An entity affiliated with a long-extinct church, St. Nicholas Collegiate Church, has sold the land rights to its former Rock Center site at 600 Fifth Avenue to Tishman Speyer for $165 million, according to public records. 

A partnership of Tishman Speyer and the Lester Crown family of Chicago already owns most of Rockefeller Center, including the 326,000-square-foot tower that rises at West 48th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The church, part of the Reformed Church of America, was first built on the site in 1847, according to the New York City chapter of the American Guild of Organists. It was replaced several decades later by an "exuberant" Gothic building, dominated by an enormous steeple. Theodore Roosevelt and his family occupied pew No. 39.

It was torn down shortly after World War II to make way for the office and retail development that we know today, but the church retained its claim to the prime land. Over the last several years, the Collegiate Asset Management Corporation, affiliated with the church, has sold off several prime assets, including 306 West 77th Street, according to city records.

Several churches have been consolidating or selling off assets of late, as The Observer has noted. Still, rarely are we likely to see one this financially grand. We weren't the only ones intrigued by the transaction: Real Estate Weekly also had news of the deal.

lkusisto@observer.com

The narrator of this memory play is Tom Wingfield, a warehouse worker who longs to be a writer and is typically seen as a stand-in for Williams. The memory is of a time late in the Depression, when Tom (Patch Darragh) lived in a tenement apartment in St. Louis with his mother, Amanda, a faded Southern belle turned overbearing mother, and his sister, Laura (Keira Keeley), who suffers from a disabled leg and an even more debilitating self-doubt.

Director Gordon Edelstein has also stripped away much of the stage direction Williams lays out in the script. Rather than opening with Tom (Patch Darragh) walking into the old, cramped apartment, the curtain rises on him alone in a grim hotel room, writing and reading his play, between sips of whiskey. He’s not entering the memory but instead telling us about it. “I am the opposite of a stage magician,” Tom famously says. “He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” The play then shifts to the past with Ms. Ivey’s breathtaking entrance, suddenly illuminated and speaking from behind a scrim, almost literally the incarnation of memory.

Amanda is an overbearing nag from those first moments onstage, filled with instructions on how to eat, how to chew, how to drink coffee, when to wear a muffler; it’s easy to see how Tom—a grown man constantly henpecked by his mother—finds it intolerable to live with her. She is narcissistic and delusional—prattling on and on about her gentleman-caller-filled youth, refusing to allow the word “crippled” to be used to describe Laura—and in Ms. Ivey’s portrayal, it’s also clear that she’s loving and dedicated, if misguidedly so, toward her children. She’s had a tough life—her husband left, presumably driven away, 16 years earlier—but she determinedly soldiers on, for herself and for them.

Tom finally brings home a gentleman caller for Laura, his coworker Jim O’Connor (Michael Mosley). The long, candle-lit second act—in which Jim, a decent guy, first slowly brings Laura out of her shell and then unintentionally crushes her, and her mother, when he reveals he’s already engaged to be married—is both beautiful and devastating. By the time the audience leaves, we’ve been wounded, too.

There’s good news for those who found Urinetown an insufficiently serious examination of the perils of water-resource mismanagement. A Cool in the Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, which opened March 4 at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharpe Theater, is, amazingly, a passionate message play about the virtues of tap water and the depredations of water bottlers.

The play nominally centers on a middle-class black family in suburban Maryland, a God-fearing mother and her skeptical daughter, who lost three generations of men when they drowned while on a trip home to Mississippi when Katrina hit. The two women have taken in a boarder—a young Ethiopian evangelical who has come to the United States to study either water management or theology.

But the main character is water. There are many things water can do, and they all happen to these characters: It can kill people, like those who drowned; purify people, like born-again Christians baptized in pretty creeks; save people, like African villagers blessed with their first small dam; and displace people, like African villagers whose communities were flooded by World Bank–funded mega-dams.

But what it can’t seem to do, at least not in Kia Corthron’s tedious, sprawling play, is create particularly compelling characters—they’re all too busy sermonizing (and not just the minister-ecologist) to seem real or convincing—or a particularly interesting story. It is somehow metaphorical, I’m sure, that as it started to drizzle on my way back to the subway, I realized I’d left my umbrella in the theater.

joxfeld@observer.com

Mr. Norton has served on the board of the Museum of Modern Art since June 1999, and his return to the Whitney Museum of American Art casts him in the unprecedented role of serving on both boards at once. Last year, Mr. Norton became the chairman of the board of P.S. 1, MoMA's hipper Queens affiliate, which he joined in 1999. He also serves on the executive committee of the Guggenheim Museum's International Directors' Council, that museum's primary acquisition committee, and on the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

But Mr. Norton's return to the Whitney involves some complex social acrobatics. It also places him at the heart of any overlap in the two institutions' missions. In recent years, the Whitney, founded as a showcase for American art, has featured more international art, putting it in more direct competition with MoMA. Mr. Norton now serves on committees at both museums. What happens if both are bidding on the same acquisitions at the same galleries, or vying to get the same exhibitions?

In the social order of generations past, it would have been unheard of to serve on the Whitney and MoMA boards at once. For one thing, the MoMA board has always been considered far more prestigious, far more difficult to join, and its annual dues are said to be higher-not including contributions to its $800 million capital campaign. The Whitney, meanwhile, has often been considered more of a consolation prize, playing the role of willful, mercurial teenager to MoMA's more polished grown-up-arguably more nimble and inventive, but also more cash-strapped.

