Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea. In recent years, New York¹s midtown gallery scene has found itself fighting for attention with its younger, hipper West 20s sibling. The epicenter of the art world two decades ago, the  radius around 57th street is still the home to nearly 70 art galleries. Several of these are headquartered in the historic Fuller Building on Madison Avenue and even more of them were pioneers in the art and antiques business in the city.
The neighborhood may reclaim some of its energy, critical mass and collector traffic when Phillips de Pury moves its headquarters uptown to 450 Park Avenue, off 57th Street, in November.
Until then, on Oct. 14, a handful of midtown galleries try to take back the night, Thursday night that is, with coordinated openings, special
exhibitions and performances.
A handful of highlights.

Edwynn Houk Gallery

745 Fifth Avenue

This photography gallery opened in Chicago three decades ago, representing André Kertesz and Brassai. A New York transplant, it moved to Fifth Avenue in 1997. Currently, the gallery is showing the somewhat lascivious work of Bettina Rheims. The French photographer made her name with a 1981 series of arresting photographs of acrobats and strippers that earned her a solo show at the Centre Pompidou before her 30th birthday. She went on to develop a specialty--photographing famous women, often nude or wearing clothing unbuttoned, whose bodies fill the frame. (She's done covers for Elle, Paris Match and Details.) Views of Madonna, Marion Cotillard and Heather Graham are interspersed here with those of lesser-known, and less-clad, models.

The Pace Gallery

32 East 57th Street

Who buys all this stuff? Pace pulls back the curtain on that issue with a show of works it has sold to collectors over the years and pried back to exhibit in celebration of its 50th-anniversary. The wall hangings on loan include Texas collector Ray Nasher's nude Picasso, Homme et Femme Nus (1971); Jon and Mary Shirley's Untitled XVII by Willem de Kooning; and Women of Venice iX from the [Michael] Ovitz family collection. Works by Piet Mondrian and other Picassos round out the trove.

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art

37 West 57th Street

The huge Armory Art Fair held every March features more than 280 galleries, but Mr. Nahem's booth the past couple of years has been one of the busiest. (Calvin Klein and Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry stopped by to check it out.) This circumspect veteran dealer is known for teasing major postwar works out of private collections, and he showcased a $2.8 million Sam Francis, Blue Balls I, 1960 at the fair that hadn't shown outside of Japan in two decades. At this month's exhibition, the dealer shows 20th-century Modern masters. 

Francis M. Naumann Fine Art

24 West 57th Street

On Thursday night, the curator and author will open a show of Gordon Onslow Ford. He was a member of the Surrealist circle in Paris that included André Breton and Yves Tanguy. But his move to New York (where he lectured at the New School for Social Research on surrealism), and then to Mexico, split him off from that group and moved his art in a different direction. This is the first New York exhibition devoted to the artist's work since 1946. 

The Findlay Galleries

In 1870, art dealer William Wadsworth Findlay opened the Findlay Galleries in Kansas City, Mo. Then, the family headed east. Today, there remain three Findlay galleries in New York--David Jr. (41 East 57th Street), Peter (131 East 66th Street) and Wally (124 East 57th Street)--all descended, in one form or another, from that business. Some fifth-generation Findlay family members are still involved in the art business.Thursday evening, David Findlay, Jr. and Wally Findlay galleries will stay open late with special exhibitions, with the latter gallery showcasing paintings by Isabelle de Ganay and works on paper by Alexander Calder, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth and several others.

The Merrin Gallery

724 Fifth Avenue

The gallery dates back nearly 40 years and, pretty much, if you were a museum and you wanted a classical Greek or Roman statue, pre-Columbian relic or even a mummy during that period, you bought it here from Edward Merrin. Client museums included the Met, Brooklyn, the Getty and the Louvre. In the past decade, hot-button repatriation issues have quieted (though far from ended) collecting in this market, but the gallery, now run by Samuel Merrin, still has among the richer assortments of antiquities of any dealer in the area. Ask to see the secret cabinet behind the revolving wall.

