Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Inside Kara Walker's troublesome art is an American romance novel that wants to be ``War and Peace.''

The recurrent lynching trees in her cut-paper silhouettes and shadow plays of plantation life in the antebellum South, the hoop skirts and lace, the brooms and whips, the scenes of men who defecate newborns and rape other men and women -- all suggest nothing less.

Of course, slavery was not pretty, nor is its legacy, Walker's central subject.

In this, she is relentless. The naive charms of the silhouette form only make her pointedly obscene tales of sexual and cultural oppression more grotesque.

Most unsettling, however, is how easily she wrings beauty from brutality. That's both the power and the predicament of ``Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,'' a traveling mid-career survey that has just arrived at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

The show includes choice selections of her buoyant black paper silhouettes (they seem to float on walls, canvas and paper), atmospheric watercolors and drawings, colored-light projections, collages, two 16-millimeter films and a five-part digital video projection that premiered this year at the Venice Biennale and didn't appear in the retrospective's earlier stops in Minneapolis and Paris.

In fact, the Whitney has given Walker a spacious, deliberately cinematic installation whose story line tends to bring out the conflicting impulses in her work as never before.

History Textbook

The accompanying catalog, which replicates the look and feel of an old history textbook, is as integral to the exhibition as the art. It contains, along with reproductions from the show, a visual essay by Walker drawn from her source material (romance novels, minstrel shows, slave narratives) as well as a useful lexicon of her images and personal history.

Walker, 38, has been stirring the pot of historical outrage from the moment of her breakthrough work, a 50-foot-long panorama, ``Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart,'' in a 1994 group show at Manhattan's Drawing Center.

This scathing, scatalogical send-up of the romanticism of ``Gone With the Wind'' -- including a slave girl who performs oral sex on a white boy -- introduced an evolving cast of characters (the Negress, the Master, the pickaninny) with whom Walker has savaged racial stereotypes while embracing their most offensive features (nappy hair, swaybacked postures, pendulous breasts).

Outraged Artists

Her use of these stereotypes, and the hackneyed 18th- century silhouettes, outraged an older generation of African- American artists, particularly other female artists, who objected to Walker's suggestion that blacks played into the racist power structure established in the pre-Civil War South and prolonged its life.

The MacArthur Foundation, on the other hand, anointed Walker a ``genius'' by granting her a fellowship that, up until then, had emphasized lifetime achievement over promise. The 1997 award, along with a vituperative letter-writing campaign by dissenting artists to keep Walker from exhibiting anywhere, left her virtually nowhere to go but down.

Instead, she increased her scale -- one installation here is a 360-degree stand-alone cyclorama of unemancipated dancing darkies -- and expanded into film, shadow puppetry and animation.

She also produced a suite of 66 small, quickly sketched watercolors on notebook paper that addressed the controversy with unbridled contempt mixed with pride and dismay.

Stereotyping Whites

They include crude Aunt Jemimas and ``typical'' white profiles. One image is a hanging tree that doubles as a cartoon thought-bubble. It begins, ``So, I ask what is a positive black image (besides a contradiction in terms).''

If the racist divide is still with us (see New Orleans, post-Katrina), the political furor surrounding Walker has long since quieted down. What's more, thanks to the Internet, pornographic imagery has become as common as displays of the American flag. This environment not only blunts the force of Walker's war on hypocrisy, it threatens to return her silhouettes to storybook sentimentality.

The crux of Walker's enterprise really lies in a dreamlike story, typed on index cards, about a woman whose good and evil twins take ``a racist for a run,'' seducing but not killing him, and fly off into the night ``leaving beauty in our departure.''

Though Walker can be crudely simplistic, her levitating silhouettes and delicate drawings have an arresting beauty and an ambiguity that is both alluring and deceptive. First it draws you in with kisses, then it pummels you with its fists.

``Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love'' runs through Feb. 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., at 75th Street. Altria Group Inc. is the show's corporate sponsor. Information: +1-800-WHITNEY; http://www.whitney.org. In March, the exhibition moves to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

(Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Linda Yablonsky in New York at fabyab@earthlink.net.

Last Updated: October 15, 2007 00:14 EDT