By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2003; Page N07

Last Sunday, at the end of his sixth and final Mellon Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, Kirk Varnedoe used the shortest sentences in all his nearly nine hours of brilliant talk that began on March 30. Of abstract art in America, a subject that attracted astonishing, overflow crowds, he said: "There it is. I have shown it to you. It has been done. It is being done. And because it can be done, it will be done. And now I am done."

Though Varnedoe never mentioned it, most of those who attended probably knew that he was ill with inoperable cancer. That last bit, "and now I am done," was painful to hear. But all the rest of these pithy closing phrases were about optimism. Varnedoe, whose career has ranged from Rodin to comic books, had traced the history of abstraction in American art from Jackson Pollock to Richard Serra, demonstrated its richness and recurrence as inspiration, and assured the crowd that it is so woven into the fabric of American consciousness that it isn't going anywhere soon.

But most of Varnedoe's sentences weren't short or simply declarative. Varnedoe speaks in rolling cadences, sentences that sprawl and spread and unspool long skeins of ideas and arguments, sentences with 10, 15, 20 clauses, bound loosely by commas, unbroken by periods, with torrents of adjectives in threes and fours and fives, such as "teeming, knotted, congested" and "cheap, commonplace, mundane and mass-produced," interspersed with commands, "Think Richter! Think Johns!" and ending, usually, with a slight slackening of pace, a lowering of the voice, and a conclusion settled in place like a perfectly carved capstone. Varnedoe speaks in sentences like the one you just read, only longer, extemporaneous and much, much better.

The flow is preacherly for good reason. Varnedoe's lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself, a church of American pragmatism that deals with the material stuff of experience in the history of art. To understand these lectures, which began promising an argument about how abstraction works and ended with an almost medieval allegory of how man confronts the void, one has to understand that Varnedoe views the history of abstraction as a pastor surveys the flock. Like a good pastor, he is kind to heretics (like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, who punctured the supposed pretensions of abstraction), and perhaps loves them more than the faithful. He is certain, even in the wilderness, that all roads lead back to the God; and he never despairs.

But this kind of faith comes with a major caveat: Varnedoe wants a new covenant with abstraction, something free of the long history of abstraction as a cult of dogmatic purity, reductionist imagination, stifling ideals and the fetish of progress.

Varnedoe began and ended his series by invoking the name Ernst Gombrich, the art historian who, in 1956, gave a series of Mellon Lectures (later turned into a magisterial book, "Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation") arguing that representation was a major, hard-won and undeniable achievement in the history of Western art. Gombrich took a rationalist line: that representational art moved from problem to problem, with artists making pictures, matching them against the world, correcting their errors, and moving on to new problems.

Abstraction, so often seen as either a series of stunts or as a dead end tending toward blank, minimalist boxes and monochrome paintings, needed its own theory, something as elegant and convincing as Gombrich's effort to explain how we got from flat pictograms to the brilliant illusions of the Renaissance and beyond. The problem Varnedoe faced, however, is that representation is the kind of thing that yields to theories and arguments; abstraction, by its very nature, resists theory.

Varnedoe's solution evolved over the course of the lectures. Abstraction, he seemed to argue, is not a set of techniques that, like representation, can be refined and built upon. Rather, it is a tendency, or habit, to look at the world in a certain way. He used words like "spirit" and "refresh" to suggest its relationship to representation, as if it's a pond in which artists repeatedly baptize themselves to cleanse and renew vision.

Its history can never be told quite so linearly as Gombrich told the history of representation. Rather, it is a series of loops, jumps, returns and new forays. But it has a history if one looks closely at the web of making and responding among artists of the last century.

And so, as Varnedoe demonstrated in his last lecture, the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock must be understood not as a single point along some grand March of Abstraction, but as a font from which artists for the next 50 years would draw different kinds of nourishment. In an almost manic, tour-de-force sequence that demonstrated how desperate he was to cover as much ground as he could, Varnedoe sketched the influence of Pollock on Carl Andre (the gravity and horizontality of making images on the floor), Yves Klein (the performance and spectacle of Pollock's dance with paint), Eva Hesse (the threads of painting made literal and vertical in string sculpture), Robert Smithson (the act of pouring and despoliation made literal as well, by pouring asphalt on a hillside). The list went on, covering more than 10 artists, recapping insights from earlier lectures, and weaving together hours of diverse and particular ideas about individual artists.

Varnedoe also demonstrated that those who argued with abstraction could never escape it. Andy Warhol (who, Varnedoe said in one of his more practiced quips, "is to the emperor's new clothes what Chanel was to the little black dress"), may have mocked the blankness of abstraction by painting camouflage patterns or giant Rorschach blots. But in making fun, he seems to have fun with the very thing he jibes against and produces some of his most "painterly" work. Roy Lichtenstein's oversize comic book images may suggest an equivalence between high abstraction and the lowest products of mass culture; at the same time, they let Lichtenstein play with the pattern of uniform dots found in cheap printing, a bit of play which is, ultimately, the kind of thing an abstract painter might do.

The last lecture, which was given a standing ovation, began with a quotation from the film "Blade Runner" that suggested the pressure Varnedoe may have felt to sum up a career's worth of insight into art: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

The words "time to die" were like a sock in the stomach. But perhaps Varnedoe was less concerned with death than with the loss of experience, the loss of things seen, because ultimately his theory of abstraction boils down to this: It can only be understood as faith in the importance of accumulating particular experiences.

For a final profession of belief, Varnedoe flashed 13 images of Richard Serra walking through the spiral of one of his massive steel sculptures. To each stage, from Serra's entrance, through various places where the sculpture reels inward, or stands straight like a cathedral, or pitches out, to the conclusion of a central, open space, Varnedoe attached a meaning. It was a way of enacting Varnedoe's particular faith, just as Christians remember their faith through stages of the cross. It was a progression from thinking about the world in unconsidered, received categories, through abandoning ideologies that don't work, to a terrifying place of uncertainty ("There is only bottomless debate . . ." he said), to an ultimate realization that it is the individual act of experiencing and making that refreshes culture. And that there's nothing else, no grand theory, no comforting ideology, no final certainty.

The tour through Serra's sculpture was a way of saying that the only overarching scheme that Varnedoe could offer was through an elaborate reading of a particular piece of abstract sculpture. But the audience had seen this already. For six Sundays, Varnedoe had responded to slides of abstract art with immense volubility and insight. On the last Sunday, trying to sum it all up, he had finished with short, almost empty declarations. "There it is. I have shown it to you . . ."

Can anyone be satisfied with just this? Varnedoe has faith that we can be, must be, and ultimately have no other option but to be.