On the other hand, there is Mr. Fischl's portrait of Ms. Gornik in the shower that, seemingly done from life, is well-drawn and lushly painted.

As prologues to two of the plays, Ms. Skipitares employs the Bengali art of patwa, in which a lushly painted scroll depicting the story is unrolled as an actor narrates and comments.

(In the few early works included here, dark lushly painted surfaces are inhabited by shadowy pairs of reclining lovers notable for their air of sexual equality.)

But the work itself is even more so: lushly painted and riotous, as if Kandinsky plotted everything beforehand but then let instinct take over, so all the immediacy of the sketches would carry into the final product.

Rivera's rhetorical power has always been obvious, but the lushly painted Cubist works and large-scale portraits demonstrate how sensuous a painter he could be.

The main difference is that on the Yuskavage catalog, the requisite cheesecake is provided not by an air-brushed photograph but by a lushly painted Yuskavage.

In the bird's-eye view an outdoor basketball court in San Juan, perspectival recession is contradicted by the optical buzz of orange lines on the court's lushly painted, mint-green surface.

From the collection of Susan Weber Soros there is "Autumn on the River," a lushly painted 1889 picture by John Singer Sargent showing a woman reclining in a boat.

The smaller images are lushly painted houses surrounded by trees and heightened by color photographs of figures.

This is a grand and awe-inspiring survey of the black experience in America, delivered in 108 pages with lushly painted illustrations.