The Nohra Haime Gallery

730 Fifth Avenue

This gallery, which will celebrate its 30th birthday next year, was a pioneer, mingling Latin American contemporary art with U.S. art long before it was common to do so. Another aspect sets in apart: In an art world where artists dump the dealers who established them at the first whiff of success, gallerist Ms. Haime has been able to keep her roster.  Her current show is of the oil paintings of Adam Straus, who is celebrating his 20th year with the gallery.

The Spanierman Gallery LLC

45 East 58th Street

Descended from the former Savoy Art and Auction Gallery, founded by Samuel Spanierman in 1928 on 59th Street. the gallery is today run by his son, Ira. While it  has a modern-art branch next door, the original showcases classic American art. Through Friday, Oct. 16, it has exhibitions of the work of Susan Vecsey and Frank Bowling, but on Oct. 21 it opens a sweeping show: "In Praise of Women," a look at portraits of women over two centuries by several dozen artists.

Actually, “abstraction” is something of a misnomer: Each of the pictures is based on an Old Master painting. But don’t call what Mr. Joint does appropriation, either; his puzzle-like riffs on Masaccio and Fuseli are deeply felt valentines to the tradition of Western painting. However buoyant and whimsical the paintings may be—Necco wafers seem to be the primary inspiration for Mr. Joint’s palette, Yellow Submarine for his sense of form—they are rigorously, if not slavishly, grounded in precedent. The Spaendonck painting is included at Naumann as a point of reference. It’s a fetching object, but the use of uninflected marble as a backdrop for a floral arrangement is, at least in this example, a decorative fillip and nothing more. Mr. Joint goes Spaendonck one better, allowing the milky surface of the marble to provide color and shape. These are Mr. Joint’s most assured and satisfying compositions to date, but one can’t help but wonder if the paintings aren’t a bit stifled by the attention bestowed upon their support. As subtle and beautiful as its properties may be, the marble never quite yields its material hold on the eye—it’s always there, snagging the eye. Let’s hope Mr. Joint’s experiment with marble turns out to be a passing fling and not true love. Credit his gifts as a painter—and his quirks—that we delight in the pictures all the same. Here is a rare artist whose skill can make you look forward to the future with anticipation and optimism.

Don Joint: Catawampus; Paintings and Prints is at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, 22 East 80th Street, until Feb. 8.

Altfest’s Austerity

The American art critic Henry McBride called Charles Burchfield’s paintings “songs of hate.” I was reminded of this phrase while looking at the recent paintings of Ellen Altfest at Bellwether Gallery. McBride found much to commend in Burchfield’s hatred of the “loathsome” locales he was drawn to and even encouraged it. Ms. Altfest’s art is suffused with a similar kind of hatred—or, at least, an unpleasant austerity—yet it’s not targeted at her subjects.

Rather, the paintings reveal a fascination with things in the world. A mass of tumbleweed wedged into the corner of the studio, a field of cacti, a bevy of house plants, driftwood on the floor, and a view of Manhattan from Long Island City or Brooklyn are all subjected to Ms. Altfest’s unrelenting and clinical eye. Hatred—if we can call it that—is manifest less in the what of the paintings than in the how. Judging from the work, it seems as if Ms. Altfest hates painting.

It’s an odd conclusion to reach, perhaps. Each canvas is a tour-de-force of verisimilitude. Honing in on a single or centralized motif, Ms. Altfest limns it with a flinty touch, and does so with merciless precision. The facture of the paintings, the literal accumulation of marks upon the surface of the canvas, is fidgety with activity—like a particularly industrious anthill or nerves after one too many cups of coffee. Ms. Altfest is begrudging in her painterly responsibilities; her doggedness conveys no joy.

The results are all but unbearable to experience. Looking at one of the paintings is like being witness to an interrogation conducted with cruel invention, under the harshest of light bulbs. Ms. Altfest’s dedication to craft and clarity provides some recompense for the work’s callousness, but not so much that you wish there weren’t something else to look at.

Ellen Altfest: Still Lives is at Bellwether, 134 10th Avenue, until Jan. 21.

