April 9 to May 9, 2015
547 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 242 7727

How can abstract painting develop — and what kind of history can this art form have? Figurative painting proceeds by identifying new subjects, and, also of course, by painting familiar subjects in unfamiliar ways. Obviously non-figurative art cannot develop in an exactly similar way. Kandinsky and Mondrian backed into abstraction by stages, as did Jackson Pollock. And then once abstraction became an ongoing tradition, working in series provided one way of keeping going. Such otherwise diverse figures as Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Mangold develop a composition, rework it until it is exhausted, and then move on. What abstract artists legitimately fear nowadays is falling into a signature style, the repetition of a basic composition in varied colors — Kenneth Noland’s chevrons in various colors would be a good example of that. If abstract art is to transcend mere decoration, it is essential for it to find some deeply imaginative way of developing.

Sometimes an exhibition review must deal with such general questions. The gallery publicity for “Transgressions” cites Bill Jensen’s very numerous inspirations — African tribal art, Chinese poetry and philosophy, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, and Russian films. And it offers an eloquent description of his surrender to a fascination with process, and his striving to avoid “preconceived outcomes.” The critical question, then, is how these very disparate influences can be synthesized in his paintings. We have the heavy black line drawing of Transgressions (Flesh) (2013), the brilliant colors of the triptych Loom of Origins (2014 – 15), the blood reds of Mountain Tiger-Sky (2013); and the drips and painted hands of Angelico, Angelico (2012-15). And the nearly all black Now I believe it peak (Huangshan Mountain) (2014 – 15). Each of these paintings is splendid — each of them could, I believe, be one work in a strong show. But seeing them together is like seeing a group show of oddly diverse artists.

Jensen is a much admired senior artist. By sticking to his guns at times when abstraction has been beleaguered, he earned our respect — and the right to be boldly experimental. That said, this is the strangest show, by miles, of a famous artist that I have seen in a major gallery. It’s a very daring exhibition, for it’s as if Jensen wants to put everything in his paintings. Up the street from Cheim & Read is Thomas Nozkowski’s show at Pace. Nozkowski is regularly praised (or blamed) for the variety of his compositions, for his refusal ever to adopt a signature style. His pictures are very varied, and yet, a Nozkowski is always identifiable. What, by contrast, I find in Jensen’s show is a boldly promising incoherence. This is why I admire Transformations even as I fail to understand it. But who knows what I’m missing: I have been wrong about ambitious artists before.

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The Space Between at the New York Studio School
February 13 to March 22, 2015
8 West 8th Street (between Macdougal and 5th Avenue)
New York, 212 673 6466

Some finished works of art efface evidence of the process of their own making. A painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or Philip Pearlstein doesn’t reveal how it was made — in that way, it is like a photograph. There is, by contrast, a special fascination in art which, by revealing the activity of its own making, makes that process part of its meaning. Such art, it might be said, is the most aesthetic visual art — it is doubly art because we both identify its abstract or figurative subject and enjoy seeing how that subject was rendered. We find this happening with Abstract Expressionism, as represented at FreedmanArt’s “Art in the Making,” by marvelous signature style works by Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, among others, and by artworks from artists of succeeding generations who extended that tradition. And the juxtaposition of a little two-sided painting Woodland Stream, Martha’s Vineyard/Chilmark Landscape (1922) by Thomas Hart Benton with a glorious drawing from his pupil, Jackson Pollock Untitled (folded greeting card) (1946-47) is a marvelous demonstration of how varied art whose making is part of its meaning can be. So too are the 23 drawings by Kit White, as illustrated in his book 101 Things to Learn in Art School (MIT Press, 2011), which present details from works by such varied painters as Michelangelo Caravaggio, Giorgio Morandi and Andy Warhol.

The press announcement for “The Space Between” identifies a key theme in Studio School teaching. Between-ness, this text suggests, may allude to the space between forms in the picture plane, between abstraction and representation, and, also, between pictorial symbols and the three-dimensional space they symbolize. Here, then, we find a variation on FreedmanArt’s theme, for speaking in these varied ways about betweenness is to allude to awareness of the process of art making. No wonder, then, that Bill Jensen and Graham Nickson are in both shows, for Jensen’s abstractions and Nickson’s figurative images provide pleasure thanks to both their subjects and our awareness of the painting process used to present those subjects. The same is true, comparing two other works on display at the Studio School: contrast, I would suggest, Margrit Lewczuk’s magnificent large Untitled (2009) with Stanley Lewis’ View from Studio Window (2003-4). Sometimes the most revealing survey displays are found not in our museums but in the galleries — here in small galleries. You could teach a whole history of Modernism using just the art on display in these two richly suggestive shows. That is a great, generous achievement.

