Paul McCartney couldn't keep record players working in his London home in the late 1960s, but a sculpture by the Greek artist Takis must not have taxed him as much.

Some people thought the piece was a burglar alarm, Barry Miles wrote in a 1998 McCartney biography, "Many Years From Now." Consisting of two aircraft wing lights (one red, one white) welded to military tank antennas, the spindly sculpture also looked like it might capture radio signals.

It was from a large series of flexible works Takis called "Signals." Five nonlighted "Signals" now stand like sentries from another era at the Menil Collection, part of a small but powerful show. It's the first U.S. survey of the 89-year-old artist's career.

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Takis' art is unique, illustrating invisible fields such as magnetic forces but also referencing ancient art and music. Takis has said he's not interested in the visual; he uses force fields to vitalize spaces. More Information

'Takis: The Fourth Dimension'

When:11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday-Sundays, through July 17

Where: Menil Collection, 1533 Sul Ross

Tickets: Free; 713-525-9400, menil.org Read More

The self-taught artist and inventor ran with an illustrious crowd in the 20th century that included Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely and the Beat poets. John and Dominique de Menil were among Takis' most important early patrons, and the museum owns one of the largest collections of his work outside Europe - about 25 pieces.

The spectacular "Ballet Magnetique I" captures your attention first, from the center of the room: Its parts include a black ball and a white cork that dangle like pendulums from the ceiling, dancing endlessly around a small spool, kept in motion by a motor and magnets.

You also can't ignore the sound emitting from the door-size white piece "Musical - M.013": About every 20 seconds, a long magnet strikes a taut wire to create a low sound that resonates through the room. The artist calls it "naked" music. It gets into your bones; the museum guards who stand near it all day either love it or hate it.

Small objects on nylon strings look like they're about to crash through the bright yellow canvas of "Magnetic Painting No. 7" but are held inches from the surface. Takis created it in 1962, when he wanted to help people "see" the phenomenon of magnetic fields. Later he didn't feel he needed to be so literal: A circular scribble of thin wires sticks like an ink drawing to the red canvas in 1999's "Magnetic Wall - M.W. 038."

Something seems to be going on at the Menil, enhanced by the elegant presentation of Takis' minimalist works by exhibition designer Brooke Stroud and curator Toby Kamps. One day recently, it seemed no one who walked by the small gallery could resist stepping in and staying a while.

Given that strong pull, you wonder how Takis flew under the radar for so long.

Born Panagiotis Vassilakis in Athens, he grew up amidst political turmoil and spent six months in jail after Greece's civil war. Inspired early by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, he taught himself to make plaster sculptures, then moved to Paris in 1954 and began forging works in iron. He made his first kinetic "Signal" then, along with small bronzes that included sphere-shaped "Interior Spaces," industrial-looking "Plants" and figures that referenced ancient Cycladic art and Giacometti's style.

But Takis found his true mojo when he began using magnetic fields as a material in the late 1950s. One of the first to bridge the gap between art and science, he even earned patents for some of his early works from the French Ministry of Industry. Takis has called himself an "instinctive savant."

He inspired the creation of a London gallery, Signals, devoted to kinetic, environmental and performance art. A swinging place, it sold mass-produced "Signals" for £10 each; their lights used turn-signal technology. Later Takis employed dashboard components from European sports cars into pieces with flashing lights, gauges and compasses.

During a period as a research fellow at MIT, he created a device that produced electricity from ocean wave motions. He also has composed music, collaborated with opera and ballet companies, created "Musical Spaces" and installations, established his own Research Center for the Arts and Sciences and made large public sculptures.

Takis remained visible in France and Greece, but he hasn't caused a stir at a U.S. museum since 1969, when he famously removed one of his magnetic sculptures from a show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, saying it was shown without his permission. That action helped launch the Art Workers Coalition, an artists' rights organization, but it may also have gotten him blackballed, said Melissa Warak, who teaches art history at the University of Texas-El Paso.

