Seward Johnson’s peculiar statue of Marilyn Monroe.

The travel website Virtualtourist.com has compiled a list of the world’s ten worst public artworks, and The Observer is pleased—albeit somewhat surprised—to see that New York’s numerous public artworks managed to avoid the list entirely.

Topping the list is Seward Johnson’s 26-foot-tall statue of actress Marilyn Monroe in a white dress in Chicago, which has rightfully earned the scorn of art critics across the nation, followed close behind by works like a statue of fictional television star Mary Richards in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a work by Jean Dubuffet in Chicago.

We were somewhat disturbed to see Mark di Suvero’s 40-foot-tall steel sculpture The Calling (1981-1982), which is installed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the list. Virtualtourist writes, "[T]hese orange beams of steel inspire a 'Really?' in many who view it." This is sad to hear, since we're a fan of the piece, which is painted Mr. di Suvero's trademark orange red.

Surely Mr. di Suvero’s work could have been dropped to make room for Tom Otterness’s bizarre “Life Underground” sculptures, the small, metal top-hatted men who fill the subway station at 14th Street and 8th Avenue. As a colleague points out, one of the works even sits on a wooden seat on the uptown A/C/E platform, obnoxiously filling one of the few seats at that stop.

Even now that it has been open to the public since 2006, going to Governors Island still feels like trespassing. The road is rocky and uneven, the grass is overgrown and most of the buildings are unoccupied. That’s evidently all part of the island’s charm: 200,000 people have taken the ferry since the visiting season opened on May 27.

Last week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood at a podium surrounded by a sea of beige suits and white summer dresses. Among them was 78-year-old sculptor Mark di Suvero wearing a bright orange work shirt with a peace sign scrawled across the breast pocket. He had a scraggly beard and his white hair stuck up in several directions.

“He used to call me his ‘favorite communist,’” Mr. di Suvero said of the mayor.

They were there to celebrate “Mark di Suvero on Governors Island,” an exhibition of the artist’s sculptures presented by Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre sculpture park in the Hudson Valley. Mr. Bloomberg was reminding the crowd of the island’s features.

“This is not all city property,” he said. “The federal government, who we sometimes acknowledge, does own the forts here.”

That’s true, but there was a dollop of sarcasm in his tone.

“If you’re a British ship sailing into the harbor and you look like you’re going to threaten us,” Mr. Bloomberg continued, “these forts are ready to defend New York City and America!”

And if all else fails, one could take shelter among Mr. di Suvero’s hulking, sturdy sculptures, at least until Sept. 25, when they are deinstalled. With their combination of bright primary colors and rusted wear, they somehow look at once alien and at home on the island. We were gathered in front of Mr. di Suvero’s New Beginning, a mix of muscular industrial materials—it was made of bent steel resting on an I-beam—and delicate patterns and symmetries that towered over the mayor and the crowd around him.

“I think what’s really important about human beings in this kind of life that seems to be so driven by economics … ” Mr. di Suvero began saying at the podium. Then he stopped, and began again: “What is interesting is what is voluntary—where we do what we wish to do in spite of money or whatever is afflicting us.” (The exhibition is free and open to the public.)

Mr. di Suvero said the show was “very difficult” to set up—there was rain to deal with, and barges and cranes. Many of the pieces are as large as buildings, like the 60-foot-long Old Buddy (For Rosko), which is dedicated to the artist’s dearly departed dog. It loomed at one end of a large field, illuminated by the sun peeking out through a break in a thunderhead starting to roll in. Its stark lines and sharp angles were imposing and sad. It looked like an elegy. “My pieces are much more like music in the sense that they’re just not one tone. They have a lot of complexity—” he was cut off by a coughing fit. Someone handed him a glass of water.

“Does this ever happen to you?” he asked the mayor.

“Yes, of course. That’s why I learned not to eat popcorn before I speak.”

“When the president was kind enough to give me the citation,” Mr. di Suvero continued, referring to the National Medal of Arts that President Barack Obama awarded him last year, “they told me I wasn’t allowed to speak.”

The work speaks for itself. Governors Island is the perfect setting for Mr. di Suvero’s pieces. The I-beams that create the angular patterns and lines of his sculptures are worn down and, seen up close, look vulnerable, despite their tough material. Similarly, the mostly abandoned residential buildings of the island and their surrounding grounds look glamorous from a distance, but reveal small imperfections upon close inspection—a broken screen door, a dying branch of ivy, a cracked shutter.

