There are several artists of the 1960s generation whose portraits have become the icons of an era: Think of Robert Smithson standing alone at the end of his jetty, or Eva Hesse clowning in her studio, or a masked and booted Richard Serra wielding that ladleful of lead. Now try to summon a comparable image of Richard Tuttle. Chances are you will fail.

It may well be that the current Tuttle retrospective—a major exhibition organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn of theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Artand scheduled to travel to New York, Des Moines, Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles—will change things.

For over twenty years, veteran Bay Area conceptualist Jim Melchert has been experimenting with ceramic tile—specifically, with what happens when he breaks it into pieces by dropping it onto a hard surface. The wall works that result from these investigations consist of the reassembled shards of one or more large floor tiles, patterned with drawn or painted marks. But Melchert is interested in something other than the accidental beauty of the skeins of spidery lines created when the brittle object shatters. Instead, in a slightly perverse exploration of “truth to materials,” he focuses on what