Organized by senior curator Neville Wakefield, MoMA photography curator Eva Respini, and MoMA archivist Michelle Elligott, "1969" is drawn entirely from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, of which P.S. 1 is an affiliate. The show recasts the convulsions, scene-making and palace revolts that probably weren’t nearly as vivid in their own time. (This critic admittedly wasn’t there.) But that’s the way history works. Could the curators have picked 1968, the worst year in modern American politics, and gotten the same or similar results? Probably. Mr. Nauman actually had his New York debut that year, at Leo Castelli, before he rolled tape for Pacing Upside Down and other endurance tests.

Forty years later, Mr. Nauman, regarded by many as the most influential artist of his generation, is as much a part of modern art culture as a Rodin sculpture. So what the hell happened? Without going into too much detail—apart from a day-by-day timeline, the show is wanting of solid wall-texts—"1969" comes across as the trashing of several precious tastes. One of the first galleries in the show includes a Color Field painting by Helen Frankenthaler. Titled Commune, it’s one of the big, lyrical stain paintings that were championed by some critics, most prominently Clement Greenberg, as the future of painting. Today, we know better. We also no longer have anything resembling a "movement." Styles change with the leaves in New York, if not more regularly.

Antiwar politics plays a big role in the show. One piece, titled Q. And Babies? A. And Babies (1970), consists of posters of the My Lai massacre, distributed by the Art Workers’ Coalition. The radical and troublemaking group—was there any other kind back then?—protested other things, too, like museum trustees who helped underwrite them. History is unclear on this point, but the Art Workers’ Coalition may be the only group to actually spill blood, albeit of the animal kind, at MoMA. To the barricades. Fluxus, too, makes an appearance, in a series of ironic kits. The civil rights movement is given less attention. One exception is the work of Emory Douglas, the official artist and minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, and a maker of agitprop par excellence. Feminism and gay rights appear barely at all in the show, although feminist art would exert an enormous influence on the next decade of art. "1969" is mostly white and male. So, depressingly, was the art world back then.

Other works summon the era’s stoned, sullen mood, like East Coast, West Coast, a filmed conversation between the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Or Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie, an engrossing account of the courtship between Factory regular Louis Waldron and Viva.

Spend an hour or two at P.S. 1, and one becomes aware of a general tilt in the direction of avant-garde toward the obscure. Advanced art requires an advanced degree. It’s taken for granted that a work by the great Nam June Paik appeals more to the inner cerebral track than the eye, unless you a have a Lou Reed–like thing for metal machine music. An artist like Robert Barry makes even fewer concessions to, say, the casual museum visitor or gallery-goer.

Forty years later, contemporary artists still have to come to terms with this stuff. The Bruce High Quality Foundation art collective has installed five noisy, attention-grabbing installations, called "portable museums," to critique the way museums work. The question they raise is indeed fatal, although not the way their creators might think. How much history can you fit onto the cutting edge before you have to start calling the cutting edge something else?

In Body Collage (1967), a performance captured on 16-millimeter film, the artist Carolee Schneeman smears a milky liquid over her naked body and proceeds to roll around in a pile of torn paper scattered on the floor of an industrial loft. The paper sticks to Ms. Schneeman’s body; the camera pans over her glistening contours. Sleek, shapely and beautiful, Ms. Schneeman struts around, displaying her “collage.” Hot stuff.

Body Collage has no redeeming value as cinema: It’s a hapless point-and-shoot endeavor. Those familiar with Ms. Schneeman, a pioneer of feminist art, will know there’s a political subtext afoot. In a 2005 interview, she dubbed Body Collage a “feminization of performative actions that moves around in the culture in odd ways.”

Before you can figure out exactly what that means, Ms. Schneeman offers an analogy between her silky, papered body and the “central representative image” of the Vietnam War: the flayed body. It’s unlikely that anyone who hasn’t read Ms. Schneeman’s pronouncement will grasp the intended volatile content. If anything, they’ll dismiss Body Collage as the jape of a young artist besotted by avant-gardist culture.

For some reason, Body Collage has been included in High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975, an exhibition of abstract painting at the National Academy Museum. Curated by the art critic Katy Siegel, with help from the painter David Reed, the show aims to “recover experimental painting and its context.”

High Times, Hard Times has traveled to North Carolina and Washington, D.C., with additional venues to be announced. It would be interesting to find out what audiences in those cities made of it. As the title makes clear, the exhibition is New York–centric, but at what price to intelligibility, let alone aesthetic pleasure? To derive much of anything from the ephemera on display calls for some working knowledge of lower Manhattan and, not least, the specialized arguments in which artists were engaged at the time.

