The Holly Solomon Gallery is best known as a champion of Pattern and Decoration: the outsize, brashly colored pictures which take their kitschy images from flowered wallpaper and 1950s “moderne” design. Pattern-and-Decoration paintings look bold, up-to-the-second, and there is something appealing in the artists’ fondness for the slightly deranged variations on great design ideas to which modern mass culture has sometimes given birth. The paintings, though, have no magic. They feel listless, enervated, no doubt because the artists are grabbing at effects without transforming those effects into aesthetic experiences—experiences of form. What Holly Solomon stands for might be called feel-good painting: it jazzes up the flatness of modernist pictorial space without giving any meaning or new beauty to that kind of space.

Holly Solomon has now mounted a show of works by Raoul Dufy—the French painter, best known as a Fauvist, who died in 195 3 at the age of seventy-five.[1]There is, in a sense, nothing surprising in this move, for Dufy himself has for years been regarded as a feel-good artist. Dufy, like the Holly Solomon artists, is unabashed in his fondness for the decorative arts: many of Dufy’s paintings take as their subject the decorative ambience of a room, and at least in the 1910s and 1920s he devoted a great deal of his energy to working as a designer—primarily of fabrics, but also of pottery. Dufy’s work has an easygoing affect; he doesn’t hammer in his points. But even if you understand what