February 20 – March 28, 2020
224 W 30th Street #1005 (between Seventh and Eighth Aves)
New York, monyarowegallery.com

In the small rectangular space of Monya Rowe Gallery, up on the 10th floor of a midtown building, Vera Iliatova’s solo show – titled “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” – takes her viewer on a surreal, nostalgic walk reminiscent of 1980s school day walks in St Petersburg, Russia. Slightly more than half a dozen moderately sized and small oil-and-acrylic paintings completed within the past year hang quitely on white walls. Iliatova reflects on her own past with deep longing for times both missed and long since passed, bringing strange, forlorn, cross-continental energy into the depicted spaces. 

One striking factor in all of these paintings is her master skill of composition. Specifically, the complexity of composition in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (2020) echoes Nicolas Poussin’s Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man (1655). The poses in both paintings are derived from Roman antiquity, as if statues came to life and were captured in a still. The stillness in Iliatova and Poussin’s work is eerily similar but the subjects could not be more different. Iliatova handles multi- figure compositions with Poussin’s grace and, in this particular work, also ties in the architecture of stairs with organic rhythm. While the staged nature of her painting – in a contemporary context – may at first glance appear uncomfortable, the classical construction feels unmistakably familiar. In this case, teenage girls with wandering glances appear hanging out together, but remain emotionally removed from each other in an industrial building amid an anachronistic landscape outside the window. Iliatova’s painting thrives on that familiarity: young women, most likely school-age (right about when Iliatova herself moved to the United States from USSR), are positioned in poses suggesting conversation and interaction. Upon closer observation, however, every single figure appears implicitly lonely, gazing down or past the others. Where Poussin’s depictions of such gazes and poses play up the drama, in Iliatova’s work they mirror a state of being, one representing both nostalgia for a time since passed and a lost opportunity for connection. Upon first glance, one of her other paintings in the show, The Ties That Bind (2019), has a similar sentiment to Poussin’s The Finding of Moses (1638). Rhythm and composition are striking in the same way, but the meaning and the somewhat bizarre arrangement of young women in a park in Iliatova’s work sets them apart from the 17th century painter by bringing them into the contemporary. 

Similarly, Iliatova’s color palette reflects on the particularity of time and place. Granite grays cast a shadow over this body of work. The warm pink gray colors are reminiscent of riverbank pedestrian paths along the Neva and Fontanka Rivers in St. Petersburg where so many school girls have spent evenings hanging out after classes. Iliatova uses a distinct palette – well known to any St. Petersburg native – evoking the region’s long, dark winters, its rainy summers. The stone city that was built on swamps by Peter the Great is close to its inhabitants’ hearts, even the ones who left at a budding age. 

Iliatova uses paint to visualize the intangible subject of nostalgia. Even if the viewer is unfamiliar with the setting, there is a clear, recognizable sense of longing for the past. She doesn’t just yearn for one time or place, though, but a full bouquet of places, styles, relationships and interactions. Even though the light and feel is straight out of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s landscapes, the buildings in some of Iliatova’s works, such as The Big Reveal (2020), are somewhat industrial, bringing it into a modern context. The landscape is perhaps a wink at 18th and 19th-century painters, but the most fascinating mishmash occurs in the fashion of the figures. The combination of sweaters, dresses and patterns ranges from the 1960s to the 1990s and even today, where vintage clothing finds a new life through thrift shops. For example, a reclining figure in the foreground in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible wears a turquoise dress; this dress is reminiscent of a 1980s-era Bloomingdale’s catalog, but the adjacent figure could easily be taken as a contemporary passerby on the street in Gowanus. The mystery comes from the artist herself, who finds her models’ outfits in crevices of Brooklyn’s thrifting shops. The choice is conscious and deliberate as Iliatova paints and repaints every figure to be both relatable yet a standalone monument to time. How does one capture time in a still image? Iliatova seizes these moments by painting her subjects in passive actions such as reading, stretching or gazing outward.  

