Tom Sanford, "Portrait of a Genius" (2011)

The artist William Powhida was a thousand miles away in Wisconsin on the evening of July 27 when a man claiming to be William Powhida drove into the ground-floor garage of the Marlborough Chelsea gallery in a vintage green Mercedes convertible, drinking from a bottle of Champagne. He sat on a couch that was barricaded off and continued drinking, inviting a few friends to join him. While an audience watched, the man bossed around an assistant, sent out messages on his Blackberry and flirted with the two svelte blond women seated next to him. A painting by the artist Tom Sanford hung on the wall: it was a depiction of the man who was in the gallery, acting the fool. In the painting, he was releasing a dove from his hands while a busty blond woman clung to his leg. It was all an act staged for a gallery opening. On the wall by the entrance, in big black letters, was the name of the show: POWHIDA.

“It was meant to bring in a new crowd and start a discourse,” Max Levai told The Observer last week. At 23, Mr. Levai is responsible for Marlborough Chelsea’s new programming that focuses on a younger audience. POWHIDA was a high-profile gesture announcing this new direction. The gallery had been cleared out save for Mr. Sanford’s painting, as if cleansed of its history and reputation.

“It was clearly a show conceived by Powhida,” Mr. Levai said when asked if he thought Marlborough was one of the themes the show was taking a swipe at. “The fact that it was a large gallery space on the ground floor helped the project conceptually, but I don’t think it would have been that different in any other context.”

“I wouldn’t have done that performance anywhere else,” the real William Powhida told The Observer last week. “It really was site specific to Marlborough. It sort of hinged on their reputation as I knew it at the time and as a lot of people know it: not really being a part of the contemporary art conversation. They do really well in their sphere in selling really established artists, but as part of the art scene that I’ve been paying attention to, they just weren’t really on my radar.”

It was a surprising pairing, Marlborough and Powhida. The crowd was a mix of art-world cognoscenti and young kids in flannel and sneakers. People sipped on Pernod absinthe instead of white wine and occasionally scoffed at the actor, who by now had lit a cigarette. A Marlboro. The writer Anthony Haden-Guest told The Observer, “We’ve been here before.”

“Someone at The New York Observer wrote an article saying the actor was really William Powhida,” Mr. Levai told The Observer a few days after the show’s two-week run at the gallery had ended. “They just didn’t get it.”

“Yeah,” The Observer said, “I wrote that article.”

“Oh.” He paused. “That was you.”

A brief but significant silence ensued.

Later, Mr. Powhida told The Observer the performance was meant to bring the character he had been developing for five years in his paintings (and in at least one YouTube video) into the real world. If this was the public birth of the William Powhida persona, how was it wrong to call that person William Powhida?

As it turns out, the show marked the birth of something else as well: the new Marlborough Chelsea. It has hired a younger staff and is recruiting younger artists. Still, the name Marlborough is one that few would consider at the cutting edge of contemporary art. The Chelsea gallery opened in 2007 with a show by Tom Otterness, whose public works can be seen all over New York. His private commissions sell in the low seven figures. (To put that into context, Mr. Sanford’s painting in the POWHIDA show sold for $18,000.)

Marlborough opened its 57th Street business in 1963 with a stable of artists that reads like a checklist of the then-dominant New York School, including David Smith, Robert Motherwell, the estate of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. After Rothko’s suicide in 1970, the artist’s three executors—one of whom was an artist represented by Marlborough and another the gallery’s accountant, who would later became its director—sold 798 Rothko paintings to Marlborough at the wholesale price of $12,000 a piece, far below the artist’s market even at the time. They sold 36 of those paintings at a profit of over $2 million. Rothko’s children filed suit against the gallery, resulting in a tangled court case that dragged on for three years. The court ruled in favor of the artist’s children, saying each painting was valued at a minimum of $90,000. Marlborough’s founder, Frank Lloyd, was later charged with tampering with evidence. Despite the scandal, Marlborough continued to be commercially successful in the years following under the leadership of Mr. Lloyd’s nephew, Pierre Levai (Max’s father), known to the art world as a serious, no-nonsense man. (Max Levai said his father was not available to speak with The Observer.)

Marlborough is not the only blue-chip gallery to try to appeal to a younger crowd. For years, the Pace Gallery, founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960, was known mostly for a stable of seminal Minimalists. In the past few years, the gallery has brought on younger artists like Sterling Ruby, and hired directors who have worked with emerging talent.

Working both ends of the Modern and contemporary art spectrum has proved to be a solid model for dealers, at least financially. The Gagosian Gallery, founded in the late 1970s and widely considered to be the world’s most successful art dealership, trades in Monets and Picassos but also does brisk business in work by 32-year-old Dan Colen. Mr. Colen’s show there last year, “Poetry,” was met with almost universally negative criticism, but the works sold. Contemporary auctions have recently surpassed Modern and Impressionist ones in terms of profit. If high-end galleries don’t start paying attention to more youthful artists, they risk becoming nothing more than mausoleums. For a primary market gallery, though, Marlborough’s roster has a large number of artists in their 70s. Many others are deceased. The gallery’s movement toward contemporary art may be a push for relevancy, but it is also, arguably, a necessity.

“I think this change is natural,” said the art adviser Todd Levin, who counts the Levais among his friends. “As the gallery gets older, the issue of succession becomes more an issue at the front of the house. You know, ‘We can’t keep existing on the same old stuff, or we’ll just be Old Master dealers.’”

