Made from aluminum, its abraded surfaces sparkling with reflected light, the sculpture is reminiscent of two-by-fours complete with "windows." The squarish structure is topped off by diagonal struts, like a roof. ( Room could well be based on a child's drawing of a house; in my notes, I kept referring to it as Home .) Inside are shelves of varying thickness and size, deftly calibrated to create jutting, propulsive relationships. Imagine an homage to Mondrian by a less puritanical Donald Judd and you'll have an idea of the peculiar nature of Mr. Boepple's achievement.

Anyone with a keen interest in sculpture should make a priority of seeing Room . Having said that, I found the three tabletop pieces surrounding it (all titled Temple ) more intriguing and certainly more approachable. Constructed from thick planks of poplar and painted black, green and reddish-brown, respectively, they offer a less literal allusion to architecture. At first glance, each of the blunt, box-like constructions seems impenetrable; narrow, shifting apertures allow the eye partial access to their interiors. Peering in, we get a sense of their intricacies but never a firm grip of the whole: The mystery of the Temple remains intact. The mutability of space, Mr. Boepple's subject, is here endowed with a solemn, though not unplayful, demeanor. When not working with the museum in mind-which is, I think the case with the Temple pieces-Mr. Boepple is liberated by ambition rather than confined by it. So honor Room as the masterwork, but relish the rest as evidence of this sculptor's enigmatic, eccentric and undeniable gift.

He is one of the most enigmatic-and best-artists around.

Willard Boepple is at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, 20 East 79th Street, until July 30.

Wishy-Washy?

Is it possible to dislike watercolor? The charms of a good watercolor picture-its transparency of tack, its effortlessness and poise-are irresistible, not least because we recognize how inherently difficult this most unforgiving of mediums is. When an artist pulls it off, it's as spontaneous as breathing. You could say the same about any work of art, of course-a painting or sculpture should pulse with an uncanny sense of life. Yet the weightlessness of watercolor, its delicate absence of body, creates the fetching illusion of images snatched from the ether. "Watercolor is tricky stuff, an amateur's but really a virtuoso's medium," wrote the critic Robert Hughes. Few mediums can humble an artist more decisively, or as quickly, as watercolor.

Watercurrents , an exhibition at Kouros Gallery, is an informal overview of 12 contemporary artists working in watercolor. Make that too informal: I know it's summertime, but some consideration could have been devoted to the installation. The show feels as if it were slapped together at the last minute. Attention to the niceties of presentation is lacking-that pieces by significant painters like Andrew Forge and Ruth Miller are displayed in student-grade frames is a scandal. Still, you can't fault the selection of artists. To name three: Carolyn Harris, who establishes forthright, fluid and staccato rhythms in Yellow Lily in the Spoon (1992); Garth Evans, whose snuggling and needy biomorphs absorb the eye with rich, bottomless colors; and Phyllis Floyd, whose depictions of plant life, crisp and sure, only divulge their vulnerabilities at the edges of form. The other painters-Wilbur Niewald, especially-eloquently state the case for watercolor, even if the organizers of the exhibition haven't seen fit to do the same.

Watercurrents: 12 Artists Working in Watercolor is at the Kouros Gallery, 23 East 73rd Street, until Aug. 13.

Slow-Burning Medium

Back to Paint , the title of C&M Arts' "exploration of issues in recent contemporary painting," begs the question: From where are we coming back to paint? Ostensibly, from an art scene that privileges everything but the venerable art form itself-installations, videos, conceptual art, performances, any object that smacks of the outré. Contemporary painting is marginal, it's true. With a few exceptions-notably, John Currin-painting has been out of the limelight, and for good reason: The medium's hard-won, slow-burning pleasures are anathema to a go-go art scene, intent on becoming an appendage to mass media.

Yet the notion that painting has been away-or that it has "re-emerged"-is silly. To pretend otherwise is to willfully blind oneself to the reality of thousands of artists continually daubing away in their studios. Not that all of them are good; precious few know what makes a painting tick. None of the artists featured at C&M Arts know. They push paint around, sure, but the materials an artist employs should be an extension of vision, not its accessory. Try divining a sense of pictorial necessity-or personality-at C&M, and you'll come up wanting. Instead, you'll be subjected to "heterotopian mutations," "oblique social subject matter" and "splintered reality"-anything but a painting that provides its own rationale. The exhibition only goes to underscore our pluralist predicament: a culture of individuals content to paint themselves into their own little, lonely corner. Which is to say that Back to Paint isn't back from anywhere.