The painterly application of brushstrokes suggests both timing and an allusion to classical painting. Iliatova is a superbly skilled painter, who depicts her world with poetic intelligence. She employs an academic style, showing off the gestural nature of figure painting. Every stroke reflects a motion, yet everything is precise, with intention. Every element of application is thorough with realistic and painstakingly depicted figures to almost Gerhard Richter-esque, blurred backgrounds. She marries elements of the history of painting within bare square inches of her paintings, but does so seamlessly and effortlessly.  This expert mix of contemporary and classical style, combined with surreal anachronism transport viewers to another time and place while maintaining an air of familiarity. 

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April 6 to June 17, 2017
522 W 19th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York City, chambersfineart.com

Though it promises to bring us closer to a subject, the zoom button on a phone camera merely enlarges what the device cannot grasp. Xie Xiaoze’s blown-up book paintings—really paintings of photographs of books—also purport to bring us into close proximity with their subject. The more we look at these images, however, the more they show us how much is missing.

Taken from libraries around the world, the books depicted in these images are, at most, the length of a forearm, but the artist enlarges them to fill body-length canvases. The paintings faithfully reproduce the focal range and cropping of the source photographs, leaving some books blurred and others cut off at the edge.

Although Xie renders details such as lettering on spines without a trace of the brushstroke, his paint application is not neutral. Rather, the overall softness of his brushwork creates a dreamy, distant quality. In Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University (2016), the artist blends the background color with a raking motion that aligns with the horizontally-laid pages of the books. Left-hand cropping further accentuates this cross-wise blur, giving us the sense of panning across the subject rather than fixing our gaze directly upon it. Though they are heavy as stones, Xie paints his books as if they were fluttering in the wind.

As their covers are closed and spines crumbling, we must rely on the gallery handout to reveal the contents of these books. A piece entitled Tribhuvan University Library Rare Book Room (Study No. 2) (2016), from a Nepalese collection of works on eastern thought and religion, shows a book covered by a fantastically wrinkled cloth. A triad of paintings, Through Fire (Books that Survived the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance at Tsinghua University) (2017), depicts half-burned Chinese books, rescued from Japanese attacks during World War II.

What we cannot see in the text Xie reveals through color. As if to evoke flames from Japanese firebombs, the artist has heightened the rich reds in the leather of the Through Fire books, which stand out sharply against their blackened pages. In The Morgan Library and Museum (f318) (2017), books jacketed in vivid greens and oranges rest on cool steel-gray shelving units. In the Tribhuvan University painting, rivers of orange cloth drape over the decaying book, a warm foil to a cool gray-green background. Transmitted through the slurry of Xie’s brushwork, these high-key colors leave us feeling slightly nauseated.

The blurring in Xie’s paintings invites comparison to that of Gerhard Richter’s photo-based works—which exaggerate the defects of their source material, news photographs, and snapshots. According to Richter, the haze was intended to remove any attachment to the image’s content: “I blur to make everything equal, everything equally important and equally unimportant.” While similarly detached from rational apprehension, Xie’s subjects connect nevertheless through the senses. Amidst the rot and the crumble of decaying books, the artist draws us close to our own fleshy weakness.

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October 10, 2015 to January 10, 2016
1219 SW Park Avenue (at SW Madison Street)
Portland, OR, 503 226 2811