“Streets and Studios,” Mr. Reed’s introductory essay for the catalog, is a rueful valentine to a city and a milieu that’s been altered, perhaps forever, by a voracious real-estate market. He fondly recalls ambitious artists, heady conversation, informal get-togethers, cheap and spacious lofts, and a fair bit of drinking. A “wonderful … urban social interaction” took place in the empty streets of pre–Pottery Barn Soho, a place where an artist “dressed to look like a bum” to avoid getting mugged.

The scene was no stranger to the era’s sometimes colorful, often dangerous political foment and relentless questioning of hierarchies and norms. A wall label informs us that the art of painting “seemed to have hit a dead end” and was “obsolete,” yet, paradoxically, a “new day [was] … dawning.” (You can almost hear the chorus of “Let the Sunshine In” filtering through the National Academy’s august halls.) Painters would create “dynamic experiences” that would “draw the viewer into the art, rather than hold you at a polite arm’s length.”

“A polite arm’s length”—what a curious phrase. Certainly the artists featured in High Times, Hard Times were reacting against Abstract Expressionism and the Color Field painters endorsed by that perpetual arch-villain Clement Greenberg, as well as, from the sound of it, the history of world art. Perhaps their purview didn’t extend much beyond the pages of Artforum and the bar stools at Fanelli’s, though. Did these artists believe that, say, Velázquez kept viewers at a “polite arm’s length”? If so, more’s the pity.

High Times, Hard Times shows how an insular societal subset responded when threatened by “radical” and (here’s the kicker) attention-getting artistic currents—Minimalism, Conceptualism, performance art and video. It’s filled with patches of fabric, slabs of paint, “flower power” abstractions, “performative actions” and other bric-a-brac.

The death of painting was part of the conventional wisdom of the time. Painters who gave credence to that hoary notion were oblivious to the possibilities inherent in the long history of their own craft. That they accepted it as the truth is a sad joke. Is it any wonder painters hid behind politics, theory and world-weary sophistication?

What we get at the National Academy are small ideas wrapped in big packages. Ostensibly out to reinvent and revitalize painting, these artists ended up diminishing it. How to resuscitate the art of painting? Pull apart its constituent components (stretchers, canvas, edges, color, composition and materials) and keep them apart—or make videos. What an appalling lack of imagination.

Maybe you had to be there. A handful of artists—Lynda Benglis, Manny Farber, Louise Fishman, Harriet Korman and Mr. Reed—would discover aspects of art-making that place their current efforts galaxies away from the over-intellectualized folderol of High Times, Hard Times. You have to wonder, though: If these savvy veterans were rattled by the circumscribed art world of the late 1960’s, what lessons do they have for painters facing today’s expanding multimedia omniverse?

High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975 is at the National Academy Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue, until April 22.

Friedman liked to vent his spleen by writing on the backs of his canvases. One note reads: “Modern aestheticism with its obscurantism and obfuscation bears the same relation to the theology which haggled hotly over the number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle and has about the same influence on art as it did on true faith.” The artist had little patience for orthodoxy, fashion or “the American collector (and dealer),” though he was magnanimous enough to note that a “few exceptions … are cheerfully granted.”

The prospect of uncovering more wisdom on the flipside of Friedman’s paintings is tempting, but not so much that we start taking the pictures off the wall. It’s what’s up front that counts, and it counts for a lot. The Language of Paint, the first full-scale retrospective of the artist’s work in over 50 years, confirms that Friedman is, in fact, an American master.

By organizing this show, Hollis Taggart Galleries and guest curator William C. Agee aim to right a historical injustice. Highly regarded in his lifetime, Friedman’s paintings found homes in the Phillips Collection, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and satisfied the uncommonly stringent standards of Clement Greenberg. Today, only a small coterie of admirers knows his oeuvre. Friedman is a specialist’s passion. It’s worth asking why that is.

In the catalog essay, Mr. Agee writes that Friedman was “by any account … a mainstream artist” participating “in the broad aesthetic thrusts that defined American art from 1905 to 1946.” He suggests that Friedman’s “originality” as a painter “caused him at times to appear as a kind of ‘outsider.’” There’s a headstrong awkwardness to his art, an eccentricity and drive not far from that of, say, John Kane, a folk painter whose striking images were much admired by modernists.

Yet Friedman wasn’t a rube. He studied at the Art Students League under Robert Henri, who also taught the likes of George Bellows, Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois. The early pieces on view at Hollis Taggart—formative attempts at Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism and, a bit more furtively, Surrealism—demonstrate a deep, if not particularly distinctive, understanding of modernist currents.

But Friedman’s art ultimately strayed from the avant-garde—or perhaps it’s better to say that it enlarged upon the notion of what “avant-garde” could mean. Greenberg intuited as much when he likened Friedman to Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, painters who proved that “there were possibilities in Impressionism which the nineteenth century failed to exhaust.”