The sculptures seem to reference this long-untouched place of New York history, as if they were once the beginnings of newly developed buildings left and discarded in midconstruction. Po-um (Lyric) juts out of a hill looking like a dying steel flower, its petals ready to fall. The reflection of the sun in its steel shape is daunting and foreign. For Chris and Fruit Loops, by contrast, are rusted brown. They sit unobtrusively among a row of trees blending in with the bark and dirt, looking like they’ve always been there.

After a loop around the island, The Observer asked if Mr. di Suvero would talk more about his work.

“Sure,” he said.

The Observer produced a digital recorder.

“You mean now? No. Oh, no. Absolutely not. I’m an old man and I’m tired.”

He then began to sing a bit of Verdi in a booming voice that was surprisingly close to being in key.

“Interview the sculptures,” he said when he was finished.

mmiller@observer.com

Another thing that made Mr. di Suvero's 1960 debut exhibition noteworthy was the critical praise it elicited. Not since Clement Greenberg hailed David Smith as "the best young sculptor in the country" in 1946 had a major sculptural talent in this country been so promptly lavished with critical superlatives. And whereas Greenberg's praise tended to be somewhat dry and laconic, the essay that Sidney Geist devoted to Mr. di Suvero's debut was lengthy and ebullient in announcing the dawn of a new era in the history of sculpture. These were the opening paragraphs of the essay entitled "A New Sculptor: Mark di Suvero," which Mr. Geist published in the December 1960 issue of Arts Magazine:

"It was bound to happen, sooner or later, the appearance of some sculpture that was not merely tremendous or interesting or even terrific, but that deserved another adjective, like great; that stepped beyond our immediate experience into history. And it happened in the show of Mark di Suvero's sculpture at the Green Gallery in New York a few weeks ago. Surely it was a vague sense of participating in a historical moment on October 18 that cast a spell on the opening-night viewers, most of them too young to have had much experience of history. I myself have not been so moved by a show of sculpture since the Brancusi exhibition of 1933.

"History is glad to record the arrival of any new artist, the creation of a new beauty, or the presence of a singular work of art, but the real stuff of history is made of those moments at which one can say: From now on nothing will be the same. One felt this at di Suvero's show. Here was a body of work at once so ambitious and intelligent, so raw and clean, so noble and accessible, that it must permanently alter our standards of artistic effort."

Needless to say, critical praise on this level, and especially from this writer-Sidney Geist is himself a highly accomplished sculptor and one of our most respected critics-was bound to command attention. It also posed a challenge for the artist: What to do next? When you've been heralded for ascending to the heights, how do you negotiate a return to common ground?

It's a further testimony to Mr. di Suvero's remarkable self-possession that he bided his time in responding to this challenge even as the art scene was exploding with a mania for more and more Minimalism. Suddenly, that hoary paradoxical notion that less is more was being revived on a scale never before attempted, as the art public flocked to visit larger-than-ever gallery spaces in which there was usually, alas, less and less to look at. In some cases, it got to the point where-especially in the newer venues in Chelsea-the design of the gallery space was almost the only thing left to look at with real interest.

Given this curious turn in "advanced" taste, the exhibition of Mr. di Suvero's most recent work, currently on view at Knoedler & Company, is almost as startling as his debut all those years ago. It's called Mark di Suvero: Indoors, and as the name implies, the show eschews gigantism in favor of intimacy. There's a greater concentration on sculpture as three-dimensional drawing. The gestures traced in these steel and stainless-steel forms are more calligraphic than constructivist; and the drawings that accompany the sculptures give us another level of engagement with the artist's inventive sensibility.

Mark di Suvero: Indoors remains on view at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street, through Aug. 12, and has been organized in collaboration with the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.

Mr. Masullo partakes of a distinctly American brand of abstraction, a tradition that mines high modernist style for individualistic-that is to say, independent and eccentric-purposes. The pictures are lovingly delineated and kitsch-inflected amalgamations of organic shape and geometric pattern. Taking inspiration from the paintings of Alice Trumbull Mason, Myron Stout and Thomas Nozkowski, Mr. Masullo is as singular, rigorous and uncompromising as his predecessors. He can nip and tuck a composition with the best of them. That doesn't prevent him from indulging in groan-inducing cutesy-pie tactics.

