I love this painting by Albert York, the famously reclusive painter, said (by Calvin Tompkins) to be " "the most highly admired unknown artist in America." York, who died in 2004 at the age of eighty, shunned the art world yet had a coterie of fervent fans, which is either the best of both worlds or eating your cake and having it, too. Sharon Butler has this column on York illustrated with three of his paintings. York told Tompkins, who profiled him in 1995, "The modern world just passes me by. I don't notice it. I missed the train." But another one came along and he took it, as my father said would happen when he advised me never to chase a train, advice as applicable to romance or the stock market as to that great nineteenth century invention without which the Russian novel would be a much poorer thing and the West would still be wild. The New Yorker's official line: "Each still-life and landscape
as exquisite weirdness," and that's certainly true of "Woman and
Skeleton," left. Congratulations to Davis & Langdale on the York show, which came down on June 14. — DL