By ARNIE COOPER

Ends of the Earth:Land Art to 1974
The Geffen Contemporary,
Museum of Contemporary Art
Through Sept. 3

Los Angeles

If you're a detail person, the first thing you'll notice about "Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974," at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is the missing start date in the show's title. Senior curator Philipp Kaiser and co-curator Miwon Kwon insist the omission was intentional. Ms. Kwon, a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that "we chose not to put a beginning date into the title of the show, since Land Art emerges through many different strains of art practices and one could locate multiple moments of its 'beginning.'"

The Noguchi Museum, NY. /Soichi Sunami

Isamu Noguchi's proposed 'Memorial to Man,' aka 'Sculpture to Be Viewed From Mars' (1947). The nose alone was to be a mile long.

You might also wonder why what the accompanying catalog calls the "first large-scale museum exhibition on Land Art" includes work only through 1974. It's not as if the genre, in which the landscape is treated as a giant canvas and the resulting artworks are not only linked to it but express it, dissolved in the mid-1970s; the noted British Land artist Andy Goldsworthy was still in college at that time. But the curators wanted to feature projects created before the Hirshhorn Museum's exhibit "Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects" established the category in 1978. "This show," Ms. Kwon says, "is about early experimentation."

The cutoff date was also an important milestone for the genre. In 1974, New York's Dia Art Foundation was established to support visionary large-scale projects. Consider Robert Smithson's mammoth "Spiral Jetty," constructed in 1970 from basalt rock and earth at the Great Salt Lake's northeastern shore and donated to the Dia by Smithson's estate in 1999. The 1,500-foot-long coil was covered by water soon after its construction but re-emerged after the millennium, allowing visitors to walk between the spirals.

This brings us to the oft-asked question—repeated in an essay written by Mr. Kaiser and Ms. Kwon for the exhibition catalog—"How can you bring monumental artworks that are continuous with the earth in remote locations such as the deserts of Nevada, Utah, or New Mexico into a gallery space?"

The very simple answer: You can't. "We don't even try," Ms. Kwon says, referring to another colossal work, Michael Heizer's 1969-70 "Double Negative," two 250-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide trenches cut into the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nev. Totaling 1,500 feet in length, this immense earthwork is visible by satellite. But you won't see even one image of it at this show. Ms. Kwon says, "We don't want to engage in the common effort made by museums to represent the work with documentary photographs." Her statement is ironic given that "Double Negative" is part of the MOCA collection, a fact that inspired Mr. Kaiser to propose "Ends of the Earth."

However, as Mr. Kaiser is quick to note, every project is different. "For example, 'Double Negative' is out there and we respect the fact that you have to drive to see it," the curator says. "But Robert Smithson took a different approach, establishing the system of the site and the nonsite." Mr. Kaiser is referring to the fact that Smithson conceived of three manifestations of his piece: not only the actual spiral in Utah but a 35-minute film and an essay, both included in the show.

Despite such distinctions, Land Art is frequently equated with larger-than-life endeavors constructed in the American Southwest. But, Ms. Kwon says, "it's not all about monumental, macho guys with bulldozers and dynamite in the desert." The show, which seeks to shatter many misconceptions about the genre, has re-created numerous smaller works: Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison's 5½-by-8-foot "Hog Pasture: Survival Piece #1" (1970-1971) contains live plants—munched on by an actual pig before the opening. And Alice Aycock's "Clay #2" (1971)—another re-creation—contains 16 4-foot squares of cracked clay, inspired by Ms. Aycock's visit to Death Valley in 1969.

Another misconception is that Land Art is antiurban. Robert Morris's "Earthwork" is a 2,000-pound pile of dirt made up of earth, brick, steel and industrial scraps from the New York area. The work originally appeared in 1968 at "Earthworks," the first group exhibition of the genre, which took place at Virginia Dwan's Gallery on 57th Street. The show also presents Swedish pop artist Claes Oldenburg's film "The Hole," depicting his 1967 performance piece "Placid Civil Monument," in protest of the Vietnam War. The 10-minute film shows gravediggers fashioning a 6-foot wide, 3-foot deep hole in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Perhaps more significantly, "Ends of the Earth" aims to shatter the assumption that Land Art is chiefly an American enterprise. The show's 200 works spotlight more than 100 artists from 17 countries in South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia as well as the U.S.

