The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

By HENRY ALLEN

On rainy days when I was a kid, I'd lie on the living-room floor and page very slowly through a book called "Modern American Painting."

To a 9-year-old mind uncluttered by art appreciation courses, the paintings weren't good or bad, this school or that; they were uncontrollably spooky, sexy, alluring, mysterious and beautiful.

Peter Anger/The State Historical Society of Missouri

Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry at Benton's home in 1938.

Some I couldn't bear to look at, they made me feel so creepy. (Paul Cadmus's "Coney Island," 1934, with its malignant vulgarity.) Some I could hardly stop looking at, they were so beautiful. (Thomas Eakins's "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull," 1871, with its early-autumn perfection.)

And then there were the five paintings by Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), who is the subject now of an intense biography by Justin Wolff, 72 years after my rainy-day book came out.

"Thomas Hart Benton: A Life" tells the story of the painter's rise and fall as a hero of American art. The fall had already started when I began my studies on the living-room floor, but I didn't know that. Benton had been overtaken by changing times, by the new Abstract Expressionism of his former pupil Jackson Pollock and by public distaste for his own loud rancor toward museums, Modernism, Europe, curators, capitalism, Marxism, homosexuals, on and on.

I knew none of this. All I saw were Benton's paintings, with their quality of being both sinister and beautiful—all those snaky curves and cartoony exaggerations, the locomotives leaning forward like the little engine that could, cruel and plaintive hillbillies, plants growing out of the chthonic earth around the tangible and endangered flesh of "Persephone" (1939). Benton's pictures hit me at a place that language could not explain.

Mr. Wolff, a professor at the University of Maine, doesn't try to explain. He chooses instead to deploy his clear and easy prose in recounting political and aesthetic history.

Along the way, he describes the struggles between those who looked to Europe for aesthetic guidance (Alfred Stieglitz, Stuart Davis, Stanton MacDonald-Wright) and those who looked for it in the American heart (Benton, George Bellows, John Steuart Curry); those who evoked reality (regionalists, American-scene painters, social realists) and those who questioned it (cubists, surrealists, expressionists).

Benton would lose this struggle to the younger artists and critics, but before then he was a national hero, the old master of the Big New Thing, which was the nationalist impulse that also inspired Carl Sandburg's big-shoulders poetry, Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" and Thornton Wilder's "Our Town."

It's hard to believe, but my old book from 1940 began: "America today is developing a School of Painting which promises to be the most important movement in the world of art since the days of the Italian Renaissance." Time magazine had put Benton's self-portrait on its cover in 1934. He'd published his autobiography in 1937. His work was both praised and reviled with passions that no art arouses now, except a Super Bowl halftime show.

Despite his vigorous reading and colorful writing, Benton was no finely sliced aesthete. Instead, he was an angry, hard-drinking, harmonica-playing, well-read little backwoods aristocrat from a small town in southwestern Missouri, a man given to the sad pugnaciousness called a little-man complex. He was called "virile" back when that was a compliment.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY/Vaga

Benton's painting 'Achelous and Hercules' (1947).

Benton was contradictory. He celebrated the American spirit while being a Marxist. He was an American nationalist accused of defaming America by showing its ugliness along with its beauty. He was a good enough politician to get hired to paint historical murals in public buildings. He was fired from his job at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1941 after saying that the typical museum was "run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait."

With the end of both the Depression and World War II, Benton's we-the-people factuality lost its eminence. Only a few practitioners would hold on to their prestige—Edward Hopper with his beautiful alienation, Grant Wood on the strength of one painting among many fine ones, "American Gothic." The paintings that stood for America in the Cold War world were Abstract Expressionist—Pollock's drips and de Kooning's slashes, the intellectualized art of Rothko and Kline. Benton should have been forgotten as a failed prophet, proof that there's nothing more old-fashioned than yesterday's tomorrow.

Yet he has kept his untidy niche in the rainy-day American mind.

Long after his death at 85 in 1975, critics still go after him, but they don't seem to attack him as much as they defend themselves against him: Robert Hughes once called Benton "flat-out, lapel-grabbing vulgar, incapable of touching a pictorial sensation without pumping and tarting it up to the point where the eye wants to cry uncle." But Mr. Wolff is part of a revisionist movement that concedes dignity to his work.

The biographer begins his book with a description of Benton and his Italian wife, Rita, on Martha's Vineyard in the early 1920s, living without plumbing or electricity amid farmers, fishermen and Indians, soaking up the authenticity that before Benton died had become a brand sold to rich summer people. It was here that he found his groove, after World War I service in the Navy, which, he said, "tore me away from . . . my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns."

