Exhibitions of the Week: Alberto Burri at the Guggenheim, Frank Stella at the Whitney

Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting (Until January 6 at the Guggenheim Museum)

Never judge an exhibition by its subtitle. While Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting can grow brutal and unsettling, trauma wasn't everything that Burri was up to. A doctor in the Italian military, Burri turned to painting in the years immediately following World War II, creating abstract compositions using burlap, melted plastic, rope, twine, sheet metal, and occasionally a traditional canvas. His methods were equally various: distending, stitching, pasting, and burning were all favorites. He appears to be an easy artist to interpret -- a metaphor for surgery here, a symbol of industrialized warfare there -- until you are actually surrounded by his canvases, which can range from serene to suave to transporting in effect. Curated with a fine sense of order and progression by guest curator Emily Braun, Burri's first American retrospective in 35 years is probably also the first and best chance to see his work as more than an easy measure of historical violence. His paintings are economical -- allergic, in fact, to any colors beyond red and brown -- but fraught with a thorny poetry.

Addressing twelve major series from Burri's career, The Trauma of Painting is an instructive exhibition on multiple counts. It's a reminder that the Guggeheim Museum has only gotten better at hosting formalist master classes like this one: 2014's Christopher Wool was a masterpiece of lucid installation, hard not to admire even if you hated the art, and the installation here is even better. (The show begins with a trio of translucent seared-plastic paintings, their aluminum frames suspended from a gallery ceiling, and culminates in large monochrome compositions set against angled back walls. Operatic, but it all works.) It's also a reminder that Burri, for all his surface similarities to the better-known large-scale abstractionists of his day, had a temperament with some marvelous incongruities. Not always one to indulge in bombast, he sent miniatures -- the same motifs as his combustion and accumulated paint series, just pocket-sized -- to friends and art collectors. Other types of smaller-scale art never seem to have crossed his mind. Somehow, the self-taught Burri became a superior painter without any sense of how to draw -- a revelation for anyone accustomed to the evocative lines of Pollock and de Kooning and the early Rotko.

For anyone accustomed to seeing Burri as a painter of big, blunt effects, this show will be a revelation of yet another kind. Simply put, Burri's most obvious paintings are his worst. One of the closest things he has to a seminal canvas, the iron-sheet Ferro SP (1961), photographs beautifully but registers as an exercise in tired symbolism in the flesh. Is that red horizontal gash a wound? A canyon? Or (and I'm going with this one) a dull flap of metal painted tomato red? At other times, Burri's art is so baroquely beautiful that it becomes a guilty pleasure. This is especially the case when he turns his palette to pure black, only to run wild with texture, as he does in a cavernously alluring melted plastic painting from 1965 and a transcendent craquelure painting from 1977. Easier to admire are the Gobi (Hunchback) canvases, with their prodded-forward matte red surfaces and random strips of fabric, and the many Sacchi (Sack) compositions, with their subtleties of texture and agitated stitched borders. The beauties in these are harder won, coaxed forward from disproportioned forms and rough materials, signifying throughout the hand of a modern-day Italian master.

Frank Stella: A Retrospective (Until February 2 at the Whitney Museum of American Art)

Last year, before it left the Upper East Side and relocated to its current Meatpacking District quarters, the Whitney staged an indispensable survey of Jeff Koons's career. This year, the museum has given us an equally indispensable survey of a second defining post-modern, Frank Stella. Before I say anything more, however, let me be completely clear about what I mean by "indispensable" - normally an art criticism platitude that keeps sorry company with "unforgettable," "vivid," and "compelling." What I mean is that Frank Stella: A Retrospective will make you feel like an idiot for the next two years if you don't manage to see it. Like Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, it is ripe with big, brash art and overripe with ideas and arguments. It is required viewing if you have any stake in the way we make art and any interest in debating the artistic future, although this doesn't mean that the Whitney's showcase is uniformly good.

Differences of opinion are inevitable with Stella: in fact, they're encouraged. A few years after rising to fame with his Black Paintings -- lumbering canvases that respond to both the grandeur of the Abstract Expressionists and the deadpan of Jasper Johns -- Stella famously declared that "what you see is what you see." That was in 1966, and he's given us a lot to see, love, and hate in the years since then. The austere colors and at times messy brush strokes of the Black Paintings gave way to shaped canvases, close-set lines, and metallic hues that play together as displaced art deco; these gave way to Technicolor paintings composed of irregular polygons and protractor arcs; then these gave way to the part painting, part sculpture, part relief, all expensive experiments that continue to this day. Among art critics, the standard narrative is that Stella's style worsened as his resources grew -- an impression that overdone yet simplistic recent works such as Raft of Medusa (1990) do little to dispel. But to write Stella off as the George Lucas of abstract art is to underestimate both the Whitney's exhibition and the persistence, in spite of the inconsequence of a good fourth of the display, of Stella's powers of structure and disruption.

Stella himself helped curators Michael Auping, Adam D. Weinberg, and Carrie Springer to arrange the survey, which follows a rough chronology but departs for the sake of association, contrast, and visual drama. The 50 foot-long Damascus Gate (Stretch Variation III) of 1970, perhaps the most resplendent of the great protractor paintings, is positioned at the very center: it serves much as Stella intended, as a motor for the rest of the exhibition. (It also enables the organizers to turn the Whitney's galleries more impressive, making them cavernous and imposing in the wake of the busy America Is Hard to See.) From there, the impetus is to branch off and try Stella's different series against this achievement and against each other. There are unexpected winners: the Polish Village series, wood reliefs that appeared right after the protractors and polygons of the late 1960s and that show Stella approaching a new medium with both excitement and tact. There are more-expected losers: anything with metal piping, anything post-protractor that uses more than four colors. But even the extravagant failures seem to have something to say. Stella is now almost 80; the fame he earned with the austere Black Paintings and their immediate kin would lead to forms and colors that seem entirely nuts. Is he trying to find a way back into austerity? On the basis of the reductive but pretty good Wooden Star I and Black Star sculptures, both from 2014, he could be. Or is he daring a younger generation of painters to outdo his nuttiness, to unashamedly power its way towards the next Damascus Gate and, quite possibly, the next Frank Stella?