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June 27 to August 30, 2013
547 West 25th Street
New York City, (212) 242-7727

Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s, a ruggedly alive exhibition organized by poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, presents fifteen artists who were in their prime during that decade. By focusing on the physical reality of the artworks, and the social reality of this specific group of artists, the exhibition escapes the trap of misty-eyed nostalgia or explicit revisionism. In his catalog essay, Rubinstein discusses the show as a way to disengage the story of abstract painting from the bottom-line narratives that are seen as the “official account” of the decade, in particular the advent of celebrity-styled painters, and the dominance of Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Geo, two labels that had more to do with marketing than with painted content. Instead, he offers the phrase “impure abstraction,” a hybrid mode of working between abstraction and figuration, to flesh out a portrait of a painting culture that was not as beholden to the one-critic model of analysis that effected the previous generation in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.

Reinventing Abstraction is more concerned with the transition of painting cultures and the accruing of historical knowledge than it is with the particulars of the decadent decade itself. The back-story to the 1980s begins with the social radicalism of the 1960s, when the majority of the exhibition’s included artists were in school, and continues through the 1970s when they were fully experimenting with their practice in an art world that had largely turned away from painting in favor of the dematerialization of the art object. The off-the-stretcher abstraction being made in the ‘60s and ‘70s had its own moment in the sun with High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975, an exhibition organized by Katie Siegel and David Reed, which Rubinstein acknowledges as a guiding spirit for his own show.

A feeling of disengagement from the immediate past manifests itself visually in many of the works on view. It is as if an invisible pane of glass were mounted on top of the canvas to emotionally cool off the fast and loose painted gesture. Jonathan Lasker’s Double Play (1987), a painting in elegant quotation marks, has all its ingredients diagrammed to perfection: a rich brown backdrop, radiating pink bars, and an area of gooey cross-hatched “painting” splashed up against the surface. David Reed’s No. 230 (For Beccafumi) (1985-6) is a vertical monument to the paint stroke, showing off a translucent-matte finish that is as sharp and slick as a silkscreen. In both works these artists are making visible the idea of painting as a compositional force sans the hot-headedness of late night studio labor. Similarly, Mary Heilmann’s exuberant Rio Nido (1987) is a play between foreground and background, between the painting as whole and the painting as parts. Blue, magenta, red, green, and yellow marks set against black are read as shot holes dripping paint, a remnant of an action, and the painting exists as the evidence.

Carroll Dunham’s Horizontal Bands (1982-83), is a Surrealism-inflected painting on pine board composed of alternating stripes of graphically rendered root vegetables, allowing one to see his trademark phalluses just over the horizon. The tentative nature of this early painting reads more as a private sketch than as a full-blown work, a proposition of fresh beginnings that charges many of the paintings on view. Bill Jensen’s The Tempest (1980-81), a dimensional portrait of a star-like figure, is thickly celestial, like a corner blow-up of a Van Gogh. Gary Stephan’s unromantically titled Untitled (#45418) (1988) is the most overtly mysterious work in the gallery, an image of a dusk-lit landscape divided in half by a biomorphic form that eclipses day into night.

What’s striking about several of the paintings in Reinventing Abstraction is their wall-dominating size. It’s a scale that brings to mind 18th-century history painting as easily as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), and speaks of financial resources and passion to burn. The lavish variety of surface textures and oil paint mixed with other media makes today’s abstract paintings seem especially anemic when it comes to materials and scale. Even the smallest work in the show, Thomas Nozkowski’s Untitled (630) (1988), radiates a deeply felt engagement with the largess of history and psychic space.

In comparison to the work on view in High Times Hard Times, the majority of artists in Reinventing Abstraction make their radical choices within the framed space of the traditional rectangle, putting an exquisite pressure on the pictorial possibilities of abstraction. A notable exception is Elizabeth Murray’s Sentimental Education (1982), a painting of conjoined parts whose scale and rapturous energy speak to the colossal task of painting as both action and object. For all its obvious labor of construction, the work epitomizes the fun aspects of high Modernism.  Her oil on canvas appears as malleable as a Play-Doh construction of cobalt colors and finely drawn zig-zags. In this painting, and indeed her entire body of work, Murray epitomizes the transcendent grace of the art student as grand master.