What he meant by "drivelings" was years of failure with various isms and abstractions in Paris and New York. He now began painting the serpentine ecstasies of a real world writhing with the vigor of pagan animism, an animism that would also be employed in the winking trees and frowning skies of Walt Disney—another artist from the Show-Me state.

Thomas Hart Benton: A Life

By Justin Wolff

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages, $40

Born in Neosho, Mo., Benton was the son of a red-bearded, thick-necked egotist—a lawyer, Confederate veteran and Democratic congressman who made the mistake of marrying a resentful snob from Texas. Tom was named for his violent great-uncle, Sen. Thomas Hart Benton (he once shot Andrew Jackson and he killed a man in a duel). His mother hated his father, and his father hated Tom's incessant drawing. When he was 7, his father began serving four terms as a congressman in Washington, where his mother ascended the social ladder.

Tom was a bad student. He escaped to Joplin, Mo., at 16 to draw for a newspaper before his father sent him to military school, which he fled after football season. He studied art in Chicago, then went to Paris, "fantasizing about Whistler, about genius and about buying a black walking stick," according to Mr. Wolff. He had the air of a genius and the walking stick but not much work to show for them. He returned to New York. He taught, he worked as a longshoreman, painted ceramics and argued politics.

Mr. Wolff chooses to describe Benton's great years, the 1920s and 1930s, by summing up the aesthetic and political battles that surrounded him. There were many sides in these battles, but none of the participants questioned the idea that they were building the ultimate future, the teleological trope of thinkers from Marx to Mussolini to the postwar critic Clement Greenberg. They were all part of a land rush on the American psyche.

By the late 1940s, Benton had lost the claim he'd staked. The new media hero was Pollock, who had been Benton's student and sometime ward since 1930. Benton praised Pollock's abstractions, and the two often exchanged wisecracks. In 1949, 15 years after Benton was on the cover of Time, Pollock was on the cover of Life. Pollock, with his mental problems and alcoholism, would be telephoning Benton until he died at 44 in a car crash.

Benton would keep travelling the western United States, studying the common folk and the landscape. But even as a realist, he was overtaken by the morbid Andrew Wyeth. He kept on selling paintings, encouraged the musical career of his son, T.P., and raised his second child, a daughter named Jessie. He let shrewd Rita manage his career. He painted a mural for the Truman Library and a portrait of Truman, his match in Missouri testiness.

Mr. Wolff fills in the life of Thomas Hart Benton, but his insights don't quite explain the mysterious fascination Benton provoked. He concludes: "We want to pin him down precisely because we cannot."

If only Mr. Wolff could be 9, lying on the floor on a rainy day, looking at the beauty, vulgarity, dark passions and bright fields of "Persephone." Open your eyes, ignore cultivated tastes, and it explains itself.

Mr. Allen, a former writer and editor for the Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 10, 2012, on page C9 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: America in All Its Ugly Beauty.

Still, it remains the New York art fair whose edge most deserves to be called cutting, the one where you stand to learn the most about promising new art, albeit of a rather attenuated, hermetic sort. With around 40 participants, it is also the most pleasantly manageable of all the city fairs. It is arrayed, as before, on an open plan, with little in the way of formal booths or even aisles, on the three upper floors of a building once owned by the Dia Center for the Arts on West 22nd Street. The airy, white-cube architecture of the interior, so redolent of artistic seriousness, continues to be a boon. I can never quite decide if the Independent is intimate or just clubby, but in this it is probably an apt reflection of the art world: basically, it is both.

As usual, nearly two-thirds of the participating galleries are from elsewhere and — also as usual — they are responsible for the bulk of the new information. Over all, the artists tend to be young and fairly obscure.

An exception, at the Paris gallery GB Agency, is the American Conceptual artist Mac Adams, now nearly 70. His “Blackmail,” a noirish 1976 installation of a violently disturbed dinner for three, suggests a very physical argument, if not an actual crime. Clues are abundant; not for nothing was Mr. Adams’s brand of Conceptualism called Story Art or seen as a precursor to Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills.” Another exception to the general youthfulness, at Susanne Zander, are the tenderly lascivious drawings of scantily clad women by Miroslav Tichy (1926-2011), the Czech outsider artist known for surreptitiously photographing his subjects, using homemade cameras.

Among the new participants, the Third Line, a gallery from Dubai, is introducing the work of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, an 87-year-old Iranian artist whose handsome glass and mirror mosaics are grounded in Islamic interpretations of numbers and geometry. Another newcomer is Labor, a gallery from Mexico City that is featuring Pedro Reyes’s “Surplus Reality,” a double narrative that presents, in storyboardlike form, a photo-novella about the struggle for land reform in Brazil and also recounts the censoring of that work when it was displayed there.