“Cézanne’s was not a canvas, it was a landscape.”
-Frantz Jourdain

I recently went to the Portland Art Museum to look at “Seeing Nature,” a survey of “landscape masterworks” from the Paul Allen Family Collection. Passing through the Paradise: Fallen Fruit imbroglio at Portland Art Museum’s entrance makes this exhibition an even more pleasurable destination. The former’s tormented, though enjoyable, curatorial bent is a commentary on modern culture and our inheritance of its public spaces, through various paintings and sculptures of PAM’s permanent collection spanning several eras, abutted sans-info or contextual sequencing. Less the mélange than a remix, though extremely understated, sculptures are clustered on a plinth at center gallery, while paintings hang in crushes along the walls. A good thing about this concept is that it takes canonized works and forces the viewer to answer for themselves the question, “Why is this major?” It’s a contemporary idea not short on tradition. That it’s jumbled up isn’t a reproach, it’s the point of the piece — to raise questions by making a work of art out of past works. But “Seeing Nature”’s M.O. is something much simpler though still nuanced, and visiting both exhibitions makes for two different museum experiences. One way of presenting a collection isn’t more valuable than the other, but what happened during my visit made certain institutional implements seem worthy of their subsisting charms.

The Paul Allen Family collection, some of whose 39 works are seen here in public for the first time, is composed of quite a few French Impressionist works and an impressive, wide array of other works from the last 500 years. The exhibition’s supreme appeal seems to be its intention to give the sensory experience of landscape. However old-hat this may seem to be, it works. The show’s sequencing is uncomplicated, with ample wall space between works, allowing space for longer looking. Three large galleries hold the paintings with central seating in each for tired feet, long visits, Instagramming, etc., and the the walls are affixed with artworks in unexpected and titillating curations.

The first room features the glorified French works including five by Monet, as well as Paul Signac’s Morning Calm, Concarneau, Opus 219 (Larghetto) (1891) with a musical connection in Pointillist fragmentation, like musical notes coming together to form a number. Signac’s fragments, like other of the experimentally adventuresome paintings in this show, fully allow the viewer to put the optical illusion of sailboats off the coast of Brittany together retinally and with their imagination. Seeing Gustav Klimt’s experimental 1903 oil painting of a birch forest at Attersee, Birch Forest, I can’t help but laugh, picturing Klimt painting among the birches, holding up his opera glasses to distort and augment the sights. The close-up view of birches juxtaposed with spacial illusion of the rest of the forest is dizzying and totally pleasurable.

Still, the same question can be asked: Why are these paintings famous and why should I care? My favorite of the show, Henri Le Sidaner’s Serenade at Venice (1907), immediately sent me into a state of reverie and welled my eyes, which also happened when I saw Degas’ Café Singer (1879) in Chicago. What causes such a reaction? Light (paint) forming the impression of life (the singer’s red lips, the sun, or in Le Sidaner’s case, low nocturnal flameglow). Le Sidaner, “delicious rhapsodist of night,” replicates the feeling of gloaming at night by way of painted paper lanterns, the luxury of sightseeing, and music made possible by subtle chiaroscuro (without Baroque melodrama) in his 1905 painting of gondoliers on a Venetian lagoon.

One of the other two rooms is full of Modernist favorites like O’Keefe, Ruscha, Richter, Hockney, Magritte, and Ernst, many of which are stretches when it comes to landscape, raising the question: what is a landscape? Take for instance Ed Ruscha’s Premium Oil (1965), a painting that brings the landscape to its viewer in its absence. What Ruscha presents here is a large silhouetted building, with the landscape a mere suggestion left to the viewer’s imagination. One would be remiss to not mention David Hockney’s massive panoramic stunner in oil, The Grand Canyon (1998), a veritable contemporary Fauve take on the natural monument. It’s by turns flat, illusionistic, cartoony, and naturalistic.

The third room features the older of the paintings, with artworks that document a return to classical themes, myths, and architecture. Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 1625 series, “The Five Senses,” involves the landscape combined with portraiture and still life, while Venice occupies the canvases of Turner, Canaletto, Manet, and Moran.

Returning to the first room to leave, I happened on Joan Kirsch, an art historian and docent giving a public tour. Knowing her wide frame of reference and clear, entertaining eloquence, I couldn’t miss the chance to listen in. Joan’s one of a kind who’s been around a while. She once told me that she used to rollerskate to the Met and then roll around the galleries looking at all the art. She and her group were at Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1888-90). I learned things that contextualized an already thrilling painting in ways that maybe wouldn’t happen without the mediated viewing of the guided tour. In Cézanne, this kind of viewing is absolutely helpful.

