Good light for painting

For $1.4 million, you probably couldn't afford a Jackson Pollock painting, but you can buy his old apartment at 46 Carmine Street.

The Greenwich Village penthouse is bright and airy, "like a Paris atelier," the listing helpfully suggests, but it also has plenty of dark and ominous overtones. Not only did the famously-troubled painter live there, but the building was once owned by Aaron Burr. Perhaps he even paced back and forth across the apartment, practicing the agile moves that felled Alexander Hamilton.

The condo, listed with Citi Habitats broker Udi Eliasi, was on the market last fall, but was pulled temporarily so that the tenant could spend his last months of his lease enjoying the four skylights and the fireplace and the open loft bedroom undisturbed by buyers tromping through the loft.

The listing bills the space as "bohemian" and "romantic," but it's also business-savvy, and comes with one-third of the commercial space on the ground floor that is said to pay all the maintenance and taxes on the building.

At 800-square feet, it's one of the smallest penthouses on the market (the "adorable" bathroom looks scarcely bigger than a shower stall, even if it does have a Japanese soaking tub), but that just means you can spend your weekends obsessively checking the floorboards for paint splatters.

See inside Jackson Pollock's apartment >>

kvelsey@observer.com

We spoke with Citi-Habitats broker Udi Eliasi who explained that the current tenant, who has five months left on his lease, didn't want hoards of prospective buyers tramping through his place. "The tenant and the landlord are just going back and forth with the access," Mr. Eliasi explained. "It will be back towards February," he said, adding that it would have the same $1.4 million asking price.

Mr. Eliasi's listing notes that the place is "Like a Paris atelier. Romantic, bohemian, sunny, quiet and ONE-OF-A-KIND." The five-story building was erected in 1827, and housed both the man who felled Alexander Hamilton and the artist who made a living doing what your five-year-old can do better.

eknutsen@observer.com

The new Parrish Art Museum under construction

Earlier this month, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton raised $675,000 at its glitzy annual fund-raising gala—the last to take place in its present building. Meanwhile, a few miles away, in Water Mill, the skeleton of the Parrish’s new home, an elegant, barnlike building designed by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron that’s as long as a city block, has begun to rise by the side of Montauk Highway, next to Duck Walk Vineyards. Days before the Parrish’s gala, the village of Southampton presented to the public for the first time its future plans for an arts center in the Parrish’s present, soon to be former, building on Jobs Lane.

On the afternoon of the gala, Parrish director Terrie Sultan took The Observer on a tour of the museum’s vault, where its collection of over 2,600 artworks is housed. She rolled back floor-to-ceiling racks to reveal paintings by William Merritt Chase, Willem de Kooning and realist Fairfield Porter, of whom she says the museum has the largest collection in the country. (When Porter died in 1975, his widow donated the contents of his studio to the Parrish.) In the new building, set to open next summer, 7,500 of the 12,300 square feet of exhibition space will be dedicated to shows from this permanent collection.

While it’s been scaled back from the Parrish’s original ambitions—an $80 million project by Herzog & de Meuron that would have mimicked the look of artist residences—the new building, a financially more manageable project that was conceived during the recession in 2009, is widely admired. (It’s still nearly double the size of the current building, and its $26.2 million price is 80 percent paid for, with construction proceeding on schedule.) With its capacity for showcasing the permanent collection, it is also meant to inspire growth in the collection: “It’s very hard to solicit works from collectors if you can’t demonstrate that they will be on view,” Ms. Sultan said, adding that “there’s a wish list.” And so far, it seems to be working. In the vault, Ms. Sultan pointed to a recent acquisition—one of Ross Bleckner’s “Architecture of the Sky” paintings still in the bubble wrap in which it was shipped. It’s the first of that series to enter a public institution (Mr. Bleckner had been saving the piece for himself, but changed his mind). Nearby were some Porter paintings that came as gifts. Ms. Sultan also mentioned a recent gift of a Keith Sonnier sculpture.

Museum supporters are eager to see that permanent collection go on regular view. A recent addition to the board of trustees—he joined in December 2009—Manhattan-based lawyer Peter Haveles characterizes himself as “a modest collector”; his children benefited from summer art-education programs at the Parrish. He said he’s excited to see the museum “operate on all of its cylinders” by doing temporary exhibitions and permanent collection shows at the same time; up to now, it’s been either/or. He described his recent visit to the vault with Ms. Sultan as being “like a 6-year-old in a candy store,” and says the typical patron of the Parrish will be excited about seeing the rotating exhibition of Fairfield Porters.

