Gallery chronicle.

In his paintings, R. B. Kitaj reminds me of no one so much as Saul Bellow. In addition to grand ambition and wholehearted expressivity, which often result in a certain lack of subtlety, both men caricature isms and ideas while habitually rendering human characters as comic-strip figures. To this melange of habits, Kitaj adds another tic, that of embodying Jewish anxiety and self-obsession to the point of unintentional parody. Of course, his two-dimensional approach to ideas inflects his attitude toward Judaism: what some critics hail as allusiveness will seem to others to be mere namedropping. But I cannot imagine Kitaj agreeing that one will find considerably more intellectual complexity in, say, a Dutch still life than in a painting of Freud or in a work such as his The Jews Are They Human? (2000), which unimaginatively offers a framed book cover from an old anti-Semitic work of the same title--whining to the converted.

Kitaj's choices gall because he is a terrifically skilled artist. His drawings, many of which were on view in "How to Reach 67 in Jewish Art" his recent show at Marlborough Gallery--October 31 to December 2--are among the finest and most genuinely provocative works by any living practitioner of art. In fact, such a wide gap separates Kitaj's best drawings from his worst paintings that one is tempted to believe two different artists create them. Consider such erotic pastels as Marynka On Her Stomach (1979) and UCLA Back (After Bunuel) (1997-2000). The former depicts a nude, splay-legged woman lying prone on a backless couch; delicate shading and strong outlining give her flesh and musculature, as well as the couch, an almost palpable volume and heft. The latter, a view of a nude woman's back, is a flat, virtually unmodeled line drawing remarkable for its simplicity. These are frank, carefully observed images, free from the burden--so often carried by the paintings--of illustrating some larger idea. When drawing, Kitaj can also display a wry sense of humor, as in My Cat And Her Husband (1977), a strongly modeled charcoal drawing of two cats mating. What stands out in the drawings is the nuanced way with which Kitaj handles his subject matter; he eschews commentary and illustration, allowing the act of rendering to be its own end.

Too many of the paintings lack even a hint of this reserve; often their subjects are worked up into shrill, overwrought statements. For instance, The Sexist (Miss X) (1995-1999) is completely undone by the contempt the artist apparently feels for the woman, nude but for an open black jacket and red high-top sneakers, who lies in bed beneath a violet-hued wall or sky with a ludicrous crescent moon showing a face in its arc. It's an image whose garish bathos makes it more suitable for a velvet poster than a gallery wall. That said, some of the more heavily allusive paintings nevertheless manage to succeed admirably. The modernist angularity and tonal modulations of Dreyfus (After Melies) (1996-2000) aptly convey the constrictions of imprisonment, while the image itself remains just inscrutable enough to keep one looking--unlike the George Bellows pastiche Whistler vs. Ruskin (1992), in which a nude Whistler knocks the critic out of the ring. One suspects that in Whistler vs. Ruskin, Kitaj favors the painter more for his infamous difficulties--including a protracted lawsuit--with the critic Ruskin than for any sense of affinity with Whistler's aesthetic. (Kitaj has had his own unfortunate battles with critics. After pointedly negative reviews of his 1994 Tate retrospective, Kitaj went so far as to blame critics for his wife's death.) Difficulties with critics aside, Whistler, with his atmospheric canvases that almost shade into abstraction, is a strange artist for Kitaj to champion, as he has long been an advocate for resolutely figurative art.

Filled with a host of demanding, contradictory works, "How to Reach 67 in Jewish Art" will please no one all of the time, yet, despite low moments, it cannot fail to engage almost everyone some of the time. Gallery goers should welcome the chance to encounter an artist who consistently challenges viewers, inspiring both derision and delight.

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) never settled comfortably into either abstraction or figuration. In his earliest, student years, he painted figurative works, but soon thereafter, prodded by the examples of Mark Rothko and Clifford Still, he turned to abstraction. During the mid-Fifties, he returned to figurative painting, adopting a style that owed much to Matisse. Then, over the last thirty years of his life, Diebenkorn explored the fraught boundary between abstraction and figuration. His best-known canvases, the Ocean Park series, which he began in the Sixties, are either landscape-based abstractions or landscapes pushed virtually to the point of abstraction, depending on which canvas one looks at and how one feels about the two major styles from which they were derived. "Early Abstractions 1949-1955" at Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art--November 8 to December 9--offered a concise retrospective of Diebenkorn's first engagement with the vanguard of postwar abstract art. The show presented eight works on paper and nine larger oils. Their smaller formats mean that the works on paper condense to a great degree the artist's naturally expansive sensibility, the depth and highlights of his underpainting and the reach of his fields of color. Still, it is easy to discern in these works many of Diebenkorn's essential strengths: the interplay of color and emphatic brush ...