It’s one thing just to spin the wheels of tradition or, if you prefer, style; it’s quite another to road-test its tenets. Reiteration isn’t invention. Tradition honors considered skepticism. Hard questions can lead to dramatic breaks and reveal surprising continuities. Modernism is testament both to the flexibility of tradition and its unyielding purpose. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Matisse’s Luxe, Calme, et Volupté are but two examples of the unlimited potential residing within its parameters.

Yet, as is more often the case, artists can ask questions that are subtler, if no less probing and challenging. It has become difficult to recognize when a contemporary painter or sculptor wrests something individual from tradition. Our what’s-hot-and-what’s-not culture—dependent on spectacle, novelty, and magazines like People and Artforum—can dull the capability to parse and undergo deeper and quieter pleasures.

Garth Evans’ sculptures at Lori Bookstein Fine Art fit into an identifiable style: biomorphic abstraction. The eight pieces operate within a modernist current explored by the likes of Hans Arp, early Giacometti, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi and Joan Miró. There are unmistakable intimations of natural phenomena: the figure, geological formations and fauna less than flora, though the organic nature of Mr. Evans’ methods recall the slow and steady transformation of plant life.

However much we can place Mr. Evans’ art within a tradition, we haven’t seen anything quite like it before. What’s unsettling about the sculptures is how they flit from under our expectations. Pegging them is a fool’s game. But Mr. Evans’ art isn’t evasive; it’s rich with—and enriched by—experience. The work takes on a lot to chew and chews it well. His bulbous forms struggle and writhe, as if they couldn’t bear the myriad contradictions they embody. It’s a fascinating tussle to behold.

You could argue that the pieces aren’t in a modernist vein at all. Modernism, despite its many glories, did much to winnow the possibilities of art, to diminish its breadth and reach. Mr. Evans’ work could be regarded as anti-modernist, or at least un-modernist, because its inclusive nature welcomes greater and, at times, maddening complexity.

If his project is anti-modern in intent, it’s also pre-modern in character. Buried not far under the surface of his muscular forms are antecedents that can be traced to antiquity, particularly the art of Greece and Rome. A transplant from England, Mr. Evans may well have spent his formative years looking at the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. In fact, I’d bet on it. His sculptures, while humbler in scope, have a related sweep and motion. The mute dignity of Toward (1992), Driven (1992-94) and Armed (1992-95) also recalls that of The Dying Gaul (circa 230-220 B.C). Their valiant gestures almost qualify them as transcriptions of that art-historical staple.

These “bodies,” Mr. Evans tells us, are “embodiments of … preverbal states of awareness.” They offer an “exploration and discovery of one’s body, its limits and its limitations and, also, of course, the pleasures it brings.”

It’s worth noting that the titles of Mr. Evans’ pieces are, if not verbs exactly, then indicative of physical effort and, as its corollary, psychological exertion. Driven, Tend, Beyond, Through, even Milk—what’s important is not that the titles describe, but that the works exemplify and expand upon those descriptions.

Mr. Evans works with humble materials. No marble or bronze for him, thank you very much; ratty and everyday stuff will do. Each sculpture is a patient accumulation of bits and pieces of discarded cardboard boxes. Cutting them into geometric shards—the triangle is a favored building block—Mr. Evans combines and shapes them into flowing, intricate and monumental forms.

He’s unapologetic about the cut-rate nature of his medium. Stains, pen marks, logos and fragments of identifiable instructions (“ndle with c”, “agile”) shuttle across the surfaces and are punctuated by colored strips of paper, among them bits of red, yellow and a muted phthalo green.

It’s unclear whether these serve a structural purpose—as band-aids, if you will, for the cardboard faceting—or as decorative fillips. It doesn’t matter: The tabs of color set into motion staccato rhythms that play off the rolling forms and the cardboard’s dirty and crumpled browns. A layer of fiberglass, pockmarked and imperfect, envelops each piece, endowing them with fleshy exteriors. Skin, Mr. Evans suggests, is not only a conductor of sensation; it is a dauntingly tenuous barrier. Mortality permeates the work, eroticism less so. The tender gravity of Mr. Evans’ pursuit is palpable.

