Drawings from that period show him to be a talented satirist whose illustrations displayed occasional glimmers of a more profound talent: for example, German Train, an illustration for Collier's magazine that accompanied an eyewitness story published in 1944 about the Polish death camps. In it, a sea of people are jammed along a railroad siding and more are being crammed into boxcars so full that soldiers can't seem to close their doors. It is a hellish vision of transporting misery but it is, in the end, an illustration and not fine art. It's the tiny slice of sky Pachner painted above the gruesome scene below from which you cannot take your eyes. It's fabulous. The dark sky is streaked with flashes of paint that don't conform to anything literal but convey an implosion of the elements as they bear witness to something terrible.

He wanted to go home to Europe during World War II, but that was out of the question, and after the war, with several generations of family he left behind all killed, he probably couldn't bear to. Instead, he walked away from a lucrative career and set up a studio to try painting full time. Little from the 1950s is in this retrospective. I can only speculate since I haven't seen work from that early period, but what's here - some collages and small paintings - indicates he was trying to shake off the literalness of his commercial work.

A smart move was to stop making people the main subject of his paintings so much of the time. Once he focused on landscapes, he began to soar.

In them, he rises above the sorry human condition, painting as from a bird's-eye view, mapping a topography stained with bloodlike red or swirled with verdant greens, sometimes scarred with black or a withering brown. The earliest examples in the show, from the 1960s, bear a sense of discovery: that the earth can be a beautiful place when seen with the right perspective. The paintings vary greatly in form, too, as if a landscape can be a metaphor for the multitudes of different people who live on the crazy-quilt surface he makes of the world.

Pachner paints utterly dark, keening landscapes, too, with layers of thick paint the color of ruined, scorched earth, places on which one would never alight.

His boyhood fascination with trains took a very dark turn in adulthood, linked to their role in the Holocaust. They appear again and again as subjects and are generally harrowing. The best of them are the most abstract - swirling wheels and hard slashes of metal look about to explode in frenzied motion.

Worth noting is that they, like most of his work after 1980, use only black paint on white canvas. Pachner had been blind in one eye for most of his life; by 1981, he realized he was going blind in his other eye, too. He could no longer mix colors or distinguish anything but sharp contrasts, so monochromatism made sense.

The world itself may have looked philosophically more black and white to him by then, less nuanced by ambivalence. And the later work has an urgency mingled sometimes with despair. You know something's up in a self-portrait from 1985 in which his eyes look like black cavities excised with smooth, clinical lines while the rest of his features collect themselves in sagging resignation.

This is not a comprehensive retrospective, even though it offers more than 130 works. Missing are his beautiful figurative paintings from the 1950s and 1960s (I know this exhibition is called "Imagined Landscapes," but trains and trucks are included, for heaven's sake).

Underrepresented, too, are landscapes that would round out our understanding of Pachner's art. He certainly nailed down loss and alienation, but he clearly recognized joy when it came his way and could convey it on canvas, too. Just look at one he painted in 1981 - not a great year for him - that employs the colors of a tropical paradise to create an ethereal grid of interlocking stalks that tower over two little houses like a garden gone wild.

Some of the rosy-hued beach scenes and flowery abstracts he painted during annual stays in Florida over the decades would have been welcome inclusions, but they perhaps did not make the cut since some of them were part of a Pachner exhibition at Brad Cooper Gallery in Tampa in 2004. Cooper, a longtime friend of the artist, will have an exhibition opening Feb. 11 of a group of Pachner's works on paper - drawings, paintings and mixed media. It spans his career, showing art from 1949-95, and will be a nice companion to this larger show.

-- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

REVIEW

"William Pachner: Imagined Landscapes" opens Saturday at the Florida Holocaust Museum and continues through June 26. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is $8 adults, $7 seniors and $3 18 and younger. (727) 820-0100.