When the Museum of Modern Art reopened in 2004, it had only two artworks on the first floor, as if they were enough to tell the tale: an Auguste Rodin and a Kelly. The man has a cult.

"I've been around a long time," said the artist, with understatement. He's intermittently on oxygen these days; at first he can't decide if he wants that mentioned or not, but then bragged, "I feel more alive" than he has in years because of it.

Mr. Kelly has new works at two of the Marks galleries in Chelsea, and older drawings at a third Marks outpost. The art is elegant, precise, powerful. But the artist, given current art-world trends, is on the defensive.

"I am an abstractionist, and abstraction is not what people are doing today. Contemporary art has gone into performance, video, even photography. Figurative images, sometimes of celebrities, can be "75 percent of the painting," He groused: Those painters make it too easy on the viewer.

But "my content is color and form. I ask 'What do you feel about the color and the form?' I don't need that extra thing." As if it settled the matter, he added: "De Kooning's paintings are about painting, and they don't need that extra thing, either."

Mr. Kelly, a fierce name-dropper ("I knew Leger, Brancusi, Giacometti, and each one was a lesson somehow"), knows that for an artist, looking over your shoulder at the next generation is part of the gig.

"Miro was living in Majorca, and he came up to me and said, 'Come visit me.' And I got there, and he asked, 'What's going on in New York? Pollock, Rothko--people are forgetting about Miro!'" Shocked, Mr. Kelly said to him, "'You're Miro, the great master!' But he taught me something. As you get older, you watch the younger painters."

The art world has changed radically in the last half-century, but Mr. Kelly said the biggest change may have been that architects have come to understand, and design, for contemporary paintings and sculpture. It didn't start out that way: In 1950, Marcel Breuer, who was later to design the Whitney Museum of American Art, spurned Mr. Kelly's work in favor of Paul Klee's, he said. And "Le Corbusier said to me, 'The trouble is you young painters need new architecture, and the problem is there is no new architecture.' But architects--James Fried, I. M. Pei--have understood very well."

Mr. Kelly said "when Renzo Piano was designing the Art Institute of Chicago building, he said, 'Oh, you need more space.' So I made a piece 64 feet by 14 feet." That piece's younger sister, so to speak, a graceful, meditative curve of white aluminum, is the keynote work of the Marks exhibitions, greeting viewers at 522 West 22nd Street.

Next week, Mr. Kelly said, he begins a new series of work in his home in Spencertown, N.Y. "The color comes ... I pull it out of the air. My eye tells me when something is right and something is not quite right."

He concluded, with some surprise: "So many people go to college now and want to be artists. Art has become such a popular thing. I guess we have to thank Warhol for that."

But don't we also have to thank Ellsworth Kelly?

"I hope so."

apeers@observer.com

Honorees included Wallis Annenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Anna Deavere Smith, and, as a sort-of wrinkle-reducer, the musician John Legend.

Also on hand were Ronald Lauder, Jessye Norman, C. Terry Lewis, Mayor David Dinkins and Jeffrey Sachs. Yoko Ono was jet-lagged, but she made it, too.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived minutes before he was to go on stage, while people were picking at their first course. He said:

“New York City is indeed the cultural capital, and anybody who doesn't think so, I'll be happy to meet them out back. Although they may have to deal with our lawyers and a couple professional boxers. Anyways, I can talk about the 500 art galleries that we have in this city, or the 330 dance companies, or the 150 museums, or the 96 orchestras, not to mention Fantasia! Who knows what Fantasia is? Fantasia is the amazing seventeen-foot Burmese python at the Brooklyn Children's Museum. I'm sure our cultural affairs commissioner Kate Levin would be happy if I did all of that, mentioned all of those things. But tonight is really about the honorees.

“First, congratulations to all of them, including all of my colleagues at the United States Conference of Mayors, who do great work not just in the arts but in areas like education, affordable housing and particularly in fighting the scourge of illegal guns on our streets.

“I would, of course, be remiss if I didn't mention that the 106th mayor of the City of New York is sitting right down in front of me. And the reason I mention that is, take a rare look at him, there he is in his tuxedo as opposed to in his normal tennis outfit! It is a rare night for Mr. Dinkins.

“Americans for the Arts is a great organization with a simple message: art asked for more. And we all know how that works, and tonight here is somebody who has been asked for a lot more, a lot more actually each time she has given. Wallis Annenberg is one of our nation's most influential philanthropists. I might also point out that she is one of the most engaging women that this country has. She is a wonderful woman. She is the arts patron of the Arts Foundation and her leadership has made a huge difference in such areas as education, social justice and the environment, and equally important, she had me over to dinner the last time I was in Los Angeles and I can tell you the chicken was wonderful. And if I don't say nice things about Wallis, I won't get invited back.

“Seriously, tonight we honor Wallis for all her contributions to the arts. She has taken her father's philanthropic legacy and expanded it westward and strengthened a thriving cultural community in southern California, and at the same time, her advocacy and generosity is still felt here in the East.

