The new Parrish Art Museum under construction

Earlier this month, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton raised $675,000 at its glitzy annual fund-raising gala—the last to take place in its present building. Meanwhile, a few miles away, in Water Mill, the skeleton of the Parrish’s new home, an elegant, barnlike building designed by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron that’s as long as a city block, has begun to rise by the side of Montauk Highway, next to Duck Walk Vineyards. Days before the Parrish’s gala, the village of Southampton presented to the public for the first time its future plans for an arts center in the Parrish’s present, soon to be former, building on Jobs Lane.

On the afternoon of the gala, Parrish director Terrie Sultan took The Observer on a tour of the museum’s vault, where its collection of over 2,600 artworks is housed. She rolled back floor-to-ceiling racks to reveal paintings by William Merritt Chase, Willem de Kooning and realist Fairfield Porter, of whom she says the museum has the largest collection in the country. (When Porter died in 1975, his widow donated the contents of his studio to the Parrish.) In the new building, set to open next summer, 7,500 of the 12,300 square feet of exhibition space will be dedicated to shows from this permanent collection.

While it’s been scaled back from the Parrish’s original ambitions—an $80 million project by Herzog & de Meuron that would have mimicked the look of artist residences—the new building, a financially more manageable project that was conceived during the recession in 2009, is widely admired. (It’s still nearly double the size of the current building, and its $26.2 million price is 80 percent paid for, with construction proceeding on schedule.) With its capacity for showcasing the permanent collection, it is also meant to inspire growth in the collection: “It’s very hard to solicit works from collectors if you can’t demonstrate that they will be on view,” Ms. Sultan said, adding that “there’s a wish list.” And so far, it seems to be working. In the vault, Ms. Sultan pointed to a recent acquisition—one of Ross Bleckner’s “Architecture of the Sky” paintings still in the bubble wrap in which it was shipped. It’s the first of that series to enter a public institution (Mr. Bleckner had been saving the piece for himself, but changed his mind). Nearby were some Porter paintings that came as gifts. Ms. Sultan also mentioned a recent gift of a Keith Sonnier sculpture.

Museum supporters are eager to see that permanent collection go on regular view. A recent addition to the board of trustees—he joined in December 2009—Manhattan-based lawyer Peter Haveles characterizes himself as “a modest collector”; his children benefited from summer art-education programs at the Parrish. He said he’s excited to see the museum “operate on all of its cylinders” by doing temporary exhibitions and permanent collection shows at the same time; up to now, it’s been either/or. He described his recent visit to the vault with Ms. Sultan as being “like a 6-year-old in a candy store,” and says the typical patron of the Parrish will be excited about seeing the rotating exhibition of Fairfield Porters.

But it’s not just the permanent collection that will be on view once the new building is completed.

“If you’re asking, are we going to be organizing and presenting world-class exhibitions that people will come from all over the world to see, the answer is yes,” Ms. Sultan told The Observer, standing in the museum’s current exhibition of work by Dorothea Rockburne. She added that the museum will be “engaging in an international dialogue on all levels.” She said it’s too early to release information about the opening exhibition, but hinted that it will be of a contemporary artist who has a connection to the East End, and that it will be “the kind of thing where people say, ‘Of course! And why didn’t we think of that?’”

Last September, the museum added a trustee—one of six new board members to join since December 2009—who seemed particularly interested in world-class exhibitions and international dialogue. Adam Sender, who runs the hedge fund Exis Capital Management, has been summering in Sag Harbor, with his family, for the past 15 years. Two weeks before the Parrish gala, he hosted a cocktail party for the museum at his home. Ms. Sultan and Art in America magazine editor Lindsay Pollock, as well as local artists like Michael Halsband and Matthew Satz, toured the spacious house and landscaped grounds, gazing at works by international avant-garde stars, the kinds of pieces you are likely to come across at Art Basel or the Venice Biennale. Mr. Sender is anything but a modest collector. A large white abstract Sol Lewitt sculpture sat on the manicured lawn; a huge Urs Fischer sculpture of a cigarette lighter dominated the living room; across from it hung a giant Damien Hirst butterfly painting; an entire gallery space devoted to pieces made from panty hose and cigarettes by Sarah Lucas was next to the stairwell; light-box photographs by Jeff Wall lit up the dining room; a bright yellow Bruce Nauman neon light tube piece that spells out “Run from fear fun from rear” illuminated an upstairs hallway; there were works by up-and-coming talents like Brendan Fowler, Elad Lassry and Matt Chambers. Mr. Sender employs a personal curator and regularly loans his artworks for exhibitions around the world.

In other words: Fairfield Porter this was not. Alice Aycock, an artist who is known for her earthwork-style sculptures, and who will have a major exhibition of her drawings at the Parrish in 2013, was among the guests at Mr. Sender’s party. “My jaw dropped,” Ms. Aycock told The Observer a week later, describing her reaction to the house, grounds and collection. “I live within walking distance and I had no idea this was there.”

She added, “If people like Adam Sender will get behind the Parrish, then the museum will be cooking with gas.”