Knowing that Cézanne has probably influenced every painter since his death doesn’t lessen his works’ challenging aspects. In this and the hundreds of Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings Cézanne made, the natural landscape looks unnatural, larger than life, not at all like it does in situ. Cézanne’s structured, strange brush strokes (owing their slant to his left-handedness) reflect the painter’s emotional baggage, to paraphrase Joan. He painted his interpretation — what he wanted you to see, not what’s necessarily there. All this led to a conversation about why so much of the work in this exhibition was satisfying, and why we call this kind of work “great.” Cézanne (one of the first experimental painters of the Modern era), like so many of the artists in this exhibition, only wanted to give you part of the picture and so he left the rest for the viewer to discern or keep wondering about. “When you’re in a forest,” Joan explained, “you don’t even need to see the whole tiger. If you see his tail, you run.”

“Seeing Nature” will also travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and will conclude at the Seattle Art Museum in 2017.

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22 July to 18 October, 2015
Schaumainkai 63 60596 (at Dürerstraße)
Frankfurt am Main, Germany +49 69 6050980

Frankfurt’s 200-year-old Städel Museum used its impressive 2012 extension to revisit the somewhat unfashionable work of the last generation of artists to come to prominence in the west of a divided Germany. 97 mostly large works by painters born shortly after the war are set out in a mixture of geographic and thematic groupings, which keeps the flow healthily unpredictable: Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg as the main centers, and self-portraits, the body and politics as subject orientations. As in the US and Italy, this era’s expressive figurative painters — dubbed the Junge Wilde (“Wild Youth”) — were seen as an antidote to Minimalism and Conceptualism, and had their moment in the market before the crash of 1987.

Many of these works haven’t been exhibited since then, and only Martin Kippenberger (who died in 1997) and maybe Albert Oehlen have maintained comparable profiles. Otherwise, the mantle of figurative significance has reverted to generations before (Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter) and after (Neo Rauch and the Leipzig school). This show demonstrated that the work, though diverse, benefits from being seen together; that there are more connections than might be assumed with the preceding and succeeding generations; and that it’s worth looking again at a wider spread of the 27 artists included.

How coherent are these paintings, seen as a group? The majority can be described as loosely and somewhat aggressively painted, trading on the apparent speed of execution, with plenty of ambiguity. Maybe it’s me reading backwards to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ended the period covered, but I also found myself drawn into the frequency with which apparent contradictions — of visual languages or content — are brought together in the same painting, as if reflecting the divided nation. That’s to be expected in the section labelled “The Political Collage.” But other rooms feature the phenomenon as well, as in works such as Volker Tannert’s Small Ceremony for the Modern (1982), in which Albert-Speer-like floodlights illuminate a post-war skyscraper, and Gerard Kever’s Untitled (1982), which combines “televised” clouds with “real” ones. A particularly striking example is KaDaWe (1981), a vast (340 x 483 cm) collaboration by Salomé and Luciano Castelli, which adopts and subverts capitalist modes of display by depicting the artists in performance, mimicking the “poses” of meat hanging over a department store butcher’s counter. Kippenberger is the master of this mode, and all four of his works here conjoin disparate elements: Two Proletarian Women Inventors on their Way to the Inventors’ Congress (1984) shows the pair on their way to collect an “innovation award” — which was probably for something already well-established in the West — set against both a Malevichian monochrome and a swirling Abstract Expressionist background, mocking all ideologies equally.

The break from preceding modes doesn’t seem extreme in retrospect. Most of the subjects are straight from the lives of the artists: punk music, sex, the city, painting itself. When the Mülheimer Freiheit group (named for the address of a Cologne studio shared by Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger) give things a kitchily surreal twist, it’s to no radical effect.

