Next January, the painter Esteban Vicente will turn eighty-five. This event ought to be cause for celebration in the New York art world; yet, to my knowledge, not a single major museum has made the slightest gesture toward commemorating the thirty-seven-year achievement of the Spanish-born artist, who remains, along with de Kooning, Pousette-Dart, and Motherwell, one of the last working members of the New York School’s First Generation. Indeed, it’s a curious fact that while Vicente has important works in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney, they are rarely shown. MOMA, for instance, has two superb paintings, but one, from the James Thrall Soby Bequest, has never been shown, and the other has not been seen since it was included in “The New American Painting and Sculpture: The First Generation,” in 1969  I have seen Vicentes in the basements of MOMA, the Met, and the Guggenheim, and the Whitney’s storage annex, and I have seen them in some of the city’s major corporate and private collections. But short of flying to Scottsdale, Arizona, last March, to see “Esteban Vicente: Selected Paintings 1952-1986,” at the Yares Gallery, anyone desiring a major overview of Vicente’s singular career would seek in vain for catalogues from museum retrospectives, for there have been none. None, that is, until recently; for that, however, he would have to go to Madrid, where, this spring, from April 24 to June 15, the Fundación Banco Exterior is