“A long time supporter of the Museum of Modern Art, she recently became active on its board, where she works very closely with another great philanthropist, Aggie Gund. Aggie, where are you? Aggie is here tonight. Another great philanthropist, Vartan Gregorian is here. If anybody needs any money, the Carnegie Foundation has plenty of it. Just give him a call. Seriously, the Annenbergs have continued to serve a wide range of cultural institutions in our city, and that's why we were pleased to honor the foundation with a Mayor's Award for Arts and Culture in 2005. And Wallis's passion for the arts and arts education really is second-to-none, but don't just take it from me, so we brought in some friends with the miracle of technology. Just watch the screen…”

Ms. Wilkin accurately divines in both mediums "the same obsession with the permutations of the act of looking, with perception itself." Yet there's a significant difference in how deeply Ms. Seidl engages with each art form. Nature informs the paintings, whose layered, improvisatory approach follows in the tradition of the New York School. The mysteries of light and space, channeled through scenes of domesticity and leisure, define the photographs. Studio and Clothesline (Quilts) (both 2003), photos whose beauty is unquestionable, are probably the most authoritative things Ms. Seidl has ever put her name to. What they can't claim is the fortitude that courses through canvases like Landlocked (2003), with its tender and fleeting geometry, or the field of exclamatory brushstrokes that is World of Good (2003). Ms. Seidl demands more of herself as an artist when she eschews the familiar, picks up a brush and heads for places unknown. Photography gives her pleasure; oil paint makes her live. The distinction is illuminated by Rosenberg + Kaufman's well-placed gamble.

Claire Seidl: Paintings and Photographs is at Rosenberg + Kaufman Fine Art, 115 Wooster Street, until April 24.

Flash in the Pan

The Whitney Biennial is like Janet Jackson's nipple: a momentary distraction from matters at hand. Art is the matter at hand for any museum dedicated to its conservation and promulgation-or so you'd think. The only thing the Whitney offers in the latest version of its signature event is an institutional stamp of approval for careerists of all sizes, shapes and tendencies. The dizzying collection of thingamajigs, dark rooms, adolescent ennui, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and-oh, yes-paintings owes its consistency to a uniform disinclination to take a stand. The avoidance of principle-like, you know, being engaged with the shaping of a work of art-may have been a provocative gambit for artists a hundred or so years ago, but now it's business as usual, a cop-out. The curators don't buck the trend: Their tastes are so accommodating that they may as well have no taste at all. Only the painter James Siena, whose tokens of obsessive craft look positively miraculous here, merits attention. Otherwise, don't you have better things to do than stand in line, fight the crowds and rue our culture's lack of artistic consensus? I thought so.

Whitney Biennial: 2004 is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, until May 30.

Gilding the Epidendrum Calceolape

The Drawing Center is, by general consensus, a valued institution. One of the few Soho venues that hasn't relocated to Chelsea, the museum has devoted itself to the art of drawing since its inception in 1977. Of course, "drawing" as an artistic category has become as pliable as "art" itself. The Drawing Center has exhibited objects that have only a tenuous relationship to drawing. Who can forget the Royal Art Lodge's huge, grungy puppets? Even so, deference is paid to the fundamental act of putting marks on a sheet of paper. The museum's track record is impressive: People are still raving about shows devoted to Ellsworth Kelly, James Ensor and the Plains Indians. The Drawing Center's dedication to young or unheralded artists, who are showcased in the regular series of exhibitions titled Selections , is commendable.

Still, there are moments I'm convinced the Drawing Center is a dangerous place-dangerous, that is, to the life of art. Take its current exhibition: Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature , an array of 19th-century drawings and photographs of natural phenomena, mostly botanical, from Britain and Scotland. There's nothing wrong with scientific illustration; it has its uses and, indeed, its charms. The trouble is that one can't see the epidendrum calceolape for the plexiglass display panels, marbleized wall treatments, uniform hanging and overweening tastefulness. The curators laud the "fluidity of media in Victorian natural history illustrations"; but what they're really interested in is interior design. More than 300 pieces have been strong-armed into serving the prerequisites of installation. The overall effect is suffocating and chilly, an overstuffed, elegant blur. In more perceptive hands-say, those of the Morgan Library- Ocean Flowers would have been a modest crowd-pleaser. As it is, the exhibition does a disservice to the crowd-not to mention science, history and drawing itself.

Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature is at the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, until May 22.

Anyone familiar with her oeuvre knows that Ms. Coffey is all about resistance. She's both an ideologue and a pure painter and neither of those things: She trades in absolutes only to deny them. This makes for frustrating art. It also makes for pictures that stick, like a burr, in the memory.

Learning that the paintings are based on newspaper photos of the war in Iraq doesn't help: try locating a political stance and you'll be thwarted. If Ms. Coffey, wearing a camouflage tank top and bathing cap, seems despondent in Conveyance (2003), she's serene when surrounded by explosions and fire in Stream (2003). These paintings do run the risk of exploiting events whose importance will inevitably overshadow whatever's on the canvas, yet the gravity of Ms. Coffey's purpose-of her mood, really-is unmistakable. The war pictures (if we can call them that) are, oddly enough, conduits for reverie, simultaneously discomfiting, soothing and convoluted. Their stark, theatrical intensity makes the more typical self-portraits-passive-aggressive meditations on identity-look a trifle silly (though their pithiness as painting is inarguable). Ms. Coffey wouldn't be the first person to open up to the world only as it threatens to descend into disarray. Perhaps that's what accounts for the subtle shift from negation to some semblance of acceptance. Ms. Coffey remains a problematic figure-if only other artists would present us with puzzles so intricate and true.

Susanna Coffey: Recent Work is at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, until Nov. 8.

