NEW YORK— Nobody comes to the ADAA’s annual Art Show looking for surprises—and justifiably so. The New York art fair that opened yesterday has no surprises whatsoever, but instead, exactly what we’ve come to expect: a really entertaining, wide-ranging show by some of the country’s best galleries for modern, post-war and contemporary art.

(The one or two galleries showing anything else looked increasingly out of place, and I wonder how much longer they’ll want to be part of this particular fair.)

Rachel Lehmann from Lehmann Maupin commented that for many years the ADAA show has been more focused on modern and Impressionist work, but that the response her gallery’s very contemporary showing was “enthusiastic and great.”

Going It Solo

As we anticipated, one immediately obvious characteristic of the 2007 Art Show is the number of dealers dedicating their booths to a single artist. Cheim & Read has a very elegant exhibition given over to Louise Bourgeois, and Gladstone Gallery has a plum spot near the entrance, filled with work by Anish Kapoor.

PaceWildenstein also has a wonderful collection of works on paper (from 1943 to 1950), by the ridiculously underrated Ad Reinhardt, and Lehmann Maupin was showing some really striking paintings and works on paper by London-based Taiwanese artist Suling Wang that sold out by Friday evening. They were priced at $4,000-$6,500 for works on paper and $35,000-$40,000 for large canvases.

I asked Lehmann Maupin’s Courtney Plummer about their decision to display a single artist. “Well, we do five fairs a year,” she told me, “and it’s difficult to get something from everyone at the gallery for each one, so this seemed a more democratic way of doing it. Also, it allows us to present a really focused look at an artist’s work and to give it a context.”

Sperone Westwater has also given over its booth to Malcolm Morley (whose paintings were going for $300,000-$400,000). The gallery’s Molly Epstein said, “With an artist as prolific and talented and various as Malcolm, we felt this was the perfect opportunity to let people see a range of his work.” She also told me, with a smile and a bit of a shrug, that they had originally planned to show one of these paintings unfinished, so that visitors could appreciate Morley’s particular working methods. But he went ahead and finished it anyway. Artists, huh? You can’t trust them to do anything right.

Art in Chorus

Of course, not all the booths are one-person affairs. Lennon, Weinberg has a very striking show of Joan Mitchell, Stephen Westfall and the splendid H.C. Westermann.

Gallery co-owner Jill Weinberg Adams told me that Westermann’s star is very much on the ascent, and the gallery is displaying two important items: his largest-ever wooden Death Ship (for $350,000) and a complete set of prints from the Connecticut Ballroom Suite (for $85,000).

Barbara Mathes’ gallery is also a multi-artist affair, and it really is a delightful experience: there’s a tiny Warhol Mao, a John Wesley, a Peter Doig, a Richard Long splatter-and-drip picture in white china clay, an exquisite Kiefer (Lilith, at $250,000), a John Chamberlain that you could sit on your mantelpiece (made from Tonka Trucks, Mathes told me), Sugimoto’s Catherine Howard, an Alighiero Boetti, a couple of Lucio Fontanas, a copper sculpture by Fausto Melotti, a little Frank Stella and an Alex Katz that you wouldn’t think was a Katz at all. Altogether, it was a perfectly varied combination for the ADAA fair.

A Couple Out-of-Towners

Elsewhere, I was delighted to find Richard L. Feigen giving some proper attention to my fellow English countryman, Richard Smith. His works from the 1960s (including Mister (1962), offered for $125,000) provided a unique link between American painterly abstraction and witty British pop, yet he is still sorely underrated. Feigen’s Frances Beatty seemed rather taken aback—though delighted—that I was so familiar with his pieces. Hopefully a lot more people will know them, and their maker, better by the end of the weekend.