ABSTRACT
Mitchell-Innes & Nash

“Abstract,” an attractive fivertist show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, reinforces two commonlaces about contemporary art exhiitions. First, the familiar bstract/realist distinction, now well over a century after the advent f modernism, says very little about rtmaking today. In its press release, he gallery practically concedes the oint, quoting artist Chris Martin: Abstraction no longer exists as a movement and no longer leads any avant-garde. The distinctions between abstraction and other art have become increasingly meaningless. Abstract painting is dead. That’s why it has become so interesting.”

You don’t have to agree with Mr. Martin’s overly clever conclusion to recognize this exhibition’s second commonplace: A group gallery show can succeed despite the flimsiest of conceptual frameworks. When art is strong enough to speak for itself, the title of the show under which it hangs simply does not matter.

Of the five artists in the exhibition, Mr. Martin is the most obvious crowdpleaser. His multimedia paintings exhibit a playful, willfully naive style that is highly idiosyncratic, yet flexible enough to reference both the soul music of Isaac Hayes and the abstract expressionism of Al Held. Mr. Martin’s works incorporate diverse materials including Styrofoam discs, papier-mâché blobs, overlapping strips of canvas, and a banana peel, in addition to the usual oil. Bulging with these sculptural additions, his paintings exemplify a transparent, openhanded approach to nonrepresentational work that is the real link between these artists.

Rebecca Morris contributes two large-scale untitled paintings — characterized by geometric blocks that interlock in one piece but float freely against an earth-brown ground in the other — with elegant streaks of dripped paint on the canvas edge testifying to the artist’s method of laying the canvas flat on the floor to paint. Alison Fox’s smaller works contain discrete blocks of color that look like strips of colored paper or pasted vinyl, as if they were part collage.

Alex Kwartler explores the play of light and darkness in works that lay bare the mental processes behind his moody conceptualism, while Phillip Allen’s three paintings probe the tension between rational form and sensual texture. Each piece presents a pattern of regular white shapes delimited by thin, colored outlines, neatly arranged between top and bottom borders of bright multicolored impasto — a lush relief that can rise a full inch from the canvas.

Lively and tactile, Mr. Allen’s surfaces seem incompatible with a notion like the death of abstract painting. What they signal instead is a fresh painterly vibrancy that has cast off the self-importance and theoretical grandstanding associated with modernism, freeing abstraction for a new generation of whimsical, imaginative artists.

-David Grosz

Until January 6 (534 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212 744-7400).

ROY LICHTENSTEIN WORKS ON PAPER: A Retrospective
James Goodman Gallery

Because nearly half of the 50 drawings and collages in “Roy Lichtenstein Works on Paper: a Retrospective,” at the James Goodman Gallery, come from the collection of Mr. Goodman and his wife, Katherine, the show offers uncommonly afforded glimpses into the working life of this artist. The couple has been collecting drawings by Lichtenstein since the early 1960s, and many of these examples have not been seen publicly since the last time the gallery showed his works on paper, in 1984.

Most of the work here falls into one of three categories: multicolored pencil drawings that served as studies for paintings, collaged studies for paintings, and largescale graphite drawings from the early 1960s. There are also two sculptured works and a print.

In a 1965 interview with David Sylvester, Mr. Lichtenstein (1923–97) spoke about his use of clichéd images — comic strips, but also objects — and how “the cliché is a cliché if you don’t know anything else, but . . . you can alter this cliché slightly, make it do something else in the painting.” This approach became the basis for his version of Pop art and much of the rest of his career.

A pair of high-top sneakers remains a somewhat clichéd icon of teenage life in America. But a closely rendered graphite drawing of those sneakers, as in “Keds” (1962), at a scale somewhat larger than life and emphasizing the abstract, crosshatch marks on the sole, alters the trite image sufficiently to infuse it with great verve.

In addition to several other such graphite drawings, one finds important multicolored studies for comics paintings, such as “Drawing for No Thank You!” (1964) and “Study for Sleeping Girl” (1964). When, however, Mr. Lichtenstein tweaked artistic styles rather than images from popular culture, the work lost some of its immediacy; it became more parodic. Still, the drawings from these later periods remained consistently engrossing.

Of the later work here, perhaps the most playful are the collage studies. In works such as “Collage for Interior With Diana” (1997), he affixed tape, printed paper, and painted paper onto a board, piecing together the final painting almost like a puzzle. The appeal of this show is, on the other hand, not puzzling at all: It is a live link to Mr. Lichtenstein’s fervent mind.

-Daniel Kunitz

Until January 15 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, no. 802, 212-593-3737).