Live From Duluth

I should hate the pictures of David Dupuis at the Derek Eller Gallery. A devotee of post-conceptualist pastiche, Mr. Dupuis uses landscape as an armature upon which to situate a motley array of cartoonish signs: lumpish stenciled letters, crusty dabs of oil, Surrealist hazes, crystallized geometry, horny tongues and drifting clouds. The surfaces are scuffed and ragtag, as if the canvases had spent the better part of their lives stacked in a garage somewhere in Duluth. Mr. Dupuis' take on adolescence is predictable: He recognizes its passing, but can't bring himself to let it go. When he tries to make a statement, as in Doubt Collecting (2003), an anti-religious farce, he capitulates to a self-conscious, smart-ass mockery.

So why bother with him? He has a rough-and-fumble talent, and just enough principle to make you want to give his pictures a break. Two of them, Candy Coated Mountain (2003) and Basin (2003), don't need the charity. Both make coherent the artist's awkward, introspective fantasies; they have a heft the rest of the work lacks. Credit the light: Strange, milky and barely detectable, it surrounds the images with a wan benevolence.

David Dupuis is at the Derek Eller Gallery, 526-30 West 25th Street, second floor, until Nov. 15.

Sassy Silhouette

The big problem with American Cutout , an exhibition at the New York Studio School, is that it isn't big enough. David Cohen, the director of the gallery, has hit upon an ingenious (and, one would think, extendable) vehicle for examining postwar American art-not collage (though the show is inconceivable without it) but silhouette, the form defined by excision and contour. The show fudges its time frame by including a 19th-century weathervane depicting George Washington, and it doesn't always hew to material fact. (Phillip Pearlstein's canvas features a painted cutout.) Mr. Cohen isn't a stickler for nationality, either: He bestows honorary American citizenship upon Henri Matisse. Then again, any exhibition devoted to the cutout that didn't take into account Matisse's monumental achievement would be in serious denial. Mr. Cohen is wise to include him (and perhaps less wise to include-and thereby give credence to-Willem de Kooning as sculptor, and also Robert Motherwell, whose contribution to the art of collage has been hugely overrated).

William King, Judith Rothschild, Conrad Marca-Relli, Irving Kriesberg, Alexander Calder, Alex Katz and Ellsworth Kelly, all significant talents, are seen to winning effect. Certainly you'll never find Mr. Katz and Mr. Kelly as ingratiating as they are here. Mr. Katz's bland arrogance is humanized when he works small, keeps it casual and leaves ambition at the door. Mr. Kelly's postcard collages riff on kitsch, sex and history with a disarming, pseudo-Dadaist ease. In the best of them, a Suprematist wedge of red is affixed to a reproduction of Edgar Degas' The Young Spartans , as if the 20th century were asking the 19th to step outside to settle their differences. The result is a draw, drolly and decisively put forth.

American Cutout is at the New York Studio School, 8 West Eighth Street, until Nov. 22.

Puzzling, Risky Paintings

The horrors of 9/11 are not the explicit subject of Susanna Coffey's paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, though scenes of a city under siege do serve as the backdrop for her continuing exploration of self-portraiture. The events of that day have been transformed in her art into something else-but what that something else might be is difficult to grasp.

Anyone familiar with her oeuvre knows that Ms. Coffey is all about resistance. She's both an ideologue and a pure painter and neither of those things: She trades in absolutes only to deny them. This makes for frustrating art. It also makes for pictures that stick, like a burr, in the memory.

Learning that the paintings are based on newspaper photos of the war in Iraq doesn't help: try locating a political stance and you'll be thwarted. If Ms. Coffey, wearing a camouflage tank top and bathing cap, seems despondent in Conveyance (2003), she's serene when surrounded by explosions and fire in Stream (2003). These paintings do run the risk of exploiting events whose importance will inevitably overshadow whatever's on the canvas, yet the gravity of Ms. Coffey's purpose-of her mood, really-is unmistakable. The war pictures (if we can call them that) are, oddly enough, conduits for reverie, simultaneously discomfiting, soothing and convoluted. Their stark, theatrical intensity makes the more typical self-portraits-passive-aggressive meditations on identity-look a trifle silly (though their pithiness as painting is inarguable). Ms. Coffey wouldn't be the first person to open up to the world only as it threatens to descend into disarray. Perhaps that's what accounts for the subtle shift from negation to some semblance of acceptance. Ms. Coffey remains a problematic figure-if only other artists would present us with puzzles so intricate and true.

Susanna Coffey: Recent Work is at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, until Nov. 8.

Live From Duluth

I should hate the pictures of David Dupuis at the Derek Eller Gallery. A devotee of post-conceptualist pastiche, Mr. Dupuis uses landscape as an armature upon which to situate a motley array of cartoonish signs: lumpish stenciled letters, crusty dabs of oil, Surrealist hazes, crystallized geometry, horny tongues and drifting clouds. The surfaces are scuffed and ragtag, as if the canvases had spent the better part of their lives stacked in a garage somewhere in Duluth. Mr. Dupuis' take on adolescence is predictable: He recognizes its passing, but can't bring himself to let it go. When he tries to make a statement, as in Doubt Collecting (2003), an anti-religious farce, he capitulates to a self-conscious, smart-ass mockery.

