What you might expect to read next is that the 84-year-old painter, whose bald pate and sinewy build lend him a monk-like aspect, who has lived and worked in this space since 1968, when Soho was an industrial slum—before the artists arrived, before the galleries moved in, and before retail forced them all out—leads an isolated life, toiling away at his canvases, far above the fray, immune to any sense of competition.

Not so.

“We compete for audiences, as artists,” Mr. Katz said, leaning toward The Observer across a coffee table, his eyebrows raised intently. “I’m competing with the Abstract Expressionist guys. I’ll knock ‘em off the wall. If you put my work next to an aggressive A.E. painting, I’ll eat most of ‘em up.” He paused. “And I want to compete with the kids. I’m there with the kids.”
He was wearing a red polo shirt open at the collar and neat white pants. He’s lean and rangy, and was evenly tanned. His voice retains traces of a gruff accent from his youth in Queens.

Mr. Katz, whose work figures in major museum collections the world over, and who has a couple of important museum shows coming up next spring—at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and London’s Tate—recently made an unexpected move. After parting ways last fall with his gallery of 10 years, the Pace Gallery, a 51-year-old establishment that represents blue chip artists like Chuck Close and Robert Ryman, as well as the estates of Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, he signed on with the 17-year-old Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a gallery known for a stable of talked-about talents most of whom are half Mr. Katz’s age. (Before showing with Pace, he’d been with the equally blue-chip Marlborough for 30 years.) The Observer spoke with him last Thursday, two days before his debut exhibition at Gavin Brown.

The association with Mr. Brown, Mr. Katz said, didn’t come out of nowhere. He’d been following the gallery since it opened on Broome Street in 1994. (Mr. Brown subsequently moved to Chelsea, then to his present location in the West Village.) He participated in a group show there, at the request of Elizabeth Peyton, a painter Mr. Brown still works with. He watched the dealer develop the careers of artists he admired, like the Trinidad-based painter Peter Doig. “It’s a hot place,” he said. Last year, he was in Mr. Brown’s gallery, speaking with the dealer about his own work.

“He talked about the immediacy of light,” said Mr. Katz, who counts among his influences Matisse and Bonnard. “Subject matter is what people usually talk about. I realized he knows what I’m doing. Not many people know what I’m doing.”

Now on view at Mr. Brown’s gallery is a group of large portrait paintings depicting only the subjects’ faces, as well as several paintings of flowers. Mr. Katz’s style has gotten more abstract recently, but he is still working consistently in a mode he began developing five decades ago: flat, simplified depictions of landscapes, or of friends and acquaintances. The current crop includes paintings of the wife of his son, the poet Vincent Katz; his London dealer Timothy Taylor’s wife; and his own wife, Ada, who has sat for countless portraits since they married in 1958. The sole man in the group is a dapper young Brazilian fellow, Ricardo Kugelmas, painter Francesco Clemente’s studio manager.

Although figurative painting, like abstraction, waxes and wanes in popularity—every few years, art magazines declare a renaissance—it’s not as though Mr. Katz’s work has ever really gone out of style. In 1989, the respected art journal Parkett devoted an entire issue to his influence on younger artists. Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, David Salle and Richard Prince have all written about, or interviewed him.

Even with his own star set pretty firmly in art’s firmament, he is concerned about remaining relevant. “You saw that film about the cave paintings from 20,000 years ago?” he said, referring to Werner Herzog’s recent documentary. “There’s no progress in art. There’s merely change. And that’s like fashion. I want to make something new, and it has to do with change. It’s more like a dress designer than a 19th-century idea of an artist. I’m restless.”

He took The Observer on a tour of his studio. Two assistants were busy photographing paintings. He showed us some drawings that derived from dress patterns in ads for Macy’s—he’s always been interested in clothing, his portrait of Vogue editor Anna Wintour was just acquired by London’s National Portrait Gallery—and small study paintings on masonite that he makes outdoors, then transforms into larger, highly abstracted landscapes on canvas.

What about Milton Avery? The Observer asked, naming the titanic American modernist who died in 1965. “My light is fast, his is slow,” he replied. “My drawing is much more complicated. We were both influenced by Matisse. I always thought he was a very good American painter. But I was better than him at 22.”

Mr. Katz’s ambition is disarming, because it doesn’t come off as swagger. He makes these statements casually, with an easy grin, as though he’s telling you whom he played tennis with this morning.

Last fall, after he left Pace, Mr. Brown wasn’t the only one to make a studio visit. Larry Gagosian, the world’s foremost dealer, also came by with, as Mr. Katz remembers it, a director of his uptown headquarters, who was keen to bring him on board. The 66-year-old dealer runs 11 galleries around the world and is known for aggressively raising artists’ prices; his seductions are notoriously difficult to resist. Earlier this year he reportedly paid a visit to the 83-year-old sculptor John Chamberlain’s studio on Shelter Island and walked away having bought the studio’s entire contents; shortly afterward he brought Mr. Chamberlain, who had been with Pace, into his own stable of artists.

Mr. Katz thought about going with Mr. Gagosian, but ultimately turned him down. He told him, referring to Gavin Brown, “You have more taste, he has more style.”

What did Mr. Gagosian say to that?

The artist smiled. “He said, ‘You’re right. He does have a hot crowd. He knows what’s going on.’”

By the time Gavin Brown, a swarthy, bearded 47-year-old Brit, arrived an hour late for a Friday morning interview at his Greenwich Street gallery—police security prior to the 9/11 anniversary had traffic on the West Side Highway backed up all the way to 125th Street, where he lives—The Observer had installed herself behind a wooden table in the gallery’s cozy second-floor kitchen-cum-viewing-room. Winded, Mr. Brown, seemingly by way of apology, collapsed into a chair and momentarily buried his face in his hands. It was the day before Mr. Katz’s opening and the city was ajitter with terrorist alerts. His shirt was halfway unbuttoned, a disheveled look The Observer initially took to be some sort of fashion statement, until he glanced down and hastily buttoned up. As a display of unpolished vulnerability, it was charming.

