The rest of the show featured smaller (though not small) "Waterfall" paintings, a series Steir has been making for several years. The delicious drips and splatters go right to the soul of modernist painting, taking Pollock's end game in a super decorative (and feminine?) direction. Speaking of allegories, the 9 x 11 ft. painting used on the announcement card, Summer Moon (2005), with its delta of forest green afloat in a drenched atmosphere of gold and light verdigris, is particularly suggestive of abstract fertility.

And the whole Ikebana sensibility, which Steir manages to both kick up a notch and keep at arm's length, is especially rich in light of the penetration of the Western art market by Japanese cartoons and other kid's stuff (of which the Takashi Murakami-curated "Little Boy" exhibition at Japan Society is a compelling example). I love the way Steir's works take Asian calligraphy motifs, once an emblem of kitsch art excess, and put them into some frozen Postmodernist space.

The sweet calligraphic stroke comes into its own in the drawings at Cook Fine Art on Madison Avenue (Steir's work was on exhibit in three galleries simultaneously, Pace Prints being the third). Laid down with intense but controlled energy on lightly gridded heavy paper, the works here are playful and sublime. In the back of the gallery, drawings from the 1991 "Winter Group" are arranged on the walls like icons in a chapel.

But the allegorical impulse is irresistible, and Steir's use of splattered paint on gridded paper suggests, alternately, the forensic investigations of the CSI television series and the comets and cosmic dust of a formalist Star Trek. The touches of highly decorative color -- additions of gold and dried-blood red -- are more fun than anything else.

At Pace Prints was an exhibition of several monoprints and a large (48 x 35 in.) silkscreen, Blue, in an edition of 40, all made at Pace's own studio. The print is $3,500, the monotypes $12,500, drawings in the $15,000-$25,000 range, and large waterfall paintings start at around $90,000.

Thinking of other large works, right around the corner from Cheim & Read is James Cohan Gallery, which feted us last month with more stains and drips, literally and abjectly speaking, courtesy of huge color-line drawings by Ingrid Calame, who bases her allover designs on traceries of stains from the Los Angeles streets. Another painting installation that comes to mind is one at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in SoHo in 2002, where Olivier Mosset painted gigantic orange rectangles on the walls, filling the space with glowing orange light.

Another really good gallery show that opened in April -- the month seemed to have more than usual -- was the exhibition of works by Thomas Struth at Marian Goodman Gallery. In the front space were large color photographs of people looking at art, Michelangelo's David in the Galleria Dell' Accademia in Florence, as it turns out, which itself can only be spotted in the photos here and there reflected in the glasses of a few viewers and on the cover of the guidebooks they carry. (The photos were ably reviewed here by Jerry Saltz; see "Ways of Seeing," May 6, 2005.)

So, Struth gives us looking at art in the front gallery, and learning how to make it in the back gallery. There, he had a two-screen video installation showing five different hour-long master guitar classes at the Lucerne Music Academy led by an instructor named Frank Bangarten. An astonishing work, more so for being so commonplace -- a music lesson -- as Bangarten joyfully guides his students towards a more expressive, more perfected performance, a kind of fine tuning that we don't hear of much in the art world, where it's all genius or nothing. It's about "this joy at captivating people," he says at one point.

Currently on view at Kraus is a selection of pictures from a Fenton descendant, photographs that were retrieved in the late 1930s from disarray in the attic of a family house near Portsmouth, an area that was subsequently heavily bombed during World War II. The works, which have exquisite clarity and historical impact, range widely in price depending on subject; several of the best have already been sold for prices of $90,000 and more, to the Clark Art Institute and the Muse d'Orsay. A touring museum exhibition of Fenton's photographs opens at the Metropolitan Museum, May 24-Aug. 21, 2005.

Also good was the giant photo-portrait of Brooke Shields taken by Sante D'Orazio at Prince's direction, on view over in a small storefront gallery on Rivington Street off the Bowery. The 39-year-old mother of one looks pretty hot, posed in a string bikini with a chopper, an echo of her famous pubescent pose for the provocative film Pretty Baby (1978), which Prince had appropriated and exhibited as "Spiritual America" in the same space in 1982.