So why bother with him? He has a rough-and-fumble talent, and just enough principle to make you want to give his pictures a break. Two of them, Candy Coated Mountain (2003) and Basin (2003), don't need the charity. Both make coherent the artist's awkward, introspective fantasies; they have a heft the rest of the work lacks. Credit the light: Strange, milky and barely detectable, it surrounds the images with a wan benevolence.

David Dupuis is at the Derek Eller Gallery, 526-30 West 25th Street, second floor, until Nov. 15.

Sassy Silhouette

The big problem with American Cutout , an exhibition at the New York Studio School, is that it isn't big enough. David Cohen, the director of the gallery, has hit upon an ingenious (and, one would think, extendable) vehicle for examining postwar American art-not collage (though the show is inconceivable without it) but silhouette, the form defined by excision and contour. The show fudges its time frame by including a 19th-century weathervane depicting George Washington, and it doesn't always hew to material fact. (Phillip Pearlstein's canvas features a painted cutout.) Mr. Cohen isn't a stickler for nationality, either: He bestows honorary American citizenship upon Henri Matisse. Then again, any exhibition devoted to the cutout that didn't take into account Matisse's monumental achievement would be in serious denial. Mr. Cohen is wise to include him (and perhaps less wise to include-and thereby give credence to-Willem de Kooning as sculptor, and also Robert Motherwell, whose contribution to the art of collage has been hugely overrated).

William King, Judith Rothschild, Conrad Marca-Relli, Irving Kriesberg, Alexander Calder, Alex Katz and Ellsworth Kelly, all significant talents, are seen to winning effect. Certainly you'll never find Mr. Katz and Mr. Kelly as ingratiating as they are here. Mr. Katz's bland arrogance is humanized when he works small, keeps it casual and leaves ambition at the door. Mr. Kelly's postcard collages riff on kitsch, sex and history with a disarming, pseudo-Dadaist ease. In the best of them, a Suprematist wedge of red is affixed to a reproduction of Edgar Degas' The Young Spartans , as if the 20th century were asking the 19th to step outside to settle their differences. The result is a draw, drolly and decisively put forth.

American Cutout is at the New York Studio School, 8 West Eighth Street, until Nov. 22.

What little I've seen of Mr. Federle's canvases-austere geometric abstractions keyed to a dour, sulfurous green-confirms that, when putting paint to canvas, he is well-intentioned, but also dry and ponderous, overly theoretical. This isn't the artist we see in the 200 drawings at Blum. The artist who made the drawings is offhand and quizzical, light on his feet. Taking inspiration from Malevich, the Bauhaus, Auguste Herbin and maybe even Ellsworth Kelly himself, Mr. Federle entertains whatever notion comes to mind, however skimpy, idiosyncratic or obvious. An often funny dialogue between representation and abstraction is a constant in the work. Early on, spiky, oddball shapes are extracted from the play of light over the Alps; later, the human form is constructed from a stack of triangles. Mr. Federle's attention to composition leads him to some arresting flights of fancy-in a stand-out drawing, strips of masking tape inadvertently set off a calisthenic counterrhythm to a punchy group of squares and rectangles. He stumbles attempting to reclaim the pre-Nazi swastika as a pictorial arbiter; mere art can't redeem what has been forever tainted. The rest of the time, Mr. Federle hits, misses, knocks it out of the ballpark and is never not asking questions. Would that Mr. Kelly were so inquisitive.

Helmut Federle: Works on Paper from 1969 to 2001 is at the Peter Blum Gallery, 99 Wooster Street, until July 12.

Systematic Spaghetti

The Federle show is inexhaustible-even when there isn't much to look at, there's still something to see. At the 19-year overview of drawings by the painter James Siena, currently at Gorney, Bravin and Lee, there's always something to see, and it's invariably highly accomplished and intensely realized. Yet the show itself wears out its welcome quickly. Mr. Siena's meticulously delineated abstractions have garnered a quiet though significant and seemingly obsessive coterie of fans. They're surely more obsessive than the artist himself: Mr. Siena's wobbly patterning may bring to mind the convoluted fancies of an outsider artist, but he's not haunted by demons or oblivious to the world. He's more duty-bound than driven-a workaholic, not a visionary.

The drawings rely on the systematic, but always veer off-course. They do conform unfailingly to the perimeters of the page. They resemble pseudo-Surrealist webbing, ornate architectural structures, lumpish crystals and endless strands of spaghetti. Various cultures have influenced Mr. Siena, most notably Islam and Navajo. The crafting of the drawings is winning in its dedication; there's no doubt one would look good hanging in the living room. Seen as a group, however, it becomes clear that flexibility of means does not guarantee flexibility of ends. The tension Mr. Siena creates has no variety or nuance; in terms of pictorial effect, the images are indistinguishable one from another. Gallery-goers are bound to love the first drawing they come across-the second one, too. Round about the ninth or 10th, they'll start to wonder what else there is to look at in Chelsea.

James Siena: Drawings is at Gorney, Bravin and Lee, 534 West 26th Street, until July 31.

