Bacon would have been pleased by the proximity. Though his contorted figures owe a significant debt to Picasso—their roiling distortions being an almost sculptural equivalent of Cubism’s pictorial fracturing—Bacon’s charnel-house dioramas are, in pivotal ways, unmodern. (Given Bacon’s distaste for abstraction, the pictures could be considered anti-modern.) The ready-made gravitas and epic nature inherent in the tradition of Western painting suited Bacon’s flashy ambitions—hence, the bald reliance on Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and the heaving musculature of Michelangelo’s nudes.

But Bacon was, if not a strict Modernist, then certainly a creature of the modern age. A niggling strain of Surrealism infiltrates the work, as does the collage aesthetic: His compositions are piecemeal affairs, with their uninflected planes of flat color, malleable forms and decal-like figures. His philosophical mien, a lean variant of Nietzschean atheism, is reflective of a more-jaded-than-thou postwar intellectualism. “I haven’t got any morals to preach,” Bacon stated. “I just work as closely to my nerves as I can.” A miserable narcissism permeates the work.

Then there’s the almost Warholian poaching of mass media. Bacon mimicked to startling effect the filmed image—his gauzy slurs of oil paint take on a ghostly, cinematic allure. His sources ranged from Eisenstein’s Battlship Potemkin and Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion to beefcake magazines like MANifique and Man-O-Rama, newspaper clippings of Himmler and Goebbels and photo-booth self-portraits. You can see actual examples of Bacon’s image stockpile at the Met, much of it grubby with paint. It’s a devastating testament to Bacon’s paintings that the reference materials are sometimes more diverting than what he made of them.

The Met show is fairly selective, but it’s endless all the same. How much designer Grand Guignol does one person need? Bacon’s vaunted embrace of chance incident—that would be the ejaculatory blurts of paint flung directly from the tube—are no less false than the late triptychs, wherein we see an artist who’s become a sheepish victim to his own style. It’s the overweening calculation of Bacon’s art, its soulless theatricality, that marks him not as a descendant of the Old Masters but as a progenitor of corporate nihilists like Damian Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Jenny Saville. Like them, Bacon makes a provocative first impression, but then leaves us with little more than a cold rush of artifice.

mnaves@observer.com

[“Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until August 16th]

“Plopping” this or that object in a highly trafficked area is presumably done for the benefit of the public weal, as if navigating around art is the same thing as appreciating it. The likelihood isn’t out of the question, but most public art isn’t public: It’s just there, arbitrary and aloof.

Writing about Arthur Carter’s public art in the recently published monograph Arthur Carter; Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings, Peter Kaplan, former editor of The Observer, describes something different: sculptures that “speak to the sidewalk passers-by” and “commune with the air and light of the city.” What he’s positing is social sculpture: art that actively seeks to engage an audience and its environs. In a city as frenetic and preoccupied with itself as this one, that can seem a tall order. But Mr. Carter’s stainless steel abstractions pull it off, “only occasionally yield[ing] to the laws and conventions” of Manhattan.

The son of an I.R.S. agent and a French teacher, Mr. Carter evinced little interest in art as a child. He was cultured, for sure—he displayed serious talent for classical piano—but Wall Street, not Julliard, won out and in no small way. Mr. Kaplan describes Carter, Berlind and Weill, the investment-banking firm Mr. Carter founded, as “world beating” for a reason: It restructured the way in which business was done and, not coincidentally, was hugely successful. The term “power broker” could have been tailor-made for Mr. Carter.

Though he bought art—Maillol, Archipenko, Picasso and Braque are a few names in his collection—Mr. Carter showed little proclivity for art-making itself. Asked if someone were to foretell his future as an artist during the Wall Street years, Mr. Carter would have said “they were crazy.” Instead, he turned to publishing, purchasing The Nation in 1985 and, two years later, founding The Observer. (He has since sold controlling interest in each publication.)

Art historian and journalist Charles A. Riley traces Mr. Carter’s artistic development to his defining hand in shaping The Observer, including the choice of its distinctive salmon color. “Design battles,” Mr. Riley writes, “extracted aesthetics [Mr. Carter] could pursue in the studio, using compositional muscles, well toned from years” of publishing. Mr. Carter is a fan of Alexander Liberman, famed design director for Condé Nast and an artist of no mean consequence. It’s no surprise: They not only shared a media background and a Connecticut neighborhood, but an aesthetic rooted in Constructivism, among the most rigorous of Modernist schools.

Mr. Carter has pursued art with the same inescapable drive he brought to business. His welded steel sculptures—with their sloping contours, lilting geometry, underplayed wit and machine-tooled surfaces—bring to mind any number of precedents: David Smith’s totemic effigies, Anthony Caro’s stringent elisions of mass and void, Alexander Calder’s effusive linearity and George Rickey’s acrobatic equipoise. (Mr. Rickey’s historical overview, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution, is something akin to Mr. Carter’s Bible.) His paintings evince a plainly stated and deeply considered debt to Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism.

But Mr. Carter knows that reiterating tradition isn’t the same as enlivening and extending it. After completing a specific work, he’ll scour the history books in order to trace its “evolution.” Mr. Carter does so not only to establish a firm link to history, but as a means of keeping himself honest: He’s loath to “infringe too closely” upon any single source. It seems an ass-backwards approach—shouldn’t an artist make sure of these things before committing time, labor and resources?—but it points to the artist’s heady confidence and, in the end, the work’s streamlined authority justifies it.