Friedman’s art does bear some comparison to the French masters. Vuillard is evident in the density of surfaces, Bonnard in the fluctuating areas of closely valued hues. The example of both men can be gleaned in a devotion to representation—in particular, to domestic interiors, the landscape and people. Yet it’s a mistake, I think, to peg Friedman as an “impressionist,” as Greenberg did. It makes him sound altogether too French. If there is any such thing as an American artist, Arnold Friedman is it.

There’s a marked shift in the work round about 1930. European precedent isn’t assimilated so much as blanketed; sophistication and poetry are overtaken, if not completely stifled, by a dour pragmatism. The subjects of the paintings—whether they be the Grand Central Highway, a vegetable stand or the New Jersey wetlands—become unrelentingly and, at times, disconcertingly concrete. Facts take precedence over sensation. The pictures are blunt, terse, severe and uncompromising.

Friedman’s willfulness can be traced, at least in part, to his duties at the U.S. Postal Service. Though he described his job as a “lame way of ducking” the concessions inherent in being a professional artist, he was mindful of the freedom a 9-to-5 gig allowed. Working for the post office “yielded a measure of independent and responcible [sic] citizenship! What American painter was permitted to retain them! Speak up!”

This degree of autonomy from the marketplace appealed to Friedman’s Yankee individualism, and it lent power to the work’s harsh integrity. His paintings from the 1940’s go off on wild and unexpected tangents. Surfaces become sharp and gritty, spaces zooming and skewed. Some compositions are abruptly sectioned off. Others are engulfed by scratchy flickers of paint and an otherworldly light. The paintings court abstraction without sacrificing representation, which Friedman clung to with a forbidding resolve. An all but unbearable tension between material and illusion is brought to bear on paintings like Shore Path and At the Lake (both circa 1940-41).

The late landscapes are especially intense. Their blunt and monumental forms are barely held in check by the perimeters of the canvas. Surfaces are built up into all-over fields of crusty pigment. Friedman likened oil paint to “a coquette [who] must be variously coaxed, coerced, humored, driven or caressed.” This pursuit clearly became more vexing the longer Friedman painted. Given the evidence on view, it also provided a greater sense of aesthetic reward.

Hollis Taggart and Mr. Agee have mounted an invaluable exhibition, and anyone interested in the art of painting should see it. Yet it seems unlikely that Friedman’s achievement will ever receive as much acclaim as it deserves or garner a wider audience. The traditional nature of Friedman’s subjects, Mr. Agee writes, obscures the “genuinely new and advanced” character of his work. His paintings can’t easily fit into a culture that favors superficial novelty.

In other words, they aren’t crowd-pleasers. Friedman probably would have considered such a thing a curse; so should we. His ornery sense of principle was a motivating force, and his marginal standing is something he worked hard to earn. How many other American artists have been as ruthlessly true to their art? As Friedman would demand: “Speak up!”

Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint is at Hollis Taggart Galleries, 958 Madison Avenue, until June 30.

Friedman liked to vent his spleen by writing on the backs of his canvases. One note reads: “Modern aestheticism with its obscurantism and obfuscation bears the same relation to the theology which haggled hotly over the number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle and has about the same influence on art as it did on true faith.” The artist had little patience for orthodoxy, fashion or “the American collector (and dealer),” though he was magnanimous enough to note that a “few exceptions … are cheerfully granted.”

The prospect of uncovering more wisdom on the flipside of Friedman’s paintings is tempting, but not so much that we start taking the pictures off the wall. It’s what’s up front that counts, and it counts for a lot. The Language of Paint, the first full-scale retrospective of the artist’s work in over 50 years, confirms that Friedman is, in fact, an American master.

By organizing this show, Hollis Taggart Galleries and guest curator William C. Agee aim to right a historical injustice. Highly regarded in his lifetime, Friedman’s paintings found homes in the Phillips Collection, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and satisfied the uncommonly stringent standards of Clement Greenberg. Today, only a small coterie of admirers knows his oeuvre. Friedman is a specialist’s passion. It’s worth asking why that is.

In the catalog essay, Mr. Agee writes that Friedman was “by any account … a mainstream artist” participating “in the broad aesthetic thrusts that defined American art from 1905 to 1946.” He suggests that Friedman’s “originality” as a painter “caused him at times to appear as a kind of ‘outsider.’” There’s a headstrong awkwardness to his art, an eccentricity and drive not far from that of, say, John Kane, a folk painter whose striking images were much admired by modernists.

Yet Friedman wasn’t a rube. He studied at the Art Students League under Robert Henri, who also taught the likes of George Bellows, Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois. The early pieces on view at Hollis Taggart—formative attempts at Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism and, a bit more furtively, Surrealism—demonstrate a deep, if not particularly distinctive, understanding of modernist currents.

