The 24-hour montage of clock, watch and other timepiece film clips screens at the Museum of Modern Art through January 21, both during regular museum hours and also, at special screenings, including one on New Year’s Eve, in the original synchronized day-long version.

Click the clock to read the review.

Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010. Single-channel video, 24 hours, still. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery

Details of screenings of The Clock at the Museum of Modern Art this coming month.

September 6 to October 11, 2008
132 Tenth Ave. at 19th Street
New York City, 212-367-7474

Robert Bordo Green Girl 2008 oil on linen, 30 x 24 inches Cover SEPTEMBER 2008 Buddy 2008, oil on linen 32 x 40 inches images courtesy of Alexander and Bonin

In the title for his 2007 Venice Biennale, critic and curator Robert Storr exhorted the art world to “think with the senses, feel with the mind.” One artist who has already staked a claim to what could be called the “concept-sualist” position is Robert Bordo. With his new show at Alexander and Bonin of 14 landscape canvases, the Montreal-born painter demonstrates himself to be more than ever the heady hedonist.

He has an incredible touch, seducing the eye with lubricated surfaces as if his medium is butter and cream rather than oil and pigment. In paintings such as “Heatwave” and “Green Girl” (all of the works discussed in this review are dated 2008), the composition consists simply of free, casual-seeming, lyrical brushstrokes in monochrome mushes made of one blended color applied over another. He achieves this gorgeous succulence without giving way, however, to a sloppy-joe expressionism, as if an accumulation of gestures is inevitably linked to the “soul.” And yet, the effect is anything but mechanical, for there is no soulless, clever-clever deconstruction of painterly activity here.

His painting is often suspended in a beautiful tension — between indulgence and restraint, depiction and form for its own sake. The two paintings mentioned already, which show him at his most abstract, maintain a strong connection with nature, whether in palette or in atmospherics, a sense of what it is like to be out in the landscape in different seasons. Their odd mix of purposiveness and nonchalance is another of those tensions that energize his work.

The diversity of this show, which finds its unity in values rather than effects, is another of its strengths. There is a wide divergence in terms of palette, texture, focus, and scale, but consistency in the depth of pleasure these canvases strike in the materiality of paint and the way its manipulations arbitrate the space between representation and experience.

“Cold Shower” gives us raindrops as broad, hairy strokes of blue and white mixed on the brush and arranged as isolated signifiers against a pale blue ground. Random dots of pink offset an almost too easy all-overness.

“Buddy” and “Skunk Cabbage” both home in on a closely cropped leaf or vegetal form, animating the surfaces with specks of staccato marks that minutely vary in color, length, and direction as if following a randomly changing magnetic pull. “Buddy” juxtaposes mauve and turquoise, each of a dull pastel hue, in a jolie-laide combination that is subversively gorgeous.

Mr. Bordo’s mode of picture making born of stylized abstractions from nature belongs firmly within an American tradition, and this show in particular has paintings that make no apology for their allegiances. “Creek,” a painting of wet in wet shades of dark gray and black that evokes a nocturnal, or heavily shaded, reflective view of water, acknowledges the “Black Brook” series by Alex Katz, while “rut” appropriates a composition of Milton Avery’s that Mr. Katz in turn was happy to repeat, of a compacted meeting of sea, sky, and sand at the edge of an open expanse of almost pure, blazing yellow. “Cabaña” is a dead ringer for a late Avery painting and an early Katz collage that schematizes the notion of landscape as layer cake.

But in joining this patriarchal succession from Avery through Mr. Katz to himself, Mr. Bordo is neither lacking in originality nor offering mere commentary on past masters: He works on his own terms. Where Avery was searching for significant, pregnant forms within nature, and Mr. Katz, in making similar reductions, was grappling with the relationship between perception and style, Mr. Bordo makes painterly experience itself the focus of his interest. Distinctions between form and style dissolve in his perplexingly pretty paintings.

