Art: Coatesville, evocatively viewed

In Sunday Evening, he pushes the complex into the background under a striated sky. We look along a truncated bridge that seems to end in midair. In Stillwater: Spring the complex is similarly subordinate, seen through the arches of a railroad viaduct, with most of the painting taken up by a still body of water littered with debris and reflecting a pinkish sky.

The most optimistic and fanciful of the quartet is A Fine Fall Day, a view from a ridge down a sloping field to houses in the middleground and the steel mill way, way beyond, barely visible. Punctuating this view, the most effusively colored of the four and the purest landscape, are three peacocks, including one perched on a tree limb in the foreground.

Who could have imagined peacocks in Coatesville? Certainly not Sheeler, or Crawford, who only had eyes for the rigorous geometry of industrial architecture. Moore's interpretation is more personal and more humanistic, more nostalgic (in the positive sense), and more profound.

The paintings deserve a better exhibition situation, though. The Ross gallery is less than ideal for large canvases and especially for these four, which should be hung in a way that gives them equivalent prominence and that allows for more natural dialogue among them.

Still, it's better that they hang together than separately. At least the show illuminates the contrast between the more or less conventional realism that resulted from Moore's first visit to Coatesville and the lusher, more nuanced images that represent reconsideration of a familiar, historically resonant subject.

Art: City in Transition

"Thirteen Miles From Paradise" continues at the Arthur Ross Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania, 220 S. 34th St., through June 14. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Free admission. Information: 215-898-2083 or www.upenn.edu/ARG.