Consider the two international works visible immediately upon entering the gallery. Playing directly in front of you is the Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely's 1962 antinuke film, "Study for an End of the World," a 22-minute piece shot in the desert outside of Las Vegas near an atomic-bomb site. The now grainy film, which appeared on the weekly television news program "David Brinkley's Journal," depicts choreographed explosions of junk found in scrap yards around Las Vegas.

To its left is French artist Yves Klein's "Región de Grenoble (RP10)," a 2-by-3-foot work simulating a relief map of the Earth utilizing his patented "International Klein Blue." It was "the artist's vision," Ms. Kwon says, "to claim a color that exceeds territorial boundaries and divisions." Back in 1957, Klein theorized that the entire planet was blue—an idea confirmed by the first human in space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who declared, "The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing." No surprise then that Mr. Kaiser says Klein had declared the entire planet a work of art.

Not that all of these projects could actually be realized. The exhibit includes Jean-Michel Sanejouand's proposal for a cultural park development on top of Mount Vesuvius, as well as the Italian architectural collective Superstudio's plan for a gridded superstructure to wrap around the globe. Mr. Klein wasn't kidding about the planet as artwork, a perspective that is evident in one of the show's most provocative pieces, Isamu Noguchi's 1947 proposal "Memorial to Man." The 15-by-34-foot photograph, which appears to be of a massive earthwork sculpture in the sand, contains a face whose nose was to be one mile long. Mr. Noguchi wanted the image to be visible from space "informing others that an intelligent life form once had existed on our planet."

Ms. Kwon says: "Although we do not assert an origin point for Land Art, Noguchi's works are the earliest in the show. 'Memorial to Man,' also known as 'Sculpture to Be Viewed from Mars,' presages many aspects of Land Art as it will develop in the 1960s—the scale of his vision; using land as material and means to articulate commentary on man's relation to earth and cosmos; the importance of the extra-human viewpoint; the coming together of the primitivistic and the futuristic. Utopic and dystopic at once."

Mr. Cooper is a freelance writer in Santa Barbara, Calif.

via online.wsj.com

—Meghan O'Rourke

Portrait by Mark Leong

FAR FROM HERE Artist Kehinde Wiley in his studio in Beijing, with works from his recent Armory Show. He lives part time in China, where he is able to paint free from distractions.

Painter Kehinde Wiley, 35, has enjoyed the kind of meteoric career that led Andy Warhol to quip about 15 minutes of fame. When he was a child, his mother, a linguist, enrolled Wiley and his siblings in art and literary programs as a way to help keep them safe in the rough South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where they lived. Early on Wiley gravitated toward the visual arts; when he was 12, he went to the U.S.S.R. on an arts exchange program, thanks to a foundation grant funded by financier Michael Milken, which ignited his interest in global politics.

After Yale's MFA program, Wiley got a coveted residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he started establishing himself as an art-world luminary. Drawn in by the "peacocking" of Harlem street life, he began making luxurious, Old Master–influenced portraits of young black men in street clothes. Subsequently, in his "The World Stage" series, he broadened his focus to include large-scale portraits of young men from regions around the globe. His work references Titian as easily as it does pop culture, and addresses stereotypes of race and class, power and history.

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COURTESY OF KEHINDE WILEY

Wiley (far right) with his father (lower left), stepmother and half-siblings in Nigeria.

Unlike other artists, Wiley is not interested in art for art's sake. His work shares his lively sense of humor, and he believes it's important for African-American kids to see pictures of people who look like them on museum walls. And he continues to break down boundaries. He collaborated with Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci on his latest project, "An Economy of Grace," which will open at New York City's Sean Kelly Gallery this month. The two chose paintings from the Louvre to serve as inspiration for a series of portraits of African-Americans in couture gowns they designed. Wiley's work, now more than ever, pushes the lines between design and high art, reinventing classical portraiture for a contemporary world.

