Curators Barbara Haskell and Sasha Nicholas present Edward Hopper at the Whitney along with 34 of his American contemporaries. The comparisons straddle the first half of the 20th century: the Ash Can School, the Precisionists, Paul Cadmus' Sailors and Floozies of 1938 (which depicts Tom of Finland-like sailors being accosted by loose women), John Sloan, Paul Strand, George Bellows with the greatest boxing painting of all time (Dempsey and Firpo, 1924). Hopper's teacher Robert Henri is represented by an obsequious odalisque of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. In My Egypt (1927), Charles Demuth celebrates a grain elevator in Lancaster, Pa., by comparing it to an Egyptian pyramid, all light and angles.

What becomes clear in all this company is that Hopper himself is a loner. It's not that his time was a lonelier time, although it may be tempting to think of it that way. He was a stand-alone artist. Some people are like that, too. Hopper is that kind of person. Private. People who don't see themselves as surrounded by a cloud of friends. People who consider participation in larger social movements as a form of submission to a reduction of character and refuse to be reduced. There's a stoic individualism at work in Hopper's pictures, present in the loneliness of urban people and the independence of objects that's relevant today.

Don't get me wrong. Hopper isn't an outsider. The world he painted covers a familiar territory, from the West Village to Cape Cod. A youthful self-portrait, painted in 1903 when he was 21, reveals a patrician young man in a somber suit, snub-nosed, soft-lipped and slack-jawed. He grew up comfortably middle class in Nyack, N.Y. Hopper channeled Degas during his first decade back from studying in Paris. New York Interior (1921) explicitly imports the 1870 Degas painting Interior. In it a disheveled, half-dressed woman lit in lamp light mends a garment. She lives in a room crowded with pictures and a clock, a stark apartment too small and shabby to contain the sinewy pale beauty of her naked shoulders. Later, his focus zooms out a little, taking in street scenes and storefronts, and then he becomes an American Atget, our painter of early-morning urban scenes before the action happens. In 1930's Early Sunday Morning (the best painting in the show in the conspicuous absence of the Chicago Art Institute's Night Hawks), long shadows and a stage-set quality monumentalize Seventh Avenue South. As for descendents, an unlikely one may be the painter Maureen Gallace. Hopper's early Queensborough Bridge (1913) prefigures her glacial brushwork on the bridge and simple deft sufficiency in the shed.

As the show makes clear, Hopper grows increasingly nostalgic. In the 1930s, while painters are celebrating skyscrapers and cars and the angular delights of modernity, Hopper's reaction to the modern is to stake out a timeless urban streetscape or rural view. He retreats to the countryside and paints small towns and American scenes: abandoned morning streets, loading docks, rooftops, under bridges, barns. He makes much of shadows, and his palette is predisposed toward the complements red and green. He tends to be voyeuristic, staging his paintings through windows or from above. His figures are solid, and his compositions emphasize the geometry of the everyday. He likes women in impossibly tight dresses; men rarely escape the costumes of their profession; and public places promise no interaction (for this reason he repeatedly painted the lonely movie theater in his neighborhood). He painted the quality of light with adjectival precision-cool electric light, thin morning light, the lonely light from a cinema screen. (If Hopper loved movies, the movies loved Hopper back: In his House by the Railroad [1925], we see the inspiration for Hitchcock's Bates Motel in Psycho).

The show is stacked in his favor. Other artists end up looking noisy and glib, their work ephemeral. Hopper weathered a storm of new styles with remarkable conservatism and consistency. A second self-portrait from 1925-1930 shows a more confident Hopper. Six foot five and blue-eyed, he has the steady gaze of the man about to become America's painter of the 1930s and '40s. This is one point of view. One could also say that Hopper missed the great and transformative waves of Modernist styles that buffeted and defined the art of the '10s through the '50s. The show gives us the unlikely experience of seeing Hopper the great loner in the context of his friends. Those who make art, who write, who engage in any kind of solitary work that relies on a point of view and time and a certain distance from contact, that relies upon individual intelligence, might relate to his position.

editorial@observer.com

The considerably less predictable Holiday in Reality: Edward Hopper (the title lifts from Wallace Stevens) provides sterling proof that Hopper’s art continues, almost in spite of itself, to gain in stature. However much we think we grasp Hopper’s achievement—only Andy Warhol among American artists is as ubiquitous and, as it is said, iconic—his paintings have yet to be exhausted by their popularity or, for that matter, their own recalcitrance. The proverbial tough nut to crack, Hopper isn’t an expansive artist, yet the work’s narrow mysteries are deeper than anyone could have expected. In his own laconic way, he’s as monolithic and imponderable as Johnny Cash.

The exhibition occupies the entirety of the museum’s fifth floor. An appreciative eye with a scalpel-sharp discernment has culled works largely from the Whitney’s more than 2,500 Hoppers—plus some loans from the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, MoMA and others.

Hopper paintings guarantee a steady flow of traffic, but the Whitney isn’t merely airing them for the sake of box-office receipts. Old favorites are on display: Who wouldn’t claim bragging rights for an image as indelible as Second Story Sunlight (1960)? Nighthawks (1942) will make a walk-on appearance come October. Many visitors will be reassured by their presence.

But the scholarly scrupulousness with which Holiday in Reality has been executed is surprising. That’s a radical departure from the Whitney’s blasé and often-contemptuous attitude toward art. Properly speaking, the exhibition isn’t a retrospective. But it explores nearly every aspect of the oeuvre, including Hopper’s forays in illustration, using aesthetic continuity and painterly process as guides rather than strict chronology.

