SUMMER ART GETS SERIOUS

Truthfully, haven't you seen enough art-joke exhibitions? You know, the kind where some young tyro tries to take aback the audience by tearing holes in the walls, pouring goo on the floor or showing slapstick videos in blacked-out galleries? Sure, such transgressive fare is often accompanied by catalogs filled with weighty theory justifying the esthetic nose-thumbing. And those shows can be a lot of fun, like goofy stalls at a flea market. But in terms of the contemplative beauty most of us seek in art, they're still just comic relief. We think it's time for a break from the comic relief. And fortunately this summer, there are plenty of opportunities for some more serious art viewing.

Nothing is more serious in painting than carefully rendered landscapes, especially if they're idealized. The masters of the style were such 17th-century French artists as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, who based themselves in Rome, the better to combine the eternal beauties of ancient civilization with vistas of the incomparable Italian countryside. Their work, together with the effusions of the poet-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ("In these parts, one must become an artist"), drew a succession of German painters to the country. The frequently breathtaking, sometimes merely pleasant, but always interesting results are surveyed in 120 works in Do You Know the Land: Images of Italy From the Time of Goethe, at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich (through July 31). Typical is the bucolic cows-and-people landscape by J. P. Hacker. The large, very coherently installed exhibition also features a cleverly conceived striped tent in one gallery containing four panoramic views of Rome by Johann Christian Reinhart. Except for the absence of scooters and Fiats, the city is quite recognizable as the one we'll always love.

Downstairs, in some refreshingly cool marble-walled galleries, is a companion show, James Anderson and the Painter-Photographers, 1846-1870 (through Sept. 11). Anderson was a British polymath who, in addition to painting, set up a studio shortly after the invention of photography devoted to documenting the statuary and architecture of ancient Rome. The 140 photo-graphs (many of them with liftable shades for protection from the light) from the collection of Dietmar Siegert constitute yet another one of those exhibitions of small, nearly uniform darkish rectangles in metronomic friezes. But there is something thrilling in seeing "objective" evidence of how ruins looked to people--many of them visible in the photographs, wearing hoop skirts and stovepipe hats--so long ago.

Three hours away by car (OK, two if you're driving the autobahn in a new BMW 600 Series convertible), your immersion in serious art continues in Zurich with Pieter Claesz: Still Lifes in the Golden Age, at the Kunsthaus Zurich, through Aug. 21. Nothing, we admit, bodes as dull as a trudge through a show of pictures of meticulously brushed loaves of bread, hunks of cheese, pale fruit and generally unappetizing meat by a 17th-century Dutchman who wasn't nearly as good as one of his peers--a guy named Rembrandt. If you get in Claesz's groove, however, and carom back and forth among his 35 paintings, tracking the changing ways in which he portrays lemon peels and reflections on goblets, it's a miniature art education all by itself. To flesh out the lesson, the exhibition includes 25 additional pictures by Claesz's predecessors and contemporaries.

Lest you're tempted to attribute seriousness only to very old art, be sure to take a look at the Kunsthaus's other showcase exhibition, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Alberto Giacometti: The Eye Decides (through Aug. 21). Cartier-Bresson, the great photographer who died last year at 93, was a close friend of the Swiss sculptor (1901-1966), who also worked in Paris. As Giacometti made his famous metamorphosis from amusing prewar Surrealist (semi-abstract anatomical puns) to grave postwar existentialist (those notoriously skinny, roughly modeled figures), Cartier-Bresson photographed him at work. They also shared subjects, including Jean-Paul Sartre. This adroitly conceived and perfectly curated exhibition--relatively small but completely satisfying--includes not only Giacometti's bronzes, oil portraits and drawings, and Cartier-Bresson's camerawork, but a selection of the photographer's drawings as well. And if you're in the mood for a very dark vision of humanity, the new Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart (just opened in April) contains a whole gallery of the German expressionist antiwar (and anti pretty nearly everything around him) painter Otto Dix. Not for the fainthearted, but definitely for the seriously art minded.

Five hundred years ago, seriousness in art was a given. Back then, it meant not the dour, grind-it-out, against-the-grain mind-set acquired with modernism, but rather a serenity focused on revealing, in loving detail, the handiwork of God. Nowhere is this probing but reverent attitude more evident than in the 15th-century Flemish painters, and none among them expresses it more gracefully than Hans Memling. A rare gathering of 20 portraits (mostly of donors having themselves painted into religious scenes) compose Memling and the Portrait, through Sept. 4 at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, Belgium. (A version of it arrives at the Frick Collection in New York this fall.)