Drunk on

Modernism

The exhibition Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Legacy , at the Kent Gallery in Soho, won't win any awards for truth in advertising. Not much of a case can be made for Bayer's legacy, either as a proponent of the Bauhaus or as a Modernist master, on the evidence of this truncated and rather discursive retrospective. The show aims to underscore Bayer's artistic consistency and stylistic fluency; it includes paintings, drawings, photographs and montages spanning almost 40 years. Instead, it makes Bayer (1900-1985) look flighty and unfocused, incapable of staying for long with any one thing.Unfurlingdreamscapes, designer Cubism, Magrittean montages, Dadaist-inspired tomfoolery and, later in life, a quasi-religious futurism-Bayer brought the same keen and glancing intelligence to them all. The early work shows us the excitement of an artist drunk on Modernism: We exult in Bayer's dizzying and newfound sense of freedom, the license to explore artistic avenues not yet imagined. The Lonely Metropolitan (1932), an absurdist exegesis on urban anomie, is the keeper; Symbols in Blue (1960), a comic procession of cosmological entities, is the charmer. The loss of tone between the two defines the exhibition and, for all I know, the oeuvre itself.

Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Legacy is at the Kent Gallery, 67 Prince Street, until July 25.

I'm no longer shocked by the kind of museum architecture that lords it over the works of art it's ostensibly meant to serve while offering few, if any, aesthetic rewards of its own. Nowadays, that's what's expected of a new museum building, and the only thing to be said in favor of Mr. Botta's SFMOMA is that it isn't another Frank Gehry romantic ruin. On the contrary, the design of SFMOMA errs in the direction of overreaching banality and boredom, with exterior forms too bulky for the neighborhood and characterless interior spaces occasionally punctuated by silly architectural conceits.

I was in the Bay Area on other business, but I decided to take a look anyway. I had a happy memory of the early Matisses in the museum's permanent collection, and I was keen, too, to see the current exhibition devoted to the work of Ellsworth Kelly. I was less keen to revisit the museum's other current attraction-the Gerhard Richter retrospective I'd already suffered through at MoMA in New York-but I took another look at that, too, alas.

Those early Matisses are quite as wonderful as I remembered them to be, and they remain, in my opinion, SFMOMA's principal aesthetic asset. As for the Ellsworth Kelly exhibition, it bears a more direct relation to late Matisse, to the period of the large-scale color cut-out compositions. In some of Mr. Kelly's work of the 1990's, he appears to have reduced Matisse's color cut-out forms to a single, large-scale, curved monochrome shape that addresses the eye less as a picture than as a wall sculpture-a reminder that the process by which Matisse produced his late color cut-outs has sometimes been described as "sculpturing light."

It's the great virtue of Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco , as this exhibition is called (it's largely drawn from collections in the Bay Area, where Mr. Kelly enjoys a significant following), that it closely documents the artist's development over a period spanning nearly half a century (1947-96).The first painting we see in the show is a highly accomplished, ultra-realist Self-Portrait with Thorn (1947), painted at the age of 24. It's also the last painting in the show to feature a distinctly American style. The following year, 1948, the young artist took off for Paris to study art on the G.I. Bill.

Mr. Kelly remained in France for six years, and it was there that he embraced the modernist avant-garde-a Parisian avant-garde that differed significantly from its counterpart in New York in the late 1940's and early 1950's. At no point in his development do the aesthetic imperatives of the New York School appear to have tempted his interest. The sometimes complex but increasingly simplified modes of abstraction he espoused remained linked to a current of Parisian aestheticism and hedonism that was firmly rejected in New York.

It's for this reason, among others, that the Minimalist element in Mr. Kelly's work-if indeed it can be called that-is not to be confused with the self-imposed anti-aesthetic of such doctrinaire Minimalists as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra and early Frank Stella. Even the most austere examples of Mr. Kelly's color abstractions are derived, however distantly, from observed experience. The aesthetic process by means of which his abstract vocabulary is distilled from something observed in the material world may be too hermetic for most observers to divine. I think that in all the most recent work, it remains fairly elusive-but it's the final result that counts.

Mr. Kelly has often been quoted as saying that he gave up easel painting because it was "too personal." I've often wondered what this could mean. What could be more personal than the persistent, unvarying project of self-abnegation on a monumental scale that we observe in his own most ambitious abstractions? In some respects, he's the most personal of all the Minimalists, for the current of Parisian hedonism that's recaptured in his painting is anything but anonymous. Call it passive-aggressive, if you like: This is a pictorial style that's ambitious to impose itself on our sensibilities and isn't the least bit diffident about doing so.

Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco remains on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 5, 2003.

Until now, what little I knew about Ms. Jagger's work I'd gleaned from gallery listings: brief descriptions of how "roadkill" is her inspiration and medium. Having suffered in recent years a plague of art incorporating dead fauna, I was in no rush to learn more. (The best place to go for that kind of thing is the American Museum of Natural History, where the specimens on display are offered in the name of science, not art.) And yet, having found myself in Soho recently on an errand, I decided it was my critical duty to pop into Kind and see the work. I was shocked-but not because it offended my not-so-delicate sensibilities. What's shocking about Ms. Jagger's sculptures is that they actually function-and succeed-as art. No Damien Hirst–like huckster, Ms. Jagger is a sculptor of singular, though not unproblematic, gifts.

Roadkill is not, literally speaking, Ms. Jagger's medium. Her wraith-like effigies are casts made in plaster of horses and deer found dead on or near the artist's farm in Kerhonkson, N.Y. Two of the three pieces are fractured "shells" of animals suspended by wires that have been attached to architectural armatures; the other, The Pregnant Deer (2000), is a free-standing piece. All of these partake of the theater: Offset with dramatic lighting, they're like marionettes in an otherworldly ballet.

