LAURIE FENDRICH
Katherina Rich Perlow Gallery

“Thank heaven for art that has nothing to prove!” Louise Bogan, former poetry editor of the New Yorker and a poet herself, understood the play element at the heart of even the most rigorous art. Her exclamation could stand as a watchword for Laurie Fendrich’s playful, controlled abstractions.

A painter for more than three decades, Ms. Fendrich received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978 and is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University. This is her first solo exhibition at Katherina Rich Perlow Gallery.

The artist acknowledges that she has inadvertently painted her way back to the Modernism of the 1930s. But even if she had refused to fess up, Modernism’s early history is there to see. Her imagery is yoked to a kind of dancing Constructivism, its angularities set in graceful motion by the curvilinear rhythms of Art Deco.

The Metropolitan Museum’s Stuart Davis retrospective in the early 1990s was a watershed event in Ms. Fendrich’s painting. The austerity of previous work began to give way to puckish tensions among vaulting curves, parabolas, and impossible swags in concert with zigzagging linearity. While Davis incorporated identifiable motifs from popular culture into his work, Ms. Fendrich is more indirect. She does not set her sights on the American scene in a definable way, but her assertive colors and near-cartoony biomorphic shapes are, as she puts it, “American — kind of obnoxious and brassy, no matter what.”

Each of the 16 paintings on view balances the levity proper to a game with the uncertainty that characterizes free play. Will the game come off? Can the player make it to the finish line? What can you do with the dozen disparate greens — some dull, others raucous — that dominate “Round and Round” (2006)? You balance and enhance them with small tiles of contrasting color in just the right tonal arrangements, that’s what. And you create a lovely nimbus around each color ration with a scumbled edge or the cutting away of a surface built with lush, optical transparencies.

The work is part playground, part calculated wager against chaos. Cultivation is at stake in this kind of pictorial game. But graphic wit, combined with sophisticated color interactions and attention to texture, rein in any tendency to arbitrariness. Ms. Fendrich scores for the side of refinement and pride of craft.

— Maureen Mullarkey

Until January 6 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-644-7171).

LEE TANNER
The Jazz Image: Masters of Jazz Photography

Jazz grew up with photography. There must be paintings of jazz musicians, but none come to mind. The statue of Duke Ellington at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street is depressingly static, with none of the grace and charm of the great pianist, composer, and bandleader. But several photographers have had a feeling for jazz, and for the men and women who make jazz, and they created an intimate visual record that accords with the music. “The Jazz Image: Masters of Jazz Photography” (Abrams, New York, 176 pages, $40), by Lee Tanner, showcases 30 of these photographers with more than 150 pictures. There are brief biographies for most of the photographers, as well as an introduction by Nat Hentoff and an afterword by Peter Fetterman.

Speaking of Ellington, there are two pictures of him, on pages 40 and 41, by Hugh Bell (1952) and Herman Leonard (1958). In both he is seated at a piano, but in the first he is turned toward the audience with an incandescent smile on his face and a sartorially splendiferous shoestring bow tie around his neck. Leonard, one of the best of the best photographers of jazz musicians, took a classic shot from stage level looking up at a backlit Ellington, caught in the spotlight with his hand poised above the keyboard. Appropriately elegant.

William Gottlieb wrote a jazz column for the Washington Post in the 1930s and started taking pictures because his editor would not assign a photographer to cover the shows he reviewed. There is a photo in the book from 1948 of Ella Fitzgerald singing in a 52nd Street club: Ella, with her monumental poise at the microphone, a delicious fuzzy white hat atop her head, and Dizzy Gillespie looking on at the side. To see the expression Gottlieb caught on the trumpet player’s face is to understand why Gillespie was so loved.

And see the smile that author Lee Tanner caught on Jimmy Rushing at the WGBH-TV studio in Boston (1966).

Many of the pictures are from rehearsals and jam sessions: Without having to worry about interfering with an audience, the photographers were free to get close to the musicians, and to shoot from many angles. There are also candid pictures, such as Herb Snitzer’s 1958 late night shot of Lester Young and Hank Jones on the sidewalk outside the Half Note, Young with his sax in a case and his trademark porkpie hat, and a sign in back advertising “Newly Decorated Furnished Rooms.”

I am sorry photographers Roy DeCarava and W. Eugene Smith are not included in “The Jazz Image,” but there is much pleasure here. The book makes me want to put on some treasured CDs.

— William Meyers