Opinion: Venerable Galleries Going Strong, Some of the best work turns up as summer ends.

By Robert Long

East Hampton's longest-running galleries, all three in business for at least a decade, have saved some of their best for the end of the busy season.

The 10th annual landscape show at Lizan Tops Gallery includes selections of work by 21 artists, with a few unexpected bonuses thrown in - a single very good, bright Jane Freilicher, for example, and a handful of Robert Dash pictures from a couple of decades ago. There's a variety of styles and as always the show is as absorbing for its range as for individual contributions.

Ralph Carpentier, who has become a kind of dean of landscape painting on the East End, is showing over a dozen recent oils that present a distinct vocabulary of clouds and light.

In a view of Louse Point at sunset Mr. Carpentier manages to paint a sky that would be garish in anyone else's hands. It goes from yellow and purple through shades of orange and red to the deepest blue - very loud for this artist - and it just convinces you to look harder next time you're outside around sundown. In a big horizontal picture of Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton, a stretch of white split-rail fence that runs nearly the width of the canvas doubles as a stitch that holds the composition together. It follows the swell and decline of the soft green fields and echoes the undulant line of the horizon, an expanse of hazy yellowish treetops.

There are little people and vehicles here and there and, as in all of Mr. Carpentier's work, you are left with a renewed appreciation for natural forms.

Frank O'Hara said somewhere that people don't look up enough (especially in the city). Mr. Carpentier makes us look up. And though he's not trying to teach us any lesson, by drawing our attention to the sweep of things - fields, skies - he reminds us of the relative insignificance of man.

Josh Dayton is an insistently modernist painter always looking for new avenues of expression and usually finding them. He and Norman Mercer, who makes sculptures in cast acrylic, are showing new work at the Arlene Bujese Gallery, also in its 10th season.

Like practically every painterly painter of his generation Mr. Dayton began by emulating the Abstract Expressionists, but long ago he developed a distinct style, stealing where he needed to. You still catch a whiff of pre-1947 Pollock here or there.

But he has always been surprising. When his surfaces had become so dense with figuration and color that you figured he had reached some kind of dead end, he began wiring ceramic fragments to the canvas, literally forcing the figure off the picture and into the gallery.

Then, he went on a kind of diet, leaving parts of the canvas bare, which made the paintings seem even deeper - there was the blank surface, then the painted surface, then the sculptural element.

Now he's thrown another wrench into the works by mixing cut-out stenciled images with painting and ceramics. In "Twenty-Inch Ache," he's collaged more conventional, de Kooning-esque figurative painting with black-and-white images like the magnified brushstrokes that sometimes showed up in Roy Lichtenstein's canvases. ("Pop Dispatch" is the sly title of a new Dayton diptych.)

For all the many elements at work in his pictures they hang together. And when he seems to be referring to another artist - Matisse or Arp in the cut-out images, for example - it is always in the service of his own assertive style.

Mr. Mercer's sculptures are variations on geometrical themes in clear plastic. What animates them is his use of primary colors that float within the plastic, like mysterious forms of light. The sculptures seem gently lit from within.

There's a family resemblance to Pop and Minimalism here but these are not assertive works, and that gives them a decorative flavor.

In a statement she wrote for a new show of Milton Avery's works, Janet Lehr of the Vered Gallery pointed out the influence of Cezanne on Avery (not to mention everyone else who has picked up a brush since), and of course she's right. Avery is a reductive abstractionist par excellence, shrinking entire landscapes to a half-dozen blobby shapes interlocked the way Cezanne interlocked natural forms.

Cezanne made a patchwork of light; Avery was more concerned with shape. The Vered Gallery's big show includes works from all periods - early and late figures, landscapes, seascapes, even sketches of ducks.

In a late work, "Double Wave," painted in 1955, the sea and sky are a flat, deep ground of brown and gray, and we recognize the sea in stylized blobs of white - the crests of waves. In "Gray Mountain," another late work, he balances forms in much the same way.

Avery concentrated on form and simple color (he was not a great draftsman, as is instantly obvious in any number of works here) and, paradoxically, by simplifying the world in this way drew our attention to it.

Sometimes, though, it's nice to have a little more activity in a picture, such as "Watchers by the Stream," from 1941.

It includes a range of brushwork and four figures - three people on the shore in the middle distance and a dog on a rock in the foreground - arranged in a manner that suggests a baseball diamond.

It's a complex picture but Avery made it seem as simple as an Ellsworth Kelly, and that's what makes his best work magical. He translated natural objects into abstract forms, but their authenticity was never in question; you sense light on the sea, the texture of rocks at the shore.

The Lizan-Tops exhibit of landscape paintings can be seen through Sept. 28, Mr. Dayton and Mr. Mercer's shows at Arlene Bujese Gallery will be on view through Sept. 18, and the Vered Gallery's exhibit of Milton Avery runs through Oct. 15.