The Entry of Christ into Washington is a panoramic view of hell as imagined by a foe of the Bush administration. As such, it trucks in those received grievances that drive the left to indignation and, sometimes, self-sabotage. Mr. Petlin’s apocalyptic picture directs its ire at predictable targets: Arab potentates, Exxon oil fields, the American flag, the Capitol building and banners that read “Irak Redux,” “Abu Ghraib,” “Yale,” “Texas” and “Dystopia USA.” All are delineated in the artist’s telltale style—a sketchy composite of drawing and painting that veers assuredly between grubby and ethereal.

The key to understanding Mr. Petlin’s worth as an artist can only partly be gleaned from the intensity of his diatribe. It helps to go beyond the immediate purview of the Kent exhibition, with its pictures of bombings and destruction along the banks of the Tigris and the outskirts of New York City.

Tucked away by the reception desk, there’s a pastel drawing by Mr. Petlin from 1986 titled Songs for Sarah. It’s not much really. The page has hardly been touched; the imagery and intent are ambiguous. There’s a desert vista, a stone wall, seven figures (one may be a bird) dotting the landscape, a stippled whale surfacing from the sand, a building, an acidic orange haze and an unexpectedly bucolic field of blue topping it all off. Throughout, Mr. Petlin displays a casual virtuosity. His approach to drawing is to the point, yet gentle in its stylistic wanderings. Songs for Sarah threatens to disappear even as it comes into focus. It has the fleeting absurdity of a half-remembered dream.

The ambiguity filters through to his distinctive brand of agitprop and complicates it. Unlike his friend and fellow artist, Leon Golub, in whose memory the painting Infantry (2004-5) is dedicated, Mr. Petlin doesn’t talk down to the audience. He trusts viewers to bring their own emotional and political intelligence to the table. Dialogue, not dogma, is the goal. Mr. Petlin can admit to different points of view, even if he finds them wrongheaded or despicable. There’s a generosity of spirit lurking in his scabrousness.

As a result, the paintings and drawings gain in authority. At the very least, they encourage the long look. A Petlin retrospective is set to open at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the spring of 2008, providing a welcome opportunity to gauge his contribution to the culture. In the meantime, the Kent show provides a tantalizingly imperfect glimpse of one man’s singular vision.

Irving Petlin is at Kent Gallery, 541 West 25th Street, until May 26.

In Good Shape

Salvatore Federico’s recent paintings and drawings, on display in the middle room at the George Billis Gallery, continue to create a bold, balletic tension out of carefully devised, hard-edged forms.

A small drawing, done with pencil on graph paper, reveals the painstaking extent to which Mr. Federico’s angular heraldic shapes are proportioned and configured. But knowing the math informing the compositions doesn’t illuminate what truly makes them dance: distillation and color.

The more anonymous the surfaces of the paintings are (Mr. Federico doesn’t hide his touch; he doesn’t have one), the more his jutting shapes gain in personality, muscle and grace. The palette, too, is sharp and emphatic. Unafraid of juxtaposing warms, cools and near-complementary colors, Mr. Federico makes the most of minimal means. The actual colors occupying a single canvas are few, yet the presence they establish is remarkably vibrant—especially when yoked theatrically to the spacious and cleansing white of High Modernism.

The white grounds of Praxedes (2005) and T.O.T.C. (2005) both animate and clear the way for exuberant arrangements of form. Who says art can’t be happy?

Salvatore Federico is at the George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until June 10.

Too-Cool Katz

If Alex Katz weren’t such a cagey talent, he’d be an embarrassment. How is it that any painter with a major reputation can get away with nonexistent drawing skills, cursory paint handling and a style so vacuous that any claim made for it sticks? Mr. Katz, whose paintings from the 1960’s are on display at the 22nd Street branch of Pace Wildenstein, demonstrates how far a person can get by adroitly deploying a spare and arrogant gift. Rarely has an artist made so much of his intelligence while investing so little in his craft.

Not that every inch of a canvas demands obsessive labor. But Mr. Katz’s pictures of family, friends, Luna Park, a swamp maple tree and “superb lilies” are so rushed and programmatic, and so stilted in their depiction of the human form, that you can only conclude that hasty means indicate contempt for the art of painting itself. Mr. Katz’s broad-brush technique makes for striking images, but as painting, the work is bland and numbing. Only with the aforementioned lilies do we see Mr. Katz pick up and engage with the possibilities—indeed, the musicality—of pictorial form. Otherwise, he’s too cool to care.

Boosters argue that his sleek style and billboard-size canvases are world-historical: that by marrying the expansiveness of Abstract Expressionism with the punch of Pop Art, he nudged representational painting back into the mainstream. Maybe so, but what does it mean when culture starts inflating sound bites into epic statements? It’s Mr. Katz’s prerogative not to worry about that and simply rush to order. It’s our prerogative to grant his art as much time and pleasure as he does.

Alex Katz: The Sixties is at Pace Wildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, until June 17.

