An artist can never have too many ideas. But an artist who has a lot of ideas had better have an imagination that is large enough to give form to those ideas. The painter Leland Bell, who is sixty-seven, has always had plenty of ideas; he has a full-bodied imagination, too. It says nothing against Leland Bell to point out that he is an artist whose work and career have been led by his ideas. As a lecturer and teacher, he has been one of our most eloquent spokesmen for classical pictorial values. And a Bell painting—whether it’s a self-portrait or a portrait or a figure composition—strikes us first as a conceptual tour de force: no other painter has such fertile ideas about how to wed a pre-modern view of pictorial completeness to a modern taste for abstract form.

It is not strange that over the years Bell’s finest paintings have been the ones in which the ideas were relatively simple—simple enough to allow his imagination to carry them up to the heights. In the self-portraits, Bell’s imagination blossomed. The Standing Self-Portrait with Drums (1980) is a great painting, and some of the portraits of family and friends are extraordinary. It is also not strange that when Bell has grappled with more complex structural ideas—generally in his figure compositions—his imagination has often lagged behind. Two compositional motifs—the Butterfly series, with three figures, man and wife and daughter, ranged around a table, and the Morningseries, with a man