But it’s not just the permanent collection that will be on view once the new building is completed.

“If you’re asking, are we going to be organizing and presenting world-class exhibitions that people will come from all over the world to see, the answer is yes,” Ms. Sultan told The Observer, standing in the museum’s current exhibition of work by Dorothea Rockburne. She added that the museum will be “engaging in an international dialogue on all levels.” She said it’s too early to release information about the opening exhibition, but hinted that it will be of a contemporary artist who has a connection to the East End, and that it will be “the kind of thing where people say, ‘Of course! And why didn’t we think of that?’”

Last September, the museum added a trustee—one of six new board members to join since December 2009—who seemed particularly interested in world-class exhibitions and international dialogue. Adam Sender, who runs the hedge fund Exis Capital Management, has been summering in Sag Harbor, with his family, for the past 15 years. Two weeks before the Parrish gala, he hosted a cocktail party for the museum at his home. Ms. Sultan and Art in America magazine editor Lindsay Pollock, as well as local artists like Michael Halsband and Matthew Satz, toured the spacious house and landscaped grounds, gazing at works by international avant-garde stars, the kinds of pieces you are likely to come across at Art Basel or the Venice Biennale. Mr. Sender is anything but a modest collector. A large white abstract Sol Lewitt sculpture sat on the manicured lawn; a huge Urs Fischer sculpture of a cigarette lighter dominated the living room; across from it hung a giant Damien Hirst butterfly painting; an entire gallery space devoted to pieces made from panty hose and cigarettes by Sarah Lucas was next to the stairwell; light-box photographs by Jeff Wall lit up the dining room; a bright yellow Bruce Nauman neon light tube piece that spells out “Run from fear fun from rear” illuminated an upstairs hallway; there were works by up-and-coming talents like Brendan Fowler, Elad Lassry and Matt Chambers. Mr. Sender employs a personal curator and regularly loans his artworks for exhibitions around the world.

In other words: Fairfield Porter this was not. Alice Aycock, an artist who is known for her earthwork-style sculptures, and who will have a major exhibition of her drawings at the Parrish in 2013, was among the guests at Mr. Sender’s party. “My jaw dropped,” Ms. Aycock told The Observer a week later, describing her reaction to the house, grounds and collection. “I live within walking distance and I had no idea this was there.”

She added, “If people like Adam Sender will get behind the Parrish, then the museum will be cooking with gas.”

“With a building like that, they have the opportunity to do some exciting shows,” said Mr. Sender, referring to the new Herzog & de Meuron structure. He put aside plans to open a private exhibition space for his collection in a disused church in Sag Harbor, joining the Parrish board instead. “Exciting to me means contemporary.”

Mr. Haveles characterized the Parrish’s board, a mixture of full- and part-time residents, as diverse and engaged, but not meddlesome. On the board level, he said, the museum is discussed not as one with aspirations to be a global or national institution, but rather as an important regional one, one that reflects the art of the region and serves the region’s needs, and that will be attractive to people visiting from other parts of the East End, and also to visitors from Manhattan.

Ms. Sultan put the emphasis on the artistic legacy of the East End—ranging from Childe Hassam to Jackson Pollock to Roy Lichtenstein to Chuck Close.  “We are very proud to be a museum in this region,” she said. “It’s one of the only regions like this in the country where the level of contribution from the artists who have an association with this area is as high as it is.”

If the word “regional” comes up often in discussions of the new Parrish, “local” and “pedestrian-oriented” are more likely to be used in descriptions of the village’s plans for its own $20 million project: a hybrid arts complex at the site the Parrish is leaving.

On July 7, the village of Southampton held the first public presentation of plans—four different ones were presented—for the Southampton Center for the Arts. Siamak Samii, chair of the village’s planning commission, told The Observer that part of a master plan for the center of the village is the creation of an arts district, of which the old Parrish site will serve as anchor. It will incorporate visual and performing arts as well as education, and parts of it will be accessible around the clock; the center will be aimed at both summer and year-round residents. (The village’s full time population is 3,000-4,000; in summer it spikes to around 12,000.)

One object of the project, Mr. Samii said, is to “bring residential living into the heart of the village.” In neighboring villages like East Hampton, he said, “commerce and retail” have been the engines of growth. “We want culture to be the engine of growth.”

The arts complex will be fueled by partnerships with cultural institutions, such as museums and theater groups, and educational institutions outside the village that will use the facility as an extension. He said the village has so far reached out to 15 institutions, including the Lincoln Center Film Festival, and responses have been positive.

