"Drawing," 1970. View more works by Christopher Wilmarth

Some exhibits are content to shed new light on an artist and his or her oeuvre. Others change our understanding of the work or illuminate an overlooked aspect of its milieu. Some exhibits aspire to all this and more. Among the latter, only a few succeed. "Christopher Wilmarth: Drawing into Sculpture" at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, curated by Edward Saywell, is that kind of stunning triumph, the result of the meeting of a remarkable curator and creative work that, at its very core, has the power to question not only our basic assumptions about art but, by extension, ourselves.

Saywell argues for the late Wilmarth, typically classified as a sculptor, to be seen as a draftsman. And he makes his case. In doing so, Saywell provides new insight into Wilmarth's work, setting up a provocative dialogue among the artist's works on paper, small maquettes, and his better known abstract sculptures, which are frequently made up of one or two sheets of etched glass and steel. Through his thoughtful editing of Wilmarth's words and visual works, Saywell pulls together a moving tribute to the artist while providing new perspectives on the creative process that unites all these seemingly different mediums. Rarely has a show of his pieces so aptly touched upon the man's strengths. Rarely has a curator used such a precise chronology of Wilmarth's art as to make its genius so unforgettably poignant.

Christopher Wilmarth is not among America's best known artists, but he deserves to be. Coming of age in the '60s, when the art world took off exponentially and one movement, one art star, one hot gallery rapidly replaced another, Wilmarth remained on the sidelines. Fashionable trends did not interest him; the fickle art scene oppressed him.

Moving from San Francisco to New York City at the age of seventeen, Wilmarth attended The Cooper Union. At the time, Minimalism and Pop Art ruled the roost. Wilmarth seemed to fit neatly into the Minimalist camp, although, like most of the Minimalists, the artist hated the label. And his art differed from that of many of the others in the movement because of its small scale, its sense of the artist's presence in the work, and dependence on surface incident.

"Invitation #1," 1976. View more works by Christopher Wilmarth

Even his early student drawings are marked by an exquisite touch. From the hard, strong lines and the erased areas that define his Matisse-inspired drawings of his wife to the hydrofluoric etched surfaces of his blue-green glass slabs, accented and held together by steel cables, Wilmarth's art is predicated on an accumulation of marks. This perfectly pitched orchestration of subtle surface incidents, Saywell aptly argues, is what we more commonly associate with drawing than sculpture, especially the sculptures of Wilmarth's day.

Much of the exquisiteness of Wilmarth's work lies in its concern with nuances, both obvious and suggestive. The two slabs of glass tied together with steel cable in "Crosscut Drawing" create a play of light and translucency that is as seductive and alluring as it is clearly a byproduct of the materials that make up the work. The atmospheric quality of the light -- the element that so captivated Matisse -- and the taut accent of the cable piercing the glass create a subtle myriad of visual relationships that are so palpable you feel you can touch them, that they can be navigated like a blind person reading brail.

The work cannot be understood in a quick glance, nor can it be experienced second-hand. The quality of a handmade mark must be seen face to face, one element measured against the next, one passage appreciated before moving on to the next. In that sense, Wilmarth's art demands a commitment in time if it is to be understood. Otherwise, all is lost. "Forms of beauty," as the poet and art critic Baudelaire wrote, "contain something eternal and something transitory -- something absolute and something particular." The same could be said of Wilmarth's pieces.

Although its abstract form is contemporary, Wilmarth's work also is steeped in the past, and not just in the history of art. Symbolism, in particular the poetry of Stephane Mallarme, whose poems he also illustrated, is the source of much of his inspiration. Like Mallarme, Wilmarth's work is self-consciously elusive. His art insinuates; it never tells. It suggests, it invites; it takes the viewer on a journey.

Maquette for "Passing Blue," 1973 View more works by Christopher Wilmarth

Wilmarth's work is at once romantic and highly personal. The Roebling suspension cable used to hold his glass slabs together is the same used to build the Brooklyn Bridge, a site of particular importance to Wilmarth and the leitmotif of another show of his work, "The True Story of the Bridge," at the Nielsen Gallery. The Nielsen show features drawings and a small version of Wilmarth's sculpture, "Gift of the Bridge," both of which were inspired by Wilmarth's endless hours studying the effects of the light and water from the Brooklyn Bridge. Filtering his life through an engagement with tradition, the traditions that shaped the artistic tenets of the past, those of his day, and those still alive in the best works today, Wilmarth found his own way of speaking directly to his audience.

At the end of his life, however, the ghost of the great Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti dominates the work in the same, too obvious way that Matisse's did in his earlier drawings. In these later pieces, there is a sense that Wilmarth had yet to process Giacometti's dogged exploration of the figure in space, to internalize it to such a degree as to make his understanding of the older artist's work his own. As an artist acquainted with Wilmarth, Ronald Bladen, remarked, "It seems that artists do their best work either at the beginning or at the end of their careers." Unfortunately, Wilmarth's suicide at the age of 44 robbed us of the art he surely would have created at his career's finale.

The "Christopher Wilmarth: Drawing into Sculpture" exhibit will be on display at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum through June 29, 2003.

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