One challenge Marlborough faces in changing its programming is building a new collector base. A curator who works with another blue-chip gallery, who spoke off the record, pointed out the paradox that Marlborough’s collectors aren’t so interested in emerging artists, and people who collect emerging artists aren’t so interested in Marlborough.

Two group shows last year—“Look Again” and “Grass Grows by Itself”—demonstrated that the gallery is serious about transforming. “Look Again,” curated by Casey Fremont and Karline Moeller (the press release was quick to point out that both women are in their 20s), was a way of bridging more contemporary works with the gallery’s older artists to provide new context. Artists like Peter Coffin and Chakaia Booker mingled with the paintings of Manolo Valdes, which are heavily influenced by the gallery’s history with Abstract Expressionism. If the suggestion to “look again” at the gallery in a different light was somewhat blatant, it was also a practical way for Marlborough to test how well it could do in a contemporary art market. One source said the idea of separating the Chelsea gallery from its midtown headquarters through the introduction of young artists “wasn’t even a question” before the young Mr. Levai came on board last year.

“The gallery, since it was conceived, was intending to bring on new artists,” Max Levai said. “Our Chelsea space is completely different from the 57th Street space. There are shows we’ve done in Chelsea that would have been impossible at 57th Street. Everybody calls it an emerging artist program and I think it’s a classic art world misnomer. In the gallery scene, they’ve already emerged, even though they’re only emerging in the auction houses.”

One of those artists is Rashaad Newsome. His work combines the iconography of heraldry and hip-hop through elements of painting, music and dance. Mr. Newsome was “suspect” when the gallery first approached him.

“My work really didn’t fit into that gallery,” Mr. Newsome said, speaking of Marlborough in its previous incarnation. “Not only because of the work itself, but because half of their artists are dead. You know, I’m alive. But they can obviously finance certain ideas that a younger gallery couldn’t. For me, it’s about the work existing, and if they can help to facilitate that? All good.”

At a party in March in collaboration with BOMB Magazine, Mr. Newsome played hip-hop beats through a laptop while wearing a big, black crown. A small group of musicians played live with him, including the young rapper Nast.

“I’m gonna promise I smoke some good weed,” Nast bellowed into his microphone.

It was quite a departure for a gallery that shows the innocuous, often idealistic work of Dale Chihuly and Red Grooms. It was also anticommercial, especially considering the gallery’s secondary market includes powerhouses like Francis Bacon.

“Ask me if I give a fuck what the haters say,” Nast continued.

Even though the press picked up on the fact that it consisted of an actor playing a role, a majority of critics, unsurprisingly, were still not pleased with any component of POWHIDA. They dismissed it as derivative schlock—from the performance right down to the audience itself.

“Powhida fans smirked knowingly,” Brian Droitcour wrote in Artforum’s online Scene and Heard diary. “Marlborough regulars furrowed their brows … The venue brought out the worst in the opening’s two demographics: The Bushwick types enjoyed playing rock stars-and-groupies beyond irony, and the actual rich dudes felt entitled to shove their way to the front of the line for absinthe mojitos.”

On Artnet, the reliably irascible Charlie Finch was more forthright. “What does it say about the art community that a derivative, no-talent turkey can create a sensation by reviving an old Andy Warhol trick to impress young morons and get a lot of summer press attention for doing nothing original?”

It is rare for a gallery to be so much a part of the show that the institution must bare the brunt of the criticism.

“Most of the reviews,” Mr. Powhida said, “I’m not gonna say they let the gallery off the hook, but there was never any question of why they did this show. For me, it was about twisting that quest for fame back on Marlborough.”

The audience’s frustration was palpable, even at the opening. Guests carried it with them as they migrated to the roof of the Mondrian Hotel, where everyone drinking switched from absinthe to vodka. A few of the actors had slipped out of character, but “William Powhida” was still at it. He was being followed by a cameraman. He spoke loudly of his genius. Many people ignored him.

mmiller@observer.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 24, 2011

An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that the Pace Gallery's new space on 25th Street had been designated as a venue for showcasing younger artists.

"At the age of 82, I'm thinking about where some of these pieces should end up, and I thought Barnard would be the perfect spot for this one."

The bench contains engravings of Holzer's truisms-hard to imagine, perhaps, in the home of any octogenarian beside Ms. Wright. Ms. Wright's granddaughter Ada Potter, who is currently studying Visual Arts at Barnard, called the sculpture "perfect for Barnard, because of its feminist themes and the fact that Jenny Holzer stood for a whole generation of women artists in the seventies."

Ms. Wright, whose daughter and granddaughter are art aficionados as well, witnessed modern art taking shape in the midcentury. "It was an interesting time," Ms. Wright reminisced of her post-college years (she graduated in 1951). "Sidney Janis was representing all the important artists, although my role was the lowest of the low. I was the gallery assistant--I typed letters, opened the mail, answered the phone--definitely not a high-profile job, but it was so interesting to see how the art world worked in those days.

"Contemporary art is hot now, but it wasn't back then. Jackson Pollock and de Kooning were important, but their work wasn't selling. They received critical attention, but no one was collecting them. They would sell for $1,000 to $5,000. It seemed that they were nothing compared to the European modern artists."

