The U.S. art world last week had a good, squabblesome book to squabble over. Its publication was celebrated by a gay party at Manhattan's Downtown Gallery. Surrounded by highly explosive canvases, Duke Ellington and Kansas City's boogie-woogie specialist Pete Johnson smote the piano while esthetic arguments added to the clamor. The book: Samuel M. Kootz's New Frontiers in American Painting (Hastings House; $5).
Kootz, 44 and a Virginia-born lawyer, is a testy critic who knows what he does not like as well as what he does. Sometimes he slips into the morass of...
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