As this well-chosen minisurvey made clear, Billy Al Bengston will be a central figure in revisionist accounts of ’60s painting. Not only is his work of the period located at the productive intersection of Color Field and Pop, a convergence explored in current painting (from Kevin Appel to Laura Owens), but he is one of a number of West Coast artists, including Robert Irwin and Ken Price, who were instrumental in redefining the terms of artistic identity in the early ’60s by insisting that subcultural affinities and leisure-time activities (surfing, car customizing) were at the foundation of

The buxom women in Jacqueline Cooper’s recent paintings inhabit a world culled from some unknown opera set in a Nordic region that seems both storybook distant and close enough to be just behind the nearest S&M club. The only contrast to the coolness of this subfreezing zone is the warm, pinkish flesh of Cooper’s heroines, of which they show a lot. Heedless of the risk of frostbite, the figures go about unclothed except for bits of lace and rope and leather hoods to keep their ears warm. Oh, but those nose rings must get cold.

Of course, nobody’s really catching a chill, because we know these

Time: late night, 1970s. Scene: a party leaving Halston’s Paul Rudolph-designed town house for the newly opened Studio 54. “Sterling St. Jacques kissed Mrs. Vreeland twice. Het told her that she had to come to Studio 54. ’It’s very futuristic,’ he said. ’Bianca is going to ride in on a white horse with two nude men,’ said Joe Eula, a friend of Halston’s. Marina Schiano, who represents Yves Saint Laurent in this country, said that she, too, thought Studio 54 was futuristic. She said that the elaborate lighting at Studio 54 constituted ’an art form.’ ’I’ve never understood that—about art