The precedents of the Expressionist generation are often explicit: Rainer Fetting’s Large Shower (1981) puts Ernst Ludwig Kirchner figures into a gay sauna; and Egon Schiele is summoned by the quintessentially 1980s pre-VCR action of Werner Büttner’s Self-Portrait Masturbating in a Cinema, which neatly inverts the “paintbrush as penis” trope. A landscape by Berndt Zimmer, Field, Rape (1979), is close to color field abstraction. Walter Dahn’s Double Self (1982) reminded me of David Hockney’s early ‘60s work, when what would become Pop was still messy. And Milan Kunc is close to later mainstream Pop. Looking forward, the artists of the Leipzig school have continuities with their ‘80s forebears, many of whom taught them, though they generally paint with more clarity and a different historical awareness: more a unification of previously competing tendencies, less a tendency to accept clashes within a painting.

Who deserves more attention? There’s nothing here to challenge the primacy of the group who studied together in Hamburg, where Sigmar Polke taught Georg Herold, Werner Büttner, the Oehlen brothers and, of course, Kippenberger; but the geographic picture is complicated by Kippenberger’s move to Berlin in 1978. Bettina Semmer was in that circle, too, and she (along with G.L. Gabriel) emerged as the most substantial female presence in a rather male scene. Each of Semmer’s three contributions are striking in different ways, and though this show doesn’t look at what these artists — most of them still practicing — did next, her subsequent work is also varied and interesting. Tannert (a student of Richter) and Andreas Schulze impress, too, though the latter’s paintings have a monumental stillness rather at odds with the tenor of the show.

The prevailing intensity edges into the histrionic in the weaker works, and the free markmaking becomes more vague than dynamising. Can the so-called 80ers, as a whole, be defended as deliberately practicing “Bad Painting,” which opposes the idea of harmonious art, whether traditional or avant-garde? Kippenberger, as with a naïvely conventional portrait sharpened by the title Mother of Joseph Beuys (1984), delivers persuasively to that agenda. So does Oehlen: two of his works here allow mirrors to disrupt the illusionistic space of the painting, knowingly undermining the established codes. And in Moonlight Falling into the Fuehrer’s Headquarters (1982), they also reflect his viewers back into a space containing a swastika. As the show’s curator, Martin Engler, says, “Contexts are consciously ruptured. The moment of dissolution becomes the content of the image.” I don’t sense the same analytic justification for the apparent badness in all cases, so that I can’t see this show bringing the likes of Helmut Middendorf and Salomé back to international attention. Indeed, perhaps the museum implicitly acknowledges a more national audience by not translating the catalogue into English — as it does those for most shows. None of that, though, detracts from a fascinating and superbly presented time capsule of a survey.

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Joining Moderator David Cohen to review shows of Diana Al-Hadid at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Mernet Larsen at Vogt Gallery, Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman Galley and Andrea Zittel at Andrea Rosen Gallery

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On the ground floor in the very narrow, five story Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan is Glenn Brown’s Oscillate Wildly (After “Autumnal Cannibalism” by Salvador Dali) (1999). Up the steep stairs you come upon Willem van de Velde the Elder’s pen and ink drawing, A Dutch Harbor in Calm, with small vessels inshore and beached among fisherman, a Kaag at anchor and other ships (late 1640s); and then you view oil paintings by Alex Katz, (Provincetown, 1959) Christopher Wool (Jazz and AWOL, 2005) and Alberto Giacometti (Téte de Diego, 1958).  And still further upstairs, amid austere abstractions by Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Brice Marden and Robert Morris, Betty Tompkins’ large acrylic Fuck Painting #4 (1972) is something of a surprise.

