The exhibition includes representative works by Mr. LeWitt from throughout his career.  It begins with two early paintings, perhaps from the 1950’s, in which the image of a generic running figure competes with the word “running,” or “run,” and also with the concept of running.  It becomes hard to tell the runner from the run.

The exhibition also includes examples of Mr. LeWitt’s free-standing or wall sculptures based on arrangements of cubes and squares.  As clear as Mr. Le Witt’s objects and wall paintings may be, their identity – like the identity of the collection – is fluid and unfixed.  They exist somewhere between familiar categories of sculpture, architecture, drawing and painting.

The collection is so rich and multisided, and so essential to the rest of the contemporary art at the museum, what a good deal more can be done with it than is done here.  By concentrating on its diversity and including so many strong works by Mr. LeWitt, Ms. Davenport has essentially organized an exhibition with its collector in the center.  It could also have been organized around themes (like the changing definitions of radical art, or the many possible relationships between geometry and irrationality, impersonal form and autobiographical content, authenticity and fiction).  The collection needs a catalogue with documentation and commentary on each work.

It is nevertheless clear from the show that the LeWitt collection is itself a gigantic, organic and amazingly idiosyncratic work of Conceptual art.  Like Mr. LeWitt’s objects, which may be imposing yet transient, and his wall drawings, which can have a mausolean gravity even when they seem so thinly painted that they could be peeled off the walls, the collection is casual yet so coherent and inclusive that it seems programmatic.

The exhibition has more to say about ideas than it does about individual artists.  It reveals a sustained interest in the possibilities of the triangle, the circle and the square.  For example, it is a long way from the black circular rubber washers on the square base of Eva Hesse's 1967 sculpture “Washer Table” to the halos of clouds in Karen Gunderson’s 1979 lithographs “CJS-North, CJS-Couth, CJS-East, CJS-West,” to Bernar Venet’s 1988 steel sculpture “Two Arcs of 238.5 Degrees,” in which two near-circles seem to have just opened their jaws, to Annette Lemieux’s 1990 painting “Fifty-Fifty,” in which a musical score on canvas suggests a Renaissance tondo or a Baroque dome.  Each of these works defines a different use of the circle.  Each reflects the belief that geometry is an effective means of both controlling and expanding meaning.