German art certainly makes New York museums do odd things. The Museum of Modern Art made special efforts for the recent Anselm Kiefer retrospective, allowing it to overflow the lower level temporary exhibition galleries into prime space upstairs. For the one hundred seventy or so exhibits of “Refigured Fainting: The German Image 1960-1988,”¹ the Guggenheim jammed almost every inch of the museum and added some remarkably unfortunate partitions, most notably a monstrous tower that completely altered Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated central space. Installing “Refigured Painting” required that a sizable chunk of the previous exhibition, a selection of postwar art from the Guggenheim’s own collection, be removed a week before the announced closing date, to the bewilderment and rage of late visitors.

The Modern’s decision to spread the Kiefer exhibition beyond the space usually allotted to temporary exhibitions was dictated by the properties of Kiefef s work and was essential to our understanding of his capabilities. Without that extra room of super-monumental paintings, we would have been deprived of some of his most typical and most successful pictures and our sense of Kiefer’s achievement would have been less accurate. But what justified the Guggenheim’s decision to sabotage its own earlier exhibit and to insert that looming wedge in the center of its soaring space? It must have been sheer enthusiasm for quantity; it certainly wasn’t the quality of the works in the show, nor the exhibition’s power to illuminate.

The title, “Refigured Painting,” suggested that the show