Even though Luxembourg and Dayan’s exhibition “The Shaped Canvas, Revisited” (through July 11) commemorates the 50th anniversary of the original at the Guggenheim, curated by the critic Lawrence Alloway, it is not a museum show, and one should not expect it to be all-inclusive. Rather, it’s an unsystematic survey of its subject, with works from differing periods and styles. Nonetheless it includes a few important works by well-known artists such as Lucio Fontana and Ellsworth Kelly. Lesser-known artists like Harvey Quaytman and Charles Hinman, as well as younger artists like Nate Lowman, Jacob Kassay, and Rebecca Ward, are also represented.

Beginning in the mid-century, abstract painters in the U.S. moved away from the subjectivity and painterliness of Abstract Expressionism. Their desire was to make painting factual by rejecting illusionism and delving into the literal. Robert Rauschenberg’s combines and Jasper Johns’s flags and targets first expressed this tendency. But it was the young Frank Stella who moved further away from questions of composition and taste by introducing the shaped canvas. At first he chose to use notched rectangles, then parallelograms, rhomboids, trapezoids, and triangles. This show includes two pinstripe paintings, the V-shaped Sieve, 1964, and the copper L-shaped Creede II, 1961, and are characteristic of the general movement toward the industrial aesthetic shared by Pop art and Minimalism.

Along with the two Stellas, Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelyy represent Minimalism. Paintings by Ron Gorchov and Mary Heilmann, as well as Lynda Benglis’s paint-splattered knotPSI, 1973, and Richard Tuttle’s unstretched, eccentrically-shaped orange canvas are examples of Post-minimalism’s new formats and approach to painterliness. The use of the shaped canvas by Pop artists is represented by Tom Wesselmann’s impressive Smoker #11, 1973, which depicts a red-lipped open mouth expelling smoke, along with Claes Oldenberg’s Key (less a painting and more a soft canvas sculpture) and James Rosenquist’s Head on Another Shape: Study for Big Bo, 1966.

Given the exhibition’s general focus on U.S. Pop and Minimalism, there’s the odd inclusion of several Italian artists: Paolo Scheggi’s Fontana-inflected Intersuperficie Curva Blu, 1965, and Pino Pascali’s canvas Coda di Delfino, 1966, which is really a wall-mounted sculpture. What is surprising is that there is no works by the artists associated with German Zero, or art concrete from Latin and South America. Beyond these weaknesses, the works chosen from the last thirty years are dependent on the strategies and logic of the ’70s. Consequently the show, which is meant to “offer a fresh new lens through which to consider the trajectory of the shaped canvas,” is actually a collection of familiar works that offer little insight or surprises.