Altoon's state of mind in the mid 1960s can only be guessed at.

He had battled depression for years, and had endured treatment consisting not just of talk but of institutionalization and shock therapy. A certain trepidation -- if not of one's own disordered mind than of the cures offered for it -- undoubtedly permeates the inner life of any person in such a predicament.

Because artists draw upon this inner life in making their art, it is all one should expect that something of this inner fragility and anxiety should come forth in Altoon's art.

The paintings barely hint at the striving energy and certainty so evident in Altoon's earlier work. There's no apparent attempt to invent new formal twists; no sign of trying to do, or outdo, the work of the more innovative, attention grabbing artists around him; no sense of grasping for something grand and transcendently important to art.

Instead, Altoon seems here fully; or, perhaps, merely; within himself and his world. As a result, these paintings may be the most honest and direct of all of Altoon's work.

In their echoing of Gorky and Miro, the paintings take Abstract Expressionism closer to its past than to its future. They're a bit like illustrations; depictions of imaginings; and thus are likely to be of little interest to academics and curators who focus on formal invention as the key indicator of importance in Modern Art.

However, while form and style change with the flow of time, the demand that art capture and hold the eye remains constant. In this regard, it is no small achievement that these last Altoons, of all his works, remain viscerally and visually seductive some 30 years later. Much of the vast amount of work produced by other, more formally oriented artists of the time cannot make such a claim.

Certainly, this is success of a kind.