Biala’s Brush

In exhibiting the elegantly offhand paintings of Biala (1903-2000), Tibor de Nagy Gallery has provided a lovely, if not earth-shaking, grace note to our understanding of 20th-century art. Giving herself the name of her hometown in Poland as a nom de plume, the woman born Janice Tworkovsky (her brother was the Abstract Expressionist painter Jack Tworkov) dedicated herself to “the kind of life I wanted to live.” That meant falling in love with the British novelist and notorious womanizer Ford Madox Ford, socializing with Brancusi and de Kooning, calling Gertrude Stein “an angry bitch,” taking Ezra Pound to task for his romance with fascism, and painting—always painting.

With their blocky rhythms and moody disposition, the paintings offer testimony to the modest pleasures of everyday life: friends over for a visit, the view outside a window, freshly picked flowers, the family cat. The work combines the intimacy of Vuillard’s densely packed interiors with a gruff and hasty variant of Matisse’s hedonism. The palette is ruddy and warm, and Biala’s sweeping brush is exhilaratingly succinct in describing form, if not as deep or as sharp as it could be. The charm of the work, as well as its chief limitation, is that it can’t shake off the clunky esprit of the inspired amateur. Biala hit the mark with Tranche de Melon sur Plat Bleu (1986), in which this morning’s breakfast is painted with a brusquely throwaway sophistication. It’s a happy performance.

Biala (1903-2000): Selected Paintings is at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 fifth avenue, until Feb. 4th.

Actually, “abstraction” is something of a misnomer: Each of the pictures is based on an Old Master painting. But don’t call what Mr. Joint does appropriation, either; his puzzle-like riffs on Masaccio and Fuseli are deeply felt valentines to the tradition of Western painting. However buoyant and whimsical the paintings may be—Necco wafers seem to be the primary inspiration for Mr. Joint’s palette, Yellow Submarine for his sense of form—they are rigorously, if not slavishly, grounded in precedent. The Spaendonck painting is included at Naumann as a point of reference. It’s a fetching object, but the use of uninflected marble as a backdrop for a floral arrangement is, at least in this example, a decorative fillip and nothing more. Mr. Joint goes Spaendonck one better, allowing the milky surface of the marble to provide color and shape. These are Mr. Joint’s most assured and satisfying compositions to date, but one can’t help but wonder if the paintings aren’t a bit stifled by the attention bestowed upon their support. As subtle and beautiful as its properties may be, the marble never quite yields its material hold on the eye—it’s always there, snagging the eye. Let’s hope Mr. Joint’s experiment with marble turns out to be a passing fling and not true love. Credit his gifts as a painter—and his quirks—that we delight in the pictures all the same. Here is a rare artist whose skill can make you look forward to the future with anticipation and optimism.

Don Joint: Catawampus; Paintings and Prints is at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, 22 East 80th Street, until Feb. 8.

Altfest’s Austerity

The American art critic Henry McBride called Charles Burchfield’s paintings “songs of hate.” I was reminded of this phrase while looking at the recent paintings of Ellen Altfest at Bellwether Gallery. McBride found much to commend in Burchfield’s hatred of the “loathsome” locales he was drawn to and even encouraged it. Ms. Altfest’s art is suffused with a similar kind of hatred—or, at least, an unpleasant austerity—yet it’s not targeted at her subjects.

Rather, the paintings reveal a fascination with things in the world. A mass of tumbleweed wedged into the corner of the studio, a field of cacti, a bevy of house plants, driftwood on the floor, and a view of Manhattan from Long Island City or Brooklyn are all subjected to Ms. Altfest’s unrelenting and clinical eye. Hatred—if we can call it that—is manifest less in the what of the paintings than in the how. Judging from the work, it seems as if Ms. Altfest hates painting.