Mr. Brown’s gallery—its official name, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, aptly captures its air of freewheeling experimentation—has become synonymous with today’s avant-garde. In 2007, he allowed Urs Fischer to dig a giant hole in the floor. (Mr. Katz admires Mr. Fischer’s work. “He’s a screamer,” he told The Observer, adding, “I’m competing with that guy.”) Last year, when Mr. Brown doubled his gallery’s square footage, this newspaper all but crowned him the next Jeffrey Deitch (the longtime downtown impresario who became director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.) Buzz comes at a cost—the big guns have taken notice of Mr. Brown’s artists; Mr. Gagosian will soon do a show with Mr. Fischer in Los Angeles.

But Mr. Brown’s Enterprise is more than a place for youthful avant-garde hijinks. It’s also becoming one for the return of forgotten midcareer talents. This summer, he turned over his gallery to Peter Nadin, who hadn’t shown in New York for 20 years; Mr. Nadin filled it with sculptures made of 6,000 pounds of honey and 57 hemlock trees.

Growing up in Britain, Mr. Brown said, he had a different perspective on Mr. Katz, who is widely considered to be the quintessential American painter. “He’s a homegrown artist here,” he said. “Oftentimes when things are that close you can’t see them. He always seemed quite exotic to me, from a distance.”

Last year, after one of his first openings in his newly expanded gallery, Mr. Brown’s director told him that Mr. Katz had told her, “I could do a show there. I like the space.” Around the same time, Mr. Brown heard that Mr. Katz had left Pace. He swiftly requested a studio visit, and Mr. Katz invited him to come around and make his case.

He didn’t recall saying anything specifically about Mr. Katz’s use of light. “I’ve always felt that his work is about the lived, present moment,” he said. “That’s what I’ve always been concerned with in my own life, and in my gallery—to try and stay present. I felt that rather than worry about his legacy, he should continue to stay in the present moment.

“He repeated that to me,” he said of Mr. Katz’s comment about taste and style, with regard to Mr. Gagosian. “I still don’t quite know what it means. You could interchange those words.”

Mr. Katz may be well established in art’s pantheon, but his prices don’t necessarily reflect that position. That is where Mr. Gagosian might have come in. Forty-nine-year-old figurative painter John Currin went to Gagosian in 2003, and it wasn’t long before his prices jumped from around $500,000 into the millions. Mr. Currin’s current auction record is $5.5 million; Mr. Katz’s is $690,600.

But catapulting the artist’s prices into the stratosphere is unlikely to be Mr. Brown’s role.

“If I have a role here,” Mr. Brown said, “it’s to reveal things in the work that perhaps people don’t see anymore, or perhaps take for granted. This body of work in particular has that kind of urgency to it.”

The opening on Saturday night was a convergence of worlds. There were grey eminences and young Turks; art people and fashion people. One woman wore a dress in the same tart green hue as the leaves in one of the wildflower paintings. There were established painters—Chuck Close, who studied at Yale when Mr. Katz taught there, and David Salle. There were Gavin Brown’s artists, like Rirkrit Tiravanija.

There was the sculptor Rachel Feinstein, wife of John Currin; New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni; up-and-coming curator, gallery owner and Interview magazine online editor Alex Gartenfeld.

Ricardo Kugelmas described posing for Mr. Katz: first, the artist spends about an hour and a half making a small painting, then he makes a drawing, and from those two things the final painting is made.

Art historian Irving Sandler, who has written extensively about Mr. Katz’s work over the years, was in a powwow with his wife, NYU art history professor Lucy Sandler and Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong.

“Look at figurative art today,” Mr. Sandler told The Observer. “Ask pretty much any figurative artist and they’ll owe quite a bit to Alex. And some of the abstract ones too. I can’t think of a more influential artist in figurative art today.” He paused. “Can you?”

Standing nearby was Mark Greenwold, a figurative painter himself and a longtime friend of Mr. Katz, whom he referred to as Katz, as though he were a character in a novel. “I’m a huge fan,” he said. “For those of us who work with the figure, it’s always been mystifying how brilliantly and economically Katz makes these things over the years. He’s kept this interest not only in painting, but in the world. Well, he only paints beautiful people.”

The Observer glanced around. Where was Mr. Katz? He was standing near one of the doors, wearing a suit jacket, looking content, scribbling his signature on an announcement card for a fan.

“Katz,” Mr. Greenwold went on. “He’s eternally youthful. It’s like that moment with Manet and Baudelaire—he’s interested in the modern, and in being this sort of dandy. It’s the idea that painting needn’t be this existential, hideous, Kafkaesque struggle to say something, but can rather be a kind of beautiful celebration.”

He looked at the art on the walls. “These are the paintings of a very young artist, in some odd way.”

sdouglas@observer.com

The Entry of Christ into Washington is a panoramic view of hell as imagined by a foe of the Bush administration. As such, it trucks in those received grievances that drive the left to indignation and, sometimes, self-sabotage. Mr. Petlin’s apocalyptic picture directs its ire at predictable targets: Arab potentates, Exxon oil fields, the American flag, the Capitol building and banners that read “Irak Redux,” “Abu Ghraib,” “Yale,” “Texas” and “Dystopia USA.” All are delineated in the artist’s telltale style—a sketchy composite of drawing and painting that veers assuredly between grubby and ethereal.

