The complications of scale bring about violent contrasts and juxtapositions, many of which make little evident sense; this is, I think, a metaphor for the anarchy of war, as well as the dishonesty that provided moral cover for those politicians who originally wanted to invade Iraq.

Like some earlier Guggenheim exhibitions, Mark Rosenthal’s 1996 splendid, mindless history of abstraction and the more recent survey Russia! are two examples, The Third Mind presents much great art without a convincing visual premise.

Although the architecture’s physical decay reflects its economic uselessness, such romantic titles as The Guardian of the Valley and Mountain of Nostalgia lend emotional value to these dour and severe scenes. These paintings speak to the failed utopian ideas in Communism.

What most truly characterizes Bush’s mature work is a seriousness, even a gravitas that amounts to a truly Olympian detachment.

Commensurate with their disconcerting depth, Kossoff’s early paintings are literally and metaphorically heavy. The defiant sweeps of brush resemble nothing so much as tire tracks on a sodden road.

For Bonnard drawing was sensation, and taking possession of the image. The next step was the translation of these notations into color, not local color, but the color that came from his interior logic.

As one grasps the combination of flatness, space, and light in Haynes’ paintings, the subtleties of her sophisticated palette and tonal gradations reveal a seductive luminosity.

However closely she references classical, renaissance and modernist genres, her paintings never lapse into nostalgia, but instead give off an arch contemporary emotion.

The painter Barkley L. Hendricks caught not only the mood, but also the dress of black Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, the subhead of the Studio Museum’s exhibition, “Birth of the Cool,” gives the nod to the development of a style whose casual hipness and intimated militancy marked a generation of African Americans.

March 6 to 24, 2009 24 Spring Street New York City, 212 965 9995 POETRY FOR ART presents newly published poetry (or poetry posted to the web for the first time) that relates, responds, or is dedicated to the work of a contemporary artist on display in New York or elsewhere at the time of … Continued