The detachment Ms. Jagger employs when casting her subjects must be formidable-it's not every artist who, confronted with the corpse of her favorite horse, mixes up a batch of plaster. I don't mean to imply that this detachment is a form of callousness. Ms. Jagger's art is gentle and loving, an homage to life rather than its embodiment. As such, it's stringent in its means and romantic in effect. Ms. Jagger balances these extremes adroitly, so that one's quibbles about the bathetic are set aside. What can't be set aside is the clumsiness of the installation: The floor lamps that illuminate the tableaus are an obstacle to both the eye and foot. Ms. Jagger needs to rethink her presentation. All the same, the show is an unlikely and unexpected triumph.

Gillian Jagger: The Absence of Faith is at the Phyllis Kind Gallery, 136 Greene Street, until July 29.

Vibrant Doodles

An artist may save every scrap of paper he's ever doodled on, but does that mean they're worth looking at? The ephemera culled from the flat files of the abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly, currently the subject of the exhibition Tablet 1949-1973 , now at the Drawing Center, are worth looking at, although one should bear in mind that they function less as ends than as means.

Each of the 188 scribbles, scrabbles and sketches on view offers evidence of an eye ever attuned to visual stimuli. Mr. Kelly takes inspiration where he finds it: from a snow-cone wrapper to a photograph of sailboats to a scrap of canvas riddled with blotches. He also sketches upon whatever surface is at hand-a gallery announcement from Julian Levy, a dinner invitation from Sidney Janis or a telegram from Mom. These notations aren't much more than throwaways, but they are free-flowing and inquisitive, foolhardy and funny. They are, in short, everything Mr. Kelly's art-his real art, one wants to say-is not.

As someone who finds Mr. Kelly's real art beautiful and boring, I had a fine old time at the Drawing Center. It's refreshing to see this most controlling of hedonists let down his hair; goofing around becomes him. One does, however, wonder about the hubris entailed in such an everything-but-the- kitchen-sink venture. Only an artist convinced of his Midas touch would dare such a thing.

Still, there are signs that Mr. Kelly doesn't take himself too seriously. The show's nonhierarchical installation-two rows of identically scaled frames ring the gallery without pause for emphasis-establishes, albeit in a back-handed manner, that this is an artist for whom aesthetic discrimination is paramount. Wise to the slim aesthetic weight his doodles carry, Mr. Kelly makes no distinctions here. The irony is that his doodles come closer to achieving the vitality we expect from art than his museum-ready masterworks. Is it unjust to claim that Tablet 1949-1973 is all the Ellsworth Kelly any reasonable person should ever need? I don't think so.

Ellsworth Kelly: Tablet 1949-1973 is at the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, until July 24.

That Huge and Angry Thing

I used to think that Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was the artist people hated to love, but now it seems like he's the artist people love to hate. If that comment sounds disingenuous, consider that Picasso's reputation has diminished in recent years. How could it not? When pranksters like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia ascend to the front ranks of Modernist masters, everything that Picasso stood for-and here I speak of him as an artist, not as a human being-is all but thrown out the window. His pivotal role in the advent of Modernism is still pretty much intact, but rumblings that his achievement is not all it's cut out to be are heard with increasing frequency. Also consider Picasso's influence on the contemporary scene: practically nil. When the art world rewards transgression and discounts tradition, Picasso is no longer an inspiration-he's the enemy or, worse, a nonentity.

These thoughts were brought to mind by Pablo Picasso: Metamorphoses , an exhibition currently at the Jan Krugier Gallery. The paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints on view are from the collection of the artist's granddaughter, Marina Picasso. The gallery calls this show a "retrospective," and I suppose it is: It spans the entirety of the artist's career. We see him make his way from an early takeoff of Goya to full-fledged Cubism to Constructivist sculpture to a 1972 drawing that plunks Rembrandt smack dab in the middle of a pornographic reminiscence. Yet "retrospective" is too grand a word for what is, essentially, a patchwork compilation. Each piece is touched by Picasso's genius-that huge and angry thing-but few are defined by it.

Metamorphoses is unlikely, in other words, to win Picasso any new converts. For true believers, it will serve as a reminder, albeit a bumpy one, of why we got religion in the first place. And when Picasso pulls off a winner against all odds-as in an appallingly hasty nude from 1946-we know that all the bumps are worth it.

Pablo Picasso: Metamorphoses; Work from 1898-1973 is at the Jan Krugier Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, until July 26.

Mark di Suvero has done it. With his exhibition of sculpture at the West 24th Street location of Gagosian Gallery, he has taken the Chelsea paradigm-you know, "My gallery's bigger than your gallery"-and brought it down to size. Or rather, Mr. di Suvero has brought it up to his size, endowing Mr. Gagosian's hangar-like space with an aesthetic rationale that it has previously (and conspicuously) lacked. Richard Serra, another sculptor who works on a monumental scale, attempted something similar in the same gallery a few years back, but whereas Mr. Serra's use of scale is invariably overweening and intimidating, Mr. di Suvero's sizable sculptures are as inevitable, organic and grandly impersonal as, oh, a mountain.