The show confirms Hopper’s obdurate Americanness. Old saws about the particularities of place and light, as well as the alienation engendered by a too-insistent individuality, are as true as ever. No more so than the Post-Impressionist canvases that Hopper painted while in Europe: They are the flirtations of a man unconvinced by his paramour’s attractions. Looking at them, you can feel Hopper bristle at what was expected of a serious young painter in Paris.

Hopper’s idiosyncrasies are put into sharp relief in a perceptive essay by Guy Pène du Bois, no mean painter himself. Hopper’s “honesties,” we read, “carry considerable brutality with them. His cannot be called a social spirit. In both person and work his statements are apt to have a too unadulterated boldness, a shocking want of pliability, of ease.” Pène du Bois wrote those words in 1931, but they would stay accurate for almost 40 more years—the remainder of Hopper’s working life.

In an apt and unforgettable flourish, Pène du Bois described the engine of Hopper’s vision as “positive hatred.” This is particularly true in regard to his vexed relationship with modernism. Hopper can’t be considered a modern painter in the manner of Marsden Hartley or Fairfield Porter: His art evinces a deep-seated suspicion of modernism’s innovations. Hopper’s skepticism, part and parcel of a dour conservatism, found modern painting too frivolous and maybe even dangerous.

He did not find modernist painting entirely uninteresting, however—Hopper’s art is, in fact, unimaginable without it. The relentless anomie pervading his paintings marks them as peculiar to the 20th century. The people punctuating his desolate vistas are as robotic as those found in the more abstracted paintings of Fernand Léger and Oskar Schlemmer. A niggling strain of Surrealism filters through Hopper’s art as well: How else does one explain houses and rooms that have more personality than the people who occupy them?

It’s in the spare structure of the paintings—“straight lines bare of fuzz,” in Pène du Bois’ words—that Hopper is most plainly a modernist. The geometry underpinning the compositions can be almost shockingly blunt. Such pictorial foundations are not unknown in history—you can find them in early Renaissance painting, and in the enigmatic domestic interiors of Vermeer. Yet it’s the unapologetic nature of Hopper’s compositions, along with the emotional vacancy it helps to cement, that makes him a creature of the 20th century. However much a loner, Hopper remains tethered, if just barely, to the tenets of modernism.

One of the great strengths of Holiday in Reality is how it illuminates Hopper’s working process. The Whitney’s many drawings reveal a deliberate and painstaking artist. A single gallery is devoted to the genesis of MoMA’s New York Movie (1939), wherein a flashlight-wielding usherette stands isolated with her thoughts as an older couple sits in the theater.

A display case nearby contains close to 30 sketchbook pages of pencil studies for New York Movie. Exacting in detail if not necessarily in means, some are mere scribbles: We see Hopper mull over the fall of a dress, a decorative plaster molding, an archway—that is to say, everything. Once brush is put to canvas, not a moment is to be wasted or improvised.

Additional drawings reveal abandoned variations on the composition. In one, the theater is empty of people; in others, the usherette bends over or is nude. In the most beguiling drawing, she has the slightest wisp of a smile. Who smiles in an Edward Hopper painting? That Hopper entertained the possibility makes for a tantalizing, stop-in-your-tracks moment.

In such instances, the exhibition is revelatory; the intricacies highlighted are inseparable from the pleasures. There are also mundane, if no less fascinating, moments. In the artist’s notebooks, you can read persnickety notes on specific colors and brands of paint (Grumbacher here, Winsor & Newton there), as well as a sales tally, parts of which may have been the handiwork of Hopper’s wife, Jo.

We learn, for example, that the Whitney’s Early Sunday Morning (1930) was sold (in the evening, actually) for $2,000, after a one-third discount. Few details escaped the Hoppers, just as few details escaped whoever organized Holiday in Reality. The Whitney’s higher-ups are hereby encouraged to grace that insightful man or woman with a well-deserved raise.

Holiday in Reality: Edward Hopper is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, until Dec. 3.

The considerably less predictable Holiday in Reality: Edward Hopper (the title lifts from Wallace Stevens) provides sterling proof that Hopper’s art continues, almost in spite of itself, to gain in stature. However much we think we grasp Hopper’s achievement—only Andy Warhol among American artists is as ubiquitous and, as it is said, iconic—his paintings have yet to be exhausted by their popularity or, for that matter, their own recalcitrance. The proverbial tough nut to crack, Hopper isn’t an expansive artist, yet the work’s narrow mysteries are deeper than anyone could have expected. In his own laconic way, he’s as monolithic and imponderable as Johnny Cash.

The exhibition occupies the entirety of the museum’s fifth floor. An appreciative eye with a scalpel-sharp discernment has culled works largely from the Whitney’s more than 2,500 Hoppers—plus some loans from the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, MoMA and others.

Hopper paintings guarantee a steady flow of traffic, but the Whitney isn’t merely airing them for the sake of box-office receipts. Old favorites are on display: Who wouldn’t claim bragging rights for an image as indelible as Second Story Sunlight (1960)? Nighthawks (1942) will make a walk-on appearance come October. Many visitors will be reassured by their presence.

But the scholarly scrupulousness with which Holiday in Reality has been executed is surprising. That’s a radical departure from the Whitney’s blasé and often-contemptuous attitude toward art. Properly speaking, the exhibition isn’t a retrospective. But it explores nearly every aspect of the oeuvre, including Hopper’s forays in illustration, using aesthetic continuity and painterly process as guides rather than strict chronology.