But Friedman’s art ultimately strayed from the avant-garde—or perhaps it’s better to say that it enlarged upon the notion of what “avant-garde” could mean. Greenberg intuited as much when he likened Friedman to Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, painters who proved that “there were possibilities in Impressionism which the nineteenth century failed to exhaust.”

Friedman’s art does bear some comparison to the French masters. Vuillard is evident in the density of surfaces, Bonnard in the fluctuating areas of closely valued hues. The example of both men can be gleaned in a devotion to representation—in particular, to domestic interiors, the landscape and people. Yet it’s a mistake, I think, to peg Friedman as an “impressionist,” as Greenberg did. It makes him sound altogether too French. If there is any such thing as an American artist, Arnold Friedman is it.

There’s a marked shift in the work round about 1930. European precedent isn’t assimilated so much as blanketed; sophistication and poetry are overtaken, if not completely stifled, by a dour pragmatism. The subjects of the paintings—whether they be the Grand Central Highway, a vegetable stand or the New Jersey wetlands—become unrelentingly and, at times, disconcertingly concrete. Facts take precedence over sensation. The pictures are blunt, terse, severe and uncompromising.

Friedman’s willfulness can be traced, at least in part, to his duties at the U.S. Postal Service. Though he described his job as a “lame way of ducking” the concessions inherent in being a professional artist, he was mindful of the freedom a 9-to-5 gig allowed. Working for the post office “yielded a measure of independent and responcible [ sic] citizenship! What American painter was permitted to retain them! Speak up!”

This degree of autonomy from the marketplace appealed to Friedman’s Yankee individualism, and it lent power to the work’s harsh integrity. His paintings from the 1940’s go off on wild and unexpected tangents. Surfaces become sharp and gritty, spaces zooming and skewed. Some compositions are abruptly sectioned off. Others are engulfed by scratchy flickers of paint and an otherworldly light. The paintings court abstraction without sacrificing representation, which Friedman clung to with a forbidding resolve. An all but unbearable tension between material and illusion is brought to bear on paintings like Shore Path and At the Lake (both circa 1940-41).

The late landscapes are especially intense. Their blunt and monumental forms are barely held in check by the perimeters of the canvas. Surfaces are built up into all-over fields of crusty pigment. Friedman likened oil paint to “a coquette [who] must be variously coaxed, coerced, humored, driven or caressed.” This pursuit clearly became more vexing the longer Friedman painted. Given the evidence on view, it also provided a greater sense of aesthetic reward.

Hollis Taggart and Mr. Agee have mounted an invaluable exhibition, and anyone interested in the art of painting should see it. Yet it seems unlikely that Friedman’s achievement will ever receive as much acclaim as it deserves or garner a wider audience. The traditional nature of Friedman’s subjects, Mr. Agee writes, obscures the “genuinely new and advanced” character of his work. His paintings can’t easily fit into a culture that favors superficial novelty.

In other words, they aren’t crowd-pleasers. Friedman probably would have considered such a thing a curse; so should we. His ornery sense of principle was a motivating force, and his marginal standing is something he worked hard to earn. How many other American artists have been as ruthlessly true to their art? As Friedman would demand: “Speak up!”

Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint is at Hollis Taggart Galleries, 958 Madison Avenue, until June 30.

This is not to say that Mr. Olitski is a total stranger to chromatic subtleties—in his earlier paintings, he proved to have an untroubled command of the stained-canvas technique of color-field painting. Yet over the course of his development, Mr. Olitski has rekindled another early interest: expanding the physical properties of the painterly medium. This interest in what he calls matter—the physical substance of his medium—has now come to dominate his handling of color. Hence the rubric Matter Embraced to describe the material and chromatic density of his latest paintings.

It’s sometimes the fate of certain highly charged abstract paintings that they come to resemble, in their general character, the processes of nature, even though no naturalistic subject was intended by the artist. In Mr. Olitski’s latest abstract paintings, we seem to be transported to some sort of virtual outer space, where storms of color light up the heavens with an unexpected eeriness and portents of cataclysm. This element of the macabre, if one may call it that, strikes me as something new—not only in Mr. Olitski’s work but in all of contemporary abstract paintings, which tends to avoid the more disquieting shades of feeling.

What isn’t new is Mr. Olitski’s appetite for change. He seems always to have been impatient to move beyond whatever came to be regarded as “success” in his painting. If, in the current show, the paintings from the 1950’s seem at first glance entirely characteristic of the reigning Abstract Expressionist aesthetic of that period, closer acquaintance with pictures like Ballet Dancer—Waiting, Piano of Stefan Wolpe and The Holy Virgin (all 1959) reveals a built-up surface of spackle, resin and dry pigment, a handling of “matter” that marked a dramatic departure from the accepted conventions of the New York School in its heyday.