The Parrish’s lease is up in summer 2012; it plans to have next summer’s gala in its completed building, in Water Mill. Between now and that time, Mr. Samii said, the village will set up boards, bring in a director and fund-raise, with the aim of breaking ground in the next two to three years. Manhattan-based arts consultancy Webb Management Services has put the three-year project, which will create 40,000 square feet of facilities at around $20 million, once the operational costs are factored in.

The village does not see its arts complex competing with the Parrish, but rather complementing it—an “amicable relationship” that, as Mr. Samii described it, could even include the Parrish’s doing loan shows there.

“One of the main elements is to engage some of the local artists even more,” said Mr. Samii. “Local artists who don’t feel they are on the radar of the Parrish. And there are a lot of them.” He added that the facility would ideally be a place “where there would be more interaction between the community and its artists.” It is envisioned as “a place of gathering, a piazza for the center of the village.”

The Parrish, as he put it, “is extending itself to a more international high-profile, high-energy art scene. But we think that should not be at the expense of ignoring the local community.”

sdouglas@observer.com

A test of Abstract Expressionism has been how an artist can sustain an authentic painting practice long after his reputation is secure. After all, productivity in art is not the same as fecundity, as it often yields a recycling of skill and taste to formulaic styling. It is an open secret that the productivity weighing against greatness in the career of Abstract Expressionist Sam Francis makes it imperative to judge his work on a painting-by-painting basis.

That said, the singularity of several of his compositions on canvas and on paper make “Sam Francis: 1953-1959,” now at L& M Arts, a show decidedly worth a visit. Installed to advantage are early paintings that explore the possibility that Abstract Expressionism need not foreclose on joy nor put the kibosh on sensuality. Francis’ mark produces a sort of vermiculation with which he composes a surface, piece by piece. Starting loosely, then going back to tighten the composition from part to part, Francis sustains an overall organic growth. Black, 1955, is a firm example of this.

But the painting that will have you grateful for his talent is Red, 1955-56. Large and opulent yet also fluid, Red seems to have been one of those creative miracles that resolves before the artist had a chance to rehearse and micromanage the results.

“Sam Francis: 1953-1959” is on view at L & M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, from Oct. 15 to Dec. 12.

IF NOT Matisse, then the team of Picasso and Braque is evidently mentoring the proponents of New York School modernity, for the obligation to integrate an American idiom into the brilliant European avant-garde is very much on the minds of artists working in New York before and after World War II. The question is, is it possible to further the cause of collage without reiterating all that Picasso and Braque put in play? At his best, Conrad Marca-Relli shows that the collage, a technique to construct a painting using actual commonplace materials, can be enlisted for expressive eloquence as well.

A retrospective of sorts, “Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945-1967” begins with the figurative dreamscapes best considered to be informative of quasi-metaphysical tendencies in painting, as though Marca-Relli was trying to reinvest the aesthetics of de Chirico with existentialism. When, however, this artist embraces collage, something paradoxical results: The more he engages this art of surfaces, the more profound the expression.

Not that every work is good, but what is telling in this show is that strongly constructed paintings appear in each of several different approaches to the problem of collage. From 1962 are three ringers: The Samurai #2 L-3-62, an urgently intense yet offbeat compound of collage and mixed media that gets more interesting the closer you look; Project F L-14-62, an all-white surface built of tacked-on surfaces aged and yellowing, its patina and nails relieving a homogeneity that could be too placid otherwise; Cunard L-8-62, a bold red, white and blue work that despite all odds remains without cliché.

“Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 1945-1967” remains on view at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70 Street, through Nov. 14.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM CONTINUES to provide the idiom of choice for younger artists, one of whom is Mary MacDonnell. “Touch” is her aptly named show, comprised of drawn paintings on board and on paper that emphasize tactile, not optical, properties of paint.

Ms. MacDonnell has produced an ingratiating exhibition that proves her participation in the slipstream of process-oriented responses to Abstract Expressionism associated with post-Minimalism. A variety of gestural marks is evident; and in her favor is that, despite the assorted technical approaches, the work does not rely on novelty for its effect. But neither does the layering communicate process so much as a staging area for gesture.

“Touch” is on view at James Graham & Sons, 32 East 67 Street, through Nov. 7.

“THE LEGACY OF Jackson Pollock,” written by Allan Kaprow in 1958, two years after the artist’s death, proved Kaprow to be a kind of Virgil to the underground alternatives to Abstract Expressionism just when the style was at a dead end, or seemingly so. That and subsequent essays continue to demonstrate Kaprow’s value as an artist/theorist, and certain of his pieces remain vital after many years. Yard, originally done for the outside courtyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery (where Hauser & Wirth now stands), is one of them.