The show confirms Hopper’s obdurate Americanness. Old saws about the particularities of place and light, as well as the alienation engendered by a too-insistent individuality, are as true as ever. No more so than the Post-Impressionist canvases that Hopper painted while in Europe: They are the flirtations of a man unconvinced by his paramour’s attractions. Looking at them, you can feel Hopper bristle at what was expected of a serious young painter in Paris.

Hopper’s idiosyncrasies are put into sharp relief in a perceptive essay by Guy Pène du Bois, no mean painter himself. Hopper’s “honesties,” we read, “carry considerable brutality with them. His cannot be called a social spirit. In both person and work his statements are apt to have a too unadulterated boldness, a shocking want of pliability, of ease.” Pène du Bois wrote those words in 1931, but they would stay accurate for almost 40 more years—the remainder of Hopper’s working life.

In an apt and unforgettable flourish, Pène du Bois described the engine of Hopper’s vision as “positive hatred.” This is particularly true in regard to his vexed relationship with modernism. Hopper can’t be considered a modern painter in the manner of Marsden Hartley or Fairfield Porter: His art evinces a deep-seated suspicion of modernism’s innovations. Hopper’s skepticism, part and parcel of a dour conservatism, found modern painting too frivolous and maybe even dangerous.

He did not find modernist painting entirely uninteresting, however—Hopper’s art is, in fact, unimaginable without it. The relentless anomie pervading his paintings marks them as peculiar to the 20th century. The people punctuating his desolate vistas are as robotic as those found in the more abstracted paintings of Fernand Léger and Oskar Schlemmer. A niggling strain of Surrealism filters through Hopper’s art as well: How else does one explain houses and rooms that have more personality than the people who occupy them?

It’s in the spare structure of the paintings—“straight lines bare of fuzz,” in Pène du Bois’ words—that Hopper is most plainly a modernist. The geometry underpinning the compositions can be almost shockingly blunt. Such pictorial foundations are not unknown in history—you can find them in early Renaissance painting, and in the enigmatic domestic interiors of Vermeer. Yet it’s the unapologetic nature of Hopper’s compositions, along with the emotional vacancy it helps to cement, that makes him a creature of the 20th century. However much a loner, Hopper remains tethered, if just barely, to the tenets of modernism.

One of the great strengths of Holiday in Reality is how it illuminates Hopper’s working process. The Whitney’s many drawings reveal a deliberate and painstaking artist. A single gallery is devoted to the genesis of MoMA’s New York Movie (1939), wherein a flashlight-wielding usherette stands isolated with her thoughts as an older couple sits in the theater.

A display case nearby contains close to 30 sketchbook pages of pencil studies for New York Movie. Exacting in detail if not necessarily in means, some are mere scribbles: We see Hopper mull over the fall of a dress, a decorative plaster molding, an archway—that is to say, everything. Once brush is put to canvas, not a moment is to be wasted or improvised.

Additional drawings reveal abandoned variations on the composition. In one, the theater is empty of people; in others, the usherette bends over or is nude. In the most beguiling drawing, she has the slightest wisp of a smile. Who smiles in an Edward Hopper painting? That Hopper entertained the possibility makes for a tantalizing, stop-in-your-tracks moment.

In such instances, the exhibition is revelatory; the intricacies highlighted are inseparable from the pleasures. There are also mundane, if no less fascinating, moments. In the artist’s notebooks, you can read persnickety notes on specific colors and brands of paint (Grumbacher here, Winsor & Newton there), as well as a sales tally, parts of which may have been the handiwork of Hopper’s wife, Jo.

We learn, for example, that the Whitney’s Early Sunday Morning (1930) was sold (in the evening, actually) for $2,000, after a one-third discount. Few details escaped the Hoppers, just as few details escaped whoever organized Holiday in Reality. The Whitney’s higher-ups are hereby encouraged to grace that insightful man or woman with a well-deserved raise.

Holiday in Reality: Edward Hopper is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, until Dec. 3.

As a bracing corrective, the Peter Blum gallery in Soho is displaying five sculptures by Hans Josephsohn—the first American showing for this 86-year-old Zurich-based artist. As such, the exhibition hearteningly affirms artistic longevity and, in this case, the creative intensity with which it can be blessed. What will all the young ’uns out in Williamsburg make of Mr. Josephsohn’s achievement? Not much, perhaps: It has so little truck with commerce and pop culture. More’s the pity. This is sculpture of a very high order. Let’s hear it for a grand old style.

Mr. Josephsohn’s Half-Figures consist of work created between 1990 and 2003. In their own mute and crusty way, these sculptures are startlingly pure. Each piece is a rock-like monolith shaped from plaster, then cast in bronze. Set upon white pedestals, they’re not-so-distant relatives of the outsized totems on Easter Island. Their choppy and chunky surfaces divulge, if somewhat grudgingly, noses, ears and a decided sense of gesture. The effigies lean with purpose, as if laboring to endure not just gravity’s pull but also the symbolic portent with which each is endowed.

Channeling magical properties residing within primal shapes sounds like a romantic’s game. Yet the dour intelligence informing the pieces dodges loopy notions of getting in touch with one’s inner caveman. The sculptures recall those of William Tucker, Philip Pavia and Irving Kriesberg, each of whom divines an inchoate poetry from bluntly articulated archetypal forms. Giacometti’s relentless search for objective fact permeates Mr. Josephsohn’s efforts as well.