Maybe it’s the fiberglass talking, but the art of Eva Hesse seems a useful counterpoint. The two sculptors share a dark and vaguely absurdist take on bodily vulnerability. Thankfully, Mr. Evans avoids (or ignores) the deadening prescriptions of Minimalism, a school that has done all-but-irreparable damage to several generations of artists.

Mr. Evans’ “bodies,” like Hesse’s skins and vessels, suggest memento mori, yet they never succumb to inertia. However occluded and strained, vitality courses through their gritty, muscular and inelegant frames. His accomplishment is, in the end, everything Hesse’s admirers claim for her art, but that her art itself can’t sustain. In his own mordant way, Mr. Evans is an optimist: He reminds us that the true and only subject of art is life.

Garth Evans: Sculpture is at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 37 West 57th Street, third floor, until Oct. 21.

In the course of his remarkable ascent to stardom, Sir Anthony's work came to occupy a position of critical esteem that in some quarters (especially in America) eclipsed that of Moore himself. Indeed, it could be argued that on this side of the Atlantic, Moore's reputation declined as a direct consequence of the growth of Sir Anthony's renown. These two British artists came to represent for the art public not only different artistic generations, but radically different conceptions of what legitimately constituted sculptural art.

Moore was essentially a carver, working in stone and wood, who took great pride in belonging to a sculptural tradition that had its origins in classical antiquity and the Renaissance masters. At the same time, however, he enlarged his vision by incorporating certain elements of primitive art as well as modernist art, especially Surrealism; and in the monumental work of his later years-which was a great favorite with the museums and other institutions-he embraced bronze as his principal medium.

Sir Anthony had likewise commenced his production by concentrating on figurative sculpture-but modeling in clay, rather than carving, was initially his preferred medium, and he has never entirely abandoned the figurative mode. As recently as the early 1990's, for example, Sir Anthony created a series of sculptures inspired by the Trojan War-the quintessential subject of the classical tradition. Yet he owes his current pre-eminence to a very different conception of sculptural art.

An encounter with the American critic Clement Greenberg resulted in Sir Anthony's adoption of abstract, open-form, welded-metal constructions as his principal medium-a medium, it's worth pointing out, that Henry Moore vehemently opposed. Greenberg was nothing if not outspoken in his advice to working artists whose talents he admired, and he suggested to Sir Anthony that he would find an ampler and more advanced model for his future work in the welded-metal sculpture of the American artist David Smith-the pre-eminent American creator of welded-metal abstraction.

Sir Anthony promptly acted on Greenberg's advice-and not by making imitations of Smith's work, but by adapting Smith's welded-metal technique to open-form, abstract constructions on a scale that sometimes exceeded even Moore's monumental bronzes. And while Smith favored a certain verticality in his abstract constructions (he often referred to his sculpture as "totems"), Sir Anthony audaciously concentrated on constructions that emphatically favored an unprecedented horizontality. The result has been a mode of abstraction that occupies an unbounded, landscape-like space and thus eradicates any suggestion of resting upon a traditional pedestal support.

To provide an experience of visual unity for the resulting sculptural sprawl, Sir Anthony made painted color an integral component of his art. Smith had experimented with color in his later constructions, but it never really served as anything more than a decorative accessory. Sir Anthony elevated color to the status of a defining attribute of open-form construction.

In this endeavor, he appears to have been greatly influenced by the vogue of American color-field oil painting in the work of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski-another of Clement Greenberg's enthusiasms. Not surprisingly, then, Greenberg responded to this development with lavish praise. Writing about the painted sculpture that Sir Anthony completed in America in 1964, Greenberg observed: "These are perhaps more purely, more limpidly, masterpieces than anything he has done before. In them that search for a low center of gravity which is one of the most constant features of his originality finds a perfect fulfillment."

