Gallery chronicle.(Review)

The art world has traded the name of William Bailey as a hushed code word for thirty years. A code word for what? Well, for the legitimacy of painting, for realism, for the return of the nude, for an indifference to the art of the moment. A professor and dean in fine arts at Yale, one who spends part of each year in Umbria, Bailey is that rare find in the criticism of modern art: a test case.

To his champions, Bailey has achieved the feat of rendering what is ordinary and known--through the conventional media of oil on canvas and pencil on paper--in ways that are strange and oddly new. To his critics, and this includes most of the art world's trendier lot, he is a ...