“With a building like that, they have the opportunity to do some exciting shows,” said Mr. Sender, referring to the new Herzog & de Meuron structure. He put aside plans to open a private exhibition space for his collection in a disused church in Sag Harbor, joining the Parrish board instead. “Exciting to me means contemporary.”

Mr. Haveles characterized the Parrish’s board, a mixture of full- and part-time residents, as diverse and engaged, but not meddlesome. On the board level, he said, the museum is discussed not as one with aspirations to be a global or national institution, but rather as an important regional one, one that reflects the art of the region and serves the region’s needs, and that will be attractive to people visiting from other parts of the East End, and also to visitors from Manhattan.

Ms. Sultan put the emphasis on the artistic legacy of the East End—ranging from Childe Hassam to Jackson Pollock to Roy Lichtenstein to Chuck Close.  “We are very proud to be a museum in this region,” she said. “It’s one of the only regions like this in the country where the level of contribution from the artists who have an association with this area is as high as it is.”

If the word “regional” comes up often in discussions of the new Parrish, “local” and “pedestrian-oriented” are more likely to be used in descriptions of the village’s plans for its own $20 million project: a hybrid arts complex at the site the Parrish is leaving.

On July 7, the village of Southampton held the first public presentation of plans—four different ones were presented—for the Southampton Center for the Arts. Siamak Samii, chair of the village’s planning commission, told The Observer that part of a master plan for the center of the village is the creation of an arts district, of which the old Parrish site will serve as anchor. It will incorporate visual and performing arts as well as education, and parts of it will be accessible around the clock; the center will be aimed at both summer and year-round residents. (The village’s full time population is 3,000-4,000; in summer it spikes to around 12,000.)

One object of the project, Mr. Samii said, is to “bring residential living into the heart of the village.” In neighboring villages like East Hampton, he said, “commerce and retail” have been the engines of growth. “We want culture to be the engine of growth.”

The arts complex will be fueled by partnerships with cultural institutions, such as museums and theater groups, and educational institutions outside the village that will use the facility as an extension. He said the village has so far reached out to 15 institutions, including the Lincoln Center Film Festival, and responses have been positive.

The Parrish’s lease is up in summer 2012; it plans to have next summer’s gala in its completed building, in Water Mill. Between now and that time, Mr. Samii said, the village will set up boards, bring in a director and fund-raise, with the aim of breaking ground in the next two to three years. Manhattan-based arts consultancy Webb Management Services has put the three-year project, which will create 40,000 square feet of facilities at around $20 million, once the operational costs are factored in.

The village does not see its arts complex competing with the Parrish, but rather complementing it—an “amicable relationship” that, as Mr. Samii described it, could even include the Parrish’s doing loan shows there.

“One of the main elements is to engage some of the local artists even more,” said Mr. Samii. “Local artists who don’t feel they are on the radar of the Parrish. And there are a lot of them.” He added that the facility would ideally be a place “where there would be more interaction between the community and its artists.” It is envisioned as “a place of gathering, a piazza for the center of the village.”

The Parrish, as he put it, “is extending itself to a more international high-profile, high-energy art scene. But we think that should not be at the expense of ignoring the local community.”

sdouglas@observer.com

Roy Lichtenstein's
Times Square Mural
Times Square Station: 1, 2, 3, N, Q, R, 7 and S trains
Perhaps the most famous piece of art in the M.T.A. system is Roy Lichtenstein's Times Square Mural, created in 1994. This 53-foot-long panel, in Lichtenstein's iconic comic-book-print style, was one of the artist's last works. The mural shows the progression of transit, representing both the past (an arch like the kind used in the construction of the original 19th-century subway system) and the future (an ultramodern rocket-ship train). Lichtenstein was commissioned for the piece, but chose to give it as a gift to the city he was born in.

Béatrice Coron's Bronx
Literature and All Around Town
Burke Avenue Station: 2 and 5 trains
In Bronx Literature, Béatrice Coron depicts the lives and works of four authors, using vivid stained glass. The large windows focus on Sholom Aleichem, James Baldwin, Nicholasa Mohr and Edgar Allan Poe, all of whom lived in or wrote about the Bronx. (The Poe panels include ravens, a full moon and a windblown landscape where pages fly from books.) En route to Bronx Literature, passengers may be able to see one of the more recent works commissioned for the M.T.A.: All Around Town. The cut-paper poster hanging in subway cars, depicting a silhouetted city, was made by Ms. Coron in 2009.

Raul Colon's Primavera
191st Street Station: 1 train
Primavera, the 15-foot-tall wall of color at this uptown subway station, was designed by Raul Colon, a celebrated artist and illustrator of children's books, including My Mama Had a Dancing Heart and Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Primavera has the same magical feel of a children's book, as a dancing couple (intentionally interracial, to celebrate the diversity of Washington Heights, said Mr. Colon) floats in the foreground. "I wanted to brighten [the station] up," the artist said. "I thought of a nice spring day, a warm feel. I wanted to make it a celebration." Mr. Colon was inspired by the feeling of Washington Heights, and by the arched space. "It had the feel of those old murals and religious paintings from the Renaissance. That's why the children have those mystical wings," he said.

