Galleries: Gallery pairs art furniture with Picasso prints

It's not a pairing that automatically comes to mind - the prints of Picasso and the furniture of Wendell Castle - but the cofounder of cubism and the art-furniture patriarch look as if they were made for each other in Wexler Gallery's current exhibition, "The Abstract Forms of Pablo Picasso and Wendell Castle." Picasso's curved and voluptuous lines on paper echo in Castle's three-dimensional forms, and vice versa. That the 13 Picasso works are predominantly black- or brown-on-white and the six Castles are monochromatic emphasizes the relationships between forms.

Picasso's drawing in these etchings, linocuts, and lithographs is a constant reminder of his brilliance as a draftsman; it also quickly and crisply illustrates his meanings in his images. In the print Muse montrant à Marie-Thérese pensive son Portrait sculpté (1933), from a copper plate heavily worked in etching and drypoint, Picasso depicts a nude female muse showing Picasso's young lover and model Marie-Therese Walter a sculpture of her own head, about which she seems to be puzzled. It's a rather demeaning theme that Picasso explored in several works from that period - that Walter was not sophisticated or attuned to abstract art and never saw her likeness in his work - and in this print it makes its mean point immediately.

In Picasso's hands, a face can be as voluptuous as a nude. Two lithographs from 1947, mounted side by side, both probably early portraits of Françoise Gilot, his consort for nearly a decade and mother of his children Claude and Paloma, demonstrate the power of strong lines and of an image that is all of a piece.

Buste de Jeune Fille, the most graphic of the two, in which the contours of Gilot's face are rendered in one continuous U-shaped line, recalls the directness and simplicity of Matisse's drawing style (Matisse did make a cut-paper portrait of Gilot in 1949).

Strong lines and shapes define Castle's recent pieces, which bring certain surrealist works to mind and look more like sculpture than furniture. Midnight (2010), a black-stained mahogany chest on long insectlike legs, could be a cartoony homage to Louise Bourgeois' spider sculptures, while two mahogany benches with seats shaped like birds suggest an African influence as filtered through surrealism.