And boy, were those artists frustrated! "Jackson Pollock would come to the gallery, and he was often pretty drunk. That was his way. He was kind of angry, and not the kind of person that was easy to approach."

Perhaps Ms. Wright's proximity to the scene inspired her first big art purchase: Then 22 years old and just out of Barnard, she indulged a youthful impulse to buy a Rothko. "I thought maybe I could swing this kind of a purchase, but Rothko didn't sell to just anyone." Ms. Wright reminisces with a mixture of wistfulness for the simpler days, and satisfaction at having had such an eye for art in her 20s. "You had to agree to be interviewed by him. In those artists' minds, it wasn't about money. It was about doing right by their work, having their work go into the right hands. More idealist, and less commercial."

Regarding whether Rothko was as much of a brooder as his works suggest, Ms. Wright says "I think he was difficult, but not toward a 22-year-old girl. It turned out to be a wonderful experience. He was very kind and fun to talk to."

That Rothko painting (#10, pictured here) is now in the Seattle Art Museum, near her home, where Ms. Wright has been on the board for decades.

"Jinny's legacy at Barnard is truly exceptional," said Barnard President Debora Spar in an email. "With her gift of a Jenny Holzer bench--Barnard's first major piece of artwork--she is...helping to establish Barnard's place in New York City's vibrant art culture".

She just returned to New York to attend Barnard's Annual Scholarship Dinner and her granddaughter's graduation in May. The Jenny Holzer sculpture is expected to be installed by then.

ssamuel@observer.com

One way to get access to the best artworks is to open a private exhibition space to both showcase emerging artists and confirm the status of established market favorites. An example of a private exhibition changing the course of art history is the case of master ad man Charles Saatchi, who handily succeeded in creating a role for himself of art collector/kingmaker. Early on, he owned great Donald Judds, Andy Warhols and more, and sold most of it in order to start buying and showing newer art at his London gallery, flipping over and over again. But it was when he created and exhibited a group of young artists he branded the YBA (Young British Artists) that he pioneered this important trend of privately sponsored exhibitions. He succeeded in having his private holdings exhibited-the show was aptly called "Sensation"-at the Royal Academy in 1997, the Hamburger Bahnhof in '98 and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in '99. The controversial show propelled several of the YBA artists into major-league market stardom. Fifteen years later, their ringleader, Damien Hirst, is the king of the art-market machine; Chris Ofili has a full-blown retrospective at the Tate Museum; and several others, like Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin, still have healthy careers. Clearly, Mr. Saatchi chose good art, but we can only speculate where those artists would have been without "Sensation."

Don and Mera Rubell went a different route. In 2002, when Art Basel launched its annual Miami art fair, a few collectors joined in to exhibit their private collections to the thousands of partygoers, collectors and scenesters who came to town. The Rubells seized this opportunity and, mingling good timing with an attention-getting location, opened a private building in Miami to exhibit their recent art acquisitions. Exhibitions of Neo Rauch, Kelley Walker and Wade Guyton, or local Miami favorite Hernan Bas, were influential in creating awareness and consensus about the value of their work. Of the Miami private annual exhibitions only the annual Rubell exhibition became a required stop on the Art Basel Miami tour, and shows like 2008's "30 Americans" were given the attention normally accorded museum exhibitions. The same show anywhere else, any other time of year, would never have achieved the same critical mass. The Rubells did on a relatively modest budget what most contemporary museums could not do with triple the resources.

In Europe, one of the most powerful collectors today is luxury goods magnate François Pinault, owner of Christie's. During the last Venice Biennale, he filled two beautiful buildings, his spectacular Palazzo Grassi and the refurbished Dogana, with his selection of 20th-century art. These shows displayed major works from established artists like Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan, all the way back to Mark Rothko. But alongside them, artists like Rudy Stingel were given somewhat overdue recognition, and emerging stars like Anselm Reyle were showcased. The spillover effect was tangible-a young artist like Mathew Day Jackson went from relative unknown at last summer's Pinault show to million-dollar result at auction in London in February.

Peter Norton, of the household-name computer program Norton Utilities, also exerted considerable influence when he was collecting more actively. Mr. Norton jumped into art collecting in the 1980s. He became active and high-profile in museum philanthropy and started buying large quantities of very promising contemporary work at a great time in the art-market cycle. Next, he hired influential curators to do keenly watched installations of his works at his house. Suddenly, his patronage became an important credential in marketing and positioning young work to other collectors. Then he came up with a unique, now famous idea: the Norton Family Christmas gift. Each year, a new artist is selected (Kara Walker and Takashi Murakami were early picks), and an extensive list of art-world movers and shakers receive a small work by that artist as a gift. It became important to see whom Mr. Norton was selecting, as well as who got on the list, so the gift had two meanings-neither of which was lost on the art world.

Publisher Peter Brant, meanwhile, has been a shrewd collector for years. He bought Warhol in the early 1990s when prices were soft; then he bought Jean-Michel Basquiat when few were interested. In the late '90s, he bought great, large-scale work by Jeff Koons when the broader market wasn't paying attention. His big spending and contrarian collecting has earned him the friendship of artists; the respect of some other collectors who follow his lead; and a coterie of dealers who track his every move like a pied piper. Last year, he opened a foundation space in Connecticut and exhibited highlights of his collection to the public for the first time. It featured top works by Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and more. His stated plans to do single-artist shows of emerging artists will likely ensure he continues to influence the art market.

