Art: Second-Generation Abstraction

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"High Art." The so-called "hard edge" artists believe that they are reaching for a new classicism. They refer to their work as "high art," as opposed to "pop art." In their self-conscious striving, their purity is strikingly mannerist and overrefined. Colors run contrary to esthetic handbooks, forms repeat until they become rote, composition is twisted out of balance.

But for some time, the public has been feeling cheated by artists painting for themselves rather than for the viewer. However unsettling, the new abstractionists paint for the viewer, coolly calculate, as Director of the Jewish Museum Alan Solomon says, to "draw the beholder into the problem"—and once he is in, keep him in on the hard edge of suspense.