Mr. Scott, whose abstract paintings and prints are on display at Hollis Taggart Galleries, doesn’t rely on slick theatrics, obtuse theorizing or technological appropriation. He has the temerity to plumb something deeper than his navel or the superficialities of pop culture. In an era dominated by secondhand conceptualism, he wrestles with firsthand experience. The confrontational act that Mr. Scott engages in? He looks out the window and likes what he sees.

Looking Through is, in fact, the title of Mr. Scott’s exhibition, calling forth questions of viewpoint, transparency, distance, detachment and, in the end, joyous connection with the world. The paintings demonstrate that what’s out there is worthy of our time, attention and, in this artist’s hands, unalloyed pleasure.

The pictures invite the eye to travel along shifting, bumping, stuttering and flowing byways. They evoke the natural world less through representation than sensation, channeling its luxuriance and snaking rhythms. Unmistakable suggestions of greenery—Mr. Scott’s garden, perhaps—provide a loose-limbed structure. An embracing light dapples the paintings.

Trailing through the pictures are tendril-like marks that only rarely coalesce into solid or recognizable shapes. Mr. Scott snugly knits this unfurling calligraphy within fluctuating fields of geometry: fractured accumulations of rectangles, squares, vertical stripes (horizontals can be picked out here and there) and the occasional circle.

The paintings are complicated, at times somewhat Byzantine, but they remain fluid and open. Their gently layered surfaces and airy spaces connote nature’s breadth and fecundity. Mr. Scott uses a brush exclusively for line-work; otherwise, he wields a palette knife with fetching nonchalance. As a paint-handler, Mr. Scott is appealingly casual, free and unfeigned as doodling.

Pungent purples, pinks, yellows, oranges and greens provide intervals and accents in intriguing counterpoint. Mr. Scott borrows from the whimsical rigor of Paul Klee and derives chromatic inspiration from Matisse; Wassily Kandinsky, more aesthetically than formally, is in the mix as well. Joan Mitchell is cited as a pivotal influence, but Mr. Scott is a more nuanced and less codified painter.

A sunny consistency is his liability. There are constant variations within each single canvas, but overall the work shimmies into a blur. Changes in scale help to provide some differentiation. Within large formats, Mr. Scott coasts on his unassuming virtuosity. The smaller paintings allow for some clumsiness, and they’re better for it: less stately, more emphatic and, at times, winningly off-kilter. Idiosyncrasy steals into Mr. Scott’s nimble hands when he has less surface area to cover.

Still, the charms of all the paintings in this exhibition are hard to resist—beguiling enough to allay criticism. In simply looking through, Mr. Scott is doing something right and then some.

Bill Scott: Looking Through is at the Hollis Taggart Gallery, 958 Madison Avenue, until March 31.

Brooklyn in Ruins

Greg Lindquist, whose paintings are on display at the McCaig & Welles Gallery in Williamsburg, is today’s equivalent to Hubert Robert—kind of.

Robert (1733–1808) was a French painter who specialized in depicting ruins. Inspired by the remnants of ancient Rome, he created his most memorable canvas from the imagination: a Louvre devastated by time. The museum, rendered as an accumulation of rubble, is dotted by vagrants grilling food, Michelangelo’s Dying Slave lying in pieces and, as a droll aside, an artist drawing from the few surviving classical sculptures.

Mr. Lindquist doesn’t trade in the picturesque, and he’s in no mood to crack jokes. Still, a dry romanticism runs through his art. Drawn to the ruins of present-day Brooklyn, Mr. Lindquist depicts the industrial quarters of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, areas marked by anonymous structures in disrepair, graffiti-strewn walls, mounds of debris and, looming over them with a stark sense of purpose, construction cranes. Awash in a wan and even light, the paintings are elegies for a city lost in transformation.

Attentive to the expansive sweep of space more typical of the outer boroughs, Mr. Lindquist is less interested in awe than in history come and gone—or, rather, going. A social subtext runs quietly through the paintings. Mr. Lindquist taps into an artist’s particular anxiety: a sensitivity to the loss of the blighted areas nearby their relatively inexpensive studio spaces, a fear of gentrification.

Meditations on the artist’s lot in life are subsumed by the demands of painting. Mr. Lindquist makes the most of a tawny range of ochres, grays and mild browns. His brushwork is blunt, scrubby and increasingly graphic. His compositions, with their distant and sometimes barely perceptible vistas, suggest isolation and remove. Mr. Lindquist’s New York City is a ghost town.

Mr. Lindquist’s scenes bring to mind Giorgio Morandi’s quietude, Fairfield Porter’s facture and, buried under the junk, Giorgio de Chirico’s creeping sense of anomie. Even if he doesn’t achieve those heights, his art doesn’t suffer from the comparisons. If anything, they’re powered by them. This is a deeply felt and promising debut.

Greg Lindquist is at the McCaig & Welles Gallery, 129 Roebling Street, Suite B, until March 31.

Mr. Angerer worked as head chef at the Tribeca seafood restaurants Fresh, Shore and Coast, and before that in the kitchens of Bouley Bakery, Jean-Georges, and Joël Robuchon in Paris. At Klee, his menu roams the Western world intrepidly, from dishes such as wiener schnitzel and paella to spaghetti puttanesca and profiteroles with cookies-and-cream ice cream. There are also over 20 wines by the glass and an international wine list with interesting Austrian choices.

As I waited at the bar for a table one evening, watching more and more people come pouring through the door, a tantalizing aroma wafted through the air: porcini. A waiter set down a large bowl of brown soup in front of the woman beside me. It smelled so good that I told her if I’d had a spoon, I’d have dug in. Further down, people were seated on both sides of the bar, which doubles as a communal table and is hung with light fixtures that look like inverted bottles. It was all very cheerful.

Ms. Mason acts as hostess. Apologizing profusely for the short wait, she led us to a booth in the back of the restaurant, which is paneled in white maple and reminds me of a ski lodge. It has large wooden booths with comfortable seats and tables big enough for six or even eight. The tables are a foot too wide to hear across, so we squeezed around the end. The semi-open kitchen is behind a wall that’s more Klimt than Klee, covered with shiny gold and green mosaic tile in a leaf motif.

We began with flammkuchen, the Alsatian thin-crust pizza (also known as tarte flambée. Mr. Angerer’s version has a flaky crust as light as puff pastry and comes topped with slivered Vidalia onions, crisp lardons of speck (a lightly smoked raw ham) and crème fraîche. I had one recently at the Bar Room at the Modern, where it’s made with fromage blanc and bacon. It’s very good, but I liked Klee’s even more.