It’s an odd conclusion to reach, perhaps. Each canvas is a tour-de-force of verisimilitude. Honing in on a single or centralized motif, Ms. Altfest limns it with a flinty touch, and does so with merciless precision. The facture of the paintings, the literal accumulation of marks upon the surface of the canvas, is fidgety with activity—like a particularly industrious anthill or nerves after one too many cups of coffee. Ms. Altfest is begrudging in her painterly responsibilities; her doggedness conveys no joy.

The results are all but unbearable to experience. Looking at one of the paintings is like being witness to an interrogation conducted with cruel invention, under the harshest of light bulbs. Ms. Altfest’s dedication to craft and clarity provides some recompense for the work’s callousness, but not so much that you wish there weren’t something else to look at.

Ellen Altfest: Still Lives is at Bellwether, 134 10th Avenue, until Jan. 21.

Biala’s Brush

In exhibiting the elegantly offhand paintings of Biala (1903-2000), Tibor de Nagy Gallery has provided a lovely, if not earth-shaking, grace note to our understanding of 20th-century art. Giving herself the name of her hometown in Poland as a nom de plume, the woman born Janice Tworkovsky (her brother was the Abstract Expressionist painter Jack Tworkov) dedicated herself to “the kind of life I wanted to live.” That meant falling in love with the British novelist and notorious womanizer Ford Madox Ford, socializing with Brancusi and de Kooning, calling Gertrude Stein “an angry bitch,” taking Ezra Pound to task for his romance with fascism, and painting—always painting.

With their blocky rhythms and moody disposition, the paintings offer testimony to the modest pleasures of everyday life: friends over for a visit, the view outside a window, freshly picked flowers, the family cat. The work combines the intimacy of Vuillard’s densely packed interiors with a gruff and hasty variant of Matisse’s hedonism. The palette is ruddy and warm, and Biala’s sweeping brush is exhilaratingly succinct in describing form, if not as deep or as sharp as it could be. The charm of the work, as well as its chief limitation, is that it can’t shake off the clunky esprit of the inspired amateur. Biala hit the mark with Tranche de Melon sur Plat Bleu (1986), in which this morning’s breakfast is painted with a brusquely throwaway sophistication. It’s a happy performance.

Biala (1903-2000): Selected Paintings is at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 fifth avenue, until Feb. 4th.

During the course of his long career in esthetic mystification, Duchamp eagerly presided over the kind of repetitions he is alleged to have been adverse to, and one of these-a replica of the Fountain , the ready-made lavatory urinal that Duchamp first produced in New York in 1917, is scheduled to be sold at auction at Sotheby's on Nov. 17. It is one of an edition of eight that was fabricated under Duchamp's supervision in 1964 and, according to a press release from Sotheby's, is expected to fetch around $1 million. This replica currently occupies a place of honor in Part I of The American Century at the Whitney Museum.

That announcement from Sotheby's, by the way, seems to have become infected by a Duchampian virus, for it speaks of the initial showing of the Fountain at the "groundbreaking 1917 New York Armory show" as a "watershed in the history of art," when all the world knows that the Armory Show took place a little earlier-in 1913-and in that show it was Duchamp's painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , that caused an uproar. The Fountain was indeed first submitted for an exhibition in New York in 1917, at the lesser-known Independents exhibition, but was rejected. In the Duchampian universe of discourse, however, dates are as fungible as the concept of authenticity or originality, and nobody but a few old-fashioned sticklers for accuracy seem to mind.

To get back to Mr. Naumann's statement about Duchamp's alleged aversion to "artistic repetition," however, I must cite a little more of the passage in which it occurs, for it will convey something of the spirit in which his weighty study of Duchamp's repetitions is written as well as the spirit of the two gallery exhibitions that have been mounted to mark its publication.

"Marcel Duchamp professed an aversion to any form of artistic repetition," Mr. Naumann writes. "'The idea of repeating, for me,' he told an interviewer in 1960, 'is a form of masturbation.'" Mr. Naumann then hastens to add: "Not that he had anything against the practice; in 1946, at the age of 59, he produced-or perhaps 'issued' is a better choice of word-one of the most original works of his artistic career: Paysage fautif , or Faulty Landscape , an essentially abstract composition made entirely out of his own semen.…When Paysage fautif was made, the use of human sperm for artistic expression was unique within the history of art; today, in more ways than one, the work can be considered seminal, for as future generations would prove, it was to have many followers."

