ECLIPSE

They tried it with Picasso, they did it with Mark Rothko, so you can bet your bottom bid they'll try it with Steven Lerner, world-famous Expressionist master who has the indecency to die with hundreds of unsold paintings lying around the attic. Within seconds of finding the depraved Lerner in an ocean of blood on his studio floor, art wheelers Simon Pyne and Harold Barclay, both fast ""friends"" of the artist, fire out from three-point stances in an ignoble sprint to cop the trove for themselves and clients. In the role of the turtle plods Lerner's daughter Wendy, a fat iconoclast strung out on oedipal problems and hooked on sex with the Savage Nomads. Not much of a contest, fight? Luckily, thought fireplug Wendy encounters painter Andrew Crowley, slims down, regroups he head, and nips the Pyne-Barclay combo at the wire with a last-ditch lawsuit. She even turns the icy, trendy Crowley into a bubbling hetero. Exactly like the newspapers wrote it, non? (Not the sex part, the lawsuit part.) Court,wise Ms. Rothko needn't bother to sue over this, however; with its slick-o portraits--the black-lipped, black-fingernailed art groupie crowd, painters chic-ly at work--this exhibition should pass without much notice.