To get a handle on the limitations of the work, first do some window-shopping. Pick a single Siena picture that will suit your apartment’s décor. Shouldn’t be too hard. Scale isn’t an issue: The wobbly, maze-like abstractions are modest in size and would fit snugly into almost any New York City home. Color, likewise, poses no problem: The palette is various, yet even in character. Mr. Siena tempers strong, sharp or sour tones with intricate compositions and careful attention to the medium itself: hard and glossy enamel paint. The paintings are forthright and intense, but they feel cozy within the bounds of their crafting. They don’t aggressively solicit our engagement.

Now try to ascertain if one of Mr. Siena’s paintings is better than another. This won’t be as easy—largely because it’s beside the point. A staggering range of pictorial influence doesn’t translate into a staggering range of effect. (The arts of Africa, Islam, Native American cultures, Paul Klee and the folk painter holed up in a warren down South are all seamlessly accounted for in Mr. Siena’s style.) The work is maddeningly consistent, with no breadth or sense of possibility. Each time Mr. Siena sits down to make a picture, he paints himself into a corner. It’s an attractive corner, but it’s the same corner as last time, and the time before that.

But this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to wonder about Mr. Siena’s motives. His signature amalgam of Outsider Art and Minimalism—in other words, obsession and inertia—is beginning to feel less like an artistic imperative than a savvy career move. There are worse ways to get your foot in the art world’s door than mixing and matching genres all but guaranteed to make a return on one’s investment. The marketplace moves in mysterious ways; artists move in ways that are often less than divine. We should be grateful that Mr. Siena’s commodities are as fetching as they are.

James Siena: New Paintings and Gouaches is at PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, until Jan. 28, 2006.

Flower Power

You don’t have to be an expert in botany to take pleasure in the paintings of Maryam Amiryani, on display at the George Billis Gallery. Though a checklist specifies the subject of each of the small canvases, accuracy isn’t the issue. Nature is an impetus, not an arbiter here. Sinuous, decorative form and strong, sparkling color drive the work. Surface, too: Ms. Amiryani abrades the pictures between successive layers of oil paint, creating textures that recall (for the artist) Iranian textiles and (for the critic) Roman wall paintings.

Would that the crisp interplay between positive and negative areas were less cut and dried. As it is, Ms. Amiryani settles for predictably effective compositions: Each image is whipped into shape by the surrounding blackish ground. That’s not to say she isn’t capable of complication—or magic. Hydrangeas (2005) is everything Ms. Amiryani wants it to be: Luminous and spooky, somewhat acidic, focused, sexy and lush. It’s a painting to fall in love with.

Maryam Amiryani is at the George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until Dec. 3.

Those Brooklyn Roads

In Billis’ front gallery, Elizabeth O’Reilly proves herself the envy of anyone who’s ever been flummoxed by oil paint. In her small works on panel, the famously difficult medium is rendered curt and supple. Each picture, whether it be of a winter landscape or the Gowanus Expressway, is punctuated by a touch keenly attuned to the vital correspondence between brushstroke and depicted form.

Ms. O’Reilly’s ease and confidence are deceiving: She places considerable skill in the service of intuition and spontaneity. No one dabs, dots and slurs oil paint like this without ample experience handling the stuff. For my money, she’s more on the mark ensconced in the snow than marooned on the darkened streets of Brooklyn, a distinction that may have less to do with location than with the artist’s response to light. Either way, she responds to these panoramas with dexterity and aplomb.

Elizabeth O’Reilly: Black and White is at the George Billis Gallery, until Dec. 3.

Vanishing Act

The exhibition of drawings and sculpture by Christopher Wilmarth, on view at the Betty Cuningham Gallery, is highly disappointing, only because it begs the question: When will a major museum give us a proper survey of this significant American artist?

Wilmarth accomplished a lot in his cruelly brief life. (He committed suicide in 1987 at the age of 44.) Not least among his accomplishments is the unlikely coupling of Minimalism’s brutishness with a spiritual longing that is its antithesis. Wilmarth’s not-so-secret weapon in this enterprise was panes of glass etched with acid, the result being a fogging effect that seems to dissipate physical form upon contact with the eye. By juxtaposing the glass within rigorously shaped steel armatures, Wilmarth also offers a singularly grave gloss on the tradition of Constructivist sculpture.

Aiming for evanescence and inviting contemplation, the work asks a lot from the viewer. In doing so, it evinces a rare regard for the audience’s capacity to engage in aesthetic experience. Wilmarth’s reticent, self-effacing mien is, in this regard, altogether appropriate and a blessing. He makes the competition—Donald Judd, Richard Tuttle and Frank Stella—look like a decorator, a nuisance and an excrescence, respectively. Until a New York museum musters the gumption to honor Wilmarth’s tough and haunting achievement, the Cuningham show will have to do.

Christopher Wilmarth: Sculpture and Drawings is at the Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 West 25th Street, until Dec. 3.

On the morning I went to see it, each visitor accorded Giacometti’s art an almost religious obeisance, whether it was a student clad in tattered jeans or a well-heeled gent with (one imagines) money to burn. Everyone spoke in whispers; the stray ringing of a cell phone set off reproachful looks and ardent apologies. The installation, deliberately paced and dramatically lit, encourages reverence. And the work itself commands the sort of grave attention that cuts the chatter.