Robert Kushner's
4 Seasons Seasoned
77th Street Station: 6 train
Passengers rushing through the turnstiles at 77th street to catch the No. 6 train might do better to catch the gilded leaves in the glass mosaics on either side. The beautiful work, titled 4 Seasons Seasoned, was created for the M.T.A. in 2004 by Robert Kushner. Mr. Kushner was a performance artist in the 1970s, before becoming a prominent member of the Pattern and Decoration Art movement, which was influenced by Eastern cultures' emphasis on artistic decorative patterns. The work here has the same Japanese style and floral motifs that are prominent in many of Mr. Kushner's other works, which can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, among other museums.

Elizabeth Murray's
Blooming
Between 59th Street and 59th Street/Lexington Avenue stations: 4, 5, 6, N and R trains
23rd Street/Ely Avenue Station: E train
A red tree blooms eternally in the 59th Street Station passageway, thanks to Elizabeth Murray, one of only a handful of women ever to be honored with a career-long retrospective at MoMA. The giant mosaic, which wraps around walls and corners, was created by Murray in 1996. Named Blooming, after the Bloomingdale's above it, this work features giant slippers and coffee cups, artifacts of the daily morning commute. Another Murray work, Steam, is on view at the 23rd Street/Ely Avenue Station in Queens. It displays the same colorful whimsy as Blooming-in one mosaic, a city skyline is trampled by giant boots.

Al Loving's
Brooklyn, New Morning
Broadway/East New York (Broadway Junction) Station: J, Z, L, A and C trains
Blue-, yellow-, green- and red-tinted sunlight forms patterns on the faces of passengers walking through Brooklyn's Broadway Junction Station. In 2001, Al Loving installed 70 stained-glass windows and a bright mosaic wall to make Brooklyn, New Morning. The richly colored panes sport geometric patterns and loops. Loving, who died in 2005, was a well-known abstract artist whose work is in permanent collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tom Otterness'
Life Underground
Eighth Avenue and 14th Street Station:
A, C, E and L trains
Do not be alarmed by the crocodile coming out of the sewer grate. It is just one of more than 100 sculptures in Life Underground, one of the most playful and popular installations in the M.T.A. system. Public artist Tom Otterness hid quirky statues around corners, under handrails and behind fixtures at the station. He said that the work has a political undertone, inspired by 19th-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast. "I took many of the images-the money-bag head, other satirical images-from him and converted them into sculpture," Mr. Otterness said.

Sol LeWitt's
Whirls and twirls (MTA)
Columbus Circle: 1, A, B, C and D trains
The aptly named Whirls in Columbus Circle was one of Sol LeWitt's last commissions, and it was unveiled two years after the famed conceptual artist's death in 2009. The 583-square-foot installation, full of fanciful loops and geometric shapes, is made up of 250 vivid porcelain tiles. Reds, greens and yellows swirl together in a dizzying array of colors. The piece is officially called Whirls and twirls (MTA)-because another similar creation of LeWitt's, Whirls and twirls (MET), is installed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ellen Harvey's
Look Up Not Down
Queens Plaza Station: E, F, G  
and R trains
Ellen Harvey designed glass mosaics of the city skyline and installed them into the walls of this busy Queens station. The cityscape illustrated there represents the actual skyline as seen from above the subway station in 2005, when the piece was created. In the mosaic, the sun is positioned in the place where the World Trade Center once stood. Look Up, Not Down, encourages passersby to be optimistic. Ms. Harvey transports passengers from underground outside and up, to a perpetually sunny day.

Ms. Freeman’s pliant geometric abstractions are the antithesis of art that aspires to sound-bite status. They encourage the long look—and reward it, too. Ms. Freeman’s process and materials foster the kind of deliberation necessary to focus and animate pictorial form: She arrives at each picture through the successive layering of stenciled patterning. Oil paint, a slow-drying medium, doesn’t readily lend itself to this manner of working; it must require considerable patience. Otherwise, the crisp, taped edges and dense surfaces that Ms. Freeman favors would turn into mush.

Chief among the ironies—and pleasures—inherent in Ms. Freeman’s work is that the measured pace of its methods doesn’t correspond with the speed of its effects. Though each composition is developed gradually, the paintings themselves are perpetual-motion machines. They shake and shimmy, herk and jerk. They’re all elbows, knees and jutting, propulsive rhythms. A Freeman painting will fold over and double back, like a piece of origami that continuously reinvents itself to the soundtrack of a Warner Brothers cartoon.

The constant in Ms. Freeman’s vocabulary of form is a wedge that has been wrested into shape from the space surrounding it. It can be triangular, circular, rectangular or, as is often the case, an amalgam of the lot that she cobbles together. These wedges are distributed evenly across the canvas, packed and stacked. Each edge of the canvas is a sounding board off of which the shapes bounce. There isn’t a square inch that isn’t accounted for and energized.