All these works are in grisaille, which here is understood not just as another color but the non-color remaining when all other colors are eliminated. North Renaissance masters sometimes painted the outer wings of altarpieces in grisaille. Imitating the look of stone, these constrained images were generally visible only during Lent. Because grisaille is perceptually inert, that non-color is ideally suited to conceptual and minimal art.  Jasper Johns’ Screen Piece 5 (1968) feels withdrawn, and Daniel Buren’s Photo-souvenir: Peinture acrylique blance sur tassi rayé, blanc et gris anthracite (1966) looks sullen. We do, it is true, think of ‘a grey day’ as depressing, but in this gallery, set against intensely colored walls, this ensemble of grisaille works is oddly exhilarating.  When academic art historians have devoted so much bookish attention to identifying relationships between the old masters, the modernists and contemporary”artists, how exciting, how positively life-enhancing it is to see the way “grisaille’ relates American and European art from historically distant periods. The great modernist art writer Adrian Stokes argued that color allows pictorial “organization to be  . . .  intricate: a mutual evocation between forms must take place at all angles and at all distances and in all directions throughout a picture, so that each part will seem rooted in its place and working there.” By asking us to identify felt affinities between very diverse paintings and sculptures, savoring the connections between Jeff Koons’s Italian Woman (1986), Gerhard Richter’s Grau (1974), and John Currin’s L’intimité (2011), all installed in front of five lengths of Joesph Dufour et Cie’s panoramic wallpaper entitled Reconciliation of Venus and Psyche: Psyche Abandoned, Psyche Wafted by Zephyrs (1815), this grisaille ensemble functions as a total work of art.

Luxembourg & Dayan has generously supported this sensationally good exhibition, which was first seen in London last month, with a lavish catalogue containing tipped-in plates, like those found in Skira publications of a half-century ago, a nicely luxurious touch.

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In recent years, Gerhard Richter has increasingly focused on his abstract works with their distinct technique involving squeegees and wooden rulers, pulling back from his alternative, realist idiom. In Richter’s world, changes are minute, nuanced and occur over long periods of time. In his abstract paintings, palette and the varying density of composition are the characterizing ingredients, prompting discussion of such intangibles as atmosphere and emotional impact rather than radical changes in style or content in his elusive work.

In his new exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, his first New York solo show in over four years, Richter offers a significant twist on his established vocabulary. The cavernous front space is dominated by a selection of large new white paintings. Certainly, it would be a misnomer to think of these as  being “white” like a Robert Ryman. Underneath translucent layers of light grays, whites and creams are hints of turquoise and cherry reds. Whereas Richter’s abstract works often feel like lush conglomerates of pasty color, into which you would like to dip your finger, these much flatter paintings veil rather than conceal. They are exercises of restraint and yet they convey melancholy and nostalgia.

Ricther works in cycles and series.  This group is mesmerizing in its grandeur and its expression of serenity. Collectively, it establishes a spiritual aura reminding us of the Rothko Chapel in Houston or Richter’s own large mosaic window (completed 2007) at Cologne Cathedral). The white paintings give way to Richter’s semi-abstract take on the theme of the September 11 attacks. Exhibited here is a print mounted between sheets of glass. The painting to which it relates is September (2005), a recent donation to The Museum of Modern Art by Richter and the collector Joe Hage. The painting is intimately scaled, 20-1/2 x 28-1/4 inches, and bridges Richter’s abstract and realist vocabulary. A crisp blue sky is offset by two large grey verticals, which immediately register as a reference to the twin towers. The scene is obscured by fields of gray, which at times morph into dense clouds of smoke. It is a masterpiece of allusion: smudges evoke airplanes, while a light gray vertical is reminiscent of the reflective windows and metal glistening in the bright morning sun. Even without providing much information or painting out details as he did in October 18, 1977, his Baader-Meinhoff series, Richter succeeds in capturing tragedy with a moving combination of clarity and gravitas.

