Throughout her career Mary Frank has struggled to give form to essential dualities: feminine and masculine, birth and death, joy and sorrow, presence and absence, transience and transcendence. Although the impact of her largely figurative work has been considerable, it has seldom been overtly political. Her subjects have been drawn from myth and natural history rather than from human history, that is, until “The Cart Series.”

“The Cart Series” is a group of monoprints on rice paper made in 1985–86. Each print in the series takes the form of a diptych juxtaposing various versions of two images:

In After Man Ray (La Fortune), 1990, Sherrie Levine’s ambitious, elegantly ironic appropriation of Ray’s classically Surrealist painting from 1938, the 19th-century billiard table has been removed from the original dreamscape and carefully reproduced not once, but six times. Though in Man Ray’s painting, the table’s bottle-green surface is raked at an alarming angle, three balls rest on the field of felt in a neat triangular configuration. Levine’s massive mahogany tables are each crowned with an identical triangle of red and white balls. As if in a long camera pan, vast slabs of green and brown