The paintings in Reinventing Abstractions are all un-mistakenly the work of grown-up artists coming to terms with inherited values while finding new rhythms with which to move abstraction forward. In this sense, the art could be seen as a visual complement to Paul Simon’s album Graceland (1986), a portrait of the decade in which commercial entertainment culture solidified its hold on American society, while also letting in the dreamy, fluent potential of Postmodernism as a way to break free from Modernism’s flight of progress. As a citizen of a tightly sealed, pluralist art world it can be easy to long for this not too distant past. It is important to fight this backward glance, and instead to ask, what does remain? I can think of a few things: the factuality of paint, the presence of art history and mentors, and the still shocking ability of a new abstract painting to dismantle the fiction of linear time, if only for a minute or two.

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Bill Jensen’s inspired show draws from several sources: mystical Chinese philosophical texts, Chinese painting, the early American modernists, and later proponents of abstract expressionism and the New York School. In light of these eclectic influences, his black-and-white and color abstractions demonstrate a tough lyricism of their own, without sacrificing in any way the artist’s long-running concerns with beauty. Looking at this highly accomplished, highly persuasive show, one can only praise the range of effects he achieves. While similarities exist in the paintings, each piece feels as if it has been made for its own reasons, so that there is the variety within unity that one associates with accomplished bodies of work. While he is an American painter, Jensen’s interest in Chinese art should not be underestimated; in his black-an-white works particularly, he shows a strong understanding of calligraphic mark-making. He has even gone so far as to commission David Hinton, a noted translator of classical Chinese poetry, for an introductory essay.

It is a dangerous thing to appropriate a style from another culture. Chances are that the artist will translate the style but not the substance of the culture he is making use of. In Jensen’s case, however, the artist utilizes general effects without becoming too beholden to the Chinese. There is some justice in his doing so—many Asian artists, the Chinese in particular, look closely at postmodern art practice in the West; conceptualism and performance art have made an especially noticeable impact on their own esthetic. Given the fact of globalization, it makes sense that artists would be eclectic in their practice; yet their open-mindedness does not necessarily translate into good art. So much the better, then, for Jensen, whose grasp of Chinese art does not paint him into a corner, where his work would become suspect and overdetermined.

Jensen offered three bodies of work: ink-on-paper efforts; egg-and-tempera works on paper; and oil-on-linen paintings. Each group demonstrates his casual yet acccomplished transformation of art history, Western as well as Chinese. The most striking of the Chinese art-inspired paintings are the ink-on-paper pieces, which are part of the “Passare da Bernardo” series; in these works one finds dramatic black stripes, often curving, which reminds the history-conscious observer of ancient seal script. Passare da Bernardo XXXVI (2009) consists of a thick series of connected lines painted in the center of the composition; beneath them, one sees equally thick, curling stripes whose density of tone is lighter. The overall feeling of the work is that of a palimpsest, in which images are written over partly erased images. It is a good way for Jensen to showcase his technical prowess, as well as enabling him to reference tangentially the great Chinese calligraphic tradition.

In Jensen’s egg-and-oil-tempera works on paper, there is not so much acknowledgment of Asian art. Here the bright colors washing over other colors, in some cases structured by curving stripes, tend to take their cue from relatively recent Western art. In the smallish painting on paper entitled With Color XXIV (2009) we see an exquisite rendering of hues and painterly effects: bright red, slightly wandering stripes roughly divide the painting into several sections. Yellow dominates the middle and top left, while orange and blue and a touch of purple is found on the upper right. On the bottom left, a red band encloses an area of pinkish-purple, while four patches of blue, painted as washes above a field of light pink, are seen on the bottom-right quadrant. The work is inspired by the major abstract artists who made New York a home: figures like Pollock, de Kooning, and especially the lesser-known James Brooks come to mind.