April also saw the first New York solo show of Yoshua Okun, a brief three-week stint at The Project on West 57th Street (before it became Projectile). Titled "Lago Bolsena," the installation featured a set of videos of people from a poor area of Mexico City -- one with a reputation as dangerous -- pretending to be monsters and animals, a good-humored bit of theater (a trope also explored in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine in 2002).

Better yet were the cabinets: Okun has inset the LCD screens, speakers and volume controls in tree trunks and branches -- an amiable combination, one that suggestively echoes a piece from the 1960s by Marisol going on the block this week at Sotheby's, a sculptural figure with a small TV set for a head. Okun's works were priced in the $10,000-$18,000 range, and seem like a good acquisition. The Mexico City native is now in L.A., where he teaches a "media sketchbook" class at UCSD.

At PaceWildenstein in SoHo, handsome Lucas Samaras oversaw the opening festivities for his installation of about 35 Apple work stations, each loaded with 4,432 digital stills and 60 short films by the artist -- the same were also installed (in lesser number) at PaceMacgill on East 57th Street. Each station contains the same wealth of psychedelicized and Rorschached images -- tree trunks (gnarly ones), the artist's living room, Central Park, flowers and fruits, and innumerable self-portraits, a compelling reflection of the idle artistic imagination at work, a definition of the artist as true eccentric.

Called "PhotoFlicks (iMovies) and PhotoFictions (A to Z)," the show is accompanied by a catalogue (a bargain at $20) that opens with a telling bit of concrete verse: "I was the house bound pet of spouse-minus mother I'm grateful for the care but grated at the constraints" and "Arne nonplussed by iMovies," among other revelatory tidbits. At $15,000 per station in an open edition, the work may be something of a hard sell -- though it's certainly worth having.

Uptown at PaceWildenstein on 57th Street is "The Music Room" by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, a show of about 20 works, both soft and monumental, devoted to musical instruments, including the 11-foot-tall French Horns Unwound and Entwined (edition of three plus one AP). Most are already sold for stratospheric sums, including a Soft Viola (2002) to the Whitney Museum; a modestly sized, molten-looking Soft Clarinet is $385,000.

At Goff + Rosenthal on West 23rd Street, the German artist Susanne Kühn is exhibiting several new paintings in which her signature primordial forests -- seen in previous years via ink-on-paper works at the now-defunct Bill Maynes Gallery -- are populated by figures of contemporary women. "It was time to also include the figure," she said.

Kühn's piney-landscape imagery, with its soaring trees and epic rock formations that suggest the Pacific Northwest, the Black Forest and Chinese landscape painting all at once, is so original that the new figures take some getting used to. No matter; they are fantastic, and a bargain (what her Berlin dealer, Annette Freiin von Spehardt of Galerie Echolot, calls "Berlin prices").

Some collector should buy the photograph by Patti Chang dubbed Fountain, a large picture of the artist apparently drinking from a silvery puddle on the floor of a public bathroom; at $4,000, it looks like a bargain. Sold was a lead pencil drawing of a giant wave by Robert Longo called Study for Serpent's Tongue ($12,000) and a painted plaster bust from 2002 by the irrepressible John Ahearn, titled Emmani ($9,000).

Ahearn had just visited the much-praised Julian Schnabel exhibition at C&M Gallery. "I like looking back at that time, the early 80s," he said. "You can see how Julian had his eye on Sigmar Polke, and was thinking of Pattern and Decoration painting, too -- does anyone remember that anymore?" Also on hand, graffiti artist Chris "Daze" Ellis, back from Cleveland, where he completed a mural on the side of the Cleveland Public Theater, and Tom Otterness, who contributed a great cartoon animation to the sale. Otterness said he's taking cello lessons.

At Marvelli Gallery in the West 26th Street Chelsea Fine Arts Building, Alex McQuilkin's DVD of "a romantic fantasy of suicide" -- the attractive young artist stares unblinking into the camera as she submerges slowly beneath the surface of her bath and stays under as long as she can -- is sold out at $3,500 in an edition of 10.