I think the central narrative of my early childhood had to do with growing up in a family where my mother had to raise six kids alone and do graduate school, while figuring out how to keep us from becoming products of the environment that we were living in. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.

One that was particularly fortuitous for me was called the Center for U.S./U.S.S.R. Initiatives. It was a program set up to create an educational exchange between American and Soviet youths, with the idea that there would be a sort of ping-pong politics style—so that perhaps Soviet children would become envious of our way of life. We had 50 American kids hanging out in the forest outside of St. Petersburg. We had to study Russian for the year, and we did art in the forest.

Most of the kids came from very well-heeled families. But my tuition for the program was covered by the Milken Family Foundation. Milken's contribution to my early development was seminal, in the sense that it opened the whole world up to me—the possibility of seeing other cultures, and envisioning a world beyond the confines of Los Angeles, certainly. It brought up race and different modes of language and expression.

When my mother was working her way through college, we kids helped her run her junk store. It was like "Sanford and Son." We'd go through the streets finding things, and people would donate things knowing that she would take them; we'd be pulling in old furniture and redoing it and selling it to people on the streets. Most of the clientele was Spanish and we learned to speak Spanish on the streets. A lot of the furniture had this really heightened, decorative, late–French Rococo, old-lady sensibility that was really annoying to me at the time. But I remember in later years feeling an affinity with the hyperdecorative because it had a sense of nostalgia, in a way.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture. So, for example, in my last book of photography, the lighting was inspired as much by Tiepolo ceiling frescoes in Venice as it was by Hype Williams's early-'90s hip-hop videos—both having a sense of rapture, both having a sense of this bling. One more sacred, one more profane.

My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria. She destroyed all the photos, and I'd never met the guy. So, when I turned 20, being fatherless, and also being profoundly interested in portraiture and wanting to know what he looked like physically, I decided to hop on a plane. Without the experience in Russia, I don't know if I'd have had the guts to do it because it was just so outsize for my life experience. I had a very youthful sense of invincibility. There were warnings all over the Internet from the State Department not to go into Nigeria at that time.

I went looking for one man in the most populated nation in all of Africa. I think there was a sense of curiosity, a psychic necessity. Just who is that other thing? What's my other half? And to stare this other guy in the face and be like, wow, that's weird.

I found him. But it was tough. All I knew was his first and last name and what he'd studied—architecture. I went from architecture department to architecture department looking for this guy. Finally, I took the ethnic route and went to the area where his last name comes from, to the major university there. His name's on the door of the architecture building. He heads the department.

I began a series of portraits of him. Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. I studied how art-making practices have evolved in Africa, and how they've influenced art-making practices in the States and in Europe, specifically with people like Braque and Picasso, who were experiencing this feeling of the uncanny when looking at African art objects, which has a lot to do with historical European notions of the black body. And, conversely, I started going back to Africans thinking of themselves through the mirror of how someone else thinks of them.

All of those different perspectives and shattered ways of thinking were incredibly helpful to me. Later on when I was studying art theory, first in San Francisco and then at Yale, this sort of postcolonial postmodern condition of shattered identities and fractured selves, I didn't have to look very far. You know? This is not conceptual; this is actual life lived. In terms of how I started putting one foot in front of the other in my own art-making process, I didn't—my job was always to absorb and learn as much as possible and then just be in the world.

I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem and became the artist in residence there, and began this process of street-casting. And so in terms of designing a practice or designing a life, I've always had certain goals in mind: find the father, build the studio in this country, or what have you. But then you just let go and you allow radical contingency to take place, and that's where the magic sort of happens. You think you know what you're going to do when you hit the ground, but then the actualities show themselves.

The work is also about the power of letting go. So much of portraiture has to do with powerful people: powerful white men in powerful poses in big, powerful museums. So what happens when portraiture is about chance? Absolute chance? Someone who just happens to be trying to get to the subway one day now ends up in the painting that goes to one of the large museums throughout the world!

For the new project, Riccardo Tisci and I pulled some connections and got a private audience at the Louvre. The poses of the women, all of whom came from the New York metropolitan area, were taken from specific paintings that we saw in the Louvre, as were the gowns that we designed together. Couture is a symbol of wealth and excess, and that's what art has been. There's a certain guilt associated with it—desire and guilt—it's always more sexy when you feel slightly guilty about it.