In one canvas, he appends cartoony hands and arms onto an array of floating rectangles; in another, an iconic black circle, Malevich-like in its portent, is transformed into a Christmas ornament. All the while, his oversweetened palette makes our teeth ache. Mr. Masullo is clearly capable of standing outside of style in order to ridicule it, yet his mockery is amiable, even at times a bit dreamy. The sensibility is acidic, not malevolent-Mr. Masullo only hurts the ones he loves. Sacrificing gravity for cheap caprice, his aesthetic is rooted in the quirks of personality. Nihilism has nothing to do with it.

How willing you are to forgive Mr. Masullo the kiddie biomorphism and insouciance depends on one's taste. Me, I enjoy his sharp wit, applaud his pictorial steadfastness and consider the excess of paintings-over 30!-a token of generosity. Not that we should be grateful for everything that runneth out of Mr. Masullo's cup; too many of the pictures are flighty or hermetic. When he does pull one off-as in 4067 , with its spic-and-span array of stripes, or the cut-rate psychedelia of 4066 (both 2003)-you realize Mr. Masullo is a precocious nuisance you're willing to put up with.

Andrew Masullo is at the Joan T. Washburn Gallery, 20 West 57th Street, until July 23.

A Little Bit Country

The drawings of Eunice Agar, the subject of an exhibition at Denise Bibro Fine Art, won't jump off the wall at you. Her depictions of farmhouses, rocky shores, shaded woody paths, cornstalks and waterfalls are unassuming, plainly stated and, in the bigger pieces, folksy in tone. They're also sweet, antiquated and innocuous-the stuff of county fairs, not the sleek environs of the New York art scene. That was the first impression, anyway-until I slowly got caught up in Ms. Agar's Yankee diligence, her heady, stoic wonder as she takes in nature's panorama. Whether transcribing with a scribble the placid depths of a pond or articulating every pebble on a beach with an array of doodles, Ms. Agar makes palpable the bottomless joy in putting pencil or charcoal to paper. None of the drawings will rock your world, but each provides a sense of ease and measure that supercharged New Yorkers would be foolhardy to dismiss.

Eunice Agar: A Drawing Survey is at Denise Bibro Fine Art until July 17.

Park Life

The three huge steel sculptures by Mark di Suvero ensconced in Madison Square Park expose "public art" for the misnomer it is-because these pieces are the exception to the rule. Artwork that may be found outside the galleries, the museums, your home or mine doesn't mean it partakes of the public sphere; temporary installations of public art, especially, are little more than pedestrian obstacles offered in the name of philanthropic outreach. Mr. di Suvero's towering steel structures aren't plunked down willy-nilly for our edification; they participate in the leisure-time activities occurring nearby.

Double Tetrahedron (2004) towers over the midriff-baring citizens lunching nearby, a heroic and very orange substitute for the water not spouting from the fountain it's in. Beyond (2004), a Picasso-ish snarl of straight lines, sharp curves and tensing musculature, partakes equally of the playground, the dog run and New Yorkers stretching before a jog. The least at home is Aesope's Fable (1990). Did the artist take it out of storage because he couldn't come up with enough new sculptures to fill the park? Perhaps, but that's a quibble given how winningly Mr. Di Suvero has insinuated himself into the life of the city.

Mark di Suvero is at Madison Square Park, 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue, until Oct. 31.

Technically speaking, Mr. Woodman's art is painted relief sculpture-his riveted aluminum structures, overlaid with oils, barely leave the wall. Yet the manner in which he bends, twists and ultimately reconciles contradictory types of space is deceiving in that he underplays his audaciousness. Mr. Woodman doesn't advertise his formal coup, as if it were no big deal. Frankly, I think it's amazing: Here's an artist whose deftly calibrated compromise between painting and sculpture is not a compromise at all. Mr. Woodman holds the integrity of each medium in dynamic equilibrium. Don't be fooled by the work's folksy gentility: Mr. Woodman's sculptures are as rigorous as they are congenial-and it's a delight to be confounded by them. Timothy Woodman is at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, 12th floor, until June 7.

Kind of Comfy, Certainly Welcome

The landscape paintings of Pam Sheehan, currently on display at Davis & Langdale, will not alter the course of art history. They don't play into anyone's idea of "progress" and politely refuse the outré. We're unlikely, in other words, to see the paintings on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art. We're more likely to see them in someone's home-in the den, say, over the mantelpiece. If this makes Ms. Sheehan's paintings sound comfy, well, they are and they aren't. The intimate scale and gentle cadences of the work strongly suggest domesticity. The chief virtue of this livable art is the quiet joy Ms. Sheehan takes in putting brush to canvas or, in her case, panel.