But perhaps the painter Eugene Leroy offers the best comparison. Like Leroy, another European artist who gradually and persistently developed his vision while working in relative isolation, Mr. Josephsohn has dedicated himself almost exclusively to the figure. How far that pursuit has taken him away from a strict fidelity to observed phenomenon could be read as a mordant commentary on the futility of representation. Yet it could also be seen as a strategy—albeit largely unconscious—of reinvesting sculptural form with the longings of the spirit.

In an odd way, then, Mr. Josephsohn works from the inside out. That’s why the monoliths seem to grapple with their own existence: Physical manifestation tries to catch up with psychological desire. The results are heroic, somewhat terrifying, surprisingly winsome and more than a little comical. Giving coherent shape to such contradictory impulses takes someone with enough experience to relish the challenge head-on. Mr. Josephsohn is just such an artist. This is one hell of a debut.

Josephsohn: Sculpture is at Peter Blum Soho, 99 Wooster Street, until May 27.

Before Ocean Park

Thank God for hindsight: Otherwise, how much would we prize the figurative art of Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)? The Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is presenting never-before-exhibited works-on-paper that capture the American painter between the Ab-Ex-inspired paintings that put him on the map and the famed Ocean Park series, those stately meditations on light and locale that assured him a place in history.

Dating roughly from the mid-1950’s to the mid-1960’s, the pieces—not only of figures, but also of suburban landscapes and domestic bric-a-brac—evince a painter in transition. Diebenkorn’s restlessness and curiosity, and sometimes frustration, are palpable in his juggling of observational description, painterly independence and an ambitious array of influences—among them, the roughhewn vigor of the New York School, the rigorous sensuality of Matisse and the all-American severity of Edward Hopper.

The excitement comes from Diebenkorn pulling these impulses together even as they pull each other apart. Not that the drawings and paintings are uniformly successful. A series of female heads are the least convincing, largely because their debt to Matisse is slavish and ham-handed. In contrast, the full-body pictures of a woman take the Matissean ball and run with it. Here the human form encompasses hard-nosed structure, concise contours and sweeping fields of lyrical color.

Yet it is the still-life pictures—washy and scrabbled arrays of scissors, knives, bottles of ink and, here and there, a flower—that express Diebenkorn’s stern gift for rhythm, composition and (the attribute he valued above all else) “rightness” most impressively. There’s a democratic bent to how he redeemed the mundane—as if the most profound of experiences could be gleaned from the contents of an ashtray. The still-lifes are no match for the abstractions that would soon follow. But they’re more than most painters can claim even in maturity.

Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings on Paper is at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, 730 Fifth Avenue, until May 20.

Beyond Therapy

Recent History is the title of Sarah McEneaney’s exhibition of egg-tempera paintings at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, but My History is more like it.

That’s the way it’s always been with the Philadelphia-based artist. Ms. McEneaney’s art is an unapologetic and rather pitiless brand of autobiography. In these paintings, we follow her recent bout with cancer, the attendant hair loss, the stark realization of the body’s fragility, the death of a beloved pet and quiet moments of productivity in the studio. Ms. McEneaney’s life is filled with conflict, illness, loss and fleeting joy. It’s like anyone else’s life, really: Why should we care enough to look at her paintings?

We shouldn’t always. Ms. McEneaney’s tirelessly delineated folk mannerisms continue to be her strength—and her limitation. When the work misfires, as it tends to do in the smaller pictures, stilted drawing and uneven navigations of pictorial space come off as affectations. As such, they can’t deliver the pictures from their therapeutic basis. She may be sophisticated, but Ms. McEneaney doesn’t always avoid the pitfalls of style or self-indulgence.

But given a little more surface area, her diaristic art gains in ambition, skill and scope. Suddenly there are spaces that careen with purpose, an acidic palette and the kind of brushwork in which every inch means something. We end up caring about Ms. McEneaney’s garden, neighborhood and acupuncture treatments because the intensely realized craft propels the paintings beyond mere anecdote. The best of them elaborate upon the recognizable burdens of humanity, but there are moments of solace. In Watsonville, Ms. McEneaney depicts herself bathing nude under a bucolic starlit sky, and she distills a rare moment of grace in which all of us can partake.

Sarah McEneaney: Recent History is at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, until June 2.

Exactly what impelled Burchfield to focus his art so intently on the macabre and the grotesque remains something of a mystery. It’s been suggested that he was influenced by the short stories of Sherwood Anderson, and while that influence may account for the feeling of isolation and abandonment in Burchfield’s work, it doesn’t really shed much light on his penchant for depicting both nature and the manmade world in such stark and threatening terms. It’s certain, anyway, that he had a deeply introspective turn of mind.

At times, writing interested him almost as much as painting, and he’s known to have written voluminous journals. He’s also known to have created a series of cryptic symbols, representing extreme states of mind, and it may be assumed that some of these—drooping trees and black rain, among them—are elaborated in his paintings. As a youngster, Burchfield is said to have taken a keen interest in nature, collecting specimens, etc., yet in his maturity his paintings and drawings tended to transform the natural world into a phantasmagoria.

It’s this powerful affinity for the fantastic that separates Burchfield from Edward Hopper, the only other American painter with whom he’s commonly compared. It was never an apt comparison, but in the period when Burchfield and Hopper were the best-selling painters on the American scene, it was naturally assumed that they had something in common. As it turned out, what they had in common was only their distance from the kind of radical modernism that was beginning to command more and more attention.

In fact, Hopper’s paintings are devoid of Burchfield’s brand of imagination. Hopper’s forte was in his psychological depiction of the relationships between the characters he portrayed. Hopper was indeed a far subtler painter than Burchfield. In many ways, Hopper was closer in spirit to a writer like Hemingway than to any other painter.