The key to understanding Mr. Petlin’s worth as an artist can only partly be gleaned from the intensity of his diatribe. It helps to go beyond the immediate purview of the Kent exhibition, with its pictures of bombings and destruction along the banks of the Tigris and the outskirts of New York City.

Tucked away by the reception desk, there’s a pastel drawing by Mr. Petlin from 1986 titled Songs for Sarah. It’s not much really. The page has hardly been touched; the imagery and intent are ambiguous. There’s a desert vista, a stone wall, seven figures (one may be a bird) dotting the landscape, a stippled whale surfacing from the sand, a building, an acidic orange haze and an unexpectedly bucolic field of blue topping it all off. Throughout, Mr. Petlin displays a casual virtuosity. His approach to drawing is to the point, yet gentle in its stylistic wanderings. Songs for Sarah threatens to disappear even as it comes into focus. It has the fleeting absurdity of a half-remembered dream.

The ambiguity filters through to his distinctive brand of agitprop and complicates it. Unlike his friend and fellow artist, Leon Golub, in whose memory the painting Infantry (2004-5) is dedicated, Mr. Petlin doesn’t talk down to the audience. He trusts viewers to bring their own emotional and political intelligence to the table. Dialogue, not dogma, is the goal. Mr. Petlin can admit to different points of view, even if he finds them wrongheaded or despicable. There’s a generosity of spirit lurking in his scabrousness.

As a result, the paintings and drawings gain in authority. At the very least, they encourage the long look. A Petlin retrospective is set to open at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the spring of 2008, providing a welcome opportunity to gauge his contribution to the culture. In the meantime, the Kent show provides a tantalizingly imperfect glimpse of one man’s singular vision.

Irving Petlin is at Kent Gallery, 541 West 25th Street, until May 26.

In Good Shape

Salvatore Federico’s recent paintings and drawings, on display in the middle room at the George Billis Gallery, continue to create a bold, balletic tension out of carefully devised, hard-edged forms.

A small drawing, done with pencil on graph paper, reveals the painstaking extent to which Mr. Federico’s angular heraldic shapes are proportioned and configured. But knowing the math informing the compositions doesn’t illuminate what truly makes them dance: distillation and color.

The more anonymous the surfaces of the paintings are (Mr. Federico doesn’t hide his touch; he doesn’t have one), the more his jutting shapes gain in personality, muscle and grace. The palette, too, is sharp and emphatic. Unafraid of juxtaposing warms, cools and near-complementary colors, Mr. Federico makes the most of minimal means. The actual colors occupying a single canvas are few, yet the presence they establish is remarkably vibrant—especially when yoked theatrically to the spacious and cleansing white of High Modernism.

The white grounds of Praxedes (2005) and T.O.T.C. (2005) both animate and clear the way for exuberant arrangements of form. Who says art can’t be happy?

Salvatore Federico is at the George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until June 10.

Too-Cool Katz

If Alex Katz weren’t such a cagey talent, he’d be an embarrassment. How is it that any painter with a major reputation can get away with nonexistent drawing skills, cursory paint handling and a style so vacuous that any claim made for it sticks? Mr. Katz, whose paintings from the 1960’s are on display at the 22nd Street branch of Pace Wildenstein, demonstrates how far a person can get by adroitly deploying a spare and arrogant gift. Rarely has an artist made so much of his intelligence while investing so little in his craft.

Not that every inch of a canvas demands obsessive labor. But Mr. Katz’s pictures of family, friends, Luna Park, a swamp maple tree and “superb lilies” are so rushed and programmatic, and so stilted in their depiction of the human form, that you can only conclude that hasty means indicate contempt for the art of painting itself. Mr. Katz’s broad-brush technique makes for striking images, but as painting, the work is bland and numbing. Only with the aforementioned lilies do we see Mr. Katz pick up and engage with the possibilities—indeed, the musicality—of pictorial form. Otherwise, he’s too cool to care.

Boosters argue that his sleek style and billboard-size canvases are world-historical: that by marrying the expansiveness of Abstract Expressionism with the punch of Pop Art, he nudged representational painting back into the mainstream. Maybe so, but what does it mean when culture starts inflating sound bites into epic statements? It’s Mr. Katz’s prerogative not to worry about that and simply rush to order. It’s our prerogative to grant his art as much time and pleasure as he does.

Alex Katz: The Sixties is at Pace Wildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, until June 17.

The Entry of Christ into Washington is a panoramic view of hell as imagined by a foe of the Bush administration. As such, it trucks in those received grievances that drive the left to indignation and, sometimes, self-sabotage. Mr. Petlin’s apocalyptic picture directs its ire at predictable targets: Arab potentates, Exxon oil fields, the American flag, the Capitol building and banners that read “Irak Redux,” “Abu Ghraib,” “Yale,” “Texas” and “Dystopia USA.” All are delineated in the artist’s telltale style—a sketchy composite of drawing and painting that veers assuredly between grubby and ethereal.

The key to understanding Mr. Petlin’s worth as an artist can only partly be gleaned from the intensity of his diatribe. It helps to go beyond the immediate purview of the Kent exhibition, with its pictures of bombings and destruction along the banks of the Tigris and the outskirts of New York City.

Tucked away by the reception desk, there’s a pastel drawing by Mr. Petlin from 1986 titled Songs for Sarah. It’s not much really. The page has hardly been touched; the imagery and intent are ambiguous. There’s a desert vista, a stone wall, seven figures (one may be a bird) dotting the landscape, a stippled whale surfacing from the sand, a building, an acidic orange haze and an unexpectedly bucolic field of blue topping it all off. Throughout, Mr. Petlin displays a casual virtuosity. His approach to drawing is to the point, yet gentle in its stylistic wanderings. Songs for Sarah threatens to disappear even as it comes into focus. It has the fleeting absurdity of a half-remembered dream.