Mr. Angerer does a clever riff on vitello tonnato, using a well-marbled black-hog pork instead of veal. The meat arrives cut in thin, tender pink slices, squiggled with a creamy albacore tuna sauce and garnished with large Sicilian capers. The porcini mushroom soup that smelled so appetizing as I waited at the bar turned out to be on the thin side (but then it had no cream). Two seafood first courses are outstanding. A glistening Arctic char tartare is layered in a wide, heavy-stemmed martini-shaped glass with lime and golden beet caviar and topped with an herb salad. The shrimp cocktail bears no resemblance to its often boring steakhouse cousin; the shrimp is halved and tossed with a champagne mustard sauce, served on a purée of avocado, and topped with baby greens and herbs.

There’s a rotating list of daily specials and pastas. Goatfish, which has a firm white flesh reminiscent of red mullet, is served on linguine with Niçoise olives in a cherry-tomato sauce. Penne is tossed in a thick, spicy tomato sauce with crumbled fennel sausage. A fine beef-and-pork sausage, made especially for the restaurant, is cut in wedges and lined up over smoked sauerkraut on a long white plate.

Mr. Angerer’s cooking methods travel far and wide, too. The main dishes are divided under the headings “wood stone oven,” “mesquite” or “griddle.” From the griddle, seared sea scallops came with seared cauliflower and a well-intentioned but characterless lobster-barley risotto. From the mesquite grill, the thick swordfish steak topped with a sheet of crispy speck is wonderful, served rare on a bed of creamed Swiss chard. The Wagyu hanger steak is also excellent, sliced and served with small potatoes seasoned with paprika and Appenzeller cheese. From the wood stone oven comes a generous black-hog-loin pork chop, lightly charred and served with roasted red cabbage, apples glazed with Calvados and mustard relish. The slow-roasted duck with plums and clover honey, moist with a crisp skin, is served with quinoa.

Desserts include a pleasant apple strudel with walnuts and “topfen” rum ice cream, made from a curd cheese called quark, and a rich Sacher torte made with thin layers of sponge cake, chocolate and apricot preserve. The unctuous bread pudding comes in a glass with nutmeg custard sauce.

As I finished dessert one evening, my attention was drawn to a mirror across the way. The reflection was all black except for a man’s head at the bottom. It was lit up by a candle, so it looked as if it were floating—a Paul Klee ghost.

Klee Brasserie is a warm and welcome addition to Chelsea. But as far as dropping in is concerned, you may get a seat at the bar, but I’d play it safe and reserve.

No Vacancy

A cautionary tale for those planning to dine at the much-hyped new incarnation of the Waverly Inn in the West Village: As you probably know, the restaurant currently has only a private number. So I stopped by one afternoon and made a reservation in person. When I showed up for dinner, the name I’d given was no longer in their computer (and I’d seen it go in). Of course, mistakes happen. But we were told to wait at the bar, which we did for 45 minutes, in an increasingly restive scrum of disgruntled customers. “I’ve been waiting here over an hour with a confirmed reservation!” complained one man. We cut our losses and walked out, leaving the manager in a confrontation with an irate woman in a black fur coat.

Luckily, Café Cluny is just around the corner. The staff is exceptionally pleasant, and the kitchen turns out a fine roast chicken. They rescued the evening.

The mystery and wonder of Klee’s work is easier to stomach than Schiele’s unapologetic narcissism—no surprise there, really—but the work isn’t without limitations. If anything, Klee and America confirms the Swiss artist’s minor standing even as it highlights his almost unerring acuity.

The exhibition traces the reception of Klee’s art in the United States, a country he never visited and, apparently, never had any interest in visiting. Though an enthusiastic audience eventually coalesced here, it was slow in coming. His influence on the burgeoning movement that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism was pivotal, but his work was too modern and, perhaps, too idiosyncratic to make early headway in the States.

A “strange meteor from Switzerland” is how Henry McBride, writing in 1924 for the New York Herald, described Klee. It’s a phrase that nicely underscores the artist’s startling otherness. As his fortunes fell in Europe, due largely to Hitler’s campaign against “degenerate art,” Americans would come to embrace him as “one of the greatest child/poets in the world” (as Diego Rivera put it).

The full story is told in the sizable catalog. A small side gallery dutifully displays photographs of Klee’s American admirers, along with explanatory texts. (The photos feature, among others, Rivera and a stunningly beautiful Frida Kahlo, playwright Clifford Odets, MoMA spearhead Alfred Barr, and important collectors like Katharine Drier and Louise and Walter Arensberg.) The real impetus for the exhibition, though, is to gather choice works by one of the most beloved painters of the 20th century.

Given the diverse charms of Klee’s art, that’s not such a bad deal. His precisely rendered miniaturist tableaus are an elusive mix of parable, reverie and fairy tale. The lessons of Modernism, particularly those of Picasso and Robert Delaunay, are easy to discern. After that, the work goes global. The cross-cultural references are broad, but they’re incorporated seamlessly and uncannily. Every time you catch yourself snagging on this or that influence—Byzantine designs, Native American totems or Egyptian hieroglyphs—Klee’s witty and elusive fictions whisk it away.

Titles count for a lot: Fool in Christ, Agricultural Research Station for Late Autumn, Sacred Islands, Owl Comedy, The Whole Is Dimming—these aren’t explanatory captions, but specific poetic renderings of the quizzical, often absurd events pictured. This verbal precision matches Klee’s approach to pictorial form. Whether orchestrating a field of staccato brushstrokes or scrubbing oils into a coarsely woven jute support, he instinctively took the pithiest route to embodying a given motif. His visionary intent was inseparable from his confidence with means and materials.

For a while, anyway. Ultimately, Klee’s sophistication as a painter is less a boon than an obstacle. His fantasies are diminished by an almost machine-like proficiency. The handling of materials, while always fetching, is surprisingly prefab. The grainy, pinkish ground of Gifts for J (1928) and the ghostly smudges of oil transfer in Abstract Trio (1923) aren’t consequences of painterly exploration but effects expertly put into place. Contrivance hampers the vitality of Klee’s intricate, toy-like symbolism. The pictures begin to feel rickety, their poetry thin, their emotions false.

The resulting loss of tone—of magic, really—is disheartening. Nonetheless, Klee’s allure as a painter remains intact. There are beautiful pictures full of oddball lyricism included at the Neue Galerie. Sacred Islands (1926), Red Balloon (1922), Cold City (1921) and Fear (1934), with its cosmic, all-seeing eye, are glories of concision, touch and allusion. Klee and America may prompt a niggling disenchantment, but it’s a modestly winning exhibition all the same. Small pleasures are better than no pleasure at all.

Klee and America is at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, until May 22.