Jensen’s colors are lush and even luxurious: seeing them, his audience remembers that the artist makes his own pigments—making his own materials is of a piece with his desire to make work that is indicative of his independence from trends. The transcendent painting entitled Images of a Floating World (Passare) (2009) seems proud of its intense colors, which include washes of red and orange (in the center), a luminous dark blue (in the lower right corner), and blotches of blue and yellow-green (on the top). Purely abstract, Jensen’s intricate use of colors shows him here to be a close friend of the abstract expressionists; Pollock is clearly a mentor.

In Time after Time (1993-2009), a work long in the making, we see a wash made up of reds and deep pinks; their stripes rise upward from the mass on the lower left, above which is a patch of olive green surrounding a light, creamy white. It is hard to find worldly correlations in so resolutely an abstract work, but that’s part of Jensen’s point—namely, that the compositions are worked out so that they remain nonobjective. Jensen is in some ways a reticent painter, removing all signs of a brushstroke. His quietness, though, becomes something else when one regards the casual mastery and expressiveness of color in much of his art.

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Donald Kuspit, Joan Waltemath, and Karen Wilkin joined David Cohen to review Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read, June Leaf at Edward Thorp, Odd Nerdrum at Forum, Anthony McCall at Sean Kelly and David Hammons at L&M Arts.

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Until September 9

Like the artist it celebrates, “The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art” is bursting with energy and ideas. The show presents Chaim Soutine 1893-1943) as a father figure of different traditions, American Abstract Expressionism and British expressive realism among them.

Of 46 works on display, seventeen are by Chaim Soutine himself, including such show stoppers as “View of Cagnes” (1924-25), on loan from the Metropolitan Museum and “The Carcass of Beef” (c.1925), from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.  These hang cheek by jowl (an apt metaphor for an artist notoriously drawn to dead animals as his favored still-life motif) with a range of modern and contemporary artists, including luminaries of the New York School like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Joan Mitchell; School of London painters Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff; and individualists as diverse as Alice Neel and Joel Shapiro, Avigdor Arikha and Louise Bourgeois.

This line up is both a plea for Soutine’s contemporary relevance and a signal of his perennial outsider status.  The organizers of the show are Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, collaborators (with Klaus Perls) on the 1993 catalogue raisonée of the artist which—very rarely for a scholarly work of this kind—sold out its first hardback edition of 25,000, reflecting a deep interest particularly among painters.  Bizarrely, as the authors observe, the fascination with Soutine doesn’t inspire the Museum of Modern Art to hang any of the artist’s work in their permanent display.  On the contrary, MoMA recently deaccessioned an important later canvas, “Chartres Cathedral” (1934), to their shame.  There is a sense, however, that such official neglect bolsters Soutine’s standing as a supreme “painter’s painter”—a maverick who inspires artists whether by his drivenness and eccentricity or his deep rootedness in craft and tradition.

Soutine satisfies either criteria, which in a way is his paradox.  He has been vaunted as a kind of painterly madman, a latter-day Van Gogh.  Phrases like “hallucination,” “drunkenness,” “Dionysian frenzy” litter the Soutine literature—one critic even spoke of his flinging down ready-made compositions and not particularly caring if they landed on the canvas—and yet in marked contradiction to this is hisfierce rigor, the hidden order that binds together his frenetic marks and energized compositions.

This duality comes across in the masterful and perplexing “Landscape with Figures” (c.1922), from Soutine’s watershed three year period in Ceret, when his work reached its most “abstract expressionist” intensity (he destroyed many of the fruits of this creative outpouring in disgust at its extremity.).  A seated group of women are on a village terrace overlooking a ravine.  There are violent flashes of color—red chairs, the orange tiles of the surrounding houses, the blue of distant hills, and the near black of the steep wall disappearing beneath the figures—which somehow survive a tendency towards chromatic mush.  Similarly, close scrutiny of what could come across as a formless, expressive swirl, reveals moments of careful observation.

The elongated features of a woman with her back to the viewer, the exaggerated hat and almost dislocated, distended arms, appear to be carved out of the negative space around them—an area of intense greens and yellows that pop forwards into the picture plane.  Chairs and benches are at once specific and perfunctory, concrete and shorthand, lumpen and animate.  The whole composition is caught up in a kind of frenzy, submitting to the force of a spiral that moves down along the wall, up through the tree, and down again into the ravine.  There a sense of things coming into focus and melting away.

Some of the artists placed alongside Soutine relate more to his primitivism than to his modernist sophistication.  Jean Dubuffet, for instance, is represented by “Pierre Philosophique (D’Epanouissement)” (1951) and “Paysage Fossile” (1952), whose grinding, dense, existentialist gloom speaks to the expressionist angst in Soutine.