Yard is and isn’t a continuation of Abstract Expressionism. Now reinterpreted by three artists around the city—here and in two other boroughs—it reveals differing aspects of itself; in the rendering by William Pope L. inside Hauser & Wirth, tires pile up within the long, dark yet glaringly lit gallery where black plastic embalmed shapes can be almost seen, to cast the once matter-of-fact accumulation as a stagy, macabre reading of the original work.

Now, what is the etiquette for passing through the space as someone is coming at you from within the gallery? “Excuse me, Miss, I’d step aside but I’m about to be swallowed by a vortex of ghoulish inner tubes”?!?

Yard (To Harrow), 1961/2000, at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69 Street, will close Oct. 24.

editorial@observer.com

He discovered last fall that many of the 32 works contained paints and materials that were not available until after Mr. Pollock's death in 1956. Alex Matter, the owner of the paintings, was sure to keep him quiet about it for the past year, though.

The New York Times reports:

In a 1976 interview, Mr. Marden answered the question: “I paint for myself. I paint for my wife … really at heart, [I paint for] anybody who wants to see it.”

Every artist wants an appreciative audience; otherwise, what’s the point? A painting is there to be seen, implicitly, by someone else. All the same, there’s a difference between taking an audience into account and playing to the crowd. Mr. Marden fits into the latter category, and it’s worth pondering who—or what—constitutes the “crowd.”

The standard complaint about Mr. Marden is that he’s elegant to a fault, whether it’s applied to the early monochromatic canvases that put him on the map or the expansive networks of looping calligraphic lines that he’s pursued in recent years. It’s an apt, if frequent, criticism: Mr. Marden rarely shakes off his penchant for the immaculately contrived mark. He can’t help but advertise his own good taste when putting brush to canvas.

In that regard, he has something in common with Sean Scully, another contemporary abstract painter with a major reputation. Mr. Scully’s recent paintings, drawings and prints are featured in Wall of Light, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully clearly take inspiration from Abstract Expressionism: the encompassing “American scale” of painters like Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko; the romantic notion that nonrepresentational form can carry spiritual portent; the conviction that art-making is a quest of heroic proportions. The work of both men is inconceivable without the example set by the New York School.

It’s equally true that their careers have been predicated on slipping out from under its imposing shadow by looking to cultures and epochs far removed from our own.

At Mr. Marden’s MoMA show, there’s a suite of painfully self-conscious collages using reproductions of antique sculptures and paintings by Goya and Fra Angelico to highlight the tradition in which he works. The Cold Mountain series and subsequent canvases are equally frank, if more circumspect, about his debt to Asian art, especially Japanese calligraphy.

Mondrian, Rothko and Philip Guston inform Mr. Scully’s stacked arrays of jutting blocks of color. His palette—smoldering, dusky, elegiac and occasionally punctuated by vibrant tones—points to the blacks, grays and tans found in the paintings of Goya, Zurbarán and Velázquez.

These links to precedent are palpable and admirable. Tradition or, as Mr. Marden has it, “that one big thing,” is a vital force, an indispensable foundation. Yet what do Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully contribute to that tradition, really?

Mr. Marden’s prowess with color is indisputable: Any painter whose palette is unnamable, even when a canvas is dedicated to a single hue, clearly possesses a gift. The Whitney’s tripartite Summer Table (1972-73) is, in its implacable richness, almost impossibly evocative. The later canvases are defined more by drawing than painting, but his ever broadening line admits to velvety and, at times, lurid tones.

Mr. Scully’s talent is for color as well. You’ve got to love how a lone vertical slab of brooding green anchors Barcelona White Bar (2004), an orchestration of deep reds, oranges and grays. However bulky and monolithic the compositions, Mr. Scully’s palette enlivens them with bold rhythms and counter-rhythms.

Overall, however, the handsomeness of both men’s work is suffocating.

Mr. Marden is incapable of making an honest mark. However intuitive, spontaneous and worked his surfaces and brushwork appear, they are calculated from the get-go. Effect, not exploration, defines the work. A colleague suggests that placing a Marden canvas next to a vintage Pollock would offer an eye-opening comparison. I’m more inclined to see how one would fare alongside a Richard Diebenkorn painting; Mr. Marden’s pictorial techniques have their basis in Diebenkorn’s quietly tenacious process.

