A Beauty Really Bare

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Actually, Muybridge's influence is a useful clue to LeWitt's intentions. Those photo strips of humans, horses and birds moving in space, their movement chopped into small progressive stages, are the direct ancestors (with cubes or grids substituted for the live subjects) of structures like LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974, which squeezes more variations out of a six-sided figure than you might have thought possible. And yet this solemn undertaking has more the air of a stubborn exercise than an imaginative act. Indeed, there are times when, as in The Location of a Line, 1975 (in the catalog but not included in the Whitney incarnation of the show), the written instructions sound like a mad, pedantic math teacher droning himself and everyone else within range into a coma. Compared with this boilerplate, Euclid reads like Mickey Spillane.

More engaging, because more romantic and genuinely beautiful, are the big accretions of small, white, open cubes, which look like the Platonic idea of ziggurats or ideal cities and recall LeWitt's interest in real-world architecture. Most of the mural-size "wall drawings" on display are fairly inert; their main characteristic is a sort of soothing, high-minded laboriousness that stands in for energy of conception. Still, their depiction of colored solids often has the decorative charm of the geometrical illustrations in old emblem books, and the color, saturated and speckled, is a big step up from the normally posterish hues, alternating between bland and blatant, of LeWitt's earlier work.

But does all this add up to a major and sacrosanct achievement, as the art historians who have compiled the catalog so vehemently claim? To feel so, you would need to think that ideas about art equal art.