If this year’s Independent has a prevailing look, it centers on stylishly abject variations on Post-Minimalist abstraction, played out in lots of small, often appealing, if rather mute, sculptures and several spare installations that are frequently by women largely unknown and unshown in New York.

On the third floor, at Sprüth Magers, Thea Djordjadze has assembled a meditation on blue in the form of a huge piece of smooth synthetic carpet that climbs from floor to wall and is flanked by several scrappy sculptures, including Plexiglas volumes that echo the hue in atmospheric terms. At Meyer Riegger, a young Czech artist, Eva Kotatkova, takes a darker turn, painting a corner black and festooning it with shelves displaying altered vintage books, cutout collages and paper sculptures.

This result, titled “Re-education Machine,” conjures a compartmentalized, overanalyzed, possibly totalitarian environment where young minds are assiduously molded. Ms. Kotatkova joins a tradition of deft image recycling that begins with Hannah Höch and continues to the Polish artist Goshka Macuga. At Freymond-Guth, Tanja Roscic, also Czech, commands a wall with a diamond grid that frames contrasting colors and textures and several very robust collages.

At Andrew Kreps, a raftlike hanging sculpture by Andrea Bowers draws the eye; it is colorful, almost decorative, so it takes a minute, and a look at the label, to realize that it is a functioning tree-sitting apparatus, outfitted with buckets, bottles and a hammock and ready to be hoisted up an endangered redwood.

Nearby at Jack Hanley, the DIY spirit is echoed in “Archipelago (Seq 14),” a large sculpture by a young artist named Marie Lorenz, who is known for building small boats that she uses to explore New York Harbor. Here she combines the decaying hull of a boat she found with a fresh white Fiberglas cast of it. Placed upright, they suggest an improvised shelter and also a monument (maybe to Bruce Nauman).

The Independent runs through Sunday at 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; independentnewyork.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 9, 2012

 

An earlier version of this review misspelled the surname of Thea Djordjadze.

 

By OLIVIA WANG

Beijing

Chatting over tea in his penthouse studio here, the artist Cai Xiaosong looks like a hipster, with rectangular bamboo-framed glasses and a black-and-white polka-dot scarf. One would not expect that the charismatic 47-year-old finds inspiration in his favorite Song dynasty (960-1279) painters. Yet "they tell me what they think of my paintings, and I also tell them what I think of theirs," Mr. Cai says. He began as a traditional landscape artist, but now focuses on portraits of rocks. To him, rocks are the essence of the Chinese landscape.

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Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In the foreground, the scholars' rock 'The Honorable Old Man'; in the background, 'Ten Differentiated Views of the Honorable Old Man' by Liu Dan.

He is not alone. In the Chinese art world today, many artists are taking Chinese antiquity as their inspiration and reinterpreting it. And one focus of their attention is Chinese scholars' rocks: complex and often bizarre natural formations, collected and admired for more than a thousand years.

Ranked among the world's earliest abstract sculptures, scholars' rocks are also collected in the West. In London last autumn, Damien Hirst's private trove served as the basis for the inaugural exhibition of White Cube's Bermondsey gallery. A show encapsulating the "scholar's spirit" through scholars' rocks will open at the Musée Guimet in Paris this spring.

During the Song dynasty, rocks were considered among the most esteemed items of the emperors and leading painters of the day. First, huge specimens were gathered for display in gardens; later, smaller ones made up home or studio collections. They brought the natural world inside, providing "imaginary travel" to magical peaks and cave paradises. The most prominent petrophile was the Northern Song emperor Huizong, whose passion for collecting rocks from all over China for his gardens drained the Empire of its resources. In that same period, the painter Mi Fu is said to have been so taken by the power and beauty of a rock that he bowed to it.

By the 17th century, artists used portraits of rocks as vehicles for self-expression, through nuances of brushwork and composition. Today, artists of varied backgrounds and approaches have rediscovered this aesthetic and are gaining wider international recognition.

Mr. Cai writes in his personal statement that he is "tracing tradition with fresh eyes." An aficionado of such European Old Masters as Rembrandt and Michelangelo, he likens painting rocks to the complexities of portraiture in Western classical painting. His use of brush and ink captures the crevices and contours of the rock's surface, heightening a sense of vertigo in the viewer. He places some of his rock portraits between two panels of glass that are then mounted on a plinth, creating a remarkable illusory effect. The rocks appear fragile and transparent, yet command an arresting presence. It's no wonder that his works shone at the 2011 Venice Biennale and are set to be exhibited in Miami and New York this spring.