Ms. Freeman loves the regularity of the grid that serves as the structural underpinning for her work—but she loves even more to call that regularity into question. What makes these steadfastly ordered pictures dance is their abrupt elisions of space, shape and rhythm. Even after you’ve become accustomed to the topsy-turvy juxtapositions of a particular painting, it continues to surprise. Ms. Freeman pulls off a hard feat: sustaining a rambunctious, bopping esprit.

A clear and grateful debt to high modernist abstraction is evident. The paintings are inconceivable without the examples furnished by Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Bart van der Leck and, closer to our own time, Ellsworth Kelly and Burgoyne Diller. A visitor to the gallery remarked upon the affinities Ms. Freeman’s art shares with quilt-making. I’d add that certain elements of vintage popular design—the bright and slightly synthetic palette, in particular—supply an undercurrent of campy good humor to the paintings.

Gathering together inspirational resources, Ms. Freeman stitches them into a distinctly personal vision. Her notion of forward momentum is to honor precedent even as she leapfrogs over it. Would that all the paintings did so with as much resilience and confidence as Purple Galaxie (2004) and the irresistible Orange Duster (2003). That doesn’t mean the rest of the pictures, replete as they are with good tidings, aren’t worth looking at. That even the lesser achievements merit your time indicates the value of Ms. Freeman’s unhurried efforts.

Joanne Freeman: Recent Work is at Lohin Geduld Gallery, 531 West 25th Street, until Dec. 24.

Stay on the Grass

On a recent morning, during the unseasonably warm weather a few weeks back, I took a moment to sit on a bench in Madison Square Park, sip a cup of coffee and read the paper. I chose a place by the playground at the north end of the park so as to avoid contact with Sol LeWitt’s concrete-block sculptures—those Minimalist insults visited upon the public sphere by Mr. LeWitt and invited by the park’s conservancy. But then an array of monolithic sculptures inhabiting the grassy areas toward the upper reaches of the park caught my eye. I got up to investigate and discovered that the unassuming objects are the work of Jene Highstein.

It’s rare for public sculpture to acknowledge the world around it. Most of the time, it’s plunked into an empty plaza or patch of greenery at the behest of some well-meaning organization. Given that most artists can’t be bothered with “other people” (to borrow a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre), the majority of public-art projects—when they’re not impeding pedestrian traffic—are superfluous at best. Not so for Mr. Highstein. He had the presence of mind to key into the underlying rationale for public parks: the serenity that only nature, however manufactured and manicured, can provide.

The delicacy with which Mr. Highstein has arranged the sculptures recalls the respect that Asian cultures—and here I think especially of the Chinese—accord to the natural world. The pieces don’t intrude on their surroundings; they partake of them. As a consequence, they seem as inevitable a fixture of the landscaping as trees, grass and squirrels. The choice of organic materials—red cedar, granite, quartzite—helps. So do the natural forces Mr. Highstein references: A series of upended cone-like structures are dubbed “tornados.”

The shapes are elemental and simple, but stately. Even the jokier pieces work—the primordial crotch-shot of Female Figure (1991) or the totemic cedar staircase that leads both upward and nowhere. They suggest artistic and perhaps spiritual sympathies with cultures closer to the land than the typical New Yorker. How well Mr. Highstein’s sculptures will fare against the bitter cold remains to be seen. My guess is that they’ll handle it with the same stoic regard with which they met the falling leaves.

Madison Square Art: Jene Highstein is at Madison Square Park, Broadway and 23rd Street, until April 2006.

Sure, there are plenty of painters, some of them well known, who have dedicated themselves to a post-ironic, Pop-based permutation of figurative art. They make a claim on a grand tradition, intending to set themselves above it (and ending up below it, instead). But what I’m referring to, for lack of a better adjective, are straight figurative painters: artists who relish the complexity of the human body without recourse to been-there-done-that cynicism, artists who seek out possibilities of form and emotion through direct observation.

Go Figure, a group exhibition of 26 painters and sculptors on display at the George Billis Gallery, won’t convince you that “the fragility and beauty that exists within the body” is an “ideal” necessarily suited to contemporary art. The majority of pieces are run-of-the-mill in their competence; few of them are inspired. Then again, those few do make you stop in mid-step and pay attention. Galleries, having consigned their A-list artists to summer break, are currently featuring not-ready-for-prime-time talent. Go Figure features a handful of painters who deserve to stick around once the temperature heads south.

Whether Marcus Cain is one of them, I’m not sure. His mixed-media works on paper offer folksy ruminations on childhood and solitude. In Mr. Cain’s cartoonish scenarios, patterning engulfs every surface and object—flesh, hair, cake and water. The narratives pictured—a boy praying, a child being measured by a parent—are Rockwellian in character, inflected with sentiment and cliché. The pieces are too squirrelly and arch to take seriously, but too tender and true to dismiss altogether.

Tom Gregg’s Eden (1997) evokes childhood as well. Isn’t that Dick and Jane, rendered in pinkish-purple, running through that encompassing expanse of floral wallpaper? The painting is less about memory than style: In the foreground, there’s a contrasting, handsomely executed still life of apples, oranges, lemons and bananas. It’s hard to know how to settle the painting’s conflicting impulses, but as a diversion, Eden isn’t bad at all.

