This winter the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery in New York City presented “Three Visions: Landscapes in 2005,” showcasing a trio of mature painters adept at combining realistic depictions of the natural world with the abstract demands of pictorial space. Harold Gregor (b. 1929), founder of the Heartland School, established his reputation with aerial views and “flatscapes” but also paints more close-up views.

“Winter Landscapes,” at the John Pence Gallery in San Francisco in January, explored the painterly possibilities of the season with forty works by contemporary artists and past masters. Less colorful than other times of year—blossoming spring, emerald summer or vibrant autumn—winter has its own attractions, even for city dwellers.

During the second half of the twentieth century—when American art was dominated by a series of movements from Abstract Expressionism to Conceptualism—Neil Welliver (1929–2005) was working in the idiom of landscape, perpetuating a genre that reaches back to the first great indigenous movement in the United States, the Hudson River School.

Mark Twain’s quip “I never let school interfere with my education” is entirely validated for a tiny segment of American graduate students exploring the inner workings of the art world and art market. This intersection of scholarship, connoisseurship and the art market is presently offered in a range of degree programs, certificate programs and special events presented by the international auction firms Christie’s and Sotheby’s at their New York headquarters and education centers.

In late 1986 I attended a lecture by a well-known critic. His topic was the depiction of the self in contemporary art. An enthusiast of the then au courant Neo-Expressionism, he used works by artists such as Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl and David Salle to argue that contemporary social ills made any kind of whole or wholesome selfhood problematic. Given this premise, the Neo-Expressionist penchant for distortion and disturbance was seen as honest realism, and anything else was either escapism or visual hypocrisy. In the question and answer period that followed I asked him how he would assess Fairfield Porter. He stated with audible contempt that Porter was another Norman Rockwell. It is one of the ironies of critical taste that Rockwell, who was so thoroughly reviled by modern artists and critics, was given an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in late 2001 and early 2002.



It takes a stunning lack of critical discernment or perhaps rigid ideological blinders to compare Porter to Rockwell. After all, Porter was an insider in the world of post-war New York modernism, the very world that recoiled from Rockwell. He was the first person to write about Willem de Kooning. In his role as a critic, first for Art News and then for The Nation, he wrote discerning and appreciative essays about modern artists as diverse as Joseph Cornell, Isamu Noguchi and Wolf Kahn…