I stopped and craned my neck, puzzled. Having kept Mr. Reed's art at arm's length in the past, I couldn't believe I was actually curious-indeed, eager-to see the work. Could Mr. Reed have discovered a new (or interesting) facet to his hyperstylized brand of abstraction? It seemed unlikely. Here, after all, was a painter whose art I had described as the oil-on-canvas equivalent of a Big Mac, "unfailing and flavorless."

Upon returning to Protetch a few days later, the exhibition now open to the public, my qualms about Mr. Reed's pictures remained pretty much intact. His meticulous investigations of the art of painting still give off a whiff of formaldehyde. The roiling, silky brushstrokes-Mr. Reed's signature mark, now widely imitated-are dramatic, denatured and cinematic. They're emblems of touch, not the real thing, and, as such, self-conscious and mannered.

The work's lustrous surfaces, having been layered, stenciled and sanded, nonetheless maintain a hands-off, disembodied character. Mr. Reed's clever manipulations of oil paint dazzle the eye, the flashy forms creating lurid elisions of color, space and gesture. This is sleek, slick and brainy stuff-fodder custom-made for those who like painting only when it admits to being on its last legs.

Having said that, I was seduced by Mr. Reed's recent efforts-though I don't want to suggest that they evince an infusion of warm blood. The work is as chilly as ever, yet it seems different, more open and exploratory, more complicated in a way that has less to do with pictorial sensation than with pictorial structure. It's to Mr. Reed's credit that he's discovering nuances within a style that had seemed fairly fixed.

The new compositions are geared to building upon, rather than exploiting, jarring juxtapositions of incident-they feel, I don't know … fulsome. And sometimes these fast paintings are slow: In one canvas, an accumulation of yellow is augmented by thalos and purples, creating an elusive range of tones impossible to register in a single viewing. In an odd way, Mr. Reed's canvases have become less statements about painting than merely paintings. That's a heartening step.

Then again, maybe I'm just relieved that Mr. Reed hasn't digitally inserted one of his paintings into an Alfred Hitchcock film or created a mock installation of the room in which the scene took place, as he's done in the past. Maybe the absence of gimmickry, coupled with a hunger for well-crafted contemporary painting, has occasioned a softening of the critical backbone. Mr. Reed's art is, in its immaculate contrivance, pretty off-putting. Then again, if it weren't off-putting, the paintings somehow wouldn't be as alluring as they are. Mr. Reed will never find his way into your heart-but he will finagle his way into your head, using the eye as his conduit.

David Reed is at the Max Protetch Gallery, 511 West 22nd Street, until Dec. 23.

Tinkering Tuttle

The Drawing Center in Soho has mounted an exhibition of drawings and sculptures by Richard Tuttle, and all you need to know about the man can be gleaned from the wall label in the entryway. There, you'll find Mr. Tuttle's name spelled out in wobbly pieces of black vinyl lettering affixed to the wall with ragged bits of foam padding. Rumpled and childlike, abject and offhand, the letters exemplify a sensibility infatuated with its own exquisite indifference.

Sensibility is all there is to Mr. Tuttle's art. His lackadaisical doodles and rickety assemblages made of wood-shop leftovers, chicken wire, metal tubs and glittery styrofoam are tossed off, artfully trivial. No wonder that gossamer webs of praise are spun around the stuff-anything to obscure the fact that there's precious little substance to the things. Instead, we're invited to bask in the radiance of an unfettered and discursive talent. That's why people love the shit out of Mr. Tuttle: Having freed himself from the responsibility of shaping form, he frees the viewer from the responsibility of having to look at art. It's light work, really.

Don't be fooled by Mr. Tuttle's whimsical demeanor. In his own willfully diminutive way, he's as self-aggrandizing as Richard Serra, Sean Scully or Frank Stella-which means, above all else, that Mr. Tuttle is an artist you can live without.

Richard Tuttle: It's a Room for 3 People is at the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, until Feb. 26.

Psychedelic Imaginings

If you're familiar with the ceramic sculptures of Ken Price-those overrefined glosses on the tradition of biomorphic form-you'll want to check out his drawings at Matthew Marks' shoebox gallery on 21st Street. They're not recommended, mind you, just odd: They depict erupting volcanoes, lightning, the ocean, and blobby, aquatic-like creatures in the company of buxom young women-not-so-distant cousins of Gauguin's Tahitian nudes.