Greenberg went on to compare Sir Anthony's achievement with that of the great English painter J.M.W. Turner: "Without maintaining necessarily that he is a better artist than Turner," Greenberg wrote, "I would venture to say that Caro comes closer to a genuine grand manner-genuine because original and unsynthetic-than any English artist before him."

Opinions will certainly differ about such an extravagant claim, but I'm obliged to say that I don't find anything in the current exhibition to support it. And I would caution viewers not to expect miracles if they venture forth to see Painted Sculpture, which remains on view at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue at 78th Street, through Feb. 26.

fortune that the traveling exhibition devoted to the early work of the American

sculptor David Smith (1906-65) has come to New York-the

final stop on its national tour-at a moment when the Alberto Giacometti

retrospective (at the Museum of Modern Art) and the Henry Moore retrospective

(at the National Gallery of Art in Washington) are still fresh in our thoughts.

Moore, Giacometti and Smith were the pre-eminent sculptural talents in the

generation that came of age in the period between the two world wars, and they

went on to dominate modern sculpture in the post–World War II years. It is

therefore of immense interest to see how differently they responded to the

spirit of the age-an age in which the disparate aesthetic impulses of Cubism

and Surrealism constituted the principal artistic challenge, and the

catastrophic political developments of the 1930's and 40's inevitably played a

role in shaping their response to that challenge.

The show that has now come to the National Academy of Design- David Smith: Two into Three Dimensions ,

organized by Karen Wilkin-is not, alas, a retrospective. Yet it has the great

merit of concentrating for the most part on the least familiar aspects of

Smith's copious oeuvre : the work of

the 1930's and 40's, which was mainly devoted to paintings, painted

collage-reliefs, bronze plaques and related studies on paper. This is not the

David Smith that is well-known to museumgoers, the Smith who gave us that

extraordinary succession of heroic open-form welded-metal constructions that were

sometimes characterized as "drawings-in-space." Those undoubted masterworks

were mainly created in the last two decades of the artist's life. Yet, as we

can now see in this survey of his earlier work, the later welded-metal

constructions owed much to the artist's early exploration of both abstraction

and representation in a variety of media not usually associated with his art.

As Ms. Wilkin correctly observes in the catalog for the current

exhibition, "more than 30 years and several retrospectives after Smith's death,

a considerable part of his work still remains all but unknown:

a large and varied group of relief sculptures …. They range from disturbing

narratives in cast bronze to expressively worked ceramic plaques to playful

assemblages of unexpected materials." The scale is intimate, the imagery often

ferocious, and the materials are indeed unexpected at times-painted reliefs,

for example, in which actual bones are incorporated as

"real" biomorphic forms.

Perhaps the best-known of the bronze plaques-to the extent that

any of them are known to today's art public-is the series of reliefs called Medals for Dishonor (1938-39), described

by Ms. Wilkin as "an angry politically engaged series of 15 bronze reliefs

encapsulating antiwar, anti-fascist sentiments." Politically, Smith was clearly

captive to the Popular Front sentiments of the day, a political allegiance that

abruptly evaporated for many of its followers with the signing of the

Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. Artistically, however, the Medals remain an extraordinary achievement. Notwithstanding their

miniature scale, they are the most successful effort at sculptural narrative in

20th-century art. I, for one, know of nothing in this vein that even approaches

their mastery, and some of the subsequent bronze reliefs devoted to more

traditional subjects- Plaque: Woman in a

Room , for example, and The Studio

(both 1945)-are also terrific.

The early small paintings and painted reliefs are less even in

quality. Smith started out as a painter and was indeed trained as a painter,

and it was through the process of building up the pictorial surfaces into

three-dimensional relief that he found himself more and more drawn to sculpture

itself. He continued to work at painting for the rest of his life, as this

exhibition also reminds us. My own view is that he never attained the same

level of quality in his paintings that distinguished his sculpture almost from

the beginning. The drawings are another story, however. Both in his drawings

and in his sculpture-from the meticulously detailed iconography of the Medals to the most purely abstract later

welded-metal constructions-Smith showed himself to be a master draftsman.