Back to Paint is at C&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, until Sept. 11.

Sculpting a Room, a Temple

Room (2000), the centerpiece of Willard Boepple's exhibition of recent sculpture at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, is a curious piece of work. It makes no bones about its architectural reference-and not just because of the title. Scale is a factor: Room is almost as big as a room, and viewers are welcome to enter it.

Made from aluminum, its abraded surfaces sparkling with reflected light, the sculpture is reminiscent of two-by-fours complete with "windows." The squarish structure is topped off by diagonal struts, like a roof. ( Room could well be based on a child's drawing of a house; in my notes, I kept referring to it as Home .) Inside are shelves of varying thickness and size, deftly calibrated to create jutting, propulsive relationships. Imagine an homage to Mondrian by a less puritanical Donald Judd and you'll have an idea of the peculiar nature of Mr. Boepple's achievement.

Anyone with a keen interest in sculpture should make a priority of seeing Room . Having said that, I found the three tabletop pieces surrounding it (all titled Temple ) more intriguing and certainly more approachable. Constructed from thick planks of poplar and painted black, green and reddish-brown, respectively, they offer a less literal allusion to architecture. At first glance, each of the blunt, box-like constructions seems impenetrable; narrow, shifting apertures allow the eye partial access to their interiors. Peering in, we get a sense of their intricacies but never a firm grip of the whole: The mystery of the Temple remains intact. The mutability of space, Mr. Boepple's subject, is here endowed with a solemn, though not unplayful, demeanor. When not working with the museum in mind-which is, I think the case with the Temple pieces-Mr. Boepple is liberated by ambition rather than confined by it. So honor Room as the masterwork, but relish the rest as evidence of this sculptor's enigmatic, eccentric and undeniable gift.

He is one of the most enigmatic-and best-artists around.

Willard Boepple is at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, 20 East 79th Street, until July 30.

Wishy-Washy?

Is it possible to dislike watercolor? The charms of a good watercolor picture-its transparency of tack, its effortlessness and poise-are irresistible, not least because we recognize how inherently difficult this most unforgiving of mediums is. When an artist pulls it off, it's as spontaneous as breathing. You could say the same about any work of art, of course-a painting or sculpture should pulse with an uncanny sense of life. Yet the weightlessness of watercolor, its delicate absence of body, creates the fetching illusion of images snatched from the ether. "Watercolor is tricky stuff, an amateur's but really a virtuoso's medium," wrote the critic Robert Hughes. Few mediums can humble an artist more decisively, or as quickly, as watercolor.

Watercurrents , an exhibition at Kouros Gallery, is an informal overview of 12 contemporary artists working in watercolor. Make that too informal: I know it's summertime, but some consideration could have been devoted to the installation. The show feels as if it were slapped together at the last minute. Attention to the niceties of presentation is lacking-that pieces by significant painters like Andrew Forge and Ruth Miller are displayed in student-grade frames is a scandal. Still, you can't fault the selection of artists. To name three: Carolyn Harris, who establishes forthright, fluid and staccato rhythms in Yellow Lily in the Spoon (1992); Garth Evans, whose snuggling and needy biomorphs absorb the eye with rich, bottomless colors; and Phyllis Floyd, whose depictions of plant life, crisp and sure, only divulge their vulnerabilities at the edges of form. The other painters-Wilbur Niewald, especially-eloquently state the case for watercolor, even if the organizers of the exhibition haven't seen fit to do the same.

Watercurrents: 12 Artists Working in Watercolor is at the Kouros Gallery, 23 East 73rd Street, until Aug. 13.

Slow-Burning Medium

Back to Paint , the title of C&M Arts' "exploration of issues in recent contemporary painting," begs the question: From where are we coming back to paint? Ostensibly, from an art scene that privileges everything but the venerable art form itself-installations, videos, conceptual art, performances, any object that smacks of the outré. Contemporary painting is marginal, it's true. With a few exceptions-notably, John Currin-painting has been out of the limelight, and for good reason: The medium's hard-won, slow-burning pleasures are anathema to a go-go art scene, intent on becoming an appendage to mass media.

