One of the raison d’etres for being in New York is to attend the opening of the PRA’s exhibition at Friedman Benda on W 26th. Street.   He’s done a lot of new work for it, freer and more abstract and more fluid than in the recent past.   Someone said that it’s a walk through art history.   It’s not as simple as that.   The works have references to history and to his deep knowledge of the history of art, but I do not regard the works as historicist.   They have absorbed visual traditions, so that they are structural references, not quotations.   Frank Stella gave a brilliant brief introduction referring to Charles Le Brun and Delacroix and Guston.   But the more obvious references in the exhibition are late Turner and Monet and Rothko.