Sketches From the Man Of Steel

Few artists have pushed drawing to such sculptural and even architectural extremes as Richard Serra. He has magnified the medium with immense black shapes that sit directly on the wall, their absorptive darkness forcing the space around them to expand or contract. Using black oil paintstick, he has exaggerated drawing’s physical surface, creating expanses of texture that have the rough tactility of bark, or massing dark, roiled spheres as thick as mud pies.

Now Mr. Serra is pushing the Metropolitan Museum of Art to new extremes, with a stark, sometimes compelling, sometimes off-putting retrospective of his drawings. The show could be called a qualified win-win, which may be as good a result as could be hoped for.

The first survey of Mr. Serra’s drawings to be mounted by an American museum, the show has been organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, along with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Laying out Mr. Serra’s drawing career with unfamiliar thoroughness, it barrels through 40 years of his adamantine engagement with the medium with a sweep that manages to encompass aspects of latter-day Abstract Expressionism while presaging today’s sociable relational-aesthetics art. It contains 41 installation drawings and large to very large framed works; four early videos that convey a visceral sense of his attachment to process, gravity and weight; and an immensely revealing, sometimes touching display of nearly 30 sketchbooks of the kind that Mr. Serra almost always carries with him but has never exhibited.

It is not quite like anything seen at the Met before: genuinely radical, physically unsettling art installed with a reasonable degree of effectiveness. It proclaims this august institution’s commitment to recent art with an encouraging forcefulness.

But there are shortcomings. For one thing — and this is basic — drawing doesn’t afford Mr. Serra the same leeway in terms of real space, real materials and audience participation that sculpture does. He is, in fact, a more austere, abstract, hermetic, “difficult” artist in drawing than in sculpture, and this narrowness sometimes accentuates his penchant for bombast and opacity. At the same time, the Met’s galleries, whether old or new, still manage to feel singularly inhospitable to postwar art, regardless of quality. It is as if the museum had the visual equivalent of a hopeless tin ear in this regard.

If the show does not represent a completely easy fit — between the Met and the new, or Mr. Serra and drawing — it helps that the artist seems to have been given carte blanche in the installation, and that he has devised ways of being in, but not completely of, the Met. The labyrinthine layout funnels viewers through spaces that seldom seem as long or as wide as they are tall, creating something of the effect of the cavernous passages of his torqued ellipses and other double-walled sculptures.

Similarly, the exhibition itself starts like a shot, with an opening gallery lined wall to wall with works that serve as a kind of full-on Richard Serra primer. It’s a deliberate vote against the genteel pause at the beginning of most major loan shows at the Met — a generally empty gallery dedicated to renting audio guides, reading wall texts and maybe sampling an artwork or two.

In a sense, this gallery, too, echoes the experience of a Serra sculpture, offering, in more diffuse form, something of the same disorienting immediacy. It immerses you in his stringent vocabulary of geometric shapes, some on paper or linen stapled to the wall. It signals his singular devotion to black — whether graphite, ink, charcoal or paintstick — as his only drawing color. (It’s the heaviest.) And it introduces his resolute emphasis on material, process, scale and space and an actively engaged viewer. There is a text panel here, but the implication, as with all Mr. Serra’s work, is that we must “see for ourselves” in the fullest sense of the term.

On every side, you sense the dismantling and rebuilding process by which Mr. Serra — and other American Post-Minimalists like Barry LeVa, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse and Joel Shapiro — wrestled sculpture beyond the closed forms and rigid endgames of Minimalism. Opposite the entrance, a series of 18 drawings of nothing but three or four charcoal lines creates a perspectival dance, intimating the shifting edges of Mr. Serra’s big, looming sheets of steel from different vantage points. (He was drawing while moving among the four converging planes of “Circuit,” one of his earliest steel-plate pieces.) Triangles and wedges suggest the planes themselves, angling through space or nestling in the landscape. Elsewhere, in a large, unframed work, a beamlike rectangle sits on a tangible horizon of folded paper.

Once past this gallery, the conventions of drawing are either left behind or aggressively manipulated. In “Forged Drawing” paintstick is applied to four chunky, geometric slabs of forged steel nearly four inches thick; now that’s weight. The wall functions less as a giant page than as an active plane that the best paintstick-on-linen pieces push into and skew.

“Pacific Judson Murphy,” which wraps around the corner of one gallery, sucks us toward it, and sucks the light out of the room as it goes. Other drawings tease ambiguously. The two big squares of “Zadikians” tilt slightly toward each other and seem to jiggle on the wall. The big, seemingly rectangular “Abstract Slavery” is actually a trapezoid; all its edges are in contention with the horizontals and verticals of its wall.

Made in 1974 and sardonically named for the labor required to cover its expanse in paintstick, “Abstract Slavery” is the first of several pieces with aggressive titles that hint at the emotional urges that often motivate Mr. Serra’s abstraction. Others, glowering in one of the show’s middle galleries, have names like “No Mandatory Patriotism” and “The United States Courts Are Partial to Government.” These two works, both diptychs, were made in 1989, just after Mr. Serra’s huge 1981 public sculpture, “Tilted Arc,” was removed from a dismal Lower Manhattan plaza, following an acrimonious hearing and court case initiated by people who worked in the federal office building it sat in front of.

In an interview in the catalog, Mr. Serra refers to these works, which are framed but not under glass, as “revenge” drawings. In each, a pair of big separate squares of blackened paper — like those in “Zadikians” — now collide and jostle, immovable objects meeting irresistible forces.

Not everything works equally well. In the catalog essays Mr. Serra frequently comes across as the main hero of the cult of late modernist abstraction, with its emphasis on materiality, process and pure perception, unclouded by imagistic associations. His drawings “are not about something, they are something,” writes Michelle White, a Menil curator, in the first essay, having just quoted another true believer saying, “They do not imply weight, they are weight.”

But at times this show suggests that without the steel forms and volumes of the sculptures, the work can sometimes seem at once meager and histrionic. Some pieces seem to present empty echoes of traditional authoritative formats. Looking at “Taraval Beach,” for example, a 1977 paintstick drawing that stretches floor to ceiling on one broad wall, you understand intellectually that as the audio guide intones, “it references the wall, floor and ceiling.” Still, it also brings to mind a Baroque altarpiece as dreamed up by black-loving Abstract Expressionist painters like Clyfford Still and Ad Reinhardt.

Some of Mr. Serra’s most recent drawings tolerate new levels of representation, in the forms of heavy spirals and arcs and especially the roiled spheres, whose thick build-up he forms partly with his feet. These works transcend — or contradict — their considerable materiality to resemble dark, toxic planets, and they seem genuinely furious but also comedic.

Such ambiguities are extended in the exhibition’s expansive final gallery, where the display of sketchbooks shows Mr. Serra drawing pyramids in Giza, basalt palisades in Iceland, and a bather from a painting by Cézanne, as well as his own work. The show’s parting surprise is open-endedness. Actually, anything could happen now.