The two pieces on display, Evviva Amore and Ulula (both 2001), were, I am told, preexisting works tailored to their current venue. Tailored, it should be reiterated, and not compromised. If anything, Mr. di Suvero looks like he had a ball adapting his pieces to the space, tacitly acknowledging its physical parameters while not-so-tacitly razzing the notion that anything so mundane as an art gallery should rein him in. As if to underscore that bigness is, for this artist, a necessity and not an option, the gallery has included Rudder (2000), a sculpture that's more ostentatious than its table-top dimensions might let on. Mr. di Suvero flexes considerably less ego the more monumental he works, proving, in the end, that monumental is where his heart is. Mark di Suvero is at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, until June 16.

Clearly, Ross Bleckner Was Never an Understudy

"What's my motivation?" is the question actors presumably ask themselves before taking on a role. As a practical query, it's not an inappropriate one for artists to ask of themselves. Not all artists, of course-no one ever lost sleep worrying whether Fra Angelico was lacking in motivation. Just the typical artist, which is to say the bad, the humdrum and the nonentity. Matters of motivation were brought to mind while I was visiting the exhibition of paintings by Ross Bleckner at the Chelsea branch of Mary Boone Gallery. Mr. Bleckner has, one would guess, never given much thought to his motivation, but given his recent pictures, he should.

Have there ever been works of art as desultory as these? A loaded question, I know, but even Mr. Bleckner's devotees must be furrowing their brows and scratching their scalps when faced with the artist's latest. Each canvas is an all-over accumulation of blob-like circles punctuated by that distinctive-i.e., cold and brittle-Blecknerian highlight. Failing to multiply as form, neither do the circles thrive as color or hold as compositions, and why the pictures are as big as they are is a mystery. The only virtue the paintings offer, as far as I can see, is that their surfaces appear to be scrubbable.

Mr. Bleckner is, from the errant evidence on view, an artist who puts brush to canvas not because he has to, but because he can-and that is never enough. Ross Bleckner is at Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, until June 23.

Kelly Calibrates To the Point of Conceit

Reading the press release for Ellsworth Kelly: Relief Paintings, 1954-2001, an exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, one notes that Mr. Kelly's color sense is "perfectly calibrated." But one wants to chime in that every particular of Mr. Kelly's art is equally-that is to say, flawlessly-calibrated. This has long been Mr. Kelly's M.O., and he's good at it, maybe too good.

Each of the relief paintings is constructed from two monochromatic canvases, one placed on top of the other; these either snuggle, shift or jut, sometimes barely, at other times by a matter of feet. The pieces are weighted-and laudably so-but the effect of the exhibition as a whole is firmly, if politely, dismissive. Mr. Kelly has rendered the environs of Mr. Marks' gallery so forbiddingly pristine that we're inhibited from exhaling, lest we dare befoul the excellences on display. Best seen at a distance where they can be read pictorially, the relief paintings, viewed up close as three-dimensional objects, are flatly, indeed shockingly, unconsidered.

"Relief," as it turns out, is merely a conceit for Mr. Kelly, so the works fail to keep up the bargain-or at least half of the bargain-implicit in their medium. The pieces, it turns out, aren't so perfect after all-as works of art, anyway. As elaborately scaled objets d'art, however, they're perfect enough, if only because they don't ask much from us in the first place. Ellsworth Kelly: Relief Paintings, 1954-2001 is at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 22nd Street, until June 29.

A 40-Year Reunion Of Four Painters

When the art critic Jules Langsner organized the seminal exhibition Four Abstract Classicists, seen at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1959, he contrasted the "articulated," "orderly" and "organizational" paintings of John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, Lorser Feitelson and Karl Benjamin against the "helter-skelter of raw existence," "the buzz of confusion" that is "day-to-day life." One couldn't ask for a better updated example of this contrast than that which greets viewers as they enter the new location of Gary Snyder Fine Art. After strolling along a, shall we say, picturesque stretch of 11th Avenue, gallery-goers encounter the crisp colors and clean geometry of Mr. Hammersley's Couple #7 (1961) in the gallery's front window. The contrast between the rawness of the former and the articulation of the latter isn't only abrupt, but it makes for the kind of experience-odd and extreme, unexpected and delightful-that only this city can afford.

Couple #7 serves as the introduction to the exhibition Four Abstract Classicists: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin, which is less a re-creation of the original show than an homage to it. A truncated homage, that is, and if the Snyder show is frustrating in its brevity-none of the painters is seen in any depth-it is, nonetheless, offbeat enough to pique our interest.

Clarity and flexibility, rather than purity and certitude, are the hallmarks of these four individual, not to say eccentric, painters. Feitelson offers up a slo-mo sensuality, McLaughlin an austerity keyed to the wispiest of baby blues, and Benjamin a fractured mix of Auguste Herbin, Indian Space Painting and the proverbial explosion in the tile factory. Mr. Hammersley is, in his own stark way, the most compelling of the bunch, and a painter whose work is a kissing cousin to that of Mr. Kelly. It would appear, in fact, that Mr. Hammersley's art kisses better, largely because its inside-out dynamism encourages an open dialogue and not the last word. Four Abstract Classicists: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin is at Gary Snyder Fine Art, 601 West 29th Street, until Aug. 25.

Haunting and eccentric, Mr. York's depictions of forests, flowers, damsels and Indian chiefs meld the mythic, the biblical and the densely personal. Putting brush to canvas with a torpid ease, Mr. York infuses every pat, slur and mottle of oil paint with consequence. (This accounts for his high standing among painters.) A somber sfumato envelops the work from the 1960's, imbuing it with a dire, perhaps even repentant nostalgia. Pictures of a more recent vintage trade the richly atmospheric for the impenetrably symbolic-their sign-like mysteries don't entrance so much as rebuff.

