Whatever their intentions, posthumous gallery exhibitions rarely feel sincerely elegiac. Even the most reverential show can make the cynic in us suspect efforts to stoke the market for the master’s remnants. This is not the case here. In contrast to the citywide retrospection of “Pacific Standard Time,” the current bonanza of exhibitions celebrating (and, more to the point, often promoting) the region’s artistic heritage, this exhibition of works by the American painter and sculptor David von Schlegell (1920–1992) seems to direct its gaze as much inward as backward. Thumbing through the press binders, filled with personal snapshots, newspaper clippings about von Schlegell’s dauntless air force service, and black-and-white installation shots of von Schlegell’s public works, I’m suddenly very aware that I am perusing not the press, but the family archives. Organized with the help of that family—writer Mark von Schlegell, painter R.H. Quaytman, and poet Susan Howe—this exhibition gathers together monochrome paintings from his final years as well as models and sketches of his public sculptures. There is also a single supine piece of carved rosewood from 1988, whose burly underside belies a finely notched ridge that runs along its upper edge like delicate wainscoting. The piece is evocative of the …