The pictures are reminiscent of underground comics, the animated film Fantastic Planet, and the fervent imaginings that line the margins of a high-school student's notebook. Rendered in a flat-footed, psychedelic style, they pay little attention to the niceties of line or shape. (Color fares a mite better.) The drawings aren't studies for sculptures; they tell us less about Mr. Price's art than Mr. Price the artist. It turns out he's a guy given to rather pedestrian daydreams. Mr. Marks felt that was reason enough to mount an exhibition-depending on your frame of mind, you might grant that he has a point.

Ken Price: Works on Paper is at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, until Dec. 24.

And how much buzz will be generated by the paintings of Kyle Staver at Denise Bibro Fine Art? Not much: The gallery doesn't have the kind of blue-chip cachet that guarantees significant foot traffic, and frankly, the art displayed there has been poky-until now, that is. Ms. Staver has exhibited before in New York, but this is the first time I've seen her work. I was lured by a reproduction of a painting titled September Morning (2002), which I glimpsed in the margins of the October issue of Gallery Guide . A bucolic scene of a man and a woman at the beach, the painting looked promising, with its abrupt flattening of space, an undercurrent of emotional confrontation and a trio of in-your-face seagulls. How true could a two-by-three-inch advertisement be to the painting itself?

True, it turns out, and then some. Ms. Staver's art offers greater aesthetic pleasure than Mr. Serra, Mr. Price and Mr. Lipski put together. Fans of spectacle, nihilism and extremity-or some unholy melange of the three-will pooh-pooh Ms. Staver's paintings and call them old-fashioned. In a sense, they're right: Her pictures of men and women, usually in a state of undress, look to Matisse: The painterly approach is brusque, hard-won, yet ultimately easygoing. The domestic tension and erotic unease bring to mind the cloistered vignettes of Vuillard. Add to the mix the monolithic figures of David Park, the quirky stiffness of folk art and the rampant patterning of Howard Hodgkin, and you have an intriguing stew of precedent.

Many artists believe in the vitality of tradition; few manage to make it live in their work. Ms. Staver's paintings are miracles of continuity: Her link to Modernism is as strong as her footing in the here and now. This achievement is not unlike that of the generation of American artists who sought to merge the painterly freedom of Abstract Expressionism with an emphasis on the figure-painters like Fairfield Porter, Leland Bell, Robert De Niro and Paul Resika. Ms. Staver can't touch Porter's tense probity-who could?-but she's suppler than Bell, more multifaceted than De Niro and less enamored of her own gift than Mr. Resika. Note how decisively the woman in Peter and Katherine (2002) puts on her gloves; marvel at the golden light that envelops Ginger Cat (2002); watch as the psychological façade put up by the two men featured in Piano Teacher (2001) is respectfully deconstructed-bravura performances all, and not the only ones, either. Ms. Staver's brand of intimism, acutely observed and gracefully set forth, goes the distance. This surprise of a show makes the heart beat faster.

Kyle Staver: Recent Works is at Denise Bibro Fine Art, Inc., 529 West 20th Street, fourth floor, until Nov. 8.

Paging Dr. Atkins

Remember the old line about how inside every fat person, there's a thin person wanting to get out? Something like that's going on with Joanne Greenbaum's oversized paintings: Inside each of them is a smaller, better painting waiting to flex its muscles. Ms. Greenbaum, whose recent work is on display at D'Amelio Terras, creates kaleidoscopic abstractions from overlapping, linear motifs: architectural structures, geometric shapes, diagrammatic patterns, even those black paper corners that Mom and Dad use to mount snapshots in the family album. The elements are plunked one on top of another, and the resulting arrangement sits inside the perimeter of the support. Actually, "floats" is more like it: Ms. Greenbaum doesn't establish pictorial space, she takes it for granted, letting the gessoed canvas-that parched, pre-packaged white-be the unhelpful receptacle for her painterly emblems. "Painterly" isn't right, either: Ms. Greenbaum's brush fudges along gracelessly,amateurish where it wants to be informal. It's too bad: The pictures hint at a clunky, pseudo-technological charm. If the canvases were smaller in size, Ms. Greenbaum's doodles might not seem so overblown; maybe then they would project a more enticing disorder. As it is, there's no compelling aesthetic reason for the pictures to be big-or for you to look at them for more than a second or two.

Joanne Greenbaum: New Paintings is at D'Amelio Terras, 525 West 22nd Street, until Nov. 1.