Nonetheless, Mr. York is, in his own dourly indelible manner, a treasure. Unless he undergoes a temperamental makeover and starts cranking them out like Robert Rauschenberg, the Davis & Langdale show is about as good an opportunity as we're likely to have any time soon to puzzle over Mr. York's homely, humble and mesmerizing pictures. Don't miss it. Albert York: A Loan Exhibition is at Davis & Langdale Company Inc., 231 East 60th Street, until May 5.

Arp-like Sculpture For a Younger Set

Peter Reginato, whose sculpture is currently on display at Adelson Galleries Inc., is an artist in love-in love, that is, with the Biomorphism of Hans Arp and Alexander Calder and the Constructivism of Julio Gonzalez. Whether gallery-goers who love these artists will love Mr. Reginato's art is up in the air. There's a lot to like, certainly, in his playful conglomerations of brightly colored thingamajigs. Each one is a wibbly-wobbly cosmos, a circus-like realm wherein myriad blips and blobs, all forged from steel, attain a goofy equilibrium. These characters accumulate into figurative totalities that recall the totemic, the robotic and the bestial.

In its parts, Mr. Reginato's art is winning: The praying mantis in Thin Golden Style (2000) and the poodle in Mild Steel (2000-01) are delightful inventions deftly given shape. As wholes, however, the work is static, its sculptural checks and balances too checked and balanced to let Mr. Reginato's flights of fancy take wing. Strolling around his amiable array of individuals, it struck me that the most beneficial environment for them would be a playground. These are sculptures that need children careening around them to fulfill the irrepressible whimsy Mr. Reginato so ardently hopes to achieve. Peter Reginato: Sculpture is at Adelson Galleries Inc., 25 East 77th Street, third floor, until April 28.

Andrew Spence One-Ups Ellsworth Kelly

When the Guggenheim Museum gave Ellsworth Kelly a mega-retrospective a few years back, the Morris-Healy Gallery, if memory serves correctly, gave the painter Andrew Spence a mini one. This simultaneous fêting was fortuitous in that it allowed one to compare Mr. Kelly's work with that of an artist who is, if not exactly a disciple, then someone who just plain likes Mr. Kelly's methodology-that methodology being the pictorial distillation of mundane objects (stairwells, say, or subway seats) into flat, emblematic images that toe the line between representation and abstraction. Mr. Kelly gained a world-class reputation for doing just that, yet Mr. Spence-whose recent canvases are at the Edward Thorp Gallery-is the better painter.

The pivotal distinction between the two is that while Mr. Kelly divines the essence of his subjects, Mr. Spence locates the pith of his. He does this, simply and surely, by giving his images body by layering oils with a palette knife. The gratifyingly tangible surfaces of Mr. Spence's pictures evidence a measured condensation of observed phenomenon. This one-to-one relationship between object and abstraction does, admittedly, risk a one-liner kind of literalness. When the punch line of a picture misses its mark-and they do so here more often than an admirer would like to admit-one wonders why Mr. Spence went to all the trouble. Having said that, he does provide aesthetic rationale for the shaped canvas that holds those drolly deracinated Geese (2001) and makes a tight balletic comedy from a Thin TV (2001), the latter of which is Mr. Spence's finest effort since 1988's definitive Ivy Windows. Andrew Spence: Recent Paintings is at Edward Thorp Gallery, 210 Eleventh Avenue, sixth floor, until May 12.

Gnarled Steel That Burlesques the Macho

If one were inclined to practice back-seat psychiatry, it would be easy enough to conclude that Lee Tribe, whose steel sculptures are at Robert Steele Gallery, suffers from a split personality. The two modes of work on exhibit aren't just dissimilar, they're diametrically opposed. The majority of pieces are gnarled, knotty masses of machine parts, works that coil with a sweaty and torturous muscularity. The rest, with their spiraling lines and sportive spirit, are comical, open and fastidiously decorative. The latter work is the more ingratiating, and at first one prefers it. Yet its significance is, in the end, less aesthetic than therapeutic: They're the artist's outlet for blowing off steam. The pieces are nice enough, but Mr. Tribe is more himself when he's letting the steam build. It's in his clusters of rage, as it were, that his tense and all-but-unbearable vision finds its truest expression.

Assembled from bolts, chains, rings and ball bearings, Mr. Tribe's sculptures are reminiscent of sea-shells, geological formations and, well, guts. Some of them harshly burlesque the macho-the arcing phallus of Of the Oracle (1998-2001) is pathetically frantic, not triumphantly cocksure-but Mr. Tribe is at his best in a batch of diminutive table-top sculptures, pieces that could be grasped within the palm of one's hand. One measure of their artistic merit, in fact, is that we want to grip these "steel stones," as if the only way to comprehend them were through touch. Recalling prehistoric artifacts or implements weathered by ritual, these lumpish clumps acquire a vital dignity by accepting the pressures, both internal and external, that have shaped them. They're among Mr. Tribe's most recent efforts. Should he continue on in this intriguing tack, his next show ought to be a doozy. Lee Tribe: Sculptures is at Robert Steele Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, third floor, until April 28.