Burchfield was in some important respects the greater craftsman. In the very first watercolor we encounter in the show at DC Moore Gallery—Sunshine and Rain (1946- 47)—the luminosity of the sunlight in dismal contrast to the rain is so brilliantly handled that we immediately recognize the hand of a master. In his depiction of light, he used watercolor as if it were oil paint, applying layers of the same color until he got the density of light he was looking for.

The test of every exhibition is whether the viewer leaves the show wishing to see more of the artist’s work. By that standard, the current Burchfield exhibition gets a perfect score from this viewer. He’s an artist I thought I knew pretty well until I saw this exhibition; what I’d like to see now is a full-scale retrospective.

Meanwhile, Charles Burchfield: Paintings 1915-1964 remains on exhibition at the DC Moore Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, through Dec. 23.

The aroma of rosemary wafted from bushes that had been placed outside to create a small dining area under an awning. A couple of friends I hadn’t seen for a while happened to be eating there, and I joined them briefly for a glass of wine before going inside. The view, across a rather grungy strip of Seventh Avenue, was of a locksmith’s shop, a Chinese take-out place and a nail parlor.

“If it weren’t for that, I could almost imagine I was in Paris,” I said.

My friend shrugged. “If you were in Paris, that’s probably what you would be looking out at.”

My dinner guests arrived, and the restaurant’s lone waiter, formally dressed in black tie, seated us inside at a table near the small bar by the entrance. The long, narrow dining room, lined with banquettes, is painted yellow, and the walls are hung with mirrors and Edward Hopper prints. Other than our party, there was just one couple, at the far end of the restaurant. It was blissfully quiet.

After one of my companions got over the fact that he couldn’t have the Scotch he’d been looking forward to all day (only wine and beer are available), we ordered a bottle of Chablis. It’s an odd wine list, mainly French and quite expensive. The menu is classic French cuisine, from vichyssoise and sweetbreads to côte de boeuf and crème brûlée.

Fillip Billan, the owner, used to have an Italian-Mediterranean restaurant here, but last spring he decided to upgrade the place, putting cloths and candles on the tables and decorating the room with giant flower arrangements. He brought in a young chef, Brian Bieler, who recently worked at Compass, and reopened two and half months ago as a French restaurant.

“What’s good?” I asked the waiter.

“It’s all good,” he replied with a smile.

But the tough dinner rolls were not very good, nor was the “gift from the kitchen,” a clump of overdressed spinach salad decorated with a twee baton of bacon. Another night, it consisted of two tiny yellow and red tomato halves and a dollop of goat cheese mousse on a crouton. I’ve never been much of a fan of the soi-disant “amuse-gueules,” those small bites supposed to tickle the taste buds before the meal begins in earnest. They’ve become as common as the “palate-cleansing” sorbets that arrive halfway through dinner in pretentious restaurants. But if a chef does insist on sending an amuse-gueule out, it had better be worth it.

There are two soups on the menu, vichyssoise and white asparagus infused with lemongrass. One of my companion’s eyes lit up at the prospect of the latter. “I love white asparagus,” she said, and when her soup was delivered, she fell upon it eagerly. But with the first taste she bolted upright, as though she’d just had an electric shock. The soup was truly awful. Washed up somewhere in the middle of a pallid, watery broth was a grilled scallop. This dish is an experiment that should never have left the kitchen.

But before I had time to fling my napkin down in disgust and ask for the check, I tasted the vichyssoise. This 50’s throwback, made with leeks and potato, was wonderful, thick and creamy, seasoned with a touch of nutmeg, a few drops of olive oil glinting on the surface.

The meal continued to seesaw. On the down side: doughy soft-shell-crab tempura and a clunky, characterless first course of wild arugula with strips of duck confit and apple that was big enough for a main course. Cucumber salad, one-third the size of the arugula salad, consisted of two long strips of cucumber wrapped around a pile of greens with radish and balsamic vinegar. Strange. On the up side: delicious seared scallops, lightly browned and juicy, with Meyer lemon adding a delicate citrusy note, and a garnish of baby leeks and mâche.

Eating here can be a frustrating experience. Mr. Bieler has mastered the classic French techniques, serving up good food made with the best and freshest farmers’ market ingredients, but many of his dishes are unfocused and lack a personal style.

Long Island duck was one of the successes. Tender and pink, it came with a golden raisin and eggplant purée and baby bok choy. The rack of lamb seasoned with chervil was also very good, served with a creamy parsnip purée and Swiss chard. Atlantic cod was beautifully cooked, crispy on one side, and accompanied by a delicate purée of celery root, spinach and a light citrus beurre blanc. But the butterfish, also known as black cod, seared with a crisp skin, needed more than the acidity of sliced baby tomatoes to cut its oiliness. A rib eye for two, charred rare, with baby leeks and asparagus, was pleasant but not memorable.

For dessert, the molten chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and blueberries was state-of-the-art. So was the crème brûlée under a glassy sheen of caramelized sugar. There is also a selection of half a dozen nicely ripened and interesting artisanal cheeses.

With a few tweaks here and there and some sharper focus, the food at Fillip’s could move up to another level. And after all the raucous restaurants I’ve been to lately, the quiet was a treat all its own.

The aroma of rosemary wafted from bushes that had been placed outside to create a small dining area under an awning. A couple of friends I hadn’t seen for a while happened to be eating there, and I joined them briefly for a glass of wine before going inside. The view, across a rather grungy strip of Seventh Avenue, was of a locksmith’s shop, a Chinese take-out place and a nail parlor.

