Abstraction. If you walk north from SoHo toward the East Village, you may come upon the John Good Gallery, an immaculate white space tucked away on Great Jones Street amidst the pleasantly run-down factory buildings. In January, Good presented a show called “Recent Abstract Painting,” and hung works by two artists who have major reputations (Jasper Johns and Howard Hodgkin) alongside works by artists in middle career (Gary Stephan and George Negroponte) and some youngsters (among them Christopher Lucas and Moira Dryer). This was a thesis show: the pieces were cannily chosen, and together they had the look of an argument well framed.

The wall on which the gallery hung Jasper Johns’s thirty-inch-high black-and-white Untitled(1980) between two small, brilliantly red and orange paintings by Howard Hodgkin presented abstraction as a genre with a sense of history. In the case of the Johns, the history is largely of the artist’s own making. The Johns abstraction—an all-over pattern made up of packed-together, roughly hexagonal striped areas—marks a stop-off on the artist’s retreat from Pop. It points us to the moment about a decade ago when this most elegant of all Pop artists decided to remake himself into a classical modernist. The beautifully brushed but impassive surface is a kind of art-historical Rorschach test for viewers—you can imagine it as anything. This pattern could point us toward Roman mosaics, European geometric abstraction—or it might just be a kitchen floor, the persistence of some banal Pop memory. The Johns painting