If Mr. Marden flaunts his sensitivity, Mr. Scully bullies the room. It’s not an unappealing approach: Forthrightness, even arrogance, can be bracing in art. But Mr. Scully is content to reiterate compositional formulas—his puzzle-like variations on the grid are, at this date, a trope that has lost its reason for being. The wisps of bright color that peek out from behind the crevices of his geometries are an easy and annoying mannerism. The physicality of his paint-handling is, in its own way, as overbearing as Mr. Marden’s and sometimes confused: The touch is often woolly and vague when it wants to be fleshy or architectural.

Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully deserve our attention, in part for the modest pleasures their work affords, but more so as signposts of our jumbled culture. They are modernists pointing not to new possibilities, but to pictorial platitudes that go down too easily to inspire great art.

History is the audience these two painters play to, and in the end, it’s their straitjacket. Tradition develops and mutates, often when artists least expect it. Henri Matisse, a painter both men admire, knew that tradition reveals its continuities and truths only when ruthlessly called into question. Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully are too cozy and too polite in their expertise to stretch that far. Sometimes culture wants something a bit rude—as do the rest of us.

Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, and Sean Scully: Wall of Light, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, are both on display until Jan. 15, 2007.

In a 1976 interview, Mr. Marden answered the question: “I paint for myself. I paint for my wife … really at heart, [I paint for] anybody who wants to see it.”

Every artist wants an appreciative audience; otherwise, what’s the point? A painting is there to be seen, implicitly, by someone else. All the same, there’s a difference between taking an audience into account and playing to the crowd. Mr. Marden fits into the latter category, and it’s worth pondering who—or what—constitutes the “crowd.”

The standard complaint about Mr. Marden is that he’s elegant to a fault, whether it’s applied to the early monochromatic canvases that put him on the map or the expansive networks of looping calligraphic lines that he’s pursued in recent years. It’s an apt, if frequent, criticism: Mr. Marden rarely shakes off his penchant for the immaculately contrived mark. He can’t help but advertise his own good taste when putting brush to canvas.

In that regard, he has something in common with Sean Scully, another contemporary abstract painter with a major reputation. Mr. Scully’s recent paintings, drawings and prints are featured in Wall of Light, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully clearly take inspiration from Abstract Expressionism: the encompassing “American scale” of painters like Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko; the romantic notion that nonrepresentational form can carry spiritual portent; the conviction that art-making is a quest of heroic proportions. The work of both men is inconceivable without the example set by the New York School.

It’s equally true that their careers have been predicated on slipping out from under its imposing shadow by looking to cultures and epochs far removed from our own.

At Mr. Marden’s MoMA show, there’s a suite of painfully self-conscious collages using reproductions of antique sculptures and paintings by Goya and Fra Angelico to highlight the tradition in which he works. The Cold Mountain series and subsequent canvases are equally frank, if more circumspect, about his debt to Asian art, especially Japanese calligraphy.

Mondrian, Rothko and Philip Guston inform Mr. Scully’s stacked arrays of jutting blocks of color. His palette—smoldering, dusky, elegiac and occasionally punctuated by vibrant tones—points to the blacks, grays and tans found in the paintings of Goya, Zurbarán and Velázquez.

These links to precedent are palpable and admirable. Tradition or, as Mr. Marden has it, “that one big thing,” is a vital force, an indispensable foundation. Yet what do Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully contribute to that tradition, really?

Mr. Marden’s prowess with color is indisputable: Any painter whose palette is unnamable, even when a canvas is dedicated to a single hue, clearly possesses a gift. The Whitney’s tripartite Summer Table (1972-73) is, in its implacable richness, almost impossibly evocative. The later canvases are defined more by drawing than painting, but his ever broadening line admits to velvety and, at times, lurid tones.

Mr. Scully’s talent is for color as well. You’ve got to love how a lone vertical slab of brooding green anchors Barcelona White Bar (2004), an orchestration of deep reds, oranges and grays. However bulky and monolithic the compositions, Mr. Scully’s palette enlivens them with bold rhythms and counter-rhythms.

Overall, however, the handsomeness of both men’s work is suffocating.

Mr. Marden is incapable of making an honest mark. However intuitive, spontaneous and worked his surfaces and brushwork appear, they are calculated from the get-go. Effect, not exploration, defines the work. A colleague suggests that placing a Marden canvas next to a vintage Pollock would offer an eye-opening comparison. I’m more inclined to see how one would fare alongside a Richard Diebenkorn painting; Mr. Marden’s pictorial techniques have their basis in Diebenkorn’s quietly tenacious process.

