b'It was my brilliant friend, Picasso-biographer Sir John Richardson, who encouraged me two years ago to meet one of New Yorks most formi-dable little-known artists: Janet Ruttenberg. John first met her in the 1970s in the Dominican Republic, when he came as the guest of her neighbor, Oscar de la Renta. He was amazed by her printmaking, and they began a longstanding mutual admiration society. When I met Rut-tenberg she was about to agree, at long last, to a public exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York that would feature her paintings and watercolor studies of people lolling in Central Park, some of which had been recently expanded with video projections. Ruttenberg, who has been completely possessed by art since her girlhood in Dubuque, Iowa, in the 1930s, has put aside her printmaking for the last 15 years in order to make these joyous, monumental paintings. Closely related to street ABOVE: Detail from the Park Avenue panels'