What’s the difference between graffiti and painting?  Can you paint (I mean, like Picasso and Rembrandt) on the outside of a building, and can you graffiti on canvas?  After seeing George Condo’s paintings at a fancy Upper East Side gallery I would answer no to both.

I’d never seen Condo’s work in person before, and what I’d seen of it online and in print made it look like very cool decorator art, the kind that sits beautifully in a large, lacquered, all-white interior.  But the canvases in the gallery, with powdery, not-quite-opaque, overlapping layers of charcoal, pastel and paint, have a bristling urban energy.  There are obvious references to cubism, cartoons, and pornography, but the paintings are really cityscapes.  There’s one particularly elegant one, in black and white, that looks like it captures the view outside a window, with a band of clouds sitting on top.  And there are graffiti-like colored ones which, in addition to the architecture of the city, suggest the patina of the city – grime, noises, voices, and violence.  After one of these paintings gets purchased and hung in a living room in Beverly Hills, what happens?  Does it dissolve into the interior design, or does it carry some of the city with it?  Maybe the power of graffiti is that it can’t be carted off.

An artist I know, who is also an accomplished writer, told me that art is just another language. I didn’t want to hear it; I wanted to believe that printmaking, painting and sculpture are infinitely more complicated than writing, and can capture inexpressible depths. But after seeing an exhibit of paintings that Joan Mitchell, the acclaimed abstract expressionist, completed in the last decade of her life, I might agree. The canvases are recognizably Mitchell’s, with an unbridled physical vitality. But they’re rendered in discrete, stripped-down forms that are set out as purposefully as words in a sentence. The paintings have an impact that’s less pictorial, less romantic, than her earlier works, and more succinctly structured. The brushwork is like calligraphy.

I was put off by the show’s title, Joan Mitchell: The Final Paintings, which seemed both sentimental and opportunistic. But there’s nothing soft or diminished about the work. These are huge, wall-sized canvases. And the brushstrokes, in their strength and certainty, are indelibly masculine. Is this assurance related to finality or mortality? I don’t think the artist suddenly felt she didn’t have any more time to waste with painterly frivolities. I think maybe she just arrived at a point where she didn’t want to fuss. After decades of serious work, she could just get down to business.

It’s easy to forget that we have our own piece of Le Corbusier right here in New York.  That would be the United Nations buildings, which he designed in collaboration with Oscar Niemeyer and Wallace K. Harrison.  Maybe the buildings are so easy to forget because they’re so hard to see.  These are monumentally-scaled buildings squeezed into four narrow riverside blocks east of First Avenue in midtown.  There’s no spot from where a pedestrian can take in the General Assembly’s swooping roof, the platonic slab of the Secretariat, and the yawning grace of the library.  Corb was an expert at plastic compositions, so it’s particularly frustrating not to get a comprehensive view of the buildings.  To see them their best, they’d need more air around them, like Corb’s government buildings at Chandigarh.

Approaching the UN on foot is dispiriting.  Because of increased security and a two-billion-dollar renovation that’s underway, the driveway, garden and waterside park have all been closed off, with the same type of metal barricades the NYPD uses at parades, only painted UN blue.  To get inside you pass through an unhappy maze of plywood ramps and white tents that have been set up in the middle of the public plaza.  But inside the General Assembly (shown above when it first opened in 1952),  you pass under floating boomerang-shaped balconies, soaked in light from the glass endwall, and get a hint of how delicious it all could be.  Right now the expansive ground hall is poorly used, with exhibit spaces, a stamp counter, and a wall with framed portraits of all the UN Secretary Generals.  When I visited Korean tourists were lined up to have their picture taken next to the likeness of Ban Ki-moon.  The wood-lined basement, darker and quieter, could also be a great space, but it’s cluttered with tchotchke shops and a cafeteria that fills both floors with the smell of stale food.  With this renovation, the UN has an opportunity to transform its icnonic mid-century interior into a dazzling social space, and to make world peace seem just a little more glamorous.

The oversized postcard announcing the new Robert Graham show at David Zwirner shows a woman sleeping on a mattress in a big, cloudy white box.  Receiving it was like getting a dream in the mail.  The sculpture on the card is one of seventeen of Graham’s early works from 1963-1973 on display.  I know Graham only through the brass entrance doors and angel he crafted for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.  Those pieces are gravely and self-consciously classical.  The sculptures at the gallery, tabletop plexiglass dioramas with naked and barely-clothed female figures inside, are stranger and more intimate.  The women walk, crawl, lounge around, play with one another, and just stand still.  It’s easy to say that the sculptures objectify women, but Graham’s handling of each figure is so fine and naturalistic, that one comes away feeling he cares for them dearly.

The vitrines he’s fashioned for these women – lined with felt, pierced with wires, patched with tape and paint, partitioned with bits of mirror and clear plastic – are spectacularly suggestive architecturally.  Almost all are square in plan and lifted on low plinths.  They reminded me a little of Mies van der Rohe’s houses, and a lot of Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion, with its life-size female figure (a neoclassical bronze statue called Morning by George Kolbe) presiding inside.  Architectural historian Vincent Scully has described this woman as a goddess figure, pushing and pulling the planes of the lucid structure back and forth.  The women in Graham’s sculptures are more inward-looking, and less robust.  The surfaces around them, that enclose them, seem like extensions of their own fragile inner lives.  Although these women are set out on display, each seems to be holding a great deal in reserve.