Craig Manister’s new group of landscape paintings continue a movement toward figuration in this painter’s work of the last decade or so. He began in the 1970s as a student of abstract expressionists Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof who influenced Manister’s early abstractions with their weighty surfaces and splendorous color divisions; he also had affinity with such contemporaries as Thornton Willis and Stuart Hitch.

At first glance, Manister’s present works recall Seurat in his pre-pointillist phase, with their bas-relief-like planar structure, rhythmic angular brushstrokes, and rich divisions of  color.  But whereas Seurat was moving from naturalism to abstraction, Manister’s abstraction began to imply figuration without direct study of specific landscapes. The lollypop trees and breadbox houses are certainly more symbol than freshly observed fact recalling neoclassical Picasso, Derain and the Italian Metaphysical painter Carlo Carrà.

Certainly Manister’s ‘keyhole”’ figures are decidedly Metaphysical: Excessively cartoonish, they are jarringly graphic within the otherwise naturalistic rendering of landscape. These animated keyholes are a motif surviving from Manister’s abstract paintings.  Sometimes they appear as solids, at other times as voids.  They seem intended as both mystery and deliberate trademark, both subject and lacuna.

In Figures with Bridge (2008) the eye of the viewer zig-zags in space from overlapping plane to plane,  neoclassic style.  The little keyhole figures recall the tiny people in a Poussin, in their diminished relationship to architecture and sky. In Large Figures with Tree and Mountain(2009) we find monumental key holes (literally reading as holes in the canvas) looming over a horizon.

Figure and Houses with Reflections (2009) comes together as both an homage and affectionate parody of the masters. Referencing one of Corot’s iconic motifs, the “Ville d’Avrey,” the faintly comic keyhole lovers languish in a severe Gallic landscape, perhaps dreaming along with Manister of the depth and mysteries of the great western canon.

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The clever paintings in Alexi Worth’s third show at D.C. Mooreappear at first glance to be organic abstractions.  On closer inspection however, they reveal themselves as wittily constructed close-up views of white collar scenarios, like the old-fashioned “brain teasers” in kids’ magazines.

Several paintings directly address the world of art professionals. “Monograph,” (all works 2008) is a further installment of the adventures of Gerberman, Worth’s balding art critic alter-ego familiar from previous shows. “Examples,”offers an art historian-eye view of slides on a light table that rhyme with distant filing cabinets.

And then there is the embarrassed crotch-shot voyeurism of “Eye To Eye” and “Thumbs,” so vulgar, yet he (or the viewer) can’t look away. This red-faced eroticism is further sublimated in works such as “Half in Hand,” “Arranger,” and “Speckled Pyramid” in which the comically and metaphorically sexual close-ups of fruit are subjected to a patterned abstracting treatment that disconcertingly resembles that déclassé pop trickster, M.C. Escher.

“Tear sheet,” a crumpled fashion ad conjures both Juan Gris’s Cubism, in its trompe l’oeil effect, and – in its staring paranoiac eye and tactile eroticism — Surrealism.

This is all great fun, and yet the total effect is not entirely humorous. After all Worth, who has for a number of years pursued a parallel career as a public intellectual (writing for “The New Yorker” and ArtForum among other publications) is known to be the serious sort.

For one thing, they are well painted.    The grainy, opaque paint surfaces and austere earth palette bespeak an unfashionably non-ironic desire to produce ‘quality’ paintings.  And there are learned references and quotations from art history and photography.    Worth has written memorably about Manet and photography, examining the flattening effects of quasi-photographic “frontal lighting” found in Manet and also relevant to Worth.  “Light areas bleach, backgrounds go dim or black…” with the effect of bringing the viewer nearer, he has written about Manet in a way reflects on his own imagery.

Except that, in his own painting, the deco-like stylizations and coolly finished surfaces tend to push the viewer back, despite the breezy narratives. In the end, well made as they are, the paintings sidestep a serious involvement with either expressive painterly transcription as  understood by Manet or the power of stand-alone abstraction, both so suspect in many art world quarters today.

He is in fact, even more unapolegetically a narrative painter, in his images about the image, than that other ironic realist to whom he has often been compared, John Currin.  By the reckoning of the current scene, this puts him on safer ground.