Mr. Bordo’s work is also, and rightly, compared with a strand of critically self-aware contemporary painting, whose luminaries include the Belgian Raoul De Keyser, the American Thomas Nozkowski, and the younger British artist Merlin James. But while, like Mr. Bordo, these are artists who confront the problematics of their activity with quiet, understated insouciance, Mr. Bordo is unbridled in the sheer delectation of his paint application, eschewing the gritty, chewy difficultness of these peers. He is reductive without ever being austere. In a sense, his charm is his way of being difficult, because he pulls it off without coming across as playing style games with cuteness per se.

Art historians (such as Svetlana Alpers and the late Michael Baxandall) have theorized very suggestively about “pictorial intelligence,” a quality found in abundance in Mr. Katz and in the new painting highbrows identified above as Mr. Bordo’s peers. With Mr. Bordo, however, it feels more appropriate to talk about “painterly intelligence,” as his thought process is so intimately bound up with the materiality of color, substance, and application. It could indeed be another of the pleasing tensions, the problematics, in Mr. Bordo’s work that sometimes the intellectual quotient that is so satisfying about his work is caught between ideas about paint and ideas in paint, but the emphasis with him is always closer to the latter. Contrary to the impression a viewer of this new body of work might have if prejudiced by the picture-within-the-picture theme of his early work, Mr. Bordo is not a conceptual artist who has taken up paint as his inquiry; he is a painter who thinks in paint.

The joy of this at once cerebrally and viscerally engaging exhibition is that, without being programmatic about it, Mr. Bordo gently forces the viewer to confront the fundamental dichotomy of illusion and actuality that lies at the core of painting’s magic.

A version of this review first appeared in the New York Sun under the head “The Heady Hedonist” on Thursday, September 11, 2008

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Philip Pearlstein: Then and Now at Betty Cuningham Gallery

June 26 to August 8, 2008
541 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues
New York City, 212-242-2772

Philip Pearlstein, Model, Neon Mickey and Bouncy Duck 2007 oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches

Philip Pearlstein is the great genre-bender of contemporary art. Ostensibly, the subject of his relentless scrutiny over the last four decades has been the nude in the interior, as the almost retrospective overview of his career at Betty Cuningham, “Philip Pearlstein: Then and Now,” suggests in 13 canvases ranging from 1964–1969 and 1988–2008.

And yet, for all the pounds of flesh and claustrophobic constructions of actual, lived in and worked in space these pictures present, the paintings are imbued with such a denial of emotion, connection or purposeful activity as to rob them of the defining characteristics of the interior genre, such as social intercourse, productivity, leisure.

The sense is that, despite the human presence and the architectural frame, Mr. Pearlstein is actually a still life painter, his intense gaze zooming in upon specific objects, their formal relationship with one another, their visually challenging proximities. In more recent canvases, the props, which reflect his avid fascination with Americana, toys, and folk objects, take on star roles. The nudes are overtly reduced to object status, splayed around the inanimate things in mercilessly matter-of-fact compositions whose construction — starting with a focus of the artist’s attention and ending wherever the edge of the arbitrary frame of vision falls — leaves no room for sentimental humanistic notions of the integrity of the figure. “Nude on Rusty Chair” (1969), on view in the office, nonchalantly decapitates the seated figure and robs her of her feet.

But even in his paintings from the 1960s — with which Mr. Pearlstein first came to the attention of the art world and in which nudes held unrivalled mastery over their prosaic domain — the passivity of the models, the drastic cropping, and the willfully perverse perspective ensured that objectification was the order of the day.

Mr. Pearlstein’s audaciously clinical anatomy studies earned him Irving Sandler’s epithet, shared with Alex Katz, Alfred Leslie, and others, of “new perceptual realism.” These artists’ return to traditional subject and means was understood as being closer in spirit to the strategies of the contemporary avant garde than the academy with which it seemed to make superficial connection. If you keep in mind the all-American objects that were to follow as their canvas-mates, Mr. Pearlstein’s early nudes relate to that most blatant of commodity objects, his Carnegie Tech classmate Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box.

