Art: Works by 7 Women, 'Aspects of Abstraction'

In “Aspects of Abstraction,” the Holly Solomon Gallery has put together the kind of exhibition with which it has not been identified. All seven artists are women. All are abstract painters for whom touch and process are important. All the paintings have an unapologetic, take-it-or-leave-it quality.

The show has a European flavor. Judy Pfaff was born in England, Ingeborg Luscher in East Germany. Marianne Eigenheer is Swiss. Joan Mitchell and Shirley Jaffe have lived in France for years. Cora Cohen has been inspired by France. Only Elizabeth Murray, represented only by a small work on paper, has had no formative European experience.

Ms. Mitchell's “Grande Vallee No. 0” (8 1/2 feet tall and 6 1/2 feet wide) is the keystone. Its ebullient yellows and blues are almost Impressionist in their surrender to the bloom of the moment. Everything else in the show, including the brooding, volcanic painting of Miss Luscher's, with its very German immersion in materials, and the economical works of Miss Eigenheer's, with lines moving sensually and inevitably across paper, share the same physical engagement with their medium.

For someone who has not seen Ms. Cohen's work in a while, her “Molloy at Tournus” may come as a surprise. It is large (8 feet tall by 8 1/2 feet wide) and confident. Irregular black stripes are stained into the canvas. Gestures influenced by Ms. Mitchell mill about at the left and begin to disperse across the surface. Not every gesture has the necessary conviction, but a dialogue between inside and outside, speed and measure, is in place.

Ms. Pfaff's “Comma, Comma” is installed near Ms. Mitchell's painting, and the juxtaposition works. More often than not, Ms. Pfaff's work suggests a crammed closet that has just burst open. The way her sunny rings and tables peel off the wall and begin to wrap themselves around us brings to mind the forward thrust of Picasso's “Dryad,” one of 20th-century art's archetypal images.

A comparison between Ms. Jaffe and Kim MacConnel, one of the stars of the gallery, who has clearly looked at Ms. Jaffe's work, is instructive. Ms. Jaffe is a proud product of the School of Paris. Her collage-like shapes, with biomorphic, figurative and sculptural associations, are situated in white fields that function as positive as well as negative space. Living in France, she has not felt Mr. MacConnel's responsiveness to popular culture and fashion, and his need to blur the line between “high” and “low” art. Her work has less of an edge than his, and it may be of less interest to an American public, but it is more finished, more of a piece.

This show may turn out to be important. If the involuted, fin-de-siecle atmosphere in New York continues, the ease and resolution of French modernist art, for which so much recent American art - caught between a slapdash and a Conceptual esthetic - has expressed contempt, could be perceived differently.