Vincent van Gogh--another Low Countries artist--was certainly serious and, in the beginning, a bit dour to boot. To most people, he's known as the creator of brightly colored, thickly painted and desperately joyful pictures of sunflowers, cornfields and still lifes. Connoisseurs, however, treasure Van Gogh almost as much for his drawings--from the charcoal figures from his Dutch period to the pen-and-ink landscape symphonies he made in France. A survey of more than 100 van Gogh drawings, on view July 2 through Sept. 18, is yet another reason to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

In the early 20th century, Fernand Leger had almost the same passion for architecture and industry as Van Gogh did for nature. During the Great Depression, he proposed to Trotsky that he create a "polychrome Moscow" by using Paris's multitudes of unemployed to scrape all the city's buildings down to white and then flood them with colored light (from airplanes!). The project never made the cut, but many very large semi-abstract sculptures and mosaics did. Several of them have been installed at a contemporary art space in Toulouse, France, called Les abattoirs, until Sept. 4. Otakar Nejedly, on the other hand, labored around the same time in what is now the Czech Republic where, to us farther west, modern art was less of a marquee event. Nejedly, however, did exactly what many early modernists did: fall in love with modernism, hie off to a faraway place (Sri Lanka) to recharge himself, then return to his native land to let the mix of influences inspire his art. A retrospective of Nejedly's gritty-but-exotic landscapes is up at the Czech Museum of Fine Arts in Prague, June 30 through Sept. 4.

No one, but no one, is more serious with a capital S about modern art than the American sculptor Richard Serra. His enormous, multitonned, six-centimeter-thick rusted steel walls, in various "torqued ellipse" and "snake" configurations, have both thrilled and frightened art lovers. Indeed, it takes an adventurous patron to do esthetic justice to the notoriously forceful Serra. Thomas Krens, the globetrotting director of the Guggenheim Foundation and its main museum in Manhattan, is one of the few up to the job. Now, he's given over that famously Brobdingnagian "hangar" gallery at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, to a semipermanent (at least there's no official closing date) installation of seven massive Serra sculptures from the last decade. Breathtaking in the singular, they're literally awesome in the plural.

Sometimes seriousness in art reflects a sober outlook on life at large. Gustave Metzger, the German-Jewish "artist-activist" who is the subject of a retrospective at the Foundation Generali in Vienna (through Aug. 28), was saved from the Holocaust by a refugee organization and emerged as an artist haunted by 20th-century society's predilection for destructiveness. So what did he do? Along with his cohorts in the Viennese aktionism movement of the 1960s, he tried to obliterate art--not by destroying other people's works but by ripping up the whole "art industry" by its roots, with (as photographs in the show testify) wild performances and dizzying installations.

Of course, neither Metzger nor anyone else has succeeded in killing off the practices of making and selling genuine objets d'art. Indeed, after 20 years of playing patron to such nose-thumbing "Young British Artists" as Damien Hirst (of pickled-shark fame) and Tracy Emin (of the "everybody I ever slept with" tent notoriety), the London advertising mogul and megacollector Charles Saatchi has decided that The Triumph of Painting is really where it's at. According to the show, at the Saatchi Gallery in London--its first part is now held over until July 3, with the second part due to open just two days later and lasting into the fall--contemporary painting has apparently "triumphed" by getting as raucous, grotesque and billboard-sized as the video-installation art it supposedly struggles against. You'll see paintings by art stars Cecily Brown, Albert Oehlen and Franz Ackermann, among many others.

And finally, Faces in the Crowd: Images of Modern Life From Manet to Today gives you cause to look at the whole spectrum of society. That's because this behemoth of an exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy (ending July 10), includes everything from paintings to photography to film to installation to video, and artists from Kthe Kollwitz to Bruce Nauman, Giacometti to Gilbert & George. If art exhibitions were numbers in musicals, this would be the one where the entire cast comes out onstage and, with a veritable orgy of singing and dancing, brings the curtain uproariously down. As it does on this roundup of exhibitions--a very serious musical in its own right.