May 31 (Bloomberg) -- Richard Serra is America's most confounding artist.

At 68, the San Francisco-born New Yorker can make a mountain of steel appear to be as soft as a velvet pillow and as finely grained as sand. He can make the earth seem to move and the sky seem to tumble, even when both are perfectly still. He can produce sculpture as awesome as the pyramids.

What's more, the three new (2006) examples of his vertiginous configurations of torqued, cocoa-colored steel -- debuting June 3 in ``Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years'' at New York's Museum of Modern Art -- are better and more sensational than any he has produced before.

At once predictable and astonishing, they are beautiful, immense and impossible just to view. To ``see'' any work by Serra is to experience physical sensations and cognitive dissonances similar to those of an amusement-park thrill ride.

Stepping within the walls of ``Band,'' for example, is to enter a tilt-a-whirl nearly 13 feet high. A ribbon of weathered steel that snakes and swerves along 70 feet of floor with a grace that belies its enormous weight and scale, the work seems to expand and contract as if it were breathing.

Seen from without, it suggests a range of sand dunes lifted from a burnished desert. With the other two sculptures installed on the museum's second floor -- designed specifically to bear this sort of 1.1 million-pound weight -- it creates the distinct impression of ancient temples excavated from a mysterious site from New York.

The whole experience is disorienting.

Lost in Sculpture

Walking along the narrow, winding corridor through the spiral-within-a-spiral that is ``Sequence,'' the most sensuous work in the show, I felt like a child lost in a maze. Here, the floor seemed to rise and fall like an uneven path through a mountain pass.

I went around it a few times, feeling both exhilarated and claustrophobic, shaking my head at the utter impracticality and completely marvelous nature of an edifice that can exist, and be appreciated, only as art. (Scary art, at that. In the early '70s, one sculpture actually crushed a rigger to death.)

``Torqued Torus Inversion,'' placed between the other two new sculptures, is a pair of mirroring, fortress-like ellipses that slope in opposite directions, drunkenly leaning toward you and away.

In some measure, Serra's work has always threatened danger, balancing weight, mass and volume in seemingly impossible fashion.

Steel Overhead

On the museum's top floor, a selection of early works from 1966 through 1986 begins with ``Delineator'' (1974-75), a 26- foot-long, 10-foot-wide slab of hot rolled steel that appears, at first, completely benign, distinguished only by its size. That is, until you look up and discover its twin on the ceiling above your head.

In another gallery, a group of free-standing ``prop'' pieces -- generally four large lead plates that Serra has variously combined into open and closed squares seemingly held fast by a single lead pipe -- defies gravity in its own way.

Because any work by the demanding Serra requires so much space, the show, put together by MoMA's curator-at-large Kynaston McShine and the Dia Art Foundation's Lynne Cooke, contains only 27 pieces.

That makes it the most concise retrospective I've ever seen. The curators tell the story of Serra's development, from his early ``scatter'' work with vulcanized rubber through the torqued ellipses that have made him world-famous in the 1990s, with a welcome clarity and lack of didacticism.

Garden Gallery

MoMA has devoted itself to Serra so completely that it temporarily removed all of the sculptures from its outdoor garden in order to display two large steel Serras that it owns but has never been able to exhibit.

In fact, they don't suit the space so well -- except looking at them from inside, where the play of light and shadow on the interior walls is quite entrancing. That can't happen when such works have a roof over them.

Of course, no mention is made of the notorious ``Tilted Arc'' debacle: The obnoxious steel wall was removed from New York's Federal Plaza in 1989, by court order, after an acrimonious, nearly decade-long public debate. (The site- specific work is now dismantled and in storage.)

Also missing are the early ``splash'' pieces with which Serra established his reputation, throwing hot lead against gallery walls. But never mind. This exhibition is so far from disappointing it doesn't matter.

If only its presence on the second floor, which has yet to accommodate contemporary art in any sensible manner, could be permanent. Then it would be just about perfect.

``Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years'' opens June 3 and continues through Sept. 10 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St. Information: +1-212-708-9400 or http://www.moma.org. LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton is the corporate sponsor.

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

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

Last Updated: May 31, 2007 00:09 EDT