With his long white beard and traditional robe, the 67-year-old Luo Jianwu could be mistaken for an eccentric 17th-century painter. First inspired by the pine trees of Central Park when he lived for more than a decade in New York, Mr. Luo is known for his dramatic depictions of unique trees, gnarled tree roots and rocks. He moved back to Beijing a few years ago so he could behold the mountains of China, seeking inspiration from nature. Mr. Luo calls rocks "the bones of mountains," because they are the foundation of Chinese landscape paintings.

At his studio-cum-flat, which was being redecorated on the advice of his feng shui master, Mr. Luo was asked which aspects draw him to rocks. "It is like looking at a beautiful woman," he replies—you don't know what draws you in, but something does. His work reflects a modern interpretation that transports the viewer to a different realm. Mr. Luo's "Rock Like a Cloud," shown recently at Kaikodo Gallery in New York, stands nearly 10 feet tall and shows a rock shrouded in mist, its amorphous form ethereal and devoid of weight.

The works of Liu Dan, a modern-day doyen of rock and landscape paintings, are in private and museum collections world-wide. The Musée Guimet and the British Museum will be exhibiting his work this spring. The 58-year-old Mr. Liu, with his long hair tied in a neat ponytail, is an intellectual as well-versed in the Chinese classics as the Western Old Masters. In his loft apartment, he shows me the exquisite objects he has collected over the past 20 years, which range from Indian sculpture to imperial paintings.

Mr. Liu has often described rocks as the stem cells of landscape painting. To him, rocks also "serve as a key to liberate the mind and heighten the imagination to create." For his "Ten Differentiated Views of the Honorable Old Man" at the "Fresh Ink" show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, last year, he painted portraits of a prized Ming period rock in the museum's collection from nine different angles, which hung on a curved wall that wrapped around the rock in a semicircle. The 10th view was a nearly 30-foot-long landscape scroll painting inspired by his interpretation of the rock.

When asked where he has found inspiration, Mr. Liu says, "I look into a candle light, but instead of the flame, I am observing the phenomenon of light and its many patterns and layers caused by the dancing flame. That's the moment I realize I have found what I was looking for." Perhaps that is how he can create the complexities and richness of his paintings that are far beyond the imagination of the viewer.

With Mr. Liu as his teacher and mentor, Tai Xiangzhou is reinterpreting traditional Chinese aesthetics in his own way. The 43-year-old Mr. Tai is an erudite scholar with a serious interest in science and astronomy, subjects that serve as inspiration for his paintings. He favors the works of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, scientists he likens to Confucius and Laozi. His favorite piece in his collection is an iron meteorite that he bought recently at a SoHo gallery in New York. He says he was immediately taken in by the object's shape and resemblance to a scholar's rock, but also by its unique history and the natural processes involved in its creation. Mr. Tai chose to paint this piece in his work "No. 4 of Big Dipper," which is accompanied by a 2,000-year-old Chinese text on astronomy. He made his U.S. debut last spring at the Chinese Porcelain Company in New York, and will have his first solo show there March 16-24. For 2013, he is preparing an exhibition featuring paintings of about 20 favorite rocks that he has encountered in China.

These artists have revived the spirit of the rock while, as Mr. Liu puts it, "pursuing human artistic tradition, not traditional art." And with the younger generation of artists increasingly following their lead, we can expect more formidable artworks to come. As the 30-year-old oil painter Yang Xun summarizes, when asked why he looks to rocks for inspiration, "rocks have no starting point and no ending—they are timeless."

Ms. Wang is a postgraduate student of modern Chinese art at Oxford University.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 8, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Dawn of a Rock Renaissance.

By PETER PLAGENS

New Haven, Conn.

'The Theory of Catastrophe" (2004)—a big overhead view of a freeway pileup painted by Malcolm Morley in a deliberately offhand, close-enough-for-government-work version of Photo Realism—could well be painting's riposte to the reason the photographer Garry Winogrand gave for photographing something: to see what it would look like photographed. Mr. Morley wanted to see what such a chaotic scene would look like painted. Of course, the obvious objection to this comparison is photography's supposed machine-made "objectivity"—even in this digital age of Photoshop. Mr. Morley, though, is himself something of a painting machine. That's a compliment, meant in the same way you might call Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer tennis "machines."

Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

'The Theory of Catastrophe' (2004).

