If there's one lesson the Rose Art Museum's iconic collection has taught its custodians, it's that even the most dramatic story can be recast from a thousand different angles.Beginning Wednesday, that story--in which Sam Hunter, the Rose's first director, acquired 21 masterpieces-to-be in a single, $50,000 purchasing spree, and the museum in the proceeding 43 years built the largest contemporary art collection in the Northeast--will be told again in "Rose Art: Works from the Permanent Collection," this time through a trifocal lens. The exhibit in three parts runs through April 1 in the Lois Foster Wing, and explores the resiliency of painting as an art form, American artists and their reflections on America, and minimalist art from the 1960s and '70s.

Also opening is the first in a series of "Paper Trail" exhibits, in which artists will display their own pieces alongside works on paper from the Rose's vault. This spring features the art of Margaret Evangeline, a Louisiana-born, New York-based artist, as well as small works by Alexander Calder, Francisco Goya, Albrecht Dürer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Amedeo Modigliani and others.

That the Rose's permanent houses such names--and those listed above barely scratch the surface--is both a treat and tragedy, since so many of them rarely emerge from the museum's austere vault. But every few years the museum mounts exhibitions dedicated to its hidden treasures; last academic year, "'Post' and After" focused on artwork from the 1980s to the present, while others have told the history of the museum through art.

"Rose Art" neither attempts to comprehensively recount the museum's genesis nor to explore in painstaking detail a specific school of art. Instead, it attests to the collection's versatility--to its stories yet to be told. According to Curatorial Fellow Adelina Jedrzejczak, the museum resisted producing another "best of" the Rose.

Philip Guston's "Allegory" (1947), an early work by the abstract expressionist, greets visitors as they enter the exhibition's first portion, which is curated by Michael Rush, the museum's director, and hopes to trace the endurance of painting. The work, created under the Works Progress Administration, is equal parts Mexican mural and creation parable: A sun and moon, thickly stroked and diametrically opposed, bookend a torso with arms, who manipulates a skeletal brass instrument emerging from the sun's mouth. The moon--whose demeanor seems purposely savage--makes or unmakes the body's bottom half with ill-intentioned hands.

The work's primitivist cast sharply contrasts the cartoonish images by which Guston achieved fame, but seems not at all out of place with the pieces by Larry Rivers, Reginald Marsh, Willem de Kooning and others with which it shares wall space.

Assembled by Chief Curator Raphaela Platow, the second and best portion of "Rose Art" traces the reflections of American artists on their country--at least as artists tend to see it. Andy Warhol's "Saturday Disaster" (1964) features a horrific accident scene, and Robert Indiana's "The Calumet" (1961) catalogs the plight of American Indians. Most frightening--although that word could describe most of these works--is Hyman Bloom's "Corpse of Man," a harshly wrought naked figure who seems scarred by industry and war. It is coincidental--though appropriate--that he rests directly across the gallery from Warhol's nightmarish Pop Art.

The most recently made work here, Barry McGee's instillation "Untitled" (2005), might have been included to map how little or much the issues on which artists often comment have changed; the piece--an array of pictures frames and rusted metal tiles wrapped around a plaster wall--has the phrase "things are getting better" scrawled across it. Whether that statement was meant to be hopeful or ironic, it is not explicitly elaborated on by the work's remainder, which is largely composed of photographs of grafitti-strewn walls, slanted geometric patterns and sketches of faces shown in various states of displeasure. The overall effect, however, is of beauty emerging from concrete, not of urban decay suffocating art.

The final portion--also curated by Platow--follows the minimalist movement, and much of it seems underwhelming by intention. "Charlotte Moorman II" (1995)--by South Korean-born American artist Nam June Paik, a chief innovator of video art--is a figure made of cellos and emptied-out 1950s Motorola televisions. "Blue Coat" (1965), by Yayoi Kusama, is as its same suggests, with thick, cushiony pockets ballooning from every inch of its surface.

But leaving the Foster Wing, visitors will be hard-pressed to gleam any cohesive narrative from "Rose Art: Works from the Permanent Collection," or even within each of its parts--nor should they. Rush and Platow wisely eliminated such obligations. There is context for these works, but little else. Mostly, they assume a role they'll likely reclaim when the museum doubles its gallery space in coming years to permanently display works from the vault: They sit, resting solely on laurels of form.


Editor's Note: The first Paper Trail was not available for viewing at the time of publication. It will be covered in more detail at a later time.