Yet the notion that painting has been away-or that it has "re-emerged"-is silly. To pretend otherwise is to willfully blind oneself to the reality of thousands of artists continually daubing away in their studios. Not that all of them are good; precious few know what makes a painting tick. None of the artists featured at C&M Arts know. They push paint around, sure, but the materials an artist employs should be an extension of vision, not its accessory. Try divining a sense of pictorial necessity-or personality-at C&M, and you'll come up wanting. Instead, you'll be subjected to "heterotopian mutations," "oblique social subject matter" and "splintered reality"-anything but a painting that provides its own rationale. The exhibition only goes to underscore our pluralist predicament: a culture of individuals content to paint themselves into their own little, lonely corner. Which is to say that Back to Paint isn't back from anywhere.

Back to Paint is at C&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, until Sept. 11.å

Another is that Andrew (as I shall speak of him here) was a rare example of a painter, teacher and writer on art who was not only admired but truly beloved by virtually everyone who came to know him. In an art world so often disfigured by contentious blather, runaway venality, herd mentality and sheer silliness, Andrew was a model of disinterested intelligence, integrity, generosity and tact. His career spanned some 50 years, first in his native England and then in the United States, and he achieved high distinction in each of the vocations to which he dedicated his remarkable talents: above all as a painter of extraordinary originality, but also as a critic renowned for the beauty and clarity of his prose and the authority of his judgment, and finally as a teacher and lecturer of exceptional eloquence.

In England in the late 40's, he began painting in a conventional, figurative style under the influence of William Coldstream and the so-called Euston Road school, and had his first solo exhibition at Agnew's in 1953. This was also the year in which he made his debut as a critic, first as a radio broadcaster, and then for such journals as The New Statesman and Studio International . What changed everything for Andrew, however, was the impact of the New York School and its Abstract Expressionist painting, which began to be felt in London in the late 50's. By 1963, when he had his last show of figurative painting in London-a show that won him both favorable reviews and solid sales-he felt ready for a fresh start in the United States. He flew to New York while his show was still selling in London.

It was another measure of Andrew's intellectual independence that he didn't choose to become a camp follower of the kind of abstraction that had prompted him to make a decisive break with his own past. He embarked instead on creating one of the most subtle and sensuous styles of abstract painting, a style that eschews everything associated with the robust gestures and outsize forms of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a painstaking pointillism in which small dots and other tiny touches of brilliant color transform the canvas surface into shimmering constellations of light and space.

As Andrew himself said of this new work on the occasion of an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in 1996: "Time is important with these paintings. They take a long time to make. I would like them to be looked at slowly enough to allow the viewer's eye to accommodate to their structure; and at as many different distances as the gallery allows." And it is certainly true that these paintings are sometimes slow to reveal the full scale of their poetry and complexity. When at last they do, however, the sheer beauty of the experience is profound.

Needless to say, painting of this persuasion doesn't lend itself to popular appeal. (And it cannot be adequately reproduced in a newspaper.) Yet I believe it to be one of the most original contributions to abstract painting in our time, and I suspect that posterity will find more to admire in it than in many of the flashier, more crowd-pleasing developments that have enjoyed their 15 minutes in the limelight.

It was as a writer, lecturer and teacher that Andrew was better-known to the public. In England, he had been a senior lecturer at the Slade School of Art in the late 60's, and in this country he began teaching at Cooper Union in the early 70's. His long association with the New York Studio School began in the mid-70's, and so did his association with Yale University, first as a professor of painting and then as dean of the Yale School of Art.

The key to his success as a teacher was, first of all, in the example he set for his students. Andrew spoke clearly and beautifully and often with passion about the paintings he loved, and he had no inclination to impose his will. What he looked for in his students was not only talent but dedication, and his sympathy with his students' endeavors was never in doubt. I heard him speak most often at the New York Studio School, and almost as moving as Andrew's way of talking about painting was the evident affection that the students felt for their teacher. He was certainly one of the people who made the New York Studio School an oasis of sanity and standards at a time when the New York art scene was elsewhere swarming with every manner of frivolity and bad faith.

I understand that Andrew had been preparing a volume of his essays on art before he died; that's a book that will be keenly awaited. But what's also needed is a comprehensive retrospective of his paintings-in a New York museum. He was a marvelous painter, and it's time to give the New York art public an opportunity to experience the scale of his achievement at firsthand. Why should we have to wait for some London institution to do that for us?