I think one of the things that must happen in the work is for it to become class-conscious. You'll never be able to exist within this marketplace without recognizing that paintings are perhaps the most expensive objects in the art world. It's not going to change anyone's life. But what it does function as is a catalyst for a different way of thinking. The very act of walking into the Los Angeles County Museum and seeing Kerry James Marshall as a kid gave me a sense of, Damn, maybe I can do this. And, so, symbols matter. One of my interests is in having the work in as many public collections as possible. When I go to the Brooklyn Museum or the Metropolitan Museum and see my stuff, I'm aware that there are other young kids who don't have access to anything like it.

—Edited from Meghan O'Rourke's interview with Kehinde Wiley

By ANN LANDI

Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Taos, N.M.

The enigmatic Agnes Martin, who spent parts of her life in this small mountainous enclave and died here in 2004, gained international acclaim for her spare, luminous canvases, fields of washy color traversed by delicate hand-drawn lines, generally in the shape of a grid. These understated works can carry a big impact, producing a meditative response in viewers and inspiring reams of appreciative criticism. Like many of the Minimalist artists with whom she is often associated, Martin could extract infinite variations on a theme, producing both small drawings and huge paintings that use the grid as their underpinning.

Agnes Martin:

Before the Grid

The Harwood Museum of Art

Through June 17

Yet Martin—born in 1912, the same year as Jackson Pollock—did not arrive at her winning strategy until she was in her late 50s, and her earlier work is not well known. Indeed, she did her best to seek out and destroy paintings from the years when she was taking her first steps into full-blown abstraction. In honor of her centenary, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos has tracked down a generous selection of works the artist made in her 30s and 40s. In addition to a couple of self-portraits and a few watercolor landscapes, these include biomorphic paintings made when the artist had a grant to work in Taos in the mid-1950s. They are lyrical works in subdued colors, taking on motifs from nature, like "Mid-Winter" (1954) and "The Bluebird" (1954), or hinting at grander, curiously archaic subjects ("The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden," 1953). This last is an explosive semifigurative work, in which the doomed couple are broken into a frenzy of jagged shapes, but more typical are several untitled paintings that show hovering, vaguely geometric or oozy, lifelike forms (the "biomorphs" of biomorphism). The museum has also included three early grid paintings from 1959 and 1961 and a selection of later works on paper in the entry hall, a preamble to the Harwood's permanent gallery of seven large paintings from 1993-94.

 

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

James Rosenquist's "F-111" is so familiar by now that memory has begun to smooth its shark-tooth edges and recall the Cold War period it exemplifies with nostalgic sighs. For some of us it's hard to recall a time when this wicked satire of the U.S. Military-Industrial-Consumer Complex was not around. A controversial hit when first exhibited almost half a century ago, the painting was quickly designated a Pop Art icon in textbooks. Students have been parsing its candy-colored tapestry of incongruous images on art-history quizzes for decades.

© 2012 James Rosenquist/Museum of Modern Art/James Rosenquist/VAGA

The Museum of Modern Art's installation restores this 86-foot-long, four-sided behemoth to the original arrangement intended by the artist.

What's jarring about its current installation at New York's Museum of Modern Art is that, until now, museums may never have done justice to the piece. That's reason enough to visit the fourth floor, where until July 30 the 86-foot-long behemoth can be seen as Mr. Rosenquist introduced the painting in 1965 at the Castelli Gallery in New York: a four-sided, wraparound mural for a space (23 feet by 22 feet) little bigger than a squash court.

This old/new arrangement alters the experience and perhaps even the meaning of the work. On previous occasions when I had stood in front of the 10-foot-high images—a turbocharged montage that splices together a U.S. fighter-bomber, a Firestone tire, a vanilla-frosted cake, a light bulb, a girl beneath a hair dryer, a nuclear-bomb explosion, a beach umbrella and a plate of spaghetti—the items were presented tautly stretched across one wall or at most two walls. Installed in this manner, viewable from far away, "F-111" could be digested as entertainment. Despite the threat of human extinction in the combustible ensemble, the work had the eye-catching appeal of a billboard along Sunset Boulevard for a disaster movie. (Mr. Rosenquist's sense of humor and spectacle is not unlike Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern's in "Dr. Strangelove." Indeed, their black comedy about nuclear Armageddon was released in 1964, as the artist began work on his painting.)

