Sam Glankoff is 87 and hasn't exhibited since his days at the Whitney Studio Club in the 1920s, a fact that remidns me of one of John Baldessari's best conceptual fables... An artist refuses to exhibit for years, declaring his work isn't ready. Finally it is ready, he puts it in a show - and nobody notices.
Glankoff is the exception to Baldessari's story. He apparently did need those decades to work out a complicated process of painting on plywood and transferring the wet mass onto paper. These print-paintings are subtle affairs, compounded of layer after layer of diffused pigment that gives them a rich atmospheric density arriving somewhere in the vicinity of Miró, Gottlieb, and Reinhardt. There is a genuineness about them that puts Baldessari's cynicism to shame. (Graham Gallery, 1014 Madison Avenue, near 79th Street; through October 31.)
