Abstract Expressionism

Herbert Gentry was an African-American expatriate painter who helped bring Abstract-Expressionism to Europe in the 1950s when he abandoned New York for Paris to escape discrimination in his native country. He is the subject of The Magic Within, an enchanting retrospective of about 40 paintings, drawings and prints inspired by African masks at the James E. Lewis Museum of Morgan State University. Gentry died in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2003, a few months after a major exhibition of his works appeared at the Parish Gallery in Washington.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Aboard a wooden rice barge chugging up Bangkok's Chao Praya River, Alex Melamid, a New York-based Russian artist, solemnly informs the assembled guests that modern painting has reached an impasse.Art has nothing left to say, he says, and so: "We must now employ other species to do our work." He sketches out plans for an art school for elephants and concludes, "I would like to see elephant art everywhere."Next, an earnest young New Yorker billed as a specialist on "inter-species art" lauds the use by elephants' of "tertiary color somewhat like Gauguin" and their "complex use of negative space."

Carol Reed's large charcoal and graphite drawings with collage elements -- part of a three-person show just opened at School 33 -- are powerful and subtle. They have the ability to draw you into a communication that gets richer the longer you stay with them.They are abstract, with broad curved and angled black shapes anchoring the images and other elements that play off them, including smudges, splatters, erasures and pieces of collaged paper. At first glance, they don't directly refer to anything.

Robert Sheckley, 77, a writer of science fiction whose disarmingly playful stories pack a nihilistic subtext, died Friday from complications of a brain aneurysm in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He wrote more than 15 novels and about 400 short stories; the actual total is uncertain since he was so prolific in his heyday, the 1950s and '60s, that magazine editors insisted he publish some stories under pseudonyms to avoid having his byline appear more than once in...

Three distinguished painters associated with Baltimore for many years are Grace Hartigan, Eugene Leake and the late Keith Martin. Their work can be seen in the latest exhibit (through Sept. 30) at the C. Grimaldis Gallery on Morton Street, the title of which describes their impact: They put "Maryland on the Map."They are painters whose works and origins are somewhat different -- Hartigan comes out of abstract expressionism, Leake out of realist landscape and Martin out of surrealism -- but each artist has used the particular tradition independently.

Fast forward 50 years, to 2058. The Baltimore region's population has doubled, and the port is booming in the post-petroleum era. Mass transit has finally taken hold, and the city's population is over 1 million. In the surrounding counties, most houses, 50 to 60 years old, with vinyl siding and vinyl windows, are looking shabby. In contrast, most city neighborhoods have become historic districts, especially those from the 1920s through 1950s - totally rehabbed and looking great. At a neighborhood school, a teacher explains that Baltimore was not always this way. The economy thrived in the 1950s, but by the 1960s many businesses and residents were fleeing to the suburbs.

On the evidence of Milton Avery's career, being a pioneer can be a thankless job. Not that Avery (1885-1965) didn't eventually win a meas- ure of recognition for his high- ly individual art, or for his role as an influential early American modernist. But much of the acclaim heaped on the artist, including the Avery retrospective that opens Saturday at the Phillips Collection in Washington, has come in the decades since his death. Avery has been called an American Matisse for his highly simplified forms and bright, flat colors.

Salvador Bru's paintings, at the C. Grimaldis Morton Street gallery (through April 13), look in some ways as if they could have been painted in the 1940s, when surrealism contributed to the birth of abstract expressionism.The biomorphic shapes that wander across paintings such as the huge (7 1/2 -by-30 feet) "Baltimore Triptych" are reminiscent of surrealism. One can think of Gorky, and here and there of Tanguy. These mix with other elements, some of which are specific enough to be named: a pyramid, for instance, which to Bru stands for knowledge or God.But what unifies these works and gives them their presence is their use of paint in abstract ways: the expression of mood and emotion through gesture and color, and the lyrical painterliness of individual passages, which at times become almost separate paintings within the painting, but still relate to the whole.

Do you remember, dear, when there was art at the lake in Druid Hill Park and in the lobby of the Playhouse Theater, when the Peale Museum had "Life in Baltimore" shows, when Morris Louis came over from Washington to teach art in his home town, when art critic Kenneth Sawyer was trying (and mostly failing) to get Baltimoreans to buy abstract expressionism?If you remember, dear, then you're not much older than I.If you remember, dear, you'll like "Back from the Future: Maryland Artists 1950s-1980s" at Maryland Art Place (through Dec. 22)

BERNARD L. BARKER, 92 Watergate burglar Bernard Leon Barker, one of the five Watergate burglars whose break-in led to America's biggest political scandal, died Friday in suburban Miami. The Cuban-born former CIA operative, who also participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, died at his home after being taken to the Veterans Administration Medical Center the night before, said his stepdaughter, Kelly Andrad. He appeared to have died of complications of lung cancer, and he had also suffered from heart problems.