But if anyone can get away with two-timing elite museums, it's Peter Norton, a former computer programmer from California who is known in the art world as an unpredictable, outspoken personality. Mr. Norton made a fortune with his Norton Utilities in the 90's, amassed one of the world's largest collections of contemporary art-it now contains 2,400 works-and has established himself as one of the most important arts philanthropists in New York.

"I'm really excited that he's involved again at that level at the Whitney," said Kris Kuramitsu, a curator of Mr. Norton's private collection and director of arts programming for the Peter Norton Family Foundation. "He's incredibly enthusiastic about the arts in New York. It's a pretty great testament to his interest and his commitment."

Ms. Kuramitsu said that Mr. Norton planned to remain on the MoMA and P.S. 1 boards even now that he was back at the Whitney. She declined to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding Mr. Norton's return to the Whitney, and said Mr. Norton was traveling on the Amazon River and couldn't be reached for comment.

Although museums are nonprofit institutions whose boards-and tax returns-are public information, they tend to shroud their boards in secrecy. Yet even by New York museum standards, the Whitney seems to be going far out of its way to downplay Mr. Norton's return to the board.

After nearly a month of not returning calls and e-mails regarding Mr. Norton, on March 8 the Whitney's acting director of communications, Stephen Soba, said only that Mr. Norton had rejoined the board "recently." (Mr. Norton appears on a Whitney board list dated December 2003 and posted on the Whitney Web site.)

Mr. Soba declined to comment further. "I don't have time at the moment to go into your questions."

Nor were the Whitney's new director, Adam Weinberg, or the chairman of the museum's board of trustees, Leonard Lauder, interested in discussing Mr. Norton's return. "Mr. Lauder is away and not available for comment. Adam is not able to take the time, and neither am I," Mr. Soba said.

The Whitney will certainly be glad of Mr. Norton's largesse, having lost some board members in the turn-of-the-century financial scandals: L. Dennis Kozlowski, who joined the board in 2001 when he was still chief executive of Tyco International, and left in 2002 after he was indicted on charges including tax evasion; and Jean-Marie Messier, who joined the board in 2001, when he was the chief executive of Vivendi Universal, and left in 2003 after the company tanked.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for MoMA, Ruth Kaplan, said the museum had no comment on sharing Mr. Norton with the Whitney.

Mr. Norton has a somewhat stormy history on museum boards. He joined the Whitney board in April 1994 under then-director David Ross. Mr. Norton had already been affiliated with the Whitney and underwrote a significant part of its 1994 Black Male show, curated by Thelma Golden. In November 1994, he stepped down from the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, after four years as a trustee, reportedly to protest the museum's decision not to take the Black Male exhibit.

Indeed, when Mr. Norton left the Whitney board in 1998, under Maxwell Anderson's directorship, it was widely perceived as a move protesting the resignation that year of Ms. Golden and another up-and-coming curator, Elizabeth Sussman, after Mr. Anderson narrowed their mandates. Yet others familiar with the situation said that Mr. Norton had stepped down from the Whitney board before Ms. Golden and Ms. Sussman resigned-and likely did so in order to join the MoMA board.

Some museum watchers speculated that Mr. Norton's return to the Whitney might win him more attention at MoMA, whose board has traditionally had baroque internal hierarchies. In 2000, Mr. Norton is said to have asked another MoMA board member, Douglas Cramer, whether he could audit the museum's powerful painting and sculpture committee meetings. He is said to have framed Mr. Cramer's response-a no-and hung it on his wall, as if it were a work of art. "It was something he hung on the wall in his apartment. I don't know if it's still there or not," Ms. Kuramitsu, the Norton collection curator, said. "He's got a pretty good sense of humor about things."

Another Whitney insider said that trustees generally don't meddle with curatorial appointments, but that Mr. Norton's return could be seen as part of Mr. Weinberg's mission to bring some of the Whitney's estranged family back into the fold. Whitney sources said that Mr. Weinberg had extended an olive branch to Flora Miller Biddle, a member of the museum's founding family and honorary trustee, who had scaled back her involvement during Mr. Anderson's tenure.

The Whitney board has traditionally been dominated by Mr. Lauder, its powerful chairman. The arrival of Mr. Norton means another strong voice to the board-one who's able to put his money where his mouth is, and who could potentially become the strongest counterweight to Mr. Lauder. Mr. Norton is devoted to contemporary art; Mr. Lauder's interests lie more in Modernism.

Through his Norton Family Foundation, meanwhile, Mr. Norton has been supporting arts groups across the city. In 2002, the last year for which the Norton Family Foundation's tax returns were available, of the nearly $3 million in overall gifts, the foundation gave $85,000 to the Museum of Modern Art. It also gave $100,000 to P.S. 1. The foundation also gave about $140,000 to the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Mr. Norton used to serve on the board, and where his ex-wife, Eileen Norton, is still a board member.

Yet the man who has become one of New York's most important arts philanthropists has always had a somewhat fraught rapport with the art world's power structure. "I have spent a lot of my life standing just outside a circle," Mr. Norton said in a 1995 New Yorker profile, referring in that case to his marriage to Ms. Norton, who is African-American. "My most common posture in life is to be just outside two related but opposing circles." He has now officially secured his place as the consummate outsider's insider.