The “academic” nude held a similarly remote proximity for fine artists as the design on a carton of household dry goods — under their noses, yet out of bounds. Mr. Pearlstein broke a modernist taboo by reinvestigating the most traditional of subjects, the passively posed nude, but he imported from cutting edge contemporary art strategies for abstracting perceived things. Primarily, this had to do with radical shifts of scale and context. Mr. Pearlstein’s nudes equally connected with Color Field painting and Minimal Art as they did with Pop, on several counts. They were larger than life (typical canvases here are 6 by 6 feet, 6 by 5, 7 by 7); the lighting was stark even to the point of blandness; and the insistence of painting exactly what is seen without capitulating to the comforting tricks of perspective or foreshortening meant that a realization of the flatness of the picture surface jolted rudely into viewer consciousness.

The selection at Cuningham stresses continuity but also dispels the put down (one of many endured by the ever controversial Mr. Pearlstein) that he has been painting the same work for 40 years. The front gallery sandwiches a recent canvas, “Two models with Large Whirlygig” (2006), between “Nude on a Blue Drape” (1964) and “Two Nudes with Red Drape” (1965). The continuity points to the perceptual realist’s affinity with one of abstraction’s absolutists, Piet Mondrian, answering Barnett Newman’s question (in the title of one of his works): “Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.” In Mr. Pearlstein, the first and third of these primaries are stridently represented while yellow comes in a contingent form — fleshtone.

Philip Pearlstein, Two Nudes with Camp Chair 1969 oil on canvas, 60-3/8 x 72-1/2 inches

These rugs notwithstanding, the early canvases are stark in their tonality and anticlimactic in their light modulation. “Two Nudes with Camp Chair,” (1969) for instance, allows enough shadow play to identify without any ambiguity the synthetic light source, which is offstage left, but the contrasts of light and shade are kept to a minimum within the figures, whose pallid complexion melds with the off-white walls and yellow carpeting.

“Model, Neon Mickey and Bouncy Duck” (2007), by comparison, is by Mr. Pearlstein’s standards a riot of chromatic complexity. There are striking juxtapositions of texture and tone — the metals of the iron garden seat, the sprung toy and its foot rest, and the armature of the neon mickey, lit up red, yellow, blue, and white; the different woods of bench and base; the brittle knots of dreadlocks against the shine of glass and metal and the softness of flesh; the different kinds of shadow from neon and overhead light. As he typically does with his black models, the nude flesh is up against a paragon of whiteness in the toy duck. Her rich skin tones bounce back the synthetic colors that surround her.

The extreme objectification of the human figure is accentuated in the paintings of the last 20 years by the increasing animation, by way of contrast, of his still life motifs. So many of his toys are animal characters, and even his furniture can have animal life. “Model with Horn Chair” (1990) pushes the organic-inert dichotomy to an almost symbolic extreme: The baroque furniture writhes with life while the nude, forced tortuously to negotiate a space for herself amidst these absurd protrusions, seems skewered by the horns. His flesh, with heavily defined ribs and muscle, has a statue-like stillness, while the sinewy, glistening horns seem to perspire.

What is less than lively in Mr. Pearlstein’s art is his paint surface, which is deadpan to the point of necrophilia. It is ironic that an artist whose modus operandi is to paint from life, with models posed in an actual space in real time, should produce distilled images that are effectively out of time and space. By rendering what he sees at the expense of what he experiences he drastically compresses space, eschewing any realist tricks for suggesting depth and recession to insist, instead, on the stark reality of the canvas as a film of vision. Architecture is akin to the cropped nudes as Mr. Pearlstein almost never gives a room its corners, rendering surroundings as flat ground rather than as volume. Similarly, the breathing flesh, quivering plastic blimps, and mechanical toys, which must present themselves to the artist in his studio with actual or implied movement, are frozen in paint. A painterly, impressionistic touch would find a metaphorical equivalent of the pulsating signs of life that Mr. Pearlstein denies. His objects — animate or otherwise — are divorced from lived experience. Despite his fanatical perceptualism, his art is anti-empirical — essentially abstract.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 3, 2008 under the heading “Philip Pearlstein, Objectifying the Nude”

