Case in point: the forbiddingly dark canvases in the introductory gallery of Cheim & Read in Chelsea, where his recent efforts are on display. The paintings are reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s late attempts to channel an existential sublime. To Mr. Jensen’s credit, they aren’t as pretentious—if only because they’re hardly anything at all. They’re mainly comprised of barely perceptible fluctuations in patina. One gallery-goer, with a poetic flourish, dubbed them “19th-century landscapes engulfed in doom.”

The paintings do recall the moody scenes of Albert Pinkham Ryder, long a favorite of Mr. Jensen’s, but mostly the Ryders that have suffered catastrophic discoloration due to his notoriously blasé attitude toward materials. Sometimes subtlety is too subtle to bother with.

But that’s a handful of pictures. The rest of the 20 or so canvases, while uneven in quality, are less stark and earnest. They’re earnest enough, mind you, but Mr. Jensen’s labor-intensive resolve is bolstered by colors startlingly new to his work.

A painter for whom the natural world is less a recognizable subject than an ominous brew of portent, Mr. Jensen’s early palette was earthy to a fault. Its unimaginative tones tended to muffle, if not outright stifle, inventive arrays of marks, textures and shapes. Given Mr. Jensen’s desire to tap into nature’s grit and physicality, such a palette was appropriate. But sometimes mud is just mud.

So where did the shrieking primary colors come from? It’s as if someone turned on the lights in Mr. Jensen’s studio—or maybe the fireplace. Deep and lustrous blues, yellows and reds, remarkable for their relative clarity, burn with harsh intensity.

That’s the most of it, but not all of it: Silky purples, fluctuating runs of rust and unsullied greens evince the exhilaration of a painter who’s finally getting a handle on the expressive capabilities of color.

Most surprising, because radically atypical, is the milky blur cascading through Luohan (Light Step) (2003-6)—a color that’s almost, but not really, whitish purple. Elusive and unnamable hues are an indicator of Mr. Jensen’s growth—at last!—as a colorist.

All of which would be meaningless if the palette were divorced from his process and rhythm. It’s not: Color thrives as an integral component of the whole. An admirer of Chinese calligraphy, Mr. Jensen’s canvases don’t achieve its elegance or fluidity (an attribute true of his works-on-paper), but his whiplash brushstroke does embody its slippery allusiveness.

Obscured behind abraded veils of color, Mr. Jensen’s trails of oil paint bristle and twist, at times with bracing recklessness. The signature small formats—37 by 28 inches is stretching it for Mr. Jensen—attain a monumental effect. Intuitively gauging the relationship between gesture and surface area, he creates a heaving internal scale that belies each painting’s modest size.

Mr. Jensen’s best pictures—Scorched Field (2004-5), Luohan (Persona) (2005-6), Bog (2004-6), The Red House (Jimi Hendrix) (2004-6) and the evanescent St. Sebastian (2005-6)—smolder as if they were lit from within; a glow, sometimes corrosive, emanates from beneath innumerable scrims of paint. It’s hard to know where Mr. Jensen’s densely layered paintings begin and end. Deciphering his tracks is pointless. The images can’t be unraveled; Mr. Jensen’s approach defies practical logic. The paintings coalesce in ways that mystify the audience and, as is evident from their spontaneity and momentum, the artist himself.

In the catalog essay “The Elbow and The Milky Way,” the critic John Yau writes of how Mr. Jensen’s paintings “cannot be seen all at once … [and] must be experienced both visually and physically.” They achieve a “state of simultaneity, of a complexity that engages more than just our eyes.” So far, so good—but then Mr. Yau insists that Mr. Jensen shares a “philosophical basis” with Jasper Johns and Robert Ryman.

Say what? The stock in trade of Mr. Johns and Mr. Ryman, a drably pedantic literalism, couldn’t be further from Mr. Jensen’s scrabbled poetry. The pictorial seductions (such as they are) found in Mr. Johns’ and Mr. Ryman’s paintings are deracinated, banal and short-lived. Mr. Jensen’s paintings are full-bodied, bottomless and repay repeated looking.

Mr. Yau’s essay is otherwise clear-eyed and perceptive. Likening Mr. Jensen to Jackson Pollock is right, particularly given the urgency bordering on desperation that marks, if not outright defines, the oeuvres of both men. Mr. Yau sharpens the focus on the pictorial hurdles that Mr. Jensen sets for himself and, not least, his “maverick” status.

In that regard, Mr. Jensen is quintessentially American. He follows in the proud tradition of headstrong individuals, unapologetic eccentrics and outright loners punctuating the history of American art, such as Thomas Eakins, Louis Eilshemius, Arthur Dove, and peers like Pat Adams, David Fertig and Andrew Masullo.