In the current MoMA installation, however, the violence isn't so easily laughed off. Bent around the four walls of a tiny space, the piece now offers uncomfortably little area for the visitor to step back. The confinement is menacing. Being forced to look at the mural from a few feet away is like examining the X-rayed stomach contents of a giant anaconda, one that has slithered its way into your dining room and is flexing its coils. The aggressive, cynical maleness of the piece is almost overwhelming.

Mr. Rosenquist has said he made it in angry reaction to U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam, a claim that has never squared with the fetishistic rendering of the sleek, deadly instrument for which the work is named. Rather than an earnest work of protest, "F-111" has always seemed patriotic, an ironic salute to national might and knowhow. (After all, the atomic bomb was an American invention.)

The silhouette of an F-111, the most advanced jet aircraft of its day, runs the length of the work and is painted on 23 aluminum panels. This high-tech material supplies the undercarriage for the images and is in some ways inseparable from them. Our eyes are asked to run along the shiny metallic skin.

Pop Art is permeated by ambiguity toward the bounty of America's consumer society, and Mr. Rosenquist's attitude is no different. He just amped up his mixed emotions in a work of unprecedented size and complexity. (Its gigantism reflects his training in commercial art, painting billboards above Times Square during summers in the early 1950s.) As with Warhol, the visual language inserts images from magazine advertising and journalism into a re-edited commentary on the culture at large. David Salle and Barbara Kruger are but two artists who in the 1980s adapted these photo-mechanical techniques to make large paintings as combative as "F-111."

New Wave cinematic rhythms for images on this scale were unheard of in 1965. Read like a strip of film, they are connected by jump cuts instead of clear transitions. The central figure (and the only human) is a smiling blond girl, a figure lifted from a 1950s Saran Wrap ad. Wearing lipstick and with her hair in ribbons but inside a hair dryer, she's a child aspiring to sophistication beyond her years. The machine on her head is also a jet engine—cone-shaped, blasting heated air, made of reflective metal—and may be sucking her up with a force she is unaware of.

Knowingly or not, Mr. Rosenquist may have woven her into his design under the influence of the so-called Daisy television ad. Broadcast in 1964 only once, but analyzed widely while "F-111" was being constructed, that notorious attack by Lyndon B. Johnson's political team on Barry Goldwater as a dangerous extremist operated on a similar sneaky level to make its point.

It, too, featured a fair-haired girl and a nuclear explosion. Standing in a field, she counts the petals she is pulling off a daisy. Suddenly an anonymous voice interrupts her and starts counting down to zero as the camera narrows to her eye. The screen then fills with a mushroom cloud. Created by media guru Tony Schwartz, the Daisy ad never mentions Mr. Goldwater. It ends with a written message: "Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."

As in advertising, the images within Mr. Rosenquist's panorama act on us subliminally, not logically. Other meanings that were elusive before are harder to ignore in cramped quarters. The spaghetti in tomato sauce, which dominates the right side of the mural, no longer seems merely to represent an unappetizing meal out of a can typical of the American diet in the 1950s and '60s. Viewed up close, the strands of pasta are alarmingly squirmy, like maggots or spilled human intestines.

MoMA has restored some of the shocking energy that "F-111" must have had in 1965. (Curiously, the dead spots in the work are also easier to detect; Mr. Rosenquist never quite figured out how to make it turn the corners at the Castelli Gallery.) It's still hard to accept the mural as an antiwar statement on a par with "Guernica," a comparison the artist vainly invites. Then again, he was addressing the escalating madness of Vietnam in the 1960s, not the destruction of a Spanish village in the 1930s. In retrospect, he may have created the first (and only?) psychedelic masterpiece.

—Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 10, 2012, on page C13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Destruction All Around.