Taking Action

There are few greater satisfactions a critic can experience than being wrong—that is, if being wrong affirms the greater cultural good. Six years ago, I complained that the paintings of veteran West Coast artist Ed Moses were “flimsy,” “overbearing and slick.” Walking through the Jacobson Howard Gallery, which is exhibiting some of Mr. Moses’ canvases from the late 1980’s (and one from the early 90’s), a question came to mind: What was I thinking?

The paintings, particularly those in the gallery’s second-floor space, are visceral but elegant, harsh but lyrical. Mr. Moses works in a familiar mode—action painting, with its play-it-where-it-lays, go-with-the-flow ethos. But it’s thrilling to see how he deepens tradition with an eye trained on history and a foot putting the pedal to the metal.

Mr. Moses may take umbrage at the “action painting” tag. Harold Rosenberg invented that conceit for his buddy Willem de Kooning; from Day 1, it was a wrongheaded bit of P.R. privileging self-expression over aesthetic resolution. “Zen boogy woogy”—Mr. Moses’ description of his method—is better; it reveals a self-deprecating sense of humor. Existentialist BS isn’t on the agenda.

Yet Mr. Moses does surrender himself to process. The pictures are literally painted with a broad brush (or sometimes a squeegee). Great swaths of black, white and ocher, along with teasing slurs of red and pink, cascade from the top of each canvas, creating supple elisions of space and atmosphere. The canvases are as tangled and dense as swamps and as immediate and raw as graffiti-covered walls.

Miró is in the mix, particularly in Mr. Moses’ use of black, as are the exquisite spontaneity and keen attention to tone characteristic of Asian art. How you regard the pictures will depend on how much you value innovation or, more accurately, novelty. The paintings are inconceivable without the examples of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. For my money, you can keep them all: Mr. Moses’ art expresses greater breadth, nuance and accomplishment. To hell with who was there first—Mr. Moses deserves a place in the firmament. Perhaps this exhibition will help get him there.

Ed Moses: The Dune Series is at the Jacobson Howard Gallery, 22 East 72nd Street, until March 31.

The mystery and wonder of Klee’s work is easier to stomach than Schiele’s unapologetic narcissism—no surprise there, really—but the work isn’t without limitations. If anything, Klee and America confirms the Swiss artist’s minor standing even as it highlights his almost unerring acuity.

The exhibition traces the reception of Klee’s art in the United States, a country he never visited and, apparently, never had any interest in visiting. Though an enthusiastic audience eventually coalesced here, it was slow in coming. His influence on the burgeoning movement that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism was pivotal, but his work was too modern and, perhaps, too idiosyncratic to make early headway in the States.

A “strange meteor from Switzerland” is how Henry McBride, writing in 1924 for the New York Herald, described Klee. It’s a phrase that nicely underscores the artist’s startling otherness. As his fortunes fell in Europe, due largely to Hitler’s campaign against “degenerate art,” Americans would come to embrace him as “one of the greatest child/poets in the world” (as Diego Rivera put it).

The full story is told in the sizable catalog. A small side gallery dutifully displays photographs of Klee’s American admirers, along with explanatory texts. (The photos feature, among others, Rivera and a stunningly beautiful Frida Kahlo, playwright Clifford Odets, MoMA spearhead Alfred Barr, and important collectors like Katharine Drier and Louise and Walter Arensberg.) The real impetus for the exhibition, though, is to gather choice works by one of the most beloved painters of the 20th century.

Given the diverse charms of Klee’s art, that’s not such a bad deal. His precisely rendered miniaturist tableaus are an elusive mix of parable, reverie and fairy tale. The lessons of Modernism, particularly those of Picasso and Robert Delaunay, are easy to discern. After that, the work goes global. The cross-cultural references are broad, but they’re incorporated seamlessly and uncannily. Every time you catch yourself snagging on this or that influence—Byzantine designs, Native American totems or Egyptian hieroglyphs—Klee’s witty and elusive fictions whisk it away.

Titles count for a lot: Fool in Christ, Agricultural Research Station for Late Autumn, Sacred Islands, Owl Comedy, The Whole Is Dimming—these aren’t explanatory captions, but specific poetic renderings of the quizzical, often absurd events pictured. This verbal precision matches Klee’s approach to pictorial form. Whether orchestrating a field of staccato brushstrokes or scrubbing oils into a coarsely woven jute support, he instinctively took the pithiest route to embodying a given motif. His visionary intent was inseparable from his confidence with means and materials.

For a while, anyway. Ultimately, Klee’s sophistication as a painter is less a boon than an obstacle. His fantasies are diminished by an almost machine-like proficiency. The handling of materials, while always fetching, is surprisingly prefab. The grainy, pinkish ground of Gifts for J (1928) and the ghostly smudges of oil transfer in Abstract Trio (1923) aren’t consequences of painterly exploration but effects expertly put into place. Contrivance hampers the vitality of Klee’s intricate, toy-like symbolism. The pictures begin to feel rickety, their poetry thin, their emotions false.

The resulting loss of tone—of magic, really—is disheartening. Nonetheless, Klee’s allure as a painter remains intact. There are beautiful pictures full of oddball lyricism included at the Neue Galerie. Sacred Islands (1926), Red Balloon (1922), Cold City (1921) and Fear (1934), with its cosmic, all-seeing eye, are glories of concision, touch and allusion. Klee and America may prompt a niggling disenchantment, but it’s a modestly winning exhibition all the same. Small pleasures are better than no pleasure at all.

Klee and America is at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, until May 22.

Taking Action

There are few greater satisfactions a critic can experience than being wrong—that is, if being wrong affirms the greater cultural good. Six years ago, I complained that the paintings of veteran West Coast artist Ed Moses were “flimsy,” “overbearing and slick.” Walking through the Jacobson Howard Gallery, which is exhibiting some of Mr. Moses’ canvases from the late 1980’s (and one from the early 90’s), a question came to mind: What was I thinking?

The paintings, particularly those in the gallery’s second-floor space, are visceral but elegant, harsh but lyrical. Mr. Moses works in a familiar mode—action painting, with its play-it-where-it-lays, go-with-the-flow ethos. But it’s thrilling to see how he deepens tradition with an eye trained on history and a foot putting the pedal to the metal.

Mr. Moses may take umbrage at the “action painting” tag. Harold Rosenberg invented that conceit for his buddy Willem de Kooning; from Day 1, it was a wrongheaded bit of P.R. privileging self-expression over aesthetic resolution. “Zen boogy woogy”—Mr. Moses’ description of his method—is better; it reveals a self-deprecating sense of humor. Existentialist BS isn’t on the agenda.

Yet Mr. Moses does surrender himself to process. The pictures are literally painted with a broad brush (or sometimes a squeegee). Great swaths of black, white and ocher, along with teasing slurs of red and pink, cascade from the top of each canvas, creating supple elisions of space and atmosphere. The canvases are as tangled and dense as swamps and as immediate and raw as graffiti-covered walls.

