01:00 AM EST on Thursday, March 2, 2006

When Jackson Pollock began dripping, sloshing and splashing paint on his canvases in the late 1940s he was, for the most part, dripping, sloshing and splashing alone.

Since then, however, many artists have embraced the freewheeling spirit behind his work, even as they adapt it to new styles and materials.

That, more or less, is the idea behind "Webs, Loops and Skeins in Modern and Contemporary Art," an engaging, if sometimes rambling exhibit at the RISD Museum. Organized by print curator Jan Howard and contemporary art curator Judith Tannenbaum, the show features works by some of the top guns of 20th-century American art, including Jasper Johns, Williem de Kooning, Sol Lewitt, Cy Twombly and, of course, Pollock.

In addition, the exhibit showcases the work of younger artists who have followed in Pollock's paint-drizzled wake. They include Willy Heeks, a Rhode Island artist whose luminous abstract painting The Set is one of the stars of the show, and Julie Mehretu, a twentysomething RISD graduate who recently won a coveted MacArthur Foundation "genius grant."

And the show's title? According to Howard, it was inspired by the words that are often used to describe these improvisatory artworks.

"When people talk about artists like Pollock and de Kooning, they always seem to use the same words," Howard explained last week during a tour of the exhibit. "They use words like 'web' or 'mesh' or 'skein,' many of which come from the textile field. That, in turn, got us thinking about artworks in our collection that could be described by the same words."

Certainly, such words are widely used to describe the works of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionist artists. "Skein," for example, seems an appropriate way to describe Pollock's Magic Lantern, a 1947 painting in which the overlapping lines suggest the bundled threads of a skein of yarn.

Meanwhile, a small watercolor by Joan Mitchell, one of the few women to elbow her way into Abstract Expressionism's male-dominated inner circle, also invites a textile reference. The cluster of dense, spiky lines in Mitchell's untitled work suggest the frayed ends of a piece of torn cloth.

OF COURSE, IT'S easy to overdo the analogies.

Did Pollock really have skeins of yarn in mind when he was painting Magic Lantern? Did Mitchell really find inspiration in a piece of frayed cloth? Probably not.

Still, one of the challenges posed by abstract art is finding words to describe what's going on. Unlike Old Master paintings, where the subject matter provides an easy starting point for discussion, abstract works often send viewers -- and critics -- running for the nearest Thesaurus.

Writing itself has proved to be fertile descriptive territory.

The looping lines in an untitled de Kooning drawing, for example, suggest a kind of abstract calligraphy. The bolder strokes in a drawing by sculptor David Smith, on the other hand, look like abstract hieroglyphics.

Sometimes the writing is literal. The Investment Report, a 1973 lithograph by German artist Mary Bauermeister, pokes fun at art-world speculators by describing artworks as if they were stock offerings. The work's satirical tone is typical of Baumeister, a member of the Fluxus art movement that also includes composer John Cage and singer-artist Yoko Ono.

Meanwhile, the seemingly random patterns in Ann Hamilton's wreathe were created by writing over and over again on a sheet of soft embossing paper. Although there are no words on the embossing paper itself (it was covered by another sheet of paper, allowing only the outlines of Hamilton's words to be recorded) the patterns suggest a kind of ghostly writing.

THE SHOW, WHICH fills the museum's upper and lower Farago Wing galleries, also features a number of illustrated books. Here, the images tend to play off the words, as in Francesco Clemente's meandering illustrations for Alberto Salvinio's Departure of the Argonaut, a book recounting Salvinio's travels during World War I.

Besides giving viewers a chance to test their verbal skills, the show also gives the museum a chance to mix and match works from different periods. Thus an untitled 1968 painting by Cy Twombly hangs next to Cascade, a 1989 installation by Christian Marclay. Though very different in style -- Twombly's painting resembles a graffiti-strewn blackboard, while Marclay's work consists of a giant wad of magnetic tape -- both emit a giddy, childlike energy.

Pollock's Magic Lantern, meanwhile, finds its contemporary parallel in Heek's The Set, a big atmospheric canvas that seems to glow with its own inner light.

Finally, the show gives the museum an excuse to exhibit some of its more recent acquisitions. Among them: a pair of drawings by Rhode Islanders Tayo Hauser and Jacqueline Ott and works by contemporary British artists Martin Boyce (a trio of painted steel sculptures) and Simon Periton (a delicate cut-paper hanging inspired by, of all things, doilies).

From naive

to natural

Speaking of the Old Masters, the museum is also showcasing Renaissance and Baroque-era artworks from its permanent collection.

"The Natural World, the Body, the Divine" features paintings and sculptures from the 16th to the 18th centuries, a period when European artists broke away from the naive religious art of the Middle Ages and embraced a new, more naturalistic ideal of artistic beauty.

The switch from Medieval revelation to Renaissance realism is nicely illustrated at the start of the exhibit, which spans the museum's two small Waterman Galleries.

Just to the left of the entrance is a lovely 14th-century Madonna and Child, in which the gracefully intertwined figures are as flat and cherub-faced as a pair of paper dolls.

Compare that with the figures in Madonna and Child with Saint Barbara and Saint Catherine, a 16th-century painting attributed to a follower of Leonardo da Vinci. Where the earlier work is mainly flat and decorative, the later painting is fully three-dimensional, with full-bodied figures inhabiting a realistic architectural space. There's even room for a sunny landscape in the background.

The Renaissance also emboldened artists to experiment with non-religious subjects, including landscapes and mythological scenes.

The RISD show features some fine examples of both genres, including a pair of action-packed mythological paintings (Nicholas Poussin's Venus and Adonis and Joachim Wtewael's The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis) and a majestic Dutch landscape (Salomon van Ruysdael's The Ferry Boat).

Many of the same themes can be found in "Design and Description: Renaissance and Baroque Drawings," a small drawing exhibition featuring works by Rembrandt, Anthony van Dyck and other Old Masters.

"Webs, Loops and Skeins in Modern and Contemporary Art," "The Natural World, the Body and the Divine" and "Design and Description: Renaissance and Baroque Drawings" run through April 23 at the RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St., Providence.

Hours: Tues.-Sun. 10-5 (and until 9 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month). Admission: $8 adults, $5 seniors, $3 college students, $2 ages 5-18. Phone: (401) 454-6500.

bvansicl@projo.com / (401) 277-7421