Ms. Sheehan's accomplishment is heartening and sure. The loose precision of her touch looks to the 19th century for inspiration, Corot in particular, but it does nod to influences closer to our time: Edwin Dickinson (I think), Fairfield Porter (probably) and Albert York (for sure). The paintings of and around Nyack, the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Danube are consistent and compelling in their emotional restraint. At times, however, Ms. Sheehan does betray a self-consciousness. By fussing around the edges of her images, she wants us to know that she's wise to the verities of 20th-century pictorial art, but Ms. Sheehan is more herself the less she gives in to gimcrackery. In pieces like Surf (2001), Nyack Beach Path (2001), Tree, Davies Farm (2001) and Reclining Stergis (2002), she eschews subterfuge for the forthright pleasures of light, place and the buttery malleability of oil paint. Most of the 30 or so pictures are merely agreeable, it's true-still, this is a painter who doesn't wear out her welcome. Pam Sheehan is at Davis & Langdale Company Inc., 231 East 60th Street, until June 14.

Forget the Drawings, Check Out Chonk On

Have there ever been drawings as perfunctory as those of Mark di Suvero, examples of which are currently on view at the Paula Cooper Gallery? Let me amend the question: Have there ever been drawings as perfunctory by an artist as consequential as Mr. di Suvero? There's bound to be an easy retort to both questions-but it won't spring to mind when you're actually looking at the things. Done in ink and marker, the artist's slapdash calligraphies are product, pure and simple. They have to be: Mr. di Suvero knows the difference between hewing to automatist principles and running on empty. Shame on him for trying to pass off the one as the other.

Having said that, let me now turn to the centerpiece of the show, Chonk On (2000), a monumental sculpture constructed from welded steel. Gallerygoers who make the rounds of Chelsea on a regular basis will note how effectively this piece plays in its current environment. Cooper's main gallery, though capacious, has always felt cramped and isolated; art rarely makes a dent there. Chonk On dents it and then some. Standing almost 20 feet high, this brooding structure is made of careening diagonals, florid counterpoints and an odd, loping curve that's both its compositional anchor and comic relief. Mr. di Suvero's piece is perfectly suited to a cavelike space in that it's a primal drama of epic proportions. It encompasses birth and death, tenderness and rage, purpose and pointlessness. And if all of that sounds a mite rich, I invite you to spend time with Mr. di Suvero's masterwork. Then see if the world doesn't feel more consequential when you exit the gallery. Mark di Suvero is at the Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street, through June 30.

Mark di Suvero has done it. With his exhibition of sculpture at the West 24th Street location of Gagosian Gallery, he has taken the Chelsea paradigm-you know, "My gallery's bigger than your gallery"-and brought it down to size. Or rather, Mr. di Suvero has brought it up to his size, endowing Mr. Gagosian's hangar-like space with an aesthetic rationale that it has previously (and conspicuously) lacked. Richard Serra, another sculptor who works on a monumental scale, attempted something similar in the same gallery a few years back, but whereas Mr. Serra's use of scale is invariably overweening and intimidating, Mr. di Suvero's sizable sculptures are as inevitable, organic and grandly impersonal as, oh, a mountain.

The two pieces on display, Evviva Amore and Ulula (both 2001), were, I am told, preexisting works tailored to their current venue. Tailored, it should be reiterated, and not compromised. If anything, Mr. di Suvero looks like he had a ball adapting his pieces to the space, tacitly acknowledging its physical parameters while not-so-tacitly razzing the notion that anything so mundane as an art gallery should rein him in. As if to underscore that bigness is, for this artist, a necessity and not an option, the gallery has included Rudder (2000), a sculpture that's more ostentatious than its table-top dimensions might let on. Mr. di Suvero flexes considerably less ego the more monumental he works, proving, in the end, that monumental is where his heart is. Mark di Suvero is at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, until June 16.

