Bell Époque

An overdue retrospective

EXHIBITION

Catherine Deneuve is surprisingly good at maternal passion.

STEPHEN SCHIFF

For more than three decades, Leland Bell has been that touching near secret: the painter's painter. This month, in his sixty-fourth year, Bell's first retrospective is on show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and Hudson Hills Press has just published a lavish monograph on his work. Both occasions are no less auspicious for their tardiness. Like many of the most interesting artists of his generation (Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Wolf Kahn, and the late Gandy Brodie come to mind), Bell paints pictures that have been nurtured by and are at the same time a reaction against the lessons of Abstract Expressionism. Largely self-taught, Bell arrived in New York (by way of Provincetown, Massachusetts) in 1940 and by the midsixties had established a unique reputation as a teacher-aesthete and artist. Erudite and steeped in the vernacular of French modernism, his work moved from abstraction to an observational form based on intimate scenes of his studio and domestic life, made significant by painterly ingenuity and dazzling draftsmanship. As R. B. Kitaj, the expatriate American artist, remarked, "what he performs is a world-view of daily existence at the level of myth." At that unruly and frequently sodden banquet that is our art scene, Leland Bell remains one of our genuine gourmets—the most civilized of diners. Phillips Collection. Washington, D.C. (Through 3/15)

RICHARD MERKIN