If Mr. Marden flaunts his sensitivity, Mr. Scully bullies the room. It’s not an unappealing approach: Forthrightness, even arrogance, can be bracing in art. But Mr. Scully is content to reiterate compositional formulas—his puzzle-like variations on the grid are, at this date, a trope that has lost its reason for being. The wisps of bright color that peek out from behind the crevices of his geometries are an easy and annoying mannerism. The physicality of his paint-handling is, in its own way, as overbearing as Mr. Marden’s and sometimes confused: The touch is often woolly and vague when it wants to be fleshy or architectural.

Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully deserve our attention, in part for the modest pleasures their work affords, but more so as signposts of our jumbled culture. They are modernists pointing not to new possibilities, but to pictorial platitudes that go down too easily to inspire great art.

History is the audience these two painters play to, and in the end, it’s their straitjacket. Tradition develops and mutates, often when artists least expect it. Henri Matisse, a painter both men admire, knew that tradition reveals its continuities and truths only when ruthlessly called into question. Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully are too cozy and too polite in their expertise to stretch that far. Sometimes culture wants something a bit rude—as do the rest of us.

Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, and Sean Scully: Wall of Light, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, are both on display until Jan. 15, 2007.

Curator Susan Davidson achieves both by focusing on Pollock the draftsman. Pollock was never much of a painter, really; line was his sole strength. The frustration that defines his oeuvre can be traced to a psychological root, but it can also be seen as a reaction to the challenge of constructing pictorial space. Seven “paintings” on paper on view toward the end of the show are typical: Looping skeins of paint congest and ultimately deaden the surfaces. Pollock rarely endowed his paintings with a convincing illusion of space; instead, he strong-armed them into being. Rage and exasperation don’t equal heroic expression.

One of the unique benefits of drawing is that we instinctively read the surface of the page as “containing” space, freeing the artist from needing to compose space as he would in a painting. Pollock came to relish the freedom of drawing, though the realization did not come immediately.

Early on, he tussled—at times painfully—with the paintings of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton. He also struggled to learn from Native American art, El Greco, Miró and Picasso—always Picasso. Round about 1943, the figurative impulses that would never completely leave Pollock’s art became engulfed in electric fields of scratchy line work. Five years later, he finally got it. In a trio of silvery drip pieces from 1948, we see his line discover—and thrive upon—a vital independence. It’s a revelatory moment, brilliantly underscored by the Guggenheim.

The late works on paper are Pollock’s crowning achievement. The ready space of the blank page transformed an inchoate sensibility. There’s an ease to Pollock’s automatist calligraphy—a deeply felt lyricism—but there’s discipline as well. Forget Jack the Dripper: The pictures are resolutely composed. The tension between spontaneity and control is energizing.

The best of the bunch is an untitled ink-and-watercolor drawing from around 1951, on loan from the Menil Collection. A punchy array of recognizable markings—eyes, an arrow, numbers and the artist’s name—are orchestrated within a field of swooping lines, stabbing marks, dots and dabs. The most surprising thing is the gentleness with which Pollock coaxes the elements into fruition. No pain, no strain—what an unexpectedly lovely dénouement. No Limits, Just Edges is far too macho a title for the lilting poise of the mature drawings. Jackson Pollock: Happy Man—that’s more like it.

No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper is at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, until Sept. 29.

Modernish

Guy Pène du Bois (1884-1958) deserves more than a tardy mention, just as he deserves more than a gallery retrospective. Not that James Graham & Sons hasn’t provided an indispensable service in mounting the second of two exhibitions dedicated to the American artist’s sly and acerbic paintings. We should be grateful to the gallery for picking up the historical slack trailing from our museums.

Perhaps Pène du Bois’ vexed relationship with modernism—exemplified at Graham by Another Expulsion (1950), in which Masaccio’s Adam and Eve are given the bum’s rush from a temple of art by a towering Picassoid creature—makes him seem too philistine for contemporary tastemakers. His pictures of sleek young things and arrogant capitalists have a period flavor, not only from the 1920’s milieu that fed his vision, but also because of his refusal to subjugate representation, narrative and a caustic strain of moralism to the prerequisites of abstraction. He was a painter of modern life, yes—a modernist, sort of.

Pène du Bois was curious and knowledgeable about the new art, but he was never an out-and-out convert. A deft synthesis of cool sophistication and comic grotesquerie, his mature paintings are unimaginable without the pictorial innovations of modernism, but not that unimaginable. His style owes much to the damning caricatures of Honoré Daumier, the stylizations of Art Nouveau, the skewed compositions of Edgar Degas and the painterly realism of his teacher, Robert Henri.