Today, when it comes to collecting art, buying well is not enough. Many collectors who have spent the money and done shows of works they own still do not garner credibility; they remain buyers of art trophies but never makers of art trophies. To make the leap requires a creative and focused approach to dealer relationships; museum patronage; focused exhibition strategies-and significant capital. The reward, beyond the art itself, is that thoughtful collectors can have more of an impact than before: in setting prices, influencing dealer and museum programming, weighing in on new discoveries and confirming reputations. The art market has totally changed, and for the good. No need to be nostalgic.

editorial@observer.com

In a 1976 interview, Mr. Marden answered the question: “I paint for myself. I paint for my wife … really at heart, [I paint for] anybody who wants to see it.”

Every artist wants an appreciative audience; otherwise, what’s the point? A painting is there to be seen, implicitly, by someone else. All the same, there’s a difference between taking an audience into account and playing to the crowd. Mr. Marden fits into the latter category, and it’s worth pondering who—or what—constitutes the “crowd.”

The standard complaint about Mr. Marden is that he’s elegant to a fault, whether it’s applied to the early monochromatic canvases that put him on the map or the expansive networks of looping calligraphic lines that he’s pursued in recent years. It’s an apt, if frequent, criticism: Mr. Marden rarely shakes off his penchant for the immaculately contrived mark. He can’t help but advertise his own good taste when putting brush to canvas.

In that regard, he has something in common with Sean Scully, another contemporary abstract painter with a major reputation. Mr. Scully’s recent paintings, drawings and prints are featured in Wall of Light, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully clearly take inspiration from Abstract Expressionism: the encompassing “American scale” of painters like Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko; the romantic notion that nonrepresentational form can carry spiritual portent; the conviction that art-making is a quest of heroic proportions. The work of both men is inconceivable without the example set by the New York School.

It’s equally true that their careers have been predicated on slipping out from under its imposing shadow by looking to cultures and epochs far removed from our own.

At Mr. Marden’s MoMA show, there’s a suite of painfully self-conscious collages using reproductions of antique sculptures and paintings by Goya and Fra Angelico to highlight the tradition in which he works. The Cold Mountain series and subsequent canvases are equally frank, if more circumspect, about his debt to Asian art, especially Japanese calligraphy.

Mondrian, Rothko and Philip Guston inform Mr. Scully’s stacked arrays of jutting blocks of color. His palette—smoldering, dusky, elegiac and occasionally punctuated by vibrant tones—points to the blacks, grays and tans found in the paintings of Goya, Zurbarán and Velázquez.

These links to precedent are palpable and admirable. Tradition or, as Mr. Marden has it, “that one big thing,” is a vital force, an indispensable foundation. Yet what do Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully contribute to that tradition, really?

Mr. Marden’s prowess with color is indisputable: Any painter whose palette is unnamable, even when a canvas is dedicated to a single hue, clearly possesses a gift. The Whitney’s tripartite Summer Table (1972-73) is, in its implacable richness, almost impossibly evocative. The later canvases are defined more by drawing than painting, but his ever broadening line admits to velvety and, at times, lurid tones.

Mr. Scully’s talent is for color as well. You’ve got to love how a lone vertical slab of brooding green anchors Barcelona White Bar (2004), an orchestration of deep reds, oranges and grays. However bulky and monolithic the compositions, Mr. Scully’s palette enlivens them with bold rhythms and counter-rhythms.

Overall, however, the handsomeness of both men’s work is suffocating.

Mr. Marden is incapable of making an honest mark. However intuitive, spontaneous and worked his surfaces and brushwork appear, they are calculated from the get-go. Effect, not exploration, defines the work. A colleague suggests that placing a Marden canvas next to a vintage Pollock would offer an eye-opening comparison. I’m more inclined to see how one would fare alongside a Richard Diebenkorn painting; Mr. Marden’s pictorial techniques have their basis in Diebenkorn’s quietly tenacious process.

If Mr. Marden flaunts his sensitivity, Mr. Scully bullies the room. It’s not an unappealing approach: Forthrightness, even arrogance, can be bracing in art. But Mr. Scully is content to reiterate compositional formulas—his puzzle-like variations on the grid are, at this date, a trope that has lost its reason for being. The wisps of bright color that peek out from behind the crevices of his geometries are an easy and annoying mannerism. The physicality of his paint-handling is, in its own way, as overbearing as Mr. Marden’s and sometimes confused: The touch is often woolly and vague when it wants to be fleshy or architectural.

Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully deserve our attention, in part for the modest pleasures their work affords, but more so as signposts of our jumbled culture. They are modernists pointing not to new possibilities, but to pictorial platitudes that go down too easily to inspire great art.

History is the audience these two painters play to, and in the end, it’s their straitjacket. Tradition develops and mutates, often when artists least expect it. Henri Matisse, a painter both men admire, knew that tradition reveals its continuities and truths only when ruthlessly called into question. Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully are too cozy and too polite in their expertise to stretch that far. Sometimes culture wants something a bit rude—as do the rest of us.

Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, and Sean Scully: Wall of Light, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, are both on display until Jan. 15, 2007.