Two sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, a suspended bronze titled “The Quartered One,” (1964-5), that resembles a leg of meat, and a wall piece, “Rabbit” (1970), relate to the totemic, almost ritualistic identification with slaughtered animals found in Soutine’s work. “There is something electric and violent and fragile that touches me deeply in all of Soutine’s works,” Ms. Bourgeois told the curators in 2005.  His carcass motif—inspired by Rembrandt’s “Slaughtered Ox” (1665)–is also picked up by Gandy Brodie in “Meditation on a Kosher Tag” (1963), while the depictions of inert fauna by such painters as Georg Baselitz, Alice Neel, and Susan Rothenberg, keep company with Soutine’s game and fowl.

The viscous veils of swirling reds and blues in Bill Jensen’s “The Five, The Seven VII (Ceret)” (2005) eerily relate to the Buffalo “Carcass of Beef” .  Jensen’s layering of translucent colors offers an abstract equivalent to Soutine’s ability to conjure hidden pockets of space while pushing his marks and colors outwards to heighten the visceral, intrusive presentness of the meat.  In the same room an untitled 2006 construction by Joel Shapiro, who owns a Soutine rabbit, takes on a carcass-like complexion: The wooden pieces hang together with awkward lifelessness; they are stained an almost sinister sanguine purple; and the bent out of shape wire (a device he started using after September 11, 2001) adds poignancy.

The heart of this show, however, is a presentation of Soutine as the father of two traditions—American abstract expressionism and British expressive realism.  The American involvement with Soutine has an historic marker: the 1950 Soutine retrospective at the MoMA, which the New York School artists took in with great admiration only seven years after the artist had died in Paris.

While Pollock is represented by a 1934 canvas whose robust, hefty awkwardness feels Soutine-like, it is his trademark “all over” drip paintings that relate to a defining quality in Soutine, identified by another Abstract Expressionist painter included here, Jack Tworkov: “the way his pictures move towards the edge of the canvas in centrifugal waves filling it to the brim.”  It is this sense of a swirling gestalt, a method in the madness of compulsively accumulated marks, which also justifies the inclusion of the poetically intense Milton Resnick.

De Kooning, on the other hand, relates directly to Soutine’s instinctive rapport with materials, the luscious, succulent, urgent, voluptuous presence of oily pigment that brings both their canvases so rudely to life.  While De Kooning’s “Untitled  XVI” (1976) hangs with the “Carcass of Beef” it has an unmistakably sexual presence in the way slippery pinks, whites and grays ooze into each other.  It is the kind of canvas that exemplifies De Kooning’s legendary remark that flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.

De Kooning is as much an avatar of British painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff as Soutine.  Auerbach’s gooey, glistening, sparkling impasto is impossible without the example of the American.  But these men, with Freud, are convincing in their role here as contemporary incarnations of the Soutine spirit.  A glaring omission in this show is the chef d’ecole of the School of London, Francis Bacon (in 2001 the same curators organized an exhibition in Germany that juxtaposed Bacon, Dubuffet, De Kooning and Pollock with Soutine) whose “Painting” (1946) directly quoted the Soutine/Rembrandt carcass.  Freud is represented by “The Painter’s Garden” (2003), a relatively rare outdoor subject that relates more to one of Soutine’s heroes, Courbet, than to Soutine.

Like Soutine, the English painters are romantics yearning to commune with the classical tradition.  Soutine was the victim of enormous prejudice even from critical supporters who mistook his expressive intensity for primitivism rooted in ignorance of painterly traditions.  He was seen as a wild primitive who painted from inner necessity, oblivious to conventions, whereas his style was in fact rooted in sophisticated observation of old masters, who he increasingly revered.  The School of London painters have a similar obsession with the past, which they believe can be reconciled with fresh, authentic, instinctive direct observation.  What is also telling is that just as the artist from the Lithuanian shtetl saw himself as keeper of the flame of French painting (working from Courbet and Chardin), the London painters (refugees from Nazi Germany, or in the case of Kossoff, the son of emigrants from Eastern Europe) as often work from Constable or Hogarth as from Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian or Poussin.