Even the handling of color—the central interest in Mr. Olitski’s painting—has undergone dramatic changes in the course of his career. Early on, his entire conception of color derived from Hans Hofmann’s variations on the Fauvism of the School of Paris. Under the influence of color-field painting, color was put on a diet, so to speak: Bravura handling was abandoned in favor of transparency and fluidity—a change very much influenced by the art criticism of the late Clement Greenberg. So enchanted was Mr. Olitski with this mode of color that he once expressed the desire to create paintings by spraying color into the open air. He settled, however, for using a spray gun to create a veil of color on the canvas surface.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that a pictorial style based on transparent veils of color would prove severely limiting. What may also have effected a change in Mr. Olitski’s handling of color was Greenberg’s death in 1994. It’s hardly news that Greenberg’s influence was central to the development of color-field abstraction; without that influence, it’s doubtful that color-field abstraction would have acquired the authority it briefly enjoyed. I don’t say this as a criticism of Greenberg, whose writings I very much admire (though I often disagreed with him). But I do believe that his departure from the New York art scene made it possible for certain artists—Mr. Olitski among them—to expand their pictorial horizons into areas of style and concept alien to his taste.

Be that as it may, it’s my view that in the Matter Embraced paintings at Knoedler & Company, Mr. Olitski has created his finest work.

Jules Olitski: Matter Embraced—Paintings 1950s and Now remains on view at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street, through Nov. 5.

Another thing that made Mr. di Suvero's 1960 debut exhibition noteworthy was the critical praise it elicited. Not since Clement Greenberg hailed David Smith as "the best young sculptor in the country" in 1946 had a major sculptural talent in this country been so promptly lavished with critical superlatives. And whereas Greenberg's praise tended to be somewhat dry and laconic, the essay that Sidney Geist devoted to Mr. di Suvero's debut was lengthy and ebullient in announcing the dawn of a new era in the history of sculpture. These were the opening paragraphs of the essay entitled "A New Sculptor: Mark di Suvero," which Mr. Geist published in the December 1960 issue of Arts Magazine:

"It was bound to happen, sooner or later, the appearance of some sculpture that was not merely tremendous or interesting or even terrific, but that deserved another adjective, like great; that stepped beyond our immediate experience into history. And it happened in the show of Mark di Suvero's sculpture at the Green Gallery in New York a few weeks ago. Surely it was a vague sense of participating in a historical moment on October 18 that cast a spell on the opening-night viewers, most of them too young to have had much experience of history. I myself have not been so moved by a show of sculpture since the Brancusi exhibition of 1933.

"History is glad to record the arrival of any new artist, the creation of a new beauty, or the presence of a singular work of art, but the real stuff of history is made of those moments at which one can say: From now on nothing will be the same. One felt this at di Suvero's show. Here was a body of work at once so ambitious and intelligent, so raw and clean, so noble and accessible, that it must permanently alter our standards of artistic effort."

Needless to say, critical praise on this level, and especially from this writer-Sidney Geist is himself a highly accomplished sculptor and one of our most respected critics-was bound to command attention. It also posed a challenge for the artist: What to do next? When you've been heralded for ascending to the heights, how do you negotiate a return to common ground?

It's a further testimony to Mr. di Suvero's remarkable self-possession that he bided his time in responding to this challenge even as the art scene was exploding with a mania for more and more Minimalism. Suddenly, that hoary paradoxical notion that less is more was being revived on a scale never before attempted, as the art public flocked to visit larger-than-ever gallery spaces in which there was usually, alas, less and less to look at. In some cases, it got to the point where-especially in the newer venues in Chelsea-the design of the gallery space was almost the only thing left to look at with real interest.

Given this curious turn in "advanced" taste, the exhibition of Mr. di Suvero's most recent work, currently on view at Knoedler & Company, is almost as startling as his debut all those years ago. It's called Mark di Suvero: Indoors, and as the name implies, the show eschews gigantism in favor of intimacy. There's a greater concentration on sculpture as three-dimensional drawing. The gestures traced in these steel and stainless-steel forms are more calligraphic than constructivist; and the drawings that accompany the sculptures give us another level of engagement with the artist's inventive sensibility.

Mark di Suvero: Indoors remains on view at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street, through Aug. 12, and has been organized in collaboration with the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.

As we've lately been reminded by a compelling exhibition at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries and the publication of an unusually interesting monograph, Robert De Niro Sr. (1922-1993) was a figure of this description. Not only as a painter and a draftsman but as a writer, too, he displayed a profligate talent that was designed to sweep us off our feet-and sometimes even succeeded in doing so.