Indeed, some of the later black-and-white abstract drawings in the current

exhibition strike me as better"paintings"thananyofthe paintings themselves.

Color remained a lifelong challenge for Smith, both in painting and in

sculpture. But color was never his aesthetic forte.

All the same, he was certainly the greatest American sculptor of

his generation, and in my judgment, anyway, he was the

only sculptor of that generation to rival-and even, at times, to surpass-the

accomplishments of Moore and Giacometti. David

Smith: Two Into Three Dimensions does much to give us a more complete

understanding of his early artistic development, but what we need now is a

comprehensive retrospective on the scale that has currently been lavished on

Moore and Giacometti. Meanwhile, the exhibition that Ms. Wilkin has brought to

the National Academy of Design under the auspices of the Pamela Auchincloss

Arts Management remains on view through Jan. 6, and Karen Wilkin's catalog is

essential reading for anyone with an interest in Smith's achievement.

has now come to the National Gallery of Art in Washington,

would be a capital event at almost any time. Yet this splendid exhibition is

especially compelling just now for anyone who comes to it from a recent visit

to the retrospective devoted to Alberto Giacometti

(1901-1966) at the Museum of Modern

Art. As different as these artists were in

temperament, circumstance, style and reputation-Moore, an English coal miner's

son who became the toast of the money-and-power establishment, and Giacometti, a Swiss painter's son who became the darling of

the alienated intellectuals-they nonetheless enjoyed parallel careers as the

leading sculptors of their European generation. Inevitably, they had certain

crucial interests in common.

One was their enthusiastic embrace of the primitivism-or, as we

are now advised to call it, the tribal art-of non-Western cultures. For both

Moore and Giacometti, this was an aesthetically

transforming experience that cast a spell over all of their subsequent

accomplishments. Another, related to this, was their parallel periods of

submission to the irrationalist agenda of the

Surrealist movement. For neither, to be sure, did Surrealism prove to be a

sufficient foundation for their ultimate artistic ambitions. Yet it, too, left

a permanent trace, even on the later work that ostensibly repudiated Surrealist

orthodoxy.

If there was ever a time, however, when Giacometti

took serious notice of Moore's work, it has (as far as I know) remained unrecorded. Moore,

on the other hand, was acutely conscious of Giacometti's,

and drew upon it both in the sculpture of his Surrealist period and in some of

his early experiments in pure abstraction. For both of these essentially

figurative artists also had brief periods of keen interest in the aesthetics of

abstraction-an interest that proved to be more durable in Moore's

sculpture than in that of Giacometti. Still, in the

catalog of the pioneering exhibition of Cubism

and Abstract Art , which the late Alfred H. Barr Jr. organized at the Museum

of Modern Art in 1936, Giacometti's abstract,

Surrealist Head-Landscape (1932) was

reproduced on the same page as Moore's biomorphic Two Forms

(1934) to illustrate the then-latest developments in abstract sculpture.

Some two decades later, on my

first trip to Europe in the winter of 1957-58, I met Moore for the first time

just a few weeks after my one and only visit to Giacometti's

famously ramshackle studio on the Left Bank in Paris. This is the way I

recorded my impressions of those visits in an essay for Arts Magazine in 1960: "There are artists-one thinks of Giacometti in Paris and Henry Moore on his Herefordshire

estate-who are as much the authors of their milieux

as of their work …. To visit Giacometti in the tight,

dark, dust-covered studio he occupies in a working-class quarter of Paris,

entering from a narrow, constricted alleyway, stumbling over plaster dust and

dried clay, the light murky and gray, the sculptor himself fretting over the

fragility and impossibility of his art-this is not in itself an 'aesthetic'

experience, but its peculiar qualities reveal something crucial about the

psychic image and the sense of human possibility which will also be found in

the art which is made there. Similarly, Moore's

current style of life as a kind of benevolent country-squire humanist, a

celebrity of his country's cultural establishment who sits on committees and

contributes to the Sunday Times ,

meets its nemesis in the monument to international bureaucracy he designed for

UNESCO in Paris."