Kurt Solmssen’s July (2000) is a bravura, though sturdy and stoic, example of painterly realism. The depiction of a woman standing on a ladder picking cherries recalls both Edward Hopper’s arrangements of structure and light and Fairfield Porter’s paint handling. Jonathan Shahn’s sculpture, Gesturing Figure (1992), is a roughhewn, life-size nude male cobbled and carved from wood. Notwithstanding his hardscrabble Expressionistic fervor, Mr. Shahn is sensitive to the nuances of material and subject. The overlays of paint are the kicker: They don’t simply adorn the work, they enhance its sculptural integrity—a tough feat to pull off.

As for best in show, it’s a toss-up. Eve Mansdorf’s Kitchen (2004) confirms my belief that she’s one of the most natural paint handlers around. Flinty yet agile, Ms. Mansdorf’s brush works its nubbly magic within a framework of curt and spiky lines. It’s heartening that the domestic dramas portrayed in her recent work have started to reveal a maturity more in line with her painterly touch. Two women face a man who has his back to the viewer; their expressions are close to impenetrable, though the tension is unmistakable. Ms. Mansdorf hasn’t altogether expunged her tendency toward theatricality, but she has learned how to downplay and deepen it.

Ms. Mansdorf loves the figure as a means of exploring human experience. Maureen Mullarkey loves the figure for its ability to absorb and refract the exigencies of painting. An actual person may have posed for Batya (2003)—a portrait of a topless woman in the studio holding a coffee cup—but in the picture, her body has become an armature upon which color, contour and mass are brought into contemplative equipoise. The subtle stylization of facial features brings to mind the Fayum portraiture of ancient Egypt; the muffled hands summon up the unbearable tenderness of Arshile Gorky’s portrait of his mother. The heartbreakingly subtle gradations of tone and touch suggest that this is an artist who considers painting both a responsibility and a joy. Ms. Mansdorf and Ms. Mullarkey have proven they’re ready for prime time.

Go Figure: A Figurative Art Show is at the George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until Aug. 13.

Abstract Concrete

I’d been hoping to make it through the summer without having to encounter the all-but-ubiquitous art of Sol LeWitt. Having little patience for “boring enough to be interesting” art—well, that’s the way Donald Judd described Mr. LeWitt’s brand of overly cerebral, serial abstraction—I’ve managed to avoid the Met’s rooftop garden and PaceWildenstein’s Chelsea outpost, both of which are showcasing different aspects of the oeuvre (sculpture and wall drawings, respectively). I wasn’t so fortunate on a recent morning spent running errands. Cutting through Madison Square Park, I came across some piles of concrete blocks—construction-site leftovers from one civic project or another.

Or so I thought. Mr. LeWitt’s Curved Wall with Towers and Circle with Towers (both 2005) aren’t much more than what the titles advertise: an abundance of concrete blocks dutifully lined up in simple, schematic structures. As sculpture, they’re non-events: Mr. LeWitt’s bland disregard for variety, vitality and invention forces him to rely on brute physical fact alone to get by. More upsetting is why the Madison Square Park Conservancy invited Mr. LeWitt to impose his thick-as-a-brick aesthetic on what has become one of Manhattan’s most agreeable public spaces. I guess they must have been blinded by his art-world cred. You’ll find more pleasure by taking in the playground at the northeast corner of the park, with its magnificent array of surrounding greenery. Sometimes our lives are not blessed by art.

Madison Square Park 2005: Sol LeWitt is at Madison Square Park, Fifth and Madison avenues between 23rd and 26th streets, until Dec. 31.

It's the nature of academies, after all, to establish rules, and it has been one of the principal functions of modernism to overturn them. What's the likely outcome, then, when the exponents of modernism embrace one of the fundamental tenets of their traditional adversaries? Answers to this question are more troubling when the rule in question is reduced to little more than the principle of repetition.

Repetition is one of the things that rule-based art is really about. Another thing it's about is anonymity or the elimination of personality in art. Mr. Glimcher prefers to speak of "axiomatic systems," but that's a distinction without a difference: In much of this rule-based art, the only discernible "axiom" is the principle of repetition-as, for example, in Andy Warhol's Troy Donahue-9 Times (1962).

The epigraph that Mr. Glimcher has affixed to Logical Conclusions is Sol LeWitt's dictum, "The idea becomes the machine that makes the art," from his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (1967). This raises similar questions, for the word "machine" is a poor metaphor for what actually occurs in the execution of Mr. LeWitt's mural-scale Conceptualist wall decorations. Each of these gigantic abstract mural projects entails the regimentation of whole crews of docile individual talents that can be relied upon to carry out Mr. LeWitt's orders with an unfailing and expressionless exactitude. What this process resembles is not so much a machine as a lock-step drill. With Mr. LeWitt serving as the generalissimo of the project, a military metaphor might have been more appropriate.