If the unhurried tour offered by The Women of Giacometti doesn’t glance upon every facet of the artist’s career, it comes close. The earliest piece on view was painted when he was 19 years old; it’s a Cézanne-like painting of his sister Ottilia. Early efforts in sculpture—a plaster bust of Ottilia; a roughhewn, Cubist-inspired portrayal of Flora Mayo, an American who studied alongside him—are more convincing. (Both pieces date from around 1926.) A preternatural, if still unrefined, gift for working in three dimensions is clearly evident.

A representative sampling of the primitivist sculptures that put Giacometti in good standing with the Surrealists is on display, including the Guggenheim’s renowned Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932). There’s a better selection of the late work, with its anxious, skeptical tone and solitary figures (elongated in the sculpture, ghost-like in the paintings). These latter pieces famously induced André Breton’s ire. The “Black Pope of Surrealism” found them insufficiently radical and booted Giacometti from the camp. Giacometti happily took his leave: He’d had his fill of what he called Surrealist “masturbation,” pegging the failings of that crowd with devastating accuracy.

Few painters in the history of art have been as relentless as Giacometti in exploring the meaning of perception. His self-appointed task was the accurate transcription of observed phenomenon, but it was his belief that attempting to fix an always-mutable physical reality, whether it be in oils or plaster, was folly. It’s well known—among his admirers, at least—that he considered himself a failure. A profound sense of despair permeates the work, but it wasn’t the existentialist romance foisted upon it by Jean-Paul Sartre, Giacometti’s friend and booster. Rather, it was occasioned by the vexing pursuit of giving tangible and permanent form to fleeting, ever-changing incident.

In paintings like Portrait of Caroline (1962) and Caroline Seated with a Red Dress (1965), he entombs the title character within jittery skeins of oil paint. Overlapping and lilting lines are typically left loose in the torso, but they coalesce into an almost sculptural mass in the face. The effect is discomfiting, even nerve-wracking, but irresistible in its pull. Giacometti makes his doubt plain. No brushstroke is arbitrary; no hesitation escapes comment. Caroline Seated with a Red Dress has an almost expressionist fervor, yet it stubbornly retains a clinical adherence to physical fact—a thrilling paradox.

Alas, The Women of Giacometti also makes plain what MoMA’s 2001 retrospective intimated: History has been kinder to the painter than to the sculptor. You hate to say it, particularly given the somber majesty of Giacometti’s achievement, but, boy, are those lumpy, spindly figures looking hokey. They’re even worse when they’re placed atop carriages or inside boxes: Giacometti’s attempt to locate the sculptures in space can be self-conscious and, at times, alarmingly arch. The paintings can come precariously close to mannerism; the sculptures don’t fight it off at all. An innate knack for sculpture led to a slackening of aesthetic vigilance, which in turn led to indulgence—albeit of a dour variety.

The extreme exaggeration of anatomy, the frazzled and theatrical textures, the bathetic dénouement—the sculptures aren’t much ado about nothing exactly, but Giacometti striving for effect is something less than Giacometti the master. When comparisons to Rodin flit into one’s mind, second thoughts follow soon thereafter. Fortunately, the painter responsible for canvases as unflinching and grand as The Artist’s Mother (1950) and Seated Woman (1958) emerges unscathed. That’s reason enough to cherish this splendidly conceived, intelligently executed exhibition.

The Women of Giacometti is at Pace Wildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, until Dec. 17.

On the morning I went to see it, each visitor accorded Giacometti’s art an almost religious obeisance, whether it was a student clad in tattered jeans or a well-heeled gent with (one imagines) money to burn. Everyone spoke in whispers; the stray ringing of a cell phone set off reproachful looks and ardent apologies. The installation, deliberately paced and dramatically lit, encourages reverence. And the work itself commands the sort of grave attention that cuts the chatter.

If the unhurried tour offered by The Women of Giacometti doesn’t glance upon every facet of the artist’s career, it comes close. The earliest piece on view was painted when he was 19 years old; it’s a Cézanne-like painting of his sister Ottilia. Early efforts in sculpture—a plaster bust of Ottilia; a roughhewn, Cubist-inspired portrayal of Flora Mayo, an American who studied alongside him—are more convincing. (Both pieces date from around 1926.) A preternatural, if still unrefined, gift for working in three dimensions is clearly evident.

A representative sampling of the primitivist sculptures that put Giacometti in good standing with the Surrealists is on display, including the Guggenheim’s renowned Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932). There’s a better selection of the late work, with its anxious, skeptical tone and solitary figures (elongated in the sculpture, ghost-like in the paintings). These latter pieces famously induced André Breton’s ire. The “Black Pope of Surrealism” found them insufficiently radical and booted Giacometti from the camp. Giacometti happily took his leave: He’d had his fill of what he called Surrealist “masturbation,” pegging the failings of that crowd with devastating accuracy.

Few painters in the history of art have been as relentless as Giacometti in exploring the meaning of perception. His self-appointed task was the accurate transcription of observed phenomenon, but it was his belief that attempting to fix an always-mutable physical reality, whether it be in oils or plaster, was folly. It’s well known—among his admirers, at least—that he considered himself a failure. A profound sense of despair permeates the work, but it wasn’t the existentialist romance foisted upon it by Jean-Paul Sartre, Giacometti’s friend and booster. Rather, it was occasioned by the vexing pursuit of giving tangible and permanent form to fleeting, ever-changing incident.

