The work of Kenneth Evett, one of the Cornell University faculty's most prolific artists, will be featured in a one-man show at the Upstairs Gallery in Ithaca Dec. 3 to 28.

Evett's works have been exhibited at major museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, D.C., and he has had more than a dozen one-man exhibitions at the Kraushaar Gallery in New York. Evett has selected more than 100 works from his private collection to exhibit in his Ithaca show, aptly titled "Kenneth Evett: From the Attic. Five Decades of Oils, Watercolors, Sumi Ink Paintings and Drawings." Among the works are some never-before-exhibited portraits of well-known Cornell faculty members and a small-scale rendition of one of his controversial murals, created for the state capitol building in Nebraska.

Evett began his association with Cornell in 1948, served as chairman of the art department in the 1970s and was named emeritus professor upon his retirement in 1979. When he wasn't teaching or tending to family obligations, Evett was putting paint to canvas, either in his old Franklin Hall studio or upstairs in his Oak Avenue home studio, which overlooks Cascadilla Creek. But Evett, once referred to as a "traveling artist," always made paintings wherever he went.

His landscapes of California, the Southwest, the Mediterranean region and Maine are evocative of particular places and seasons.

"I can remember what the weather was like, and how I had to climb over rocks to find a good place to paint," he said, contemplating a watercolor of mountains in Arizona. Many of his watercolors, which also are available for sale at period prices, cover an entire wall at the Upstairs Gallery.

Portraits, too, are abundant in Evett's output, and they are plentiful at the show. One familiar with Cornell's faculty will enjoy matching the sketch to the person.

"While I enjoyed the conversation and company of my sitters, most of them looked stricken when they saw what I had done to them," Evett said. Gallery visitors will spot images of a brooding Alison Lurie (1976), a relaxed and refined Mario Einaudi (1963), Karel Husa (1960) and Toni Morrison (1978). Many of the drawings are on small slips of note paper. Prominent among the portraits is a 1975 oil painting of Professor Theodore Lowi, dressed in a brilliantly colored sport coat and wide-cut tie.

The sumi ink works that Evett has on exhibition express the anxiety that many Americans felt during the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear war and environmental ruin were widely perceived as imminent. These are large works without color; only strokes of black sumi ink indicate the mood of the time.

Despite favorable reviews from the New York Times early in his career, Evett would not enter the art world's spotlight until controversy greeted his work. In 1954 he won a national competition to create three 15-by-24-foot murals for the rotunda area of the Nebraska State Capitol Building in Lincoln. The project, for which he was paid $26,000, was to portray the various occupations of the people of Nebraska in a series murals titled "Labors of the Heart," "Labors of the Hand" and "Labors of the Mind." Reminiscent of Picasso's "Three Musicians," Evett's "Labors of the Heart" depicts a cellist, dancer and flutist. The current exhibition at the Upstairs Gallery features an original color study of the winning entry done in warm oranges and golds, colors that Evett said complement the interior limestone walls of the building.

The controversy began when the first mural was unveiled to state lawmakers in 1955. Evett's work, which employed an array of cubist devices, met with disdain from various elected officials. One state senator railed, "If that is art, thank God I am not an art critic." Another senator decried the work as having been drawn "with a T-square." Still another suggested that Walt Disney be contacted to paint the murals, saying, "At least we will get a good laugh." Critics and curators were more approving. They found Evett's murals "strong, simple, very architectural and altogether in keeping with the design of the building and the intent of its creator."

Evett was in Rome when the first mural was unveiled and learned about the uproar from the Paris edition of the New York Times, which ran an Associated Press wire photo under the headline "State Capitol Mural Upsets Nebraska Legislators."

"It was sort of fun to be in the limelight," said Evett. Dozens of reporters, even a CBS television crew, converged on Evett, who at the time was working on the second mural in a studio at the American Academy. "Sometimes I regret that I wasn't more combative and argumentative with my critics, but in those days Senator McCarthy was carrying on a campaign against the Red Menace, and as I had a youthful left wing past; I feared that exposure might cost me my commission.

"The whole episode seems to have been a typical example of a public pastime of the period -- you know, unveil a piece of radical art and get the public upset," he said recently, 41 years after the incident.

Now 83, Evett has put away his oil paints, seemingly for good, but he continues to paint watercolors and, as a former art critic for The New Republic, now offers his opinions on art in The Bookpress.

"I think I'm the best American watercolorist since John Marin," said Evett, referring to the American painter best known for his expressionistic watercolors of Manhattan and the Maine coast, "but nobody else thinks that."

Perhaps a visit to the Upstairs Gallery will change their minds.