“Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure” has to be the most genteel exhibition of art the Guggenheim has ever mounted. Not the most over-hyped; not the worst. Unlike the museum’s recently concluded show of photographs by Deanna Lawson, “Light’s New Measure” avoids overt politics. Nor does it place an emphasis on pictorial innovation like the concurrent show devoted to the pioneering abstractionist Vasily Kandinsky. The Adnan exhibition is just . . . mild. There’s no sin in that. Were contemporary artists inclined more toward gentility than provocation we might be better off. And Adnan’s art—the paintings, in particular; the tapestries, ditto; the videos, not at all—bears suitable merit to invite pause. Pause over what, you might ask? The vagaries of reputation, for one; the primacy of the painted mark, for another. The museum touts Adnan’s work as “an intensely personal distillation of her faith in the human spirit and the beauty of the natural world”—boilerplate PR, you might say, but it’s to the credit of Adnan’s color-saturated pictures that they capture some of that optimism.
Occupying the bottom two rungs of the Guggenheim’s rotunda, “Light’s New Measure” is the first of three exhibitions organized in conjunction with the aforementioned “Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle,” an array of paintings and works on paper culled from the permanent collection. (The other shows will feature the artists Jennie C. Jones and Cecilia