Donna De Salvo, the curator of the show, has solved this problem, so to speak, by broadening the concept of landscape. According to the museum’s “fact sheet,” which serves in lieu of a catalog, “The exhibition looks at the variety of ways artists establish or imagine places—though not necessarily specific locations.” Thus, what is said to be on view are “worlds both natural and artificial, and states from the physical to the mental.” In other words, there’s hardly a landscape to be seen in the Whitney’s Landscape show, which makes this farrago of an exhibition very avant-garde indeed, if only in the minds of the geniuses at the Whitney who dream up such things.

The fact is that the show is nothing more than a random selection of objects from the museum’s permanent collection. Thus, the first painting we encounter is a large abstract painting by Jackson Pollock entitled Number 27, 1950. It’s a very fine example of Pollock in his prime, and the Whitney has every reason to exhibit it as often as possible. But Number 27, 1950 is not a landscape, and it violates everything we know about Pollock’s aesthetic to present it as such.

The next painting in the show is Mark Rothko’s Four Darks in Red (1958), another fine example of New York School Abstract Expressionism that is not a landscape. Rothko would certainly have been appalled at the thought that this painting might be mistaken for a landscape: Metaphysics and poetic tragedy were of far greater interest to him in his work than any “view or vista of scenery on land.” And Ms. De Salvo is simply hallucinating if she believes that Dan Flavin’s construction of pink, yellow and red fluorescent light tubes—another work selected for the show—really qualifies as an example of landscape.

This whole nutty idea gets really weird with the single largest work in the show: a collage-construction on wood panels, measuring 240 inches wide, that looks like nothing so much as a picture of a mammoth necklace. It’s title, Gravity’s Rainbow (Large) (1999), no doubt refers to the well-known novel of the same name. Without doubt, too, it’s the single largest collage I’ve ever seen, and as each of its myriad images has been cut from the pages of a glossy magazine, it’s almost horrifying to think of the labor that the artist, Fred Tomaselli, has invested in the work. But it doesn’t belong in an exhibition called Landscape.

Why does the Whitney persist in mounting exhibitions that are so poorly conceived? Is it simply because it’s easier—and, of course, cheaper—to make a selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection than to organize solo exhibitions of individual artists? After all, there’s no shortage of highly accomplished American artists, living and dead, whose work has never been given a solo exhibition at the Whitney. For that matter, why doesn’t the Whitney give us a show of American landscape that’s really about landscape and not all this other stuff? I suppose that would be too conventional for a museum that wants to think of itself as avant-garde.

Meanwhile, the show that falsely claims the title of Landscape remains on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, through Sept. 18.

This turn of phrase suggests that painting is a process within which the artist immerses himself. Mr. Camenzio goes on to relate that for Mr. Whitney, putting brush to canvas "reveal[s] his wishes differently from how he expected." Surprise, then, is an integral component of Mr. Whitney's art.

That an artist is a medium for forces beyond his control is a sentimental notion, but that's not to say it can't be true. Works of art-the good ones, anyway-share a startling inevitability, the sense that they sprung, fully formed, from the materials in which they were shaped. How many artists are willing to abdicate their egos to such a self-abnegating endeavor?

Mr. Whitney does, though not as much as one would like. Each of his squarish canvases is a brick-like accumulation of color separated by a series of horizontal striations. The paintings expand toward the center with a series of large rectangles aligned roughly along the midpoint of the canvas. These are topped off by a similar but smaller array of forms; a row of two horizontal rectangles is tucked underneath. All of it is fitted within the parameters of the canvas, like cardboard boxes inside a storage cabinet.

This standardized armature admits to discrepancies in scale, shape and rhythm-but just barely and begrudgingly. Unable to relinquish a reliance on all-over uniformity, Mr. Whitney's attitude toward composition-the considered and balanced arrangement of dissimilar forms-is neither casual nor rigorous: It's disregarded. The recurring superstructure, however much it may be tweaked here and there, isn't an organic element of the work's shaping; it's an imposition that stifles the paintings. Flexibility is called for. The artist could ease up on the controls.

Then again, Mr. Whitney probably depends on paint-handling and color to enliven the regulated compositions. To his credit, he almost gets away with it. Possessed of a distinctive touch-offhand, a little cloddish, scruffy but never sloppy-Mr. Whitney is loath to overstate his case and, as such, discloses a modest and amiable nature. The variegated palette brimming with chalky purples, sharp yellows and bright aquamarines (to name just three hues) is, in its warmth and bumptiousness, of a piece. The layered surfaces and glowing tones would suggest the influence of Mark Rothko, though Mr. Whitney doesn't partake of existentialist romance; color, for him, is a conduit to joy. The pictures are sunny in the best sense of the word.

The finest of them has been corralled into the back gallery, presumably because of its size (large) and its character: It's the only picture that strays from the signature format. Admittedly, introducing an extra row of color may not seem like a big deal, but in an art of circumscribed form, an extra bit of not much can mean quite a lot-in this case, a more expansive sense of ease. In the end, you'll thank Mr. Whitney for pointing out just how pleasurable pure color can be.

Stanley Whitney: New Paintings is at the Esso Gallery, 531 West 26th Street, until April 15.

Plain and Simple

What do you do with a one-trick pony who specializes in exercises in futility? If you're the Museum of Modern Art, you honor him with a mid-career retrospective. "A survey of what, exactly?" is the question likely to be prompted by the exhibition Thomas Demand.