The most telling link between the businessman and the artist is the clean efficiency of Mr. Carter’s personal philosophy. “The simpler the economics are, the better. If you don’t understand it, you don’t do it.” This Koan-like declaration is as applicable to the studio as it is to the boardroom. Whether taking inspiration from the 13th-century mathematician Fibonacci, the Tao Te Ching or the Coast Guard—where, after all, he learned welding—Mr. Carter holds true to the notion that art, however distilled or abstract, is a celebration of life’s complexity. His deeply unpretentious and optimistic vision brings, pace Mr. Kaplan, “order to the madness of the world”—which is, come to think of it, exactly what we should expect from an artist.

mnaves@observer.com

The Ponzi King deserves, not commentary done on a deadline, but vitriol made gross and lurid through paint. Mr. Saul’s finicky style, with its innumerable pats of oversaturated color, is inherently anti-immediate; we’ll have to wait for his definitive take on capitalist excess and arrogance. But then, topicality isn’t Mr. Saul’s forte. Bile is.

For the last 50 years or so, he’s thrived on the stuff, and created a body of work that stands as a monument to garish, adolescent overkill. From his early, not un-fond forays into AbEx pastiche to the pseudo-pointillist cartoons for which he’s gained a significant following, Mr. Saul has trained his scatological eye on humankind’s failings and follies. Ronald Reagan, Fidel Castro, O. J. Simpson, Donald Duck, Jeffrey Dahmer and Newt Gingrich—in mortal combat with Little Orphan Annie, no less—have met with his ire.

Mr. Saul has worked on themes both grand (totalitarianism, the ubiquity of racism and genocide) and trivial (zit-popping, nose-picking and Marcel Duchamp). Either way, he invests a given motif with gleeful and raucous overstatement. “I like the way [a] picture presents problems you have to deal with,” the artist, in an understated mood, told BOMB magazine. If there’s no particular breadth to Mr. Saul’s maliciousness, its unflagging nature is impressive in its purity.

Which is a not-so-roundabout way of saying that the exhibit is more of the same. The fleshy and contorted figures; the electric palette; the Silly Putty–like elisions of space; and an endearing weakness for the easy mark—Joe the Plumber no less than Bernie Madoff—the recent work demonstrates that Mr. Saul is as reliable a stylist as he is a misanthrope. Stalin and Mao make an appearance, as does the artist himself, brandishing a large pickle and running through a bowl of what appear to be SpaghettiO’s.

A keen, if dyspeptic, student of art history—Mr. Saul is, for example, a fan of 19th-century academic painting—he knowingly parodies Willem de Kooning’s slash-and-burn methodology in a canvas titled (what else?) Better Than De Kooning. A homage to Max Beckmann’s The Night simultaneously simplifies and amplifies that masterpiece’s grotesqueries without necessarily tapping into the German painter’s philosophical gravity. But that’s kind of the point: Mr. Saul prides himself on his amorality. He trades in across-the-board vituperation. He’s refreshingly un-p.c. that way. That’s why charges of, say, misogyny don’t phase him.

Not that he doesn’t ask for them. The unabashedly puerile Viva La Difference (2008) is a case in point. A kneeling man in purplish-pink pajamas—he resembles Derek Jeter, though the folks at Nolan emphatically state that it’s not—crouches by a bed, putting his arm around a multiethnic lump of flesh with six breasts, six vaginas, blond hair and no face. In the catalog interview, Mr. Saul’s posits the canvas as a bedroom emollient for the collector ready to snap it up. There’s no accounting for one’s tastes in aphrodisiacs. But neither is there any doubting the integrity of an artist who is, in the end, less cantankerous or scabrous than just plain lovable—at least for those of us with a weakness for exuberant ill will.

“Peter Saul: New Paintings” is at David Nolan Gallery, 527 West 29th Street, until May 23.

mnaves@observer.com

What makes “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery’s 21st Street location, a surprise and, in the end, an event is just how un-boring it is. The show rescues Picasso from the doldrums of his own ubiquity; then it looses him to rampage through west Manhattan. Rarely has the stuff of life coursed through Chelsea with as much gross exuberance.

Curated by John Richardson, a confidante of the artist and author of the definitive A Life of Picasso, “Mosqueteros” sets out to establish a great Late Phase for Picasso—a “monumental apotheosis,” as the exhibition’s catalog puts it, on a par with those of Titian and Cézanne. The exhibition includes over a hundred drawings, paintings and prints created during the last 10 years of the artist’s life. (Picasso died in 1972 at the age of 93.)

Mr. Richardson had his work cut out for him. With its unceasing tumult of twats, tits, assholes, rubbery matadors and whores-fondly-remembered, Picasso’s late work has been dismissed as the goggle-eyed scrawls of a dirty old has-been. The description isn’t far off the mark. But few artists have cannibalized their own art (or their own lives) with as much brute vigor and corrosive good humor. Genius doesn’t redeem awful art. But it took some kind of genius to make paintings as spectacularly sloppy as these.