Self-reliance may be the American way, but it’s not without social and political liabilities. In art, it’s less fraught with consequence, so it can provide a heady sense of possibility. The “wild, anarchic beauty” of Mr. Jensen’s art (the dead-on phrase is courtesy of Mr. Yau) underlines that truth and is evident—thrillingly, ineradicably—in the artist’s successes as well as his failures.

We shouldn’t ignore (or forgive) the frequency of the latter. Mr. Jensen wouldn’t have integrity if he didn’t risk falling on his ass. Nor would he make good paintings if he didn’t dust himself off and give it another go. Tenacity is the rule. Mr. Jensen is the real thing, and all the more rare because of it.

Bill Jensen is at Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, until March 24.

Some of the 59 watercolors on view have been borrowed from major institutions, such as the Phillips Collection; others are from the Dove Estate and have never been seen publicly. Diminutive in size, most measure no larger than five by seven inches.

The images veer from abstract—Dove (1880-1946) is often touted as the first modernist to paint an out-and-out abstraction—to fairly straightforward renderings of boats, a pond and row houses. In between those poles is an only somewhat discernible cow—a “cow at play,” the title informs us—in a lumpish array of shapes and masses. But identifiable motifs don’t matter so much as the experiences that have been encapsulated.

Nature was Dove’s abiding inspiration and touchstone; it left an indelible stamp on everything he put his hand to. Georgia O’Keeffe, a friend and fellow member of Alfred Stieglitz’s coterie of artists, stated that Dove was “the only painter who is part of the earth.” Indeed, Dove eked out a living as a farmer for some years, out of necessity but also, one might guess, out of a constitutional bent. “Works of nature are abstract,” he wrote in a poem. “They do not lean on other things for meaning.”

That the majesty and monumentality of nature could be expressed on a piece of paper no larger than an index card testifies to Dove’s gift for scale and proportion. He certainly responded to the forthrightness of watercolor upon taking it up in 1930. Often defined and augmented with black pen line, the watercolors exemplify the rhythms, shapes and mutability of natural phenomena. The world is pictured as a roving, sentient and largely beneficent force. Tinged with mysticism, Dove’s work is also a nascent form of environmentalism. It calls for humility and insists that humankind should know its place.

What makes Dove such an endearing artist is that he’s a bit of a klutz: There wasn’t an elegant bone in his body. Despite the wiry lilt of his line or the unerring drag of his brush, Dove’s touch is defined by a homely urgency. Forms don’t just evolve in the pictures; they galumph. He grasped the particulars of his subject—whether it be rocks, trees, the sun, animal life or a sleet storm—even as his brush swept brusquely over it.

The atmospheric pressure of an oncoming storm is palpable in Grey Light (1935); so too is the wind zooming through Canandaigua Outlet, Oaks Corner (1937). Dove possessed an uncanny ability to simultaneously distill and encompass awesome forces with the barest mark and the bluntest form. Arthur Dove: The Watercolors illuminates and elaborates upon his singular achievement. It’s a joy to behold.

Arthur Dove: The Watercolors is at Alexandre Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, until June 16.

Deep Time

The mixture of sophistication and naïveté in Frances Barth’s paintings give the impression that she’s an admirer of Dove, though not an outright disciple. Ms. Barth’s investigations of nature, now on view at the New York Studio School, are characterized by a dispassionate remove. As a painter, Ms. Barth is more inclined to flex her intellect than extend her empathy. Her spare and diagrammatic paintings re-imagine, if not the landscape itself, then landscape as a pictorial genre.

Ms. Barth’s primary concern is finding an overriding logic from a fractured array of signs and symbols. The recognizable imagery in the pictures—mountain ranges, fissures in the earth, jagged, rock-like forms and what appear to be aerial views of the ground—are anything but arbitrary: The artist mentions a desire “to chart with different visual languages an epic story which could only exist in geological time.”

If Dove was a mystic with a deep connection to the land, Ms. Barth can be likened to a clinician intent on probing its permanence. Mixing and matching abstract structures with fragmented representation, the paintings don’t lack a philosophical bent. Ms. Barth posits her art as a “narrative creation … [taking] place over deep time.”

Ponder, for a moment, what “deep time” might be, then take in the pictures themselves. Painted with acrylic in an affectless manner, the pictures are almost shockingly casual. Dry and uninflected passages of tawny pinks, greens and browns co-exist, if just barely, with lopsided topographical details.

Ms. Barth’s line is hesitant, her compositions wobbly. Yet what emerges is an art at peace with its often-troublesome contradictions. The pleasure and puzzlement it offers stem, in no small part, from how self-effacing means can thwart grandiose intentions. If the paintings weren’t somewhat pretentious, they wouldn’t be interesting; if they weren’t somewhat goofy, they wouldn’t be good.

