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special context. In Los Angeles, in a street-level gallery on Melrose,
Stern's pictures seemed no less robust, no less authoritative as
paintings,
but somehow more aestheticized, less rough-hewn. Your awareness of
California's omnipresent car culture made Stern's shifting crowds seem
newly vulnerable, like an endangered species, while his layered painting
gestures seemed more transient than ever, suggesting a new reading of
these works as about a transplanted European's perceptions of modern
American city life.
The Met's roof garden, with its spectacular views of the ew York
skyline, is a challenging site for any sculpture. The marvelous group of
stainless steel Smiths in this summer's show, intelligently chosen to
demonstrate both his single-mindedness and his wide-ranging inven–
tiveness, his acute sense of the human presence and his ability to create
unprecedented structures, stood up brilliantly to this difficult back–
ground. Except for the expanse of sky, this quintessentially urban set–
ting couldn't be more different from the fields and distant green
Adirondack slopes against which Smith first studied these sculptures,
delighting in the way the burnished stainless steel reflected light and
color. Yet the buildings surrounding Central Park entered into a new
and invigorating conversation with the sculptures, one based not on the
contrast between the man-made and the natural, but on the likeness and
unlikeness of different kinds of man-made constructions-differences of
function, scale, mass, and articulation. This provocative dialogue was a
stimulating bonus to the pleasure of seeing a group of fine works by one
of the giants of twentieth-century sculpture. Not that spending time
with wonderful art in a dramatic setting needs justification.