“If it weren’t for that, I could almost imagine I was in Paris,” I said.

My friend shrugged. “If you were in Paris, that’s probably what you would be looking out at.”

My dinner guests arrived, and the restaurant’s lone waiter, formally dressed in black tie, seated us inside at a table near the small bar by the entrance. The long, narrow dining room, lined with banquettes, is painted yellow, and the walls are hung with mirrors and Edward Hopper prints. Other than our party, there was just one couple, at the far end of the restaurant. It was blissfully quiet.

After one of my companions got over the fact that he couldn’t have the Scotch he’d been looking forward to all day (only wine and beer are available), we ordered a bottle of Chablis. It’s an odd wine list, mainly French and quite expensive. The menu is classic French cuisine, from vichyssoise and sweetbreads to côte de boeuf and crème brûlée.

Fillip Billan, the owner, used to have an Italian-Mediterranean restaurant here, but last spring he decided to upgrade the place, putting cloths and candles on the tables and decorating the room with giant flower arrangements. He brought in a young chef, Brian Bieler, who recently worked at Compass, and reopened two and half months ago as a French restaurant.

“What’s good?” I asked the waiter.

“It’s all good,” he replied with a smile.

But the tough dinner rolls were not very good, nor was the “gift from the kitchen,” a clump of overdressed spinach salad decorated with a twee baton of bacon. Another night, it consisted of two tiny yellow and red tomato halves and a dollop of goat cheese mousse on a crouton. I’ve never been much of a fan of the soi-disant “amuse-gueules,” those small bites supposed to tickle the taste buds before the meal begins in earnest. They’ve become as common as the “palate-cleansing” sorbets that arrive halfway through dinner in pretentious restaurants. But if a chef does insist on sending an amuse-gueule out, it had better be worth it.

There are two soups on the menu, vichyssoise and white asparagus infused with lemongrass. One of my companion’s eyes lit up at the prospect of the latter. “I love white asparagus,” she said, and when her soup was delivered, she fell upon it eagerly. But with the first taste she bolted upright, as though she’d just had an electric shock. The soup was truly awful. Washed up somewhere in the middle of a pallid, watery broth was a grilled scallop. This dish is an experiment that should never have left the kitchen.

But before I had time to fling my napkin down in disgust and ask for the check, I tasted the vichyssoise. This 50’s throwback, made with leeks and potato, was wonderful, thick and creamy, seasoned with a touch of nutmeg, a few drops of olive oil glinting on the surface.

The meal continued to seesaw. On the down side: doughy soft-shell-crab tempura and a clunky, characterless first course of wild arugula with strips of duck confit and apple that was big enough for a main course. Cucumber salad, one-third the size of the arugula salad, consisted of two long strips of cucumber wrapped around a pile of greens with radish and balsamic vinegar. Strange. On the up side: delicious seared scallops, lightly browned and juicy, with Meyer lemon adding a delicate citrusy note, and a garnish of baby leeks and mâche.

Eating here can be a frustrating experience. Mr. Bieler has mastered the classic French techniques, serving up good food made with the best and freshest farmers’ market ingredients, but many of his dishes are unfocused and lack a personal style.

Long Island duck was one of the successes. Tender and pink, it came with a golden raisin and eggplant purée and baby bok choy. The rack of lamb seasoned with chervil was also very good, served with a creamy parsnip purée and Swiss chard. Atlantic cod was beautifully cooked, crispy on one side, and accompanied by a delicate purée of celery root, spinach and a light citrus beurre blanc. But the butterfish, also known as black cod, seared with a crisp skin, needed more than the acidity of sliced baby tomatoes to cut its oiliness. A rib eye for two, charred rare, with baby leeks and asparagus, was pleasant but not memorable.

For dessert, the molten chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and blueberries was state-of-the-art. So was the crème brûlée under a glassy sheen of caramelized sugar. There is also a selection of half a dozen nicely ripened and interesting artisanal cheeses.

With a few tweaks here and there and some sharper focus, the food at Fillip’s could move up to another level. And after all the raucous restaurants I’ve been to lately, the quiet was a treat all its own.

Sure, there are plenty of painters, some of them well known, who have dedicated themselves to a post-ironic, Pop-based permutation of figurative art. They make a claim on a grand tradition, intending to set themselves above it (and ending up below it, instead). But what I’m referring to, for lack of a better adjective, are straight figurative painters: artists who relish the complexity of the human body without recourse to been-there-done-that cynicism, artists who seek out possibilities of form and emotion through direct observation.

Go Figure, a group exhibition of 26 painters and sculptors on display at the George Billis Gallery, won’t convince you that “the fragility and beauty that exists within the body” is an “ideal” necessarily suited to contemporary art. The majority of pieces are run-of-the-mill in their competence; few of them are inspired. Then again, those few do make you stop in mid-step and pay attention. Galleries, having consigned their A-list artists to summer break, are currently featuring not-ready-for-prime-time talent. Go Figure features a handful of painters who deserve to stick around once the temperature heads south.

Whether Marcus Cain is one of them, I’m not sure. His mixed-media works on paper offer folksy ruminations on childhood and solitude. In Mr. Cain’s cartoonish scenarios, patterning engulfs every surface and object—flesh, hair, cake and water. The narratives pictured—a boy praying, a child being measured by a parent—are Rockwellian in character, inflected with sentiment and cliché. The pieces are too squirrelly and arch to take seriously, but too tender and true to dismiss altogether.