The ambiguity filters through to his distinctive brand of agitprop and complicates it. Unlike his friend and fellow artist, Leon Golub, in whose memory the painting Infantry (2004-5) is dedicated, Mr. Petlin doesn’t talk down to the audience. He trusts viewers to bring their own emotional and political intelligence to the table. Dialogue, not dogma, is the goal. Mr. Petlin can admit to different points of view, even if he finds them wrongheaded or despicable. There’s a generosity of spirit lurking in his scabrousness.

As a result, the paintings and drawings gain in authority. At the very least, they encourage the long look. A Petlin retrospective is set to open at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the spring of 2008, providing a welcome opportunity to gauge his contribution to the culture. In the meantime, the Kent show provides a tantalizingly imperfect glimpse of one man’s singular vision.

Irving Petlin is at Kent Gallery, 541 West 25th Street, until May 26.

In Good Shape

Salvatore Federico’s recent paintings and drawings, on display in the middle room at the George Billis Gallery, continue to create a bold, balletic tension out of carefully devised, hard-edged forms.

A small drawing, done with pencil on graph paper, reveals the painstaking extent to which Mr. Federico’s angular heraldic shapes are proportioned and configured. But knowing the math informing the compositions doesn’t illuminate what truly makes them dance: distillation and color.

The more anonymous the surfaces of the paintings are (Mr. Federico doesn’t hide his touch; he doesn’t have one), the more his jutting shapes gain in personality, muscle and grace. The palette, too, is sharp and emphatic. Unafraid of juxtaposing warms, cools and near-complementary colors, Mr. Federico makes the most of minimal means. The actual colors occupying a single canvas are few, yet the presence they establish is remarkably vibrant—especially when yoked theatrically to the spacious and cleansing white of High Modernism.

The white grounds of Praxedes (2005) and T.O.T.C. (2005) both animate and clear the way for exuberant arrangements of form. Who says art can’t be happy?

Salvatore Federico is at the George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until June 10.

Too-Cool Katz

If Alex Katz weren’t such a cagey talent, he’d be an embarrassment. How is it that any painter with a major reputation can get away with nonexistent drawing skills, cursory paint handling and a style so vacuous that any claim made for it sticks? Mr. Katz, whose paintings from the 1960’s are on display at the 22nd Street branch of Pace Wildenstein, demonstrates how far a person can get by adroitly deploying a spare and arrogant gift. Rarely has an artist made so much of his intelligence while investing so little in his craft.

Not that every inch of a canvas demands obsessive labor. But Mr. Katz’s pictures of family, friends, Luna Park, a swamp maple tree and “superb lilies” are so rushed and programmatic, and so stilted in their depiction of the human form, that you can only conclude that hasty means indicate contempt for the art of painting itself. Mr. Katz’s broad-brush technique makes for striking images, but as painting, the work is bland and numbing. Only with the aforementioned lilies do we see Mr. Katz pick up and engage with the possibilities—indeed, the musicality—of pictorial form. Otherwise, he’s too cool to care.

Boosters argue that his sleek style and billboard-size canvases are world-historical: that by marrying the expansiveness of Abstract Expressionism with the punch of Pop Art, he nudged representational painting back into the mainstream. Maybe so, but what does it mean when culture starts inflating sound bites into epic statements? It’s Mr. Katz’s prerogative not to worry about that and simply rush to order. It’s our prerogative to grant his art as much time and pleasure as he does.

Alex Katz: The Sixties is at Pace Wildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, until June 17.

It
can now no longer be doubted that Mr. Katz is one of our most accomplished
living artists, a painter who has deftly transformed a conventional pictorial
interest—the light and landscape of coastal Maine—into pictures that are truly
original. I'm referring both to the small-scale collages, with their casual
glimpses of the artist's life, and to the mural-size paintings with their
multiple figures. The latter are also brilliantly realized portraits of his
circle of family and friends, some of them well-known artists and writers.

With
an insouciance that often reminds us of the New York poets Frank O'Hara and
John Ashbery, Mr. Katz brings to his Maine subjects the flavor of Manhattan art
life. This is not the Maine of Winslow Homer or Rockwell Kent or the Wyeth
clan. Mr. Katz's Maine is less scenic and more oriented to both daily life and
the life of art. As Suzette Lane McAvoy, the curator of Alex Katz in Maine, writes in the show's catalog: “Katz's Maine is
not the tourist view of crashing surf and lighthouses; it is at once more
intimate, and more universal.” More cosmopolitan, too, but certainly intimate
in its evocation of family life. The artist's wife, Ada, is a frequent subject
for his iconic portraits, as is his son, Vincent—even the dog, Sunny, is
included in this pictorial chronicle of a family romance.

The
Maine/Manhattan connection in Mr. Katz's work has its origins in the earliest
stages of the artist's career. In 1949, while still an art student at the
Cooper Union in Manhattan, Mr. Katz spent a summer session at the Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Me., and this marked the crucial
turning point in his artistic development. “At Skowhegan,” he recalls, “I tried
plein-air painting and found my subject matter and a reason to devote my life
to painting. The sensation of painting from the back of my head was a high that
I followed until the present.” As Mr. Katz has also written: “My intention was
to make something fresh and post-abstract.”

"Post-abstract”
is, of course, a reference to the dominance of Abstract-Expressionist painting
in the 1940's and 50's—a dominance that many art students and even some senior
artists found difficult to resist. Except in one respect—his affinity for the
oversize scale and ambition of Abstract Expressionism—Mr. Katz did indeed
succeed in resisting the Abstract-Expressionist aesthetic. He adopted the Ab-Ex
scale to his own very ambitious representative style; indeed, in paintings like
Wildflowers 3 (1993) and Walking on the Beach (2002)—both 192
inches wide—he produced works far greater in size than most Ab-Ex efforts.