Rule-based art is not itself a style; it's a stylization of existing styles, which is to say a repackaging of images and procedures already familiar to us. It signifies an impulse that gives codification priority over creativity-an impulse that anticipates, if not creative exhaustion, at least a decline in expectation. This is bad news for the future of modernism, or would be if this kind of art succeeded in expanding its domain, which it may well do in the near future, though in the long term its failure is inevitable. Rule-based art is creatively infertile-a parasite wholly dependent upon artistic initiatives that it's incapable of creating for itself.

Yet there's no denying its historical significance, and no denying, either, that it portends an art in which rules are pressed into service as a substitute for imagination. In this respect, the movement that rule-based art most closely resembles is Minimalism, which has similarly exiled itself from the imaginative faculty. Both the Minimalist movement and rule-based art are thus reminders that modernism itself may be entering upon a slow, inexorable slide into Alexandrian parody of itself. There are certainly some signs of such a slide in the many ineptitudes and outrages that have been on display in the now-expanded Museum of Modern Art. Has any other art museum of comparable stature ever had to endure such a negative response from a devoted constituency?

MoMA has responded to the chorus of criticism with a massive advertising campaign, which has attracted the kind of crowds that are more responsive to publicity than to artistic quality or museological probity. It was to be expected, I suppose, that the high excitement and heady subjectivism of the Abstract Expressionists would be followed by a period of emotional retrenchment. This is, indeed, what's happened, and rule-based art is very much a part of it. If you doubt it, try reading your way through the 188 pages of Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule-Based Art.

Table-Tussling at Bivio

It's a good thing I visit a restaurant more than once before writing a review. Bivio is a new Italian trattoria located in the far West Village (near the meatpacking district). The proprietors are Daniel Emerman and Alessandro Prosperi, who also own Bottino, the popular artists' hangout in Chelsea (as well as the late, lamented Barocco in Tribeca). Their new place has already attracted an art-world clientele sporting black and gray Comme des Garçons outfits and brush-cut hair.

The first time I came here for dinner-a Friday night-the restaurant was out of control. The evening began with an argument with the host. He insisted that I'd booked a table for two; I insisted that I'd booked it for four (and, moreover, had called that afternoon to make it five). He then kept saying, "But we have a table for you for two," and I kept saying, "But I booked for five." And so it went on, back and forth, as though we were rehearsing a dialogue from the "In the Restaurant" section of a foreign-language phrasebook.

Miraculously, a table for five was produced, right by a collection of Sol LeWitt drawings, a series of small, framed squares of white paper with lines on them, arranged to form a large rectangle on the wall. We sat down and waited. And waited, and waited. We spent the next half-hour waving and craning our necks, trying to attract the attention of a waiter. Any waiter. One of my friends, who was desperate for a drink, even waylaid the busboy as he put down a basket of bread on the table. "Could we order some wine?"

"No," replied the busboy, without missing a beat. "You have to ask a waiter."

Fair enough. But where was the waiter? Meanwhile, the dining room, badly understaffed, was now full. And coming right from the next table was that horrible, shrieking female voice-the one I seem to encounter every time I go into a noisy restaurant. I won't go on anymore about that exhausting evening, which included three raucous birthday parties and lasted over three hours. The food, in fact, was pretty good, but if I didn't have a job to do, dear reader, I would not have gone back.

I'm glad I did. On a weeknight, Bivio can be as relaxed and pleasant as it is loud and hectic on the weekend. The welcome this time around was warm, and the service was not only friendly-it was efficient. Since the concept behind Bivio is a wine bar, there's an interesting choice of boutique wines (many of them by the glass) and a menu of small plates to be shared, in addition to main courses. One wall of the dining room is a blackboard with specials of the day chalked on, along with a list of charcuterie such as prosciutto di Parma, speck, duck prosciutto, bresaola and Italian cheeses.

Bivio's L-shaped dining room, designed by architect Hassan Abouseda, is sleek and minimalist, done up in black and silver; the circular bar is covered in a shiny skin of metallic scales. Picture windows lined with lace curtains run along two sides of the room, which also features persimmon-colored banquettes and polished zebra-wood tables. The restaurant fills up late, but on my second visit, even though every table was taken, it wasn't uncomfortably noisy. Perhaps it was those birthday parties that did the place in on my earlier Friday visit.

The food at Bivio is straightforward and simple; attention is paid to fresh ingredients of high quality. You can begin by sharing a plate of fried calamari, hot and crisp, albeit in a rather thick batter, or a plate of tuna tartare, de rigueur even in an Italian restaurant these days, cut in chunks and tossed in sesame oil with ginger and watercress. Asparagus is cooked au gratin, topped with prosciutto and parmigiano, and roasted artichoke has a bread stuffing; it's good and garlicky. There are several kinds of bruschetta, too (the one topped with the woolly tomatoes shouldn't be on the menu this time of year). Salads include a sprightly mix of fennel, arugula and slivers of parmigiana with blood oranges, and endive and watercress with pomegranate and a generous hunk of a creamy Gorgonzola.

