Sometimes, unexpected context can give the requisite jolt that leads to aesthetic discovery. Paul Kasmin’s Chelsea gallery, with its exposed concrete ceilings and whitewashed walls, usually plays host to Frank Stellas or color-field abstractionists. The exhibition opening today, however, with its gilt frames, polite period imagery, and paint quality (intimate strokes, restrained tonality), feels like something wrested from a paneled gallery on Museum Mile.

The English painter William Nicholson (1872–1949) seems at first glance like a quintessential Edwardian. Rolling lowlands, luxurious still-life objects, a lady lounging in a Whistlerian interior, and a snoozing pug are rendered with a fluent, bravura painterliness that belongs as much to a bygone age as the pastoral and urbane experiences it conveys. But “William Nicholson: Paintings” is a bracing tonic for those hungry for the magic of painterly depiction. It makes a foppish, latter day academician suddenly look incredibly relevant, challenging some of the ground rules of what passes muster as representation in contemporary painting.

This is Nicholson’s first American showing since 1926. The exhibition follows on the heels of a recent retrospective at London’s Royal Academy that took account of his varied artistic interests, including his innovative printmaking (he collaborated early in his career with his brother-in-law, James Pryde, as the duo, J. and W. Beggarstaff, to produce advertising posters that rivaled Lautrec and Mucha in vivacity and modernity); his society portraiture, which secured his knighthood in 1936; his monumental group portrait of the World War I Canadian high command in front of a mammoth aerial photograph; and his book illustrations.

“Miss Simpson’s Boots,” (1919) with its jocular, convivial title, has a painterly succulence, a relish that puts you in mind of Sargent. The kinky patent leather of the once-fashionable footwear glistens against the smooth expanse of painted balustrade and light-dimpled, recently-folded cloth. At the same time, the painting — with its reductive seriality, elevation of an almost humble subject, and use of a real presence as a cipher for transcendent abstraction — has a modernity about it, not unlike Morandi’s work.

Nicholson was a maverick, but an opposite sort to Morandi. Rather than pursue a singular brand of Modernism, Nicholson seemed completely out of the Modernist picture once his printmaking days were behind him. Nor was he a tongue-in-cheek anachronist like Morandi’s compatriots in the Novecento and Pittura Metafisica movements. Although he obviously looked with admiration at Manet, early Degas, Whistler, and Sickert, Nicholson seemed at heart a painter of the 17th or 18th Century. His small, Rococo panel, “A Young Nobleman Surveys the City,” (1910) is almost a riposte to the century of his birth.

This show is an entirely non-commercial venture (Nicholsons rarely appear on the open market). It reflects the passions of its organizers: Sandford Schwartz, who wrote a 2004 critical biography of the artist and co-curated the Royal Academy exhibition, and Mr. Kasmin, a descendent of Nicholson.

An aristocratic hauteur accounted for Nicholson’s popularity with English upper-class taste: The Queen was a lender to the Royal Academy show. Her painting, “The Gold Jug” (1937), had belonged to the Queen Mother, who, guided by Kenneth Clark, formed what could be called an adventurously conservative collection. Another Nicholson fan was Winston Churchill, who took art instruction from the painter.

Today’s roster of Nicholson admirers is much closer to the cutting-edge. The anglophile nostalgist Duncan Hannah has made works after photographs of Nicholson, one of his painting heroes. Merlin James, who showed recently at Brent Sikkema, was an essayist in the RA catalogue; his New York debut at the same gallery in 1998 took the form of a three-painting show—one of his own, plus a Nicholson and an Alex Katz. Mr. Katz himself comes to mind whenever Nicholson captures a specific light sensation with his disarming brevity.

In “April, 1917” (1917), for instance, an unseasonal snow brightens an otherwise dingy, smog-filled London street, recalling Mr. Katz’s solitary, florescent light strips in the New York winter nightscape. The perfunctory monochrome figure in “Cliff Top, Rottingdean, by Moonlight” (1910) has a body language that deftly conveys a sense of huddling up against a cold wind. This lends scale to the otherwise near-abstractness of horizontals and verticals in the depiction of moon-drenched ripples and protruding rock exposed in the wet sand.

Frequently in Nicholson’s painting, actual and perceived scale vary in ways that belie their traditional look and make them secretly daring. This is especially the case in the later landscapes: “Andalucian Homestead” (1935), a painting lent by David Bowie, looks up a vertiginously steep incline, presenting the houses as a shocking white crown to the curved brow of a hill composed of loose, fat swift strokes and dabs of green and brown. The scale is completely thrown by a miniscule donkey being led at the foot of the hill, making you question where on earth the painter (and you, the viewer) might be. 

Sickert is an avatar of “Le Retour de la Joconde,” (1914): Gold frames glisten in the otherwise murky interior of the Louvre, where a crowd gathers around the recently recovered stolen Mona Lisa. One figure (thought to be Nicholson) looks in the opposite direction, at the viewer. The painting has an uncanny ability to seem at once mysterious and matter of fact, poignant and present. The depiction of a masterpiece restored to its rightful place is a good metaphor for the present show, a lively, convincing portrait of an unrepentantly untimely master whose American moment has arrived.

Until March 18 (293 Tenth Ave between 26th and 27th Streets, 212-563-4474)

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Karin Davie
until June 25
Mary Boone
541 W. 24th Street
between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues

Karin Davie paints endless loops in more ways than meet the eye. In the best sense of the word, she is a formalist — the plastic fact of what she paints represents a conundrum of painting itself. Her joyfully dumb, intriguingly mesmerizing squiggles fill Mary Boone with visual music.