The late paintings careen with irresolution. They’re less about depth and invention than speed and immediacy. Colors, brushwork, patterns and space are set down with arrogant brevity or looping, scrabbled density.

Mr. Richardson posits the work as a conscious attempt to out-race irrelevance. Abstraction and neo-Dadaism had usurped Picasso’s avant-garde credentials: “By the mid-1960s, [Picasso’s] fans were melting away,” notes Mr. Richardson in his catalog essay. Picasso undoubtedly kept tabs on his contemporary standing.

But the Old Masters proved the most inspiring contemporaries. The vital presence of history powers the work. The recurring bobble-headed musketeers, with their broad brimmed hats, tidy facial hair and elaborate raiment, are straight from central casting as run by Frans Hals. Rembrandt clearly preoccupied Picasso, as did Velázquez and El Greco. Picasso may have been a consummate egoist, but he realized his artistic and—there’s no other way to put it, really—moral distance from these forebears. His roiling meditations on their art are filled with wild and clear-eyed gratitude. Nowhere else in Picasso’s oeuvre—nowhere—do you feel as much joy, wit and humility. It makes for an incredible rush.

The late canvases would be nothing if they weren’t self-indulgent—Picasso’s chutzpah accounts for their garish kick. But the prints confirm his preternatural gift for drawing. The delicacy, grace and profound elegance of his line are in thrilling evidence even when grainy experiments with print-making processes thwart it—maybe especially when they thwart it. The showpiece is La Celestine (1970), a single sheet of paper featuring 66 separate images printed from as many etching plates. It’s a showman’s compendium of a favorite theme—artist and model—and is of a piece with the mordant generosity that is the great painter’s last gift to us all.

“Picasso: Mosqueteros” is at Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, until June 6.

mnaves@observer.com

You’d have to go to Rembrandt or Goya to find as pitiless a depiction of the human animal as Pierre Bonnard’s Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) (1939-46), on display in “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” at the Met.

The old man faces us, naked from the waist up. His bald head, covered in shadow but sharply defined, tilts forward at a niggling angle—as if its weight were increasingly untenable. His skin is translucent and seems barely capable of holding together. Propped within an almost impossibly compressed space, the man gazes intently at nothing in particular. He is, it is clear, distracted by his own mortality.

You’d have to go to Rembrandt or Goya to find as pitiless a depiction of the human animal as Pierre Bonnard’s Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) (1939-46), on display in “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” at the Met. Is there a modern or contemporary artist who dedicated himself to flesh and bone with as much terrifying candor? German Expressionists are stylistic show-boaters in comparison; Lucian Freud, a cackhanded academician. Alice Neel? Cartoon angst. Jenny Saville? Oh, please.

Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) and the less scabrous if equally intense Self-Portrait (1938-40) are, literally speaking, the odd men out at the Met. Nowhere else in the exhibition does Bonnard plumb psyche or physiognomy with as much daunting specificity. But their fairly overt character amplifies Bonnard’s art—or, at least, how it is popularly perceived—in ways that otherwise might prove elusive. Forget the doting painter of cozy domesticity. The French master is something altogether more haunting, idiosyncratic and unclassifiable.

Bonnard (1867-1947) is an artist beloved by many, but not by all. His luminous pictures of fruit baskets, breakfast tables and keening, afternoon light have engendered surprising rancor. Only those “who know nothing about the grave difficulties of art,” wrote art critic Christian Zervos shortly after Bonnard’s death, could admire pictures as “facile and agreeable.” Picasso famously loathed Bonnard’s art: “That’s not painting, what he does.”

In our own time, art historian Linda Nochlin fantasized about “plung[ing] a knife” into a Bonnard canvas for its presumed feminist affronts. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl described Bonnard’s paintings as “masturbatory” and “eye candy.” Writing in the catalog, art historian Jack Flam mentions how Bonnard has been dismissed as “lightweight.” “Bourgeois” is a common epithet.

Better abuse than neglect, but even then, Bonnard suffers. Mr. Flam points to the artist’s fortunes in the academy: “Many people who teach general courses in twentieth-century art simply leave him out.” He traces Bonnard’s “invisibility” primarily to narrow historical strictures. Sure, his innovative work with the Nabis is an important Modernist pit stop. But mostly, Bonnard was a mousy guy given to meditations on place, intimacy and loss. How sexy is that?

The 19th-century trails Bonnard. It can be somewhat startling to realize that he painted up until the time of Abstract Expressionism. But though Bonnard followed upon post-Impressionist logic, he didn’t coast on or rehash its verities. His vision veered into more personal and psychologically charged aesthetic terrain. His deceptively unkempt pictures have their equivalents less in a rock ’em, sock ’em roll call of isms than in, say, Proust’s rueful elaborations on memory. It’s not that Bonnard wasn’t forward-looking. It’s that his vision was encompassing.

What that “more” might be can be hard to finger. Part of the pleasure we derive from Bonnard’s art is its polite refusal to yield its secrets. In The White Tablecloth (1925), bread, fruit and drink are set out on an expansive white tablecloth. A woman in a striped robe stands at the table, her back hunched in stony reverie; Bonnard renders her monumental, sphinxlike. Another woman, altogether less corporeal, glimpses blandly aside. Drama is both overstated and never realized. It’s a masterpiece of narrative elision. Here, but not only here, does Bonnard reveal himself as the 20th-century’s Vermeer.