Mr. Morley was born in 1931 in London. His family's house was blown up by a German bomb during the Blitz; homeless for a time, he led a rough-and-tumble youth. Serving a three-year sentence in the Dickensian-sounding Wormwood Scrubs prison for breaking and entering, the young Mr. Morley read "Lust for Life," the novel about Vincent van Gogh and, he later told a critic, he figured that being an artist was something he could do. After attending art school in London, he moved to New York in the late 1950s. There he met Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and was set on a course combining Warhol's wan acceptance of practically any subject that passed in front of his face as suitable for painting with Lichtenstein's surgical irony toward the paradox of the painted image—is it just a bunch of borrowed colored shapes, or is anything meaningful fully there?

For more than half a century, Mr. Morley has attacked that paradox by painting and painting and painting. He's taken his brushes and palette on a wild ride from dreary English postwar realism ("Richmond Hill Below the Wick," 1954) to hard-core Photo Realism (the ocean liner "Cristoforo Colombo," 1965), varieties of neo-expressionism ("Camels and Goats," 1980), cliché-embracing pulp-illustration pictures of World War II fighter planes ("Beautiful Explosion," 2010) and, most recently, veritable installation art (an exterior segment of a pub called "The Spitfire," 2012). All of this and more is engagingly crammed into the modestly proportioned art gallery of the Yale School of Art, a little minimalist building that's usually used for graduate-thesis exhibitions. "Malcolm Morley in a Nutshell" was curated by Robert Storr, the school's director, and it's an art education all by itself.

An awful lot of expertly improvisational painting moves—oddball compositions, deft brush strokes, snappy colors, risky gimmicks such as miniature 3-D barrels hanging by wires in "Depth Mine with Sharks" (2011)—are in action at a breakneck pace. While a few artists might be better at paint-handling than Mr. Morley, he does keep his colors separate and crisp, and he can make you shiver at the dark, cold wetness of Atlantic Ocean water. A certain visual garrulousness is part of his charm.

Malcolm Morley In a Nutshell: The Fine Art of Painting 1954-2012

Edgewood Avenue Gallery, Yale University School of Art

Through March 31

But he isn't perfect—and he probably wouldn't want to be. A couple of titles ("Aero-naughty-cal Manuever" from 2009, for instance) are too cute. A painting called "Split Level" (2011) is an expedient top-and-bottom reprise of two previous paintings, and one of the pub installations, "Biggles" (2011), is too sentimental for real translation into a work of art, yet too garish to convey genuine affection. "Rat Tat Tat" (2001), a 17-foot-wide triptych depicting cardboard punch-out models of World War I aircraft—and the least successful work in the show—is installed directly above the gallery entrance, as if to encourage you to miss it.

In the end, though, Mr. Morley is great at representation, not just verisimilitude. He paints whatever wows him at the moment, and manages most times to find the superficial essence (a deliberate oxymoron here) of his enthusiastically varied subjects. Mr. Morley's emphasis on finding his artistic inspiration outside of himself is what keeps his art from succumbing—as so much contemporary work does these days—to overintellectualizing and bottomless self-reference. "The idea," Mr. Morley has said, "is to have no idea. Get lost. Get lost in the landscape." By landscape, he means the hurly-burly of the world at large—ships, airplanes, naval battles, exotic animals, pubs and the occasional catastrophe. The exhibition is a kind of tribute to the good, old-fashioned, lusty painter's life, and—although Mr. Morley is in his ninth decade—an artistic spirit that's still as young as they come.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 8, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Don't Stop, Just Paint.

The Tate Modern in London announced on Monday that it had purchased one of Ai Weiwei’s famous installations of life-size, hand-painted porcelain “Sunflower Seeds.” It bought 8 million of the 100 million seeds that were on view in a giant installation at the museum a year and a half ago. The mini-version was bought directly from the artist, officials at the Tate said, and the remaining 92 million seeds have been returned to Mr. Ai.

When “Sunflower Seeds” was originally installed in the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall, the museum encouraged visitors to touch and even walk on the piece. But it reversed course days later after officials found that the movement of the crowds released hazardous dust. It was also determined that there were traces of lead in the paint.

The new acquisition may be less than one-tenth the size of the original, but it is still a lot bigger than a sunflower piece by Mr. Ai that Sotheby’s sold in London last year, one of an edition of 10 works each composed of 100,000 seeds. That version was bought by an unidentified telephone bidder for $559,394, or about $5.60 a seed. The Tate would not say what it had paid for its eight million seeds, but did say that it managed the purchase with help from the Tate International Council, the Art Fund and the collectors Stephen and Yana Peel.

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

New York

Has any American artist ever enjoyed a career as streamlined as Cindy Sherman's? Since taking off in this city at the Times Square show in 1980, the photographer-cum-performer from Long Island via Buffalo has ascended on a steady ride to the top of the art world, seemingly without effort.