Tom Gregg’s Eden (1997) evokes childhood as well. Isn’t that Dick and Jane, rendered in pinkish-purple, running through that encompassing expanse of floral wallpaper? The painting is less about memory than style: In the foreground, there’s a contrasting, handsomely executed still life of apples, oranges, lemons and bananas. It’s hard to know how to settle the painting’s conflicting impulses, but as a diversion, Eden isn’t bad at all.

Kurt Solmssen’s July (2000) is a bravura, though sturdy and stoic, example of painterly realism. The depiction of a woman standing on a ladder picking cherries recalls both Edward Hopper’s arrangements of structure and light and Fairfield Porter’s paint handling. Jonathan Shahn’s sculpture, Gesturing Figure (1992), is a roughhewn, life-size nude male cobbled and carved from wood. Notwithstanding his hardscrabble Expressionistic fervor, Mr. Shahn is sensitive to the nuances of material and subject. The overlays of paint are the kicker: They don’t simply adorn the work, they enhance its sculptural integrity—a tough feat to pull off.

As for best in show, it’s a toss-up. Eve Mansdorf’s Kitchen (2004) confirms my belief that she’s one of the most natural paint handlers around. Flinty yet agile, Ms. Mansdorf’s brush works its nubbly magic within a framework of curt and spiky lines. It’s heartening that the domestic dramas portrayed in her recent work have started to reveal a maturity more in line with her painterly touch. Two women face a man who has his back to the viewer; their expressions are close to impenetrable, though the tension is unmistakable. Ms. Mansdorf hasn’t altogether expunged her tendency toward theatricality, but she has learned how to downplay and deepen it.

Ms. Mansdorf loves the figure as a means of exploring human experience. Maureen Mullarkey loves the figure for its ability to absorb and refract the exigencies of painting. An actual person may have posed for Batya (2003)—a portrait of a topless woman in the studio holding a coffee cup—but in the picture, her body has become an armature upon which color, contour and mass are brought into contemplative equipoise. The subtle stylization of facial features brings to mind the Fayum portraiture of ancient Egypt; the muffled hands summon up the unbearable tenderness of Arshile Gorky’s portrait of his mother. The heartbreakingly subtle gradations of tone and touch suggest that this is an artist who considers painting both a responsibility and a joy. Ms. Mansdorf and Ms. Mullarkey have proven they’re ready for prime time.

Go Figure: A Figurative Art Show is at the George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until Aug. 13.

Abstract Concrete

I’d been hoping to make it through the summer without having to encounter the all-but-ubiquitous art of Sol LeWitt. Having little patience for “boring enough to be interesting” art—well, that’s the way Donald Judd described Mr. LeWitt’s brand of overly cerebral, serial abstraction—I’ve managed to avoid the Met’s rooftop garden and PaceWildenstein’s Chelsea outpost, both of which are showcasing different aspects of the oeuvre (sculpture and wall drawings, respectively). I wasn’t so fortunate on a recent morning spent running errands. Cutting through Madison Square Park, I came across some piles of concrete blocks—construction-site leftovers from one civic project or another.

Or so I thought. Mr. LeWitt’s Curved Wall with Towers and Circle with Towers (both 2005) aren’t much more than what the titles advertise: an abundance of concrete blocks dutifully lined up in simple, schematic structures. As sculpture, they’re non-events: Mr. LeWitt’s bland disregard for variety, vitality and invention forces him to rely on brute physical fact alone to get by. More upsetting is why the Madison Square Park Conservancy invited Mr. LeWitt to impose his thick-as-a-brick aesthetic on what has become one of Manhattan’s most agreeable public spaces. I guess they must have been blinded by his art-world cred. You’ll find more pleasure by taking in the playground at the northeast corner of the park, with its magnificent array of surrounding greenery. Sometimes our lives are not blessed by art.

Madison Square Park 2005: Sol LeWitt is at Madison Square Park, Fifth and Madison avenues between 23rd and 26th streets, until Dec. 31.

All the more reason why we should welcome the exhibition of Pène du Bois paintings currently on view at James Graham & Sons. The title of the show- Guy Pène du Bois: Painter of Modern Life , which I take to be a reference to Baudelaire's great essay, "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863)-strikes exactly the right note for sparking a renewed interest in an artist who was a far more considerable figure in the art world of his day than is now generally recognized.

In many respects, Pène du Bois was the kind of artist in whose work Baudelaire himself took a keen interest-an artist who focused on the fashions and manners of his period to create a pictorial comic opera of contemporary life. In the section of "The Painter of Modern Life" entitled "Beauty, Fashion and Happiness," Baudelaire wrote:

"These costumes, which seem laughable to many thoughtless people … have a double-natured charm, one both artistic and historical. They are often very beautiful and drawn with wit; but what to me is every bit as important, and what I am happy to find in all … is the moral and aesthetic feeling of their time. The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These [works] can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues."

It would be hard to imagine a better description of Pène du Bois' paintings than this.

To the task of creating pictures of this persuasion, which combine a disabused wit with a realist's appetite for worldly experience, he brought an impressive battery of talents, attachments and affinities. Born in Brooklyn, the son of a journalist and critic who had a passion for French literature, Guy was in fact named after Guy de Maupassant, a family friend, and Guy Pène du Bois was always as much at home in Paris as in New York.

At the age of 21, he made his debut exhibition in the Paris Salon. Yet owing to his studies with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri in New York, Pène du Bois' paintings belong to the mainstream of 20th-century American realism. Where his art differed from the realism of such contemporaries as Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent, however, was in its subjects as well as the undercurrent of satire and gentle mockery in their treatment. The working-class subjects of the so-called Ashcan School of American realism held no appeal to Pène du Bois as a painter, though as a writer he produced monographs on the Ashcan painters that are still worth reading. So too, by the way, is the book he wrote, Artists Say the Silliest Things (1940), in which his penchant for wit and satire is on full display.