With Dense, Demanding Work

In its own quietly determined way, the New York Studio School has become one of the city's most significant venues for contemporary art. When I say "contemporary art," I don't mean the kind of soulless folderol in the

go-go galleries of West 24th Street.

I mean art that thrives on its own

autonomous merits, that locates its

reason for being in tradition and the possibilities inherent within tradition's strictures. Despite the prevailing temper of today's scene, that kind of art is alive and well, defiantly unfashionable and here to stay.

The gallery at the New York Studio School has proven itself invaluable by mounting shows

devoted to the work of significant artists otherwise neglected by our cultural institutions. It has exhibited the sculptures of Willard Boepple, the drawings of Eugene Leroy and Ruth Miller, and the paintings of George McNeil. And last fall, David

Cohen, the current director of the gallery, put together a survey of present-day watercolor painting that was, in its scope and scale, of museum quality-not bad for a venue whose dimensions are considerably less than a stone's throw in either direction.

Now comes Thomas Nozkowski: Drawings , the school's current exhibition, also organized by Mr. Cohen-or rather, he's let the artist organize it himself, marshaling a 25-year retrospective of works on paper. Mr. Nozkowski always struck me as being one of the art world's best-kept secrets, until I realized just how many people were in on the secret. Over the years, through informal conversation with artists, curators and critics, I've discovered that his small-scale abstractions are widely admired for their rigor, wit and integrity. Mr. Nozkowski is not, in other words, an unknown quantity. Nevertheless, he remains, as one observer put it, "a stealth artist"-off the art world's radar screen.

So why isn't Mr. Nozkowski better known than he is? There are ready answers to this question-that he's a visual artist working in an age of conceptualism; that his small pictures run counter to the bigger-is-better tendency of art-world reputation; that he's a self-effacing artist in a scene dominated by showoffs and celebrities. All of which is true, and only part of which explains his understated success. The chief reason Mr. Nozkowski isn't as well-known as other, less talented artists is that his paintings-while immediately recognizable as accomplished-are obdurate and withholding, almost forbiddingly dense. They recognize the viewer, certainly, and tip their hat to him; after which, they make their demands. Mr. Nozkowski's art isn't user-friendly: It asks too much to go down easy.

Which is another way of saying that the pleasures Mr. Nozkowski's wobbly geometries and tautly configured biomorphs afford depend on how willing one is to accept their terms. The New Yorker 's Peter Schjeldahl used the phrase "hard bliss" when writing about Mr. Nozkowski's art, and that conceit hasn't been bettered. Mr. Nozkowski's paintings put such a high priority on engagement-on the viewer's ability to grapple with the image before him-that one can't help but respond with an invigorated sense of responsibility. Once that responsibility has been met-through bouts of thorough and appreciative looking-the paintings surrender a diversity of associations, emotions and complications.

One of the virtues of Mr. Nozkowski's work is that it reminds us of art's ability to transform and encapsulate a variety of impulses. Basing each of his abstractions on a specific memory or "real world objects," he then follows its often circuitous and contradictory logic-refining the image, losing it, denying it and, ultimately, discovering it anew, albeit in a radically different form. In a handful of drawings at the Studio School, we recognize concrete images even if we can't quite place the source: Their identifiability is, as it were, on the tip of one's mind.

Mr. Nozkowski's work is both consistent and elastic, intimate, with an Arpian gift for shape. What has deepened is his skill as a draftsman and, especially, as a paint handler. The artist we see at the Studio School recognizes that confounding one's skill can be a way of strengthening vision, making it increasingly resilient, vital and surprising. The drawings aren't the best place to get to know Mr. Nozkowski; they often feel like memos to himself rather than full-fledged works of art. Having said that, I'll confess to a niggling feeling in my gut, a sense that I'll regret that last sentence when I take another look at the drawings: Gems may appear. Still, if Mr. Nozkowski's paintings are his gift to history, then the Studio School show is an exemplary aid in the understanding of that gift.

Thomas Nozkowski: Drawings is at the New York Studio School, 8 West Eighth Street, until March 1.

In the Comfort Zone

Troublemaking in the art world is no trouble at all: Your audience is eager to applaud gestures calculated to provoke outrage. The only time art does make trouble-inadvertently-is when it comes in contact with the real world, the world of people unaware of the artist's arrogated right to offend. Most of the time, however, artistic transgressions bump around safely within the scene's comfort zone. And so it is with Nicky Nodjoumi, whose paintings are currently on display at the Stefan Stux Gallery. Looking at his depiction of Mohammed Khatami, the president of Iran, being led with a leash through a dense thicket of woods by a nude woman striking a balletic pose, I thought: Here's somebody else asking for trouble and knowing he'll receive none. Then again, making light of a Muslim leader at a historical moment when Islam is at the forefront of international events is provocative and political-particularlyforanIranian émigré artist.

Mr. Nodjoumi is an equal-opportunity satirist. Not only does Islam come in for jibing, so does the United States and its leaders as well as sex, science and rationalism, as embodied by business-suited automatons. Yet provocation is only a means for Mr. Nodjoumi, functioning as a veneer for a dreamy and not-altogether-cynical absurdism. So don't think of him as a troublemaker. Don't think of him as a painter, either: Mr. Nodjoumi's drawing skills are nonexistent, his surfaces threadbare and his paint-handling formulaic. Instead, think of him as a cartoonist with a small knack for poetry and a worldview that, while weary, is not immune to magic.