Cindy Sherman

The Museum of Modern Art

Through June 11

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Museum of Modern Art

'Untitled Film Still #21' (1978).

So esteemed by institutions that the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is her third (the Whitney Museum honored her first, in 1987, when she was only 33), she long ago achieved pop status with baby boomers. Name-dropped in lyrics by Chicks on Speed and on HBO's "Six Feet Under," she is overdue for a guest spot on "The Simpsons."

To be acclaimed without inspiring resentment from the art press or her fellow artists is little short of miraculous. No one minds that for 35 years she has been making the same kind of photograph: self-portraits that depend on a Lon Chaney-like repertoire of disguises to address questions about social reality and the vulnerabilities of the female body. The spectrum of characters she has created with this simple formula, everyone seems to agree, is dazzling.

Her popularity isn't hard to explain. Most of her pictures aren't brain-teasers and can be read at a glance. Too much has been written about Ms. Sherman's art reflecting the ocean of images from movies and television that surround us. (The MoMA catalog essay by the show's organizer, associate curator of photography Eva Respini, continues this tired and wrong-headed line of thought.)

It's true that Ms. Sherman's pictures often refer to other pictures. The justly celebrated "Untitled Film Stills" series from 1977-80, seen here in its entirety, relies on her audience's knowing the sources for her characters in Hollywood and European cinema. But to interpret these female types through the lens of Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist who proclaimed that the "simulacrum" of media had replaced lived experience, is to miss the empathy and self-amusement behind her role-playing. Critics love to bedizen her photographs in fancy theories, but Ms. Sherman seldom overthinks. The most impressive aspect of her work may be how economically she orchestrates her three-ring circus of effects.

Ms. Sherman is a superb caricaturist and comedienne who with body language, props, hair, make-up, facial expressions, backgrounds and camera angles can signal exactly how she wants her audience to feel about her subjects. Unlike, say, Matthew Barney's rococo mythologies, the sets never engulf the point of her photographic cartoons.

The artists who came to mind as I walked through the MoMA show were not those her own age, but Honoré Daumier and Thomas Rowlandson, and the actresses Tracey Ullman and Meryl Streep. Ms. Sherman's stage-directed tableaus also come out of the history of American illustration and advertising as well as postmodernism, rootstock that MoMA could have exposed had it shown her 1987 travesty of Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving meal.

Ms. Respini's essay cites the feminist artists Hanne Wilke and Lynda Benglis as forerunners. But there is nothing truly confessional or shocking about Ms. Sherman's self-portraits. She does not bare her own breasts or buttocks, only prosthetic ones. Her wigs and masks don't conceal so much as they expose the visible flaws and grotesque insecurities of the characters she plays.

In public, she is similarly recessive and shy. Her art may be overexposed, but she is not. Even when she became the unwanted subject of a 2008 documentary, "Guest of Cindy Sherman," co-directed by ex-boyfriend Paul H-O, she emerged as unblemished and guileless in contrast to the venal poseurs who rule the international art world in the film.

Despite offers from megagalleries, Ms. Sherman has remained for more than 30 years with Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer, founders of Metro Pictures, the New York space that launched her. Her one professional misstep may be the Hollywood movie she directed in 1997, "Office Killer." (It goes unlisted in the catalog chronology.)

If fame seems not to have afflicted her with a monstrous ego, Ms. Sherman is stoked by healthy fires of ambition. She has spoken of being irritated that her male counterparts from the early 1980s—Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Eric Fischl, David Salle and Julian Schnabel—were more quickly rewarded by the market.

Her 1989 series based on Old Master paintings exhibits her sweet revenge. These pictures, gorgeously installed here against burgundy walls, reflect the diminished status of women and of photography in art history. Playing figures of both sexes in portraits by Raphael, Caravaggio and others, she is climbing into the ring with a stable of canonical male artists while also cheekily humanizing the men and women in the gilded frames. Instead of sabotaging the originals, the act of photographing herself in these guises restores the overvarnished past to the momentary hazards of actual life. Her version of a Holbein ambassador imagines him as a bushy-eyed nerd. An Ingres aristocrat with an appraising gaze is a floozie gone to seed.

With the leveling laughter of comedy, Ms. Sherman has cut women as well as men down to size since the "Untitled Film Stills." That top prices for her prints have surpassed those for all but a few of her contemporaries can be a point of pride for women everywhere. Whether casting herself as abused or haughty, she speaks for those who refuse to be patronized or ignored.