Painting from memory, Bonnard created patchwork encapsulations of discrete experiences. However abundant or intricate a particular composition is, objects and figures are intransigent and isolated; they’re fixed within their own descriptive parameters. The wiry tension in Lunch (ca. 1932), also known as Breakfast, accrues from tenuously stated relations between a bouquet of flowers, a teapot, a teacup, a shimmering woman and a threatening silhouette. It’s a painting whose lush disharmony is almost unbearable to look at.

Bonnard’s art unsettles, not least because its seductions are irresistible. He brought to the pictures a chromatic density seemingly contradictory to his feathery touch. Color smolders into fruition, gaining in luxuriance and acidity. Bonnard’s brush—skittering, self-effacing and relentless—glances upon objects, but puts them in the service of mood: We recognize things, but the image itself is suffused in a haze of paint. His sometimes infuriating modesty can’t disguise his aesthetic rigor. As a painter, he was, as a friend notes, “one tough son-of-a-bitch.”

“The Late Interiors” continues the conversation about history’s limitations put into motion by the Met’s recent Morandi exhibition. What to do about great artists whose peculiarities prevent them from efficient categorization and Major status? You can celebrate their underdog marginality or you can question the received wisdom. Bonnard may well piss off people because he’s no one’s idea of a revolutionary, but his mastery is irrefutable all the same. He’s just that good. 

“The history of twentieth-century art,” Mr. Flam concludes, “must be reckoned in a different way.” “The Late Interiors” is a welcome step in that reevaluation.

mnaves@observer.com

“Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until April 19.

Or, at least, au courant. Given the laconic expression in Slick (Self-Portrait) (1977), Mr. Hendricks probably views this development with no small measure of bemusement. He knows the convolutions of fashion. Mr.

In an interview with Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the painter Barkley L. Hendricks states that there aren’t “too many contemporary painters I get inspiration from.” Ms. Golden, citing Mr. Hendricks’ “resonance” in the art scene, seems taken aback. He has, after all, benefited from a marketplace that currently smiles upon figurative art. Money, it would seem, has made Mr. Hendricks’ stark brand of portraiture relevant.

Or, at least, au courant. Given the laconic expression in Slick (Self-Portrait) (1977), Mr. Hendricks probably views this development with no small measure of bemusement. He knows the convolutions of fashion. Mr. Hendricks’ art came into its own some 40 years ago and shortly thereafter gained in renown. As someone who once appeared in an advertisement for Dewar’s Scotch, he’s experienced “resonance” firsthand.

Birth of the Cool—the title comes from Miles Davis’ seminal LP—is a selective overview of Mr. Hendricks’ art at the Studio Museum. He’s made still lifes, watercolors, photos, assemblages and (huh?) black light drawings, but it’s portrait paintings for which he’s best known—and rightfully so: They’re assured, taut and true. The work’s in-your-face immediacy is startling, but that’s not all. Each picture unfolds with, yes, cool deliberation.

Mr. Hendricks’ subjects are painted life size, maybe a little larger. They’re rendered with consummate skill: Mr. Hendricks applies paint with deadpan economy. Rigorous attention is paid to likeness, as is conveying the specifics of gesture, attitude, fashion and, if not necessarily character, then type. To a significant extent, raiment takes precedence. Mr. Hendricks isn’t an effusive temperament; nonetheless, you can feel the pleasure he takes in limning wide collars, hot pants or the sloping overcoat in Steve (1976).

Associations peculiar to the period—the late 1960s and early ’70s—abound: Try not thinking Superfly or recalling then-burgeoning Afrocentrism. Politics are alluded to—Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people—Bobby Seale) (1969), for instance, or in the oddly beatific visage of a Vietnam-era soldier in FTA (1968). The work evinces an artist peculiarly aware of, and not unamused by, the sociological and historical ramifications in painting black Americans. As catalog essayist Richard J. Powell notes, Mr. Hendricks’ perplexing interest in stereotypes reveals an intellect attuned to devastating ironies.

All the same, Mr. Hendricks is a pure painter. Though his figures are representational, the space in which they are situated is not: Each is surrounded by expanses of flat and uninflected color. The abrupt disconnect between figure and ground recalls Byzantine icons—Lawdy Mama (1969), with its domed format and field of metallic gold, is a blatant reference—and, in the work’s billboardlike punch, Pop Art. Some may want to lump Mr. Hendricks in with Photorealism, but, as an artist trained in working directly from life, mechanical reproduction isn’t an overriding concern. It’s the actual he’s after.

A daunting concentration to detail worthy of Netherlandish painters can be seen in the studio windows reflected in the sunglasses worn by Mr. Hendricks in Slick. But relentless pictorial honing can make him seem an abstract painter. Mr. Hendricks carefully situates each model within the parameters of the canvas; the way they’re juxtaposed within its edges is exacting, as are his subtle elisions in color. In What Goes On (1974), Mr. Hendricks orchestrates white ground, white clothing and brown skin to thrilling effect. Somewhere, Malevich is smiling.