Frances Barth: Paintings is at the New York Studio School, 8 West Eighth Street, until July 1.

Tony Oursler’s Studio (2005), that’s why. Maybe at some point in the Met’s history, they’ve displayed a more meretricious piece of work, but I doubt it. Not even Thomas Struth’s installation in the great hall a few years back—those giant videos of people staring into space—can match the sheer pretentiousness of Mr. Oursler’s riff on Gustave Courbet. Yes, that Gustave Courbet.

What, you might ask, does a 21st-century installation artist who specializes in projecting videos of grotesque faces onto biomorphic sculptures have to do with a 19th-century French realist? Other than a commission from the Musée D’Orsay to reinterpret Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio (1855), a prize of that museum’s collection and one of the painter’s signal canvases, not much.

Presumably, though, the tenuous Courbet connection is what attracted the Met to Mr. Oursler’s mixed-media “environment”; the French master endows the video installation with an imprimatur of high culture—or so the logic goes. (It also makes the Met—you know, that stuffy place with all those old paintings and sculptures—seem a bit more with it.) Yet straining for historical credibility can’t help Mr. Oursler’s Studio transcend what it is: an exercise in hipster solipsism.

Wedged into the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of the Met, the “NYC Version” of the installation is higgledy-piggledy with stuff: speakers; a “genetic code copyright”; a stack of books, Philip K. Dick and Sybil among them; home movies of the artist’s child; and “inspirational objects” by the architect Rem Koolhaas, the sculptor Aristides Logothetis, the maven of found paintings Jim Shaw, the artist’s wife Jacqueline Humphries and others. A big green blob with myriad blinking eyes is Mr. Oursler’s self-portrait. Just like Courbet, get it?

There’s also a video projection featuring skewed and flashing images of David Bowie, Leonard Nimoy, John Waters, John Baldessari and other luminaries. Accompanying the tableau is a soundtrack of droning feedback, rumbling sounds and stream-of-consciousness jabber. It’s the first time I’ve heard the word “cocksucker” issue forth from a work of art at the Met.

The aesthetic distance between Mr. Oursler and Courbet is unbridgeable. Mr. Oursler looks at Courbet’s masterwork, and rather than seeing an encompassing and enigmatic manifesto of artistic principle, he senses an opportunity to inventory his buddies. Granted, Courbet included Baudelaire, Proudhon and Champfleury in The Artist’s Studio, yet their specific identities are subservient to the pictorial sweep of the painting. Such a notion is beyond the ken of Mr. Oursler: The Friends of Tony are simply paraded around as emblems of an insular and often privileged art-world elite. The ultimate effect is to alienate anyone not a party to that sociological sphere. To paraphrase Chevy Chase: He’s Tony Oursler, and you’re not.

“Just as Courbet was defining his reality,” declares Mr. Oursler, “I want to mark our time. Today the simulacrum is as real as anything.” It’s hard to know what’s more dispiriting: an artist who can’t imagine a “real” world outside the confines of his own narrow purview, or a great museum wasting space on that selfsame artist. The Met, having stumbled, has the wherewithal to pick itself up and dust itself off. Mr. Oursler doesn’t have the gumption or the vision to do either.

Studio: Seven Months of My Aesthetic Education (Plus Some), NYC Version, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, through Sept. 18.

Wood Dove

On my way to the Oursler fiasco, I whisked through the Met’s lively collection of early American modernist painting and sculpture. Given that I was “on assignment,” I barely did more than tip my hat to old favorites—Patrick Henry Bruce, John Storrs, Guy Pene du Bois, Marsden Hartley, Florine Stettheimer—and then boom! There it was, snuggled into a corner of the permanent collection as if it was an afterthought: Tree, Forms and Water (circa 1928), a pastel on plywood by Arthur Dove. Where has the Met been hiding it all these years? It’s unlike anything else I’ve seen by Dove.

Well, not that unlike: As with Dove’s finest work, Tree, Forms and Water makes an intriguing hash of the divide between representation and abstraction. Would we recognize the subjects without the title? Certainly we’d intuit that Dove’s craggy shapes and heaving rhythms have their basis in the natural world. The abruptly cropped composition may obscure the imagery, yet it also intensifies the interdependence of shapes and forces.

Tree, Forms and Water is anchored by a large, blood-red form—the tree, I think—but the manner in which Dove applied pastels, grinding them into the grain of the plywood, gives it a visceral quality hugely at odds with the rest of the man’s oeuvre. We rarely think of this humble man of the soil, this American mystic, as a muscular artist. Here, Dove strong-armed his way into the not always pleasant intricacies of the human body. It makes for an unnerving and surprising picture.