One of the best dishes on the menu (and one that's surprisingly hard to get right in a restaurant) is the roast chicken; it's moist and juicy, and served with peppers, grape tomatoes, white wine, herbs and excellent roast potatoes. Those potatoes alone are worth a trip to Bivio: golden-brown and seasoned with fried sage leaves and garlic. They come with the herb-encrusted rack of lamb (which, alas, arrived medium, because the person who ordered it forgot to specify) and can also be ordered as a side dish. I also recommend the whole roasted branzino, which was perfectly cooked and served with olive oil, herbs and lemon, and the wild Alaskan king salmon with a robust salsa verde.

Desserts include a lovely, frothy tiramisu, pears poached in white wine and served with zabaglione, and a decent chocolate hazelnut tart.

I ended up liking Bivio. On that dreaded Friday, as we were leaving, the host did apologize for the confusion over our table. And I'm sorry, too. I should've known better than to eat at a hot new restaurant on a Friday night.

the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has now come to the Whitney Museum

of American Art, the first thing to consider is the artist's credo. For Mr.

LeWitt has never been shy about making his intentions explicit. The

bibliography of his writings and publications on this subject is, indeed, one

of the most extensive in recent history. While other hands have frequently been

enlisted to execute his paintings and drawings, it is in his writings that we

come closest to hearing the artist's own voice-the voice of a Minimalist who

found in the operational strategies of Conceptual art a perfect vehicle for the

creation of a copious production.

Here, then, is a paragraph from one of Mr. LeWitt's key

texts, his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," first published in Artforum in 1967: "I will refer to the

kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea

or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a

conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are

made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a

machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative

of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes

and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of

the artist as a craftsman. It is the objective of the artist who is concerned

with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and

therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry. There is no

reason to suppose, however, that the conceptual artist is out to bore the

viewer. It is only the expectation of an emotional kick, to which one

conditioned to expressionist art is accustomed, that would deter the viewer

from perceiving this art."

To which should be added the following passage from the same

text: "To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity.

It also obviates the necessity of designing each work in turn. The plan would

design the work."

For its current incarnation of the LeWitt retrospective, the

Whitney has supplied a text of its own, from which I shall quote only a single

sentence: "A key figure in the development of Conceptual art in [the 1960's],

LeWitt belongs to a generation of artists who, in their search for new

directions, found little promise in the hothouse emotionalism of the highly

venerated Abstract Expressionists of the New York School."

Now you may not have thought of the paintings of Mark Rothko

or Willem de Kooning or even Jackson Pollock-never mind those of Ad Reinhardt

or Barnett Newman-as examples of "hothouse emotionalism." And if, when you

visit the LeWitt retrospective, you take a look at the examples of Abstract

Expressionist painting from the Whitney's own collection that are also on view

at the moment, you will find little to support this theory of "hothouse

emotionalism." But never mind. This is what passes for deep thought at the

Whitney these days, and it is only meant to persuade us that Sol LeWitt has

never been guilty of such dreaded emotionalism, hothouse or otherwise. On this

point I am easily persuaded.

On another subject,

however-Mr. LeWitt's claim that there is no reason to suppose "that the

conceptual artist is out to bore the viewer"-something more needs to be said.

For there is an immense quantity of

work in this retrospective-rooms and rooms of it-that this viewer found to be

almost unendurably boring. I am not suggesting that Mr. LeWitt has set out to

bore us, but a large measure of boredom is built into his depersonalized

method. When "the plan" designs "the work" and "the execution is a perfunctory

affair," then boredom awaits us, whether or not the artist intends it.

It is worth recalling, in this connection, that back in

1967, when Mr. LeWitt published his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," boredom

was, so to speak, a hot issue in the art world. No less an eminence than Susan

Sontag had grandly proclaimed (in Against

Interpretation ) that "There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom." She

was writing in defense of what she called "the new languages which the

interesting art of our time speaks," which would then have included Minimalism

and Conceptual art.

It was left to Barbara Rose, however, to offer up the

grandest defense of boredom in art. In a widely read essay called "ABC Art,"

published in Art in America in 1965,

Ms. Rose wrote as follows: "If, on seeing some of the new paintings,

sculptures, dances or films, you are bored, probably you were intended to be.

Boring the public is one way of testing its commitment. The new artists seem to

be extremely chary; approval, they know, is easy to come by in this seller's

market for culture, but commitment is nearly impossible to elicit. So they make

their art as difficult, remote, aloof and indigestible as possible. One way to

achieve this is to make art boring. Some artists, often the most gifted, finally

end by finding art a bore. It is no coincidence that the last painting Duchamp

made, in 1918, was called Tu m' . The

title is short for tu m'ennuie -you

bore me."

As Ms. Rose was then married to Frank Stella, she brought a

special authority to this proposition. It was undoubtedly in response to this

defense of boredom that Mr. LeWitt felt obliged to deny that "the conceptual

artist is out to bore the viewer."