At Haswellediger & Co Gallery on West 23rd Street, young artist Lindsay Brant triumphs with a fairly gothish installation, featuring some large black dogs made of papir-mche (they seem to have accidentally bitten off their owner's hand), a photo of a dead deer in the woods, and a decapitated head with glass eyes, egg-shell skin and red-bead strings of blood coming from the neck. The price range for these works is $800-$12,000; the artist is daughter of collector Peter Brant and Art in America publisher Sandy Brant.

At Derek Eller Gallery small paintings of Gothic comedy and horror by Andre Ethier, a young artist from Canada who "doesn't have much of a resume." The one I liked (but didn't buy; I think it was $600) was illustrated in Roberta Smith's New York Times roundup. . . . At Cohan and Leslie, all eight paintings by Simon Aldridge, a British artist who lives in Connecticut and specializes in suburban landscape visions broken into video-screen dashes, are maked sold at $8,000-$13,000. . . . At David Zwirner Gallery, a Monday-night opening for a show of new paintings by Neo Rauch, to avoid the auctions scheduled for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Could success by warming up his socialist surrealist scenes just a little bit?

New spot on the gallery tour is the Trygve Lie Gallery, located in the basement of the Norwegian Seaman's Church at 317 East 52nd Street, opening several months ago with a show organized by Turid Meeker and called "Sheer Veil." It featured works by Cecilie Dahl, Eva Faye and Anne Katrine Senstad. And, yes, they're all Norwegian. . . . . Spotted in "The Continuous Mark," the set of four exhibitions at the New York Studio School devoted to works by its teachers and alums -- a show now completed -- is a small abstract painting by Museum of Modern Art veteran curator Robert Storr.

More field reports, most of them true: Larry Gagosian is opening a gallery in Rome on June 6, a suite of three rooms located in the historic city center. His timing is considered curious, since that's the day the rest of the Rome art scene closes for the summer. . . . Dennis Oppenheim is giving a collection of models of his public art works to the Price Art Tower in Bartlesville, Okla. Madrid's Museo Reina Sofia is also putting its collection of his works on view. . . . The Museum of Modern Art has acquired a Francis Bacon triptych from Tony Shafrazi Gallery, insiders say. Shafrazi is also sponsoring a show of 1980s art star Zadik Zadikian in Teheran, according to a card that came in the mail. Zadik's specialty, if memory serves, was covering commonplace objects with gold.

After Damien Hirst's Virgin Mother was installed in the interior plaza of Lever House, supercollector Aby Rosen couldn't help but buy it. What did it cost, $2 million in an edition of three? He has a city permit for a one year installation, so it'll be on view for at least that long. . . . Gary Indiana's new book, Schwarznegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Consent (New Press), with cover designed by Barbara Kruger, hits the stores this week. . . . Noted in New York's Grand Central Station, ads on coffee cups for "Dal" at the Philadelphia Museum, presumably only a Amtrak ride away. "To gaze is to think," it quotes.

The Metropolitan Museum, covered with scaffolding for work on its faade, now looks like a ghost of its former self. . . . Elton John spotted in China shopping for new Chinese photography at Shangart gallery in Shanghai. . . . Paul Judelson is moving I-20 Gallery to 23rd Street. . . . Suite 106 is moving from Wooster Street in SoHo to West 24th Street. . . . Leo Koenig Gallery is leaving Centre Street for 23rd Street and 11th Avenue.

Chris Ofili is now represented in New York by David Zwirner Gallery as well as by Gavin Brown's Enterprise. . . .Art-mag mogul Louise MacBain launches her new art awards with a $50,000 prize to vanity artist Gregory Colbert, whose insipid sepia-toned photos of people and animals are currently plastered on ads around New York City. So much for her taste and vision.

Assorted byline news: New York Sun freelance auction reporter Lindsay Pollock has departed the paper for Bloomberg Muse, where she is to appear on TV as well as in print. "They made me an offer I couldn't refuse," she said. . . . Former Art + Auction editor Jori Finkel's byline is back -- in the Sunday New York Times, where she reported on the newest fad among L.A. collectors, backyard "skyspaces" by James Turrell. Prices start at $500,000; contact Santa Monica art dealer Bill Griffin . . . Art Review has shut down its New York office, though Daniel Kunitz stays on staff.