Nicky Nodjoumi: Paintings is at the Stefan Stux Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, ninth floor, until Feb. 15.

The contemporary fascination with Artemisia also stems from the violence she suffered. At 17, Artemisia was, to use the legal term of the day, "deflowered" by a colleague of her father, the artist Agostino Tassi. Tassi, already a figure of considerable disrepute, was brought to trial and sentenced for the crime. The rape of Artemisia has colored the way many people view her art-and who can blame them? After all, some of her best pictures depict strong-some might say vengeful-women taking matters into their own hands. Given Artemisia's tale of victimization, endurance and ultimate success, she seems a figure tailor-made for the age of Oprah. Already the subject of three books, a movie and a play, Artemisia will undoubtedly continue to be the focus of popular beatification.

How much light this beatification will throw on her art is another question. Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy , an exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offers an exemplary opportunity to consider the paintings of both. Judith W. Mann, curator of European art at the St. Louis Museum of Art-who organized the show along with Keith Christiansen of the Met and Rossella Vodret of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Roma in Rome-has no doubts about Artemisia's artistic legitimacy. She does, however, wonder whether "the application of gendered readings has created too narrow an expectation" of Artemisia's accomplishment. Similarly, Ms. Mann worries about how the life might obscure the work.

These are good reasons to worry: Politics and biography are lousy guarantors of art. So it's a mercy that Artemisia is as solid a painter as she is. She certainly knew that she was good: take a look at Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (circa 1615-17) and watch your P's and Q's around that ferocious confidence.

Artemisia's finest paintings are those that depict the Old Testament narrative of the "worthy woman" Judith and her slaying of the Assyrian general Holofernes. Visitors to the Met will startle at Artemisia's gorier renderings of this tale, particularly the blood-splattered Judith Slaying Holofernes from 1612-13. But the two versions of Judith and Her Maidservant -one dating from 1618-19, the other 1625-27-are more nuanced, less violent and just as charged. Depicting the moments directly after the beheading of Holofornes, the works show the title characters responding to an unforeseen presence or noise. The earlier canvas is unsettling in its intimacy, while the later piece is a tour de force of expressive lighting. Both are tense in their calm. It is with these riveting pictures that Artemisia clears the murk surrounding her art.

The real discovery of Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy , however, is Orazio. Renowned in his own day, Orazio was, at the age of 40, transformed as a painter by the example of Caravaggio, an artist he befriended and shared studio props with. Although his talent would eventually propel him into the company of kings, Orazio was always something of a roughneck-spending his money recklessly, hitting the taverns, and writing obscene (and sometimes libelous) verse. Yet his paintings evince a temperament capable of profound religious feeling and astonishing pictorial delicacy.

Orazio's Annunciation (1623) is the centerpiece of the show and as supernal a machine as one could hope for. The crowd-pleaser will undoubtedly be Lute Player (circa 1612-15), a canvas that more than deserves the sobriquet "Vermeer-esque." Yet the show-stopper is Mocking of Christ (circa 1628/30-35). Treading a line between devotion and absurdity, this chilly painting pits refinement of means against brutality of subject. Mocking of Christ is bound to disturb all who come in contact with it and may offend some; therein resides its queasy power. It has to be one of the harshest paintings in the canon of Western art.

Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy is superbly mounted and a tremendous feat of scholarship, but it isn't perfect. The exhibition is, in the end, too big for its subjects. Neither Orazio nor Artemisia can withstand the extensive scrutiny they are given here. Their artistic gifts, while substantial, lack expansiveness-there's only so much of this family's genius we want to put up with. Having said that, any exhibition that includes paintings as crystalline as Orazio's Danae (1621-23) or as resplendent as Artemisia's Susanna and the Elders (1622) qualifies as a must-see. So head to the Met and get ready to be impressed-at least for enough of the time. Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until May 12.

able to transform kitsch into something more than what it is, and Ann Agee is

one of them. Her recent porcelain figurines, currently the subject of an

exhibition at PPOW Gallery, constitute a high-strung tribute to maternity. Taking

inspiration from children's storybooks, folk art and the half-price sale at the

thrift shop down the street, Ms. Agee has created a pan-ethnic and pan-sexual

world of upwardly mobile urbanites, one in which multiculturalism is less an

ideology than a fact and a blessing.

Her gleaming cast of expectant

parents is rubbery, giddy, goofy and, as such, a hair's breadth from succumbing

to a fatal case of the cutes. Ms. Agee holds the work together, though, partly

through spirit (jubilant), partly through color (lustrous) and mostly through

pattern (wild). Her explicit portrayals of childbirth and, especially, the

dissections of male and female genitalia seem out of character for Ms. Agee and

are probably a bone thrown to a crowd that favors transgression over

commonality. But her diorama of a Lamaze class, the centerpiece here and a delight, is touching, tender and tacky in just the right

measures. Ann Agee is at PPOW, 476 Broome Street, until Nov. 10.

Flogging The Nude

Most everyone is familiar

with the distinction between "nude" and "naked," just as most everyone knows

the difference between home fries and hash browns. Yet there hasn't been a

conceit that's so shopworn it can't be put in the service of one "narrative" or

another, and so it is with Naked Since 1950 , an exhibition of paintings, drawings,

sculpture and photographs dedicated to the human form currently at C&M

Arts. That the show favors sex over sensuality is a given, as is its emphasis

on politics, putrefaction and longings that aren't as taboo as they once might

have been.