Ms. Golden describes Mr. Hendricks’ achievement as “somewhat timeless.” Somewhat? What a curious aside. Artists play for keeps; their work thrives long after its historical context has come and gone. Mr. Hendricks is wise to this truth. His great loves are timeless through and through: Rembrandt and Caravaggio. In fundamental ways, they’re Mr. Hendricks’ true contemporaries. Birth of the Cool is a long overdue recognition of what is likely to be a timeless achievement. In the short term, it’s wry, pointed and something to see.

“Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool” is at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, until March 15.

Wan and Icky

Fans of Egon Schiele, Joy Division and heroin chic—which is to say, narcissism, gloom, the sleek and sickly—will discover a kindred soul in the South African–born painter Marlene Dumas. Using a palette keyed to gritty runs of black, Ms. Dumas devotes herself to childhood, international politics, childbirth and porno—all of which are rendered wan and icky, chilly and denatured. Ruminations on memory and mortality are undercut by glib theatrics: Ms. Dumas’ brush glances off brutal images as if insouciance were the same as outrage or tissue paper the same as flesh-and-bone.

“Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave” is at MoMA, 11 West 53rd Street, until Feb. 16.

mnaves@observer.com

Distinctions particular to portraiture came to mind when I was looking at Philip Burke’s portrait of Kurt Cobain, frontman for grunge rock band Nirvana and a suicide at the age of 27. It’s a jangled caricature made up of skewed lines, jabbing brush strokes and seemingly incompatible elisions of color. Cobain’s right eye glares at us; the left eye is ratcheted upward and obscured by stringy hair. Compare Mr. Burke’s Cobain to those by Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum. Ms. Peyton paints a symbol of soppy adolescence. Mr. Burke, by contrast, paints the man who wrote a song titled Rape Me.

Mr. Burke is taken less with dreamy narcissism than with stark likeness. He’d better be: A commercial artist out of sync with the ephemeral nature of mass-produced periodicals is begging to have readers gloss over his illustrations on the way to the crossword puzzle. 

Immediacy and impact are Mr. Burke’s stock in trade—the pictures grab and hold; they elaborate as well. Mr. Burke’s double portrait of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is hilariously concise: Mr. Richards’ shambling integrity and rakish charm are rendered with dead-on acuity. We’re reminded of who the soul of the Rolling Stones really is.

Regular readers know Mr. Burke’s art well: His garish illustrations have been featured on innumerable covers. You’ll recognize not a few when visiting “Philip Burke: Face Nation,” an exhibition on view at Antiquorum gallery and mounted in association with The Observer. A formidable presence in the national media, Mr. Burke’s illustrations have appeared in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Times, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair—the list goes on.

Caricature is inherently pitiless; even the kindest exaggerations intend to reveal, not flatter. Athletes, politicians, rock ’n’ rollers, film stars and the stray supermodel—Mr. Burke paints them as if they were molded from Play-Doh. Every feature—nose, chin, boobs and teeth—turns rubbery, knotted, lumpish or swollen; every attitude is brutally abbreviated. The palette is a queasy mix of cools, warms and oddly congruent clashes in tone. Oils—a famously difficult and time-consuming medium—are applied with speedy resolution. Mr. Burke’s paint-handling slashes and burns with supple precision. Tight deadlines do that to an artist.

You’ll find The Donald here; Princess Di, too. The president-elect beams as the American flag waves behind him. Ray Charles hugs himself, his cavernous laugh accented by explosive dark glasses. Bob Hope eyeballs us with well-honed unctuousness. John Lennon’s face warps and swells, an unnerving distortion that condenses his arrogance and intelligence all the same.  Notwithstanding Mr. Burke’s prevailing acidity, these portraits are relatively benign and sometimes surprising. Mr. Trump comes across as fairly haimish. Who knew?

But, really, the level of pleasure afforded by a caricature increases in direct proportion to its cruelty. Politics brings out the nasty in Mr. Burke. Al Sharpton’s face is subjected to malevolent puckering. The sitting president is a pinheaded cowpoke. And then there’s Hillary Clinton as Queen Elizabeth—a fleshy sack of noblesse oblige rendered in sickly greens, pinks and purples. You’d have to go back to George Grosz to find something quite as poisonous. Our next secretary of state wouldn’t take that as a commendation. Mr. Burke should.

“Philip Burke: Face Nation” is at Antiquorum, 595 Madison Avenue, until Dec. 13.

Scrabbled Pretensions

Eric Fischl, Cindy Sherman, Sandro Chia and Terry Winters—you can’t throw a rock in Chelsea without hitting a 1980s art star. Mr. Winters fares the best, combining signature biomorphic shapes with schematic structures gleaned from (don’t ask) “knot theory.” The paintings sag under the artist’s scrabbled pretensions and a continuing over-reliance on Philip Guston and Cy Twombly, but there’s a difference: At long last, Mr. Winters understands color. Perfumey creams, pinks, grays and blues quaver, trickle and delicately claim their pictorial turf, endowing the pictures with chromatic amplitude.

“Terry Winters: Knotted Graphs” is at Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, until Jan. 24.

