Remembrance of things past.

If the path to hell is really paved with good intentions, as my father always maintained, then the organizers of the raucous survey "High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" at the National Academy Museum, should prepare themselves for an uncomfortable afterlife. (1) That this unwieldy, baggy monster of a show means well is beyond dispute. The concept is appealing: a close look at a little examined, provocative moment in the history of recent art. The subject is promising: the years when the aesthetic certainties of post-war abstraction began to weaken under the pressure of new materials, new formal possibilities, new political crises, and new social concerns. And the timing seems right: we're far enough away from the decade or so under review that it should be possible to examine the art of the period with fresh eyes. That the organizers succeeded in bringing their concept to life is admirable and impressive. We have to applaud both the sheer hard work and dogged perseverance required to locate and assemble so many widely dispersed, representative works, and the intellectual effort expended on making sense of this free-wheeling, super-charged era. And we must be grateful for the insight the exhibition offers into the formative, early works of some of today's most respected practitioners "of a certain age," and grateful, too, for the way the show evokes the aesthetic climate in which those works were made and first exhibited.

But--and it's an important "but"--the reach of "High Times/Hard Times" far exceeds its grasp, even if we make allowances for the unavoidable fact that no selection of this kind, however ambitious or comprehensive, can possibly include everyone who might appropriately have been represented. (Just who ought to have been there, of course, depends on whom we talk to; everyone I've encountered has a personal punch list--myself included.) The most peculiar thing about the show is that it not only delivers less than it promises, but it also delivers more. While "High Times/ Hard Times" is by no means the panoramic, all-encompassing overview implied by the subtitle "New York Painting 1967-1975," it does, at the same time, include a great deal of material that seems to enlarge the exhibition's generating premise--a group of eccentric works that escape even the broadest, most elastic definition of "painting," nonetheless presented under that heading. In short, as I suppose we must expect of all wide-ranging surveys, no matter what their stated aims or announced limits, "High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" is informative, exhilarating, irritating, overwrought, and inadequate, all at the same time.

On the plus side, the show includes a lot of art that hasn't been seen much lately. Some of it hasn't aged well, but a lot of it plainly warrants further attention. For countless reasons--the current art world's pursuit of the next new thing, its fascination with unformed youth, the instability of reputation, the constraints of museum exhibition and storage spaces, the vagaries of curatorial taste, the caprice of art dealers, and much more--some of the artists represented in "High Times/Hard Times" have exhibited far less frequently, in recent years, than their promising starts in the late 1960s and early 1970s would lead us to expect. Similarly, the early work of even the show's best known and most consistently exhibited artists has often been hard to come upon. There are exceptions--Richard Turtle, Ron Gorchov, and Joan Snyder, for example, have all had retrospective exhibitions of some kind in the past few years--but for the most part, the chief virtue of the rather shapeless selection at the National Academy is that it reminds us of the number of energetic, individual voices of the period, the diversity of ideas about what a work of art could be, and the amazing variety of ways that those ideas were made manifest, during the heady years, post-Beatles and pre-AIDS, when aesthetic innovation struggled to keep pace with the burgeoning women's movement, nascent gay rights activism, the escalating civil rights movement, and growing resistance to the Vietnam War--not to mention the allure of recreational drugs and other period amusements. At intervals throughout the installation, vitrines of exhibition catalogues, art magazines, and other ephemera hint at the context in which the works on display were produced and exhibited. The catalogue, which is full of artists' statements and nostalgia-provoking period photographs, does a fine job of suggesting what downtown was like during the age of illegal loft living, when Soho was a light manufacturing zone, rents were cheap, everyone involved in the show was a lot younger, and, by all reports, anything seemed possible.

At first, "High Times/Hard Times" seems to live up to the promise of its subtitle. It begins with a generous selection of mostly large, muscular paintings, starting with a big Guy Goodman in the lobby of the National Academy Museum's elegant building--a brash work constructed with giant, layered strokes, overlapped and clenched in the middle of the canvas, like tightly crossed legs. Upstairs, we encounter such works as Dan Christensen's exuberant tangle of spray painted loops, glowing against an expansive white ground. It's difficult to decide whether the picture should be classified as an intelligent, high-art version of graffiti or an uninhibited riff on Jackson Pollock's all-over pours, inflected by the vernacular and the psychedelic, but however we choose to classify it, Christensen's zingy canvas is a high point of the show. (The freshness and energy of the painting adds special poignancy to the artist's sudden death early this year, shortly after a mini-retrospective of his work opened at Spanierman Gallery, and before the opening of "High Times/Hard Times")