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AXA Gallery, until August 14, 2006
787 Seventh Ave at 51st Street, New York, 212 554 4818

Ellsworth Kelly, Daffodil, 1979-80

Think of a typical Ellsworth Kelly, of the kind of work that makes him probably the best known living abstract artist, and what comes to mind is a sail-like shaped canvas, perhaps, or a freestanding aluminum form, in a strident, singular, retina-saturating color.  Or, going back to his classic, hard-edge geometric abstractions of the 1950s and ‘60s, severe rectangles, again in no-nonsense chromatic solids.  You could say he is an echt minimalist: a stylish, diffident advocate of the less is more aesthetic.

Repair to the AXA Gallery at the midtown AXA-Equitable Building, and you might have a change of heart: The hardnosed abstractionist has a soft underbelly in the form of forty years of exquisite nature studies.  The exhibition is organized by the Grand Rapids Art Museum, who possess a definitive collection of all his plant lithographs from his “Suite of Plant Lithographs” (1964-66) up through half a dozen prints from 2004.  In it, Mr. Kelly emerges as the Redouté of High Modernism, leaving no leaf unturned, covering cyclamens to camelias, ailanthus to algae, melons to magnolias, sunflowers to string beans.

There are seventy two prints in the show, and collectively they make for a powerful statement.  There is actually remarkably little formal development over his career of as plant portraitist—or, to make the same point positively, he achieved formal maturity in this idiom from the outset.  The prints are mostly big, at around two by three feet, with the depicted plant, leaf or fruit centered on the off-white page and rendered with tight economy strictly in outline.

Mr. Kelly’s engagement with flora dates back to the outset of his career.  In 1949, while living in Paris, he drew seaweeds and algae from life, influenced in his choice of subject by his School of Paris mentors, Matisse and Arp, (he met the latter.)  It is a drawback of the exhibition not to include some of these earlier drawings, even in the catalogue, to show the more varied notation of these detailed, yet still streamlined sketches.  By the early 1950s, experimentation with increasingly schematic line, cutout, collage led Mr. Kelly towards a severe, reductive abstraction, first of grid systems, then of geometric forms.  It was only in the mid-1960s, back in France, that he was ready to readmit representation as an aspect of his work in the form of printmaking.

When you get used to the fact that Mr. Kelly is drawing plants from life, then actually what emerges is a feeling of business as usual: in many ways, these drawings are of a piece with his geometric abstraction.  The look is singular, uncompromising, confident, stylish, and personal.  The tone is even, consistent, and not despite but because of its severity, sumptuously absorbing.  The cream walls and blond frames, and the expanses of paper supporting marks of similar quality, induce a sense of serenity and order.  With not a hint of green in sight, you are in the world’s coollest hothouse.

Ellsworth Kelly, Lemon Branch (Branche de citron), 1965-66

The fact that he sticks to outline and denies himself any form of modeling suggests a degree of abstraction even in observational drawing.  His concern is with the essence of each plant he is working on, rather than the given living thing that engages his vision in a particular time and place. In this sense, the prints are true to their botanical forebears in their high-minded typology.  The lack of color and the insistence on line gives a scientific gravitas to the enterprise—like black and white photography—even though, in fact, the sleekness denies information—a reminder that less is only more aesthetically.

Mr. Kelly treats his leaves and plants in isolation from their trees but as if still hanging to them—again, revealing an aeshetic sensibility that accords with a scientific approach.  This is even the case with “Oranges,” from the 1964-66 suite of 28 images, the only lithograph that depicts fruits without surrounding foliage: Viewed in their fullness from below, only a couple of nipples ensure that they are read as oranges at all.  Other fruits, like “Grapefruit,” “Tangerine,” and “Lemon” in the same portfolio, come with their stalk and a few leaves to ensure a credible sense of attachment.  While the images are insistently flat, there is enough of a sense of roundness, depth and overlap in the forms to suggest credible volume.