So what is there to learn

from such a motley mélange? That Alice Neel and

Lucian Freud deserve each other? That Cindy Sherman should be put on trial for

crimes against Barbie? That Lisa Yuskavage makes

Picasso and de Kooning at their most perfunctory look

like Picasso and de Kooning at their most masterful?

There is some solace to be found here with works by Giacometti,

Dubuffet, Diebenkorn and

Hopper, but the overall effect is demoralizing. Did we really need more

evidence of the poverty of skill, scope and imagination that typifies the art

of our time?

The only artist who escapes

unscathed is John Currin, whose canvas The Pink Tree (1999), while of a piece

with the show's reigning puerility, is nevertheless sharp enough to stand out

from it. How much this has to do with context, I don't know, but I suspect that

Mr. Currin is one of those annoying figures we ignore

at our own risk. Naked Since 1950 is

at C&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, until Dec. 8.

Mandelman's Minor Masterwork

By the time she left Manhattan for Taos, N.M., in 1944, the painter Beatrice Mandelman (1912-1998), whose oeuvre is the subject of an exhibition at Gary Snyder Fine Art, had

established herself in the New York art scene to a not inconsiderable degree. Having studied at the Arts

Student League, Mandelman went on to work at the

W.P.A., exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art and associate with the likes of John Sloan,

Willem de Kooning, Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky. Health concerns took Mandelman

out West, but New

York never

left her. Even a later painting like Jazz

II Series #1711 (1987) recalls the clattering rhythms and abrupt

transitions of the city and, in particular, The

City , Fernand Léger's

masterpiece of 1919. (Mandelman had, for a time,

studied with the French master.)

Mandelman's kaleidoscopic abstractions

evince a wide range of influences, from stained-glass windows to the School

of Paris, from Native American art

to the New York School.

The terseness of her compositions recalls that of Lee Krasner, and her faith in

the decorative as a legitimate means of artistic pursuit the pictures of Judith

Rothschild. Mandelman wasn't as large in her

ambitions as the former, nor as luscious a colorist as the latter; like both,

she was a sophisticated and capable painter who never quite made the grade.

Still, if her paintings are unlikely to send anyone scurrying to the

art-history books with a bottle of white-out and a waterproof marker, they are good

to look at. Rift Series Diptych #8 (1001)

(c. 1986) is the best to look at and a minor masterwork. The Triumph of Beatrice Mandelman (1912-1998)

is at Gary Snyder Fine Art, 601 West 29th Street,

until Nov. 24.

an exhibition at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, is so resolute in its rigor that

one is likely to overlook how funny it is. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but dry

and droll, deeply comical. While loyal to the tradition of Constructivism, as

well as deferential to the blunt certainties of Minimal art, Mr. Steiner's

steel sculptures locate their wit in juxtapositions of form that owe more to

Constantin Brancusi than to David Smith or Donald Judd. And juxtaposition is

the key: Mr. Steiner's monumental meditations on contingence and connection

adroitly pit solidity and openness, stasis and animation, repetition and

particularity.

The artist employs forms that range from imposing grids to

machine-tooled patterning to a recurring shape that is part insect, part

Stradivarius, and not unrelated to the exaggerations of the female form typical

of the sculptor Gaston Lachaise. Stating its case starkly, the work sparks

slowly and ultimately ranges far afield. Bells and Smoke (2001) seems an

exegesis on the mysteries of science; Sleeping Muse III (1999), a provocative

compromise between ritual sacrifice and showroom display. Of the five works on

exhibit, only Bones and Flutes (2000) stumbles, being more standoffish than

outstanding. Does this mean Mr. Steiner hits his mark 80 percent of the time?

Hardly-no artist is that good. But that one should even entertain the thought

goes to indicate the impressive scale of this sculptor's talent. Michael

Steiner: Sculpture is at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, 20

East 79th Street, until Oct. 27.

Sincerity That

Seems Dated

Is likening the exhibition Herbert Ferber: Calligraph Emblem

of Motion, currently at Knoedler & Company, to traveling in time a polite

way of stating that the work on view is dated? Certainly, the abstract

paintings and sculptures of the American artist Herbert Ferber (1906-1991) are

conspicuously uncontemporary. With their sweeping gestures and elemental forms,

the pieces recall an era when artists unapologetically pursued the universal

and were solemn in their sincerity. The earthy tones, washy pigments and

pared-down iconography of Ferber's pictures recall those of Robert Motherwell, Mark

Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, and his debt to Surrealism-while more apparent in

the sculpture than in the paintings-is thorough and real. But this is an art

without necessity.

Ferber's forays into action painting came after that battle

had largely been won; their vaulting heroism doesn't reinvent a trademark style

so much as reiterate it. The sculptures fare better:

Their arcing, pointed wedges lend, balance and counterbalance to decisive

effect. Yet even then, Ferber's cranky and cursive icons are too sweaty and

self-conscious, too burdened by an overweening ambition. Calligraph Emblem of

Motion showcases a respectable achievement, but Ferber is an artist of his

time, not for the ages. Herbert Ferber: Calligraph Emblem of Motion is at

Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street,

until Nov. 10.

A Painter's Prints

Trump His Brushstrokes

It is a testament to Paul Resika's skills as a printmaker

that he's able to translate the go-for-broke spontaneity of his paintings into

a medium that is, by its very nature, removed from the immediacy of touch.