But maybe this is making unduly heavy weather out of things, and .like the comics Worth is known to admire, these works are –as they appear- simply fun  If so, that is not really such a bad place to be.

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A visitor to Nicolas Carone’s show  may feel momentary confusion over whether this is a typical Washburn Gallery exhibition featuring some master of Abstract Expressionism as in previous shows like the prints of Jackson Pollock or the work of Leon Polk Smith. A quick glance at the labels, however, reveals that these big paintings date from 2006- 08.

But actually, the visitor’s first impression was not so wrong.  These works, by a skilled and energetic 90 year old, recall that Carone was a fully-fledged participant in the 1950s scene, was a friend and neighbor of Jackson Pollock’s and exhibited successfully (notably at the legendary Stable Gallery), if intermittently, during that time.

Though Carone has always enjoyed professional respect among his peers, his work has long been difficult to see. He had long been a popular teacher of drawing at the New York Studio School where he was also a bit of an enigma.

An enigma, because though the classroom corrections and thumbnails were obviously practiced and masterful, and his knowledge and passion for painting and drawing were undeniable, curious students (full disclosure- I was one! ) saw only small but intriguing tidbits of his work.

Things have changed recently, as Carone has been very productive and showing frequently, notably at Lohin Geduld and David Findlay Jr. In fact, due to his vigorous rate of production, the show is overhung, the huge paintings triumphantly covering into every available wallspace, an evident surplus of work.

The paintings resemble the sort of automatic abstractions Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning practiced in the 1940s, such as the latter’s “Attic” (1949), in which the beautiful shapes suggest fragmentary glimpses of the figure. In Carone, too, an underlying classicism combines with a freewheeling painterly cubism.

In fact, this show approaches orthodox Abstract Expressionism more than is normal for Carone and perhaps the splattery free use of acrylic, the black mixed to resemble glossy household enamels, is intended as an hommage to de Kooning’s work of the mid 1940s.  In the austere paintings “In Orbit” (2007) and “Psychic Blackout” (2007-08) the forms are closely cropped within the rectangle, the looping muscular lines standing out as white on a black field.

Even closer to de Kooning are “Over the Threshhold” (2007) and “Not to Be Touched” (2006), with black lines on white, the largeness of the cropped forms reading more abstractly, with negative and positive shapes trading priority, and erasures and drippings emphasizing process and physicality.This “automatic writing” approach also resembles the methods of bebop jazz:, Gershwin’s “I Got Rythm,” for instance, is stripped of the cues that make the tune recognizable to point up the pure abstract musicality.

The large “Lost Tribe” and “Shadow Dance” both from 2007 seem to resemble groups of dancing figures in the classical style of Ingres, the ‘legs’ lost in the cascades of black drips against the white background. On extended viewing, surprisingly precise glimpses figure parts appear, jostling negative shapes in the elegantly free calligraphies derived from his lifelong practice of life drawing in the context of the classical tradition.In other recent shows by Carone, there were a number of works on paper incorporating subtle pencil and red chalk notations that make this connection even more personal and explicit.

This classicism seems to be particularly natural baseline for Nicholas Carone, encouraged as it was by the cultured Italian American family he was born into.  Local artists, writers and musicians were constant visitors to his childhood home, encouraged by his extraordinary mother, who also enrolled him at the Da Vinci art school on Eighth Street in the village and allowed him to quit school at 14 to pursue an artistic career.  During World War II he studied at the Hans Hoffman School, a seminal experience, and after the end of the war lived in Italy (where he still maintains a residence) where in the postwar period he astonished the Italians with their first glimpse of the American Abstract- Expressionist style.

This American treasure, born June 4, 1917, continues to astonish us today.

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Stanley Lewis is a powerful painter.  His vision is independent, original, raw.His latest work is to be seen at the Bowery Gallery, an artist- run cooperative dedicated to painters working in the tradition of French modernist figuration.  This setting allowshim to work without commercial constraints but also without the resources to promote him and his work effectively. Nevertheless he has built an impressive reputation among artists and his prices have risen quite a bit just lately, due to a committed group of patrons.