The young German artist uses a camera to take sizable pictures, but he's not a photographer; the camera is employed solely as a means of documenting the meticulous constructions that Mr. Demand crafts from colored paper and cardboard. What does he construct? Orange peels, a forest, a field of grass, but mostly architectural interiors-typically, anonymous spaces redolent of bureaucracy and, here and there, more intimate environs (a bathtub filled with soapy water, for instance). Mr. Demand gleans most of his subjects from mass-media sources.

Getting things straight, then: Mr. Demand appropriates existing images and makes them into life-size maquettes, which he photographs before destroying; after which he makes a big print of the photo and encases it under a glossy sheet of plexiglass. What's depressing about this process is how it so consistently thwarts our interest. The elaborate, handmade maquettes must be amazing to see-but Mr. Demand won't let us see them. The photographs, conversely, aren't anything to see. (There's more to being a photographer, after all, than pushing a button.) In point of fact, Mr. Demand doesn't do anything-he's too busy divorcing himself from the art he's ostensibly making.

What we are left with is a brand of nihilism so predigested and cute that you could sell it to Fischer Price at a profit. As for the attendant literature, with its weighty allusions to Nazi Germany, the 2000 American Presidential election and other "fables of democracy," it's bullshit, plain and simple, that you couldn't sell to anyone-except, it appears, to our premier museum of modern art.

Thomas Demand is at MoMA, 11 West 53rd Street, until May 30.

Both contain elements of surprise. For the segment of the art public that's mainly familiar with the spare, unembellished forms of Stout's earlier black-and-white abstractions, the surprise in these abstract paintings from the 1950's will be the variety and vitality of their chromatic invention and the geometric rigor of their composition. In the Journals, the surprise is not so much biographical-Stout has long been known to have lived a solitary life-as it is intellectual: the revelation that he devoted such close critical attention to the work of his contemporaries, keeping a detailed written record of his responses to their accomplishments and what he regarded as their failures.

In one respect, the Journals resemble the paintings: They are at their best when they are most concrete. Stout's reflections on the nature of painting itself are not always persuasive when they wander into the realm of generality. Many of his broader reflections are pure tautology. When he turns his attention to particular artists, however, he's far more engaging.

He came of age as a painter in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Hans Hofmann was his principal mentor. From the Journals, we now know that he followed the development of Abstract Expressionism with a keen critical interest, while in his own painting he pursued a radically different course: a mode of abstraction small in scale, purist in form and intimate in feeling-an art utterly devoid of expressionist bravura and emotional display. This polarity of interests is reflected in the Journals, where the two most frequently cited painters are Hofmann and Mondrian.

When writing about the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic that he rejected in his own work, Stout brought to bear an independent critical intelligence at once measured, respectful and disabused. Thus, writing in the 1950's-when many young painters were heedlessly producing hectic imitations of de Kooning-Stout observed: "The artists seem to be caught with the forming of form out of a sort of chaos of de Kooning. I don't know then whether it is the way a powerful personality is fighting and even dragging the form out of nothing that catches them, or whether it is the form itself that seems so welcome."

In 1951, he wrote: "De Kooning, more conscious always of the fullness, the accomplishment of Western painting, is constantly torn and almost rent asunder in his struggle. It's as though he were trying to reconcile Gorky with Rubens …. The tremendous and vital energy of his struggle has also a tremendous influence on other painters. The very intensity of his purpose inspires a whole school of young painters who, less afraid after the achievements of Gorky and Pollock and de Kooning, are powerfully inspired by the latter's vitality and integrity of purpose, have been unashamed to attempt some almost shameless and formless painting."

This is the best account of the downside of de Kooning's influence I have seen. Alas, Stout didn't live long enough to see the quantity of shameless and formless paintings that de Kooning himself produced in his dotage.

About the paintings of Mark Rothko, Stout also harbored doubts. "With Rothko," he writes, "I am the least impressed of all. When he gets something, it's beautiful: the clear, water-color floating quality of forms that are more color-mergings than actual forms, colors becoming other colors in a movement-in-liquid (yet there's a dryness, even so). He controls it better technically than spiritually."

The artist of this group that Stout most ardently admired was his teacher Hans Hofmann, who was clearly a father figure to him. Hofmann inspired similar feelings in many of his gifted students, and for Stout he was also a model for artistic probity. As to the source of Hofmann's authority vis-à-vis his art students, Stout was correct in observing: "He is the link with the past that they wouldn't otherwise have."

Selections from the Journals of Myron Stout (Midmarch Arts Press) is a book that every art student should read-and that many artists would profit from reading-and their understanding of it would be much enhanced by a visit to the exhibition Myron Stout: Paintings, c. 1950, which remains on view at the Washburn Gallery, 20 West 57th Street, through April 16.

"In using the myth," Eliot wrote, "in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him …. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art, towards … order and form."

Eliot didn't have the visual arts in mind when he wrote this, but his point about the use of myth in Joyce nonetheless exerted an influence in art circles. Years ago, there was a well-known art gallery in Provincetown called H.C.E. (for "Here Comes Everybody," in Joyce's Finnegans Wake) that specialized in Abstract Expressionism, and a good many of the first-generation Abstract Expressionist painters gave mythic titles to their work.

