Following the Leader . . . . . . To Fascinating Treasure

New York City’s contemporary art galleries are like children playing follow the leader. Once they clustered on the East Side: on 57th Street and north along Madison.  Then they rushed to Soho and anchored that burgeoning outpost of avant garde shops, restaurants and residential lofts.

   Now it’s far west Chelsea, a bland industrial area between 10th and 11th avenues, above and below 23rd Street.  Large spaces are housed in nondescript buildings with either sleek glass and steel entries or forbidding opaque facades. And a small army of excruciatingly thin young men and women clad mostly in black sit everywhere, glued to computer screens, or move languidly about the spaces. Welcomes are rare.

   This is the land of gallerinas and artists on the way up. Surprisingly, it is also home to an increasing number of museum quality shows, especially at Larry Gagosian’s two galleries, where a magnificent show of Claude Monet’s late paintings just closed and a seductive exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein still lifes is in full bloom.

   If  non-public museum shows of such quality and impact are not the norm, they seem at home in the showrooms of the world’s most important dealer in contemporary art. Gagosian’s list of artists and clients is boggling, his influence singular. So why shouldn’t he indulge himself — and us — in continual shows of great art. And offer it admission- free.

   The Monet was amazing:  Gorgeous examples of  increasingly abstract water lilies and willows from the early 1900s in the first gallery gave way to stunning, darker, more adventurous post-war pictures. On the very brink of abstraction, Monet yielded his famous control and refinement to a wildness of thick paint, swirling dark colors and an ambiguity of focus. This is nature — lilies, roses and the famous Japanese bridge — rendered primitive and dangerous. 

   The Lichtenstein, on the other hand, is all about control and stasis.  Gone are the comic book days of pop. In are verycarefully composed interiors and arrangements of domestic and generic objects rendered in his signature Ben-Day dots heavy outlines, but now with stripes and crosshatches and some peculiar spikes at odd angles in the works.

   The early work from about 1972 or so shows fruits — mostly bananas and grapefruits — in yellows and black. Clearly, if awkwardly, sexual, the pictures still maintain the innocence and flatness of signature Lichtenstein.

   Later pictures incorporate tableware — cups and wine glasses and silver pitchers — and invoke traditional still life works but with absolutely no emotion or traditional lushness. Mostly he rendering other artists’ work in his own style, making comments on the genre.

   Most interesting are the works that render subjects in pared down Cubism or that render Matisse in the Lichtenstein vocabulary.  An odalisque is a design element; Matisse’s famous studio is given a new color and rendered in both dots and dashes. 

   These works — over 50 in all — are especially interesting as Lichtenstein’s escape from the world of cartoon.  He held on to the popular appeal of comics but used classical techniques in his own way.  If these paintings do not have the powerful “wowâ€� punch of his more famous work, they are fascinating examples of a major artist’s changing interests and development.

      “Roy Lichtenstein:  Still Lifesâ€� runs through July 30 at Gagosian Gallery, 555 W. 24th St. in New York City.  Hours are Tues. to Sat., 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.  (212) 741-1111.  Catalog are $125.