Lewis emerged from the circle surrounding the painter, teacher and charismatic outsider, Leland Bell with whom he studied at Yale. Bell saw the influence of French modernism as way of deepening figurative painting through greater consciousness of form, and was a great admirer of Giacometti, Balthus and the later work of Andre Derain. Lewis also admires the English painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff with their perceptual approach and aggressively activated paint surfaces.

Like them, his gloppy paint surfaces are aggressive and sensual though he differs in that he is much more involved with a direct naturalistic transcription of the casual, disheveled, white bread American subjects.  These he paints directly and laboriously on the spot, including everything in his  field of vision, weeds, trash, cars, power lines, etc.

The supports are roplex- soaked corrugated cardboard, old splintering plywood, cotton duck and/or crinkled paper glued or mounted and stapled on masonite – he’s an alchemist who can turn trash to gold.

Lewis is a master colorist. His unfailingly authoritative skill for painting real, rich and crystalline light, joined to his muscular composition, is the key to his power and success. An occasional pitfall for Lewis in his early work (as for Bell himself) was an uncomfortable stylization resulting from an effort to force formalism onto perception. Recently, he has resolved the problem in the direction of a more direct long- form rendering of nature. For example in his “12th St. and 4th Ave” 2006, painted in Brooklyn, he continues exploration of direct optical perspective in a fisheye view of a rather carefully characterized parked car (a Saab), tenements behind, street signs, tree in the foreground, all tense as a bent knife blade. Objects suggesting human presence such as the Saab in the foreground, seem to function as subject focus, replacing the role of the figure in the landscapes of Poussin and Corot.

The “View of the West Side of House” 2003- 07, is a loving rendering of the artist’s own porch with its gently curving trees, the sky punching through. A w-shaped jacknife torsion is seen in the triangular compressions of  in the “View from the Porch- East Side of House” 2003- 06.   “Mayville Court House” 2006 is a studiedly casual presentation of a small town scene with a characteristic wildly tilted horizon line.  An even wilder tilt can be observed in the “Monroe Marina” 2007, where it is as if a photographer dropped the camera while framing the scene.

The drawings, well represented here, are often made with such physical intensity that there are holes in the paper. The large snow scene “Winter View from West side of Houses” 2004- 07, for instance, entails a process of drawing and correcting by pasting paper repeatedly producing a scarred, heavily textured surface resembling impasto.  The drawing is so sharply observed  and intensely abstract that Lewis is able to demonstrate that the most powerful formal solutions can be found, at least sometimes, by giving oneself over to the direct study of nature, and the best way of finding high style can be found by turning one’s back on the direct pursuit of it.

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In Phillip Geiger’s painting “A Different Shirt” of 2006, on display at Tibor deNagy, we look beyond a tabletop display of deliciousness, cake, sunflowers, etc to a young woman, her head turned completely away from the viewer, enigmatically gazing into empty rooms. There’s a forthright richness in the color and fatty pigment, and even a kind of lustiness in the painterly rythms used to describe such privacy.

In an essay written for “Human Measures,” a 2005 show about painterly realism at the University of  Indiana, Philip Geiger described his attitude towards making paintings: “Intuitive seems to be the right word. I stop thinking… and try to let intensity carry the painting.”

Intuitive and discreetly sensual they are, depicting a tastefully domestic world of spare interiors and attractive people. The intensity is achieved by pearly light revealed through rich, spontaneously painterly surfaces.

Though a graduate of Yale, Geiger is a southerner and thus something of an outsider in New York.  His unapolegetically appealing paintings are unfashionably about his concept of ideal beauty. He is a contemporary intimist in the tradition of Vermeer, Corot, Vuillard and more recently, Fairfield Porter, to whom he is often compared.  Porter is different however, in his explicit desire to depict and even exploit the details of his life with his family and eminent circle of friends whose identities are specifically identified in an open way.

In fact, Porter’s inclusion of modern celebrity culture into traditional figurative paintings reflects an urban sensibility, and is an important part of the appeal of his works.

Geiger will have none of that.  He is a poet of domesticity and sublimation and is always faultlessly discreet toward his subjects.  That the specific interior depicted in most of the paintings — a sparsely furnished, turn-of-the-20th-century dining room and parlor — is the artist’s own home is only indicated by its repeated presence in much of his work since the early nineties. These sunlit spaces on modestly scaled canvases and boards are a setting for casually  elegant twenty-somethings engaged in intimate domestic interactions.

