MICHAEL KIMMELMAN_info.pdf

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN (NYT) 587 words

Published: December 26, 2004

THE opening of the Museum of Modern Art was hands down the grandest and most talked about event of the

fall. But the retrospective of the Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu at the Japan Society in New York was

the most moving. Mr. Tomatsu's pictures -- severe, tragic and dispassionately beautiful -- are works of genius.

I caught sight of Richard Tuttle earlier this month at the Wolfsonian museum in Miami Beach mulling over how

much more he could pack into a small room filled with oddments he had been invited to select from the

museum's collection. They included Tiffany finger bowls and a Hitler pincushion. The links weren't necessarily

obvious, but as always with Mr. Tuttle, the show was really a subtle exercise in the virtues of looking hard, at

unexamined things. And on the topics of looking hard and subtlety, not many artists have rivaled Agnes Martin's

Zen mastery of color and line. She died this year. So did Leon Golub, a big-hearted painter of opposite

temperament and equally passionate conviction, an agitator for justice and an endearing grump.

I also watched Richard Serra install five of his 22-ton sculptures last spring, forged steel blocks, in four ornately

frescoed rooms along one side of the garden of the National Archaeological Museum in Naples: the identical

blocks turned and rotated on end to appear different one from another, to displace volume differently in each

room. There was Mr. Serra, like a modern Atlas, throwing a shoulder into one of the enormous blocks being

hauled into place atop air cushions.

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan accomplished their own heroic feat, publishing a richly detailed biography of

Willem de Kooning. And while we're talking about artists who defined the last century: Henri Cartier-Bresson

also died this year, in August, and I remember Richard Avedon just a few weeks earlier describing when he and

Cartier-Bresson first met. Cartier-Bresson, Avedon lamented, had complained about Avedon's portraits. Two

months later, Avedon died. Both men, so different, made the world seem huge and endlessly fascinating.

Magical pictures arrived this year at Lucas Schoormans Gallery in Chelsea with a Giorgio Morandi show, in

Howard Hodgkin's ecstatic paintings at Gagosian and in the sprawling Byzantium survey at the Met. There was

magic in the monumental Aztecs exhibition at the Guggenheim; in Dan Flavin's light sculptures at the National

Gallery; in Eve Sussman's slow-motion video version of ''Las Meninas'' by Velázquez, with its soundtrack of

swooshing fabric, at the Whitney Biennial; and in Robert Frank's early photographs at Tate Modern.

Besides the Flavin show, the year featured a slew of reconsiderations of Minimalism and its progeny, with a

Robert Smithson survey, ''A Minimal Future?'' and ''Beyond Geometry'' in Los Angeles, and a Donald Judd

retrospective in London. They were all important, but I recall a hot, bumpy drive with two friends to Smithson's

''Spiral Jetty'' in Utah last summer. An empty valley rimmed by mountains spilled suddenly down to the Great

Salt Lake, with rushes of cranes flying overhead and fields of sunflowers rising into the rocky slopes.

Photo: ''Après Guerre, Prostitute, Nagoya,'' a photograph by Shomei Tomatsu, who was the subject of a

retrospective this year at the Japan Society in New York.