Miró is in the mix, particularly in Mr. Moses’ use of black, as are the exquisite spontaneity and keen attention to tone characteristic of Asian art. How you regard the pictures will depend on how much you value innovation or, more accurately, novelty. The paintings are inconceivable without the examples of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. For my money, you can keep them all: Mr. Moses’ art expresses greater breadth, nuance and accomplishment. To hell with who was there first—Mr. Moses deserves a place in the firmament. Perhaps this exhibition will help get him there.

Ed Moses: The Dune Series is at the Jacobson Howard Gallery, 22 East 72nd Street, until March 31.

Innovator, Activist, Healer: The Art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis traces the career of an Austrian who began her artistic development as a student at the legendary Bauhaus in Germany, where the faculty included such celebrated artists as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer, as well as the architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In this heady intellectual milieu, where utopian political theories were combined with radical aesthetic ideologies to produce a pedagogical program guaranteed to offend established taste, Dicker-Brandeis proved to be an exceptionally gifted and versatile talent. Indeed, the range of her accomplishments is phenomenal, for it encompasses, beside paintings and drawings in both traditional and modernist styles, stage and costume design, architectural drawings and original designs for modernist furniture—all of which are well represented in the Jewish Museum exhibition. Also documented, alas, is the tragic fate of the artist herself: In 1944, at the age of 46, she was murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Even in the last, horrific chapter of her remarkable life, Dicker-Brandeis remained a heroic spirit. In 1942—before Auschwitz—she was sent to Terezín, where she somehow managed to teach the children in the concentration camp how to draw; and in 1943 she organized a secret exhibition, in the camp, of the children’s drawings. These drawings, which were not discovered until after the end of World War II, are also represented in the current exhibition. This is not the kind of work that’s likely to turn up in textbook histories of modern European art, but it nonetheless has something important to tell us about the survival of the creative spirit in the darkest period of modern European history.

About Dicker-Brandeis’ own work as an artist, it’s interesting to observe that after clearly demonstrating a precocious command of nearly every aspect of the Bauhaus aesthetic, she turned toward a more traditional mode of representational painting and drawing. Her portrait studies and drawings of the nude are the work of a mature talent; the most accomplished of them are a painting, Double Portrait from a Photo (circa 1938-40), and a stunning pastel of a reclining male nude, Nude Pavel Brandeis (circa 1938-42), a portrait—of a sort—of her husband. She also had a Communist phase, in which she produced anti-fascist agitprop posters in the photo-montage style better known to us in the work of Hannah Höch and John Heartfield.

It should be understood, of course, that much of Dicker-Brandeis’ art has been lost to posterity—destroyed, as she herself was, in the Nazi terror. What must also be recalled is Hitler’s implacable campaign to rid the German Reich of the modernist art he intensely despised. Germany in the pre-Nazi Weimar period had been one of the most vibrant centers of modernism on the international art scene. Its art galleries and private collections of avant-garde art were the most renowned in the Western world, and this, too, became one of the principal objects of Hitler’s wrath. As early as 1933, the first of several exhibitions designed to ridicule modernist art was staged in Karlsruhe, and in 1934 Hitler delivered his first speech condemning “degenerate art” in Nuremberg. The climax of this evil campaign came in 1937 with the enormous Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. Needless to say, the Bauhaus was closed, and it was in the aftermath of the Degenerate Art campaign that many German artists, art dealers, art historians and collectors fled to a safe haven in the United States.

Unfortunately, Dicker-Brandeis was not one of them. She was offered an opportunity to emigrate to Palestine, but her husband Pavel was denied a visa and she refused to abandon him. For a time, they found refuge in the Czech countryside, but that was short-lived.

Innovator, Activist, Healer: The Art of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis remains on view at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, through Jan. 16, 2005, and is accompanied by an excellent catalog.

Served at Vela's Hydraulic Tables

Everything about Vela is black. The walls are black, the mirrors are black, the metallic banquettes that curve like waves above your head are black, the tables and floor are black. The staff wears black; even the immense long bar is black (except for the bottles behind it, of course). If you're wearing black, you'll simply disappear into your banquette, your disembodied head floating in space like one of the egg-like creatures in a painting by Paul Klee-and from time to time your disembodied hand will be seen lifting a pair of chopsticks.

"This place is more like a 70's nightclub than a Japanese restaurant," said a friend who was appropriately dressed in a black shirt and nursing a martini when I arrived. "It reminds me of Studio 54 and Heartbreak."

I read somewhere that the Spanish director Luis Buñuel said the only way to make a perfect martini was to let a streak of sunlight pass through the bottle of vermouth and your glass before you poured in the gin. No chance of sunlight here. But there are candles- vela means candle in Portuguese-and huge pink silk lampshades that cast a gentle glow over the tables. Outside the club-I mean restaurant-there's a red velvet rope and, in the vestibule, a vast gold-painted wall inlaid with tiny glass beans. A waterfall cascades behind the reception desk where the dark-suited host checked off our reservation and led us into the cavernous dining room, where the columns are covered in bamboo.

On a recent evening, the tables along the banquettes were filled with groups of wide-eyed young women decked out like tropical birds in bright summer colors, tossing back their hair and, from time to time, giving vent to piercing, bird-like shrieks. The crowd around the bar was mostly male. It felt like prom night. I couldn't believe this was the same place that for years was Cal's, an amiable neighborhood restaurant famous for its hamburgers.

Now the food is an up-to-the-minute blend of Japanese ingredients and the tropical flavors of Brazil. The chef at Vela, Joo-Joo Kim, was formerly at Sushi Samba in South Beach. In addition to traditional sushi, there are dishes such as cherry-blossom smoked yellowtail served with mango salsa, and skewers of salmon cured with lemongrass and pumpkin and topped with avocado. Translucent slices of pink snapper are lined up on a long plate, garnished with plum mousse and a refreshing citrussy yuzu-lychee vinaigrette. As a side dish, there's black rice or black beans-and if you're into an all-black version of rice and beans, you can get both.

Vela is as much about the cocktails as it is about the food. If you believe that the only drink that goes with Japanese cuisine is a chilled barrel-aged sake or beer, then you'll blanch at the idea of ordering a caipirinha instead. It's Brazil's national drink, made with cachaça, a white rum distilled from sugar cane. Vela serves it traditional style; with lime or passion fruit and lychee purées (called a "Buzios" after a popular beach outside Rio). They also carry artisanal cachaças as well as sakes and wines.

