SANTA MONICA

A brace of three new galleries sprouted in neighboring spaces in the industrial area of Santa Monica just as the grand hoopla around the opening of new modern art facilities at the County Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art peaked. The galleries roost in handsome, commodious spaces that combine the best qualities of New York and L.A. showplaces--they are conveniently proximate and there is no parking hassle.

Best known of the three is the BlumHellman gallery, which represents the return of the prodigal dealer Irving Blum, who directed the important Ferus Gallery here in the ‘60s before moving to New York. Now the gallery is bicoastal.

An opening group exhibition presents fresh work by entrenched New York artists and seems bound together by a marked degree of cleverness. Roy Lichtenstein’s “Imperfect Painting” is an abstraction of triangles, one of which sticks out of the painting like a foot dangling off the bed. A behemoth painted relief by Frank Stella incorporates a rolled-rug shape that is stylized like a Lichtenstein. A pair of Jasper Johns’ paintings each include a rendering of a 19th-Century double-image drawing that reads both as the cheek of a beautiful young girl and the profile of an old hag. Robert Rauschenberg is slick and witty as ever. The news from Ellsworth Kelly is that he is now rendering his Minimalist-illusionist shapes in steel.

Lest we conclude that all mainstream art has become sophisticated distraction, Donald Sultan sobers us up with a few huge drawings nominally depicting great lemons in sooty black silhouette. They have the dark power of vintage Abstract Expressionism haunted by some terrible vision of oppressive giantism. (BlumHellman Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., to Jan. 3.)