Review of Kaldis exhibits 1998

ART IN REVIEW; Aristodimos Kaldis

By GRACE GLUECK Published: June 18, 1999 Lori Bookstein Fine Art 50 East 78th Street Through July 14 Foundation for Hellenic Culture 7 West 57th Street Through Aug. 29 The Turkish­born, Greek­bred painter Aristodimos Kaldis (1899­1979) arrived in New York in 1917 and later became a friend and colleague of the New York Abstract Expressionists. But his ebullient work, always based on the Mediterranean landscape of his childhood, lacked the ambitious ideology of theirs. In his earlier canvases sunny, lively colors, simple lines and sparsely detailed forms made up sweet scenes of seaside life. These include ''Aegean Village'' (1941), on view at the Bookstein gallery in ''Kaldis Rediscovered: Paintings 1941­1977.'' Its bright blue water, rife with tiny boats, fronts a beach of small pastel houses, backed by a line of dark mountain peaks.

Later Kaldis's work took on complexity. His forms grew more abstract, his canvases got bigger, and his compositions exploded spatially, allowing large areas of white to dominate, punctuated by dashes and bursts of color that stood for landscape elements.

The most effective of these larger paintings, shown in ''Monumental Late Paintings, 1974­1977'' at the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, is ''Minerva Surveying Europa'' (1974), in which color and line flow together, inflected by areas of white, to evoke mountains, churches, the sun, the sea, flora, fauna and other manifestations, in a catchy lyrical harmony.

Also on view are portraits of Kaldis by Elaine de Kooning and Raoul Middleman. Six black­and­white gouaches by de Kooning show Kaldis in various sleeping poses; two more­formal oils show him seated and awake, in 1954 and 1978. Done in the brushy, sketchy de Kooning style, they do give a sense of the painter's expansive personality. Mr. Middleman's contribution, an undated oil portrait also done in Expressionist style, makes the long­haired Kaldis, smoking a cheroot, look out of sorts.

GRACE GLUECK