In paintings like Portrait of Caroline (1962) and Caroline Seated with a Red Dress (1965), he entombs the title character within jittery skeins of oil paint. Overlapping and lilting lines are typically left loose in the torso, but they coalesce into an almost sculptural mass in the face. The effect is discomfiting, even nerve-wracking, but irresistible in its pull. Giacometti makes his doubt plain. No brushstroke is arbitrary; no hesitation escapes comment. Caroline Seated with a Red Dress has an almost expressionist fervor, yet it stubbornly retains a clinical adherence to physical fact—a thrilling paradox.

Alas, The Women of Giacometti also makes plain what MoMA’s 2001 retrospective intimated: History has been kinder to the painter than to the sculptor. You hate to say it, particularly given the somber majesty of Giacometti’s achievement, but, boy, are those lumpy, spindly figures looking hokey. They’re even worse when they’re placed atop carriages or inside boxes: Giacometti’s attempt to locate the sculptures in space can be self-conscious and, at times, alarmingly arch. The paintings can come precariously close to mannerism; the sculptures don’t fight it off at all. An innate knack for sculpture led to a slackening of aesthetic vigilance, which in turn led to indulgence—albeit of a dour variety.

The extreme exaggeration of anatomy, the frazzled and theatrical textures, the bathetic dénouement—the sculptures aren’t much ado about nothing exactly, but Giacometti striving for effect is something less than Giacometti the master. When comparisons to Rodin flit into one’s mind, second thoughts follow soon thereafter. Fortunately, the painter responsible for canvases as unflinching and grand as The Artist’s Mother (1950) and Seated Woman (1958) emerges unscathed. That’s reason enough to cherish this splendidly conceived, intelligently executed exhibition.

The Women of Giacometti is at Pace Wildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, until Dec. 17.

The guest list exuded a swish Sotheby’s cachet—understandable, since both David Nash and his wife, Lucy Mitchell-Innes, are ex-staffers (he as international director of Impressionist and Modern Art, she as worldwide head of Contemporary) as well as long-time uptown dealers.

A-list collectors like Melva Bucksbaum, who sits on the Whitney Museum board, and critical museum curators like Bonnie Clearwater, head of the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, coalesced in a singular Sauvignon Blanc–laden moment. Collector Jane Holzer dripped in diamonds. Cindy Sherman was decked out in lime green patent-leather go-go boots and navy velvet sheath; she nestled in a chair next to Anne Bass. Even bad boy Julian Schnabel showed up in shorts and a sleeveless shirt unbuttoned to the navel. He was, of course, accompanied by a Tibetan monk.

At the gallery, though, none of the eight Roy Lichtenstein paintings on the gallery walls were actually for sale. That would have been old-school.

This party, which openly signaled Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s entry into an extraordinarily elite clutch of mega-dealers, actually covertly explains an evolution within the gallery world itself. Because, to be a real player now, a dealer must—for starters—have multiple galleries.

And a gallery must sprawl in another ways: It must now also be a production studio. As Barbara Gladstone has long been a film producer for Matthew Barney, more and more bigwig dealers are bankrolling and pre-selling artwork, years before it even exists.

Towards the end of her party, Ms. Mitchell-Innes shed her black velvet gilt-edged Prada heels. “I want to have a kunsthall with activities like lectures and recitals,” she had said days earlier. That’s certainly on her roster for the Chelsea space—but primarily, isn’t it a juggernaut of the new Chelsea commerce?

Only 232 galleries line the streets of West Chelsea. But just about any art-minded person can have one gallery. Members of the multi-venue dealer club include Pace Wildenstein, headquartered at 57th Street and Madison Avenue, which just opened a second Chelsea gallery and now encompasses a jaw-dropping 50,000 square feet. (That’s about the size of a small museum.) The staff? “It’s about 100,” said Pace Wildenstein’s director and president, Marc Glimcher, with an uncanny measure of nonchalance.

Dealer Matthew Marks now touts three galleries in Chelsea—and he’s adding a fourth. On Sept. 13, dealer Perry Rubenstein opened a third gallery in Chelsea.

Ms. Mitchell-Innes trudged endless blocks of Chelsea herself in search of the downtown space. She even looked at Annie Leibovitz’s studio, which is directly across the street from where she settled on 26th Street, but Wal-Mart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie snapped up the space last fall for $11.37 million to house her Cedar Lake dance company.

When she did settle on a space, Ms. Mitchell-Innes hired designer Bill Katz, who rendered the space with a minimalist grandeur. He has trimmed up homes and studios for the likes of Jasper Johns and Francesco Clemente, not to mention Phillips de Pury & Company’s former 57th Street abode. Ms. Mitchell-Innes had the concrete floor laid three times before it came up to her exacting standards of a particularly subtle shade of gray. The gallery’s renovation budget alone reportedly skyrocketed upwards of $600,000 for a mere 3,500 square feet.

Other dealers wishing to join this club may now be hard-pressed. “Two years ago, I did not have a single dealer thinking of taking on additional space—now I have clients clamoring,” said real-estate agent Susan B. Anthony.