• By KELLY CROW

In the early 1980s, German artist Gerhard Richter painted 24 views of flickering white candles, and not a single one sold. When one of those "Candle" canvases came up at Christie's in London this past fall, it sold for $16.5 million.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A visitor at the blockbuster retrospective 'Gerhard Richter: Panorama' at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie; it will travel to Paris in June.

Few people can pinpoint the moment when an artist becomes iconic in the way of Pablo Picasso or Andy Warhol, but right now the art world is trying to anoint Mr. Richter. Last year, his works sold at auction for a total of $200 million, according to auction tracker Artnet—more than any other living artist and topping last year's auction totals for Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti and Mark Rothko combined. At Mr. Richter's gallery in New York, the waiting list for one of his new works, which can sell for $3 million apiece, is several dozen names long.

In November at Sotheby's, London collector Lily Safra paid $20.8 million for Mr. Richter's 1997 eggplant-colored "Abstract Painting," an auction record for the artist. Other artists have sold individual works at higher prices—Jeff Koons, for example—but in terms of volume at auction, Mr. Richter currently tops the market.

The artist's ascent is being driven by market demands as much as curatorial merit: Auction houses and museums, eager for new masters to canonize, are showcasing Mr. Richter's works around the world at an ever-increasing clip. An influx of international collectors and dealers are also seizing the moment to buy or sell his pieces at a profit—including art-world tastemakers such as Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich, French luxury-goods executive Bernard Arnault, dealer Larry Gagosian, Taiwanese electronics mogul Pierre Chen and New York hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen.

   

 

Germany's Gerhard Richter's artworks sold at auction last year for a total of $176 million, more than any other living artist. Kelly Crow has a profile of Richter and his work on Lunch Break. Photo: Sotheby's

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German artist Gerhard Richter.

Mr. Richter's work is uniquely suited to the tastes of the current art market. Like Picasso, he paints in a number of different styles—from rainbow-hued abstracts to poignant family portraits—giving collectors plenty of choice. Like Warhol, he is prolific, which ensures a steady volume of his works in the marketplace—yet enough of his works are in museum collections that he has avoided a glut. And ever since the deaths last year of painters Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud, collectors searching for another senior statesman have started giving his work a closer look.

Collectors are paying a particular premium for Mr. Richter's larger abstracts from the late 1980s, which have all the visual impact of a work by Francis Bacon or Mr. Rothko, artists whose prices spiked before the recession. These abstracts are also immediately identifiable as being Mr. Richter's creations, making them easy status symbols. San Francisco dealer Anthony Meier says, "Collectors want an iconic work in a format that everyone recognizes. Monkey see, monkey do."

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Mr. Richter, 80 years old, isn't a household name in the U.S. yet, but he's revered in Europe. Born in Dresden, he fled the former East Germany months before the Berlin Wall went up. He has spent the past six decades experimenting with ways to refresh traditional painting categories like the still life. He's best known for haunting family portraits that evoke smudged newspaper clippings—a wry response to Pop that won him a pre-eminent spot among Europe's postwar painters. He also uses an oversized squeegee the size of a car bumper to create layered abstracts. That he flits between several painting styles, rather than sticking to one signature look, has always confounded some audiences, yet the toggling is actually his calling card, the painter as polymath.

A blockbuster retrospective, "Gerhard Richter: Panorama," has been crisscrossing the art capitals of Europe, having just traveled from London's Tate Modern to Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, where it will show through May 13. So far, the show has drawn large crowds; it heads to Paris's Centre Pompidou in June.

For his part, Mr. Richter seems a reluctant commodity. At a time when superstar artists typically have a different dealer for every continent, he funnels nearly all his new works through New York dealer Marian Goodman. Both are soft-spoken and rarely attend high-profile auctions. The pair has declined lucrative licensing deals and private commissions. For years, their combined efforts have helped his price levels retain an air of integrity. Ms. Goodman, speaking on behalf of the artist, who declined to be interviewed himself, said, "He has an honest market."

Ol auf Holz Museum Ludwig, Koln;ln/Privatsammlung © Gerhard Richter 2012

Mr. Richter has created more than 3,000 paintings, but nearly 40% of them (including 'Betty,' pictured here) are in museum collections, which has prevented a market glut.