Tony Oursler’s Studio (2005), that’s why. Maybe at some point in the Met’s history, they’ve displayed a more meretricious piece of work, but I doubt it. Not even Thomas Struth’s installation in the great hall a few years back—those giant videos of people staring into space—can match the sheer pretentiousness of Mr. Oursler’s riff on Gustave Courbet. Yes, that Gustave Courbet.

What, you might ask, does a 21st-century installation artist who specializes in projecting videos of grotesque faces onto biomorphic sculptures have to do with a 19th-century French realist? Other than a commission from the Musée D’Orsay to reinterpret Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio (1855), a prize of that museum’s collection and one of the painter’s signal canvases, not much.

Presumably, though, the tenuous Courbet connection is what attracted the Met to Mr. Oursler’s mixed-media “environment”; the French master endows the video installation with an imprimatur of high culture—or so the logic goes. (It also makes the Met—you know, that stuffy place with all those old paintings and sculptures—seem a bit more with it.) Yet straining for historical credibility can’t help Mr. Oursler’s Studio transcend what it is: an exercise in hipster solipsism.

Wedged into the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of the Met, the “NYC Version” of the installation is higgledy-piggledy with stuff: speakers; a “genetic code copyright”; a stack of books, Philip K. Dick and Sybil among them; home movies of the artist’s child; and “inspirational objects” by the architect Rem Koolhaas, the sculptor Aristides Logothetis, the maven of found paintings Jim Shaw, the artist’s wife Jacqueline Humphries and others. A big green blob with myriad blinking eyes is Mr. Oursler’s self-portrait. Just like Courbet, get it?

There’s also a video projection featuring skewed and flashing images of David Bowie, Leonard Nimoy, John Waters, John Baldessari and other luminaries. Accompanying the tableau is a soundtrack of droning feedback, rumbling sounds and stream-of-consciousness jabber. It’s the first time I’ve heard the word “cocksucker” issue forth from a work of art at the Met.

The aesthetic distance between Mr. Oursler and Courbet is unbridgeable. Mr. Oursler looks at Courbet’s masterwork, and rather than seeing an encompassing and enigmatic manifesto of artistic principle, he senses an opportunity to inventory his buddies. Granted, Courbet included Baudelaire, Proudhon and Champfleury in The Artist’s Studio, yet their specific identities are subservient to the pictorial sweep of the painting. Such a notion is beyond the ken of Mr. Oursler: The Friends of Tony are simply paraded around as emblems of an insular and often privileged art-world elite. The ultimate effect is to alienate anyone not a party to that sociological sphere. To paraphrase Chevy Chase: He’s Tony Oursler, and you’re not.

“Just as Courbet was defining his reality,” declares Mr. Oursler, “I want to mark our time. Today the simulacrum is as real as anything.” It’s hard to know what’s more dispiriting: an artist who can’t imagine a “real” world outside the confines of his own narrow purview, or a great museum wasting space on that selfsame artist. The Met, having stumbled, has the wherewithal to pick itself up and dust itself off. Mr. Oursler doesn’t have the gumption or the vision to do either.

Studio: Seven Months of My Aesthetic Education (Plus Some), NYC Version, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, through Sept. 18.

Wood Dove

On my way to the Oursler fiasco, I whisked through the Met’s lively collection of early American modernist painting and sculpture. Given that I was “on assignment,” I barely did more than tip my hat to old favorites—Patrick Henry Bruce, John Storrs, Guy Pene du Bois, Marsden Hartley, Florine Stettheimer—and then boom! There it was, snuggled into a corner of the permanent collection as if it was an afterthought: Tree, Forms and Water (circa 1928), a pastel on plywood by Arthur Dove. Where has the Met been hiding it all these years? It’s unlike anything else I’ve seen by Dove.

Well, not that unlike: As with Dove’s finest work, Tree, Forms and Water makes an intriguing hash of the divide between representation and abstraction. Would we recognize the subjects without the title? Certainly we’d intuit that Dove’s craggy shapes and heaving rhythms have their basis in the natural world. The abruptly cropped composition may obscure the imagery, yet it also intensifies the interdependence of shapes and forces.

Tree, Forms and Water is anchored by a large, blood-red form—the tree, I think—but the manner in which Dove applied pastels, grinding them into the grain of the plywood, gives it a visceral quality hugely at odds with the rest of the man’s oeuvre. We rarely think of this humble man of the soil, this American mystic, as a muscular artist. Here, Dove strong-armed his way into the not always pleasant intricacies of the human body. It makes for an unnerving and surprising picture.

