Morality on canvas, in Lancaster

'Don Perlis: Narrative Reborn" is a truly amazing exhibition at Lancaster Museum of Art, one that convincingly suggests painting today is a moral endeavor.

It features 33 canvases painted by Perlis from the 1980s to the present and ranging in size from about 10 inches square to 18 feet long. Apart from two key self-portraits done at turning points in Perlis' life, and a fiercely theatrical portrayal of his Oscar-winning close friend F. Murray Abraham as King Lear, the show chiefly emphasizes narrative subject matter about city life, history, and, more recently, opera.

This lifelong New Yorker got an early start in narrative painting, but it takes years to learn the full complement of necessary skills - figure painting, making a constructed painting able to convey drama, depth replacing flatness, and choosing a significant and worthy subject.

Already well advanced in these abilities by the late 1980s, he produced large narrative paintings about the urban threats of incivility, lawlessness, racial strife, and homelessness. Included here are three famous factual episodes. The most unforgettable, shown in the triptych Incident, was the 1984 case in which "subway vigilante" Bernard Goetz opened fire with an unlicensed handgun on three youths who confronted him in a New York subway car, then disappeared into the darkness. An epic 7 by 18 feet, the three-painting suite conveys Perlis' understanding that myth is history writ large.

The obvious question arises, since Perlis' mayhem oils were all done in the late '80s, when a traveling exhibition of works by German artist Anselm Kiefer was being seen across the United States (including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art): Did Kiefer's large-scale paintings, which revived history as a subject, influence Perlis?

Hardly. Kiefer was examining cultural politics relating to the Third Reich legacy, and exhibiting work in a tortured heroic style based on expressionism and abstract expressionism. By contrast, Perlis' realistic mayhem images point out the dangers of public indifference, prejudice, and bitterness toward our fellow human beings; they raise none of the unanswered questions Kiefer's art did.

By the 1990s, Perlis had entered a quieter time of focusing on his studio, on literature and the stage, producing a number of fine views from his studio window. His street scene September Morn includes a skateboarder and a child reaching for a lost balloon who draws our attention upward to smoke pouring from a tower just struck nearby. It's 9/11, but nobody we see below, entering the subway or talking on a cellphone, is yet aware of what the day has become.

And than, in this stunning show, the artist's latest strikingly dramatic scenes of opera performances declare his genuine high spirits. Yes, narrative is truly reborn on his watch.

What a remarkable coincidence to see the marching, shouting crowd of "occupiers" crossing 15th Street to City Hall just minutes before I stepped from a SEPTA bus and into the fascinating "Leon Bibel: Art & Activism in the WPA" show at Gershman Y. Bibel (1913-1995) produced an enormous body of artwork for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which - among many other things - from 1935 to 1942 paid artists to continue creating their work.

Bibel's art studies in California included assisting a student of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Moving East, he signed up with the Federal Arts Project, became an active easel painter and printmaker, and taught as well.

To say that this Polish-born artist's themes about the dignity of work, social injustice, city life, and war speak to us today is especially true of his compositionally rhythmic lithograph Unemployed Marchers (1938). Bibel understood and convincingly portrayed the human condition and its joys and sorrows in a great variety of sympathetic episodes - all of it true to life as he had witnessed it. This is one of the Y's most timely and informative shows in recent memory.

Water Elemental Crafts and Fine Art in Lansdale bills itself as a commercial gallery that's run like an artists' co-op with the soul of a nonprofit. It's featuring creative work by Visionary Fusion, a three-person glass studio active since the 1980s in Northeast Philadelphia. Their show "Mighty Glass Vessels and Other Curiosities" spotlights work in molten glass by Ken Mott, Steve Viterelli, and Aaron Wiener.

Some large bowls are distinctive in their zebra or tiger-stripe patterning, others in airy, basket-weave glass, and still other designs in subtle tints. The studio constructs its own tools needed to do this innovative work.