He reveled in the hypocrisies of entitlement. The finest pictures make an acidic comedy of manners out of the foibles and follies of the well-heeled. Not that the painter himself was immune to the trappings of wealth: He was clearly taken by high fashion, particularly as it applied to women, and ready access to culture. Still, he never let himself be suckered by spectacle. Romance may filter through Pène du Bois’ art, but it’s always fixed with a dash of vinegar.

Well, almost always. Despite the inclusion of biting pictures like the Whitney’s Mother and Daughter (1928) and Father and Son (1929), the second installment of the retrospective shows Pène du Bois becoming a kinder, gentler artist toward the latter part of his career. The crash of 1929 reduced an income based on steady painting sales. A bit of financial independence was lost; so, too, was a degree of artistic independence. A softer, more diffuse tone took over—perhaps to appease a social strata (of potential collectors) that he’d previously lampooned.

Enigmatic narratives make up for the lack of vitriol. Is something unsavory happening in Ace of Spades (1945)? It’s hard to tell. Still, you can’t avoid pining for the witty insights and crisp paint handling of the earlier work. For that, you’ll have to go to a watercolor-and-ink drawing like The Hostess (1930), in which the artist mocks the title figure’s pretensions even as he relishes her aristocratic profile and fleshy girth. It’s a moment that highlights Pène Du Bois’ distinctive gift and its later, but not altogether fatal, diminishment.

Guy Pène du Bois: Painter of Modern Life—Part II: The Mature Years is at James Graham & Sons, 1014 Madison Avenue, until June 30.

More on Paper

Though you might miss it at first glance, there’s an informal, almost chatty correspondence between the paintings on paper of Sasha Chermayeff and the collages of Chuck Bowdish, on display at the Sideshow gallery in Williamsburg. Ms. Chermayeff employs a roller, of all things, to create spare and billowing abstractions. Mr. Bowdish imagines distant vistas haunted by isolated figures. The two artists would seem to have little in common.

A deep-seated respect for the characteristics of paper unites them. For Ms. Chermayeff, the white of the page is an equal partner to the trailing ribbons of woodblock ink left by the artist’s hand or, in this case, roller. Her broad, colorful swaths, alternately glossy and matte, unfurl across the page with an ease that points to the influence of Asian calligraphy and Willem de Kooning’s late paintings. Mr. Bowdish’s respect for paper is evinced, paradoxically enough, in the rough-and-tumble manner in which it is torn and reconfigured: The fragility and relative disposability of the material allow for a jarring undercurrent to enter his muffled Surrealist narratives.

Then there’s the manner in which the figure asserts itself in the work. Mr. Bowdish populates his collages with characters inspired by the most profound reaches of history, including the arts of Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, Paul Gauguin, Giorgio de Chirico and, er, bondage porno. His idyllic dreamscapes are blessed by sumptuous women; sometimes a lone F.B.I. agent or a factory building marooned in space appears. It’s art with curious intentions and ambitious reach, and it hits the mark.

The figurative impulse informing Ms. Chermayeff’s paintings is more obscured, yet just as insistent and perhaps a bit sexier. Her forms—they’re too wide to be called lines, too resilient to be bars—slope and shimmy in a way that recalls Ingres’ exacting contours. Certainly Ms. Chermayeff’s nuanced approach to structure and surface offers an analogue for muscle and skin. It’s within specialized formats—in the compressed scale of a suite of 30 small paintings or the expansive verticality of fold-out books—that Ms. Chermayeff refines the musicality of the body’s rhythms and processes most compellingly.

Sasha and Chuck is at Sideshow, 319 Bedford Avenue, until July 17.

The same can be said of Mr. Coleman’s music, and it’s a serendipitous convergence that brings the two together. A major exhibition of Pollock’s works on paper is going on at the Guggenheim Museum. A rare concert by Mr. Coleman’s quartet takes place this Friday at Carnegie Hall, as part of the JVC Jazz Festival.

Mr. Coleman has often been called the Jackson Pollock of the alto saxophone, and he smiles at the comparison. In the liner notes on his 1959 album, Change of the Century, he described his music as “something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock.” The cover of Free Jazz (1960) featured a reproduction of Pollock’s White Light.

In the late 40’s, Pollock shattered the barriers of modern art, abandoning figures, conventional color schemes, even the boundaries of a canvas. A decade later, Mr. Coleman did the same to modern jazz, abandoning chord changes, standard rhythms and the divide between the soloist and the band; in his music, everybody improvises all at once, yet it somehow holds together.