So how to explain Grace , Bob and Lumpy , all of which were painted this year? Segregated from the main body of the exhibition, tucked away in the back gallery, they're unlike the rest of the pictures in kind and in quality. With art of minimal means, minimal shifts in emphasis make all the difference. In these three paintings, Mr. Spence doubles up on pictorial space, thereby breaking the bounds of his flat, sign-like images and providing a flexibility to his wobbly targets, diagrammatic curlicues and pointed ovoid glyphs. As a result, the paintings don't just declare themselves, they do something. They also have the deadpan wit and the scrupulous attention to surface and color we expect from Mr. Spence. And they're damn good.

The lesson here is that a painter is better off fine-tuning the conventions of his medium than finessing design. Should Mr. Spence prove to be his own best student, his forthcoming pictures will be something to see.

Andrew Spence: Recent Paintings is at the Edward Thorp Gallery, 210 11th Avenue, sixth floor, until Dec. 7.

Synesthesia

Let's hear it for the good-not great, but good-artist, the painter or sculptor whose scope is small, who makes few innovations and delivers real and sometimes profound pleasure. The American artist Alan Gussow (1933-97), whose pastel drawings are the subject of an exhibition at the Babcock Galleries, is a minor figure following in the path of a major one-the early American modernist Arthur Dove. Like Dove, Gussow pursued an often clunky mixture of the mystical and the pragmatic, the abstract and the true-to-life. His deep-seated regard for the natural world is evident with each smudge of pastel he put to paper-fitting for an artist who was also a politically involved environmentalist. The best of the pictures use abstraction as a cloak to wrap around their inspiration-whether it be a chili pepper, an eggplant or the full moon-and Gussow's palette is finest when muted: Smoky browns and dusty purples are his forte. The standout at Babcock, The Feel of a Ripe Tomato in My Left Hand (1987), is a gem of synesthesia: The title seems silly at first, but then you see how thoroughly Gussow's self-contained scrawls realize his conceit.

Alan Gussow is at the Babcock Galleries, 724 Fifth Avenue, until Dec. 20.

Cinematic Urgency

It's not a good sign when a catalog outshines the exhibition it accompanies, but such is the case with The Barbarians , a new series of sculptures by Sir Anthony Caro, now on display at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Looking at the photographs of Sir Anthony's totemic warriors and hieratic steeds, one is impressed by their fearsome yet comic power, their cinematic urgency. Assembled from terra-cotta, steel, leather and wood, his archetypal sculptures, with their building-block torsos and coarsely abbreviated features, bring to mind a range of influences: Egyptian reliquaries, Chinese armor, African fetishes, Mongolian vestments, Picasso, Giacometti. Whether seen in cropped close-ups or in action shots, The Barbarians appear as participants in a grand historical pageant-one can almost hear the soundtrack, all martial rhythm and stirring crescendo. But again, that's looking at the catalog, after the camera lens and the book designer have done their bit. Looking at the pieces themselves, one is disappointed by the absence of vitality: The sculptures look plain poky.

The last time he exhibited in New York, Sir Anthony was daunted by precedent-the 13th-century Italian painter Duccio, to be specific-and bored by his own expertise. This time around, he's revitalized and purposeful, ambitious and how. His intent is clear: to give body to paradigmatic attributes specific to humanity and to art itself. Here and there, he succeeds-or at least entertains. The gnarled schnozz of Kharjar (1999-2002) is a grotesque wonder, and I love the rumpled old geezer driving the kharsag , a traditional Mongolian cart made of wood.

Overall, The Barbarians series is too literal in its primitivism, too pedestrian in its distortions and too willful by half. In the end, one wishes Sir Anthony would forgo the heroics to muck about in the studio-fool around, have some fun. He can do it, too: Ask the folks at Mitchell-Innes & Nash to show you the toy-like maquettes he created for the current installation. They might not be art, but neither are they burdened by it.

Anthony Caro: The Barbarians is at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue, until Dec. 20.

The 1920's and 30's are particularly well represented in the show, with classic works by Gaston Lachaise, Charles Demuth and Gerald Murphy, as well as some of the artists already mentioned. If only for the large room on the second floor devoted to paintings by Hartley from almost every phase of his long career, this is a show not to be missed. A few of the late Hartleys- Prayer on Park Avenue (1942), for example, and the seascape called Storm Down Point Way, Old Orchard Beach (1941-43)-are likely to be unfamiliar even to people who think they know Hartley's oeuvre pretty well.

This period of early American modernism-roughly, the years from the Armory Show in 1913 to the war years in the early 1940's-has always been a priority interest at Salander-O'Reilly, and the exhibitions that the gallery has devoted to this period have greatly enhanced our understanding of its achievements. The attention given this period hasn't been exclusively confined to the most famous reputations, either. The shows devoted to the work of Morton Livingston Schamberg (1881-1918) in 1982 and 1986 did much to revive interest in this all-but-forgotten modernist. Schamberg, who was himself represented in the Armory Show, is best known today for his paintings based on machine forms, for his Cubist-influenced abstractions, of which there are several fine examples in the current exhibition, and for a Dada classic entitled God (1917-18), a construction of plumbing fixtures mounted on a box that the artist produced as an antiwar statement. He died in the great flu epidemic of 1918 at the age of 37.