Yet there is also a tradition of Northern color, which is significantly different from the colorism of Mediterranean Europe and is often seen at its peak in the work of Northern painters who have been deeply affected by their encounters with the light of the South. Northern color–think of Edvard Munch, Walter Sickert, Max Beckmann and Marsden Hartley, among the modernists–tends toward sharper contrasts and more theatrical densities. In climates where the brilliancy of the sun is a fugitive experience for much of the year, its pictorial representation is often endowed with a psychological intensity that is alien to Southern sensibilities. As a consequence, Northern color tends to be highly dramatic, and for that very reason its fidelities to certain extremes of light and shadow in nature are often mistaken to be excessive or unnatural.

This is no doubt the reason why the painter and critic Andrew Forge–himself a master of what I would characterize as Southern color–recently wrote of Graham Nickson's paintings that "His color is extreme." The occasion was the exhibition of Mr. Nickson's paintings and drawings last year at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, but the statement applies equally well to the artist's current exhibition at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries. Extreme, in Mr. Forge's sense, Mr. Nickson's color certainly is, and pretty spectacular as well.

What, then, did Mr. Forge mean by "extreme"? "In all of his work," wrote Mr. Forge, "there is a sense of something being pushed to a limit–a limit of saturation, of tonal contrast, of dissonance. What establishes the limit is a certain conception of light. This is where the line is drawn beyond which color would run berserk."

If this makes Mr. Nickson sound like an exceptionally exciting painter, well, the truth is that he is one of the most exciting and ambitious painters on the current art scene. You would never know this, of course, from the indifference and neglect his work has met with from most of the critics and curators in this town. But that's true of a lot of good painting nowadays: Many of our critics and curators seem to have written off painting itself as a lost cause–unless, alas, it can be seen to embrace some trendy subject like race or gender or whatever the O.K.-cause-of-the-month may be.

For such blighted sensibilities, Mr. Nickson's paintings may indeed be hard work. He thinks big and works big. One of the paintings in his current show, Inlet: Dark Water (1981-97), is 10 feet tall and 14 feet wide, and contains, among much else, nearly a dozen figures. Another, Sanctuary II (1996-2001), is even bigger. As these dates indicate, the artist often devotes years to a single picture, reworking the complexities of its color and composition over time until they have reached that amazing "limit" which Andrew Forge spoke of. Often, the paintings are preceded by large-scale charcoal drawings–and I mean large: a drawing for Sanctuary II , dating from 1984, measures 74 by 90 inches. (Unfortunately, it is not included in the current show.)

For some years now, Mr. Nickson has concentrated his attention, in both drawing and painting, on outsize compositions of figures on a beach, often seen in moments of threatening weather or outright downpours. These motifs and Mr. Nickson's command of Northern color are brought to a grand, full-throttle climax in such paintings as Inlet: Dark Water , Sanctuary II and Departure: Gulls (2001). Yet another big painting in the current show, Traveler: Red Sky (2001), appears to inaugurate a new series of figureless landscapes and skyscapes based on the artist's copious on-the-spot production of watercolors of dawns and dusks recently executed in locales as diverse as Australia and Italy, Florida and New England. What another fine critic, Karen Wilkin, has written about these watercolors may also be said of Traveler: Red Sky : "The natural world has been so exaggerated, intensified, and refined that it becomes, for all its familiarity, utterly strange, and magical."

Sooner or later, the panjandrums of the New York art world are going to have to wake up to the fact that Graham Nickson is one of its living masters. This would not even have to be argued if one of our museums had had the sense to bring last year's exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle to New York. Never mind. The day will come when we shall see such a retrospective in a New York museum, and the public will be amazed. Meanwhile, the current show at Salander-O'Reilly is not to be missed.

For the benefit of those not yet familiar with Mr. Nickson's work, let me explain that he was born in the North of England in 1946, trained in London and Rome, and has been living and working in New York for a quarter of a century. Since 1988, he has also been the dean of the New York Studio School. How he manages to do so much at such a high level of achievement is a mystery even to those who know him well. But art of this quality is always something of a mystery, isn't it?

The exhibition at Salander-O'Reilly remains on view at 20 East 79th Street through April 28.