Upper East Side Saturday

Starting out with Fairfield Porter at Tibor de Nagy. This beauty greets one at the entrance.
Gallery Link 

Then downstairs to Alexandre to see the Gregory Amenoffs. Gallery Link

Such unusual paintings- these images are lighter than the dense and craggy paintings themselves.

They owe a lot to early American landscape, as the press release makes clear. 

In several paintings, this hanging shape contains light, or water, or sun, an alternative landscape to  its immediate surroundings.

A sense of the surface- utterly painted. The light comes from deep within the paint, the juxtapositions of color.

A swampy space and sunset...

Perhaps my favorite work in the show, with daylight framing nightfall

In the back, a Neal Welliver.

It struck me with visual force that Maureen Gallace Gallace Linkmight be his rightful heir.

More landscape: a lovely John Walker

An artist new to me, Tom Uttech, of Wisconsin.

Calm excess...

Two more Amenoffs, as I emerge from the back

The relationship to Dove and Hartley is particularly felt here.

Onward to a lovely Maria Lassnig show at Petzel uptown. Gallery Link

Hung opposite the previous painting - a moment, upon seeing, that brings one to laughter.

A comedic, modernist shorthand begins to develop at odds with the naturalistic palette.

And morphs into visions of power

Or irony or blindness

Detail. Lassnig kept a signed Alice Neel reproduction dedicated to her - one sees  parallel interests between the two artists.

Similar to Neel, in Lassnig's self portraits there is a powerful psychological force revealing a core facet of identity--here achieved through color and form as much as touch. 

Onward to visit fabled Buddhist LA painter Billy Al Bengston at Venus Over Manhattan. Gallery Link

Here, Bengston paints a motorcycle series based on the actual one in the show, raced by his friend Aub LeBard. 

These are easel-size paintings.

With wonderful direct application. The lights, however, created a strobe effect. Bengston's paintings, both the bikes and chevrons, looked simple and fresh, straight out of the studio, experimental. 

At Gagosian, Nude, From Modigliani to Currin. Gallery Link (turns out I missed a whole floor of this show - the historical floor with Cezanne, Giacometti, Picasso, Modigliani - show is on until November 19th, so there's time).
Here, a gorgeous, simply gorgeous David Hockney- incredible color with surprising red and warm lavender highlights throughout, not to mention the geometry (see the square under table, for example, or the shadows leading out the door - what a painter!

Really strange painting, not sure by whom. 

Made odder by its facture, which separated into impasto marks above the illusionist surface.

Bacon

Currin

Wesselman - love this combine-like installation with the graphic figure and Renoir  on the wall.

Matisse

Bourgeois

Murakami, harking back to the early work first shown at Boesky in Soho in the 90s! These are 2010. 

Currin

Detail, Currin

Wesselman  collage

Jenny Saville. More when I return to view the top floor.

Mary Jones at John Molloy on 78th St. Gallery Link

Really wanted to see these flower collages and they did not disappoint. They unite two bodies of previous work by Jones, flower paintings I'd seen in a two-person show in the early 'aughts in Chelsea and more recent Xray paintings curated by Lauren Comito in the exhibition Future Past Perfect at Projekt 722 in Bushwick and MS Barbers Gallery, Los Angeles.  

Generous marks and the ad hoc addition of stencils,with a separate palette and history, make for dynamic layers that speak to the process of making -studio landscape, in a way.

Then the more Surrealist roller paintings, with surfaces so lush I can only tell you to go see them for yourself.

Paint splays across the rolled mark, you can't tell what layer is where, or how anything got there, as if predetermined. There is a graphic, superficial relationship to Ernst's Arizona paintings, but these paintings have a real range; the marks are not only rolled but carved within the surface, blurred with irridescent pigments and air gun glitters.

A 2014 collage with wallpaper and gold leaf.

Smaller works.

Then to the Met, with a Majolica crucifixion...

and a Long Shawl, designed and made with goat fleece and silk in Paris by Denerous & Boglavy in 1849 

and a vase of tin-enameled earthenware (faience) from Marseilles, circa 1760, by Factory la Veuve Perrin.
Farewell, Rococo--which apparently thrived in the south and east long past its vogue in Paris...

Concluding at the bustling and beautiful Max Beckmann exhibition. Here, some landscapes by Beckmann: a mill in a forest...

Park

And a lovely, dramatic sunset over water.