Mr. Kelly’s line quality nestles, throughout this body of work, in a distinctive middle-ground that’s at once assured and tentative.  There is a strong sense of slow, deliberate observation—these are not dashed off, bravura lines, nor stylised approximations.  There is some variety of pressure in his lines, but an overall consistency and evenness. Sometimes there is tension or awkwardness in the curves and joins, but there is no evidence of pentimenti, or rubbing out or going over.  It is as if he is cautious about what he puts down, but fearless in then standing by it.

In “Pear III” from the same portfolio, for instance, the fruit is rendered in a single, continuous line that fluctuates in a way that reads, very credibly, as the organic shape of the fruit.  The leaves have stray lines that don’t quite meet, but that serves to suggest their quivering, flickering quality, just as the crude strength of lines depicting the branches conveys their delicacy and resilience.

These prints can suggest both abstraction and naturalism.  The scale ensures that you engage with the images on the maker’s terms: Too big to turn comfortably by hand in a portfolio, you must grant them the dignity of a wall.  Unlike botonical studies from Leonardo to Ruskin that notate on a reduced scale, these actually blow up their subject beyond life-size.  This might seem to place them at the level of the decorative and the schematic, but it also means you sense the originating hand, arm, whole body of the artist.  They are not “of” nature but “in” nature, in the sense of the distinction drawn by Jackson Pollock.

Mr. Kelly’s modus operandi, likewise, can come across as direct or indirect. Original sketches are made in situ in gardens or parks.  These are then copied in the studio, on specially treated papers which are then transferred in the print shop to the lithographic plate so that the printed impression inverts back again to the original drawing orientation.  Lithography is the printmaking medium truest to the instrinsic quality of the original line, the crumbliness of the crayon.  At every level, in other words, Mr. Kelly places himself at a remove – from direct observation, from the give and take of printmaking experimentation – in order, ironically, to arrive at freshness and a sense of truth.

The Plant Lithographs are among several activities that underscore Mr. Kelly’s attachment to the observed world.  He has made collages in which his characteristic color shapes are applied as torn fragments of paper to views of New York or reproductions of favorite works of art, a means by which to accentuate through obliteration.  He draws self-portraits.  And he photographs the man made environment—shadows on steps, a curved horizon line in a snowy field, a hangar doorway, a manhole—finding readymade Kelly-like shapes and forms as a vindication of his own formal vocabularly.  These engagements with nature and observation inevitably force a rethink of the remoteness and artifice of his abstraction.

In contrast to the 1960s Minimalists whom he formally anticipated, he is really a much gentler spirit, an old fashioned abstractionist whose forms—however severe looking—are rooted in nature.  His plant lithographs, like his postcard collages and photographs, reveal a shape sensualist who looks at the world.  But just as surely, his naturalism has the sharp, cool cerebralness of a master of abstraction.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 8, 2006

June 25 to November 20, 2006
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46 Avenue, Queens, 718-784-2084

Ron Gorchov, Ulysses 1979 oil on Linen, 60 x 59 x 14 inches Collection of Julian Schnabel, Courtesy PS1/MoMA

Ron Gorchov can lay claim to a rare achievement: He has created a distinctive form without becoming formulaic. Eleven of the 27 works in his show on the top floor of P.S.1 are painted on a similarly shaped, immediately recognizable idiosyncratic support, and within a close-knit family of motifs. The remainder are smaller canvases painted with vertical stripes.  Yet far from coming across as repetitive, the show is charged and sprightly.

“Double Trouble” brings together works from the 1970s and from the last five years in Mr. Gorchov’s trademark idiom: oil paint on linen, crudely stapled to a curved wooden stretcher. Organised by P.S.1’s founder and director, Alanna Heiss, the show is something of a homecoming for Mr. Gorchov: He was included in the museum’s inaugural 1976 exhibition, “Rooms,” when Ms. Heiss brought her Institute of Art and Urban Resources to the disused Queens public school building that is now a MoMA affiliate. The artist also had a solo show there in 1979.

