"The Artist, the Teacher, the Protégé."

The show "The Artist, the Teacher, the Protégé" at Old City Jewish Art Center is right on target, addressing the hopes of many that Philadelphia artists are well served by the area's commercial and nonprofit art galleries. This particular nonprofit venue exists to recognize outstanding achievement by local living Jewish artists of varied backgrounds. Its focus here is on five Jewish artists and their protégés. Herewith, a look at the artist/teachers (the work of their protégés is under wraps until a Sunday afternoon reception).

Public sculptor Harold Kimmelman leads off with a scale model of his spunky signature piece, Burst of Joy, which sits at the entrance to Center City's Gallery mall. Mosaic artist Jonathan Mandell is a cheerfully gifted storytelling patternmaker whose energized surfaces jostle the eye with pulsing, flowing glass shards and semiprecious stones.

Seeing Mordechai Rosenstein's work, you just know that time is the resource he squandered to steep himself in this handsome Hebrew calligraphy, while Daniel Ostrow offers his grittier, more startling vision of wooden sunken ships, and Philip Zuchman's pungent landscapes of places visited are soaked in dream and memory.

The "American Masters" exhibit at Somerville Manning Gallery is a departure from typical fare at this Brandywine Valley "Wyeth circle" showcase. Putting aside that tradition, the gallery has found a solid, pragmatic stance from which to approach and make sense of a vast area of mostly 20th-century painting. This way, the works reinforce one another and reestablish some of the resonance that is the life of a culture.

There's an early Jackson Pollock alongside work by his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton; a honey of a Mary Cassatt Mother and Child pastel; several light, rough, and pleasing Charles Burchfield and Maurice Prendergast watercolors. Other scenes are by Milton Avery, Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin, plus figure paintings by Martha Walter, Winslow Homer, Everett Shinn, and a diverting Arthur Dove.

Don't let the refined sophistication of David Ahlsted's painting style distract you. This mature artist's own personal mode of feeling somehow holds style and subjects in a single affectionate unity in his Gross McCleaf Gallery solo. The will to create and control an entire world is distilled in his continuing series of episodic scenes in oil, compiled from various sources. Featured are lively bathers on South Jersey beaches and still lifes that have a peculiar elegance and weightlessness, with their greenery banked against dramatic skies. Another ongoing theme, Delaware River industrial-shipping traffic viewed from New Jersey, has definite possibilities. This is serious work.

Ruth Bernard of Lancaster, showing oils at the same gallery, seeks expressive depth and fervor in richly colorful, thickly painted canvases, mainly still lifes. Some provide lots of visual energy as well as feeling. Obviousness is the pitfall here, and Bernard will have to prove she isn't trapped in it. Her work, meanwhile, offers a bold vision definitely worth watching.

Timothy Sanchez's energetic interest in abstract-expressionist painting flourishes well beyond the peak period of that mid-20th-century style. This Vero Beach, Fla. artist clearly takes a hedonistic delight in materials he works with in 14 big canvases alive with Florida Coast-inspired color at Villanova University Gallery. The strength in his work comes from his direct touch. Color often looks as if it's collaged on, and sometimes it is. Sanchez wants his paintings to look refined, but only in a sort of colloquial way. Evidently that's why he chooses to include the paste-ons - it's his way of acquiring structure to play with. By far his best paintings are

Large Red

and

Yellow Rec

.