Endearing Naïveté

Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2008), a video projection by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, transforms MoMA’s mezzanine into a watery Edenesque parable. A cinematic tumble of luridly colored flora, fauna, nudes and discarded soda cans offer testimony to nature’s beneficence and its ruin. As an environmentalist tract, Ms. Rist’s tone-poem installation is blessedly light of touch—its moralism is spectacular, not profound. A huge circular sofa, throw pillows and shag carpeting in the gallery provide a comfy spot to marvel at Ms. Rist’s endearing naïveté.

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) is at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, until Feb. 2.

Tenderly Distressed

Maryam Amiryani’s still-life paintings are gems of pictorial economy. Small in scale and ineffably concentrated, they contain anonymous surfaces upon which are placed one or two crisply delineated objects—a toy zebra, a paper hat or poppies. The colors are few, rich and clean; the mood intimate bordering on otherworldly. A spare strain of symbolism infiltrates Ms. Amiryani’s art, but it’s her tenderly distressed surfaces that entrance.

“Maryam Amiryani” is at George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until Dec. 20.

mnaves@observer.com 

You’ll see Calder invent the mobile at roughly the midpoint of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years; 1926-1933,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was a transformative moment prompted by a move to Paris. Upon arriving in 1926, Calder delighted in the city’s convivial atmosphere and often saucy entertainment—the performer Josephine Baker was a favorite. Calder ingratiated himself with luminaries like Miró, Léger, Man Ray, André Kertész and Mondrian.

A trip to the Mondrian’s studio was life-changing: “This single visit gave me a shock … I wanted to paint and work in the abstract.” The resulting paintings are humdrum reiterations of neo-Suprematist principle. But then there are the sculptures: looping tabletop armatures, all sprung wire, wooden spheres, motors and balance—always that delicately calibrated balance. The excitement inspired by Mondrian is palpable. Calder’s light bulb goes off; our hearts start beating faster.

And then it’s downhill from there—or so “The Paris Years” suggests. It isn’t because the gravity-challenged pieces in the final gallery disappoint. It’s because the work leading up to the mobiles evinces a facility that’s almost alarmingly preternatural. When an artist makes a medium his own—discovering its peculiarities, possibilities and how it becomes congruent with individuality—it’s a revelatory moment. But wire for Calder? It’s as if it had forever been waiting for him. There’s no revelation here—just magic gleaned from the ether.

“The Paris Years” begins with a dizzy and seemingly insurmountable introduction: A stellar array of portrait heads. Friends, artists, celebrities and Herbert Hoover—they’re caricatures given uncanny dimension. “Drawing in space” is a shopworn Modernist trope typically applied to Constructivist sculpture, but Calder’s wire caricatures are the real deal. Jennifer Tipton, whose regular gig is lighting for the theater, has done a superb job emphasizing this aspect of Calder’s art. The portraits don’t cast shadows; they reveal facets—often more profound than we might expect from this artist—that otherwise might have remained unknown.

The remarkable thing about Calder’s wire pieces is how they address volume.  These are sculptures in the round. They encompass and encapsulate space with breathtaking speed and ease: Jimmy Durante’s shnoz, Josephine Baker’s breasts, acrobats in midair, a pot-bellied bobby and a monkey-limbed John D. Rockefeller playing golf are all bodies. Calder may have employed diagrammatic means, but he made the insubstantial monumental. In not altogether surprising ways, the work recalls that of Rodin.

Gesture, too, is unerringly put into place: the forward trot of The Hostess (1928) betrays her snobbery. But notwithstanding its softball acidity, the sculpture is indicative of Calder’s defining graces: Sociability and showbiz. Playing to the audience powered his fancies and his sense of invention. Calder delighted in the circus—yes, the Whitney’s mainstay Calder’s Circus (1926-31) is here—not least because it was a metaphor for his own temperament, strengths and vision. He thrived on applause.

Calder made toys for children, but all of his work—or, rather, his best work—are toys. The biggest difference between the early wire sculptures and the mobiles-to-come is that the latter lent themselves to public display; the former, to intimacy. “Hands-on” is the key to Calder’s winning and ineluctable genius. “The Paris Years” makes that distinction abundantly and delightfully clear.

“Alexander Calder: The Paris Years; 1926-1933” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art,  945 Madison Avenue, until Feb. 15.

Uncanny Concision

The Japanese tradition of shaping bamboo for baskets and floral displays dates back a thousand years, but it’s become a freestanding sculptural medium for contemporary artists. “New Bamboo” includes 23 artists, and while each possesses immaculate skill, not a few mistake fussiness for intricacy and self-aggrandizement for expertise. At their most astonishing—Nagakuri Ken’ichi’s unnerving effigies or Tanabe Mitsuko’s comical and primordial biomorphs—the artists render bamboo fluid and tensile, impossibly delicate. Natural forces—wind, sun, breathing and, er, UFOs—are embodied with uncanny concision.

“New Bamboo: Contemporary Japanese Masters” at the Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, until Jan. 11, 2009.

Rueful Irony

Native American culture is the basis of “Identity by Design,” and ritual the fulcrum, but sensuality is its pleasure. Crafted for ceremonies specific to women, the dresses range in design and craft from ascetic to spectacular to gaudy—a little bit of rhinestone goes a long way. Subtle transitions between materials—fire-polished beads, cowrie shells, elk teeth and the irresistible nubble of animal hides—beg for our touch. A Lakota dress accented by tattered American flags begs for irony almost too rueful to consider.

