The 20th century was uncommonly obsessed with the common man. And woman, of course, though not until later in the century. That was after the common man had lost the family home to dust storms and bank foreclosure, drifted west in the Great Depression, won a world war in the guise of G.I. Joe, appeared onstage as failed salesman Willy Loman, moved into a prefab Levittown house, and was celebrated in a fanfare by Aaron Copland later picked up by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Simpsons. Baldness and blue hair aside, Homer and Marge are pretty much the common man and woman incarnate in a wobbly new century, once again grappling with foreclosures and wondering if nouveau bread lines might take the place of nouvelle cuisine.

With perfect timing, the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum has mounted a show, mostly from its collection, reprising art about ordinary people and their world of mundane things. Called "Common Sense: Art and the Quotidian," it runs Saturday through May 23, and taps into the deep well of appreciation, even reverence, for ordinary folk that is a motif in American life.

Here are Thomas Hart Benton's lithographs of Depression-era farmers; Lewis Hine's agitprop photos from the early 1900s of kids playing baseball and taking the air in tenement alleys; Andy Warhol's ironic silk-screened celebration of canned soup, and even a photo by Minnesotan Paul Shambroom of emergency personnel training at the National Center for Combating Terrorism -- terrorism being the new normal in American life.

Nuances of common

As Weisman curator Diane Mullin explained during a preview tour, the word "common" has a lot of nuanced meanings, ranging from cheap or trashy goods to shared concerns, from bad behavior to its opposite (common sense). Calling someone "common" can be an insult or a term of ennoblement, as Copland intended.

All those often conflicting undercurrents run through the exhibition. When Hine, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn photographed the poor and dispossessed, their images were political statements intended to expose social neglect and rouse indignation. But when James Rosenquist juxtaposed images of common wiggly stuff -- grass and spaghetti -- he was just making a rather lame visual pun.

The show is loosely arranged in four sections: depictions of common people; representations of ordinary things; images of mundane places; uncommon encounters and ordinary language.

As is often the case, the representations of common people are especially engaging. Apparently inspired by August Sander's famous photo of two German girls out for a walk, contemporary American sculptor Jim Lawrence executed a rough-hewn, crudely painted wooden sculpture of the pair, their raw faces as expressive as an Edvard Munch painting. Nearby, Christian Petersen struck a neoclassical note in his 1941 bronze of a farmer lunging forward and tearing an ear of corn from its stalk like a Greco-Roman warrior ripping his sword from its scabbard. In a pair of tender portraits, Marsden Hartley likewise ennobled a drowned Maine fisherman and his austerely stoic mother. And Shahn's little 1932 gouache paintings of doomed Italian anarchist Nicola Sacco with his family, and of his wife and their lawyer, are extraordinary visual documents.

Next, artists depict the stuff of daily life. Jim Dine used a generic bathrobe as a surrogate self-portrait, showing the colorful garment close-up as a swaggering, barrel-chested figure virtually popping out of the picture frame. In a fool-the-eye image, Robert Rauschenberg collaged postcards of waves and pelicans over lithographic images of flattened cardboard boxes that suggest a boardwalk through a conceptual beach. Lucio Pozzi even makes an abstract drawing by sweeping dirt onto paper.

Americans tend to go misty-eyed over images of majestic mountains and mighty rivers, but then they carve up the landscape with freeways (as photographed by Frank Gohlke), litter it with stop signs (as seen by Michael Bishop), and build chemical plants and extraordinarily banal housing developments (as photographed by Stephen Shore and David Heberlein).

A fascinating video by University of Minnesota faculty artist Jan Estep animates the last gallery. In it inmates in a St. Louis prison repeat cliches about time -- it's relentless; it waits for no man; it flies when you're having fun, etc. The endless murmuring of such commonplace observations serves as an ironic and rather poignant coda to a quiet little show of modest art about quotidian stuff observed on forgotten days. Such is life.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431