It is yet another Duchampian paradox, of course, that Mr. Naumann should be so concerned to establish what is "original" and "unique" in an oeuvre largely devoted to repetitions and replications, but I am myself prepared to accept the idea that Paysage fautif may be Duchamp's most original work. As with so much of Duchamp's production, whether it is art is entirely beside the point. You will find a full-color, full-page reproduction of this "seminal" work on page 17 of Mr. Naumann's new book.

With Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , in which Duchampian mystifications are conflated with the mystifications of Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), we seem to have arrived at a late Alexandrian phase of Duchamp studies. Now it is not so much the work itself as the cataloguing and classification of its repetitions and influence that are the primary focus of an immense scholarly labor. Thus the two exhibitions that have been organized to mark the publication of Mr. Naumann's book-the show at Achim Moeller Fine Art that takes its title from the book itself, and the show called Apropos of Marcel: The Art of Making Art After Duchamp in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction at the Curt Marcus Gallery-have a sort of reliquary character. We are expected to be amused by this surfeit of Duchampian repetition, all of it scrupulously documented and classified, but we are also expected to worship at the shrine of the mind that created this joke in the first place.

As a collection of Duchamp memorabilia, the show at Achim Moeller is by far the more amusing. Everything that you may ever have wanted to know about Duchampian repetition is on display in two floors of the gallery and is also documented in an elegantly produced catalogue that will surely figure in many future exhibitions of Duchampian relics. Apropos of Marcel , at the Marcus Gallery, is rather more depressing, but it brings us the work of four living artists (so to speak)-Richard Pettibone, Elaine Sturtevant, Sherrie Levine and Mike Bidlo-who have voluntarily consigned their talents to a task that Duchamp himself likened to masturbation. That there is now a lively market for such Duchampian imitations is itself part of the joke, of course.

I seem myself to have made a minor contribution to this Alexandrian phase of Duchampian research, as I now learn from Mr. Naumann's book. In writing about some of Mr. Naumann's earlier labors on Duchamp's behalf, I characterized one of his footnotes as "absurd[ly] didactic." (This was in a Sept. 30,1993, Observer column.) This has prompted Mr. Naumann to append a glossary to his new book in which he painstakingly attempts to clarify the significant differences that are alleged to distinguish such terms as "appropriation," "replica," "imitated rectified ready-made," and "semi-ready-made," among others. This glossary is itself one of the most hilarious contributions to art-historical scholarship ever attempted. I won't say it is worth buying the book for, but a Xerox of this two-page glossary is guaranteed to enliven almost any dinner party at which the inanities of the New York art world in 1999 are under discussion.

The exhibition at Achim Moeller Fine Art, 167 East 73rd Street, remains on view through Jan. 15. Apropos of Marcel , at the Curt Marcus Gallery, 578 Broadway in SoHo, closes Nov. 6.

Whether Duchamp harbored any such desire will probably never be known, since the artist did not write about it and spoke about it to no one except Mr. Schwarz, according to the author. What is clear from the letters column of the January issue of Art in America is that Mr. Schwarz will probably go to his grave defending his theory. In a heated, lengthy response to a review of The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp that appeared in the January 1998 issue of the magazine, Mr. Schwarz takes apart reviewer Francis Naumann, a New York-based critic and expert on Dada who was a protégé of Mr. Schwarz until they had a falling out in 1991, a fact that was never mentioned in Mr. Naumann's review.

Mr. Naumann's review disputes Mr. Schwarz's unconscious incest theory. Mr. Naumann cites sources who maintain that Duchamp was not aware of Mr. Schwarz's theory and never approved of the text of The Complete Works . He says that Duchamp slept through the lecture in London at which Mr. Schwarz introduced his theory.