Well, I've never had any reason to revise my opinion of that

UNESCO monument, but about Moore himself and his highest achievements-which are

not, I think, to be found among the bulk of his public commissions-I've had

ample reason to revise my first impression. As I have had more opportunities to

become closely acquainted with every phase of Moore's

copious production, I have been more and more persuaded that the campaign to

discredit his accomplishments was in urgent need of critical resistance. And

that campaign-to which, alas, I may have made a small contribution myself early

on-has been even more zealous and mean-spirited in London

than in New York. For a detailed

account of its principal participants and their charges, see David Cohen's

essay "Who's Afraid of Henry Moore?" in the excellent book-length catalog of

the current retrospective in Washington.

It was upon seeing an earlier retrospective in the summer of

1972-the sensational exhibition mounted at the Forte di

Belvedere in the hills overlooking Florence-that

my own last doubts about Moore's greatness were laid to rest. It goes without saying that

as a venue for an exhibition of sculpture, Florence

is a formidable challenge for any artist. Yet Moore's

retrospective proved to be an unalloyed triumph. Bathed in the mellow light of

the Tuscan summer, the large outdoor sculptures-often silhouetted under an

azure sky-were allowed to declare their classical affinities with aesthetic

impunity. And indoors, in the intimate galleries devoted to the smaller

sculptures and the drawings related to them in Moore's

earlier primitivist and Surrealist periods, the sheer

virtuosity of invention was breathtaking.

It was not to be expected that Washington

could provide as sympathetic a setting for Moore's

work as Florence did, but in every

other respect the current retrospective at the National Gallery gives us an

even ampler and richer account of its many-sided achievement. Even for viewers

who have reason to believe that they know everything there is to know about Moore's oeuvre ,

there are many remarkable surprises-not only in the abundant representation of

the Surrealist period, but in the many sculptures and drawings from the wartime

and postwar years of the 1940's and early 50's.

Here, too, a comparison with Giacometti

is all but inescapable, for in both careers we are reminded that the trauma of

the Second World War brought these artists to a significant crossroads in their

artistic development. With European civilization radically imperiled by the

Nazi conquests, both artists found themselves impelled to reconsider their

relation to the traditions of Western art, and this inevitably involved

renegotiating their relation to the avant-garde ethos that had nurtured their

earlier accomplishments.

Both artists certainly knew there was a price to be paid-in

critical reputation, if not in financial success-for recanting their

commitments to the avant-garde. In Paris, André Breton-the so-called pope of

the Surrealist movement-was unforgiving about Giacometti's

departure from its ranks, and in New York, Clement Greenberg-the leading

advocate of the American avant-garde-hastened to denounce both Moore and Giacometti for their apostasy. Always more of a pessimist

than Moore, Giacometti openly acknowledged what this

turning point in his own work signified. "After me," he said, "there will be no

one to try to do what I'm trying to do." Yet what biographer James Lord wrote

about Giacometti may be equally applied to Moore: "He

saw with melancholy clairvoyance that he stood at the extreme end of a

tradition."

If you doubt the truth of that observation, I advise you to take

a look at the enormous sculptural construction by Frank Stella now being

erected on the grounds of the National Gallery, and make the appropriate

comparisons.

The Henry Moore retrospective, organized by the Dallas Museum of

Art in collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation in England, remains on

view in Washington through Jan. 27. It is an exhibition that everyone with a

serious interest in the art and culture of the 20th century will want to see,

and indeed revisit. And its accompanying catalog, entitled Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century , is not only an excellent

guide to the artist's work, but at times a trenchant and undeceived study in

the politics of artistic reputation.