The Intimate, Acutely Observed

If you navigate the art scene by buzz alone, you'll wind up in predictable places. Ask an insider what there is to see at the galleries right now, and you're sure to be pointed in the direction of the Richard Serra show at the Chelsea branch of Gagosian Gallery. Little wonder: When Mr. Serra rolls into town, New Yorkers are guaranteed a sensational feat of engineering. You'll also be sent to the Matthew Marks Gallery on 24th Street to see the ceramic sculptures of Ken Price. And why not? Mr. Price's postmortem on biomorphic abstraction is certainly fetching. For reasons I couldn't fathom, an exhibition of sculptures by Donald Lipski, which just closed at Galerie Lelong, has also sparked a fair amount of chatter.

And how much buzz will be generated by the paintings of Kyle Staver at Denise Bibro Fine Art? Not much: The gallery doesn't have the kind of blue-chip cachet that guarantees significant foot traffic, and frankly, the art displayed there has been poky-until now, that is. Ms. Staver has exhibited before in New York, but this is the first time I've seen her work. I was lured by a reproduction of a painting titled September Morning (2002), which I glimpsed in the margins of the October issue of Gallery Guide . A bucolic scene of a man and a woman at the beach, the painting looked promising, with its abrupt flattening of space, an undercurrent of emotional confrontation and a trio of in-your-face seagulls. How true could a two-by-three-inch advertisement be to the painting itself?

True, it turns out, and then some. Ms. Staver's art offers greater aesthetic pleasure than Mr. Serra, Mr. Price and Mr. Lipski put together. Fans of spectacle, nihilism and extremity-or some unholy melange of the three-will pooh-pooh Ms. Staver's paintings and call them old-fashioned. In a sense, they're right: Her pictures of men and women, usually in a state of undress, look to Matisse: The painterly approach is brusque, hard-won, yet ultimately easygoing. The domestic tension and erotic unease bring to mind the cloistered vignettes of Vuillard. Add to the mix the monolithic figures of David Park, the quirky stiffness of folk art and the rampant patterning of Howard Hodgkin, and you have an intriguing stew of precedent.

Many artists believe in the vitality of tradition; few manage to make it live in their work. Ms. Staver's paintings are miracles of continuity: Her link to Modernism is as strong as her footing in the here and now. This achievement is not unlike that of the generation of American artists who sought to merge the painterly freedom of Abstract Expressionism with an emphasis on the figure-painters like Fairfield Porter, Leland Bell, Robert De Niro and Paul Resika. Ms. Staver can't touch Porter's tense probity-who could?-but she's suppler than Bell, more multifaceted than De Niro and less enamored of her own gift than Mr. Resika. Note how decisively the woman in Peter and Katherine (2002) puts on her gloves; marvel at the golden light that envelops Ginger Cat (2002); watch as the psychological façade put up by the two men featured in Piano Teacher (2001) is respectfully deconstructed-bravura performances all, and not the only ones, either. Ms. Staver's brand of intimism, acutely observed and gracefully set forth, goes the distance. This surprise of a show makes the heart beat faster.

Kyle Staver: Recent Works is at Denise Bibro Fine Art, Inc., 529 West 20th Street, fourth floor, until Nov. 8.

Paging Dr. Atkins

Remember the old line about how inside every fat person, there's a thin person wanting to get out? Something like that's going on with Joanne Greenbaum's oversized paintings: Inside each of them is a smaller, better painting waiting to flex its muscles. Ms. Greenbaum, whose recent work is on display at D'Amelio Terras, creates kaleidoscopic abstractions from overlapping, linear motifs: architectural structures, geometric shapes, diagrammatic patterns, even those black paper corners that Mom and Dad use to mount snapshots in the family album. The elements are plunked one on top of another, and the resulting arrangement sits inside the perimeter of the support. Actually, "floats" is more like it: Ms. Greenbaum doesn't establish pictorial space, she takes it for granted, letting the gessoed canvas-that parched, pre-packaged white-be the unhelpful receptacle for her painterly emblems. "Painterly" isn't right, either: Ms. Greenbaum's brush fudges along gracelessly,amateurish where it wants to be informal. It's too bad: The pictures hint at a clunky, pseudo-technological charm. If the canvases were smaller in size, Ms. Greenbaum's doodles might not seem so overblown; maybe then they would project a more enticing disorder. As it is, there's no compelling aesthetic reason for the pictures to be big-or for you to look at them for more than a second or two.