“Double Trouble” is a title that, like Mr. Gorchov’s work, operates from different angles. On one level, his work operates both on sculptural and painterly terms, rather like Elizabeth Murray’s expressively shaped supports. More specifically, the Gorchov shape, which has been compared variously to a saddle, a mask, and a shield, curves in such a way as to be both concave and convex, as it is bent twice, top to bottom and side to side, rather like the plywood seat of an Eames chair. And his pared-down vocabulary is very fond of forms in pairs — without his quite being a dualist. In this context, double trouble is an addiction that an aesthete is only too proud to admit to, like girl trouble.

Mr. Gorchov had been off the scene for a long time — the show leapfrogs the 1980s and ’90s — when was brought back to art-world attention last year with a show organized in a temporary downtown space by the young impresario Vito Schnabel. His main room at P.S.1, like the office space Mr. Schnabel found for him, has a rugged, no-nonsense feel — a soaring ceiling and a décor lacking in finesse  —that is theatrically appropriate to the heraldic, almost martial quality of the work. What with the armor-like shape of his canvases, you are put in mind of the great hall of a medieval castle.

Mr. Gorchov’s paint handling is robust but unfussy. His typical work places simple shapes of one color against a ground of another. These can be mirror image, geometric shapes, like the double pair of relatively neat yellow ovals against a sloppy, expressive green ground in the 9-foot-tall “5th One” (2006); or discrete, irregular shapes like the pair of contrastive green forms in “Palais Jamais (Who’s Afraid of Purple and Green)” (2005), which seem to slip toward the sloping edges of their support. Despite their distinctiveness, the shapes in “Palais Jamais” resist categorization as either organic or hieroglyphic.  In other works, like “Veronique” and “Mariana’s Room” (both 2006) amoeba-forms recalling Arp have a fluid sense of evolving growth.

Other motifs have figural connations. “Amphora” (1975) resembles a pair of bowed legs. “Ausonian” (2006) suggests footprints, and “Hazard” (2005) hints at handprints.

Sometimes the shapes have a hard, slow, sculptural sense, like the flint or menhir-like pair in “Rejiv” (2005), where nervous, drawn pentimenti increase the sense of forms carved out of the pictorial ground. Other times, as in “Gigue” (2000) there is a gestural sensibility — forms whose calligraphic speed suggest fluency and immediacy.

These contrasts of form language, speed, and depictive phenomena keep the show lively, diverse, and energized. Far from being specific to one mood or message, Mr. Gorchov’s idiom turns out to have the flexibility of a sonnet, conveying a whole range of emotions and values.

2012 work in Cheim & Read exhibition

“Joel Shapiro: Recent Sculpture”
PaceWildenstein until July 31
534 West 25th Street
212-929-7000

“20th-Century Sculpture”
Acquavella Galleries until May 22
18 East 79 Street, at Madison,
212-734-6300

Someday it will have to be explained why the most vaunted exponents of modernism in the 1960s spent their senior years chasing a romantic muse. Jules Olitski, Anthony Caro, and Helen Frankenthaler have all noticeably gone this route.

Ms. Frankenthaler, whose show of 10 new paintings opened last week at Knoedler & Company, began her career at the cutting edge of abstraction. She was a crucial transitional figure between Jackson Pollock and the “post-painterly” generation. Just as Caro and Olitski, who were famous for cool, sparse abstraction, traded their hallmark styles, respectively, for expressive figures and sublime landscapes, so Frankenthaler, in her new work, succumbs to an urge to depict.

Helen Frankenthaler, Yoruba, 2002 acrylic on paper, 40½ x 60½ inches courtesy Knoedler & Company

These paintings, on paper and canvas, are sumptuous, absorbing, and masterful, but you have to pinch yourself to remember that she was once an artist pushing the boundaries of the language of painting. If these pictures were a tenth of their size and admitted fractionally more narrative incident they could be taken for the work of a Victorian. Her “Yoruba” could sit besides a William Trost Richards of the 1870s.