Not everyone is ready to bet on Mr. Richter. Jose Mugrabi and David Nahmad, major dealers in Warhol and Picasso, respectively, said they don't think Mr. Richter has enough heft to compete with the market presence of those modern masters. Mr. Mugrabi said Mr. Richter's art is more fashionable now than it used to be, but not more important.

Trends in contemporary art, as in fashion, can also change quickly, so it's unclear whether Mr. Richter's prices will keep climbing or drop again over the long run. In the late 1980s, prices for Frank Stella's geometric paintings rose quickly to nearly $4 million before reaching a plateau in 1989 that he hasn't matched at auction since. Mr. Rothko's abstract paintings also soared to $72.8 million during the market's last peak in 2007, but nothing by him has sold for half as much in the past couple of years. Art adviser Nicolai Frahm says he's counseling his collector clients to hold off seeking Mr. Richter's works "until his prices equalize."

Sotheby's

Russian industrialist Roman Abramovich is among the influential collectors who have helped to make Mr. Richter's market. Mr. Abramovich paid $15.1 million for Mr. Richter's 1990 'Abstract Painting' at Sotheby's.

Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, said he thinks such lofty comparisons to Picasso and Warhol will hold up, though. "Richter doesn't want to be the next king, but he has taken painting farther than just about anyone else," he said.

Richter's Rise

Mr. Richter works out of a pair of pristine studios in Cologne, including one attached by a garden path to the home he shares with his third wife, Sabine, and their young son, Moritz. Mr. Richter suffered a stroke a few years ago, but he remains fit and moves easily, his face framed by a jaunty pair of translucent eyeglasses.

The son of a Dresden schoolteacher, Mr. Richter grew up in communist East Germany, steeped in the academic rigors of Soviet Realism. Some of his first jobs included painting murals of cheery workers for the state. In 1959, he saw Western contemporary art for the first time at an exhibition called Documenta in the German town of Kassel; afterward, he told friends he would have to rethink what he knew about art after seeing Jackson Pollock's drippy splatters and Lucio Fontana's punctured canvases.

Sotheby's

Part of Mr. Richter's appeal to collectors: He paints in a wide range of styles, from colorful abstracts to hazy portraits. His 'Sailors' sold for $13.2 million at Sotheby's.

Two years later, he and his wife, Ema, enlisted a friend to sneak them by car into West Berlin so he could study art without political constraint. The couple moved to Düsseldorf, and by the end of the summer the Berlin Wall had gone up. He never saw his parents again.

Over the next decade, the artist grappled with occasional homesickness—and the legacy of his country's role in the war—by painting portraits of his relatives that looked like black-and-white photographs, only hazy. The subjects included his "Aunt Marianne," who was exterminated by the Nazis because she was mentally ill, and his "Uncle Rudi," a Nazi soldier who died fighting in the war.

Rudolf Zwirner, one of the artist's earliest dealers, was impressed when he saw the work in 1962; few German artists were addressing such disquieting topics. For years after the war, wealthy American collectors who were championing Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol considered German art "taboo," Mr. Zwirner said, so he and other dealers cultivated collectors for Mr. Richter nearby. Their prices rarely topped $1,000. "I sold Richters to my physician, my neighbors, my brother—anybody I could convince," he said. To this day, it's not unusual for bourgeois families in the region to own dozens of works by the artist; one collector in Munich owns 70 works. By the time Mr. Richter was invited to represent Germany in the 1972 Venice Biennale, his pool of countrymen collectors was deep.

Christie's

Mr. Richter's 1982 'Candle' painting sold in October at Christie's for $16.5 million.

In the years that followed, Mr. Richter churned through several different series—like those candles—which didn't sell as well as the angst-ridden paintings of his German contemporaries like Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. But in the mid-1980s, he began making brightly colored abstracts, and collectors pounced. San Francisco collectors Donald and Doris Fisher, who founded the Gap retail chain, bought several of these works.

