print Summer 1969

Allan Hacklin, David Diao, Donald Kaufman

I

ALLAN HACKLIN, DAVID DIAO, AND DONALD KAUFMAN are three relatively unknown New York painters who number among a larger group of young artists such as Ralph Humphrey, Dan Christensen,¹ Kenneth Showell, David Paul, Alan Shields, and others who have been exploring a new kind of painted expressiveness which, though varied in appearance, is definitely in reaction to the major trends of sixties painting (hard-edge geometrics, stained color-field, deductive structuring, Op, Pop, etc.). Attempting to register their changing attitudes about art as a mode or quality of attention without necessarily

print Summer 1969

Sidney Tillim

Sidney Tillim showed two of his large figurative paintings and a number of watercolor studies and drawings at the Noah Goldowsky Gallery. Since Mr. Tillim is a critic who has been assiduous and perceptive in his frequent defenses of representational painting as well as in his discussions of modernism in the pages of Artforum, before turning to a critique of his current work, I think it is in order here to review some of the ideas upon which his own artistic enterprise is predicated. In his article, “A Variety of Realisms,” appearing in this issue, Mr. Tillim airs his dissatisfactions with the

print Summer 1969

James Rosenquist

That James Rosenquist still entertains the possibility of creating a fully realized mural scale art (subsequent to his F-111 exhibited last year at the Metropolitan Museum) is once again evidenced by his recent showing at the Castelli Gallery of a new room-filling set of panels called Horse Blinders. The multi-partite work is composed of canvases sprayed and painted with giant photo-montage images and fragments of illusionistic texturing, and of intermediary aluminum corner sections, also partially covered with images. A brush of electrical cable wires, knotholed wood simulations, soupy marbleized

print Summer 1969

Clinton Hill

As the basis of his sectioned acrylic painted and assembled panels, Clinton Hill, showing at the Zabriskie Gallery, uses a rather standard and unexceptional notion of relationships. Attractive though they are on first examination, his paintings manifest a single-minded decorative sensibility which never quite supersedes the level of those relationships the artist chooses to diagram in his work. Partitioned into four or five actual or painted rectangles within square or rectangular fields, the surface of each section of a canvas is softly modulated with neutralized tints (grey pinks, off-white,

print May 1969

Alan Shields

Although barely farther uptown or more accessible to the general public than most New York artists’ studios the Paula Cooper Gallery (a second floor loft in the downtown factory district), housed one of the most exciting and surprising one-man shows of the season. Kansas-born Alan Shields has shown only one or two of his earlier machine-stitched unpainted canvas “hangings” previously; in a group exhibition which opened the same gallery, and in a “Soft Art” show currently at the Trenton State Museum (which does no justice to his concerns). It is difficult to call these first attempts paintings

print May 1969

Peter Alexander

At the Elkon Gallery, Californian Peter Alexander was seen in his first full East Coast exhibition, although several of his luminously elegant cast plastic cubes and wedges have been shown at random in the gallery and recently in the Whitney’s Sculpture Annual. Alexander’s characteristic medium is a wedge-shaped pinkish or lavender/blue/grey delicately slender object, partially transparent, which catches, reflects and diffuses light as it passes through the prismatic density of the piece. Neither fully object, nor fully treated as illusion in the pictorial sense, the work situates itself somewhere

print May 1969

Peter Young

The work of painter Peter Young has not yet been exhibited in a one-man show in New York, although several group shows in the past season have included his canvases. The Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C., provided a three year look at the rather inexplicably drastic alternations his thinking has gone through during this period. A recent exhibition shared with another young New Yorker, David Diao, at the Castelli Gallery also aired three newer paintings in the “dot” series from 1968. At his best Young combines a delicate touch and a range of often surprisingly pastel color with a conceptual

print May 1969

Marilyn Lerner

Offering herself some lively and refreshing alternatives to Minimal art or to other current trends such as process oriented sculpture, conceptualized projects, or earthworks, Marilyn Lerner makes her one-man debut at the Zabriskie Gallery. With accomplished craft Miss Lerner displays a heterogeneous group of laminated wood sculptures, sometimes encased in plastic, sprayed partially with bright color, softly dyed, varnished to a high gloss, or simply left to expose the natural textures of the different woods used in laminating. It is obvious from this first show that the printmaker turned sculptress

print May 1969

Robert Mangold

Moving away from the subtle color modulated bending surfaces of his earlier chasuble shaped panels, at the Fischbach Gallery Robert Mangold showed a series of scored masonite works in flat colors which shift his concerns towards a more puritan and literal approach to the shaping of his paintings. Mangold now prefers to create the sense of a flat surface being spatially warped by means of carefully worked out diagonal and vertical incisions which form subdivided triangle and parallelogram shapes within the ochre, khaki green or greyed-blue fields. Vectors, X’s, and pie-slice areas section these

print April 1969

Corcoran Biennial

The 31st Corcoran Biennial abandoned its traditional juried selection this year under the direction of James Harithas, who limited both the number and choice of participants according to his unilateral decision. Congratulations are due Mr. Harithas for the administrative triumph of the Biennial—he organized the show around younger artists, mostly abstractionists of differing persuasions, and practically all unknown in the Washington area. Few of the 22 painters have been seen in one-man or even group shows, although several of the older participants have had previous exposure on a limited basis.

print April 1969

Donald Judd

Two sculptures by Donald Judd at the Leo Castelli Gallery clarified for me some vague feelings of physical incompleteness and ideological limitation which his large Whitney retrospective last year had suggested. The work looked impressive, spare, and often extraordinarily lucid or elegant, but this with a very bounded sense accomplishment to my eye—as if many half-embodied or half-considered concepts were efficiently cloaked by the technologically clean-cut geometric boxes and fabricated modular units typical of Judd’s mature work. Although he has advocated the abandonment of composition in an

print April 1969

John Chamberlain

The perfect and appropriate setting for a small retrospective of John Chamberlain’s work was the Leo Castelli warehouse on West 108th Street, an immense, concrete floor garage space lacking all the parquet or red-carpeted elegance and cloistered feeling of the downtown gallery, or of galleries in general. Scattered around were a number of wall and floor pieces—the well-known automobile parts crammed and jammed into muscular, abstract conglomerates, lacquered metal shards, a big twisted urethane foam work from 1966, and a room filled with the newer collapsed galvanized zinc sculptures made from

Emily Wasserman