Galleries 57

There were a few good art shows on 57th Street yesterday; fortunately I got there on the last day of one the of the better ones.

Kraushaar Gallery showed Leon Goldin's "Five Decades of Works on Paper" (which ended on April 10; work shown left). Goldin's abstract charcoal drawings seem drawn from life, but yet are completely abstract lines and shapes. The one exception is probably the most beautiful and haunting of the works on display.

You can immediately understand the trees, horizon line, and pathways in his "Riverside Park" from 1964. Goldin will scratch and rub charcoal into the paper and then erase it so a ghostish gray emerges from the heavily-textured paper. The battle between the neutral grays and blacks of the charcoal and the warmth of the paper keep the drawings vibrant. In "Riverside Park" Goldin the allows the creamy paper to be as strong and surprising as his stout chalky line and foggy erased grays.

Goldin's work is about proportion and balance, how to harmonize line, mass and color within a rectangular surface, and how to organize a seemingly random marks with a muscular poise.

In the same building at Tibor de Nagy, Jane Freilicher is showing paintings of flowers and cityscapes. The show is an extended riff on the color orange versus the color blue. Hilton Kramer talks about the show so I don't have to (even though I don't like it nearly as much as he does). Also at Tibor de Nagy is Edwin Dickinson's pictorial paintings of domestic scenes where all colors fade towards neutral in an overall blur. Both shows are up until April 17.

What happens when you mix brawny American primitivism, cubist angularity, and the surrealist quality of claustrophobic stillness? Hello, George Ault (pictured right)! Zabriskie Gallery has brought together drawings and paintings from the 20's and 30's that Ault painted while living in New York City and Woodstock, New York. The drawings are can be surprising in the way he builds up a cloud with marks only around it, or the way he marks a room's corners with light instead of dark. Sometimes Ault expresses a tree in just a few lines; sometimes he obsessively builds up pine tree needles with hundreds of strokes.

If you're looking for variation, Ault isn't the only one to express it. Alexandre Gallery is showing works by fourteen artists. There are classic moderns like John Marin and Marden Hartley, as well as contemporary masters like Neil Welliver and Lois Dodd. The nicest surprise in this show is Adele Alsop's gestural paintings that mix pinks, greens, and creams (pictured below left). In one piece, she captures a forest scene with the sun coming up by painting flesh-toned tree branches writhing in the sun that's instantly recognizable as both realistically accurate and creatively original.

Lois Dodd's small landscapes can be about a simple thing -- like the tension between flecks of orange leaves and a steely blue tree, or red laundry hanging in front of a green shack. And did I mention they're showing a painting by Neil Welliver? The current "Selected Works" is up until April 17 at Alexandre, and then comes Mr. Welliver's "Oil Studies" beginning April 24. Yes, I'm going to be camping out for that one like a middle-aged divorcee standing in line for Kenny Rogers tickets.