John Heliker, who died this Spring in his nineties, had his first show at Kraushaar Galleries in 1945. His last, “A State of Seeing,”[1] was the gallery’s first devoted exclusively to the artist’s drawings. While Heliker was of the same generation as de Kooning and Pollock, and formed close friendships with Philip Guston and Walker Evans, he was also, as Jed Perl notes in his catalogue essay, “not an easy artist to place.” Even so, the thirty-eight drawings on view at Kraushaar comprise a brew wafting with the scents of early eighteenth-century French influences mixed with a particularly mid-twentieth century American expressivity. His Don Giovanni, Two Figures has the on-the-spot immediacy of a Watteau sketch though without the older artist’s solidity and precisely rendered details; Heliker drew only the figures, providing no background and thus no context, nor has he included facial features. Ronda< ...