Moving on, we keep encountering works that bear witness to the way Christensen's colleagues, as he did, tested new materials and new ideas to expand the limits of what a painting could be. It's not all wonderful, but the best works play with the apparently unassailable givens of the taut, rectangular canvas and discover new possibilities. Jo Baer and Cesar Paternosto emphasized the edges of their paintings, literally, by restricting their geometric imagery to the "sides" of canvases stretched on exaggeratedly thick bars; they turned structural necessity into the main event and succeeded in challenging, at least briefly, entrenched conceptions of the physical nature of painting. Ralph Humphrey and Ron Gorchov posited similar notions, in very different ways. Humphrey, as was typical of him, rounded off the corners of Untitled (1969), like an old-style TV screen, a simple intervention that alters our associations with the picture's undulating field of pastel bars; Gorchov not only rounded the edges of Cockrobin (1975), but also warped his support, so that the economical, confrontational image that results becomes a vaguely threatening, makeshift shield.

Others attacked the conventions of "straight painting" even more audaciously, examining the permutations of edge, surfaces, shape, and substance, sometimes dispensing with the stretcher and, sometimes jettisoning the notion that paintings hang on the wall. Lynda Benglis detached paint from its support in her poured latex "fallen" paintings, spreading crisp-edged, elongated pools of intense color at our feet. The late Al Loving layered strips of torn, stained canvas into a loose-jointed, jazzy, irregular shape that at once invokes the legacy of Cubism, Color Field painting, and the accidental palimpsests of old posters on urban walls. The catalogue's equating this kind of "soft" construction with feminist ideology would probably have not amused the picture's author. Louise Fishman, who would approve of the connection, casually joined small rectangles of canvas, stained dark gray, into a ramshackle grid, with string "drawing" in an untitled work from 1971 that offers us a tantalizing preview of the forthright, brushy grids of her recent paintings. Richard van Buren solidified color as pigmented, translucent resin, shaping it by crumpling and layering the sheets of translucent hues, and mounting them on the wall. Among the most extreme manifestations of this impulse were the late Alan Shields's eccentric, free-standing "paintings," represented in the show by a patchwork polyhedron of stained canvas, stretched over a wooden form, and a "picture plane" dissected into a fragile grid, embellished with beads and thread. Another weirdly compelling standout in the extreme department is Dorothea Rockburne's large but strangely provisional, aromatic geometric composition--a rectangle, tenuously floating on a skin of oil and plastic sheeting apparently being unrolled before us. Harmony Hammond's multicolor braided "target" floor pieces, however, never stopped looking like rather tacky rugs.

The underlying premise of "High Times/ Hard Times" is that painting was under siege in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Disposing pigment on the surface of a rectangular stretched canvas was supposed to be an outmoded, pointless activity. The work of the Color Field painters and the Pop artists was widely visible at the time, but it was seen as belonging to the past. Conceptual art, performance, video, photography, earth art, and all the rest of it were seen as vital alternatives to an exhausted tradition. (The fact that performance has it origins in the Happenings of the late 1950s and that many of the Color Field painters and Pop artists belong to the same generation as the artists included in the National Academy Museum show is another matter.) The organizers of "High Times/Hard Times"--Katy Siegel, the exhibition curator, and the painter David Reed, described as "exhibition advisor" and "instigator" of the show--maintain that for the artists they selected, making paintings in the face of the pervasive, fashionably hip notion that painting was dead was a transgressive act, a bold affirmation of independence. But as the show makes abundantly clear, many of the included artists invented ways of working that have little to do with conventional notions of what paintings are. Does this mean that painting wasn't really dead, at the time, or does this reinforce the idea that painting, at least as usually conceived, really was, as its opponents claimed, no longer a stimulating discipline? The question remains unanswered. The presence of these eccentric works in "High Times/Hard Times" presumably opened the door for a surprising number of brazenly "non-paintings" and "anti-paintings"--videos, filmed records of performances, and the like--although what these "alternative" works have to do with painting often remains problematic.