Ms. Davie’s motif is a thick, confident, lyrical, sausagelike line that changes color with consummate ease and curls up and around itself with voluptuous, serpentine physicality. At first they seem like effortless nursery doodles, until you realize some remarkable technical features.

For one thing, there’s no ground. Without allowing the line to diminish in scale, there is implied recession into deep space; the squiggle disappears to a distant vanishing point. The pace — both that of application and that at which the viewer is meant to look at the lines — is very hard to determine: The whiplash lines are bravura, but at the same time exude luxuriant ease, somewhere between allegro and andante.

Then there is the freshness and verve of her color. You can tell she is painting wet in wet, with wildly different hues keeping company on the same brush. Yet for all her promiscuity with pigment, she doesn’t end up in a mush. On the contrary, there are exhilarating flashes of illumination — a sense, in fact, of brilliant light pouring out of or onto selected passages within the composition.

In the mid-1990s the Canadian-born painter came to prominence as part of a wave of artists who looked with retro nostalgia to the implicit or explicit psychedelia of Op Art, Color Field painting, and 1950s and 1960s interior décor. She was part of a four-person project room display at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998 with Udomsak Krisanamis, Bruce Pearson, and Fred Tomaselli — all artists who could be said to get high on ornament. She was included in group shows with such indicative titles as “Post-Hypnotic,” “Ultra Buzz,” “Hypermental,” and “Ecstasy Shop.”

Her painting is still on cloud nine, but it has gotten used to its own druggy pop referentiality, insisting in its maturity on inherent painterly concerns essentially unchanged since the heady days of (sic) high Modernist abstraction. You could say that her work occupies a kind of aesthetic loop, scrolling back and forth between pop and purity.

This certainly comes across in her “drawings,” which are in the back room. These papardelle-like protruding reliefs are ingeniously torn from single sheets of paper, colored on the reverse with zippers sewn into the exposed edges. Intertwined are shiny sheets of aluminum-like Mylar. Like the paintings, and more so, they are at once tricky and simple essays in critical décor.

***

Pat Steir
Moons and a River until May 7
Chiem & Read
547 W. 25th Street
between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues
212-242-7727

For a telling generational comparison with Ms. Davie (b.1965) and her pop-abstract attitude, check out Pat Steir (b.1940), whose “Moons and a River” exhibition ends this weekend at Cheim & Read. They have obvious things in common: Both favor angst-free lyrical abstraction, are open to chance, are unafraid of the decorative, embracing its problematics in a vaguely feminist way, and are sumptuous and sensual. But Ms. Steir is an earnest romantic to the degree that Ms. Davie is a sassy deconstructionist.

In her 26-foot-long “ Blue River ” (2005), Ms. Steir recalls the Color Field stain painter Morris Louis . Yet her palette is at once more naturalist and shrill: The curtain-like “unfurled” forms are bright red and silvery white, bookending the blue “veil” washes to the point, almost, of producing a tricoleur banner. At the same time, her washy, drippy effects are phenomenological to an almost literal extent that would be impossible in Jackson Pollock.

Pollock’s drips, painted on the floor, implied ethereal spatiality; Ms. Steir’s drips evoke rain corroding a surface. Like Degas in front of Monet, we want to turn up our collar. It turns out, though, to be a light shower: “Summer Moon,” (2005) is shamelessly decadent in its Orientalist appeal and lustrous palette of greens and golds, feeling like it wants to decorate the home of a latter-day Freer.

***

Pamela Crimmins
Dreamhouse until May 26
Littlejohn Contemporary
41 E. 57th Street
Madison Avenue
212- 980-2323

The calendar, if not the weather, tells us it’s time to dig those swimsuits out of the closet. As if in anticipation, the galleries are awash with images of pools. Exhibitions run a gamut, in their response to aqueous movement, from the photorealist paintings of Eric Zener, closing this weekend at Gallery Henoch, to David Hockney’s pool prints of the 1970s, exploring the ripple in all its permutations, opening next week at Mary Ryan. Keeping these latter, perennial classics company on 57th Street is a remarkable group of photographs by Pamela Crimmins at Littlejohn Contemporary.

In contrast to Mr. Zener, who paints as if he were offering a photograph but primly rations precisely the perceptual quirks the lense would offer up as disturbed water impacts his water-treading supermodel types, Ms. Crimmins offers a kind of painterly photograph, in which the quirks of medium and subject, of perception and reproduction, constantly run into one another in complex cross-currents. From within a pool she photographs the people, furniture, and buildings around its perimeter, enlisting the body of water between herself and her motif as a secondary lens. Sometimes she agitates the water with her flipper to further fragment the field of vision, accenting the edges of her ripples with scorching prisms.

The press release calls her result surreal, and as a modus operandi it does indeed recall André Kertesz’s distortion photographs; her uppercrust Connecticut houses, captured in meltdown, also bring to mind the expressionistic wobble of Soutine, Schiele, and Friedensreich Hundertwasse. But the historical movement that makes more sense is Cubism: Strange perspectives that seem at first like puzzles ultimately follow their own system for seeing the world. Ms. Crimmins’s Archimedesian realization — in, of all places, a suburban swimming pool — is that we are from the water, after all.

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