The four exhibitions devoted to Arnold Friedman (1874-1946) between 1986 and 1996 were a similar effort to rescue the work of an undeservedly forgotten modernist of great distinction. Shamefully, no museum has ever accorded this work the attention it deserves, yet in the current exhibition, in the company of masters like Hartley, Marin, Dove and Maurer, Friedman's paintings more than hold their own. In pictures like Still Life (Petunias) , Cat in Chair and Interior With Cat and Bookcase (all circa 1942-46), he is as subtle and original a colorist as Vuillard and Bonnard, and the late landscapes, too, are paintings of an astounding originality. Yet today he remains an underground reputation, admired by a few critics and connoisseurs but still unknown to an art public besotted by crackpot talents and kitschmongers of every variety.

About another of my favorite American modernists in this exhibition-Alfred Maurer-I will defer comment until I have seen the exhibition devoted to his work at the Hollis Taggart Galleries, which is scheduled to open on Nov. 30. (It remains on view at Hollis Taggart, 48 East 73rd Street, through Jan. 15.) Suffice it to say that Maurer, too, was an extraordinary talent, and there are also examples of his work in the Salander-O'Reilly show that you are unlikely to have seen before.

These early 20th-century American modernists have by no means been the sole interest at Salander-O'Reilly during this 25-year history. As its recent Turner exhibition served to remind us, the gallery has also treated the New York art public to an astonishing series of exhibitions devoted to the European masters-Rubens, Delacroix, Constable, Corot and Géricault, among others-while at the same time devoting equally serious attention to the work of a wide variety of contemporary painters.

This would be a remarkable phenomenon in any period, but to encompass such a range of artistic achievement at such a high level of esthetic quality in our period, which has suffered such a radical deficit in artistic standards, is something of a miracle. It is certainly one of the reasons why this gallery has won such a distinctive place on the American art scene during the past quarter-century. And with the announcement that we can look forward to exhibitions devoted to Rembrandt and his relation to Titian and Tintoretto, and to the late works of Joan Miró, in the coming year, it looks as if this remarkable standard will continue for the foreseeable future. Bravo, and congratulations!

The current show, Modernist Painting and Sculpture in America: The Past 25 Years at Salander O'Reilly , remains on view at the gallery, 20 East 79th Street, through Dec. 4

About the ambition and passion-especially the passion of resentment-that the American artist Benny Andrews has brought to the recent paintings and drawings that comprise The Critic Series and a Musical Interlude , which is currently on exhibition at the ACA Galleries, there can be little doubt. This is an art born of a pent-up sense of grievance, and explicitly designed to even old scores. (Mr. Andrews will be 70 next year.) Yet, given the level of feeling involved, the result is remarkably cool. Too cool, perhaps, and certainly too gentle and too eager to be admired, for the work to wholly succeed as wounding criticism. For while these paintings and drawings are certain to be very entertaining for anyone who closely monitors the follies and fetishisms of the contemporary art scene, they are anything but shocking. This is not the kind of satire that goes for the jugular.

Part of the problem may stem from the artist's decision to avoid specific, recognizable personalities in these satires. "These are not portraits of particular critics," Mr. Andrews writes in a statement about the show, "but rather 'generic' bullies, snobs, gossips, racists and sexists." Yet satire that settles for generic targets of abuse sets a distinct limit on what it can accomplish as criticism. It leaves to the viewer the task of matching the type to some immediately recognizable counterpart in the real world. And it isn't as if the real art world of the 1990's doesn't abound in suitable subjects for satire-or, for that matter, that apostles of politically correct ideas about racism and sexism ought not to be included among them.

While Mr. Andrews sets the scene for his satires in the current art world, the frame of reference he brings to them is historical, and the history isn't always reliable. That, too, has the effect of blunting the work's critical edge. The only critic he cites as "exemplary" is the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was indeed a great critic. But he wasn't the kind of critic Mr. Andrews thinks he was. (For one thing, he paid little attention to the most innovative painters of his own time.) Baudelaire's praise of Delacroix, who belonged to an earlier generation, is what Mr. Andrews especially admires, and what artist wouldn't envy the praise that Baudelaire lavished on Delacroix? "M. Delacroix is decidedly the most original painter of both ancient and modern times," wrote Baudelaire in his essay, "The Salon of 1845." Never mind that this hyperbole wasn't entirely true. Great as Delacroix undoubtedly was, he was certainly not the "most original painter" in the history of the world, and no one knew that better than Delacroix himself. It doesn't help matters, either, that Baudelaire's name is misspelled in every single reference that is made to it.