In
this independent, “post-abstract” endeavor, what did Maine contribute to Mr.
Katz's breakaway achievement? His own answer to this question is unequivocal:
“It was [in] Skowhegan that I first got involved with Maine light which is richer
and darker than the light in Impressionist paintings. Being able to see Maine
light helped me separate myself from European painting and find my own eyes.”

Given
both the quality and the scale of Mr. Katz's achievement, isn't it time for a
comprehensive, up-to-date retrospective in a New York art museum? After seeing
these two exhibitions in Maine, I certainly think so. Not only would such a
retrospective be a major art event, but probably very popular as well.

Meanwhile,
Alex Katz: Collages remains on view
at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Me., through Sept. 18; and Alex Katz in Maine can be seen at the
Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Me., through Oct. 16.

It can now no longer be doubted that Mr. Katz is one of our most accomplished living artists, a painter who has deftly transformed a conventional pictorial interest-the light and landscape of coastal Maine-into pictures that are truly original. I'm referring both to the small-scale collages, with their casual glimpses of the artist's life, and to the mural-size paintings with their multiple figures. The latter are also brilliantly realized portraits of his circle of family and friends, some of them well-known artists and writers.

With an insouciance that often reminds us of the New York poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, Mr. Katz brings to his Maine subjects the flavor of Manhattan art life. This is not the Maine of Winslow Homer or Rockwell Kent or the Wyeth clan. Mr. Katz's Maine is less scenic and more oriented to both daily life and the life of art. As Suzette Lane McAvoy, the curator of Alex Katz in Maine, writes in the show's catalog: "Katz's Maine is not the tourist view of crashing surf and lighthouses; it is at once more intimate, and more universal." More cosmopolitan, too, but certainly intimate in its evocation of family life. The artist's wife, Ada, is a frequent subject for his iconic portraits, as is his son, Vincent-even the dog, Sunny, is included in this pictorial chronicle of a family romance.

The Maine/Manhattan connection in Mr. Katz's work has its origins in the earliest stages of the artist's career. In 1949, while still an art student at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, Mr. Katz spent a summer session at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Me., and this marked the crucial turning point in his artistic development. "At Skowhegan," he recalls, "I tried plein-air painting and found my subject matter and a reason to devote my life to painting. The sensation of painting from the back of my head was a high that I followed until the present." As Mr. Katz has also written: "My intention was to make something fresh and post-abstract."

"Post-abstract" is, of course, a reference to the dominance of Abstract-Expressionist painting in the 1940's and 50's-a dominance that many art students and even some senior artists found difficult to resist. Except in one respect-his affinity for the oversize scale and ambition of Abstract Expressionism-Mr. Katz did indeed succeed in resisting the Abstract-Expressionist aesthetic. He adopted the Ab-Ex scale to his own very ambitious representative style; indeed, in paintings like Wildflowers 3 (1993) and Walking on the Beach (2002)-both 192 inches wide-he produced works far greater in size than most Ab-Ex efforts.

In this independent, "post-abstract" endeavor, what did Maine contribute to Mr. Katz's breakaway achievement? His own answer to this question is unequivocal: "It was [in] Skowhegan that I first got involved with Maine light which is richer and darker than the light in Impressionist paintings. Being able to see Maine light helped me separate myself from European painting and find my own eyes."

Given both the quality and the scale of Mr. Katz's achievement, isn't it time for a comprehensive, up-to-date retrospective in a New York art museum? After seeing these two exhibitions in Maine, I certainly think so. Not only would such a retrospective be a major art event, but probably very popular as well.

Meanwhile, Alex Katz: Collages remains on view at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Me., through Sept. 18; and Alex Katz in Maine can be seen at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Me., through Oct. 16.

Mr. Hudders has his painterly priorities in place. He doesn’t set himself above style; he employs it as a means of bolstering vision. The paintings, syncopated to the slo-mo cadences of a dream, make solid—and still ephemeral—intimate moments; think of them as immaculately arranged glances. As you might have guessed, Mr. Hudders is only nominally a realist. When painting architecture, he’s as streamlined and clean as Niles Spencer; when establishing atmosphere, he’s as uncanny as Giorgio de Chirico. He hints at the surreal, but avoids its literalist tendencies by paying merciless attention to pictorial form. Note, for example, the precise manner in which Mr. Hudders situates objects in relationship to each other and to the canvas’ edge—he’s no mean hand at structuring a composition. Couple that with a touch that clarifies the structure of a given object while intimating the spirit (or secret) housed within it, and you have an art that is magical and stoic, clear-headed, eccentric and recommended.

William Hudders: New Paintings is at the Tatistcheff Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, until Oct. 30.

Late Author’s Art

If you’re under the age of 60, there’s a good chance you’ve come in contact with the work of the abstract painter Esphyr Slobodkina (1908-2002), but maybe not through her abstract paintings. Slobodkina is the author of Caps for Sale, a picture book detailing the encounter between a peddler selling hats and a group of mischievous monkeys. Considered a classic of children’s literature, Caps for Sale has sold more than two million copies since it was first published in 1938. Slobodkina wrote other children’s books as well and achieved a level of fame as an author that eluded her as a painter. Not that the art went unnoticed—the work is out there, found in the collections of major museums through out the United States. Kraushaar Galleries Inc. is showing a small but representative selection of Slobodkina’s paintings and works on paper.