Coursing through Mr. Resika's etchings and monotypes, currently the subject of

an exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, is the

artist's unmistakable brushstroke brashly delineating his signature motif:

boats on the water. As someone who has long admired Mr. Resika's paintings, I'm

surprised by how the prints trump them in terms of grit. Has Mr. Resika ever

achieved anything as dolorous as Boats, Stormy

Sea (1998) when putting brush to

canvas? Not that I've seen.

Similarly, the tonal variations in the etchings-velvety

grays, distressed blacks, wan silvers-are so varied and rich that one suspects

Mr. Resika the colorist prospers most when limited to black and white. To get

an idea of how masterful the etchings are, one need look

no further than the monotypes, which approximate the paintings and seem a lot

more indulgent for it. (Mr. Resika, to his credit, remains suspicious of the

slippery satisfactions of that medium.) The centerpiece is Still Boats and Moon

(2001), but Boats at the Pier (2001) and Little Boats I (2001) are the

highlights. The former is gutsy, the latter's a honey, and in between Mr.

Resika works with a freedom and a surety most artists only dream of. Paul

Resika: Etchings and Monotypes, 1998-2001 is at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 50

East 78th Street, until Nov. 3.

Tender Observations

Of One Tough Cookie

By my count, of the 80 or so drawings on display in

Fairfield Porter: Drawings from the Estate, an exhibition at Hirschl &

Adler Modern, only one is a dud, and it's the earliest thing here. [Seated

Woman] (1942-48) bungles such niceties as anatomy and pictorial space, only

coming to life in the contours of the shoes on the title figure. Other than

that, this show-filled as it is with the tender observations of one tough

cookie-rivets as much as it charms.

Whether the subject is a sleeping dog, the rush of the

oncoming tide or the attentive arc of a friend's neck, Porter's drawings are as

to-the-point as they are casual, as tight as they are tossed-off. Justin

Spring, Porter's biographer, writes

of the artist's striving for "a transparent style," for an art absent of the

self. This is a good conceit, but one that doesn't do justice to Porter's

driving impersonality. Still, why piddle about semantics when faced with drawings

as good as these?

One done in red ink of a daughter, a dog, a house and some

flowers is a marvel of brevity and my favorite thing here. But this is an

exhibition packed with favorite things, and ample evidence of Porter's sharp,

shrewd and relentless eye. Fairfield

Porter: Drawings from the Estate is at Hirschl & Adler Modern, 21

East 70th Street, until Nov. 10.

The problem with this spectacular space is that it doesn't make for an environment conducive to the experience of art. This is, as anyone who keeps half an eye on the art scene knows, the point. Ms. Boone's Chelsea gallery, ostentatious even in its severity, is tailor-made to let art know its place to, in effect, diminish its authority while milking the prestige only art can afford. Mr. Jensen's paintings look pitiably small in Ms. Boone's behemoth. How can any object combat the imperial imperatives of such a status-minded milieu?

Of course, a work of art should retain its autonomy, if not exactly flourish, under the least accommodating of conditions. If the little-boy-lost character of Mr. Jensen's show can be attributed to its current confines, it is also something for which the artist himself can be fingered. Coming after the amazing exhibition of his paintings on paper, seen last spring at Danese Gallery, Mr. Jensen's paintings on canvas disappoint. The Danese show saw this dogged and admirable artist working with a hard-won ease, a thrilling confidence. The work invited, sustained and rewarded repeated visits. As someone who was transported by those pictures, I'm sad to report that confidence and ease are nowhere in evidence at Boone. Doggedness and how is what we're left with. This is puzzling. Why do the canvases, which aren't dissimilar to the paper pieces, fail to take off?

The reason has something to do with the differences between working on paper and working on canvas, and everything to do with what Mr. Jensen brings to those differences. It's not uncommon for artists to approach paper with a greater flexibility than they would their primary medium. This freedom can be attributed to the relative disposability of paper less investment in materials can equal less pressure and a surface that inherently seems to encourage an investigative, playful casualness. In the paper works, Mr. Jensen moved with a brusque but considered pace, marveling at how his painterly calligraphy took on its own wild independence. The paintings on canvas, in comparison, are labored rather than earned, frantic instead of assured. When Mr. Jensen swirls, smears, scrapes, blots, dribbles and slashes oil paint on his canvases, we see him reaching hoping for a denouement that's as natural as it is surprising. Yet the results are less revelations than white flags. It's as if Mr. Jensen can't walk up to one of his canvases without slipping on his hair shirt and fretting over this, his next masterpiece. Why, we wonder, can't he just loosen up and go with the flow?

On my subsequent visits to Boone, individual pictures did assert themselves, among them the cinematic slash-and-burn of Ashes to Ashes, the blur of spidery latticework in Devotee II, and Images of a Floating World #14 (all 2000-2001), in which pinkish-orange brushmarks achieve an abrupt detente with their scarred ground. In these pieces, one gets a glimpse of the mood and mystery if not the natural-born mysticism Mr. Jensen esteems in the art of Albert Pinkham Ryder, a figure who has long been an inspiration of his. Yet one wonders just how salutary a role model Ryder has been. Ryder was, after all, an original, and originals don't leave a lot of wiggle room for those who follow in their wake. A better exemplar for Mr. Jensen may be someone like Fred Astaire. Astaire created an illusion of effortlessness so convincing (and enthralling) that it subsumed the hard work upon which it was predicated. He knew that the trick the magic, really was in not letting them see you sweat. This is a lesson Mr. Jensen has yet to bring to bear when putting oil paint to canvas. Bill Jensen: New Paintings is at Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, until March 24.

