NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- In the 1960s art world, illusion was a dirty word. The old tradition of a painting as a window onto imaginary realities seemed beyond exhausted — just more proof of painting’s death. Abstract painting was tolerated, especially if big and flatly painted so that it was undeniably an object. Magic and poetry were banished. “What you see is what you see,” said the young Frank Stella, the moment’s dominant painter.

Even before pocketing her MFA in 1965, Vija Celmins refused to accept such formalist tyranny. Painting wasn’t dead to her, and bigness and abstractness were not de rigueur. Celmins (her name is pronounced VEE-ya SELL-mins) emerged from the University of California in Los Angeles art program determined to be in step with her time yet go her own way.

Now in its sixth decade, the artist’s way has been lavishly retraced in “Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory,” a quietly ravishing, brilliantly installed (if slightly too big) exhibition of 114 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures at the Met Breuer. Let the magic begin.

“I thought I would sit down without all my theories and aesthetics,” the 80-year-old artist has recalled, quoted in a text in the show’s first gallery. “I was going to start in a more humble place with just my eyes and my hand.”

Within a decade, she was becoming known for precise, painstakingly wrought illusions of reality: expanses of ocean waves, star-studded night skies, clouds or the moon’s surface, rendered in graphite, charcoal or muted tones of oil paint. They can take years to make despite their often small size and seem so realistic as to be mistaken for photographs but they feel equally cosmic when they zero in on a bit of pebble-strewn desert, a spider’s web, a fragment of glazed porcelain or the inside of a shell, pocked with tiny craters.

And a different buzz descends when you take a closer look — which the smallness invites. Depicted reality dissolves. Prolonged scrutiny brings awareness of the artist’s hand, the careful textures of her marks and above all the discipline and concentration that produced them. They invite and reward reciprocal patience and concentration, slowing down perception so thoroughly that the show almost exists in its own time zone.

Celmins calls her efforts “redescriptions,” which fits their documentary but luminous plainness and unshowy technique. While her work is aligned with pop, minimal and conceptual art — and even photo realism — and has perceptible debts to Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Giorgio Morandi, it has always stood alone, outside stylistic factions, and stubbornly at odds with her influences.

Her singularity extends beyond her art. Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia’s capital, which her family fled during the fall of 1944, when the Soviets reinvaded. They made their way across Germany surviving seven months of bombing, and after the war they spent two years with a Latvian refugee camp in Esslingen, near Stuttgart, before immigrating to the United States in 1948. They ended up in Indiana, where the artist earned an undergraduate art degree. Perhaps her wartime and immigrant experiences gave her a depth that many of her American contemporaries lacked — a skepticism and impatience, and a bluntness.

In a recent profile of the artist by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker, for example, Celmins starkly observes that this show was “too large” in its West Coast debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (I saw it. She wasn’t wrong.) The New York version is somewhat smaller. But here, organized by Gary Garrels of SFMoMA and Ian Alteveer of the Met, it takes full advantage of the diverse gallery spaces of Marcel Breuer’s exceptional architecture. It is the tribute that Celmins’ greatness deserves.

The retrospective, over two floors, charts the artist’s path as a big, generous arc, moving from images of the objects and ephemera in her studio, to the freeways of Los Angeles, and beyond, to the larger world — history, nature and outer space.

It opens on the museum’s fifth floor, devoted to works from a mere five years (1963-68), when Celmins first committed to “looking at simple objects and painting them straight.” She depicts her studio companions — an electric heater, its red-hot coil at full blast; a two-headed lamp; and an electric fan — in varieties of gray. “I’m from a gray land, Latvia,” she has said. They also testify to her attraction to the lush backgrounds of Velázquez.

You’ll find here the first of the artist’s occasional sculptures, which she considers 3D paintings. In the earliest, she acknowledges her debt to surrealism, including a small fur-lined house and some everyday objects rendered large, like Magritte: a lead pencil over 5 feet long and three Pink Pearl Erasers of nearly 2 feet.

Celmins has claimed that she is not a “confessional” artist. But the looming Vietnam War inspired her to revisit her memories of World War II with subtly harrowing results. She painted images clipped from magazines in slightly fogged-in grisaille, as if suffused with tragedy. Sometimes it hits forcefully, like the anguished B-17 leviathan of “Burning Plane,” breaking up as it crashes to the ground. It takes a second look to see the slumped figure in the driver’s seat of “Tulip Car #1,” which indicates that what initially resembles a junkyard wreck is possibly from Pearl Harbor. In a smaller gallery of tiny graphite drawings there is a depiction of a letter addressed to the artist in her mother’s cursive handwriting. Celmins made the envelope’s five stamps separately; each is a tiny drawing with crenelated edges, three offer aerial views of the Pearl Harbor attack.

The second part of the show, on the fourth floor, is devoted to images of the natural world — especially her paintings and drawings of waves, night skies, galaxies and constellations and the sparkling spider webs, those little universes of their own. You may find yourself jumping back and forth among works, parsing similarities but mostly fine differences of scale, material and technique.

Then the show rounds back in to portrayals of objects the artist lives with, usually rendered from photographs in magnified, fieldlike close-ups. “Japanese Book” portrays a 19th-century book whose creased and worn indigo blue cover seems like a coda to Celmins’ images of night skies, waves and clouds. An especially magnificent recent painting offers a close-up of the porcelain fragment. Its finely rendered craquelure glaze is mind-boggling. The surface darkens on one side, almost like a cropped view of the moon, or a patch of slightly reptilian skin.

The sculptures on this floor intensify the involvement with painting and also ascend to what might be called the trompe l’oeil sublime. In 1982, after five years’ work, Celmins completed the piece from which the show takes its title: “To Fix the Image in Memory” presents 11 pairs of small stones — one real and one meticulously made of painted bronze — forming its own small desert landscape.

This exceptional work pales next to the artist’s latest forays into three dimensions, which combine small, antique school blackboards of slate with Celmins’ identical copies in painted wood; they re-create nearly every nick, scratch and grain, right down to the flecks of chalk dust and sometimes evoke seascapes.

At once voluble and mute, these relics of the human quest for knowledge require almost granular scrutiny before their secrets start to emerge, but you cannot be absolutely sure which the artist made. They are perhaps the most devotional of Celmins’ efforts. She all but disappears into them, leaving behind only praise for the world.


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