Slobodkina, the artist, is worth getting to know, though no one is likely to mistake her for a great painter. Born in Russia, she came to the States in 1928, enrolled at the National Academy of Design and helped found the American Abstract Artists group. Taking as a given the innovations of Cubism, Neo-Plasticism and, to a lesser degree, Surrealism, Slobodkina funneled them through a gentle and idiosyncratic temperament. Modernist purity wasn’t her thing: Slobodkina’s flat, interpenetrating planes and loose-limbed biomorphs engage in whimsically acrobatic scenarios. An erotic undercurrent is there to see in a tactile palette and, especially, the manner in which her cobbled shapes balance and touch, as if they were capable of registering the slightest sensation. Slobodkina’s "journey into abstraction" is more charming than epochal, but that’s not to say you won’t perk up when acquainted with it.

Esphyr Slobodkina: Journey into Abstraction is at the Kraushaar Galleries, 724 Fifth Avenue, until Oct. 30.

More Abstractions

Should the Kraushaar show pique your fancy, you’ll want to head west on 57th Street to the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which is showcasing a few of Slobodkina’s peers (and some of her betters) in the exhibition Breaking Boundaries: Early American Abstraction, 1930-1945. Rosenfeld can slap together a show like this merely by having the cleaning crew take a vacuum to the storage racks, but that doesn’t mean what’s been displaced isn’t worth your time. Be patient with the work: What first appears to be a musty array of Modernist pastiches turns out to be quirky or eccentric or endearingly homespun.

The painter Carl Holty transmutes Miró by channeling Barney Google; Theodore Roszak indulges in a Suprematist pun by riffing on a sewing machine; Charles Shaw proves himself adroit at investing simple forms with balletic wit; Burgoyne Diller gets away with sculpture by hewing to the logic of painting; and Ed Garman—well, the transcendentalist yearnings he commits to canvas have the punch and pizzazz of a pinball machine. You’ll have to ask at the front desk if you can take a look at the picture—Mr. Rosenfeld has the Garman squirreled away in the back office. You can’t blame him for not wanting to share: It’s an upper of a painting and the best thing here.

Breaking Boundaries: American Abstract Art, 1930-1945 is at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, until Oct. 30.

On the other hand, there are painters of quite traditional subjects—portrait figures and landscapes—who are not only unfazed by this oversized space, but positively revel in it. One of them is Alex Katz, whose new exhibition, called Twelve Paintings, is on view at the Chelsea branch of the PaceWildenstein Gallery. Ten of the paintings in this show are tall, vertical portraits of women, each nearly nine feet high, in which the female subjects are cropped at the top just above their hairline and, at the bottom edge of the canvas, at the chest. The sides of the paintings are similarly cropped in a way that sometimes eliminates the subject’s left eye. Such crops are by now an established convention in Mr. Katz’s oeuvre, as is the movie-screen close-up scale of the portrait subject’s features—a convention one is tempted to dub in-her-face portraiture.

Rothko famously said of his own large color abstractions that their scale was necessary for achieving a certain intimacy with the viewer, and it’s true of many large-scale color-field abstractions that they do invite a kind of public intimacy for the eye to settle into. But it’s also often true that large-scale figurative paintings have the opposite effect on the viewer: An eye or a mouth that’s many times larger than life-size may be shocking or amusing or otherwise unexpected, but it’s not likely to afford the viewer an experience of intimacy. The iconic scale of the subject’s facial features tends to drain them of character or personality. If not for the cheerful spirit of Mr. Katz’s outsized portraits, one might even call the scale of these faces grotesque—cheerfully grotesque.

But "cheerful" isn’t quite the mot juste. For a better description, we have to venture into the uncharted realm of feeling and thought that, for better and for worse, has come to be called "cool." Since this word has now become part of the mindless static of contemporary life, it’s almost impossible to define; one might even say that it would be the essence of an "uncool" mind to attempt to define "cool" too narrowly. What it seems to mean for many people is a style or sensibility in which an affectation of minimal effort achieves maximum effect.

Whatever it is, Mr. Katz seems abundantly possessed of it in his large-scale portrait paintings; they strike this viewer as very cool, indeed.

Mr. Katz is also a highly accomplished painter of landscapes and skyscapes, however, and his inspired handling of those subjects is anything but cool. His landscapes and skyscapes are exquisitely painterly—and, let’s face it, painterliness isn’t cool. It’s too obviously painstaking to be cool; it is—dare one say it?—too traditional to be cool. There’s only one landscape painting in the show at PaceWildenstein—the huge Winter Scene (2004), which measures eight by 10 feet—and it’s a knockout achievement.

Equally impressive is an even larger canvas called 6:30 AM (2004), which measures 11 and a half feet square and is clearly related to Winter Scene, but may at first glance be mistaken for a gray and white abstraction. One is tempted to say that with these two paintings, Mr. Katz is the hottest painter of winter snow on the current scene.

Alex Katz: Twelve Paintings remains on view at PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, through Oct. 9.

About the chromatic appeal of these floral bouquets, there is a wonderful observation by Thomas Nozkowski in his essay for the show's catalog. "Notice how the city pulls apart," he writes, "to give these stalks and stems room to perform their Matissean shimmy." In some of the paintings- Nasturtiums Before a Red Cloth , for example, and Nasturtiums and Petunias I -the spirited patterns traced by the blossoms, leaves and stems of the flowers do seem to be performing a kind of dance on the canvas, in which every element is not so much composed as choreographed. In other paintings, however- Light Blue Above and Flowers on a Wicker Tray -the flowers in their vases seem to be sitting for their portraits. Under the magic of Ms. Freilicher's fluent brush, they acquire a "personality" that places them beyond the category of still-life.