As a painter, De Niro aspired to nothing less than competition with the Old Masters, with whose work he felt a deep sense of kinship, and as a writer on art he was often a more penetrating critic than many professionals. Compare De Niro's essay on Bonnard, which is included in its entirety in the new monograph, with some of the absurdities written by Linda Nochlin and Peter Schjeldhal on the same subject, and you'll see what I mean.

This is Ms. Nochlin on Bonnard's paintings of his wife Marthe: "exquisite rot, canvases shimmering with the iridescence of putrefaction, glowing with the ooze of the informe." This is Mr. Schjeldhal: "There is a decadence that excites and decadence that enervates. Bonnard's is the second sort: edgeless, nerveless, weird, fussy." And this is De Niro: "His work besides being an expression of light is often about light and its play on forms, and this gives it its often evanescent quality …. To me his affinity is more with Watteau and Fragonard than with Poussin or even Titian." (De Niro was equally cogent when writing about Manet, Munch and Soutine.)

In his excellent essay on De Niro for the new monograph, Peter Frank sets the record straight on a great many details of the artist's life and work. On one subject, however-De Niro's alleged closeness "in spirit" to Bonnard-I must disagree. Neither in spirit nor in substance did Bonnard and De Niro have anything in common as painters. Bonnard painted from the wrist, so to speak, applying one dab of color at a time in a spirit of intimacy with both his subject and his materials. De Niro painted with his arm, in sweeping gestures and bold outlines. (Indeed, there's more of de Kooning in De Niro's paintings of the female figure than there is of Bonnard.) And nothing could be more alien to Bonnard's sensibility than such "black paintings" (as they may be called) as De Niro's River Bathers (1956) and Crucifixion Après Mantegna (1985), which are reproduced in the monograph.

Even as a colorist-and at his best De Niro was a brilliant colorist-he was closer to Matisse than to Bonnard: De Niro drew on canvas with a brush loaded with color. The still life entitled Last Painting (circa 1985-93) is a virtual homage to Matisse, and many of De Niro's beautiful drawings, too, owe much to the example of Matisse's draftsmanship.

As for the paintings explicitly based on the work of earlier masters, ranging from Delacroix to Mantegna, what was of primary interest to De Niro was neither their subjects nor their style but the occasions they offered for an expression of his own painterly virtuosity. The paintings "after" Delacroix's Moroccan Women series do capture something of Delacroix's bravura, but De Niro's Crucifixion paintings are so devoid of both religious sentiment and iconographic detail that they verge on abstraction. (Indeed, the subjects in many of De Niro's paintings tend to be ambiguous.)

The undated painting called Untitled Abstract in the Salander-O'Reilly exhibition looks to me to be a painting of a seated figure in a white shirt with a guitar resting on a shelf in the upper area of the picture, just above the head of the sitter. Mr. Frank is certainly correct in characterizing De Niro as a "painterly representationalist," but it's also true that De Niro brought to his representational paintings an eye schooled in the aesthetics of abstraction.

In this connection, it's worth recalling that De Niro began his adult career as an abstract painter who, at the age of 24, won high praise from Clement Greenberg. Reviewing De Niro's first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1946, Greenberg wrote: "[T]he originality and force of [De Niro's] temperament demonstrate themselves under an iron control of the plastic elements such as is rarely seen in our time outside the painting of the oldest surviving members of the School of Paris." Strangely, however, what Greenberg objected to was De Niro's "hot, violent color"-precisely what I and many others especially admire in his later paintings.

What we need, now that the history of his career has been established, is a retrospective exhibition that will bring the sum of De Niro's achievements to a public scarcely aware of their existence.

In the course of his remarkable ascent to stardom, Sir Anthony's work came to occupy a position of critical esteem that in some quarters (especially in America) eclipsed that of Moore himself. Indeed, it could be argued that on this side of the Atlantic, Moore's reputation declined as a direct consequence of the growth of Sir Anthony's renown. These two British artists came to represent for the art public not only different artistic generations, but radically different conceptions of what legitimately constituted sculptural art.

Moore was essentially a carver, working in stone and wood, who took great pride in belonging to a sculptural tradition that had its origins in classical antiquity and the Renaissance masters. At the same time, however, he enlarged his vision by incorporating certain elements of primitive art as well as modernist art, especially Surrealism; and in the monumental work of his later years-which was a great favorite with the museums and other institutions-he embraced bronze as his principal medium.

Sir Anthony had likewise commenced his production by concentrating on figurative sculpture-but modeling in clay, rather than carving, was initially his preferred medium, and he has never entirely abandoned the figurative mode. As recently as the early 1990's, for example, Sir Anthony created a series of sculptures inspired by the Trojan War-the quintessential subject of the classical tradition. Yet he owes his current pre-eminence to a very different conception of sculptural art.

