A Review of "Eric Fischl Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art WADING IN "A Visit To/A Visit From/The Island" (1983), among the paintings in "Eric Fischl: Beach Life," at the Museum at Guild Hall in East Hampton. If being a starving or unsuccessful artist sounds harrowing, being a successful one comes with its own pitfalls. Take Eric Fischl, for instance. One of the most successful figurative painters of his generation, Mr. Fischl, who was born in 1948, attended the California Institute of Arts when it was a hotbed of post-1960s Conceptualism, but followed a less popular path and remained a painter. In the course of his career, he has been denounced by feminists, who saw his nudes as throwbacks to earlier eras in which women were objectified by male painters, and by postmodernists, who considered his large canvases luxury objects that exemplified rather than opposed the excesses of the 1980s art market. Further public missteps include a controversial bronze monument to the tennis player Arthur Ashe placed outside the National Tennis Center in Flushing, Queens, in 2000 and a figurative 9/11 memorial that was removed from Rockefeller Center in New York. More recently, Mr. Fischl has come under fire from critics who have seen his portraits of affluent friends and patrons as out of touch with the protests of the past year that highlighted global disparities in wealth. With this in mind, Mr. Fischl's show at the Museum at Guild Hall in East Hampton feels like a momentary refuge for an artist who is more at home in the Hamptons than anywhere else in the world - literally, since he lives with his wife, the painter April Gornik, in North Haven, near Sag Harbor. Titled "Beach Life," the exhibition here dovetails not only with the local landscape but with what might be called the sociology of beachgoing. The earliest paintings in the show, from the 1980s, treat going to the beach as a discombobulating, Surrealist sort of activity, where the sun beats down on a spare, barren landscape rife with odd juxtapositions and menacing details. "The Beginning and the End" (1988) features a standing female nude with a tiny male figure seen through her legs in the distance and the large, slightly grotesque head of a sleeping man in the lower right foreground. "Costa del Sol" (1986) is a mise-en-scène with a group that includes a nude woman posed like a 19th-century odalisque and a dwarf reminiscent of those who appear in Spanish paintings from the 17th century (just as the title cites that country's famous beaches). An untitled work from 1990 features a nude woman in a deep blue field of color, approaching a dark boulder that sits in the right half of the painting. In the brochure accompanying the show, which includes an essay and interview with the artist, Phyllis Tuchman writes that despite Mr. Fischl's education and friendships with the so-called Pictures artists who came out of CalArts with him, Mr. Fischl "himself never adopted their intellectual approach to art making." There is one early painting here, however, "A Visit To/A Visit From/The Island" (1983), that feels in keeping with the Pictures ethos of juxtaposing images to create a social or political critique. On the left side of the large canvas is a beach scene with a group of white people frolicking amid a variety of upscale water toys - a boat, windsurfing board and so on - in the turquoise waters off a high-rise beach resort. The right side of the picture contains an entirely different scene, filled with dark-skinned people in the midst of a crisis, with frantic figures coming to the aid of others, who appear to be unconscious. Despite Mr. Fischl's eschewal of appropriation and many other landmark "80s techniques, this canvas feels similar to the work of David Salle, a friend of Mr. Fischl's and a fellow CalArts student, who leans more toward postmodern pastiche and pairings that create dialogues between images. At the same time, "A Visit To ..." is a rather basic attempt at this device that, while skillful in its renderings of figures and chaotic water scenes, borders on dangerous stereotypes of what the beach signifies to people of different races. It feels as if Mr. Fischl is on firmer ground in his more recent, less complicated pictures, which feature his friends and family and approach figurative painting in the serious, formal tradition of artists like Philip Pearlstein, Lucian Freud or another East End master, Fairfield Porter. "Beautiful Day" (2006) and "The Raft" (2007) look like sunny snapshots of figures in and around the water. Mr. Fischl does work from photographs and manipulated photographic compositions, as do many of his contemporaries. "The Gang" (2006) is a particularly personal image, featuring a group of friends that includes Mr. Salle and Ms. Gornik. In a gallery adjacent to Mr. Fischl's show is a photographic precursor by the artist to "The Gang," a digitally manipulated composition that gives you an idea of the artist's process in making this work. In her essay, Ms. Tuchman compares "The Gang" to paintings of leisure created by 19th-century French Impressionists like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Gustave Caillebotte. Fair enough, although those painters were also capturing a rapidly changing society in the midst of industrialization, the mixing of social classes in outdoor settings, and the bohemian artist as a go-between - a citizen-observer who both participated in the new forms of urban leisure and documented them. Mr. Fischl's contribution to painting is more modest. A competent figure painter - not quite Mr. Pearlstein or Mr. Freud - he entered the field when painting was simultaneously declared dead and resurrected by the market. He has carved out a wildly successful career. At the same time, Mr. Fischl's scope and his ambitions, both in subject matter and the formal handling of paint, are rather narrow. The beach, while interesting as a 20th-century and postwar phenomenon - and particularly as a local obsession - is not, in his hands, the stuff of great art history. "Eric Fischl: Beach Life" is at the Museum at Guild Hall, 158 Main Street, East Hampton, through Oct. 14. Information: (631) 324-0806 or guildhall.org.