A Lot to Look At, But You Won't Look A Lot

The painter Michael Bevilacqua, whose canvases are on exhibit at Fredericks Freiser Gallery, learned his craft customizing hot rods and it shows. His pictures, notwithstanding the painstaking exactitude of their stenciling, are fast, sleek, colorful and sharp. Juxtaposing snippets of appropriated imagery, each painting is an encomium to pop culture or, should one say, pop overload. They're crammed with brand names, band names, Blue Meanies and the Michelin man. Mr. Bevilacqua's stylings aren't inappropriate to his subject: They key in to a society impelled by the short-sighted and short-lived fascinations of youth.

As a geezer-in-training, I'm mildly heartened that I recognize as many of Mr. Bevilacqua's emblems as I do. As a geezer-in-training who treasures the life of art, however, the paintings don't impel me to find out about those I don't. While the pictures have a nice improvisatory feel, Mr. Bevilacqua doesn't know where to go or what to do with his improvisations. His compositions accumulate but don't add up, and the artist's touch is as dead as it is efficient. Zippy and inert may be an unusual combination, but it doesn't make a lot to look at worth looking at a lot. High-Speed Gardening is at Fredericks Freiser Gallery, 504 West 22nd Street, until March 17.

Shit Hits the Fan At This McCarthy Show

Thrill-seekers willing to get shit upon in the name of art should set out for the Luhring Augustine gallery, where Santa Chocolate Shop, an installation by Paul McCarthy, is currently on view. The uninitiated should be warned that the previous sentence is less figurative than they might think. Mr. McCarthy's shambling forays into infantilism, recorded for posterity on video, employ rag-tag animal costumes, large quantities of food stuffs, and partners in putrefaction happy to bare, if not their hearts and souls, then every other portion of their anatomies. The artist's grosser-than-thou absurdism is intended as a kind of primal comedy, a scatological satire on the delusions of civilization. Yet the only amusing thing about Santa Chocolate Shop is the way visitors to the gallery steal furtive, embarrassed glances at one another, in the hope that the eyes they meet don't belong to someone they know.

In addition to the Luhring Augustine show, Mr. McCarthy is having a retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho; his art can also be seen at Deitch Projects and the I.B.M. Building on 57th Street. Cultural completists have their work cut out for them. New Yorkers who are a bit more discriminating in their cultural pursuits as well as have a range of interests that dares extend beyond the grimier precincts of the art scene will conclude that life is short and act accordingly. Paul McCarthy: Santa Chocolate Shop is at Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, until April 7.

The pieces suggest funny things: One massive work constructed from kertu wood looks like a totem of marshmallows; another appears to be an oversize and petrified piece of popcorn. Mr. Cragg's art, however, isn't funny. It's sterile and inert-slick rather than shaped. Not one of the pieces has anything to say to another. Each, in fact, creates its own vacuum-packed space, effectively sealing us off from experiencing it. This has the curious consequence of making the gallery seem, if not vacant, then more vacant than it should be. Never before have I been so aware of an art gallery being a showroom. Of course, all galleries are showrooms of a type, but Mr. Cragg's work transforms Ms. Goodman's space into an art-world Ikea, with merchandise that is studiously designed, cleanly manufactured, probably not economically priced, but perfect for putting a plant next to. Most of what is proffered as major art nowadays asks the viewer for little more than laudatory neglect. Here's some more of it. Tony Cragg: New Work is at the Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, until Dec. 30.

A Palette Rooted In Its Subject

As with almost all types of art, the painterly domestic realism practiced by Catherine Drabkin is a dime a dozen-until, that is, someone comes along to remind you of how compelling it can be. How does Ms. Drabkin distinguish herself in this cozy-some might say mild-mannered-genre? Through color and what can only be called a graciousness of vision. Ms. Drabkin, whose paintings in oil and gouache are on display at Kraushaar Galleries, knows color, handles it well, but sometimes misgauges its pitch and function, particularly in the works on canvas. In them, color is less an integral component of her landscapes, still-lifes and interiors than an imposition. When she delineates a plastic bottle of dish soap with electric greens, purples and blues, she does so adroitly, but we're not quite sure why she bothered.

Although Ms. Drabkin's colors aren't appreciably different in the gouaches, it is within them that her palette is rooted in the subject and, one feels, more itself. Perhaps the dry opacity of gouache tempers the artist's facility for a jewel-like tincture and endows it with patience and body. Certainly, the fluidity of the medium allows her images to expand with color, giving these works on paper an inviting fullness. Whatever the case, the gouaches honor the modest comforts and everyday intimacies of a settled life-an arrangement of flowers by the window, having the time to paint, things like that. The artist's scenarios aren't completely devoid of hubbub: The presence of children is evidenced, most memorably, by a toy lizard that pops up in several pictures like an honorary member of the family. Ms. Drabkin's paintings underline one of the puzzlements of parenthood: The ability of a child's plaything to travel of its own accord. Catherine Drabkin is at the Kraushaar Galleries Inc., at 724 Fifth Avenue, until Dec. 22.

Cool Cars and Commonwealth Avenue

The painter George Nick, whose recent work is the subject of an exhibition at Fischbach Gallery, has three great passions in life. Two of them are pictured in his paintings: vintage automobiles and the city of Boston. The third, and not the least of them, is the art of painting, a medium in which he acquits himself, in the estimation of his admirer John Updike, with "good conscience and simple truthfulness."