Kossoff is the English painter who comes across as the most Soutine-like.  He is represented by two of his finest works: “Here Comes the Diesel, Spring” and “Christchurch, Winter Evening” (both 1987).  Like Soutine, Kossoff (and Freud and Auerbach as well) prefer to have their subject present, although these Kossoffs are actually painted in the studio after copious drawings sur le motif.  Where Soutine would destroy many of his canvases, an equally doubt-driven Kossoff scrapes down numerous unsuccesful earlier attempts at achieving the desired image, some memory of which lingers under the final effort, the result of a single session.  His motifs, like Soutines, seem to wobble precariously in the expressive effort of landing in the picture.  And his buildings and trains, like Soutine’s French villages, anthropomorphize as if under the weight of their author’s ambition to instill into them a depth of feeling.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 6, 2006.

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This review first appeared in The New York Sun, July 21, 2005.

Black is the primary color of the creative classes; every artling sports it. Now Betty Cuningham Gallery is trying it on the walls in a “search for resonant symbols”. Despite curator Phong Bui’s unsmiling jargon (“centralizing black as a mediating agent”), the search turns up merrier widows than expected.

Dead black barely exists in nature and is often ignored by painters as a palette color. Lustrous blacks can be created from colors that lose their identity mixed at full intensity and, touched with white, create inimitable grays. Everything here looks straight from the tube, surprising for work intended to “broaden the meaning of black.” But not to niggle. Good painting is on view, even some color.

The pictorial language of Forrest Bess and Thomas Nozkowski, a dialogue between abstraction and description, suits this scant palette. An isolated, self-described visionary Modernist, Bess (1911-1977) exhibited with Betty Parsons from 1949 to 1967; his work is rarely seen anymore. This small untitled painting (c. 1952) evokes moonlight over water by adjusting textures heightened by a few well-aimed strokes of white. Simplicity of form, refined edges and command of paint quality combine in Mr. Nozkowski’s untitled oil (1995). Luminous egg shapes play against a series of tenebrous, filamented placentas, each one bounded by subtle threads of near-purple.

One arresting (untitled, undated) painting by Nick Carone, haunted with elusive color, hints at human form emerging—inchoate and with difficulty—from unlit chaos. It makes Terry Winters and Phiilip Guston, nearby, look facile and dull. Joan Waltemath lends optical interest to tube black by manipulating refractive capacity with iron filings, interference pigment and metallic powders. Her “Universe is a Square” (1996-99), rectangles of pure color floating over a beautiful surface, is the single geometric abstraction with emotive power. In Norman Bluhm’s “Silent Vamp” (1980), undulant ebony forms press against each other with volumptuous abandon, squeezing high color through the interstices.

Displayed in its own niche, Bill Jensen’s “Black Madonna” (1978) is a ghostly tar baby surrounded by dripping slashes. It has the necrophiliac charm of an album cover for a death metal band: Our Lady Queen of Demonstealers. What was Jensen listening to in ‘78? Alice Cooper? Black Sabbath? Judging from “Death’s Door” (2003-4), he’s still listening.

Christopher Martin’s prominently positioned “Here (For Wallace Berman and Hilma AF Klimt)”, 2005, is an over-amplified cipher crudely inscribed in white and bisected by a cable-like line with a box in the center—a dumbwaiter to nowhere. The thing reminds us how far art has traveled from obligation to the visual. Art is now the mark of an artist’s presence: something left behind, like paw prints. It also reminds us that the word curator is misleading. Less the disinterested expert of popular piety, a curator is frequently an agent for artists, dealers or collectors.

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“Ying Li” at the Painting Center until February 28 (52 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, between Broome and Grand Streets, 212-343-1060). Prices: $1,800-$4,000.

“Marc Quinn” at Mary Boone Gallery until February 28 (541 West 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-752-2929). Prices: $125,000-$140,000.

Jackson Pollock famously answered an inquiry about his influences with a belligerently short shortlist: Picasso and Albert Pinkham Ryder. A valid description of Bill Jensen – who is himself an eloquent and impassioned supporter of the maverick American romantic – would be a synthesis of Pollock and Ryder.

Like Pollock, Mr. Jensen is blessed with lyricism of line, a kind of suprapersonal calligraphy that is nonetheless intensely his own. But his brush is always tempered, questioned, energized by awkwardness: He is like the young Pollock in temper, mature Pollock in fluency.