Ms. Frankenthaler actually came out of landscape. Her poured and stained gestural paintings of the mid- to late-1950s – the seminal “Mountain and Sea,” for instance – often took landscape as their starting point. But now the references to nature are literal and overt, with horizons and promontories. “Bacchus” (2002) is almost a Caspar David Friedrich redone in a funkier palette. What a palette, mind you: The purples of this moody nocturne glow and brood simultaneously. She achieves extraordinary effects of depth and airiness through audacious layering of her acrylic paint.

It is somehow touching that this veteran abstractionist should reverse historic due process, turning “inscapes” back into landscapes. By so doing she reconnects with Old Master painting, and emphatically disconnects with minimalism. But it is telling that the most beautiful painting in the show, “Warming Trend,” is also the least legible (more Turner than Whistler). The painting fluctuates at different distances from blues and violets to turquoise, purple, and mauve. In more than one sense, it is phenonemal.

***

Joel Shapiro, Untitled, 2002 wood, 10-1/12 x 64¾ x 25 inches courtesy PaceWildenstein

In many ways an old-fashioned constructivist, Joel Shapiro’s career reveals a sly ability to run with Modernist hares while hunting with Minimalist hounds. By adopting motifs like little houses, chairs, and stick figures, he tweaked life back into Minimalism’s ponderous forms. Mr. Shapiro is not Minimal art “lite” as such, but nonetheless he animated an austere movement with welcome humor.

Scale has always been a lively element in his work, a means to startle, as well as to address representation. Diminutive has more typically been his thing, with Monopoly-board houses and dollshouse chairs. Now, in a show of five new sculptures, Lilliput has conceded to Gargantua. The 21-foot ceiling of PaceWildenstein’s Chelsea gallery struggles to contain the largest piece. As if to add insult to injury, the sculpture’s components – bronze-cast wooden beams – rhyme inadvertently with the building’s exposed I-beams.

The pieces that work best are the ones that are the least figural. And yet, ironically, “working” means conveying bodily movement and animation. This is sculpture that has internalized a sense of the body without needing to depict the body. The largest sculpture, a bronze from 2001-03, is actually not the strongest. Most of it reads literally as a stick figure, throwing back its torso and kicking out a leg, but it has a huge protuberance that doesn’t reconcile to a figural interpretation. Suspiciouslynecessaryfrom a structural perspective, its comes across like the absurd crutches of a Dalí figure.

Far more sensual and satisfying is a nearby piece in wood and metal from 2002-03. Individual components can’t be reduced to this limb or that, but there is an exuberant downward spring- as in a fencer’s thrust or a certain kind of jive. The shiny metal hinges, and a flamboyant diversity of grains and stains in the cool wood ensure that the surface of the piece keeps pace with the liveliness of its structure.

This is an important exhibition, for Mr. Shapiro and for sculpture. Not only are there big sculptures but a big conception of what sculpture can be.

***

And just what conceptions there have been is recalled in a stupendous display of 20th-century sculpture at Acquavella. On two floors of his princely Upper Eastside premises, William Acquavella has brought together nearly 40 pieces, many borrowed from private collectors. Matisse is royally represented. There is a rare chance to study the five progressively (or, equally, “regressively”) pared-down portraits of “Jeanette” from 1910-13, which start with a relatively benign, convincingly modelled head and culminate in a dynamic representation where the forehead and nose virtually stand out as an autonomous form.

These inevitably draw comparison with the extraordinary 1931 “Head of a Woman” by Picasso (even here, there is a mini Matisse-Picasso dialogue) where the hair and nose form themselves into a coiling limp phallus. The later sculptures downstairs feel somewhat cramped and rushed through, but upstairs there is a joyous technicolor contest between Miró and Calder, and an oxymoronic lead “Air” by Maillol.

This article first appeared in The Sun, May 15, 2003.