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

Stephen Greene

Stephen Greene’s studies, drawings and oils at the Staempfli Gallery show a hand and sensibility which are generally adroit in adapting to the needs of the mechanized biomorphic abstractions the artist has made his idiom. Like fantasized, fragmented, and floated machines, his rotating discs, socket-like forms and tensile lines are sketched out in a monochromatic Gorky-esque atmosphere which is both elegant and delicate in the best of the larger paintings such as the Equation of Night. Towards the formation of an intimately personal style Green draws on evident, though varied sources; his work

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

Larry Zox

At the Kornblee Gallery Larry Zox’s flattened, four-pointed stars, single or paired, were radiating a new accented openness of color. During and after his last show Zox evolved this inscribed star format as a less geometrically segmented and systematic, but more discrete and subtle means of projecting both quiet and saturated hues. While a. number of the paintings in this show are unexceptional (such as Weekapaug or Prudhoe, with their blandly white or black central images and tailored edging vectors in neutral shades like plum brown, subdued orange, or yellow ochre), the series as a whole

print April 1969

Lester Johnson

One might say that Lester Johnson’s compressed lineups of booted, helmeted, crouching gangs of male figures at the Martha Jackson Gallery are the figurative equivalent of Al Held’s abstract bulk volumes. In canvases scarred and pitted by viscous, encrusted surfaces Johnson shackles dense silhouettes whose delineated flatness and lack of interior articulation contrast to the way in which these bodies are thickly packed into the contours of the field and seem to want to burst out from such confines. A frontal mug shot of anonymous, even threatening figures, Three Men With Hats (1968), describes

print April 1969

Anne Truitt and Richard Friedberg

Dressed up minimal and poly-chromed clunky post-Caro—sculptural idioms by now familiar and already somewhat hackneyed—were the works in two exhibitions, Anne Truitt’s at the Emmerich Gallery, and Richard Friedberg’s at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Truitt’s tall, painted rectangular columns are set on thin (one to one and one-half inch) indented and invisible platforms so that these single, flawlessly colored iconic shafts seem to rest in a state of tenuous suspension above the ground. The attempt to make color intrinsic to the most basic, denuded forms—to make this color radiate from within the

Emily Wasserman