One of them was Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), whose exhibition Pictographs 1941-1951 is on view at the PaceWildenstein Gallery. Gottlieb was a New Yorker who, after an early expressionist period with a group called "The Ten" and work on the Federal Art Project, found inspiration in the work of the expatriate European Surrealists, who'd fled to New York to escape the Nazi occupation of Paris. Freudian psychoanalytic theory was a crucial component of the Surrealist sensibility, and it also enjoyed a huge following among New York intellectuals; for Gottlieb, an additional appeal was that Freudian theory was saturated with allusions to classical mythology-the most famous instance, of course, being Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex.

Gottlieb was fortunate in enjoying the friendship of two older painters, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, who served as mentors in his struggle to liberate his work from the conventions and sentimentalities of mainstream American painting. Gottlieb's account of this struggle is worth quoting at some length: "Rothko and I came to an agreement on the question of subject matter; if we were to do something which could develop in some direction other than the accepted directions of the time, it would be necessary to use different subjects to begin with and, around 1952, we embarked on a series of paintings that attempted to use mythological subject matter, preferably from Greek mythology …. It seemed that if one wanted to get away from such things as the American scene or social realism and perhaps cubism, this offered a possibility of a way out, and the hope that given a subject matter that was different, perhaps some new approach to painting … might also develop."

What developed, in Gottlieb's art, was the pictograph, which divided the canvas surface into irregular grids containing a variety of signs, shapes and symbols purporting to harbor allusions to classical mythology. The first of these was called-what else?- Eyes of Oedipus (1941) and is frankly a rather lackluster composition, mainly of eyes and noses. Yet within a year or two, Gottlieb developed the pictograph into brilliant compositions of mask-like images and dazzling color that together recall us to the primitive rites and practices of the ancient world. In my judgment, certainly, the pictographs-with their highly accomplished synthesis of abstraction and representation-remain one of the high points of the Abstract Expressionist era.

Rothko opted for a very different development in his painting-a development that led to pure abstraction minus any visible trace of a representational image. This hasn't prevented certain critics from "discovering" images in Rothko's paintings, usually images related to Christian iconography. But these, in my judgment, are critical mirages. Why Rothko himself continued to declare that he was not an abstractionist remains a mystery-one that I'm happy to leave to the Freudians to explain.

My guess is that this new exhibition of Gottlieb's early work will do much to enhance a reputation that in recent years has been somewhat in the doldrums; for a younger generation, it's certain to be a revelation.

Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs 1941-1951 remains on view at PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, through Dec. 31, and is accompanied by an excellent, well-illustrated catalog.

The irony, of course, is that Rothko adamantly refused to acknowledge that he ever was or ever aspired to be an abstract painter. His blunt statement to the poet Selden Rodman in a 1957 interview-"You might as well get one thing straight …. I am not an abstractionist"-expressed a sentiment that he never tired of repeating. He seems truly to have believed it too, even as he continued to produce the paintings that all the world regards as prime examples of abstraction. A decade before that 1957 interview, Rothko was already insisting, "I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers." The "dramas" he had in mind appear to have been the Greek tragedies. If ancient Greek drama was his measure of achievement, it's easier to understand why he would want to dismiss mere abstraction as an inadequate account of his artistic mission.

Painting is nonetheless the art to which Rothko's ambitions were confined, and the year 1949 marked the crucial turning point in his artistic development in that medium. Everything prior to that-especially his ill-fated detour into the mystifications of Surrealism-was a prologue to his emergence as a major abstract painter.

How, then, can we account for Rothko's unexpected breakthrough after a prolonged period of producing very minor work? Of the many attempts that have been made to elucidate what the current show calls the "Painter's Progress," Bernice Rose's essay for the Bonnard/Rothko show remains the most persuasive. To my mind, it's nothing less than conclusive.

In her essay, Ms. Rose identifies the winter of 1946-47 as the moment when Rothko commenced his search for an exit from the pervasive influence of the Surrealists. She asks the crucial question ("What was the catalyst for Rothko's shift?"), and provides an answer in veryspecificterms-painterlytermsthat shocked a lot of Rothko's admirers, who, in taking their cues from the artist, rejected all formalist explanation of his pictures.

"The forms and the range of hues in Rothko's first color paintings," according to Ms. Rose, "suggest that the immediate catalyst for change was Pierre Bonnard." Even more startling than the claim itself was the installation of Bonnard/Rothko , in which paintings by Bonnard were juxtaposed with the early Rothko color abstractions that were directly derived from them. The evidence was irrefutable, and so was Ms. Rose's account of the resulting change in Rothko's art.

"Bonnard's last exhibition in New York opened in December 1946 and ran through January 1947, the month of his death. It was a small exhibition, with 15 paintings, shown in a gallery that was well-known at the time, but has since closed, the Bignou Gallery on Madison Avenue. Rothko may well have looked at Bonnard earlier with his friend, the painter Milton Avery, but this time there seems to have been an immediate reaction: the leap into color. In the paintings that he began in that winter of 1946/47, now called Multiforms, Rothko's color patches appear to take up details of Bonnard's paintings and enlarge them, transforming Bonnard's tendency to free the colored paint gesture from the object description into a kind of abstraction …. This selection of abstract areas from Bonnard was one aspect of what Rothko took away with him from the exhibition. He also took away the sensation of brilliant color as the source of light."