Clearly, Ross Bleckner Was Never an Understudy

"What's my motivation?" is the question actors presumably ask themselves before taking on a role. As a practical query, it's not an inappropriate one for artists to ask of themselves. Not all artists, of course-no one ever lost sleep worrying whether Fra Angelico was lacking in motivation. Just the typical artist, which is to say the bad, the humdrum and the nonentity. Matters of motivation were brought to mind while I was visiting the exhibition of paintings by Ross Bleckner at the Chelsea branch of Mary Boone Gallery. Mr. Bleckner has, one would guess, never given much thought to his motivation, but given his recent pictures, he should.

Have there ever been works of art as desultory as these? A loaded question, I know, but even Mr. Bleckner's devotees must be furrowing their brows and scratching their scalps when faced with the artist's latest. Each canvas is an all-over accumulation of blob-like circles punctuated by that distinctive-i.e., cold and brittle-Blecknerian highlight. Failing to multiply as form, neither do the circles thrive as color or hold as compositions, and why the pictures are as big as they are is a mystery. The only virtue the paintings offer, as far as I can see, is that their surfaces appear to be scrubbable.

Mr. Bleckner is, from the errant evidence on view, an artist who puts brush to canvas not because he has to, but because he can-and that is never enough. Ross Bleckner is at Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, until June 23.

Kelly Calibrates To the Point of Conceit

Reading the press release for Ellsworth Kelly: Relief Paintings, 1954-2001, an exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, one notes that Mr. Kelly's color sense is "perfectly calibrated." But one wants to chime in that every particular of Mr. Kelly's art is equally-that is to say, flawlessly-calibrated. This has long been Mr. Kelly's M.O., and he's good at it, maybe too good.

Each of the relief paintings is constructed from two monochromatic canvases, one placed on top of the other; these either snuggle, shift or jut, sometimes barely, at other times by a matter of feet. The pieces are weighted-and laudably so-but the effect of the exhibition as a whole is firmly, if politely, dismissive. Mr. Kelly has rendered the environs of Mr. Marks' gallery so forbiddingly pristine that we're inhibited from exhaling, lest we dare befoul the excellences on display. Best seen at a distance where they can be read pictorially, the relief paintings, viewed up close as three-dimensional objects, are flatly, indeed shockingly, unconsidered.

"Relief," as it turns out, is merely a conceit for Mr. Kelly, so the works fail to keep up the bargain-or at least half of the bargain-implicit in their medium. The pieces, it turns out, aren't so perfect after all-as works of art, anyway. As elaborately scaled objets d'art, however, they're perfect enough, if only because they don't ask much from us in the first place. Ellsworth Kelly: Relief Paintings, 1954-2001 is at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 22nd Street, until June 29.

A 40-Year Reunion Of Four Painters

When the art critic Jules Langsner organized the seminal exhibition Four Abstract Classicists, seen at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1959, he contrasted the "articulated," "orderly" and "organizational" paintings of John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, Lorser Feitelson and Karl Benjamin against the "helter-skelter of raw existence," "the buzz of confusion" that is "day-to-day life." One couldn't ask for a better updated example of this contrast than that which greets viewers as they enter the new location of Gary Snyder Fine Art. After strolling along a, shall we say, picturesque stretch of 11th Avenue, gallery-goers encounter the crisp colors and clean geometry of Mr. Hammersley's Couple #7 (1961) in the gallery's front window. The contrast between the rawness of the former and the articulation of the latter isn't only abrupt, but it makes for the kind of experience-odd and extreme, unexpected and delightful-that only this city can afford.

Couple #7 serves as the introduction to the exhibition Four Abstract Classicists: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin, which is less a re-creation of the original show than an homage to it. A truncated homage, that is, and if the Snyder show is frustrating in its brevity-none of the painters is seen in any depth-it is, nonetheless, offbeat enough to pique our interest.

Clarity and flexibility, rather than purity and certitude, are the hallmarks of these four individual, not to say eccentric, painters. Feitelson offers up a slo-mo sensuality, McLaughlin an austerity keyed to the wispiest of baby blues, and Benjamin a fractured mix of Auguste Herbin, Indian Space Painting and the proverbial explosion in the tile factory. Mr. Hammersley is, in his own stark way, the most compelling of the bunch, and a painter whose work is a kissing cousin to that of Mr. Kelly. It would appear, in fact, that Mr. Hammersley's art kisses better, largely because its inside-out dynamism encourages an open dialogue and not the last word. Four Abstract Classicists: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin is at Gary Snyder Fine Art, 601 West 29th Street, until Aug. 25.