As we move through the show, it's impossible not to wonder what the criteria were for inclusion. While I realize that there are few things more irritating than presumptuous critics who try to second-guess the efforts of dedicated curators, large surveys like "High Times/Hard Times" make this sort of speculation irresistible. Did the organizers try to limit their choices to a particular generation? Some of the painters I find most conspicuously absent are exact coevals of those selected. Why have figurative painters been excluded? And why have so many gifted, serious New York abstract painters been left out? (Their work clearly fits the announced thesis and a good number of them exhibited at prestigious galleries and were included in significant museum exhibitions, from the early 1970S to the present.) I'm thinking of Frances Barth, Pat Lipsky, Ronnie Landfield, Harvey Quaytman, and Stanley Boxer, among many others, an ideologically and formally diverse group united by a wholehearted belief in the enduring potency of the materials of painting and painting languages. Perhaps they were excluded because they saw themselves not as subversive in their attachment to painting or as rejecting the tradition of post-war American abstraction announced by Abstract Expressionism and the Color Field painters, but rather, thought of themselves as continuing and building upon that legacy.

And what about Larry Poons and Frank Stella, contemporaries of many of the artists in the show, yet nowhere to be found? Poons's aggressively textured Elephant Skins and his astonishing Throws of the early 1970S exemplify how modernist painting traditions may be simultaneously honored, disputed with, and expanded. Stella, who is frequently referred to in the catalogue, may conceivably have been excluded because his early Pinstripes were seen as Minimalist paintings, yet as his work developed in the late 1960S and 1970s, he became increasingly fascinated by "pure," albeit atypical, painterly ideas about shape, illusion, and fierce color. Stella, of course, had attracted a lot of attention during the years encompassed by the show; in 1970, he had a retrospective at MOMA, aged thirty-four--notably young in an era before unfledged art school students could expect to be snatched up by dealers. Does Stella's early ac count for his exclusion or, as with many of the artists whose absence I've noted, was it because he was enthusiastically supported by formalist critics? Even though Michael Fried, rather than Clement Greenberg, was Stella's early champion, perhaps there's guilt by association.

The wall texts suggest a positively Soviet effort to erase Color Field painting from the canon and, by implication, to discredit the movement's most articulate supporter, Clement Greenberg. The label for Christensen's jazzy painting, for example, insists that the overlapping calligraphic loops indicate a quest for three-dimensionality at odds with the aims of Color Field painting. Since Christensen counted most of the painters associated with Color Field as friends, and felt he largely shared their aesthetic, this observation might have come as a surprise to him. Similarly, Jane Kaufman's 6 pm (1971), a sprayed expanse of hot pink, shifting to orange--essentially an homage to 1960S Jules Olitski without the edge drawing--is presented without acknowledging the precedent. (This is noteworthy because David Reed established his reputation with cleverly crafted abstractions that could be read as ironic, postmodern comments on Olitski's gestural paintings of the late 1970S.) Even Abstract Expressionism gets elbowed out of the picture; the resurgence of Ab Ex-type materiality and gestural paint handling in the show's works of the 1970S is explained as a response to the physicality of performance.

As we move through show, more questions arise. There's a surprising amount of video, both as a record of performances and as an electronic phenomenon (a phase mercifully outgrown by most of the medium's most interesting current exponents). There's something rather touching about the earnestness and naivete of some of the performances; others are just plain silly or slightly embarrassing--Carolee Schneemann's glossily presented Body Collage (1967), for example. The video records a nude Schneemann, looking cheerful but self-conscious, spreading glop on herself with a big brush and, pace Yves Klein, rolling in what appears to be a mountain of tissue paper. According to the catalogue interview, this was intended as both a feminization of the male province of performance and, as an allusion to the flayed body, a protest against Vietnam. I'll grant you the brush, but is it really painting? In Franz Ehrhard Walther's Opposite (1967), two people position themselves with great ceremony and seriousness, face down on two rectangles of cloth, and take turns pulling on a rope threaded through channels each piece of fabric. This apparently speaks to alienation and the difficulty of communication. The cloth appears to be canvas, but I remain unconvinced that this rather puerile effort really stretches the boundaries of what painting can do.

Critical and personal reactions to "High Times/Hard Times" have been mixed. Some non-included artists I've spoken to are bitter; others are glad to see fondly remembered work by some of their recently neglected colleagues. The young take it all at face value. I'm of two minds. I realize it's churlish to take exception to what is, on balance, an informative, if slightly skewed cross-section, but I can't help equating the interest in the era of "High Times/Hard Times" with the recent revival of mini-skirts and that film about Andy Warhol's Factory. Luckily the best of the art at the National Academy has more staying power.

(1) High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" opened at the National Academy Museum, New York, on February 15 and remains on view through April 22, 2007.