Anyone who's made a close study of Bonnard's paintings will have no trouble finding traces of the French master's aesthetic in the pictures that have now been brought together in the Painter's Progress exhibition, which focuses on the year 1949. This was the year in which Rothko perfected his own mastery of the paintings he called "dramas," which most of us regard as some of the most beautiful abstract paintings in the entire modern canon.

It has been admitted that Bonnard was an unlikely figure to influence any painter associated with the Abstract Expressionists, who prided themselves on their independence from the School of Paris. And it goes without saying that Rothko never acknowledged the debt. Yet, as D.H. Lawrence once said-Trust the tale, not the teller of the tale-meaning, of course, that a writer's or artist's work must be judged on the basis of what it is, not on the basis of descriptive claims. Unless prompted by Rothko, I doubt that any visitor to Rothko: A Painter's Progress would regard this beautifully installed exhibition as a show of "dramas." But thanks to what we now know about Rothko's interest in Bonnard, this exhibition turns out to be an even richer experience than it might otherwise have been. It remains on view at Pace Wildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, through Feb. 23.

Thus, in response to the radical innovations of Post-Impressionist painting, Bloomsbury gave us the notion of "significant form," which seemed to mean something at the time but was later found to be too facile a concept to explain the complexities of Cézanne or Matisse. Closer to home, the emergence of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1950's brought us the notion of "action painting." This was nicely designed to make it seem as if the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning et al. were somehow akin to the Existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, then all the rage in intellectual circles. But "action painting," too, was an utterly bogus idea, as virtually everyone in the art world now recognizes.

More recently, in response to Andy Warhol and his Factory, we were given still another catchpenny formulation-"the end of art"-which, insofar as it means anything at all, certainly doesn't mean that artists have ceased to create works of art. What it's said to mean is that art has now, post-Warhol, become a branch of philosophy-and thus, by implication, only professional philosophers are in a position to assess its accomplishment. This notion, too, now enjoys a kind of afterlife in the seminar rooms and on the margins of media coverage of the arts.

What brings all this to mind at the moment is the exhibition called American Sublime: Epic Landscapes of Our Nation, 1820-1880 , at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. I hasten to add that there is nothing bogus about this wonderful exhibition or its excellent catalog. In my experience, anyway, American Sublime is the best survey of its subject I have seen; indeed, it's a model of what a historical exhibition of this kind ought to be. The selection of paintings observes a consistently high aesthetic standard, and the scrupulously conceived organization is designed to illuminate not only the artistic achievements of 19th-century American landscape painting but the specific historical, social and geographical imperatives that shaped its development.

As it happens, however, American Sublime opened at the Pennsylvania Academy just as another exhibition-the Barnett Newman retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art-was in its closing weeks. This coincidental overlap was bound to create some confusion in minds susceptible to bogus claims. For the late Barnett Newman (1905-1970), an abstract painter of modest accomplishment who was part of the New York School, famously claimed that his paintings also represented a version of the American Sublime. In 1948, he published an essay called "The Sublime Is Now" in the magazine Tiger's Eye , and this, together with similar writings by Newman and others, led to the notion that certain Abstract Expressionist paintings (especially the work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Newman himself) were now to be seen as belonging to the same pictorial tradition as the 19th-century paintings of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt et al.-the tradition of the American Sublime.

This fanciful formulation, which has absolutely no foundation in anything but facile rhetoric, proved nonetheless to be irresistible to certain art-world thinkers. The Museum of Modern Art even went so far as to mount an exhibition that was designed to prove the efficacy of the idea, but that only succeeded in establishing its absurdity. Yet there's no idea so absurd that it can't be made to serve some academic or journalistic function, and so the fiction that the paintings of Thomas Cole, say, and those of Barnett Newman were somehow joined in a common aesthetic or spiritual mission has acquired an intellectually respectable status in certain quarters of the art world.

It was hardly a surprise, then, that when I attended the press viewing of the American Sublime exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy, almost the first question I was asked was whether I believed in this preposterous fiction. My interlocutor, who is himself a scholar in the field of the 19th-century American Sublime, was greatly relieved to hear that I did not. But I'm afraid we're doomed to see this fiction endure for another generation or so, if only in the classrooms where such fictions abound.

What does the concept of "the Sublime" mean, anyway? Andrew Wilton, in a catalog essay entitled "The Sublime in the Old World and the New," provides an excellent historical summary of this very slippery idea. For a more succinct explanation, the one given in the 11th edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) can hardly be improved upon. It reads, in part, as follows: "Sublime … in aesthetics, a term applied to the quality of transcendent greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual or artistic. It is especially used for a greatness with which nothing can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation or measurement. Psychologically, the effect of the perception of the sublime is a feeling of awe or helplessness."

Whether or not every painting in the American Sublime exhibition can be said to meet this standard of "transcendent greatness" is debatable, but it's nonetheless amazing to see so many paintings at the Academy succeed in approaching such a standard. In the 10 galleries which the Philadelphia Museum of Art has devoted to the Newman retrospective, however, the feeling of helplessness we experience in the presence of such minimal aesthetic endeavor on such an extravagant scale has nothing to do with "awe," never mind "transcendent greatness." It's a helplessness induced by sheer, unrelieved boredom-a boredom from which all the fanciful formulations of art-world rhetoric can offer no relief.

American Sublime: Epic Landscapes of Our Nation, 1820-1880 , remains on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through Aug. 25. Barnett Newman closes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on July 7.