In the middle of the season that saw the bot tom fall out of the art market, the mood in the galleries is refreshingly calm. As I write this at the end of December there has yet to be a single gallery show this season that has galvanized the people who live for a trend. This is all to the good. Nineteen ninety/ ninety-one is turning into the first season in a long time that belongs to the artists who want nothing better than to disappear into their work. As a gallerygoer I’m finding that my mind isn’t so cluttered with controversies as it was a year or two ago; I’m finding that I’m not preoccupied with something that’s not worth being preoccupied with, whether it’s the work of Robert Mapplethorpe or Jeff Koons.
Down at the Bowery Gallery, which is in the habit of mounting a December “Small Works” show that consists of contributions by gallery members and their friends, there was a very strong showing of painterly paint ings—paintings that were representational, semi-abstract, or abstract. Richard La Presti’s still life, done in a heavy, choppy brushwork that kept his ordinary objects in a state of Cézannesque immanence, had a miraculous atmosphere: dense yet light-filled. (And, at 150 dollars, it was probably within the budget of a secretary who’d been laid off by Drexel Burnham Lambert.) Next door, the Prince Street Gallery was cele brating its twentieth anniversary with a show of old and current members. This