print October 1966

George Herms' Zodiac Boxes

THERE IS A SENSIBILITY that seems to be, in great respect, peculiar to the West Coast, a sensibility which conceives of time as a kind of metaphysical shaper both of the artist and his attitude toward his material. This conception developed through the 1950s into a highly romantic approach to the found object or pre-effected image, and was shared, in one guise or another, by such artists as Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, Ed Kienholz and George Herms, along with certain of the Beat poets (who were among the first to turn the anachronistic contents of their environment into a kind

print December 1966

Anthony Magar and Forrest Myers at Dwan

THE NEW CURRENTS IN American sculpture appear to have converged upon geometry. Taking as a start the work of Gabo, Pevsner, Albers, David Smith, Anthony Caro, et al, the younger sculptors seem to have been rushing out to the machine shops and commissioning elegant abstractions of steel and aluminum, and defending the invasion as a function of contemporary scientific and mathematical thought. The approach seems to be a justification of art through science. But, art as a visual, tactile experience cannot be dealt with entirely in terms of intellectual patterns. In the end the product, the finished

print Summer 1966

Arakawa

In this, his second exhibition at this gallery, Arakawa shows a series of large canvases designed to look like blueprints. But they are blueprints of an imagination steeped in the history of 20th-century art. They refer simply to schematic explications of recent formal and idealic concepts with special reference to Jasper Johns and Marcel Duchamp, but there appears to be little in the way of any real dialogue or critical stance; rather, one finds a simple, personalized restatement of the ideas of these other artists.

Arakawa’s only formal contribution is in his use of color, which tends to add

print Summer 1966

David Simpson

Simpson’s previous exhibition in this gallery involved paintings consisting of horizontal lines of colors that looked like samples of Indian Madras. In this show he has changed to curves rather than straight bands and has brightened his colors. If, in his previous work, the paintings looked like swatches of much larger bolts of fabrics, in these he has wrapped his image around the edge of the support and abruptly broken the curve in order to contain the picture. But, still, one finds a very conventional use of color and a fairly arbitrary system of band width that provoke no particular tensions,

print May 1966

Robert Morris

This is the first Los Angeles exposure of a body of Morris’ recent, widely-publicized work in which he has attempted to reduce the traditional qualities of sculpture—tactility, visual incident and structure—based on extra-optical premises to a kind of total gestalt experience. One does not see these simple, neutral, grey polyhedrons in the conventional sense of seeing sculpture. Rather, the pieces are sensed as spatial amalgams, objects that disrupt or comment upon the space of the room. Interest in the shapes themselves is quickly diminished, leaving an impression of scale as the dominant

print May 1966

Frank Lobdell

This is the first major retrospective exhibition of one of San Francisco’s most influential painters. During the late 1940s and early 1950s Lobdell’s presence at the California School of Fine Arts emerged as the dominant force in the inculcation of the moral/intellectual attitudes of Clyfford Still, an approach that has seemed to dominate much Bay Area painting and sculpture up to the present moment.

In being confronted with the vast body of Lobdell’s work one is impressed immediately with the consistency of a morphological approach to image and paint application that attempts to tear loose

print April 1966

Robert Graham

Graham, in this first one-man show, exhibited a group of boxes mostly made during 1965. They are crafted of wood and transparent plastic and contain Surrealist-inspired views of contemporary figure groups, modeled of unfired clay, realistically painted, performing secret, erotic, rituals in conventionalized landscapes and beachscapes. A nude man holds a girl in a bathing suit in an acrobatic pose in a pool of water, or a group of bathers indulge their sexual fantasy knee-deep in the sea. Landscapes themselves become conventionalized and almost sexy. On occasion, the figures merge with the

print April 1966

Neil Williams

In his first Los Angeles one-man show, Williams shows a group of paintings made between 1963 and 1966. The earlier works use a basic parallelogram-shaped canvas with interior cutouts or sides cut into jagged streamlined directions, and an image structure composed of repeated sets of a single shape (designed to relate to the canvas shape) and to conform to a somewhat mathematical order. These are all of a single color on a contrasting ground.

The more recent pictures assume shapes that are more arbitrary, based upon superimpositions of different sized and angled rectangles. These complex fields

print April 1966

Allan D’Arcangelo

In this exhibition of recent work D’Arcangelo has simplified, fragmented and flattened his silhouetted imagery of highway markings and the highway landscape and moved more directly into a formalist focus. Where, in certain earlier paintings, the highway would recede illusionistically toward the vanishing point, in these pictures it holds and affects the picture plane. The broken white center dividers become, now, parallelograms and the grassy embankments flat walls of green canvas separating the black road-base from the blue sky-top.

The play, here, is between flatness and illusory depth with

print April 1966

Die Wiener Schule

“The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism” as it is represented by its five founders in their first American exhibition, is an anachronism. Ernst Fuchs, spokesman for the group, claims the intention has been “to resurrect some long-forgotten artistic traditions by combining many qualities and disciplines, dispersed in most modern art, into a truly ‘fantastic realism’.” He claims kinship with such painters as Altdorfer and Grunewald, the Parisian Surrealists and the French Symbolist painters of the late 19th century. One sees, also, in the work of Erich Brauer, an affinity to Hieronymus Bosch; in

print February 1966

FIVE YOUNGER LOS ANGELES ARTISTS

An exhibition designed to present the recent work of the five winners of the Contemporary Art Council’s New Talent Purchase Awards. These awards were established in 1963 to provide a year’s financial subsistence to a most promising young Los Angeles Area artist, in return for the opportunity to select one work for the Museum’s permanent collection.

The show presented five young artists, all functioning within the current modes of advanced art, but there was little reaching out, few risks. Each has found an imagery and technique that gives him a personal trademark but none (with the possible

print February 1966

Jess Collins

Jess (Collins) has been well-known in the Bay Area for a number of years as the creator of metaphysical, poetic collages (generally limited to black and white) composed of old magazine photographs, engravings and illustrations. These depended upon subtle juxtapositions of images cleverly made to appear as if the original material was found in the form presented. They were closely related to the collages of Max Ernst but dealt in a cosmology more complex and, often more esoteric than Ernst’s. The present show is composed of a series of oil paintings executed over the past five years. In these,

Don Factor