A remarkable exhibition can be seen at the Phillips Collection, organized as part of the museum’s ninetieth anniversary celebrations: a group of canvases by the tough-minded painter Joseph Marioni, made between 1981 and 2011.1 They are accompanied by a selection of paintings from the museum’s own holdings, chosen, partly by the artist himself, as historical background and counterpoint to his rigorous, passionate investigations of color and radiance—or as he puts it, “liquid light.” In addition to its considerable aesthetic pleasures, “Eye to Eye: Joseph Marioni at the Phillips” is specially welcome because, in this country, there are fewer opportunities to see substantial gatherings of the painter’s work than his admirers would wish.

Marioni, born in Cincinnati in 1943, educated at the Cincinnati Art Academy and the San Francisco Art Institute, and resident in New York and rural Pennsylvania, is represented in the collections of many important American private collections and institutions, including the Phillips, the Fogg, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Yet his radiant monochrome paintings, notable for their conflation of sensuousness and severity, luxuriousness and discipline, are more assiduously collected and exhibited, both privately and publicly, in Europe than in his native United States. An opportunity on this side of the Atlantic to see thirteen carefully selected Marionis spanning three decades of his life as a painter is reason to rejoice.

But for a practicing critic, even one extremely enthusiastic about the artist’s efforts, “Eye to Eye” is also a reason for some