In his letter, Mr. Schwarz points out that he himself made eye contact with Duchamp several times during the lecture Mr. Naumann claims the artist slept through, and spoke to him about it afterward. He believes that such criticism has been disseminated by Alexina (Teeny) Duchamp, the artist's wife, who "never made a secret of her dislike for me" and did not share his theories.

Mr. Schwarz's letter asks: "Can our profession condone a critic who uses the space of a periodical to vent his animosity, and who indulges in spiteful and vindictive language to defame an author? Is a critic allowed to replace argued objections with gossip and hearsay intended to delegitimate an author?" He goes on to maintain that "Naumann's review abounds with malevolent insinuations, internal inconsistencies and misconceptions. Instead of discussing my analysis of actual works and statements which fully support my thesis, he resorts to the cheapest possible arguments, reporting malignant gossip, hearsay and prejudiced statements that have nothing to do with the thesis I expounded."

In the year since the review appeared, Mr. Schwarz has rallied a number of critics to his corner. He quotes a letter he received from Arthur C. Danto, the art critic for The Nation : "At the moment there is a kind of epidemic of what one might call Duchamposis-or Duchampitis-which consists in rewriting the complete works in ways which, if true, would make Duchamp vastly less interesting than I believe him-and certainly you believe him-to be. My Duchamp is the Duchamp of Arturo Schwarz." He also cites William Camfield, a source in Mr. Naumann's review, as saying, "I do not share Francis Naumann's opinion about your work on Duchamp. The fact that this comment looms in Naumann's memory and is featured in his review represents him as an individual."

In his response to Mr. Schwarz's letter that also appears in the current issue of Art in America , Mr. Naumann writes, "Shortly after my review appeared, Paul Matisse, Duchamp's stepson, wrote to inform me that I was incorrect when I stated that Duchamp died before Schwarz's book appeared. 'Schwarz sent him just about everything as he wrote it,' he recalled. 'Marcel spared himself by not reading it. Instead, he would just turn to the last page, jot something like, 'Very interesting,' sign his name and send it back.'"

Mr. Schwarz, in turn, has prepared a response to Mr. Naumann's response for an upcoming issue of Art in America , which he shared with The Observer . "Naumann disregards Duchamp's intense correspondence with me. Instead he quotes an opinion, and I wonder on which ground it was expressed, of Paul Matisse, Duchamp's stepson, who notoriously shared his mother's dislike for my writings, to the effect that 'Schwarz sends him just about everything that he wrote. Marcel spares himself by not reading it. Instead, he will just turn to the last page, jot something like very interesting, sign his name and send it back.' From this I gathered that Paul Matisse also has the gift of ubiquity since he was not living in New York, nor have I ever seen him in Neuilly or Cadaqués, when I was discussing with Duchamp."

Mr. Schwarz confirmed that he threatened to sue the magazine because of what he calls the libelous comments made by Mr. Naumann. Elizabeth Baker, editor of Art in America , did not return a phone call seeking comment before publication. "It is not a question of opinion," said Mr. Schwarz. "They should have checked whether what Francis Naumann wrote was true or not. As a matter of fact, I wanted also to sue Francis Naumann. But when I heard about the consequences of my suing him I decided not to do that, because it would have practically exiled him from Europe."

Since Mr. Naumann has prepared his own book on Duchamp that will be published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. later this year. Mr. Schwarz believes that he has been motivated by a desire to "destroy my work to promote his work." Ever the Freudian, Mr. Schwarz also believes that Mr. Naumann, who is young enough to have been his son, is also motivated by an Oedipus complex. "He turns against me because he considered me a father, and now, as Freud has very well illustrated, he tries to kill his father."

Mr. Naumann has also prepared more material for publication in an upcoming issue of the magazine. He claims that Mr. Schwarz bullied the magazine into printing every word of his letter by threatening to sue and even added a new paragraph late in the process that Mr. Naumann never saw before publication. He also claims that Art in America cut his response, making room for an advertisement that ran in the space that could have been used for his words.

"The thing that I find troubling," Mr. Naumann told The Observer ," is that threats and intimidation can have any influence within the context of scholarly exchange. I can't even get over it."