STRING THEORY.

"Jasper Johns: Catenary," a large show of paintings, drawings, and prints at the Matthew Marks Gallery, is advertised as a return to form. In the opening sentence of the catalogue's introduction, the art historian Scott Rothkopf writes, "Johns's paintings had grown too full"--conceding, in a remarkable gambit of damage control, a widely felt distaste for the artist's works of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, which were "jam-packed with signs of Johns's life and art." (Those signs included allusions to Leonardo, Grunewald, Duchamp, and Picasso; dolorous references to an unhappy childhood and encroaching death; recyclings of the artist's signature motifs; and coy hints of private meaning.) Rothkopf hastens to his good news: "Johns wiped the slate clean." Would that it were so. Johns has only reduced the number of elements in works that still bespeak self-imitative pastiche, and tied them together, almost literally, with real and drawn catenaries. (A catenary is the curve assumed by a cord hanging freely from two points.) Sagging strings cross most of the paintings, at times attached to thin wooden slats that may be hinged or cantilevered at the edges of a canvas. The new works do reemphasize the cynosures of his painterly genius: tone and touch. Subtly varied, tenderly stroked grays in mixtures of oil paint and wax predominate. But those plangent qualities, once so moving, feel forced here.

Falloffs in the later work of major artists are so far from unusual as to be the rule in our mercurial culture. But Johns still raises hopes--he can already boast of having had a second act in his fifty-year career--and so retains the power to disappoint. In many ways, we still inhabit an art world that he inaugurated in the late nineteen-fifties, along with his ally Robert Rauschenberg and, not least, their dealer, Leo Castelli. The eureka moment came in 1954, when, at the age of twenty-four, Johns made a strong, delicate painting that didn't just represent but, when you thought about it, was the American flag--a sign the same as what it signified. By taking an object from the realm of common fact--as he did throughout the fifties and early sixties, with paintings of targets, numbers, maps, and more flags--and then returning it to that realm transfigured, he rescued art from the endgames of modern art, including lately played-out Abstract Expressionism. His breakthrough democratized art's worldly estate, projecting a sensibility at once public and private, high and low, and bohemian and bourgeois. But, like other revolutionary insights in art history, this one was swiftly subsumed by other artists. And by the mid-sixties Johns's incisive early work had given way to a first phase of "too full" supererogation in arch, hectic painting-constructions that seemed to bode inevitable decline.

But then came the abstract hatch paintings of the seventies--uniform patterns of clustered diagonal lines in primary or secondary colors, producing visual equivalents of symphonic music in major or minor keys. (The common term for those works is "crosshatch," but their lines never cross.) They not only clarified Johns's contribution to aesthetics--the euphoric irony of infusing banal designs with sensitive, intelligent, painterly persuasiveness--but seemed to interweave mutually resistant strands of modern art: the expressive, the decorative, and the cerebral, with an occasional whiff of the perverse. (Some of the paintings secreted sexual whimsies: faint circles referred to holes in wooden boxes, called "Dutch wives," that once comforted sailors at sea.) The hatch paintings--and drawings and prints, modulating the idea across the many mediums in which Johns is a virtuoso--justified a general sense, which was validated by record auction prices, of Johns as the crown prince of American art after Abstract Expressionism, at least in America. (A persistent coolness to Johns overseas points up the nationalist element in his initial fame as a herald of American culture in its moment of global triumph.) This show, his first since a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1996, seemed pre-scripted for fresh glory.

Instead, the thirty-eight works on hand amount to Johnsian exercises in kit form. You see what he's doing and get what you're ...