Spicy dishes such as the tuna "pinchos," tuna sashimi served on crispy rice, and the rock shrimp tempura, flavored with sweet sake and served with a spicy dashi sauce, are great with cocktails, even martinis. So are the smoky char-grilled Kobe beef skewers, cooked rare and topped with barbecue sauce and jalapeño. The lobster tempura, on the other hand, was a disaster; it came wrapped in asparagus and served with a heavy sesame batter so thick that it reminded me of the wrapping on pigs-in-a-blanket-and it certainly wasn't worth $18.

On one occasion, a special of the day was a dish that looked like a particularly terrifying monster in a horror movie. Three plump, luminous and very orange uni and soft-boiled quail eggs were perched on a nest of ice and the longest sea-urchin spikes I've ever seen-they must've been at least three inches; if you stepped on one of those, you'd be laid up for a month. The waiter set down a small white jug on the side of the dish. "Low-sodium soy sauce." As if anyone cared. But the uni was terrific. I wish they'd put this on the menu every day.

Joo-Joo Kim creates intriguing combinations, such as stuffed "oshinko" wraps made with four different kinds of raw fish arranged on a long platter around pickled vegetables. Fluke is wrapped around a caperberry; a piece of tuna embraces a Japanese radish; salmon comes with hearts of palm, and smoked yellow tail with pickled spicy cucumber. This dish can't really be shared, and I'm sure you won't want to either. Another plate from the "Vela Rolls" section of the menu consists of rolls of anago (sea eel), cut into bite-size pieces, as well as shiso leaves, ginger, narazuke (wintermelon, marinated in miso and sake) and kanpyo (a Japanese gourd).

There are also larger plates, including a Wagyu rib eye and lobster with scallops, hearts of palm and spicy Brazilian sausage. Pan-seared duck comes in tender, pink slices garnished with grilled star fruit and bok choy, crispy polenta fries and a rich sauce made with tropical fruit sangria. It's superb.

Desserts are good too, although the first time I came here, I gave up on the chocolate cake. The waiter said it would take "five to seven minutes." That seemed reasonable, so I ordered it. Twenty minutes later, I asked where it was.

"It will take five to seven minutes." came the Kafkaesque reply.

Forget it.

(On the way out, I saw people eating small round chocolate cakes and wondered how long they'd had to wait for them.) I had better luck another time, and it was worth the wait-the cake was made with rich dark chocolate and garnished with sesame tuiles and glazed bananas. The poached pear is also first-rate, served with a delicate lychee mousse and lychee purée.

Vela also functions as a cocktail lounge, and it's the first restaurant I've heard of with hydraulic tables that can be raised or lowered like the French automobile, Citroën. Early in the evening, when you're expected to sit up properly for your meal, the tables are 30 inches high. Later on, they're lowered to 22 inches as (according to the press release) "late-night diners segue into a more loungy mode." More likely they're slumped down, head on the table, after that one caipirinha too many.

L'Actuel tried so very hard to be trendy: With its seafood bar, "French" tapas, pizza, cheese platters, stews served in tajins, cocktail tables made of stone, Japanese lanterns and bar stools covered in suede, it was a veritable compendium of the latest hits in restaurant design and fare. I liked the food, especially the pizzas, but not enough that I ever went back, particularly given the restaurant's location: a small

hotel called the Kimberly, on a dreary block just east of Lexington Avenue. If the restaurant belonged anywhere, it was in the meatpacking district.

Now the brasserie theme has been dropped, and the place has turned itself into a serious restaurant. You walk through a warm red bar and lounge into the dining room, which is softly lit and quirkily decorated. It has high ceilings, and the back wall is covered by white chiffon curtains that hang down in folds like rows of diapers. On the left are two gigantic wine cabinets with steel mesh doors. Across the way, the giant platinum mirrors of L'Actuel have been replaced with pleasant Mondrian-style paintings done in blocks of pastel colors. Oriental carpets cover the redwood floor, and instead of the Japanese lamp shades of yore, light shines from red sconces that look like miniature upside-down teepees. The room is quieter and much more comfortable than before, with red and green velvet banquettes, oil-burning lamps in glass bottles and white cloths on the tables. Earlier in the year, the centerpiece was a

surreal-looking green lawn made of wheatgrass, with a bouquet of red roses plonked in the center. Now it's a giant spray of unpainted twigs hung with red and silver Christmas balls.

Chef Schillinger is from Alsace, where his father had a two-star restaurant (he and Mr. Lhopitault also owned Destinee, which closed last year). His food is gorgeous to look at, playful and inventive, yet firmly based in the classics. It's served on eye-catching plates that come in all kinds of fanciful shapes and styles. They look straight out of Moss Design on Greene Street-curved glass, swirling teardrops, jagged edge tiles and deep white bowls-and they serve as frames for glistening pools of sauce and meat or fish that are lined up in precise, military rows or cut into minuscule cubes.

Given the chef's background, it's hardly surprising that the tarte flambé, an Alsatian pizza, should be so extraordinary. It's a holdover from the old menu, brought sizzling to the table topped with onion and cheese. The onion is slightly raw under its layer of melted cheese; the bacon is smoky and the crust feathery and light, not heavy or filling. Mr. Schillinger has also kept another pizza from before, a combination of tuna and wasabi (a Barry Wine dish from Mercer Kitchen). Except for this and the scrambled eggs with caviar that is served alongside poached egg with truffle mashed potatoes, the menu-which is quite short-is entirely new.

Tartare de St. Jacques is made with sea scallops, hand-cut into quarter-inch squares and served with ginger, tomato confit and a creamy caviar dressing. Lobster salad is heaped on a tiny pile of mixed greens, with a paper-thin cracker stuffed with crabmeat and a lemongrass and mango dressing. The plate is decorated with globules of green basil mayonnaise arranged in a semicircle in graduating sizes. (I wonder how many times the cook working on this plate messes it up!)

One of my dinner companions was shocked to see salmon flavored with sumac on the menu: "Isn't that a poison?" Like a Japanese gourmet taking on the potentially lethal fugu fish, she ordered it anyway. Four perfect rectangles of salmon arrived on a crisscross pattern of dark brown sauce that stuck to the plate like glue. The fish was moist and smoky, a perfect foil for the airy horseradish cream and thin, spongy pancakes that garnished it. So what's next? Deadly nightshade?

Mr. Schillinger extracts intense flavors from his ingredients. A line-up of rectangular slabs of rare, seared sesame tuna is served with mustard sauce and dollops of ratatouille. How did he coax such taste out of summer vegetables at this time of year? A thick, perfectly cooked chunk of seared cod is matched with garlickly mashed potatoes and black olives. The porcini with the seared sea scallops had such a powerful aroma, I'm sure you could have smelled it from the next table. Braised lamb shank flavored with orange and served with potato gnocchi (which looked like little pancakes) had a rich, plummy sauce and buttery texture.