Why is MoMA devoting another retrospective to someone who has already exceeded her share of attention? Wouldn't it be more timely for a curator to elevate some of the younger artists (Nikki S. Lee, Laural Nakadate, Yasumasa Morimura, to name three) who have followed Ms. Sherman's example in first-person photography? Her influence has extended backward as well, bringing renewed notice to Victorians (Lady Clementina Hawarden) and gender-bending surrealists (Claude Cahun) who took on various costumed personae.

But if Ms. Sherman was not the first woman to dress up and act out for the camera, her single-minded exploration of this method may be unique. The MoMA survey justifies its existence by tracking a deepening of sympathies since the Whitney retrospective. There are no indications that constantly photographing herself has left her feeling sick of her own image.

Ms. Respini strengthens Ms. Sherman's weakest series, the clowns from 2004, by dispersing them throughout the rooms and making these sexually and emotionally ambivalent figures a key to her work. Suspicions about the manipulative powers of her face and body, and of photography and art, have been central concerns of hers. With a few easy and readable cues, she can appear as distant as a movie star or as vulnerable as the cursed Ovidian gods and goddesses in her so-called Fairy Tales series from the mid-1980s.

The so-called Society Portraits, in the last rooms at MoMA, are her latest pictures (2000-2008) and my favorites. Here, she manipulates her own face and body with frightening precision, cutting ever close to the bone. Digital tools have allowed her to be multiple people in party scenes and to improve the often muddy color seen in her earlier work.

Ms. Respini is too polite to discuss what is obvious about these middle-age women clutching at remnants of their youthful selves. Ms. Sherman is at a stage in life (58 years old) when everyone stares in the mirror and considers what plastic surgeons might do to allay time's ravages. These doyennes are not unlike the collectors whose support makes possible extravagant shows like this one at MoMA. The artist is not so gently biting the jeweled, liver-spotted hands that have fed her career so richly. At the same time, she is facing down the inevitable atrophy of her own mortal flesh. Any laughter these frail creatures give rise to gets caught in the throat.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 7, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Roles of a Lifetime.

By PETER PLAGENS

Significant modern sculpture has been generally assumed to be pretty big, made out of metal or some kind of assemblage, uncolored or at least muted, rough-hewn or "tough," and certainly without utilitarian allusions. Ken Price, who died Feb. 24 in Taos, N.M., at age 77, made relatively small objects out of clay, many of them brightly painted, very smooth and, if not exactly useful around the house, at least wittily referential of that possibility. Price was a ceramist—he studied with the celebrated Peter Voulkos at the Otis Art Institute kilns near downtown Los Angeles, and got a master's degree from Alfred University's renowned two-year ceramics program in just one year—who became a sculptor, who became a great, sui generis artist on the order of Francis Bacon or Sidney Nolan.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Matthew Marks/Ken Price/Fredrik Nilsen

'Zizi' (2011)

Part of Price's uniqueness—especially in today's logorrheic, theory-besotted art world—was his straightforwardness. At a talk he gave seven years ago at Don Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Price said: "I can't prove my art's any good or that it means what I say it means. And nothing I say can improve the way it looks." The first of his works to be noticed were the circa-1960 football-size "eggs," intensely painted in color schemes of eye-boggling pinks, greens, oranges and yellows, and augmented with openings inside of which lurk dark, glossy, larvae-looking stuff. Then he went to cups—hilariously impractical vessels with bodies of snail forms or Constructivist geometry (imagine a Gerrit Rietveld chair for your morning coffee)—that are like nobody else's, before or since.

Price was born on the west side of Los Angeles on Feb. 16, 1935, and raised in comfortable circumstances. (He was privileged enough to take some trumpet lessons from Chet Baker.) His parents designed and built a home close to the beach, so their boy was ready, willing and able to surf practically every day. The sport was a big deal to him (the announcement for one of his shows at the groundbreaking Ferus Gallery contains a photograph of Price standing straight up on a board in a wave, arms triumphantly outstretched), and surfing trips to Baja California, brought him into contact with one of the major influences on his aesthetic, Mexican curio shops. He spent six years in the 1970s, in fact, on a never-completed (but exhibited in parts) project called "Happy's Curios," named after his wife. It consists of cabinets of hand-made homages to Mexican commercial pottery, Day of the Dead imagery, satiny cloth and flowers.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Ken Price/Fredrik Nilsen

'L. Red' (1963)

A quietly affable fellow, Price could break out of his beloved studio labor (which he thought was the greatest blessing of being an artist) to create the occasional album cover (for his friend Ry Cooder), illustrations for poetry books (by Harvey Mudd and Charles Bukowski) and liquor labels (for a favorite brand of mezcal). He also taught for 10 years (1993-2003) where he first went to college, the University of Southern California, before finally decamping to Taos.

