Idea for unusual romantic gift

Lois Dodd came to artistic maturity among that group of American artists commonly known as the painterly realists, including Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher and Nell Welliver. At 75, Dodd's gift and grace show no sign of lagging, and this was a show with unusual merit--and moxie.

The work spanned three decades, and one of the capital beauties of these canvases was their sharp resemblance to one another, as if an excellent idea could, through a willing vision, be successfully subjected to endless variations. The subtitle of the show, "Windows and Doorways," summed up the essence, if not the metaphysics, of the works--countless renderings of those portals by and through which we live out our lives. The metaphysics? A door admits us, a window denies us; both of them set up conditions of denial, desire and self-reflection.

Dodd's paintings ring clear as a bell as we fathom them one by one. In fact, they are as wood-bark cheery as a Welliver, and as outsizedly friendly as a Katz. However the absence of human beings marks more than a degree of difference between them. Windows seen at night are a great specialty for Dodd, whether in Manhattan or the country, for they can play especially deftly with appearance and reality, smoke, air and weather. But Dodd can work her peculiarly lovely magic in the daytime, too: Steamed Window from 1979 (18 by 13 inches) plants crystalline chunks of mist in the corners of four panes, against an autumnal background.

Falling Window Sash from 1992--large (60 by 38 inches), as the majority of these canvases tended to be--is a metaphysical shocker in that the top sash has slipped its moorings and is heading for the ground below, with no one there to stop it. Alfred Hitchcock would have been pleased: crisis is frozen in time, and the jumble of outdoor reflections we get from loosened windowpanes bearing down on each other is brutally beautiful.

Perhaps my favorite work in this show was the quiet and sobering Night House (1975), a maroon-on-brown nocturne that comprises two corners of a low-lying cottage sporting bright yellow-curtained windows against an otherwise featureless landscape. Here, Dodd seems to be getting down to cases on the subject of her near-hallucinatory romantic vision. Still, the metaphysicians among us may prefer the placid yet piercing 1987 Two Windows, Clapboard Siding (36 by 60 inches). A bit of green roof and tan siding surround two windows, one revealing a green cupboard door open next to a reflection of fall branches, and the other, to the left, sheer fall leaves. One window lets us in, the other blocks us out. It's a little like life, ambivalent about everything except its own ambivalence.