It was she who sold Larry Gagosian a one-story garage on West 24th Street back in 1999 for a reasonable $5.75 million.

Today, Ms. Anthony places a value of $50 million on Mr. Gagosian’s 21,000-square-foot space in Chelsea. “Larry really started it all,” she said. Mr. Gagosian, of course, commands a vast empire, with galleries in Chelsea, Beverly Hills and London, and one more in the former Parke Bernet building on Madison Avenue.

Ten years ago, Chelsea rents ran, at most, $10 a foot. These days, ground-floor space is $55 dollars a foot and up. And the average gallery ground rent runs $137,500 annually. “I have dealers aching to buy, but there’s nothing to sell,” said Ms. Anthony.

This July, she received an offer of $33 million on a three-story, 45,000-square-foot building on West 15th Street. The owner scoffed; he refused to take less than $45 million.

“Once, a single gallery owner waited for an artist to show up with 10 paintings, sell them and split the proceeds 50-50,” said Mr. Rubenstein. But that model is so yesterday. “The time of handling and selling tangible objects with a predictable return is fast becoming less viable for those engaged in conventional dealing,” he said by phone from Los Angeles.

“There’s a very different dynamic driving dealing now,” said Pace Wildenstein’s Mr. Glimcher, who was speaking from Marfa, Texas, where he was attending parties for the Chinati Foundation. “Now, dealing is about maintaining a relationship with artists very similar to the one filmmakers have with producers,” Mr. Glimcher said. “There are upfront production costs and decisions to be made about how to fabricate an artist’s work.”

“You’re responsible for their lives, and there’s no immediate return,” said Mr. Rubenstein. He recently hired engineers and subcontractors to install the Paris-based American artist Sturtevant’s (she doesn’t use a first name) Duchamp 1200 Coal Bags. The bags hung from his gallery ceiling and collectively weighed over a ton. (Of course, he also sold five of her paintings, which run up to $350,000.)

Mr. Glimcher’s example is the Israeli conceptual artist Michal Rovner, who has a Paris retrospective at the Jeu de Paume right now. “We provided the investment necessary for her to explore something that was only in her head,” he said. Again, it paid off; Ms. Rovner’s show last April sold out practically instantaneously. Even Donald Marron, Lightyear Capital founder and chief executive, snapped up one of her video projects.

And Pace Wildenstein’s ambitious Keith Tyson show opens on Oct. 15. Fret not—every one of the 45 pieces in the show, including 18 sculptures, is already sold, and prices ran up to $300,000.

What else could lurk beneath this gallery expansionism and the ability to invest in represented artists’ work but a solid river of receivables?

“I have a one-year-old gallery,” said Mr. Rubenstein, “and in the first week of September, as many 30 invoices for various artworks crossed my desk—and there’s no indication that this pace is letting up.”

“The number of collectors has shot up 10 times in the last three or four years,” said Mr. Glimcher.

The ranks of the hyper-rich collectors are swollen with gentlemen like LVMH magnate Bernard Arnault (with a personal wealth of $17 billion); and Maryland real-estate developer Robert Meyerhoff, who flew in for the Mitchell-Innes & Nash party and recently pledged $300 million in art to the National Gallery in D.C.; and hedge-fund honcho Steven A. Cohen, who has spent in excess of $400 million in the past five years on art.

To get some of that money, dealers know they have to pre-spend it—and they certainly have to spend some of it on their artists.

“Now, the dollars that dealers have to spend to simply stay in the game are humongous,” said Thea Westreich, the savvy blond art consultant who is considered the sole reigning high priestess of art-market analysis. She points to her own costs: an in-house Ph.D. in photography and an 11,000-volume library, which is insured for $4 million.

“Today, Larry and Pace Wildenstein are the paradigm for the entire business,” said Ms. Westreich from her perch in Soho, referring, of course, to Larry Gagosian. “Everyone is missing the critical point of the art business today: It’s artist-driven, and you don’t get the best without offering what Larry does.” And what “Larry” has always offered is unbelievably vast space, hard-core global contacts and legendarily generous allowances to artists.

So the mega-dealers, in trying to keep up with the Larrys, may have built themselves some wildly gorgeous gilded cages. “You must make yourself indispensable to the artist,” Mr. Glimcher had said, “or they will move.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abstract Concrete

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

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

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

It's the nature of academies, after all, to establish rules, and it has been one of the principal functions of modernism to overturn them. What's the likely outcome, then, when the exponents of modernism embrace one of the fundamental tenets of their traditional adversaries? Answers to this question are more troubling when the rule in question is reduced to little more than the principle of repetition.

Repetition is one of the things that rule-based art is really about. Another thing it's about is anonymity or the elimination of personality in art. Mr. Glimcher prefers to speak of "axiomatic systems," but that's a distinction without a difference: In much of this rule-based art, the only discernible "axiom" is the principle of repetition-as, for example, in Andy Warhol's Troy Donahue-9 Times (1962).