It seems that Richter’s latest quest is to create paintings for every imaginable mood. Austere, calming, provocative, aggressive, confronting, soothing, luring, denying – these are some of the adjectives that can be applied to works on display. Sometimes, impressions are tied to Richter’s palette – a combination of orange, black and yellow as seen in Abstract Painting (910-2), (2009) might evoke heated tension while a mélange of blue-greens, flesh and coral, as in Abstract Painting (910-6), (2009) feels serene and comforting. On other occasions it is largely due to gesture. Many of Richter’s latest works contain relief-like carvings into the painted surface, possibly made by the other end of his brush or a palette knife.  At times these feel accidental, but they are often strategically placed. These vertical and horizontal lines, which in the case of Abstract Painting (908-4), (2009) hint at the structure of a grid, translate as mysterious inscriptions in ways that relate to Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictographs or Klee’s works on wet clay. They add something quite unusual to Richter’s oeuvre – a faint sense of whimsy. More importantly, they offer a trace of the artist’s hand, which in Richter’s case has for too long, and unjustly so, been deemed mechanical and aloof.

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 11, 2007 under the title “Pax American in the Serene Republic”

The Venice Biennale has been the Olympics of the visual arts since its inception in 1895. In odd years countries choose their artist representatives for permanent pavilions in the Giardini or in rented spaces around town: scuoli, palazzi, churches, cultural foundations. In addition there are major curated exhibitions that offer overviews of the state of art: in the Italy Pavilion, the largest in the Giardini, which since the demise of fascism has become an international survey; in the Arsenale, where generally hipper talents are showcased in a mammoth, historic rope factory; and in a cornucopia of “collateral” satellite events.

This year, for the first time, the director is an American: Robert Storr, a former Museum of Modern Art curator and recently appointed dean of the Yale Art School. The title he has come up with is “Think with the senses, feel with the mind: Art in the present tense.” While his selections and reasonings reflect a notion of art in troubled times, his generally neat, sober, focused festival is a deal less anarchic and querulous than biennials past. Pax Americana has arrived in the Serene Republic.

Actually, a division between the Giardini and the Arsenale, crudely speaking, is between War and Peace. The rougher, former military-industrial buildings include such meditations on conflict as Mr. Storr’s choices of Italian artists Paolo Canevari, whose “Bouncing Skull” (2007) features a kid kicking around a skull in front of a gutted tower block in the former army HQ in Belgrade, and Gabriele Basilico’s sumptuously ruinous cityscapes, “Beirut 1991” (2003). The mood in the work of both, however, is melancholy and poignant rather than desperate or macabre. Argentine Léon Ferrari, by contrast, went for the jugular with “Western-Christian Civilization” (1965), in which Christ is crucified on an American bomber. The inclusion of this early work at the opening of the exhibit reads as a political apologia by Mr. Storr.

Having, so to speak, atoned for his passport at the Arsenale, the American curator has no qualms in presenting many of his countrymen in the Italia pavilion, which is the heart of the Biennale. There are rooms devoted to Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois and Sol LeWitt, Biennale familiars all, but also to newer introductions for an international audience such as Elizabeth Murray, Thomas Nozkowski and Raymond Pettibon. Mr. Nozkowski’s thoughtful, quirkily compact little abstractions – loosely intimating specific sources and improvising playfully upon art historical precedents – epitomize Mr. Storr’s thesis of art at the nexus of the sensual and the cerebral.

Two of the largest rooms are given over to German giants of the contemporary scene, Gerhard Richter (whose 2002 MoMA retrospective was organized by Mr. Storr) and Sigmar Polke. But where Mr. Richter might have contributed to the sense of political tension and terrorism with his Baader-Meinhof paintings, and Mr. Polke with his cacophonous, deliberately overloaded referential paintings, they are shown instead here in a serene mode, Mr. Richter with his enigmatically lush smudge paintings and Mr. Polke by a series of arcane, near-monochrome sensual pictures using violet pigments on irregular stretches of fabric, as in “Neo Byzantium” (2005).

With so many Americans elsewhere, the actual American pavilion is given over this year to a deceased Cuban: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996 at age 38. His spare, minimalist heaps of candies and stacks of posters that visitors can take away elegaically symbolize a dispersal of essence. The show offers a welcome moment of quiet and repose amid the clamor of the Biennale.