The de Menils brought that landmark show, "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age," to Rice University soon after that. They had some ideological tension with Takis over his "performance" but remained friends, Warak said.

She thinks Takis may also have been left out of the scene after Klein and others signed their famous New Realism manifesto and didn't include him. He may also have had language barriers, and he sold a lot of his art to private collectors in Europe, so it got scattered.

Kamps credits Warak with rediscovering Takis at the Menil a few years ago when she was a research fellow. The museum's staff knew they had some works by Takis; a few of his small bronzes long stood atop a cabinet in the curatorial offices; others were kept at the de Menil's home.

Warak specializes in the art and music of the 1950s and '60s. Her curiosity about Takis led her to the deep storage area of the museum's basement, where she found the badly damaged "Magnetic Painting No. 7" in a box. Looking at it under infrared light, she and conservation fellow Erin Stephenson found ajokelike, indecipherable inscription in pencil, written in French, under the paint. The signature made them think at first the piece was by Alexander Calder.

Warak also pulled out "Ballet Magnetique," which smoked the first time the staff plugged it in. (Its restoration required the help of an electrical engineer.)

"It was a real field day for me," Warak said. "Most of these works had not been exhibited since the 1970s, if at all."

Archival documents suggest Dominique de Menil pondered staging a Takis show in the 1970s.

So, 40 years later, the artist received Kamps in Greece jovially, with open arms.

"I think he'd been waiting to see somebody from the museum because he had such a great affection for the de Menil family," Kamps said.

Takis was surrounded by beautiful young women and an assortment of magnets; he wears a magnetic belt and uses magnetic filters on his cigarettes.

"I felt like I was in the presence of a kind of shaman, somebody who had a much more finely tuned awareness of the soup of signals in which we all swim now," Kamps said. "Takis knows who he is, and I believe him."

Takis keeps an astonishing range of work in his apartment, including erotic sculptures and sculptures made with mercury cathode tubes. His art holds "a sort of archaeology of technology," Kamps said. "He would go to Army surplus and electronic surplus stores and pick out devices and make things with them."

When Kamps visited, Takis gave two works to the museum, "Magnetic Wall - M.W. 038" and "Musical - M. 013."

The curator also brought back magnetic devices Takis had him wear while they spoke, including a headband, bracelets and a belt with a rare-earth magnet so large Kamps wondered if it would cause his plane to crash.

"I could feel maybe the iron in my blood being polarized; I felt something. Or maybe it was just being in the presence of this amazing artist and talking ... with somebody who has synthesized physics and Zen Buddhism and solar yoga," Kamps said. "He sees this all as a kind of research."

Kamps didn't want to sound flaky, but his always-wide-open eyes seemed even more alert than usual.

Birds, bees and dogs utilize magnetic fields, he suggested, so why wouldn't ancient humans also have had internal compasses.

"The paradox of this is that we're in an age where we have so much information coming at us. His work is a kind of call for awareness of all these forces that are around us. He's talking about the brute forces of the universe, the stuff that keeps us on the planet, that makes radio waves. It's a message from the future that hasn't been fully realized."

A concurrent retrospective at Paris' Palais de Tokyo, through May 17, features 50 Takis pieces, including many tall "Signals" and some of the cathode-tube works. Along with the Menil's contemplative show, it's a vivid reminder of the giddy spirit artists and others felt in the mid-20th century about mankind's place in the frontiers of physics and space.

Unlike many other artists, however, Takis has been both very present in the moment and inspired by his study of ancient art and music. "He's used his Greek heritage to inform his view of the future," Warak said.

Twenty-first century technology wows, but it's not the same thing Takis' works visualize.

"We were supposed to have tele-portation, tractor beams, light-speed travel," Kamps said. "Instead we've got this beautiful screen-based reality. But it's a virtual reality. He's talking about an actual reality, which is very far advanced."