London: Tate Modern has a whopper of a show, with a title to match its size: "Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World." Though this is the first major exhibition in the U.K. dedicated to the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), its early Modernist scope is larger than the one man, who worked in practically all the art forms extant in his lifetime. His real importance was as the founder of the magazine and movement called De Stijl.

Examples are exhibited of van Doesburg's contributions to painting, architecture, design, typography, poetry, art criticism and publishing. But more important, and often artistically superior, are the exhibits of work by others he influenced. Van Doesburg believed in an abstract, geometric art, dependent on horizontal and vertical lines, at first shunning the diagonal -- to the point that this became a matter for arguments that were almost theological.

He also went through a period of excluding all but the primary colors. This of course brings to mind Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Mondrian's paintings, scattered through the more than a dozen rooms of this vast show, leap off the walls, despite being hung with many painters who adopted the same format, geometric means and media.

To my eyes it is obvious that Mondrian is better than other, similar De Stijl artists, such as Vilmos Huszár, Karl Peter Röhl, Walter Dexel, Peter Keler and van Doesburg himself. But there is more to this exhibition than these paintings -- breathtaking compositions in stained glass, Bauhaus designs, and wonderful De Stijl furniture, especially the large group by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld. There are examples of terrific commercial and popular art, and excursions into Dada, Constructivism, film and musical composition; also some sensational models and interior designs -- even a lip-smacking menu for the Café Aubette cinema-dance hall in Strasbourg, on which van Doesburg collaborated with Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp.

Revelatory Lundquist Retrospective Looks at Ambiguity

Stockholm: At first glance, "Torso," a 1961 painting by Swedish artist Evert Lundquist, seems to be an early modernist update on an old European tradition. With a centrally placed, sketchy motif -- possibly a sculpture on a table, or a nude with her arms behind her -- the painting has a haunting stillness that reminds us of Jean-Siméon Chardin. But our modernist eye deceives us. "Torso" has led a double life. Lundquist also exhibited the painting turned on its side, thereby seeming to create a different work, called "Still Life," with a different motif, this time of an apparent table setting. "Torso," in its upright position, is one of many ambiguous works on display in a revelatory Lundquist retrospective at Stockholm's Moderna Museet.

At the peak of his career in the 1950s and '60s, Lundquist (1904-94) was Sweden's best-known painter. But a rather old-fashioned view of the artist's work allowed many Swedes to dismiss Lundquist -- or even forget about him entirely. The Moderna Museet show seeks to rediscover and reinterpret the artist's work by emphasizing the role that improvisation and randomness played in his technique.

Fond of thick applications of paint, Lundquist was capable of a spontaneity that recalls America's Jackson Pollock rather than Europe's Old Masters. The catalog recounts a story of Lundquist walking around a museum show before an opening with tubes of paint, changing canvasses at the last minute with only the help of his fingers.

Lundquist is a near-abstract artist, and his best paintings maintain a tantalizing tension between a richly textured abstract background and a figurative motif. His best works -- like "The Axe" (1974) -- are variations on the theme of a figurative object trapped in an abstract canvass. Only very late in life, when he was nearly blind, did the motif itself emerge as dominant, like in his 1988 painting "The Cup," in which a white cup rises out from its sea-green surface.

Indian Exhibit Blends Folk-Art Traditions With Modern Imaging

London: The Saatchi Gallery, that perfect blend of art and commerce, has found its ideal theme in its current show, "The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today."

As the mobile phone has spread across the Indian subcontinent and PCs are common, an emerging high-tech culture has led to enclaves of wealth and entrepreneurship. This in turn has led to a lively art world, where folk-art traditions collide with the computer-generated image; religious icons fuse with new materials; and the relationship between the economic climate and the art world is expressed in political, stereotype-busting, gender-conscious works of art.

The show's 11 large galleries feature works owned by Charles Saatchi and created by 24 living artists of Indian or Pakistani origin, some of whom live and work in America or Britain. The quality is variable, but at its considerable best -- as in Atul Dodiya's homage to the late painter Bhupen Khakhar -- it has some of the resonances of great Indian art of the past.

I particularly enjoyed gallery 8, with Subodh Gupta's paintings and sculptures of stainless steel and brass kitchen utensils, and Bharti Kher's collage of candy-colored, felt bindis (the spot on the forehead worn by married women). Gallery 10 has three impressive, huge works and one small one by Jitish Kallat. The four-meter high "Eruda" is a black lead-covered sculpture of one of the boy booksellers who work at traffic lights on the streets of Mumbai. Though most have never been to school and are illiterate, they engage in authoritative conversations about the books they're selling.

While at the Saatchi Gallery, be certain to see Richard Wilson's masterpiece, "20:50," which floods part of the lower ground floor with a pond of reflective, used engine oil.