National pavilions are each chosen by a named commissioner, who is sometimes also that show’s curator. While following their own tastes and local agendas they often respond to the mood set by the Biennale director. The British artist Tracey Emin has played down her carefully cultivated popular persona as the “bad girl” of the British art scene with an elegant, almost prim display. There is nothing like her earlier slept-in bed or tent embroidered with the names of everyone she has slept with. While her imagery continues to play on a harrowing personal mythology of teenage angst – evident in earlier monotypes shown here taken from earlier sketchbooks and delivered in a knowingly pathetic, spindly line – sexual languor does not prevent her paintings from looking like polite salon abstraction riffs on Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell.

Next door, in one of the strongest shows in the Giardini, France’s Sophie Calle picks up Ms. Emin’s self-pity and takes it in a totally different direction. When the artist was jolted via e-mail by a boyfriend, she sent his crass missive to over a hundred women chosen for their different professions and skills and asked each to interpret the letter and propose a reply. A statistician analyses the length of 22 sentences in the letter; a clown reads aloud with personal asides, interpreting the letter in positive terms, grasping at straws, feeling the tenderness of his ellipses and parentheses; a pair of Talmudists debate its meaning dialectically; an actress – Miranda Richardson – reads it dramatically and then performs origami.

In harmony with Mr. Storr’s breakdown of dichotomies, there are many shows that elide the personal and the political. Callum Morton is one of three Australians showing in different venues. In the grounds of a private foundation in the Dorso Duro that also hosted shows for Armenia, Latin America, Scotland, and the New Forest in England, Mr. Morton erected a macabre, battle-worn wreck of a modernist breeze-block house. This turns out to have been modeled on his childhood home, built by his architect father, scaled down to two-thirds actual size. The intrepid visitor enters this smoldering ruin through a front door, only to discover an air-conditioned white marble elevator lobby attended by a custodian in a white jacket. Pressing the button actually releases various ominous sound effects.

It so happens that in the blistering Venetian summer any art work that offers creature comforts is guaranteed sympathetic attention. In Singapore’s slick but thoughtful four-person show at the neo-gothic Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, for instance, Zulkifle Mahmod’s “Sonic Dome: An Empire of Thought” (2007) has a huge circular bed visitors lie on to contemplate a halogen star-studded, sound-filled dome, the bed occasionally vibrating in harmony.

The sprawling Arsenale hosted two large areas for places hitherto excluded from the Biennale: the People’s Republic of China and Africa.  The Chinese offered four women installation artists, including Cao Fei a.k.a. China Tracy, who filled an inflated tent with gentle pop music and computer animations, and Kan Xuan, whose video animations of transmogrifying Buddhist sculptures were placed amidst the arsenal’s rusty, pungent gas tanks. Africa was an odd show. A curatorial panel chaired by Mr. Storr borrowed exclusively from one private collection (Luanda-based Sindika Dotolo’s). While it is a step in the right direction to franchise the continent, the inclusion of a white Spaniard, Miguel Barceló; a dead American, Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the British artists Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare wastes wall space for deserving, living Africans.

Actually, nationality is often a point of contention at the Biennale, whose organization remains a legacy of 1890s nationalism and imperial power. Often countries chose famous citizens who live abroad, or domiciled foreigners. Newly autonomous regions in Europe, such as Wales or Northern Ireland, now have their own shows. Wales, for instance, out in a former beer warehouse on the Giudecca, includes the sculptor Richard Deacon, who lives in London, and the painter Merlin James, who lives in Glasgow, Scotland, but who were both born in the principality. Their shows – sharing space with a thoughtful photography-and-video-based Lebanese national pavilion (Syria and Egypt also have pavilions, incidentally, as does Israel) – are definitely worth the vaporetto ride. Mr. James, in particular, rivals Mr. Nozkowski as a poster boy for Mr. Storr’s notion of thinking sensually and feeling cerebrally. His self-referential yet authentic seeming paintings are delectably anxious about their own condition.

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