Baziotes

Bill, studied art with the sculptor Tony Smith and the painter William Baziotes at New York University.

The show’s dense installation encourages surprising connections, like that between the horizontal black shapes that dominate Romare Bearden’s “Patchwork Quilt,” from 1970, and William Baziotes’s “Pompeii,” from 1955, each with its own ratio of abstraction and figuration.

William Baziotes' "Serpentine" is marvelous but eccentric — an unusually large, unusually spare example by a second-tier New York artist who had moments of genius.

William Baziotes: ‘A Centennial Exhibition: Surrealist Drawings of the 1930s’ Susan Teller Gallery 568 Broadway, at Prince Street SoHo Through Dec. 29 American art of the 1930s and ’40s continues to surprise.

But the cartoonish, slightly deranged boldness and sometimes vicious ebullience of Baziotes’s efforts seem ahead of their time.