The epigraph that Mr. Glimcher has affixed to Logical Conclusions is Sol LeWitt's dictum, "The idea becomes the machine that makes the art," from his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (1967). This raises similar questions, for the word "machine" is a poor metaphor for what actually occurs in the execution of Mr. LeWitt's mural-scale Conceptualist wall decorations. Each of these gigantic abstract mural projects entails the regimentation of whole crews of docile individual talents that can be relied upon to carry out Mr. LeWitt's orders with an unfailing and expressionless exactitude. What this process resembles is not so much a machine as a lock-step drill. With Mr. LeWitt serving as the generalissimo of the project, a military metaphor might have been more appropriate.

Rule-based art is not itself a style; it's a stylization of existing styles, which is to say a repackaging of images and procedures already familiar to us. It signifies an impulse that gives codification priority over creativity-an impulse that anticipates, if not creative exhaustion, at least a decline in expectation. This is bad news for the future of modernism, or would be if this kind of art succeeded in expanding its domain, which it may well do in the near future, though in the long term its failure is inevitable. Rule-based art is creatively infertile-a parasite wholly dependent upon artistic initiatives that it's incapable of creating for itself.

Yet there's no denying its historical significance, and no denying, either, that it portends an art in which rules are pressed into service as a substitute for imagination. In this respect, the movement that rule-based art most closely resembles is Minimalism, which has similarly exiled itself from the imaginative faculty. Both the Minimalist movement and rule-based art are thus reminders that modernism itself may be entering upon a slow, inexorable slide into Alexandrian parody of itself. There are certainly some signs of such a slide in the many ineptitudes and outrages that have been on display in the now-expanded Museum of Modern Art. Has any other art museum of comparable stature ever had to endure such a negative response from a devoted constituency?

MoMA has responded to the chorus of criticism with a massive advertising campaign, which has attracted the kind of crowds that are more responsive to publicity than to artistic quality or museological probity. It was to be expected, I suppose, that the high excitement and heady subjectivism of the Abstract Expressionists would be followed by a period of emotional retrenchment. This is, indeed, what's happened, and rule-based art is very much a part of it. If you doubt it, try reading your way through the 188 pages of Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule-Based Art.

I can't blame the guy for giving the Shapiro a knock or two. The artist's blocky minimalist figures have, in recent years, become increasingly agitated and off-kilter. The sculptures at PaceWildenstein-all of which were created during the last four years-elaborate on this tendency, at times to an almost pugilistic degree. Perhaps the collector, apprehensive that a potential investment might tumble over during a high wind, felt that a check on its durability was called for-like kicking the tires of a new car.

Truth be told, not a few of Mr. Shapiro's pieces couldn't survive a high wind. Though many of the 31 sculptures reiterate Mr. Shapiro's longstanding commitment to a distilled and hieratic art, it's the rickety work that will raise eyebrows.

Cobbled together from lumberyard leftovers, wire and a clatter of nails, and painted with a bright and brash kindergarten palette, the assemblages are notably lacking in tautness. Mr. Shapiro's signature totems are defined by rigid, elemental gestures; the new, smaller pieces literally hang loose. This casual quality is reinforced by an all-over-the-place installation redolent of the works-in-progress spirit of the studio. The absence of resolution, of decisions meted out to the nth degree, is a marked change from what we have come to expect from Mr. Shapiro.

Or is it? The press release informs us that the new sculptures are Mr. Shapiro's response to "alterations of the cultural and psychological landscape." What these "alterations" might be is never made clear or decisive, and the work isn't as changed as Mr. Shapiro and his dealer would like us to believe. The dribbles of paint, the awkward accumulations of nails, the jerry-rigged joints, the exuberance and whimsy-you can't help but grit your teeth at the willfulness of it all. Mr. Shapiro is always striving for effect, even at his sloppiest. The would-be classicist donning the mask of a slacker? Come on. Mr. Shapiro can pretend, but he can't convince. Risk is beyond his ken.

Perhaps the "alterations" that Mr. Shapiro is responding to relate to an art scene increasingly geared toward artists fresh out of school, high on adrenaline and out to conquer the world. Mr. Shapiro may be eager to tap into that energy: Who doesn't want an infusion of zip and zing? But if the new work is a reaction to 9/11 (the time frame of the show would seem to imply that this is the case), then the message isn't getting through-unless, that is, showy irresolution counts as a viable response to historical fact. Still and all, I enjoyed the Shapiro show, if only for the sense-however self-consciously it's put into place-that we've been made privy to the inner workings of the artist's mind.

Joel Shapiro: Work in Wood, Plaster and Bronze: 2001-2005 is at PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, until April 16.

Market Aesthetic

Corporate culture is ubiquitous and at times deserving of our ire. To complain about the taste governing Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Collection, a selection of art culled from the boardrooms of the Swiss financial service (most of it a promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art), is to engage in observations that are predictable and redundant, if often accurate.

We shouldn't expect a deeply considered aesthetic from a company that looks expressly to the market for building a collection of art. (Unless, of course, you want to argue that the market is its aesthetic.) Anyone who keeps half an eye on the art world will recognize how mainstream and tame the UBS collection is. There isn't a thing in it that hasn't been given the nod by Christie's, The New York Times or MoMA itself. Susan Rothenberg, Gerhard Richter, Donald Judd, Christopher Wool and Bruce Nauman-ho hum, another raft of run-of-the-mill masterpieces.

