THE MISSION.(art enthusiast Heiner Friedrich and the Dia Art Foundation)

"I have nothing to say about works of art,"said Heiner Friedrich, who rarely talks about anything else. "They speak for themselves, very clearly and very powerfully."His voluminous black raincoat and crimson scarf, cast aside as he entered the restaurant, lay across an empty chair. He wore a gray-green T-shirt, tan suspenders, loose black pants, and maroon shoes. At sixty-five, Friedrich looks much the way he looked thirty years ago, when I first met him--trim, buoyant, with thinning ginger-blond hair and rimless glasses. Although he has lived here since 1971, his German accent is intact, and he speaks with the disjointed, barely suppressed excitement of someone who expects to convert you. "Art has no history--there is only a continuous present,"he went on. "The non-stop presence of art! Vel?zquez, Goya, Manet are all in one line, which extends to Matisse and Warhol. If art is alive, it is always new. Listen, listen, my wish is that we visit the Giotto chapel in Padua and stand for an hour, you silently and I silently, and we see what happens to us. It is as contemporary as anything in the world today. That is what Dia is about. A focus on art is the specialty of Dia."

Dia--the Dia Art Foundation--conceived by Friedrich and brought into being by him and two associates in 1974, is the renewal of an old idea about art patronage. Unlike museums, which collect and display a more or less representative sampling of the art of certain historical periods, cultures, or styles, Dia has focussed on supporting post-1960 work by a very few artists, which it collects in depth and presents in isolated, long-term, single-artist installations. During its first ten years, Dia's level of support for the chosen few was so ambitious and so ecstatically impractical that, when a financial crisis loomed, the experiment nearly foundered. Dia survived, but without Friedrich. Having resigned in 1985 from the institution he had created, he bided his time, haunting the peripheries and offering fervent advice and dire warnings.

Time has now vindicated his vision, more or less. A week or so before our lunch, he had gone up to Beacon, New York, sixty miles north of Manhattan, to see the vast museum that Dia was preparing to open in a former Nabisco printing plant. Dia:Beacon, which opens on May 18th, has two hundred and forty thousand square feet of exhibition space--nearly twice as much as the new moma will have--filled with the work of twenty-four artists. Some of them are well known, and some are not. "Shadows,"seventy-two abstract paintings by Andy Warhol, blanket the walls of a three-hundred-foot-long gallery to the left of the main entrance. Three gigantic "Torqued Ellipses"and one "Torqued Spiral"by the sculptor Richard Serra fill what was once Nabisco's railroad shed and loading dock. The first thing the visitor sees on entering the museum, however, is a pair of rectangular galleries, each one as long as a football field and forty feet wide, containing a single work of sculpture, called "The Equal Area Series,"by Walter De Maria, a reclusive artist who does not grant interviews and who hasn't shown in New York for many years. Each gallery contains six pairs of stainless-steel circles and squares, seven-eighths of an inch thick, which lie flat on the floor and increase fractionally in size from one pair to the next.

Comparable spaces have been allotted to Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Fred Sandback, Joseph Beuys, and other charter members of the Dia cenacle, and to such relative newcomers as Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Hanne Darboven, Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Michael Heizer, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Ryman, whose work Dia has acquired since Friedrich left. No common denominator links the artists. Judd and Flavin, who died in 1994 and 1996, respectively, are often cited as leaders of the Minimalist movement. De Maria and Heizer were pioneers of earth art in the nineteen-sixties, excavating and shaping monumental works in the deserts of Nevada and California. Ryman and Martin are painters, while Nauman, Darboven, and Weiner have explored radically dissimilar ramifications of conceptual art. It is in keeping with Friedrich's encompassing idea that the Beacon installations will be long-term and unchanging (unless an artist approves a change), and that, whenever possible, the artists were invited to choose their own spaces and to oversee their installations. But Friedrich's approval of Dia:Beacon is qualified, at best. "Compromise is the word at Beacon,"he told me. He has informed Michael Govan, Dia's young director, and Leonard Riggio, the chairman of Dia's board of trustees, that they have gone about this in the wrong way. "My request for Beacon was that they choose not twenty-two or twenty-four artists but maybe five, six, or seven,"he told me, "and those being alive today could be commissioned the way Matisse was commissioned for the chapel in Vence, the way Giotto was commissioned for the Cappella Scrovegni, in Padua."For someone who fully believes, as he does, that the art of the past fifty years rivals that of the Italian Renaissance, compromise is never an option.

Growing up in Berlin during the war years, Friedrich saw enough suffering and destruction to make him yearn for something that ...