Which is where Ryder, with his oxymoronically dark luminosity, comes in. Although Mr. Jensen’s palette is nothing like Ryder’s-the American master was a reckless experimenter with bitumen– it has something of hisspiritual weight. Mr. Jensen’s more recent work – some of which is hanging at Danese Gallery – reveals newfound chromatic boldness. This show brings together two series of works, both from last year: a densely colored and textured set, “Duo Duo,” worked in egg-and-oil tempera, and “Drunken Brush,” a predominantly black-and-white set whose appropriately Zen-like title signals a close affinity with Oriental calligraphy.

A “salt of the earth” quality to Mr. Jensen’s color still reinforces the sense of his rootedness in nature, however. He seems at times to be willing himself to become an agent of nature, refusing to settle for being a mere transcriber of its surfaces. He replaces some of the intellectual ambition to be found in Terry Winters (an artist he sometimes resembles) or in Thomas Nozkowski, with an innocencenot to be found in these more canny practioners.
His achievement, however, is to embrace the spiritual without going gooey.

In eloquent denial of William James’s distinction between tough- and tender-mindedness, his forms and touch reveal traces of both. [no break]In similar vein, he collapses the dichotomy of fast and slow: The movements he describes and embodies seem, like geological forces, at once wayward and inevitable. They evolve at a mind-numbingly gradual pace yet suddenly jerk forward cataclysmically.
To my eye, Danese has overhung Mr. Jensen’s dense, tense, and exhaustive paintings by around 30%, which will mislead cursory visitors with an impression of repetition and sameness. To the converted, however, this testing hang is an added incentive for repeat visits.

For a more traditional but no less spirited pursuit of the lyrical in landscape, be sure to catch Ying Li’s show at SoHo’s Painting Center before it closes this weekend. Eighteen works reveal bewildering diversity both of influence and of pictorial ambition.

She has a touch to die for in terms of bravura painthandling and innate good taste. In her best works, she manages to endow brushstroke with the power of metaphor. Different brushes and their tips sometimes converge in a single canvas in a Dionysian orgy of painterliness.

Often, in works that look to Turner or Boudin or to more contemporary examples like Louis Finkelstein or Stuart Shils, Ms. Li is inspired to gorgeous but familiar effects, to a comfortable expression of the pleasures of landscape. In other works, she pushes further towards abstraction, almost offering a pastiche de Kooning, for instance, in “Riverstroke #1” (2003), but with no less tasteful a result.

Only in two or three works, however, does a restlessness reveals itself, an indication that jouissance is not enough. “Vermont, Deep Fall” (2003), for instance, shares the frenzied logic of Soutine to suggestthat expressiveness and a sense of structure need not be mutually exclusive. Ms. Li’s best paintings pulsate with emotional and pictorial complexity.

Marc Quinn has always been one of the more thoughtful of the “YBAs,” the notorious band of young Brits collected in the 1990s by Charles Saatchi. True, Mr. Quinn went for the jugular with “Self” (1991), a self-portrait head made of 8 frozen pints of his own blood, but his work is usually richer and more historically layered than that of his shamelessly shallow and opportunistic peers.

His current show at Mary Boone finely balances the poignant and the prurient. He has had 11 carvings made of people with missing or deformed limbs, victims of birth defects or misadventures. These enervatingly literal carvings have the deathly dullness of the neo-classical Bertel Thorvaldsen. But by finding models of a certain readymade modernity, Mr. Quinn can be said to have married the academicism of that dreary Dane with the biomporphic oddity of Henry Moore or Arp – a fusion typical of Britain’s young neo-conceptualists.

Mr. Quinn was shortlisted for a competition staged at London’s National Gallery recently for a work for the empty pedestal in Trafalgar Square. He chose to depict Alison Lapper, a thalidomide child, now grown and in an advanced state of pregnancy. He argued that it complemented Horatio Nelson atop his column on two counts: overcoming handicap is as heroic as fighting for one’s nation, while the admiral is famously missing a limb and an organ.
Seen alone, Ms. Lapper was indeed heroic. But amassed in a whole Valhalla of the deformed and the maimed, Mr. Quinn’s project begins to seem a little sick. That said, the figures are of handsome, strong, and athletic men and women, dignified in the titles with their real names. If they inspire some viewers to confront their own squeamishness and preconceptions about beauty and wholeness, they will have achieved something.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 26, 2004

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