Baudelaire nonetheless figures prominently in the biggest painting in the show, the 1998 Judgment for Baudalaire [sic], in which we observe a realistic bust of the poet, who in this depiction looks either drunk or asleep or suffering from an overdose, set on a pedestal in the corner of a grotesquely antiseptic contemporary art gallery. In the foreground, a couple of art critics, a man and a woman, neither of them very attractive, are both taking notes on the same painting. The woman has a pet serpent protruding from the briefcase that is tucked under her left arm; the gent is distinguished by what I take to be donkey's ears and remarkably bad taste in his choice of wardrobe. (We are not into deep subtlety here.) The same unlovely, note-taking couple also turn up in a smaller painting called-what else?- Predators (1998).

Michelangelo is another of Mr. Andrews' heroes, and the big picture that is named for him, Interior/Exterior (For Michelangelo) (1998), is my own favorite in the show. For one thing, the areas of the picture that are meant to evoke Michelangelo's pictorial style contain some of the best examples of pure painting to be seen in this series. Mr. Andrews' standard practice of combining oil paint with fabric collage on canvas tends to produce a pictorial surface that I find highly rebarbative. This is not inappropriate, to be sure, when the main purpose of the picture is satirical. But when it isn't, when the artist is depicting subjects he loves-as he does in the Musical Interlude pictures that are also on view at ACA-that same rebarbative surface seems very much at odds with the sympathetic feeling the work is meant to convey.

Another thing that makes Interior/Exterior (For Michelangelo) an interesting picture, however, is the bold contrast it makes between the heroic painting of the past and the kind of debased painting that is so chic today. In this picture, the note-taking critics have their backs turned on the great painting of the past in order to scrutinize an overscale contemporary painting of women's underwear hanging on a clothesline. Does this make the picture sound a little like an old New Yorker cartoon? Well, all of the paintings in The Critic Series have a cartoonlike character, but that is inevitable in satirical painting of this persuasion.

What is sometimes more of a problem is to know who or what is being satirized. In the Michelangelo picture, for example, the critics are minor characters. The principal focus is on that stupid painting of women's underwear, other versions of which turn up elsewhere in the show. In other words, it is the contemporary artist, not the critics, that is the object of satire. Similarly, in the pictures named for the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin, it is the artist who paints underwear that is under attack. There are times when Mr. Andrews' real grievance is with the painters who are painting such junk. But it wouldn't do, I suppose, to devote a show to satirizing one's fellow artists. Blaming "generic" critics is a lot less risky.

If Mr. Andrews plans to continue on with The Critic Series , I have a suggestion to make: Forget about Baudelaire on Delacroix and turn instead to the essay by Baudelaire called "Of the Essence of Laughter, and Generally of the Comic in the Plastic Arts," especially the passage that speaks of "a backward effort of mind which produces what is called 'pastiche.'" It might also be worth pondering why, in the history of modern pictorial satire, Arthur Dove's The Critic remains unrivaled.

The Critic Series remains on view at the ACA Galleries, 41 East 57th Street, through Feb. 27.

By the mid-1930's, Dove had for a quarter of a century been creating pictures that are both remarkably original and yet very much akin to the paintings of certain other modern masters. Yet pictures of the kind he favored, which were either completely abstract or tending toward abstraction even when openly addressed to subjects drawn from nature, were still regarded as an alien presence on the American art scene. There was not yet much of an awareness in the public mind that modernism, while still castigated by academic realists, social realists, regional muralists and sundry other champions of "tradition," was now itself a vital tradition that an artist like Dove could continue to draw upon for inspiration and support. For many benighted souls, modern art was still thought to be a hoax perpetrated by people who "had never seen another picture."

With what ardor, invention and lyric grace Dove did indeed continue to work in this modernist tradition in his later years is made wonderfully vivid for us in the superb retrospective of his work that has now been organized at the Phillips Collection in Washington. Arthur Dove: A Retrospective is quite the best exhibition of this artist's work I have ever seen-and I think I've seen all the major Dove shows of the last 40 years. Beginning with a Still Life Against Flowered Wallpaper (1909) and ending with Flat Surfaces (1946), his last major painting, this retrospective does full justice to every phase of Dove's development. There are things in this exhibition that I, at least, do not remember seeing before, and even the most familiar paintings and assemblages are seen in a new light in a survey that encompasses some 78 objects.