But there were a couple of losers. The halibut in a herb crust arrived looking as though it had been baked under a layer of the wheatgrass from the old dining-room centerpiece. It was overcooked, damp and spongy, and the bland tabbouleh sauce underneath did nothing to help. I was disappointed with the sweetbreads, too: They came under a foamy mushroom emulsion that had a lovely, truffly smell, topped with large, peeled fava beans. The dish was flat and needed something astringent-such as capers or even lemon-to bring it to life.

Desserts are elaborate. "I forgot what I ordered," said my companion, gazing down at the plate. Yves Tinguely and Paul Klee could have had a hand in its design, with the colorful splodges and the zeppelin-shaped pastry cylinder. But there was a clue: a pear silhouette in chocolate powder. Pear parfait!

Apart from a caramelized mango gratin that was way too sweet, pastry chef Raphael Sutter's desserts were both playful and delicious. The mango on polenta-which a friend described deliriously as tasting like a fruit version of uni-was inspired. So was the traditional Alsatian apple tart, which consisted of thin slices of apple on a fine pastry shell with vanilla ice cream. I also liked the selection of mini crèmes brûlées: vanilla, coffee, basil, thyme, citrus and honey. Mr. Schillinger must know his audience, for there are three chocolate desserts to choose from and they are all worth the calories. They include a heavenly molten chocolate cake with raspberry sorbet, and a bittersweet chocolate bombe with an apple marmalade filling and a green apple sorbet on the side.

Olica has set out to become a destination restaurant. This part of town may lack the frisson offered by a trip downtown, but the food is terrific. So what's in a name?

OLICA

**1/2

145 East 50th Street

583-0001

Dress: Business Noise Level: Fine Wine List: Mostly French, with some good inexpensive choices Credit Cards: All major Price Range: Lunch and dinner, main courses, $23 to $33 Lunch: Monday to Friday, noon to 4:30 p.m. Dinner: Monday to Thursday, 5:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, to 11:30 p.m.

* Good

** Very Good

*** Excellent

**** Outstanding

no star Poor

It's true that there are a lot of artists dazzled by the possibilities of technology, viewing it as a legitimate means of artistic inquiry. It's also true, although less remarked upon, that many artists worry how such technology might hamper the manner in which we see and experience the world. These are sticky issues, and the Whitney doesn't pretend it has all the answers. But by placing bets on this particular horse, the museum is acting on its hunch that "digital art practice" is the shape of things to come.

Of course, the Whitney's betting record in recent years has been less than profitable. The museum has a habit, one as unfortunate as it is congenital, of treating every trend that rolls down the pike as a "watershed moment," and BitStreams is no exception. The most remarkable thing about it, in fact, is how previously imagined the whole thing is. Notwithstanding the technological wizardry that's plugged into the museum's electrical outlets, BitStreams isn't about the future of art: It's about the art of presentation. The dry and depressing lesson we've learned from the triumph of the Conceptualist aesthetic-an aesthetic that informs this exhibition more than any single technological advance-is that the more art removes itself from the sensuality of materials, the more significant becomes its means of display. Installation, in other words, provides the alibi for a deficit of body.

Those employing digital media, which are by their very nature bodiless, are forced to make their efforts actual enough to occupy exhibition space. This goes to explain the finical attention to scale and environment that exemplifies BitStreams. The artists at the Whitney, from all appearances, employ the following strategy: If you can't make it real, make it big, and if you can't make it big, call the interior decorator. If all of this sounds like a Luddite's complaint, then ask yourself why these harbingers of the "unreal" rely on-to name just two items proffered-sod and grease to put their putative art across?

Whether digital technology will make a significant contribution to the visual arts is an open question. I remain skeptical. The more virtual our world becomes, the more, I think, human beings will seek solace and sustenance in the real. We as a species have too much of an investment-a primordial investment, if you will-in the material to forsake its complications, contradictions and pleasures. BitStreams is a breathless, empty venture. What it lacks, ultimately and profoundly, is the there without which we are nothing. BitStreams is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, until June 10.

Meditations On Permanence

Pat Adams, whose paintings are currently on display at Zabriskie Gallery, could teach the current generation of technophiles a thing or two about the potentialities of substance, of stuff celebrated and transformed. Ms. Adams employs a gamut of materials-oil, acrylic, enamel, grit, beads, shells and the lethal-sounding isobutyl metha-crylate-to create dense cosmologies of geometry and pattern. The surfaces of Ms. Adams' pictures are obdurate in their physicality, but the pictures themselves aren't finished or, more to the point, final. Each one retains an openness, a sense that the image arrived at is a temporary state of some unknown event or phenomenon.

While there's a strain of mysticism permeating Ms. Adams' art, there's nothing flaky or vague about her paintings. They're as firm, sharp and condensed as those of Paul Klee, an artist with whom she warrants some comparison. Like Klee, Ms. Adams favors an earthy palette-a dark red, tinged with purple and tending to brown, is her signature color-and her art is similarly taken with the symbolic. Unlike Klee, Ms. Adams' art is more private than whimsical, and her images risk a rune-like inaccessibility. Yet, the more her paintings bury their secrets, the more their secrets gain in purity.

Ms. Adams' finest pieces, Until (2000) and Nor Perhaps (2001), transfigure straightforward-not to say simple-compositions into mesmerizing meditations on permanence, continuity and our own fleeting toehold in the firmament. Which means that Ms. Adams' art is, in a not so oblique way after all, accessible indeed. Pat Adams: Recent Paintings is at Zabriskie Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, until June 15.

What Goes On Above the Horizon

Prior to the opening of her current exhibition at DC Moore Gallery, the painter Jane Wilson had provided this observer-and, from what I gather, not this observer alone-with one of the most memorable moments of the season. Her painting Snow, a 1964 oil on canvas, wasn't only featured in The First Fifty Years 1950-2000, an exhibition seen last winter at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, it was the best thing in it. This was some feat, given that The First Fifty Years was a compilation, and an impressive one at that, of "greatest hits" documenting the gallery's history. With its diffuse yet sharply stated light, Snow coupled the in-and-of-itself painterliness of Abstract Expressionism with the just-outside-the-window imperatives of realist art. The painting evinced an artist who, while not immune to pictorial bravado, found a tersely stated equanimity more suited to her vision.