Habitually, many have their backs to the viewer, prompting us to speculate that just as we are invited into Geiger’s domestic space we are also seeing a window into the actuality of Gieger’s family drama.   He maintains, however, that the models are paid.

The titles sometimes seem to be intended as pointers to some sort of drama, such as “Locked House” (2007), a scene lit by artificial light orchestrated in reds and oranges which an older girl and two teens seem united in tension. In another, a young woman with her back to us, daisies on the white table beyond, is called, mysteriously, “Favorite Words” (2006), and an asymmetrical composition of a sleeping girl is called “Remembered Color”(2006).

“I do not intend narrative in my work though people have found it there,” he has said, and that though the subject is important to him, it represents “a moment of life in the world found, not set up. I feel they come from the intensity of looking and forming.”

And also it seems, from the artist’s natural politesse.

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The United States in the mid-twentieth century produced a wider range of artistic styles than is generally acknowledged in the art history books, and the critical preference for abstraction obscured the achievements of many good artists who did not reject representation and tradition. An excellent example of one of these overlooked artists is the sculptor Peter Agostini (1913- 1993), a selection of whose work can be seen at Salander-O’Reilly through June 23rd.

Agostini was deeply committed to the classical tradition of studying from the model. His sculptures are influenced by Modernist and Renaissance masters. The artist stated that his painterly clay and plaster life studies of the human figure, which vary in size, and his masterful studies of a horse in action, were heavily influenced by such Renaissance masters as Verrocchio and Donatello, as well as Tang dynasty tomb sculptures of horses.

Agostini’s most unusual works are his castings of everyday objects such as clothes lines and clothespins, egg cartons, bottles, and soft inflatables such as balloons and twisted automotive inner tubes, combined in a variety of ways with other elements.

These works, produced in the fifties and sixties have been associated with Pop Art, but have a different origin and artistic effect entirely, and are closer in spirit to the painters categorized at the time as ‘romantic realists’ such as Edwin Dickinson, Ivan Albright and Walter Murch. These painters combined cubist and surrealist ideas with virtuoso naturalism and a concern for rich paint surfaces and romantic decay.

The surreal and ambiguous group of cast plaster and hydrocal pieces included in the show, such as “Butterfly” of 1959 and “Swell” of 1965, where a semi- inflated rubber inner tube cast with great precision is twisted in a way that makes the identity of the subjects of the castings (i.e. the inner tube, etc.) quite clear, suggests many readings, but especially the female body (or genitals). In “Squeeze” (1960) the artist makes this very explicit by including of a pair of hands which could be caressing one another or caught in the act of sculpting or creating. These works have always attracted attention, but aren’t Agostini’s best.

The castings are too raw and don’t synthesize with his additions to them. They produce a result that is closer to the conceptualism of a Racheal Whiteread than the sketch-like unity that Agostini sought. They lack the unity and internal rhythm that mark his best work.

By the seventies Agostini had abandoned the casting of real objects and began to make life studies of the nude figure and horse. These figural works are haunted by a certain nostalgia for ancient art and a love of the fragment. The group of elegant small clay and plaster sketches included here, like most of his best work, emphasizes touch and the integrity of the materials. The large terracotta “Untitled Head” (1972) retains a sense of the lump of clay that it is made from, the features drawn directly into the clay in a way that recalls Ruben Nakian.

The life sized “Old Apollo” (1976) demonstrates Agostini’s classicism and his fascination with decay and archaic objects. This is a vigorous sculpture the style of which has been emulated by his Agostini’s best pupils, Chris Cairns and Bruce Gagnier, as Gagnier’srecent show at Lori Bookstien demonstrates. Agostini’s horses however, are inimitable.

There are three medium-sized examples in this show. They are subtly stylized, the proportions manipulated in the interests of unity and compactness. There is something uncommonly right and timeless about these works. They are as convincingly connected to cubism as to the Tang Dynasty. They represent, in their freedom, a generosity of spirit and deep sensitivity. They are spiritual self-portraits and ultimately, Peter Agostini’s greatest legacy.

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