Although it's almost contrary to the joyful, just-look-at-it spirit of Price's art, his art-historical importance must be mentioned. When Price, Voulkos, John Mason, Billy Al Bengston and a few others got together at the Otis kiln, the Los Angeles modern-art world was, if it palpably existed at all, provincial and behind the times. The Otis ethos was "Let's make whatever the hell we feel like making as fast as we can while being so technically proficient it's scary." Coupled with Los Angeles's lack of a brooding avant-garde such as New York's, and with Los Angeles's cars-and-plastic visual environment, it formed the basis of the great Southern California art revolution currently being celebrated in the Getty-sponsored plethora of "Pacific Standard Time" exhibitions. (Mr. Price had three sculptures in the Getty's own lead PST show—now closed—and is one of the featured players, along with Voulkos and Mr. Mason, in Scripps College's current PST exhibition, "Clay's Tectonic Shift.") At the time of his death, Price was working with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a 50-year retrospective, a show that will turn up in 2013 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—where, if it isn't a gobsmacking revelation of the first water, something's wrong with New York.

In more academic terms, the art of Ken Price is a lively link between the austerity of Minimalism (he never wasted a curve or a color) and the inclusiveness of postmodernism (his work can remind you of everything from Constantin Brancusi to American Indians to Japanese woodblocks), proving that in art there are no real ruptures, only intriguingly disguised continuities. But in the end with Price it's the object—not history, not theory, not jockeying for position among cities—that counts. Somebody asked him why there were as many as 70 coats of reworked and pitted acrylic paint on his late, obsessively crafted, bloblike sculptures. "That's so it looks good rather than bad," Price replied. Nothing anyone can say about his work can improve upon that.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer. He writes the bi-weekly gallery-review column for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 6, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Words Need Not Apply.

They do so across the expanse of the museum’s fourth floor, tracing their loops over a surface painted with a blueprint for the building. At one end, opposite the window onto Madison Avenue, hangs a giant neon-tube portrait of Ms. Michelson, glowing green.

Nicole Mannarino is the first to enter and the last to leave. Her blue jumpsuit, slit in a bare V, from neck to waist, has kimono sleeves that suggest wings as she holds her arms out to the side. She circles backward on half-toe, pauses periodically to reset, and continues circling.

Eleanor Hullihan arrives, her legs uncovered — the costumes, by Ms. Michelson and James Kidd, are remarkable for their individualized exposure of flesh — and the two women circle together with a precision that grows more incredible as their paths diverge and overlap. Each lowers an arm to avoid a collision.

One at a time, three other circlers join in; one at a time, all five circlers depart. (This is not counting the character in the horse’s head from Ms. Michelson’s 2009 work “Dover Beach,” who comes and goes inscrutably.)

That’s the gist of the dance, and the dancers’ entrances and exits constitute major events. But so, eventually, do small variations in the circling or quick digressions from it. Very late in the game, a mere torso tilt screams “beauty.” A few leaps forward by Ms. Hullihan seem as shocking as a reversal of gravity.

You might take all of this as a meditation on time, or on minimalism in art and dance. Or you might be bored out of your mind. (James Lo’s score meditates on minimalism in music.) There was significant audience attrition at the Thursday opening, particularly during the middle section, where the dancers stop circling to stand for what seems like eternity.

Meditating, however, is made difficult from the beginning by a conversation in voice-over, stalled and repeated, between Ms. Michelson and the playwright Richard Maxwell. They ask themselves the inane questions artists are often asked, and their inane answers — about how challenging art isn’t popular, etc. — are made more irritating by a purposefully insincere tone. Later, when Ms. Michelson recounts telling her dancers to “make it very beautiful,” it’s like a confession.

Meditation on the movement is thwarted again at the end, when Ms. Michelson’s voice, which has gone quiet, returns to opine about faith amid a ridiculous fable about God’s other child, Marjorie. Religion is also invoked in the program, where Ms. Michelson quotes George Balanchine’s praising comparison of American dancers to angels “who, when they relate a tragic situation, do not themselves suffer.”

But these dancers do suffer. The choreography is punishing, physically and mentally. Ms. Mannarino, her stylish jumpsuit sweat-darkened by the halfway point, endures heroically, but Moriah Evans is saddled with an oversize smock, and Ms. Michelson emphasizes her obvious struggle with the movement by excluding her from the parallel orbits of the others.

“You can get away with murder,” Ms. Michelson says, pretending that she doesn’t care if we agree. The choreographer whose image looks down upon the dancers and who keeps interfering and who demands acts of devotion is a cruel and anxious god.

“Devotion Study #1” continues through Sunday at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.