Frederick Sommer’s career is as elusive as the images that comprise it. This is partly because Sommer has put very few of those images into circulation over the years, but more because he has employed such a range of techniques. He has done landscapes, portraits, nudes, and even some street photography. He has accordioned reproductions of Albrecht Dürer prints and photographed the results. He has done paper cutting as if it were a form of automatic writing, and photographed that result with light playing through the slits. He has done superimpositions and collages and assemblages in great variety.

Rodney Ripps could be the victim of a busk. What’s a busk? It’s an ancient ceremony of renewal wherein the household equipment, old clothes, uneaten food, and other odds and ends of a town are burned to ashes in a communal bonfire. American democracy itself was founded on this notion—both Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine articulated the common agreement that laws should be changed with every generation. Jefferson was willing to give each accession 19 years; the artworld gives it a season.

Certainly two years ago, if not one, Ripps’ new work would have ridden the shoulders of the crowd; it’s

In 1948, refugee director Robert Siodmak made his best movie for 20th Century-Fox. It’s called Cry of the City, and in it a hood named Martin Rome (Richard Conte) is on the run in New York after having been wounded in a shooting. At one point Martin gets a rather flashy ex-girlfriend of his, Brenda (Shelley Winters), to help him find medical attention. As she drives the semiconscious Martin around the city at night, an unlicensed doctor who has demanded cash up front operates on him in the back seat of the car. At last the doctor tells Brenda she’ll have to pull over. She does, on a crowded side

The surrealism in the photographs of John Horgan, Jr., is the kind with a small s, the sort that is unintentional. Often, it is a result of the peculiarities of composition when you have to fill a very large picture of a very large landscape. Horgan made albumen mammoth-plate photographs of Southern plantations around 1890. Most of his pictures were done from a distinct elevation to show the sweep of the country, like those establishing shots from a crane in Gone With the Wind. The effect this creates is one of compartmentalization. There are sometimes two or three geographically separate areas

Compared to the work of such neoExpressionists as Rainer Fetting and Salomé (his ex-students, though he isn’t much older than they), K.H. Hödicke’s paintings are neither proudly anti-intellectual nor aggressively expressionistic. He has a way of choosing subjects that seem to address more substantial matter than German art-historical tradition or painting for painting’s sake, but his social commentary exists for the most part on the surface. Hödicke does take on such social ills as prostitution, pornography, and what looks like white imperialism, to name a few, but Hödicke the stylist doesn’t

Choosing subject matter to paint is evidently the least of Bernd Zimmer’s worries. No matter how banal the reality may be, Zimmer will make it look as if it’s a hallucination. His neo-Expressionist landscapes all have the feel of imminent catastrophe, as if in every innocent scene there exists some terribly subtle crime, hidden from the pedestrian eye.

In Grosser Wasserfall (Large Waterfall), 1980, a rush of light water cascades downward over ragged rocks that hover in midair, threatening to crash out of the picture plane. The spatial relationships between rocks and water are a little irrational,

Most of the young American painters and sculptors included in “Represent . . .” are interested in using representation as a means to an end other than itself, or other than as an excuse for art-historical meanderings. The members of this group of 11 artists may not share an approach to making socially engaged art, but they do share what ranges from a playful wish to a longing to subvert social (and artistic) hypocrisies. In one manner or another, their works address the issue of social violence—and this commonality among their paintings and sculptures is as hazy and difficult as the issue itself.

There’s a little bit of everybody in Tom Butter’s new sculpture. First and foremost of all, there’s Eva Hesse—not only because of the use of fiberglass, but also because these seamed cylinders bear a resemblance to her Repetition Nineteen III of 1968—also fiberglass cylinders and, like Butter’s, slightly deformed and dented. Hesse’s were not obviously seamed, but, in fact, two of her other pieces deal almost exclusively with that motif: Seam and Area, both 1968. What’s Butter’s own? The color (both Hesse’s and Butter’s volumes look like the kind of translucent plastic water glasses used in

Even though sculpture moves at a somewhat slower pace than painting, anyone working with welded steel at this point has got to be doing something mighty unusual with it to get the viewer’s adrenalin flowing. When you walk into a roomful of Richard Stankiewicz’s metal works, you could easily get a sinking feeling. If you’re conscientious, you try to pump the saliva back into your mouth and at least admire the obsession.

For Stankiewicz is continuing here his demonstration of the basic strategy of post–David Smith modernism, which Rosalind Krauss once defined as “treat[ing] the sculpture as an

Collectively titled “Myths,” Andy Warhol’s latest series of paintings and prints is, with two exceptions, like a “knock, knock” joke with a yawning silence after “Who’s there?”. It also offers an insight into the success of his earlier portraits, which were always more about iconography than myth. Depicting figures like Mao or Marilyn or Elvis, Warhol’s genius lay in knowing how to make the leap from portrait to product. By accepting and elaborating on an extant, marketed image (a presold package), Warhol was free to traffic in cultural emblems. The wonder of it is that his emblems ultimately

There has always been a creepy, Frenchified romanticism in Deborah Turbeville’s photographs. It’s the kind of esthetic that leads to Delphine Seyrig slinking around in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad or vaguely contemplating suicide in Marguerite Duras’ India Song. Turbeville’s models look as if they’ve been stuffed with Quaaludes and artfully strewn around the set like so many satin throw pillows. And, lest we forget what century we’re living in, every shot is permeated with a “leprosy of the soul” angst.

Thumbing idly through Vogue and hitting a layout by Turbeville can be amusing—a model