.'s Grey Art Gallery, The Park Avenue Cubists: The Work of Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen and Shaw (to be shown from Jan. 14 to March 29). Upcoming as well is what promises to be a comprehensive survey of the history of abstraction, Seeing Red: An International Exhibition of Nonobjective Painting , at the Hunter College Art Galleries from Jan. 30 to May 3. For aficionados of abstract art, it looks as if 2003 will be a year for the revisionists.

Meanwhile, Laurie Fendrich: Recent Paintings remains on view at the Gary Snyder Fine Art gallery, 601 West 29th Street at 11th Avenue, through Jan. 25.