It has become the custom in discussions of Dove's work, owing to the small oils he called Abstractions in 1910-11, to make much of his status as a pioneer of abstract painting-even, perhaps, the pioneer, superseding the claims made for Vasily Kandinsky, as Debra Bricker Balken puts it in the catalogue of this show, "by maybe a year." But as Ms. Balken also points out, the question of what Dove knew or did not know about Kandinsky at that early date remains unresolved and is probably unresolvable. It is exacerbated, moreover, by the attempt made by Dove's dealer and patron, Alfred Stieglitz-who really was familiar with Kandinsky's ideas-to capitalize on Dove's early abstractions in order, as Ms. Balken writes, "to buttress his [Stieglitz's] growing claims for America's artistic parity with Europe."

In my view, however, "America's artistic parity with Europe" did not then exist, and to claim otherwise places an esthetic and historical burden on those early abstractions of Dove's which the work itself cannot support. To my eyes, anyway, those pictures read more as symbolist paintings based on motifs drawn from nature than as abstract paintings that abjure all reference to recognizable objects. It is no insult to Dove, either, to be reminded that in 1910-11, he was not yet an artist in Kandinsky's league. Alfred Stieglitz had many admirable qualities, as we see illustrated in his early support of Dove, but it is worth remembering that as a dealer he was no stranger to what later came to be called hype. In the New York art world, he was indeed one of its pioneers.

It isn't, in any case, in the early work in this Dove retrospective that the artist's finest achievements are to be found. Dove doesn't really hit his stride as a modernist painter of remarkable originality until the 1920's when, for the first time, almost every object he produces-collage and assemblage as well as well as paintings-is wholly individual in conception and beautifully realized in the execution. Still largely based on nature, the paintings move in and out of the realm of abstraction so consistently that the distinction often made between abstraction and representation in his work hardly matters.

The most audacious of his pictures in the 1920's are undoubtedly the assemblages that make use of unconventional materials-which have, alas, become all too conventional in our own day-and the paintings that are similarly executed in mixed media. Rain (1924), for example, is an assemblage composed of twigs and rubber cement on metal and glass. Starry Heavens (also 1924) is a painting executed in oil and metallic paint on the reverse side of a glass plate backed with black paper. The most famous of the assemblages- Goin' Fishin' (1925)-uses bamboo and the sleeves and buttons of a blue denim shirt, while the extraordinary painting called Hand Sewing Machine (1927) applies oil pigment, cut and pasted linen, and graphite to a sheet of aluminum.

Oddly enough, it is in this period, too, that Dove produced his most Kandinskyish abstract painting- George Gershwin-"Rhapsody in Blue," Part II (1927), which has the look of the kind of "Improvisation" that Kandinsky himself had abandoned more than a decade earlier. The connection probably had more to do with the parallels both painters believed united abstract painting and classical music than with any conscious effort on Dove's part to imitate Kandinsky-but the resemblances are nonetheless striking.

By the 1930's, the assemblages and the unconventional materials are largely abandoned as Dove, whose health had begun to deteriorate, concentrates exclusively on the art of painting. In this retrospective, "late" Dove emerges as the primary Dove, for it was in his last years that he created his greatest abstract paintings- Naples Yellow Morning (1935), the three Sunrise paintings (1936), Flour Mill II (1938), Rain or Snow (1943), Sand and Sea (1943) Roof Tops (1943), That Red One (1944) and the final Flat Surfaces (1946).

What William Agee says about Flat Surfaces in the catalogue of this retrospective-"It is a singularly personal variant of abstract art of the time, while closely paralleling the work of Robert Motherwell, and within a few years, of David Smith and Ellsworth Kelly"-might also be said of certain other late abstractions in the exhibition. My own favorite is That Red One , which I think is a finer, deeper painting than anything I know of in the oeuvres of either Motherwell or Kelly.

The extent to which Dove was consciously working within the tradition of modernist abstraction during this late period is well documented for us by Mr. Agee in the catalogue. "In April 1936, while visiting New York," writes Mr. Agee, "Dove had seen and commented favorably on the landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art. A week later, on April 23, he visited A.E. Gallatin's Gallery of Living Art at New York University, where he would have seen a broad group of important abstract and nonobjective paintings, including work by Mondrian.… Two months later, Dove went to the trouble of translating an article by Mondrian, most likely Mondrian's response to an inquiry into the state of modern art published in a 1935 issue of Cahiers d'art. " And so on. Dove, who spent time in Paris before the First World War, knew what the standards of achievement were for the kind of art he aspired to create, and in the late work he met those standards more consistently than at any other time in his life. It was a considerable achievement, and it is our good luck that this retrospective does it such justice.

The exhibition remains at the Phillips Collection in Washington through Jan. 4, and will be coming to the Whitney Museum in New York, Jan. 15 to April 12, before traveling on to the Addison Gallery in Andover, Mass., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.