“Identity By Design: Tradition, Change and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses” at the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, One Bowling Green, until September 2009.

Thrilling Anyway

Masterworks by Botticelli, Titian, Giorgione, Lorenzo Lotto, Tintoretto and Ghirlandaio—O.K., “Portrait of a Young Man” and “Portrait of a Young Woman” (ca. 1490) are just attributions, but who cares? They’re thrilling all the same, and are among the many reasons to visit “Art and Love in Renaissance Italy.”  Glassware, maiolica, sculpture and jewelry offer additional testimony to perennial commemorations of betrothal, marriage and birth. Don’t forget sex—the ridiculously vulgar The Triumph of the Phallus is an ornate priapic homage that could’ve been lifted from Monty Python.

“Art and Love in Renaissance Italy” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Feb. 16.

mnaves@observer.com 

When Mr. de Montebello announced his retirement almost a year ago, many New Yorkers were taken aback. The museum’s public face and its unmistakable voice (who hasn’t heard those dulcet tones emanating from the nearest audio guide?), Mr. de Montebello was the museum’s eighth and longest-serving director. He hasn’t been a fixture of the city’s life so much as one of its linchpins. Under Mr. de Montebello’s guidance, our greatest museum became even more indispensable.

Not least because of respect paid to the public. “Elitism” is a dirty word redolent of sniffy aristocrats, but Mr. de Montebello has proven that it isn’t necessarily the same thing as snobbery. By advocating for the highest standards, he placed faith in the acumen and ability of that many-headed monster, the general audience. This outlook is starry-eyed, perhaps, but better naïveness than rank condescension. Besides, Mr. de Montebello has been vindicated. Look at the crowds: They want to see the best. In his own erudite way, Mr. de Montebello is a populist.

The Met acquires an object after a variety of experts—curators, conservators, librarians and scientists—discuss and debate its historical and artistic merits. But Mr. de Montebello was the final word—or so it’s said. “My-way-or-the-highway” betrays not a little arrogance; there’s no doubting Mr. de Montebello must have frustrated and infuriated colleagues. But quality, not appeasing, was the goal. Do I remember correctly Mr. de Montebello stating that collecting used condoms wasn’t in the museum’s mission statement? He took his job seriously.

EIGHTY-FOUR THOUSAND objects entered the collection during Mr. de Montebello’s tenure. There are bound to be a fair share of clunkers—how could there not be? All the same, the work on display—around 300 or so pieces—is probably fairly skimpy in terms of the good stuff. You just know the riches go deeper than that. Helen C. Evans, curator of Byzantine art, must have exercised considerable diplomatic skill in coordinating the 17 curatorial departments when organizing the exhibition.

The curators had free reign, but Mr. de Montebello made a request: The exhibition should be mounted in a cross-cultural and ahistorical manner. Five thousand years of art—why not mix-and-match Mesopotamian devils, Jasper Johns, sandstone Buddhas, a Kongo power figure, Islamic miniatures and Peter Paul Rubens’ busty wife? Commonalities in aesthetic and functional purpose are gently emphasized, not least as they apply to art’s ability to encapsulate spiritual longing and solace. (Mr. de Montebello has spoken movingly about the profound feelings engendered by Duccio’s “Madonna and Child.”)

Juxtapositions of time, style and place, often extreme and never denied, are rendered fluid. Credit Jeff Daly, the senior design adviser, for a beautifully nuanced installation—he hasn’t done the impossible; he’s made the possible revelatory. But consider what he’s working with: a collection guided by a man whose discernment, intelligence and eye have led him to a fairly unfashionable conclusion: Art is the embodiment of humankind’s noblest impulses. Mr. de Montebello is an optimist. That’s but one reason “Three Decades of Acquisitions” sings.

“The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Feb. 1, 2009.

Daunting Intensity

Political artist Sue Coe aims her latest critique at cruelty inflicted on elephants. Most of the pictures focus on early 20th-century circuses replete with dicey stagehands, a clammy P. T. Barnum and Thomas Edison—the great inventor electrocuted an elephant as a publicity stunt. A nitpicky hand at oils muffles Ms. Coe’s rancor, but the drawings—fiery admixtures of gouache, graphite, watercolor and collage—embody it with daunting intensity.

“Elephants We Must Never Forget: New Paintings, Drawings and Prints by Sue Coe” at Galerie St. Etienne, 24 West 57th Street, until Dec. 20.

Deadening Literalism

Alfred Kubin’s black-and-white drawings, nightmarish dreamscapes enveloped within gloomy chiaroscuro, recall Goya’s Los Caprichos and Redon’s mystical reveries, but Salvador Dali is the better comparison. Lacking moral indignation or haunting romanticism, the Austrian loner illustrated his monsters, hobgoblins and “slaughter festivities” with deadening literalism and stilted authority. The drawings aren’t hallucinations given heft, but melodramatic inventories of Freudian portent.

“Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909” at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 26.

mnaves@observer.com

Hype knows no bounds, but the Ramírez find is a pretty big deal. Long known to aficionados of outsider art, his drawings were the subject of a retrospective last year at the American Folk Art Museum. Ramírez’s vertiginous tableaux of caballeros, animals and preternatural, zooming trains prompted far-reaching accolades. The Times claimed him as “one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.” Watch your back, Matisse.