The real turning point for Mr. Richter came in 1995 when New York's Museum of Modern Art paid $3 million for a suite of 15 grisaille paintings called "Oct. 18, 1977." The artist painted this cycle in 1988 as a response to the arrest, trial and grisly death in 1977 of a group of young German anarchists-turned-terrorists. Mr. Storr, the Yale dean who then served as the museum's senior curator of painting and sculpture, began planning a major survey of Mr. Richter's work for the museum.

As soon as word leaked about the museum show, Mr. Zwirner said his phone started ringing with American collectors seeking Richters. A year later, in 1996, Sotheby's in London put a Richter on the cover of one of its sale catalogs. Back in Germany, longtime collectors started getting letters from auction houses: Did they care to sell a Richter?

MoMA's long-awaited survey opened six years later, in 2001, and suddenly series that had seemed random when they debuted, like his "Candle" works, seemed relevant, said Sotheby's specialist Cheyenne Westphal. Three months after the exhibit opened, the auction house sold his "Three Candles" for $5.3 million.

Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

Mr. Richter with his longtime dealer, Marian Goodman

Two years after that, a lawyer and collector based in Zurich named Joe Hage began gathering auction prices and exhibit details about the works in Mr. Richter's oeuvre. He started a website, gerhard-richter.com, and began posting the results online.

For newer, Internet-savvy collectors, Mr. Hage's site has proved popular because of all that its tallying has revealed. Mr. Richter has created 3,000 paintings—fewer than Warhol's 8,000 silk-screens but considerably more than Salvador Dalí's 1,200 works. He's also heavily traded, with more than 200 of his works turning up at auction every year, which provides buyers with a regular stream of price points to analyze. Museums own roughly 38% of his works, though, including half of his most coveted works, those large squeegee abstracts.

By 2006, an influx of newly wealthy collectors began competing hard for contemporary art, spiking values for dozens of artists including Mr. Richter. Sotheby's began shipping its top Richters to Hong Kong so potential bidders there could see his works. In May 2006, a bidder at Berlin's Villa Griesbach auction house paid $1 million for Mr. Richter's 1971 portrait of "Mao." The following summer, the same painting came up for bid at Christie's in London and sold for $2.5 million.

Then came the snowball: In February 2008, the artist's eldest daughter, Betty, sold her 1983 "Candle" for $15.8 million, triple the high estimate, at Sotheby's. Three months later, Mr. Abramovich dropped $15.1 million for Mr. Richter's green-gray "Abstract Painting" from 1990. It was only priced to sell for up to $7 million. With that, collectors recalibrated Mr. Richter's high bar to $15 million or more.

© Gerhard Richter, Courtesy The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Mr. Richter's 1997 'Abstract Painting,' which Lily Safra bought for $20.8 million at Sotheby's.

During the recession that followed, potential sellers of Mr. Richter's masterworks largely sat on the sidelines, but by late 2010, as the market perked up again, a fresh set of collectors began embellishing their collections with Richters. That November, Sotheby's got $13.2 million for his 1966 "Sailors," a work that spent years in the New Museum Weserburg in Bremen. The buyers were Houston hedge-fund manager John Arnold and his wife, Laura.

A pivotal sale four months ago sealed the deal. At Sotheby's in New York, London collectors Marc and Victoria Sursock offered up eight Richter abstracts; all sold for well over their asking prices, including the abstract that went to Ms. Safra for $20.8 million. Last month in London, collectors came back for more: Christie's got $15.5 million for a green Richter abstract, while Sotheby's sold a creamy abstract to a former Zurich nightclub owner, Carl Hirschmann, for $4.8 million.

Mr. Richter has told friends he thinks his recent auction records are "absurd." But for his longtime collectors, they're paying dividends.

A few years ago, as Berlin endocrinologist Thomas Olbricht was constructing a five-story museum to showcase his art collection, he realized he was running low on cash. So he sold a blue-orange Richter abstract. Mr. Olbricht had paid about $287,000 for it in 1996; Christie's sold it for him in 2008 for $14.8 million.

Today, the museum, called the Me Collectors Room, rises from a narrow street in Berlin's bustling Mitte neighborhood. "I still wish I'd been able to keep that painting," Mr. Olbricht said. "Today, it would be worth $20 million."

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared Mar. 9, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Top-Selling Living Artist.

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.

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.

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.