But you know what? Sometimes the market is right. Not all of the time-in fact, for very little of the time. (Maybe it's better to say that sometimes the market is not wrong.) Certainly the good stuff that got past the consultants at UBS-beginning with In the Studio (1975), a prime example of Philip Guston's late style-stands out because it's the individual exception to the innocuous rule. Maybe, one naïvely hopes, that was MoMA's ultimate game plan: culling the gems from a profusion of dreck, and consigning the rest to the storage racks or the auction block.

If that's so, pieces by Richard Diebenkorn and Bill Jensen-featured in the catalog but not in the exhibition-would enrich the permanent collection. The same goes for Untitled III (1982) by Willem de Kooning, an "Alzheimer's Painting" that is engaged and coherent enough to belie the tag. Other pieces to add to the list are: Howard Hodgkin's In Bed in Venice (1984-88), Neo Rauch's Wound (1998) and an untitled 1990 watercolor by Jasper Johns, the most agreeable thing this perpetually overrated artist has put his hand to. Admittedly, I'm seeing the glass as one-tenth full rather than nine-tenths empty. That's the kind of small optimistic gesture you need to make in order to get through Contemporary Voices awake and in one piece.

Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Collection is at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, until April 25.

On the other hand, there are painters of quite traditional subjects—portrait figures and landscapes—who are not only unfazed by this oversized space, but positively revel in it. One of them is Alex Katz, whose new exhibition, called Twelve Paintings, is on view at the Chelsea branch of the PaceWildenstein Gallery. Ten of the paintings in this show are tall, vertical portraits of women, each nearly nine feet high, in which the female subjects are cropped at the top just above their hairline and, at the bottom edge of the canvas, at the chest. The sides of the paintings are similarly cropped in a way that sometimes eliminates the subject’s left eye. Such crops are by now an established convention in Mr. Katz’s oeuvre, as is the movie-screen close-up scale of the portrait subject’s features—a convention one is tempted to dub in-her-face portraiture.

Rothko famously said of his own large color abstractions that their scale was necessary for achieving a certain intimacy with the viewer, and it’s true of many large-scale color-field abstractions that they do invite a kind of public intimacy for the eye to settle into. But it’s also often true that large-scale figurative paintings have the opposite effect on the viewer: An eye or a mouth that’s many times larger than life-size may be shocking or amusing or otherwise unexpected, but it’s not likely to afford the viewer an experience of intimacy. The iconic scale of the subject’s facial features tends to drain them of character or personality. If not for the cheerful spirit of Mr. Katz’s outsized portraits, one might even call the scale of these faces grotesque—cheerfully grotesque.

But "cheerful" isn’t quite the mot juste. For a better description, we have to venture into the uncharted realm of feeling and thought that, for better and for worse, has come to be called "cool." Since this word has now become part of the mindless static of contemporary life, it’s almost impossible to define; one might even say that it would be the essence of an "uncool" mind to attempt to define "cool" too narrowly. What it seems to mean for many people is a style or sensibility in which an affectation of minimal effort achieves maximum effect.

Whatever it is, Mr. Katz seems abundantly possessed of it in his large-scale portrait paintings; they strike this viewer as very cool, indeed.

Mr. Katz is also a highly accomplished painter of landscapes and skyscapes, however, and his inspired handling of those subjects is anything but cool. His landscapes and skyscapes are exquisitely painterly—and, let’s face it, painterliness isn’t cool. It’s too obviously painstaking to be cool; it is—dare one say it?—too traditional to be cool. There’s only one landscape painting in the show at PaceWildenstein—the huge Winter Scene (2004), which measures eight by 10 feet—and it’s a knockout achievement.

Equally impressive is an even larger canvas called 6:30 AM (2004), which measures 11 and a half feet square and is clearly related to Winter Scene, but may at first glance be mistaken for a gray and white abstraction. One is tempted to say that with these two paintings, Mr. Katz is the hottest painter of winter snow on the current scene.

Alex Katz: Twelve Paintings remains on view at PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, through Oct. 9.

The American artist Doug Ohlson knows enough about black to use it judiciously; only two paintings included in the exhibition of geometric abstractions at the Andre Zarre Gallery contain black: Sevastopol (2003) and Acoustic Shade (2003). In each, black anchors Mr. Ohlson's signature arrays of floating vertical bars, providing dramatic and spatial counterpoint to the colors surrounding it. The rest of the palette is various and subtle, creating enticing and, at times, eye-popping elisions of tone, temperature and intensity. Smoldering pinks, livid aquamarines, implacable grays, dull blues-they shift, shimmy and stutter within an embracing field of light and space.

Horizontal formats bring out the best in Mr. Ohlson; you sense a sharpening of focus when he's attempting to relate a fleshy orange on the right side of the canvas to a blue-gray over on the left, and both to everything else in between. That doesn't mean Mr. Ohlson shakes the expertise that dogs him; his next show of paintings will be just as satisfying as the last. Blessed with an automatic grasp of the possibilities of color, Mr. Ohlson can pump out the paintings in his sleep. Then again, considering what most artists accomplish when fully conscious, we should be thankful for pictures as attractive and true as Gallipoli (2004), Spandrels (2002-3) and-for the regal expanse of black alone- Sevastopol .

