Most modern artists, like frontier farmers, think of nature as a wilderness to be tamed and used. They hack out their own fields, grow whatever they please (sometimes it looks as though the weeds had got the better of them). But 62-year-old Leon Kroll is one modern who has never strayed far from the well-tilled plantations of traditional art. His nudes, portraits and landscapes are smooth, serene, invariably recognizable.
Kroll's unobtrusive interpretations of nature have been branded slick, vacant and posey by the fiercer critics, but they were good enough to win 23 prizes in the past 34 years (including a Carnegie...