J M W Turner

LONDON -- The vivid sunsets painted by J.M.W. Turner are revered for their use of color and light and for their influence on the Impressionists. But could they also help global-warming experts track climate change? A group of scientists has studied the colors in more than 500 paintings of sunsets, including many of Turner's 19th-century watercolors and oils, in hopes of gaining insights into the cooling effects caused by major volcanic eruptions.

The Quint Gallery (664 9th Ave.) is exhibiting works by two artists that, despite their very apparent differences, share a mysterious romanticism in character. Frank Cole, whose works have previously been seen at the Quint and at Installation Gallery, customarily works in a large format. These new works, painted constructions with some forms in relief, are, despite their uniformly small scale (26 by 20 inches), proposals for much larger works.

The art lover can afford to entertain sultanic numbers of favorites. Today the Uffizi, tomorrow the Getty. This week imagination wafts to Washington in a powdered wig, next it's Paris in a patterned robe. Why cement choice when you can play Henry James at the Huntington in spring and Jack Kerouac at the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia singin' the Mexico City blues on a warm winter's day ? Resist notions that art be a headline price, a political vice or a medium of mass amusement.

The British are born to travel. Historically, just about any sort of trip seemed to suit them. Sir Francis Drake loved bounding the main. Eighteenth-Century gentlefolk with pretensions to culture had to make the European Grand Tour by coach, post chaise, hook or crook. Before the invention of the voracious camera, the colloquial language of visual memory was the watercolor.

"Color in Drawing" at the Getty Center ponders a debate that's curiously timely despite being about 500 years old. In 15th century Italy, the aesthetic pundits of Florence decreed that, in art, line is superior to color. Like so many supposedly theoretical arguments, this one had a political subtext. Florence was full of painters who practiced a largely linear art. Its rival city-state, Venice, was chockablock with artists in love with the hues of the rainbow.

The J. Paul Getty Museum broke the world auction record for a painting Thursday evening in London, paying about $10.5 million for "The Adoration of the Magi" by Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna. The picture was sold at Christie's in a session lasting less than half an hour. The Getty was represented by Tim Bathurst, a director of Artemis Fine Arts, who landed the treasure in about three minutes.

What a strange painter Albert P. Ryder was. What a strange little play "Ryder" is. Like the miniature oils of impassioned land scapes, cloudscapes and allegories this turn-of- the-century American painter produced with obsessively slow deliberation, Michael Holmes' biographical portrait at the Chandler Studio builds layer upon layer of emotion in a tiny space.

A multimillion-dollar group of heart-melting French Impressionist paintings goes on public view today at the County Museum of Art. The trove of 11 works represents a "permanent loan" and one outright bequest to the museum from the late film producer and museum patron Hal B. Wallis. The gift, Paul Gauguin's 1886 "The Field of Derout-Lollichon," was painted in Pont-Aven when the artist was still under the influence of Cezanne and Pissarro.

"O'Neill, with his massive corpulence and scarlet, varicose nose, was a Hogarthian embodiment of the superstate he had labored for so long to maintain." David A. Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, no doubt pondered for some time before choosing just those words to describe Speaker of the House Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill in his recent book, "The Triumph of Politics." And Hogarthian is a masterstroke of venom.