An encounter with the American critic Clement Greenberg resulted in Sir Anthony's adoption of abstract, open-form, welded-metal constructions as his principal medium-a medium, it's worth pointing out, that Henry Moore vehemently opposed. Greenberg was nothing if not outspoken in his advice to working artists whose talents he admired, and he suggested to Sir Anthony that he would find an ampler and more advanced model for his future work in the welded-metal sculpture of the American artist David Smith-the pre-eminent American creator of welded-metal abstraction.

Sir Anthony promptly acted on Greenberg's advice-and not by making imitations of Smith's work, but by adapting Smith's welded-metal technique to open-form, abstract constructions on a scale that sometimes exceeded even Moore's monumental bronzes. And while Smith favored a certain verticality in his abstract constructions (he often referred to his sculpture as "totems"), Sir Anthony audaciously concentrated on constructions that emphatically favored an unprecedented horizontality. The result has been a mode of abstraction that occupies an unbounded, landscape-like space and thus eradicates any suggestion of resting upon a traditional pedestal support.

To provide an experience of visual unity for the resulting sculptural sprawl, Sir Anthony made painted color an integral component of his art. Smith had experimented with color in his later constructions, but it never really served as anything more than a decorative accessory. Sir Anthony elevated color to the status of a defining attribute of open-form construction.

In this endeavor, he appears to have been greatly influenced by the vogue of American color-field oil painting in the work of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski-another of Clement Greenberg's enthusiasms. Not surprisingly, then, Greenberg responded to this development with lavish praise. Writing about the painted sculpture that Sir Anthony completed in America in 1964, Greenberg observed: "These are perhaps more purely, more limpidly, masterpieces than anything he has done before. In them that search for a low center of gravity which is one of the most constant features of his originality finds a perfect fulfillment."

Greenberg went on to compare Sir Anthony's achievement with that of the great English painter J.M.W. Turner: "Without maintaining necessarily that he is a better artist than Turner," Greenberg wrote, "I would venture to say that Caro comes closer to a genuine grand manner-genuine because original and unsynthetic-than any English artist before him."

Opinions will certainly differ about such an extravagant claim, but I'm obliged to say that I don't find anything in the current exhibition to support it. And I would caution viewers not to expect miracles if they venture forth to see Painted Sculpture, which remains on view at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue at 78th Street, through Feb. 26.

Given the quality and audacity of these early abstract paintings, it's a wonder that Hofmann is nowadays so seldom cited as one of the masters of the New York School. Yet the reason why Hofmann is sometimes marginalized or entirely overlooked in accounts of the New York School are not obscure: He belonged to a generation that was not only older but also European. In a period when the New York avant-garde was given to boasting about the degree of independence it had achieved from European precedent, Hofmann's background-which included study in Munich and a close personal acquaintance with the masters of the School of Paris-was regarded in some quarters as a liability.

Opinion was divided. In the art schools he founded in New York in 1933 and Provincetown in 1935, young aspiring modernists regarded their studies with Hofmann as a crucial stage of their artistic development. Indeed, I can recall a time when virtuallyeveryyoung painter I met was a Hofmann student or aspiring to become one. The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts (as it was called) had become a rite of passage into the New Yorkavant-garde. And yet the critics-with one exception-tended to withhold their accolades.

Theexception, Clement Greenberg, proved to be important both for Hofmann and for a public still somewhat bewildered by the variety and complexity of artists' abstractions. In his classic essay, "'American-Type'Painting" (1955), Greenberg, who was then mainly known to the public as the writer who had "discovered" Pollock, enthusiastically nominated Hofmann for a similar stardom. The key passage in this essay is worth quoting for the benefit of viewers not yet acquainted with Hofmann's accomplishments as a painter:

"Hans Hofmann is the most remarkable phenomenon in the abstract expressionist 'school' (it is not really a school) and one of the few members who can already be referred to as a 'master.' Known as a teacher here and abroad, he did not begin showing until 1944, when he was in his early sixties, and only shortly after he had become definitely abstract. Since then he has developed as one of a group whose next oldest member is at least twenty years younger …. Hofmann's pictures in many instances strain to pass beyond the easel convention even as they cling to it, doing many things which that convention resists. By tradition, convention, and habit we expect pictorial structure to be presented in contrasts of dark and light, or value. Hofmann, who started from Matisse, the Fauves, and Kandinsky as much as from Picasso, will juxtapose high, shrill colors whose uniform warmth and brightness do not so much obscure value contrasts as render them dissonant. Or when they are made more obvious, it will be by jarring color contrasts that are equally dissonant. It is much the same with his design and drawing: a sudden razor-edged line will upset all our notions of the permissible, or else thick gobs of paint, without support of edge or shape, will cry out against pictorial sense …. Many people are put off by the difficulty of his art-especially museum directors and curators-without realizing it is the difficulty of it that puts them off, not what they think is its bad taste …. Hofmann's art is very much easel painting in the end, with the concentration and the relative abundance of incident and relation that belong classically to that genre."