While landscape and cityscape remain important to Ms. Freilicher's paintings, flowers now appear to have supplanted the human figures as her other commanding interest. It's not a new interest, however. In 1952, when Fairfield Porter reviewed Ms. Freilicher's first exhibition, his principal focus was on a painting called Figure on a Bed , and in retrospect it's interesting to see how accurately he foresaw the direction in which her paintings would be heading in the years to come. "Reading from the top down," Porter wrote, "the figure looks like clouds in a greenish-blue sky, the bed like the opposite banks of a river landscape, the floor and the dog below like the river and near shore," and so on.

Even more interesting, in relation to Ms. Freilicher's current work, is the illustration chosen to accompany that 1952 review: The painting is called Early New York Evening , and it depicts-what else?-a window view of the Manhattan cityscape with a vase of flowers on the window sill in the foreground. The cityscape is rendered far more realistically than in Ms. Freilicher's more recent pictures-the Cubist element remains understated, and the vase of flowers is less demanding of our attention-but the principal pictorial idea was clearly in place more than half a century ago. (You can read the review and see a reproduction of the painting in Art in Its Own Terms , the 1979 collection of Porter's critical essays edited by Rackstraw Downes.)

Something that Porter wrote in 1960, in an essay called "Impressionism and Paintings Today," may also be relevant here. About the flower paintings of Leon Hartl, a painter now forgotten by everyone but the painters who saw his work, and the landscapes of Alex Katz, who is still going strong, Porter observed: "Though Hartl and [Katz] are realists, they are both abstractionists in color." So, indeed, is Jane Freilicher. Abstractionism in color is particularly evident in her two Flora paintings on handmade paper, with their shallow-spaced, all-over structure, and an abstractionist impulse can be seen in all of her recent paintings. It's even more emphatically stated in Seascape , another painting on handmade paper, which has a structure of stacked horizontal forms.

All of this suggests that what we've been witnessing-though not always acknowledging-in the history of American art since the 1950's is a widespread movement among representational painters to come to terms with the powerhouse influence of the Abstract Expressionists. Not only as a critic but also as a painter, this was an issue that Fairfield Porter was absolutely obsessed with: In writing about abstract painting, he often went looking for its subject matter, and in writing about realist painting, he was mainly concerned with pure pictorial form.

What this also suggests is that, in the long term, representational painters may have derived greater benefits-pictorial, aesthetic benefits-from the Abstract Expressionists than abstract painters have. It may be heresy to suggest this, but in the presence of Ms. Freilicher's current exhibition, it's a heresy worth thinking about.

Jane Freilicher: Recent Work remains on view at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, through April 24.

Anyone familiar with her oeuvre knows that Ms. Coffey is all about resistance. She's both an ideologue and a pure painter and neither of those things: She trades in absolutes only to deny them. This makes for frustrating art. It also makes for pictures that stick, like a burr, in the memory.

Learning that the paintings are based on newspaper photos of the war in Iraq doesn't help: try locating a political stance and you'll be thwarted. If Ms. Coffey, wearing a camouflage tank top and bathing cap, seems despondent in Conveyance (2003), she's serene when surrounded by explosions and fire in Stream (2003). These paintings do run the risk of exploiting events whose importance will inevitably overshadow whatever's on the canvas, yet the gravity of Ms. Coffey's purpose-of her mood, really-is unmistakable. The war pictures (if we can call them that) are, oddly enough, conduits for reverie, simultaneously discomfiting, soothing and convoluted. Their stark, theatrical intensity makes the more typical self-portraits-passive-aggressive meditations on identity-look a trifle silly (though their pithiness as painting is inarguable). Ms. Coffey wouldn't be the first person to open up to the world only as it threatens to descend into disarray. Perhaps that's what accounts for the subtle shift from negation to some semblance of acceptance. Ms. Coffey remains a problematic figure-if only other artists would present us with puzzles so intricate and true.

Susanna Coffey: Recent Work is at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, until Nov. 8.

Live From Duluth

I should hate the pictures of David Dupuis at the Derek Eller Gallery. A devotee of post-conceptualist pastiche, Mr. Dupuis uses landscape as an armature upon which to situate a motley array of cartoonish signs: lumpish stenciled letters, crusty dabs of oil, Surrealist hazes, crystallized geometry, horny tongues and drifting clouds. The surfaces are scuffed and ragtag, as if the canvases had spent the better part of their lives stacked in a garage somewhere in Duluth. Mr. Dupuis' take on adolescence is predictable: He recognizes its passing, but can't bring himself to let it go. When he tries to make a statement, as in Doubt Collecting (2003), an anti-religious farce, he capitulates to a self-conscious, smart-ass mockery.

So why bother with him? He has a rough-and-fumble talent, and just enough principle to make you want to give his pictures a break. Two of them, Candy Coated Mountain (2003) and Basin (2003), don't need the charity. Both make coherent the artist's awkward, introspective fantasies; they have a heft the rest of the work lacks. Credit the light: Strange, milky and barely detectable, it surrounds the images with a wan benevolence.

David Dupuis is at the Derek Eller Gallery, 526-30 West 25th Street, second floor, until Nov. 15.

Sassy Silhouette

The big problem with American Cutout , an exhibition at the New York Studio School, is that it isn't big enough. David Cohen, the director of the gallery, has hit upon an ingenious (and, one would think, extendable) vehicle for examining postwar American art-not collage (though the show is inconceivable without it) but silhouette, the form defined by excision and contour. The show fudges its time frame by including a 19th-century weathervane depicting George Washington, and it doesn't always hew to material fact. (Phillip Pearlstein's canvas features a painted cutout.) Mr. Cohen isn't a stickler for nationality, either: He bestows honorary American citizenship upon Henri Matisse. Then again, any exhibition devoted to the cutout that didn't take into account Matisse's monumental achievement would be in serious denial. Mr. Cohen is wise to include him (and perhaps less wise to include-and thereby give credence to-Willem de Kooning as sculptor, and also Robert Motherwell, whose contribution to the art of collage has been hugely overrated).

