Monuments are every sculptor’s dream, and a mixed blessing. They bring the sculptural vision to a big public and extend the tradition of Stonehenge, the Gothic cathedrals, Rodin. But they consume disproportionate energies to their aesthetic return.

A sculptor can have 100 new ideas in the studio, but realizing just one of them on a monumental scale requires time and energy, and usually assistance. A maquette inspires affection and awe: Literally issuing from the artist’s hand, it can have an emotional quality that is lost when it is transformed into a monolith. The public version of a personal idea can be seen by more people, but they are often rushing to catch a train or sitting with their backs turned while they enjoy a sandwich. Sometimes they are delinquent children looking for a surface on which to skateboard or to scrawl graffiti. The alienation that started with the sculptural process is passed on to the end user.

The other problem with monuments is that the artists making them become monuments, too: static, officious, fixed in their ways. The paradigm of the modern sculptor ruined by success is Henry Moore. At least, that’s the received wisdom shared by Rachel Whiteread, who cites Moore as a reason she doesn’t want to be typecast as an artist who makes memorials. After her successful, widely admired “Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust” in Vienna’s Judenplatz, inaugurated in 2000 after years of planning and negotiations, her new series at Luhring Augustine represents a struggle to find a post-monumental identity.

Ms. Whiteread was a natural for the Holocaust commission (won in competition) because her often poignant art deals with memory and loss. It is both a strength and a weakness that her career is built upon a singular sculptural strategy: to make solid the negative space surrounding or sometimes, more intriguingly, inhabiting the objects from which her works are cast.

The irony is that Ms. Whiteread is far more effective than most sculptors when struggling to produce a big, public statement than when (no pun intended) casting around for smaller ideas, sketches, tentative explorations. Her successful projects have extended her medium and the viewer’s notion of sculpture or of the very experience of things: “House” (1993), a cast of an entire terraced house in London’s East End, shamefully demolished weeks after completion by a philistine municipality; her similar treatment of individual rooms and staircases; and her contribution to an ongoing series of temporary pieces on the vacant fourth pedestal in London’s Trafalgar Square. In the last of these, she cast the pedestal in transparent resin and mounted this simulacrum in reverse on the existing structure, a temporary apotheosis of the support, the ultimate celebration of the overlooked.

But on a smaller scale, and in the works that seem like spin-offs of her ambitious projects, Ms. Whiteread’s aesthetic can quickly degenerate into an echo of itself: occasionally suggestive but generally pedestrian. The Holocaust memorial teased out the negative space behind shelved books – a multilayered evocation of the “People of the Book,” the sense of missing volumes, of untold tales, of cruel statistics. Following the commission, Ms. Whiteread turned out smaller works and variations that cheapened the memory of her original insight. At her best, Ms. Whiteread’s sculpture exploits and thus transcends the mundane things in the world that inspire it; at second best, which never lurks far behind, the mundane claims her art. Maybe it is because her casting process – which produces a simulacrum of the original with differences of varying degrees of subtlety – pushes literalism to such an extreme that the sculpture will be so forcefully extraordinary or ordinary.

Her latest works derive from “Embankment” (2005), an installation (which I have not yet seen) in the gargantuan Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, on view through April. This work is made of about 14,000 white plaster casts of different cartons, stacked to varying heights, among which visitors walk. At the smaller but still voluminous Luhring Augustine, where individual sculptures are sparsely installed, there are two bodies of work: “pure” cartons, and cartons stacked in relationship to actual furniture.

The problem with cartons is that there isn’t enough difference between exterior and interior. In Ms. Whiteread’s best works, the difference between an object cast from without and within implies the surrounding or vacated space. The difference with a carton is academic – however the cast was made, the result looks just like a carton, only it isn’t empty and isn’t made out of cardboard.

The relationship of cast to actual in works like “Wait” (2005), where six plaster units surround a chair, or “Surface” (2005), where a table cohabits with four carton shapes, seems gratuitous. There is none of the sinister poetics of the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s collisions of cement and furniture.

For Ms. Whiteread, attention to small, banal things produces results that are small and banal. She is no Chardin or Richard Tuttle. The act of variation merely produces upscale tchotchkes. In her smaller mode she mimics her conceptualist mentors in the casting of negative space, Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys; when confronting complexities, both thematic and technical, she can tap a richer vein of metaphor and association. But don’t despair of Ms. Whiteread – just wait for the next monument.

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Alexander Calder (1898-1976) ought to be an example of a sculptor ruined by success: He was extraordinarily fecund in his early years, pioneering new sculptural forms with the mobile, the stabile, and wire construction. But exploring these further and making them bigger was no kiss of death, as a stunning show at PaceWildenstein’s second Chelsea space, leased from the Dia Foundation, makes clear.

The beauty and intrigue of a Calder often has a lot to do with an inherent tension between human touch and machinist impersonality. The son and grandson of sculptors and a trained engineer, Calder merged art and technology. His mobiles – “drawn” in wire, metal, and found objects, often revealing a nervous, wobbly line – miraculously “worked,” staying aloft, floating, shimmering.

Calder’s late stabiles, the subject of this show, are mammoth steel-plate pieces. They arose from lucrative sculptural commissions during the building booms of the 1960s and 1970s, but are far from leaden or officious as a result. Actually, they extend the elastic exuberance of his mobile inventions and knowingly acknowledge a sense of the ponderous, circus-clown-like imitations of elephants and whales. Beefy, bolted together forms force an awareness of both heavy engineering and animal stockiness.

Most of the show consists of working maquettes. It is fascinating to chart upward progressions in scale when there are intermediate models at hand: “Jerusalem Stabile” (1976), for instance, a red-painted steel 1:3 model, just shy of 12 feet high, dominates the show. This is a must-see show, but who can explain the bizarre, pretentious catalog, which represents the works in scaleless, surfaceless, computerized graphics – defeating the whole point of the enterprise?

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In the debate about intimacy and monumentality, Philip Grausman’s portrait sculpture throws a cat among the pigeons. He makes images of people that are at once familiar and depersonalized, obviously born of observation and yet coolly hieratic. They are installed in Lohin Geduld’s cramped quarters with the same dramatic effect as Ms. Whiteread’s and Calder’s works are in their respective sprawling art barns.

Mr. Grausman’s heads in stainless steel are set on tubular pedestals of the same material, crowded into a back room like some Roman mausoleum. There is something martial, even vaguely fascistic, in their polished metallic surface. They look a bit like life masks at first, but they have an animation that is only possible from sculpture ex nihilo. Still, they elude the old categories of carving versus modeling in the way they are at once severe and fluid.

The show is dominated, however, by “Susanna” (1996-99), a 10-foot-high version of a female head in fiberglass. Dwarfing its surrounding space, it brings to mind Magritte’s surrealist fantasy of a comb and shaving brush in mammoth disproportion to a bedroom, or perhaps Romantic meditations of people amid monumental classical ruins. The white material has an ethereal, weightless quality, giving the woman’s serene expression a Buddha-like calm.

Whiteread until March 31 (531 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-9100).

Calder until March 4 (545 W. 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-929-7000).

Grausman until March 11 (531 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-675-2656).