Ramírez emigrated from Mexico to the United States in 1925. Looking for jobs in Northern California, he worked in the mines and for the railroad, but not for long. He was arrested and hospitalized for “catatonic” behavior. Ramírez spent the remaining 32 years of his life shuttling between institutions, eventually ending up in DeWitt State Hospital. Ramírez hardly spoke while institutionalized. He began to draw during the mid-1930s.

It wasn’t until mid-century that Ramírez’s art began to gain notice. Dr. Tarmo Pasto, a professor of psychology and art, saw the drawings and made Ramírez the center of a study on the relationship between creativity and mental illness. Pasto supplied Ramírez with drawing materials, storage space and public exposure. He acquired 300 pieces. How aware was Ramírez when he gave the drawings away? How ethical was Pasto in accepting them?

However fuzzy the circumstances, there’s no doubting the good doctor’s gift to history; without it, Ramírez’s astonishing achievement would have been lost. Or maybe not. Taking Antiques Roadshow as inspiration—no, really, she did—Brooke Davis Anderson, organizer of the Folk Art Museum retrospective, placed notices for Ramírez drawings in Northern California newspapers. She received an e-mail that was, as Ms. Anderson breathlessly describes it, “a curator’s dream come true.”

The message was from Peggy Dunievitz, daughter-in-law of the late Dr. Max Dunievitz, and Peggy’s daughter-in-law, Julia. Dr. Dunievitz worked at DeWitt, picking up where Pasto left off. He bought supplies for Ramírez and, given his ability to speak Spanish, conceivably had conversations with him. Dunievitz collected drawings; Peggy thought the family had around 50. Stored in the garage, packed in rose boxes and placed on top of the fridge, there were almost three times as many. A generous sampling of them are currently on display at the Folk Art Museum and Ricco/Maresca Gallery.

RAMIREZ'S ART IS unrelentingly intense and limited by forbidding narrowness. Psychological claustrophobia is its inescapable strength and its defining liability: The work deepens, but remains static. Still, Ramírez’s pictures are wonders of iconography and pictorial invention. Evenly distributed linear patterning, bulging and scalloped, radiates and flexes with taut, manic purpose. Hieroglyphic figures are trapped within the resulting up-ended and theatrical settings. Is that the Virgin Mary, the Statue of Liberty or an Aztec priest? Specificity is less important than an air of eternal isolation.

Necessity largely determined Ramírez’s materials. Chewed newspaper, tongue depressors for ruling straight lines, matches wetted with saliva, and paste made from potatoes were his tools. They’re employed with rough-hewn certainty. The pictures are crumpled—the result, most likely, of negligence both on the part of the artist and a host of caretakers. But Ramírez’s imagery is bolstered, not obscured, by stuff, however grubby or worn. Ramírez’s clubby and insistent line guarantees the imagery’s haunting integrity.

The most unsettling Ramírez drawings are devoted to rows upon rows of tunnels. Unpeopled trains travel through them with ghostly portent. Often the tunnels are empty: deep and airless archways. In several pieces, staggered sheets of paper have been collaged together, making for expansive and scary vistas. You feel the inescapable burden of Ramírez’s constricted psyche. This is true of many outsider artists, but not all of them are cut from the same untutored cloth. Ramírez is something rare and special: His world is real and he makes us part of it.

“Martin Ramírez: The Last Works” is at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, until Nov. 29; and at the American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street, until April 12.

Light Fare

“The Seduction of Light: Ammi Phillips/Mark Rothko Compositions in Pink, Green and Red,” also at the American Folk Art Museum, attempts to locate commonalities between the 19th-century folk painter Ammi Phillips and Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. It’s a stretch—palette and “soul-thirsting” aren’t flexible enough to accommodate it. As it is, Phillips’ crisp and brilliantly mannered portraits make a hash of Rothko’s dour pretensions. The irresistibly mischievous dog skulking in several Phillips canvases all but makes you forget the fuzzy rectangles nearby.

Until March 29.

Chilly Affectation

Garish, slack and hapless, Elizabeth Peyton’s paeans to adolescence, celebrity and Kurt Cobain would shame the marginalia in a high-school notebook. Would that she were as starry-eyed and precocious. Instead, fey portraits and louche mise-en-scène reveal an artist incapable of differentiating teendom’s enthusiasms from their wan approximation. An artist who can’t paint, draw or trace, Ms. Peyton fails to redeem her chilly affectations.

“Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton” is at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, 235 Bowery, until Jan. 11.

Dull Dazzle

Beatriz Milhazes’ abstractions are beautiful without being seductive, over the top but not swoon-inducing. Layering stylistic motifs gleaned from Islamic art, modernist painter Sonia Delaunay and a hothouse palette influenced by her native Brazil, Ms. Milhazes contrives radiating fields of pattern—ornamental fireworks. The craft is appealingly secondhand—Ms. Milhazes paints on plastic sheeting and transfers the results onto canvas, but the work’s dazzle is routine and somewhat dulling.

“Beatriz Milhazes” is at James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, until Nov. 15.

mnaves@observer.com