The same unassuming probity-albeit now offset by a low-key grandeur-informs Ms. Wilson's recent work, the subject of Land/Sea/Sky at DC Moore Gallery. Of the three title motifs, it is the latter that predominates in her art. Each of Ms. Wilson's squarish canvases is devoted largely to what goes on above the horizon: an ominous bank of rolling clouds, the cleansing orange-yellow light of morning, an enveloping gray-green fog. The sky's unfolding expanse of space and its innumerable varieties of color and light hold Ms. Wilson and power her art. Land and sea, in contrast, don't do all that much for her. The horizons seen traversing the bottom of her pictures exist mainly as compositional foils and, as such, receive only obligatory attention. The best paintings at DC Moore are the "emptiest," the most given to the fugitive subtleties of atmosphere and light: Sun in February, Fog-Lit Night and the magisterial Lingering Blue (all 2000), whose fluttering greens, purples and blues only wobble when they're obliged to demarcate the concrete. One wonders if Ms. Wilson's work wouldn't benefit from her disregarding the land and sea altogether. Only when she relinquishes the pull of gravity does her art flourish. Jane Wilson: Land/Sea/Sky is at DC Moore, 724 Fifth Avenue, until June 8.

Under the directorship of its founder, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus did not offer training in architecture to female students, who were relegated to the sphere of household crafts. Painting was not then part of the official program of instruction, which gave priority to architecture, crafts and industrial design. Paul Klee, for example, taught design in the weaving workshop. Which is how Albers came to embrace weaving as her principal artistic medium and Bauhaus notions of form and function as her aesthetic philosophy.

It was an odd vocation for a gifted young woman of her social class. She was born Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin, the daughter of a prosperous Jewish businessman, Siegfried Fleischmann, who manufactured furniture, collected antiques and frequented the art museums. Albers' mother, whom she is said to have disliked, was an Ullstein, a family that presided over what would now be called a media empire. It was mostly devoted to book publishing and commercial magazines-the Condé Nast of Weimar Germany.

Albers had started painting at an early age. As an adolescent she was provided with a private art tutor, and in the family's spacious Berlin apartment there was a room devoted to her paintings. An early attempt to study with Oskar Kokoschka in Dresden was rebuffed, however, and her enrollment at the Bauhaus at the age of 23 seems to have marked the end of her ambitions in that direction.

Whether this was a loss for painting must remain a matter of speculation, of course. Based on the watercolors and other works on paper in the current shows, my guess is that it probably was a loss for painting. Of the 17 items in the section of Making Choices devoted to Albers, 15 are works on paper-watercolor, gouache, pencil and India ink-and all, in my view, are more compelling as examples of abstract art than many of her textile compositions. So, too, are the design studies on paper and the later prints in the Jewish Museum retrospective.

This is only partly owing to the severe restrictions which the Bauhaus conception of "functional form" imposed on the imaginative element in textile art. As a material means of creating abstract art, there is something inherently monotonous- visually and expressively monotonous-about the weaving medium itself when it is separated from its decorative function, as it is in this retrospective, and made to serve as an autonomous museum art. It is then that we are inevitably reminded that the traditional distinction that is made between the crafts, on the one hand, and fine art, on the other, is based on something more than intellectual snobbery. It is based on the nature of aesthetic experience, which accords to some media a higher artistic status over others precisely because of their capacity to encompass a greater range of emotions and ideas. In other words, a greater range of vision.

I must therefore respectfully disagree with the claim advanced in the catalogue of the current Albers retrospective by Nicholas Fox Weber that "Anni elevated the status of woven threads and put the medium on equal footing with oil on canvas and watercolor on paper." Neither am I persuaded by Mr. Weber's further claim that "Anni [created] individual objects that hold up against some of the finest abstract paintings of the [20th] century." This is not an assessment that can be seriously entertained, for there is nothing in the current retrospective to support it. Mr. Weber is no doubt correct in observing that Albers "did her utmost to achieve with the [weaving] medium what her heroes like Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky had accomplished in paint," but this proved to be an ambition that was unachievable.

Let's face it: In the history of abstract art on both sides of the Atlantic, the work of Anni Albers is scarcely more than a footnote. That it is a very interesting footnote, as footnotes sometimes are, is largely due to the personal and historical circumstances in which Albers and her husband Josef pursued their respective artistic vocations. In this respect, Mr. Weber is right to describe her as "a brave woman."

"She left the comforts of her luxurious bourgeois upbringing to join those daring souls who wanted to do the unprecedented at the Bauhaus," he writes. "She married a man from the other side of the tracks-in part because they shared a consuming faith in art," and they persevered "in spite of the sometimes desperate vicissitudes of their existence, in which Nazism, illness, and financial duress were a reality."

Theirs was indeed the fate shared by many gifted members of their intellectual generation in Weimar Germany. While others repudiated their bourgeois origins in favor of communism or Zionism or, among those who were not Jewish, even Nazism, the Albers' radical commitment was to modernist art, and they were among the fortunate who were able to secure safe passage to America when Hitler closed the Bauhaus in 1933 and stigmatized modernist art as "degenerate," and hence forbidden.

Theirs is certainly a dramatic story, and Anni's role in that story is beautifully documented in the final room of the current retrospective-the only room, alas, in which visitors to this exhibition tend to congregate in order to study the details of her life and that of her more famous husband. In the rooms devoted to her work, however, this intensity of interest is much diminished. To relieve the visual monotony of these woven abstractions, the organizers of the exhibition have engaged the services of Gae Aulenti, the Italian architect responsible for the horrors of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, to provide the work with an installation that at times simply overwhelms the work itself.

As you might expect, Albers' wall hangings from the Bauhaus period are closer in spirit to the kind of geometrical design that was taught in the school's introductory Vorkurs . In the later work, an attempt is made to provide the woven abstractions with somewhat more dramatic textures and sculptural effects. The latter reflect the influence of Peruvian textiles, in which Albers developed a keen interest. Yet there is no escaping the tedium inherent in the visual and material monotony of the medium itself. If not for Ms. Aulenti's installation design in the first room of the exhibition and the absorbing documentary material in the final room, there would not be much to sustain one's attention. Neither the woven versions of Paul Klee and De Stijl abstraction nor the neo-primitive adaptations of Peruvian folk art add much to our aesthetic experience, and about the most ambitious single work in the show- Six Prayers (1965-1966), created as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust-one can only say that it is scarcely sufficient for its subject.

Anni Albers remains on view at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, through Aug. 20.

Although he was accorded some passing praise early on from critics as diverse as Clement Greenberg, Henry McBride and Emily Genauer-in 1943, Greenberg cited a watercolor by Wheeler as "the most striking piece of work" in a large exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum otherwise said to be dominated by "archaizers," "academicists," and "eclectics"-Wheeler's career was never an easy one. And it wasn't only a matter of the economic hardship suffered by many artists of his generation. Wheeler's was often a difficult case even for fellow artists and other friends who admired his work.

It was typical of his erratic behavior, for example, that when the group of Indian Space Painters with whom he was most closely associated organized an exhibition of their work at the Gallery Neuf in New York in 1946, Wheeler-as Ms. Stavitsky writes in the catalogue of the Montclair show-"declined to participate in their exhibition that year and their magazine Iconograph, deploring what he perceived to be their narrow emphasis on technique." This is all the more bizarre when one considers the high degree of concentration that Wheeler lavished on his own meticulous technique in adapting the forms of Northwest coast Indian art to modernist pictorial structures derived from Paul Klee and Joan Miró.