Still, as the viewer makes his way through this immense

retrospective, he may be persuaded that Mr. LeWitt was indeed one of the

artists who, at a certain point in his development, was "finding art a bore,"

and as a hedge against boredom-the viewer's, if not his own-began to embrace a

kind of razzle-dazzle brand of color design as a substitute for artistic

thought. So the monkish Minimalism of the 1960's was soon followed by the

atrociously vulgar color design that now covers so many of the walls of the

Whitney Museum, all of it executed by hired hands. "A perfunctory affair,"

indeed, and it remains on view at the Whitney through Feb. 25

I don't mean by this merely the reinstallation of familiar modern masterworks from MoMA's great collections in ways that radically depart from the allegedly "linear" reading of the modern movement that was established by the late Alfred Barr and more or less reaffirmed by William Rubin during his tenure as director of the museum's department of painting and sculpture. This reconfiguration of MoMA's masterworks-and indeed, of a fair number of works that don't exactly qualify as masterpieces-is, of course, the most obvious thing about Modern Starts , and has already been much commented upon. The agenda I have in mind is about something else.

Simply stated-and in certain sections of Modern Starts it is an agenda that is very simply implemented-what governs the conception of this extraordinary exhibition is a shift in intellectual priority from the esthetics of modernist style to a concentration on the subject matter of the art under review. This is, to be sure, a perfectly legitimate way to approach the art of the modern era. Yet, in common with other approaches to such a large and complicated subject, this emphasis on subject matter, or thematic "content," is more illuminating about certain works of art than it is about certain others.

About many forms of representational or figurative art, for example, it can sometimes be very illuminating indeed. Yet even in that area of modernist art it can also at times be very misleading, for it tends to reduce the iconography of modernism to a succession of illustrations-illustrations, that is, of the social or technological history of modernity. And that is not, perhaps, what many of the major talents of the period under review, 1880 to 1920, had in mind in creating their work, even their representational work. Moreover, the tripartite division of Modern Starts into sections devoted to People , Places and Things made this tendency to reduce modernism to the level of historical illustration more or less inevitable.

Where this approach to the modernism of 1880 to 1920 most conspicuously fails, alas, is in its treatment of the rise of abstract art, which is one of the major events in the last decade, 1910 to 1920, covered by this exhibition. Amazingly, there is simply no attempt made in this very large exhibit to provide a coherent account of this development. In his introductory essay for the catalogue of Modern Starts , John Elderfield acknowledges that the birth of abstraction did indeed present vexing problems for the organizers of the exhibition. "It has originally been our idea to devote a separate section to abstraction," he writes. "We felt that this was necessary, not only because of the intrinsic importance to our period of the creation of abstract art, but also because of the difficulty of its comprehension, even now, nearly a century later. It took quite a long time before we realized that, by dealing with abstraction separately, we were creating enormous problems for ourselves, and quite possibly for the viewer, too."

The solution that Mr. Elderfield and his colleagues settled upon, then, was an exhibition devoted to what he calls "the themes of figural representation," to which, in effect, examples of abstract art by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and other pioneers of abstraction are not only subsumed but presented to the public as if they, too, were somehow to be regarded as examples of "figural representation." To drivxe home this dubious point, certain works that lie outside the historical framework of the Modern Starts show are introduced to underscore what the eye, unaided, might not be able to discover for itself. Thus, Mondrian's abstract drawing, Pier and Ocean 5 (1915), is hung alongside a series of 1990 photographs of ocean surfaces by Robert Adams, and Kandinsky's classic abstractions, called simply Panels for Edwin R. Campbell 1-4 (1914), but said by later writers to be a representation of the four seasons, are installed in close proximity to Cy Twombly's 1993-94 series of paintings actually called The Four Seasons . It is at moments like these in Modern Starts that the exhibition descends into the worst sort of intellectual humbug.

Mercifully, in most cases the examples of abstract art in Modern Starts are exhibited without comment or comparison. For some of the wall-text commentary in the installation of the exhibition is risible. Thus, the immense abstract black-and-white wall drawing that MoMA commissioned Sol LeWitt to create for the entrance to the People section of the show is burdened with the following explanation. Because this abstraction incorporates curved lines, they are said to be allusions to "the corporeal," and "For these reasons his abstract drawing is presented as an introduction to People ." Similarly, the vertical "zips" in the huge Barnett Newman abstraction in the first room of People are said-on whose authority, I wonder?-to represent some sort of masculine principle, therefore appropriate to the People section.

About the Sol LeWitt abstraction, by the way, it isn't until the reader gets to the notes on page 350 of the catalogue that there is offered the following explanation: "The work by Sol LeWitt is, in fact, not precisely related to the section called People : It is a fully abstract work. We wanted to include it because its combination of linearity and curvilinearity is reminiscent of some of the more extreme, abstracted figural representation in the People section. (We do not presume, however, to suggest that the artist himself would think about it in this way.) Furthermore, we wanted the contrast to show how far modern art has changed since the abstracted figural representation included in this section of the project." Then why not say so in the exhibition itself?

Modern Starts is, as I say, a marvelous exhibition, but in its treatment of the rise of abstraction it remains a hopeless muddle. To this subject, anyway, Barr's reading of the history of modern art remains a far more reliable guide.