Joanne Greenbaum: New Paintings is at D'Amelio Terras, 525 West 22nd Street, until Nov. 1.

communities usually massacre and then afterward revere," wrote the great

American art critic Henry McBride of the

fine American painter Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967), whose watercolors and

drawings are the subject of an exhibition at Kennedy Galleries. McBride's

statement has to it a mock-dramatic flourish that is typical of his wit. His subsequent

commendation of Burchfield's pictures-that they were "songs of hate"-did not.

That the latter remark was a curious plaudit is obvious, yet McBride was a bit

off the mark in making it. Certainly "hate" conveys the severity of

Burchfield's vision. It also implies that the work is utterly subjective, and

that isn't the case at all. What's illumined in the pictures isn't the artist's

emotional temper, but that of his subject-the natural world.

Burchfield's portrayals of

farmland and forests evidence mankind only through its artifacts: train tracks,

shacks and rickety fences. Nature is the animating force of the pictures, a

nature as unforgiving as it is independent. The tranquil moments in Burchfield's

pictures are few; the nestling flowers of Bloodroot

(Black Ravine) and the storybook embrace of Snow Scene (both 1917) are peculiar in their calm. More typical is Sunburst After Spring Storm (1951),

wherein the land betokens an optimism and an order only as preparation for

admonition. This is a song of retribution, not hate. Think of Burchfield as kin

of Clyfford Still, another intransigent loner whose vision was as dour as his

gift was narrow. Then ponder the permanent berth the God of Jonathan Edwards

has taken in the American countryside. Charles

E. Burchfield: The Imaginative Landscape is at Kennedy Galleries, 730 Fifth

Avenue, until Jan. 19.

His Surfaces Sing,

His Forms Do Not

The surfaces of Ken Price's

sculptures, seven of which are now on display at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, are

breathtakingly abraded. Mr. Price layers acrylic paint onto his ceramic

biomorphs and then wears it down, removing some of it; in the process, he achieves

a luxurious veneer of nubbly color. His palette ranges from psychedelic

mottlings of orange, green and blue to less flamboyant shimmers of aquamarine,

yellow and rust. Elbow grease has been invested in the work's hard sensuality,

and it is to Mr. Price's credit that the pieces never feel labored. His

surfaces sing. His forms, unfortunately, do not.

The sculptures bring to mind the usual suspects informing

biomorphism-microscopic life forms, vegetation, sea creatures and the like-and

that's the problem with the work: its usualness. Imagine a Hans Arp enamored of

cartoons and taxidermy rather than the unconscious and nature, and you'll have

an idea why Mr. Price's blips and blobs feel freeze-dried and stilted. Lacking

a vital autonomy, the pieces engage us primarily as displays of artistic

know-how. We note how the artist keeps our eye engaged by making the pieces

various from every conceivable angle; we smile at the droll, groping comedy his

specimens engage in; and we drift back to those super surfaces.

Those for whom surface is

paramount will fall in love with Mr. Price's work. The rest of us will respond

with an appreciative bemusement and move on. Ken Price: New Work is at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, 20 West 57th

Street, until Dec. 22.

The Internet Show?

Here We Go

The first rule of art criticism is that an exhibition must be

seen before it is written about. So why devote 200 words to a show I haven't

seen and don't intend to? Because Artists

of Brücke: Themes in German Expressionist Prints , which has been organized

by the Museum of Modern Art, isn't real. It's the museum's "first exhibition

created exclusively for the [W]eb." One understands why MoMA selected German

Expressionist prints for their initial Internet showcase. Prints are, by their

very nature, removed from the directness of touch, and prints by the

Expressionists are renowned for the punch they pack. The implication is that

the work is sort of virtual already, and that its graphic potency will,

nonetheless, make itself felt over the glare of the computer screen.

The fundamental truth that

MoMA is traipsing over is that a work of art is an object whose

physicality-whose thing-ness-is essential to the experience of it. It's there

or it's not. This goes for prints, too: Who could deny the brusque force of a

line that's been put into shape through the gouging of a wood block? It is of

some small reassurance, then, that the claims made for Artists of Brücke have less to do with aesthetics than with

accessibility, "fluidity" and education-the usual bromides about the Internet.

So maybe I'm a nervous Nellie

peering down a slope that's not as slippery as I think. Maybe the physical

integrity of art isn't being undermined. Maybe ventures such as Artists of Brücke will go the way of the

eight-track tape. In a culture as tech-happy as our own, don't count on it and

worry. Artists of Brücke: Themes in

German Expressionist Prints is at www.moma.org/brucke and will remain

online indefinitely.