What this odd behavior signified-besides, that is, a certain tendency to be arrogant, independent and quarrelsome-was Wheeler's preference for mystical utterance and oracular statement in speaking about his art. However hard he may have worked at perfecting his own very precise pictorial technique, even to the point of diagramming the many punning symbols that crowd his pictures with multiple meanings, it was to uncanny and occult spiritual forces that Wheeler attributed his artistic vision. In writing about his art-and he wrote a good deal-he wouldn't settle for anything less than the miraculous. To comprehend the importance he placed on such mystifications, it is therefore necessary to know something about his life, for Steve Wheeler's story is that of a man who had had to reinvent himself in order to pursue the artistic vocation that became the center of his existence.

"In his résumés and various writings," writes Ms. Stavitsky, "Wheeler typically reinvented himself as a first-generation American born in New Salem, Pennsylvania." In fact, as Ms. Stavitsky adds, "he was born as Stephen Brosnatch on April 3, 1912, in a village in Slovakia … and adopted the Americanized name of Steve Wheeler as a translation of his mother's family name in 1939."

In this respect, of course, he was very much a man of his time. Like a number of his contemporaries on the New York art scene-Arshile Gorky, John Graham and, for that matter, Mark Rothko-taking a new name was for Steve Wheeler but a first crucial step toward acquiring a new artistic identity. In this connection, moreover, it is hardly surprising to learn that as a prelude to that decisive moment in his career, Wheeler-or rather, Stephen Brosnatch-destroyed most of the work he had produced during what he afterwards dismissed as his "years of apprenticeship to art history," thereby clearing the way for his reincarnation as Steve Wheeler.

It was to the mining town of New Salem, where his father labored in the coal mines, that Stephen Brosnatch had been brought as an infant, and it was in those same mines that Brosnatch himself went to work at age 16. Years later, Wheeler claimed it was from the voice of an "oracle" heard in a mine that he first learned of his artistic vocation-hence the title of the painting called The Oracle Visiting the 20th Century (1943)-but his decision at an early age to devote himself to art was undoubtedly assisted by an uncle who earned his living as a commercial artist in Chicago. That uncle was his first art teacher; his last and most important was Hans Hofmann, with whom Wheeler studied for two years in New York.

Notwithstanding the metaphysical and historical fables Wheeler invented about himself-and he was neither the first nor the last artist to engage in such personal myth-making-his youth reads like a story Willa Cather might have written, the story of an immigrant teenage kid working in the mines by day and devoting his nights to voracious reading, learning to play the violin and painting in the family attic. In time, Wheeler accumulated a large and extraordinary private library devoted to art history, ethnology, philosophy and psychology-some relevant and representative volumes are included in the Montclair exhibition-which fed his developing interest in a mode of pictorial art that is at once abstract in its forms and symbolic in content.

It was in the development of a pictorial style of this persuasion that the two principal influences on Wheeler's painting-the art of the Northwest coast Indian tribes and the narrative abstraction of Paul Klee-were absorbed into a flattened, highly colored, Cubist format that probably owed something to Hofmann's teaching methods. The result was never painterly in the Hofmannesque manner, however. It was basically a tightly controlled graphic style that gave priority to the symbolic narrative that is told and retold in virtually every picture of the artist's mature period-a narrative in which Wheeler was intent upon mythologizing his own quest for the miraculous.

Opinions will naturally differ about the level of success Wheeler achieved in his pursuit of this mystical, hermetic narrative about his own life as an artist. For myself, there is a cornball element in Wheeler's art-an impulse that at times bears a closer resemblance to the contrivances of Rube Goldberg than to the spirit of Northwest coast Indian design or the paintings of Paul Klee-that tends to undermine the gravity of the artist's intentions. On the other hand, I am moved by the sheer exuberance-a distinctly American, urban exuberance-of a pictorial style that in principle is very much at odds with its governing technique but in practice manages to transcend the artist's compulsive attempt to impose absolute control on every detail. That exuberance suggests to me, anyway, that in his painting at least-if not in the rest of his often difficult life-Wheeler achieved a release from the demons that had haunted him since the days of his youth in the coal mines of Pennsylvania.

But in writing about Steve Wheeler's work on this occasion, I cannot speak with complete critical detachment, for in the last years of his life he touched my own life in a curious way.

About 10 years ago, I acquired a pied-à-terre on the fourth floor of a building in midtown Manhattan only a short walk from my office. It turned out to be the building in which Wheeler had lived and worked for many years, occupying the entire second floor. From time to time, I would run into an elderly, white-haired gent who seemed to live there, but I had no idea of who he was. I noticed the name on the mailbox was "Wheeler," but it never occurred to me that he was the painter Steve Wheeler. He seemed to know who I was, however, and always greeted me by my first name, in the hall or on the street, in a very cordial manner. But we never carried on a real conversation. It was only when he died about five years after I moved into that building that I discovered he was Steve Wheeler.

Then I discovered something else, too. Soon after Wheeler's death, my landlord-who is himself a painter-knocked on my door one day to tell me there was something he wanted me to see in Wheeler's second-floor studio. What I was shown, amid the disorder of Wheeler's voluminous library, was what seemed to be a complete archive of my own writings on art-magazines dating from the 1950's, clippings from The New York Review, The New York Times, Commentary and the art journals from the 1960's and 70's, a complete run of The New Criterion from the 1980's, and so on-including early columns I had written for The New York Observer in a room two floors above Wheeler's own residence.

I won't attempt to describe the emotions I experienced at that extraordinary moment. Suffice to say that it was the only time in my life when I had reason to feel like a character in one of those late stories that Henry James devoted to the lives of artists and writers. And insofar as this story can be said to have had an ending, that too is fairly Jamesian-for I now occupy part of the second-floor space that was formerly Steve Wheeler's studio.

Reading Gail Stavitsky's account of Wheeler's life in the catalogue accompanying the current exhibition, I see that I must have become his neighbor just before or after the death of his wife, whom he had married in 1939-the year he changed his name. After her death, his life declined into what Ms. Stavitsky describes as "bitter reclusion" and what others have called paranoia. Younger scholars hoping to interview him about his earlier career were said to be rudely treated, and when a show devoted to the Indian Space Painters was organized at Baruch College in 1991, Wheeler-as Ms. Stavitsky delicately puts it-"had to be escorted from the gallery." In our brief encounters, however, he was always a model of courtesy, and that is how I shall always remember him. The exhibition remains on view at the Montclair Art Museum through Jan. 4.