Mr. Nick works with a loaded brush, and his jots, jabs and slathers of oil paint, while a mite too pleased with themselves, advance with a magnanimous bravado. The artist is at his best when painting out-of-doors. When Mr. Nick holes himself up inside the Boston statehouse or in a showroom adjacent to his beloved Bugattis and Bentleys, his touch becomes sludgy and his knack for light deserts him.

When he hits the streets, and especially the streets of Boston, Mr. Nick is at home-in more ways than one. In the painting Commonwealth Avenue in July (1999), he depicts a block-long cluster of row houses towered over, physically if not pictorially, by a lone skyscraper in the distance. Mr. Nick extols the brick-by-brick character of the row houses by suffusing them with dignity and camaraderie. Everything in the canvas-from its accordion-like composition, to the astonishing resonance of Mr. Nick's reddish tones, to the single, almost surrealist blip of a cloud-is on target. Commonwealth Avenue in July is a paean, deeply felt and not a little rueful, to urban gentility. It's a great painting. George Nick: Paintings is at the Fischbach Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, until Dec. 23.

In the catalogue for Twenty-Four Paintings –a 1997 exhibition of Mr. Nozkowski's work that was seen at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.–Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for The New Yorker , wrote that the artist's paintings "inhabit art history of the last two decades like half-submerged rocks in a stream … they are right in the flow, but they hardly go with it." This is a right-on appraisal of Mr. Nozkowski's nudgy standing in the New York art scene. Notwithstanding the fact that his paintings are much admired, they remain something of a fugitive quantity. One suspects that Mr. Nozkowski, whose recent paintings are on view at the Max Protetch Gallery, likes it that way.

One of the reasons Mr. Nozkowski's paintings flit under the radar screen of established taste is their size. In an art world where significance and reputation are often measured by acreage of canvas, Mr. Nozkowski's preferred format–a horizontal canvas measuring 16 by 20 inches or thereabouts–can seem trifling. Yet the work's astonishing fullness exposes the bigger-is-better fallacy as just that. Given their dimensions, proximate inspection of Mr. Nozkowski's pictures is compulsory and pleasurable–intensely so, in fact. With their layered surfaces and sharp colors, the images are snuggled within their jewel-box format with a keen, though not complacent, mastery. The pictures are profoundly inquisitive and somewhat secretive. Looking at one of Mr. Nozkowski's paintings can be likened to reading a book or looking into a microscope: an intimate, solitary activity that brings a world into focus.

Mr. Nozkowski's images have a droll, puzzle-like fascination. The paintings collude, fracture and harmonize geometry and nature. The artist melds shapes and spaces, often contradictory in character, into mysterious arrangements of form–realities, really. Unlike the proverbial puzzle, however, the paintings don't add up logically or, rather, they locate a logic peculiar to their own circuitous and slippery genesis. (The best paintings always seem to be in a state of transmutation.) We intuit, if not deduce, how Mr. Nozkowski has arrived at each image and are absorbed by the work's befuddling complexity. The paintings bring to mind a multiplicity of associations–from topographical charts to insects to architecture–but they do so without reining in their dreamlike specificity. His images are precisely punctuated, but also reverberant and a little nutty. Not for nothing has the artist referred to the pictures as "conundrums."

One would be hard pressed to state that Mr. Nozkowski has a "style." Certainly, aspects of his pictorial vocabulary and his way of shaping them are distinctive; we can also make linkages between the artist's paintings and the primordial naturalism of Arthur Dove or the deadpan biomorphism of Hans Arp. Yet each of Mr. Nozkowski's canvases is stubbornly singular, not to say isolated, in its definition. No two canvases are alike even though they are all of a piece. This isn't to say that the artist is all over the place or that each picture is a cul-de-sac. The pictures are as tuned and open as we would want a painter's work to be. Mr. Nozkowski's oeuvre could best be considered a family whose roots go deep but whose members demand to be engaged with one-on-one and nose-to-nose.

Mr. Nozkowski begins each painting with a subject in mind–a place or a memory–which is then stated, questioned, pinched, pulled and plumbed over the course of months and, at times, years. This approach isn't born of fetishism or a misguided sense of artistic integrity. It's an attempt to uncover and pinpoint the painting's core, its reason for being. What is remarkable is how the paintings amplify and recapture the "Let's see what happens if …" spark that served as their impetus. Mr. Nozkowski's scarred, scrabbled pictures aren't strained or self- congratulatory; they're earned and inevitable. Every form, space, color and relationship is freighted with history, humor and surprise.

In 1947, the critic Clement Greenberg wrote that the art of Jackson Pollock "lacks breadth." That observation could serve as an epitaph for the art of our own time. Fatigued by innovation, distillation and deconstruction, the contemporary scene can do little more than contemplate its own navel or reinvent the Duchampian wheel. Narrowness is the norm. Yet there are painters and sculptors attempting to reinvest art with experience, sensuality, possibility and scope. Mr. Nozkowski isn't attempting such an art; he's achieved it. The beautiful conundrums currently at the Max Protetch Gallery not only display a painter working at the top of his form. They confirm that Mr. Nozkowski is one of the finest painters we have. Thomas Nozkowski: New Paintings at the Max Protetch Gallery, 511 West 22nd Street, until March 18.