In windswept, granite-paved plazas across the country, metal sculptures by Alexander Calder preside like benevolent monsters.  It’s a shame these works possess so little of the charm that the sculptor’s smaller pieces have.  That charm overpowers at the new exhibit at Pace on 57th Street, Calder 1941.  The galleries are filled with pieces Calder completed that year, all with the signature spinning wire arms and medallions, and all scaled intimately.  The smallest pieces are the size of water pitchers, and the largest are just taller than a man.  Each one is light in form and in spirit.  Visiting the gallery was like walking through a garden.

These pieces, particularly the tabletop ones, have a toy-like quality that makes one want to get close to them.  The gallery guard issued three separate warnings to my friend and me while we were there, and he seemed especially harried, as if he’d been overextended since the exhibit opened.  What’s the appeal of these small pieces?  From every angle the sculptures take on a different aspect, so that it’s almost criminal to show them in a single photograph.  As one circles them, the experience is cinematic more than sculptural.  And, from every angle, the thin wire and flat metal shapes are strongly graphic, with delicate asymmetries gives them a personal feeling.  These sculptures feel like they’ve been drawn in the air.

The title of Agnes Martin’s show at Pace Gallery, “The 80’s: Grey Paintings,” sounds less like an art exhibit than a SNL skit about a super-annoying former art star.  In reality Martin’s paintings have a fragile, personal quality that makes them hard to pin down, both in terms of time and place.  Martin came of age with the great minimalist and abstract expressionist New York painters of the 1960’s, but ran away to New Mexico and stopped painting altogether for a while.  Looking at her paintings today, they seem to get at the fundamental conundrum that a painting is both its own new world and a canvas covered with paint.

The works at Pace, all six-by-six-feet squares, have been carefully gridded with graphite and filled with washes of white and light grey paint.  They are delicate – one needs to step right in front of them to see them – and they are luminous and musical.  I’m reminded of Robert Ryman, who also painted mesmerizing all-white squares.  But Ryman’s canvases are highly fetishized objects, all about the richness of the surface.  In contrast Martin’s canvases seem ideal, like fields of possibility.

Architects are fascinated with the sculpture and furniture of Donald Judd, so the title alone of his show at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea (Works in Granite, Cor-ten, Plywood, and Enamel on Aluminum) should make them palpitate. Architects appreciate the vernacular materials and rigorous form-making of Judd’s work, and the way the objects flirt with architectural language without really being architecture, so that they seem strangely attenuated physically and syntactically.  

But when seeing Judd’s work in person, two aspects lost in the adoration quickly become apparent.  First, the works are immaculately crafted.  The plywood Judd uses is the finest grade, sanded super smooth, and joined in ways that the most experienced carpenter would admire.  The steel plates he uses are finished with a delicacy that Richard Serra could not even imagine.  Second, the works are strangely (and disappointingly, I think) non-architectural.  Most are too small to enter and too large to pick up, hovering in the nether-region between furniture and building.  They’re loaded with spatial suggestion but ultimately sculptures.