So it’s a tingling sensation to follow this modern icon, now 76, wearing a porkpie hat and a self-designed suit that Jasper Johns might have painted, as he shuffles through the Guggenheim, musing on Pollock’s works.

Gazing at Green Silver, another 1949 “all-over” masterpiece, he says, “See? There’s the top of the painting, there’s the bottom. But as far as the activity going on all over, it’s equal.” He pauses and shakes his head, impressed. “It’s not random. He knows what he’s doing. He knows when he’s finished. But still, it’s free-form.”

Sort of like your music?

“Well, like music, not just my music.”

But most musicians put the melody up front, the chords in the background.

“But that’s only because somebody told them that’s how it should be.”

Mr. Coleman has long found abstract art a congenial setting. He made his New York debut at a Bowery bar called the Five Spot in November 1959 (one month after the first Guggenheim opened). A group of neighborhood artists—Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning—had persuaded the bar’s owner to bring in progressive-jazz musicians.

Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane played there for months on end. But it was Mr. Coleman who set off a storm. The city’s cultural denizens divided into factions. Fistfights broke out over whether Ornette was a trailblazing genius or an eccentric fake. The same reception, of course, had greeted Pollock at the start of his earlier revolution, some gasping that he’d unlocked the future, others scoffing that he just couldn’t paint.

“I paint sometimes myself,” Mr. Coleman said. “I know what’s behind wanting to paint. You want to touch something you can’t see. This term ‘abstract art’—what it means is something that causes you to see more than what you’re looking at.”

He pauses to focus on a drawing from 1946, looking at it intently from one side, then from the other side. “Mmm, mmm, mmm. Man, that’s good!” he says. “What’s the title of this?”

The placard says Untitled.

“Ah,” he replies with a smile. “That’s a good title.”

Fred Kaplan is a columnist for Slate.

The same can be said of Mr. Coleman’s music, and it’s a serendipitous convergence that brings the two together. A major exhibition of Pollock’s works on paper is going on at the Guggenheim Museum. A rare concert by Mr. Coleman’s quartet takes place this Friday at Carnegie Hall, as part of the JVC Jazz Festival.

Mr. Coleman has often been called the Jackson Pollock of the alto saxophone, and he smiles at the comparison. In the liner notes on his 1959 album, Change of the Century, he described his music as “something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock.” The cover of Free Jazz (1960) featured a reproduction of Pollock’s White Light.

In the late 40’s, Pollock shattered the barriers of modern art, abandoning figures, conventional color schemes, even the boundaries of a canvas. A decade later, Mr. Coleman did the same to modern jazz, abandoning chord changes, standard rhythms and the divide between the soloist and the band; in his music, everybody improvises all at once, yet it somehow holds together.

So it’s a tingling sensation to follow this modern icon, now 76, wearing a porkpie hat and a self-designed suit that Jasper Johns might have painted, as he shuffles through the Guggenheim, musing on Pollock’s works.

Gazing at Green Silver, another 1949 “all-over” masterpiece, he says, “See? There’s the top of the painting, there’s the bottom. But as far as the activity going on all over, it’s equal.” He pauses and shakes his head, impressed. “It’s not random. He knows what he’s doing. He knows when he’s finished. But still, it’s free-form.”

Sort of like your music?

“Well, like music, not just my music.”

But most musicians put the melody up front, the chords in the background.

“But that’s only because somebody told them that’s how it should be.”

Mr. Coleman has long found abstract art a congenial setting. He made his New York debut at a Bowery bar called the Five Spot in November 1959 (one month after the first Guggenheim opened). A group of neighborhood artists—Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning—had persuaded the bar’s owner to bring in progressive-jazz musicians.

Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane played there for months on end. But it was Mr. Coleman who set off a storm. The city’s cultural denizens divided into factions. Fistfights broke out over whether Ornette was a trailblazing genius or an eccentric fake. The same reception, of course, had greeted Pollock at the start of his earlier revolution, some gasping that he’d unlocked the future, others scoffing that he just couldn’t paint.

“I paint sometimes myself,” Mr. Coleman said. “I know what’s behind wanting to paint. You want to touch something you can’t see. This term ‘abstract art’—what it means is something that causes you to see more than what you’re looking at.”

He pauses to focus on a drawing from 1946, looking at it intently from one side, then from the other side. “Mmm, mmm, mmm. Man, that’s good!” he says. “What’s the title of this?”

The placard says Untitled.

“Ah,” he replies with a smile. “That’s a good title.”

Fred Kaplan is a columnist for Slate.