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

print February 1969

John McCracken

At the Robert Elkon Gallery, slightly confused visitors walked among seven sets of mute, white, rectangular plywood boxes which flanked the length of the single room, asking where the John McCracken show could be seen. To viewers who have been accustomed to the lustrous polish of McCracken’s elegant epoxy-finished planks, richly coated with appealing colors like plum or lipstick red, the neutrality and unglamorous coolness of these constructed modular forms is quietly unsettling. Spaced 58 inches apart across the length of the gallery floor and reaching over seven feet in height, the columnar

print February 1969

George Segal

For anyone familiar with George Segal’s plaster-peopled environments, there was more of the familiar in this year’s showing at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Though descended from the disorganized variety and excitement of the early Happenings, the new arrangements and neat variations of setting begin to look more and more trivial—and less than ever as if anything is really happening. I still find Segal’s plaster casts and cropped environments awkwardly achieved even at their most psychologically haunting or arresting. Earlier works often benefited from this very awkward element in the starkness and

print February 1969

Ruth Vollmer

Ruth Vollmer showed her sculptural explorations of the sphere at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Diluted post-Bauhaus, warmed over into modestly scaled modern Minimal, was the overall look of the models and large pieces. Although elegant, well-made and cleverly conceived, there was little else which raised these works above the rather mechanical exercises in organization and dynamics (some of the pieces float or rock, or suggest variability) which they appear to be. What was best demonstrated is that a bit of sophistication and good fabricating can go a long way these days to accomplish a look which

print February 1969

James Bishop

That Jim Bishop has lived away from the United States for the past decade (he has been painting in Paris) accounts, I think, for the sense of private, circumscribed ambition and of a self-exploratory enterprise which one feels upon viewing his paintings. Work from the past two years shown at the Fischbach Gallery reveals that Bishop has not particularly cared to keen pace with the blown-up scaling and brilliant, hard-edge color fields which emerged in the work of other American painters who had worked in Paris (Kelly, Held, Noland) and in the post-Abstract Expressionist paintings done here in

print February 1969

William King

At the Dintenfass Gallery, William King’s latest aluminum figures looked like giant cookie cutouts, combining a stylized formalism with the humorous caricature which was more typical of his earlier vinyl and burlap stuffed models and carved wooden figure groups. Now working in half-inch-thick sheet aluminum, King has made his anonymous interpenetrating silhouettes less specific to the features and characterization of the human form. This kind of generalization is often quite effective, as in the large pair called Learning, where the elongated legs of a man bending over to hold a little girl’s

print January 1969

Alan Saret

After plodding around, for the better part of the last year or so, through sundry heaps of minimal monuments and dirt piles, flailing plastic biomorphs, sodden or silly polychrome wiggles, and uninspired planks and boxes, I was beginning to think that the prospects for a sculptural renaissance were pretty slim. Recently, several one-man shows by artists under the age of thirty have suggested, to the contrary, that some fresh ideas are circulating again, making for a lively and inventive new group of objects, sculptures, and in-betweens.

“Mountains of Chance, Documents of Ruralism . . . Changing

print January 1969

Christopher Wilmarth, Eva Hesse, and Paul Brach

Another newcomer was Christopher Wilmarth, with his first show at the Graham Gallery. He proves adept at both wall-relief and floor-based sculptures done in a satisfying though unexpected combination of softly polished light birchwood and plate glass. The bulk and apparent weight of the wooden volumes and extended masses are contrasted with the transparency and vulnerability of the glass—but both of these traditional or known “truth to materials” qualities are actually contradicted or modified by the specific way in which Wilmarth has chosen to use the glass and wood. The latter is shaped into

print January 1969

Paul Caponigro and Duane Michals

A show at the Museum of Modern Art reviewed the current work of a young American, Paul Caponigro, whose photographs were recently published in a monograph by Aperture. Caponigro spent a year in England and Ireland photographing Stonehenge, Druid’s altars, megalithic stone circles and dolmens. He aimed to involve himself emotionally with the process and human activity which went into their formation. In this sense he brings a much greater commitment and almost moral obligation to these impeccably printed and elegantly composed pictures than he does to his earlier intimate studies of flowers,

print November 1968

E. W. Nay

E. W. Nay, the German colorist, died at the age of 66 in Cologne in April of this year, and Knoedler’s has presented, in his first posthumous retrospective, a large sampling of the painter’s last works. I found them peculiarly pathetic and self-consciously hesitant, betraying the failure of both hand and vision to consummate themselves in old age with the authority and boldness one marveled at in a painter like Matisse, or with the confidence Nay himself must have possessed as a young artist. The often awkwardly achieved configurations, with their partly biomorphic, partly jagged and irregular

Emily Wasserman