I think this passage from Greenberg's essay, with its references to Matisse and the Fauves juxtaposed with an emphasis on Hofmann's characteristic dissonance, tells us almost everything we need to know about the artist's qualities. It reminds us both of Hofmann's gifts as a colorist-he was, I believe, the greatest colorist of the Abstract Expressionist group-and of that distinctively dissonant impulse that separated his art from European convention and the School of Paris.

A Search for the Real can be seen at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, 20 West 57th Street, through Feb. 12.

The teacher of choice in this circle was Hans Hofmann, a veteran of the School of Paris, and some regarded the French émigré painter Jean Hélion-who had escaped from a German prison camp and lived to write a book about it, They Shall Not Have Me (1943)-as a role model. Mondrian, who died in New York in 1944, was also greatly admired, and jazz was a passion. The critic who put the Jane Street Group (as it came to be called) on the map was Clement Greenberg, who wrote favorable reviews in The Nation in 1947 and 1949.

This is the period recalled for us in two exhibitions at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery: The Jane Street Gallery: Celebrating New York's First Artist Cooperative and Selected Works: Jean Hélion . Together, they document a chapter in the modern history of New York art life that few artists, critics or curators under the age of 40 are now likely to be even vaguely acquainted with. The reason, of course, is that by the end of 1949, when the Jane Street Gallery closed its doors, the Abstract Expressionist painters of the New York School-Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell et al.-had achieved an ascendancy unrivaled by any other movement or group. This left the Jane Street painters, most of whom came to reject abstraction, in the difficult position of inviting attention as the kind of independent talents that trendy opinion had already declared orphans of the Zeitgeist .

It was in this situation that Jean Hélion (1904-1987) emerged as an emblematic figure for the Jane Street painters. As a member of the Abstraction-Création group in Paris in the early 1930's, Hélion had achieved recognition on both sides of the Atlantic as a master of abstraction. When that group was dissolved in 1936, he came to the United States, where he spent four years before returning to France in 1940 to join the French Army. It was owing to his experience as a prisoner of war in Germany (1940-42) that he made his fateful decision to abandon abstraction in favor of a mode of representation closely tethered to the observation of everyday life. He thus became a sort of father figure for those painters in the Jane Street Group who were similarly inclined to break free of the orthodoxies of abstraction.

It was as individuals, however, rather than as a group that the Jane Street painters responded to the conflict between abstraction and representation. Nell Blaine (1922-1996) certainly had the gifts to win an immense success as an abstractionist, as we can see from the knockout in the current show, Red and Black (1945). Yet she went on to create her finest work in landscapes, interiors and still lifes that were inspired by Bonnard and Matisse. Judith Rothschild (1921-1993), on the other hand, remained a dedicated and highly accomplished abstract painterfrom

start to finish. LelandBell (1922-1991),whose high-intensity self-portraits_now occupy an honored place in the canon of 20th-century American figurative painting, seems never to have had a vocation for abstraction, to judge from thehapless, heavy-handed variations on the art of Jean Arp he was exhibiting at the Jane Street Gallery in the 1940's.

Abstraction was_nevera temptation_for Larry_Rivers (1923-2002), a latecomer to the group who commanded attention with his very first show, in_1949,_with paintings heavily influenced by Bonnard._This didn't_bother Clement Greenberg, who in his Nation review did not hesitate to declare that Rivers was "a better composer of pictures than was Bonnard himself in many instances"-a judgment that many people (Rivers included) found shocking at the time, and still find shocking today. There's certainly nothing in the Bonnardesque painting in the current show to support the critic's bizarre claim. But then, Bonnard was always something of a problem for Greenberg, who could never quite forgive him for failing to become an abstractionist.

For myself, anyway, the star of the Jane Street Group is Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2000). She was another painter never tempted by abstraction. She had already achieved a mastery of her bold, figurative style in her 1945-46 paintings, as we can see in the Jane Street show, and her later work is even more powerful. (A Self-Portrait in Overalls , circa 1987, is currently on view at the National Academy of Design.) It's a scandal that no New York museum ever mounted a retrospective of her paintings during the five decades she lived and worked in the city.

The small show of selected works that accompanies the Jane Street Gallery exhibition is unlikely to make many converts among newcomers to the work of Jean Hélion. But for Hélion fans-among whom I count myself-it's nonetheless a pleasure to see even some minor examples of an artist who's still insufficiently known here, and to be reminded of the role he played in a now-forgotten chapter of New York art life.

Both The Jane Street Gallery: Celebrating New York's First Artist Cooperative and Selected Works: Jean Hélion remain on view at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, through July 25.