A lot of what passes for abstract art these days is a pastiche of what abstraction once was. “3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hima af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin,” at the Drawing Center, purports to establish the aims and lineage of geometric abstraction from the early 20th through the early 21st centuries. Instead, it misrepresents not only how Western geometric abstraction began but also how it has evolved.

The show is approximately 175 works by three abstract artists: the well-known Minimalist Martin (1912-2004) and two virtual unknowns, the Swedish painter Hima af Klint (1862-1944) and the Swiss medium and healer Emma Kunz (1892-1963). It is a strange view of abstraction, through a postmodern lens that is heavily fogged by Minimalism, Conceptualism, and spiritualism. In the end, the show has much more to do with theory than with great art.

There are some exceptionally good works by af Klint and Kunz, but overall, the two just do not measure up to pioneering European abstractionists – Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Klee, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian – that the show’s scholarship attempts to connect them to. The two were contemporaries of those masters and at times were pioneering or inspired by similar ideas. But just because you use a grid does not mean your work has anything whatsoever to do with Klee and Mondrian. The inclusion here of the Minimalist Agnes Martin implies that hers was the way forward for abstraction. Happily for fans of great geometric abstraction, there were and continue to be any number of spectacular artists who are actually advancing rather than stifling the tradition.

Af Klint, Kunz, and Martin all worked with abstract geometric forms, but the show is more interested in the fact that these artists wrote avidly about their work. “3 x Abstraction” is not about works of art but rather ideas: spiritualism, telepathy, healing, and divination; Emersonian transcendentalism, Taoist philosophy, theosophy, and mysticism. It is fascinating but of little aesthetic merit.

Af Klint is the most interesting and talented artist in the show. She was a member of a group of women artists known as “The Five.” As early as 1896 (long before the Surrealists), she was making “automatic drawings.” The show includes sketchbooks filled with some of this work – visually uninteresting scribbles, really. Roughly 50 of her spare, geometric drawings and paintings are also on view, many of which, on the surface, resemble diagrams out of Klee’s notebooks or Goethe’s book on color theory. Sometimes her works, as in the “Series II” (1920) – abstractions each made of an inscribed circle that explores a specific religion: Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, all lined up together on the wall – look like soccer balls or phases of the moon.

Her “Parcifal Series” (1916) – sheets filled with a washy, watercolor square (red, yellow, orange, green) next to a word that describes its properties: “forwards” for red; “downwards” for taxicab yellow; “upwards” for blue – is convincingly straightforward, scientific in feel. As is her “Atom Series” (1917), diagrams of squares and circles that re late physical and spiritual forces. Her best work in the show is an oil painting roughly 5 feet square, “Series SUW, Group 4, No. 14, The Swan” (1914-15). The painting depicts a large white circle held tightly against, and floating within, a varyingly dense black field. The circle is divided, like a pie, by three faintly colored triangles that radiate outward from center. Related to Kandinsky, the painting breathes, expands inward and outward, and is both solid and fluid.

Kunz’s drawings were executed within continuous sessions that could exceed a 24-hour period. Done in colored pencil on graph paper, they are unbelievably obsessive, linear works that she used with her patients for diagnosis and as healing aids. She used a process of radiesthesia (the act of divining with a pendulum), and the infinite number of lines follow the grid and build into shapes. They can often look like Native American sand paintings or microscopic diagrams of nature, such as that of crystals, plants, or starfish. Some of them begin to quiver, as in “Work No. 020” (undated), in which the lines resemble water or wood grain; or they, tight as guitar strings, feel woven and reverberate, as if they were plucked, throughout the grid.

Kunz’s drawings are best when they are not symmetrical and evenhanded – when, rather than feel like illustrations that move equally outward from center, they feel more like shapes in transition or like living beings. In “Work No. 194” (undated), line weight varies so that a delicate transparency is achieved; and shapes, made of overlapping, zigzagging lines, give the impression that forms are elastic and dancing, that they are evolving from square to triangle to circle and back to square – as if everything, though different, were connected.

There are roughly 30 small works by Martin on view at the Drawing Center (all from the 1950s and 1960s, when she began doing abstractions), most of which are monochromatic, vaporous, decorative grids of fine lines on pale grounds. Her works, though similar in feel at times to those of af Klint and Kunz, are the weakest of the three. Minimalists such as Martin immobilized abstraction into a bland, generalized, and anesthetized art held loosely together by the grid. Her pale grids and bands of color express generalities so vague and subtleties so calm that the artworks – lacking formal power, clarity, and metaphoric specificity – say virtually nothing.

Early 20th-century geometric abstraction freed color, form, and space from representation into pure emotion. It released art from narrative into an expansive, metaphoric realm where viewers could move easily, fluid ly, within a given poetic theme. Abstract forms, without a “specific” story and without being beholden to represent a “specific” thing, could be felt as pure movement and rhythm. Abstraction allowed us to experience color and shape as we do music – or at least to begin there.

Although abstract artists were inspired by advances, discoveries, and theories in spirituality, literature, music, art, science, psychology, and technology (both Western and non-Western), their best works have always first and foremost been concerned not with ideas but with creating form.

What “3 x Abstraction” needs is the work of a great artist such as Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) – who, virtually single-handedly, invented the language of geometric abstraction. Held up next to Delaunay’s vibrant, complex, and inexhaustible explorations of color and geometry, the drab, repetitive, one-note yawn of Agnes Martin could be seen once and for all for what it is.

Until May 21 (35 Wooster Street, between Grand and Broome, 212-219-2166).