Doug Ohlson is at the Andre Zarre Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, seventh floor, until June 30.

Radically Limited

PaceWildenstein describes the paintings as "a radical departure." The New York Times lauded them for "pushing at the extremes of cause and effect." Artists I've bumped into while making the rounds extol the paintings' daring turnabout in style. We will undoubtedly hear more of the same when further word comes down on the recent efforts of Agnes Martin, on display at the 57th Street branch of PaceWildenstein.

Ms. Martin, now 92 years old, has spent the better part of a lifetime painting stripes-a pictorial motif that suits her spare and gentle meditations on rhythm, light and the land. Examples can be seen in this exhibition.

But people aren't excited about those pictures; they're buzzing over the five canvases, segregated in the north section of the gallery, in which Ms. Martin breaks with the stripe. Triangles, trapezoids and squares-the vocabulary of form opens up and becomes concrete. The palette, typically wan, now includes a muddied field of burnt orange, furtive moments of yellowish green and a prominent, recurring black. To an artist for whom nuance is everything, changes in pictorial motif are not inconsiderable, and Ms. Martin's decisions deserve attention and commentary.

But do they merit all the fuss? I mean, come on : Ms. Martin's recent art isn't "radical" or "extreme"-it follows the ruminative path she's been treading since Day 1. The painterly approach is unchanged; the canvases are characterized by grainy washes of acrylic paint, ruled yet sentient lines, and a sense that the smallest mark carries with it the tremendous burden of sensibility. The compositions continue to be predicated on symmetrical arrangements of form. The tenor of the work is ever tender, unkempt and awestruck. But is this a revolution in style? It's more like a tempest in a teapot.

We're told that the paintings reiterate themes found in Ms. Martin's formative work from the late 1950's and 1960's, which are the subject of an exhibition at Dia:Beacon. Whether a jaunt on Metro-North is required to better appreciate the recent pictures is a question I'll leave to the reader-I don't get paid enough to waste an afternoon at the Temple of Doom. More fascinating are the questions prompted by the limited scope of Ms. Martin's oeuvre and its ardent following. The ephemeral emotions she gives body to are fluently set forth, and the paintings have their attractions. Yet consistency of style and integrity of vision are meager compensations for an art that does barely something with almost nothing. Ms. Martin is capable of asking from herself only so much as a painter; that's her lot in life. Our lot is a culture that should ask more of its artists-and doesn't.

Agnes Martin: Homage to Life is at PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, until June 30.

Confounding Space

"Sublime" is a word that should set off alarms when it's used in connection with the visual arts. Few artists deserve the accolade-after Fra Angelico and Vermeer, the list peters out. As for embodying the sublime, the noble pursuit finds its most convincing realization in the work of the Old Masters, who had the painterly goods to give shape to the ineffable. For the New Masters, most of whom have resigned themselves to an aesthetic of diminishing returns, the sublime is a pretext for making skimpy art-as if the closer an artist comes to God, the less responsible he is for the exigencies of craft. Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman are the paradigms of this phenomenon-the bad examples, too. (Ms. Martin is among its wispiest adherents. The sculptor Christopher Wilmarth is the exception that proves the rule.)

The current heir to this dubious tradition is the Bombay-born, London-based artist Anish Kapoor. The word "sublime" pops up three times in the press release accompanying Whiteout , an exhibition of Mr. Kapoor's sculpture at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery. The work, according to the artist, involves itself with "issues that lie below the material … the non-physical things, the intellectual things." Looking at the two new major pieces at Gladstone, Whiteout (2004) and Carousel (2004), you know what he's talking about.

Whiteout is a rectangular block, roughly six feet in height, with concave sides that seem to arch inward unto infinity. Carousel is made up of two large discs, covered with stainless steel and situated on the horizontal, connected with a sloping, centralized column. Both pieces are blindingly white. Mr. Kapoor uses the color as an agent of intense spatial flux. The eye strains in an attempt to discern where solid form ends or, for that matter, begins. The distinction between illusion and fact is stretched so taut that it loses its meaning. Is the interior of Carousel like a bowl, or is it like a table? Visitors to the gallery crane their necks, peer intently and (contrary to the sign at the gallery entrance) touch the sculptures in order to figure out just where the pieces are .

Confounding actual space is, in Mr. Kapoor's hands, a neat and spectacular trick-the work rates high on the gee-whiz scale. Yet there's no satisfaction taken in its making. Enthralled by the "non-physical" and "intellectual things," Mr. Kapoor is oblivious to art as a sensual pursuit, as a material challenge. The perceptual conundrums in which he trades generate headaches, not delight. In the end, neither pleasure nor pain is the issue; indifference is. Immaculate and self-sufficient, the work couldn't care less if you looked at it. Mr. Kapoor's art renders the viewer unnecessary-and it makes us feel … impure. How dare we intrude upon its sanctity! The sculptures can't be troubled to acknowledge us. At which point, we begin to wonder if we should acknowledge them.

Anish Kapoor: Whiteout is at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, until June 25.