William King, Judith Rothschild, Conrad Marca-Relli, Irving Kriesberg, Alexander Calder, Alex Katz and Ellsworth Kelly, all significant talents, are seen to winning effect. Certainly you'll never find Mr. Katz and Mr. Kelly as ingratiating as they are here. Mr. Katz's bland arrogance is humanized when he works small, keeps it casual and leaves ambition at the door. Mr. Kelly's postcard collages riff on kitsch, sex and history with a disarming, pseudo-Dadaist ease. In the best of them, a Suprematist wedge of red is affixed to a reproduction of Edgar Degas' The Young Spartans , as if the 20th century were asking the 19th to step outside to settle their differences. The result is a draw, drolly and decisively put forth.

American Cutout is at the New York Studio School, 8 West Eighth Street, until Nov. 22.

Puzzling, Risky Paintings

The horrors of 9/11 are not the explicit subject of Susanna Coffey's paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, though scenes of a city under siege do serve as the backdrop for her continuing exploration of self-portraiture. The events of that day have been transformed in her art into something else-but what that something else might be is difficult to grasp.

Anyone familiar with her oeuvre knows that Ms. Coffey is all about resistance. She's both an ideologue and a pure painter and neither of those things: She trades in absolutes only to deny them. This makes for frustrating art. It also makes for pictures that stick, like a burr, in the memory.

Learning that the paintings are based on newspaper photos of the war in Iraq doesn't help: try locating a political stance and you'll be thwarted. If Ms. Coffey, wearing a camouflage tank top and bathing cap, seems despondent in Conveyance (2003), she's serene when surrounded by explosions and fire in Stream (2003). These paintings do run the risk of exploiting events whose importance will inevitably overshadow whatever's on the canvas, yet the gravity of Ms. Coffey's purpose-of her mood, really-is unmistakable. The war pictures (if we can call them that) are, oddly enough, conduits for reverie, simultaneously discomfiting, soothing and convoluted. Their stark, theatrical intensity makes the more typical self-portraits-passive-aggressive meditations on identity-look a trifle silly (though their pithiness as painting is inarguable). Ms. Coffey wouldn't be the first person to open up to the world only as it threatens to descend into disarray. Perhaps that's what accounts for the subtle shift from negation to some semblance of acceptance. Ms. Coffey remains a problematic figure-if only other artists would present us with puzzles so intricate and true.

Susanna Coffey: Recent Work is at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, until Nov. 8.

Live From Duluth

I should hate the pictures of David Dupuis at the Derek Eller Gallery. A devotee of post-conceptualist pastiche, Mr. Dupuis uses landscape as an armature upon which to situate a motley array of cartoonish signs: lumpish stenciled letters, crusty dabs of oil, Surrealist hazes, crystallized geometry, horny tongues and drifting clouds. The surfaces are scuffed and ragtag, as if the canvases had spent the better part of their lives stacked in a garage somewhere in Duluth. Mr. Dupuis' take on adolescence is predictable: He recognizes its passing, but can't bring himself to let it go. When he tries to make a statement, as in Doubt Collecting (2003), an anti-religious farce, he capitulates to a self-conscious, smart-ass mockery.

So why bother with him? He has a rough-and-fumble talent, and just enough principle to make you want to give his pictures a break. Two of them, Candy Coated Mountain (2003) and Basin (2003), don't need the charity. Both make coherent the artist's awkward, introspective fantasies; they have a heft the rest of the work lacks. Credit the light: Strange, milky and barely detectable, it surrounds the images with a wan benevolence.

David Dupuis is at the Derek Eller Gallery, 526-30 West 25th Street, second floor, until Nov. 15.

Sassy Silhouette

The big problem with American Cutout , an exhibition at the New York Studio School, is that it isn't big enough. David Cohen, the director of the gallery, has hit upon an ingenious (and, one would think, extendable) vehicle for examining postwar American art-not collage (though the show is inconceivable without it) but silhouette, the form defined by excision and contour. The show fudges its time frame by including a 19th-century weathervane depicting George Washington, and it doesn't always hew to material fact. (Phillip Pearlstein's canvas features a painted cutout.) Mr. Cohen isn't a stickler for nationality, either: He bestows honorary American citizenship upon Henri Matisse. Then again, any exhibition devoted to the cutout that didn't take into account Matisse's monumental achievement would be in serious denial. Mr. Cohen is wise to include him (and perhaps less wise to include-and thereby give credence to-Willem de Kooning as sculptor, and also Robert Motherwell, whose contribution to the art of collage has been hugely overrated).

William King, Judith Rothschild, Conrad Marca-Relli, Irving Kriesberg, Alexander Calder, Alex Katz and Ellsworth Kelly, all significant talents, are seen to winning effect. Certainly you'll never find Mr. Katz and Mr. Kelly as ingratiating as they are here. Mr. Katz's bland arrogance is humanized when he works small, keeps it casual and leaves ambition at the door. Mr. Kelly's postcard collages riff on kitsch, sex and history with a disarming, pseudo-Dadaist ease. In the best of them, a Suprematist wedge of red is affixed to a reproduction of Edgar Degas' The Young Spartans , as if the 20th century were asking the 19th to step outside to settle their differences. The result is a draw, drolly and decisively put forth.

American Cutout is at the New York Studio School, 8 West Eighth Street, until Nov. 22.