What interested Pène du Bois as a painter, however, was the beau monde-the world of money, fashion and status with which he was well acquainted on both sides of the Atlantic. In painting that world, he was generally more sympathetic in depicting its women than its male characters. Thus the two male figures in black tie in The Art Lovers (1922) are seen with their backs to the picture they have ostensibly come to look at, and the two figures, also in black tie, in Father and Son (1929) are positively ghoulish. So is the figure in the even more powerful Portrait of Robert Winthrop Chanler (1915). In the portraits of couples, too- The Doll and the Monster (1914), for example and The Confidence Man (1919)-the men are indeed monstrous.

It was to his portraits of fashionable women that Pène du Bois brought both his deepest sympathies and something else as well: an understanding of the pictorial qualities of their clothes. It's in these paintings of women, and in some of his group and party pictures- Rose Madder Club (1934), Bal des Quatre Arts (1929) and Carnival (1927)-that Pène de Bois excelled as an artist. Oddly enough, the most sympathetic depiction of men is to be found in Soldiers (1930), while in the painting Mr. and Mrs. Chester Dale Dining Out (1924) both figures are depicted with great affection. (Chester Dale was one of the major collectors of modern painting in Pène du Bois' generation in New York.)

Given his French sympathies and his firsthand knowledge of the Paris art scene, it's odd that Pène du Bois seems not to have had much interest in the great modernist art of his time-not, anyway, the kind of interest one would expect to see registered in his own painting. For that subject to be understood, we would have to have a collection of Pène du Bois' writings as an art critic. The obvious person for assembling such a collection is Betsy Fahlman, author of the excellent catalog that accompanies the current exhibition.

Guy Pène du Bois: Painter of Modern Life remains on view at James Graham & Sons, 1014 Madison Avenue at 78th Street, through July 9.

These painters are not discriminated against according to generation. I'm old enough to remember a time when Milton Avery (1885-1965) and Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) were both relegated to the class of talents denied museum retrospectives. Why? They were apparently considered insufficiently avant-garde by doctrinaire modernists and yet too modern to be embraced by doctrinaire traditionalists. So it was left to posterity: The museums granted them posthumous recognition.

The exhibition of paintings by Lois Dodd at the Alexandre Gallery is a reminder that at the age of 75, she too now belongs to this class of neglected talents. For close to half a century, Ms. Dodd's work has been seen and admired in more than 50 solo exhibitions. One of her recent shows ( Women at Work , at the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Me.), a rare (for Ms. Dodd) and often hilarious survey of naked female figures performing common household tasks, was a runaway sensation. It was the kind of show that visitors returned to again and again-as I did. The show was great fun as well as an experience of high-octane painterly virtuosity.

It's unlikely, however, that a single New York curator ever bothered to see it, even though Ms. Dodd has been a presence on the New York art scene for decades. She studied at Cooper Union in the 1940's; she was one of the founders of the Tanager Gallery in the 50's; and she taught at Brooklyn College for many years. Like a great many other New York painters, past and present, she has found some of her best subjects in rural Maine.

As is often the case in New York these days, the galleries provide what the museums overlook or deny. While the exhibition at the Alexandre Gallery is hardy the Dodd retrospective we needed, it does have the great virtue of giving us a concentrated account of one of the artist's most inspired inventions: the complex, highly poetic pictorial compositions based on the structures and settings and shifting light to be seen in and around the windows and doorways of old Maine houses.

To these pictorial inventions, Ms. Dodd brings a commanding mix of realism and abstraction. Fidelity to exact observation is tempered and elevated by the discipline of formal rigor. If there are identifiable affinities or sources for such a style, they are likely to be found in the precisionism of Charles Sheeler and certain other varieties of American Cubism, as well as the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian. Yet nature, too, is given its due, especially in the depiction of foliage and seasonal change. And it's in her brushy, fragmented renderings of nature-often seen reflected in rectangular window panes-that Ms. Dodd also reminds us that she came of age as an artist in the era of Abstract Expressionism.

It's interesting to observe how this range of abstractionist conventions and styles is adapted to the spatial ambiguities of her window and doorway subjects. Is there an allusion, perhaps, to the all-black abstract paintings of Ad Reinhardt or even the early abstractions of Malevich in the series of black rectangles to be seen in the painting called Barn Window with White Square (1991)? Probably not, but the comparison nonetheless leaps to mind.

On the other hand, there is certainly something Hopperesque in the haunting Night House (1975), even though Ms. Dodd's use of realism differs in many respects from Edward Hopper's vein of anecdotal melancholy. (In an essay for the catalog of the current show, John Yau makes a strong case for Ms. Dodd as "Hopper's heir," but I remain unpersuaded; the complexities in every development of her oeuvre are too distant from Hopper's dour, unforgiving realism. No heir of Hopper's could have possibly conceived of a show like Women at Work .) It is, in any case, in a painting like Falling Window Sash (1992) that the artist's stunning combination of realism and abstraction is most elaborately developed.

Well, it's clearly going to take a while for the New York museums to catch up with Lois Dodd's fast-paced development-and it may not happen in her lifetime, or mine. But when such a retrospective does come to New York, it will be a smash. Meanwhile, Windows and Doorways: Paintings of Three Decades remains on view at the Alexandre Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, through March 1.