KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
I
F YOU AVOIDED SHOWS
with "millennium" in the title, this winter's
exhibitions offered welcome distraction from the hordes of holiday
tourists, the weather, Y2K anxieties, and the year-end hoopla. For
escape value and aesthetic pleasure, there was little to beat
Still Life is
Still Alive
at Jan Krugier Gallery. These intimate images of a circum–
scribed tabletop world inspired fantasies about taking pictures home,
although it might have proved impossible to choose between a delec–
table Pierre Bonnard, a muscular Max Beckmann, and a cool, assured
Giorgio Morandi-not to mention the splendid Braques and Picassos or
the unexpected Alberto Giacomettis and Joaquin Torres-Garcias.
Among others. As we have come to expect of Krugier, the exhibition
was a vivid reminder of what true connoisseurship is all about.
Farther uptown, at Hollis Taggart,
Alfred Maurer: Aestheticism to
Modernism
afforded an opportunity
to
see a broad spectrum of work
by this important but still underrated pioneer modernist (and occa–
sioned the publication of a handsome, informative catalogue by the
show's curator, Stacey Epstein). Maurer is, oddly, both well known and
obscure. His place in the history of American art is acknowledged and
a few significant exhibitions have been mounted by public and private
galleries in Washington and New York over the past two decades or so,
but we hard-core fans still await the definitive show-the one that will
make everyone realize just how good Maurer is. The retrospective at
Hollis Taggart, alas, while ambitious, wasn't it. While it covered Mau–
rer's entire career and included some first-rate pictures, the selection
seemed rather expedient and the installation, problematic. Paintings
crowded every available wall of the gallery's townhouse, along stair–
cases, over computer desks where staff were working, and in private
offices, making it hard for the visitor to concentrate (or
to
avoid feeling
like an intruder) . It's evidence of the strength of Maurer's art that so
many paintings withstood this chaotic presentation, most notably a
selection of stilllifes from the late
1920S,
with their tipped tabletops and
crisply overlapped, sharp-edged planes, and a group of figure paintings
ranging from the elongated, quasi-expressionist women of the twenties
