print Summer 1968

Paul Feeley

An exhibition of 49 paintings and a huge nine-piece sculpture court by Paul Feeley, who died in 1966, was organized by critic Gene Baro at the Guggenheim Museum, and included works dating from the last decade of the artist’s life. Since his death there has been a good deal of ballyhooing around and about the work of an artist whose modest and certainly not extraordinary talents do not seem commensurate with such attentions. Nor does one gather from the narrow ambitions of the paintings themselves that Feeley would have been party to such a fuss. The body of work exhibited is, in fact, notable

print Summer 1968

Robert Goodnough

In a series of large mural-sized canvases painted over the past two years Robert Goodnough has been synthesizing two alternate tendencies which have made themselves felt throughout his development. In his show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, this combination is especially manifest, taking form in a new kind of openness and clarity which mark these paintings as among Goodnough’s major achievements in an otherwise uneven career. One has always noted this artist’s vacillation between an impulse to structure, perhaps too rigidly (derived from the Purist disciplines he experienced while studying with

print Summer 1968

Michael Steiner

Faced with Michael Steiner’s radical rejection of his affinities to Don Judd or to others of that reductive persuasion, one senses this young sculptor’s ambition to create an art imbued with the complexity and toughness of say, a David Smith—yet without the latter’s imaginative ability or formal inventiveness to back up such an aspiration. Steiner has now given up fabrication processes in order to work more closely with his own materials (polyester resin which he casts over wood and paints bright pastel shades and primary hues). If there has been a logic to Steiner’s short development—from the

print Summer 1968

George Sugarman

Where Steiner fails to capitalize upon the use of color in order to articulate (rather than equivocate) sculptural ideas, George Sugarman, showing at the Fischbach Gallery, succeeds to a greater extent. This is of course due to fundamental differences in formal organization and aim, but it also points to the fact that color need not always be felt as a superfluous feature of plastic form. In his four-part sculpture Yellow to White to Blue to Black (in which the last two parts are coupled) Sugarman emphasizes the separateness of each unit by both spatial disposition (the pieces are set at intervals

print Summer 1968

David Weinrib

Although it is evident from this year’s group of cast plastic sculptures exhibited at the Royal Marks Gallery, that David Weinrib has overcome certain technical difficulties with his medium, it is also clear that the exploitation of its full expressive potential still offers him distinct formal problems. On the one hand, he shows several elegantly achieved pieces, while on the other, he reveals his still Abstract Expressionist attachments, in an unwillingness to abandon notions of assembling and agglomerating separate, multiple forms. Bulbous sacs, barrel shapes and buttressed arcs are often so

print May 1968

Robert Irwin, Gene Davis, Richard Smith

IN HIS CATALOG INTRODUCTION to the Jewish Museum’s simultaneous showing of three independent painters, Curator Kynaston McShine points to the collective energy, innovation, quality, and anticipation which are asserted in the work of Robert Irwin, Gene Davis, and Richard Smith—even though their achievements represent differing creative approaches and esthetic premises. The purpose here is to explore why, after viewing the selections from current work, one is left with a sense of tremendous and valid ambition stopped short or deflected in mid-career, or with the feeling that the promise and

print May 1968

Paul Mogenson

Sprayed various shades of gold (in, for instance, a pale silver gilt or a coppery gold), Paul Mogenson’s paintings at the Bykert Gallery have been passed off with little ado by some of this young artist’s critics. They are admittedly problematical works and are even at times intriguing, for certain contradictions make these rectangles arranged in arithmetic progressions a bit richer—but it is a richness which just makes it through the back door. I was bothered by a kind of dry intellectualism about these paintings, which takes form in Mogenson’s use of ordinary mechanical pictorial devices—devices

print May 1968

Robert Smithson

One’s frustration with Robert Smithson’s work at the Dwan Gallery is of the same order as that with Mogenson’s. But Smithson, despite his scientistic pretensions, is quirky in a way that Mogenson is not. Smithson calls his white fiberglass sculptures “infra-perspectives” or “dimensional finite compressions” (relating to something like the 3-D artifice of latitude lines on the globe), since they represent fragments of imaginary perspective projections in compressed form. Infinite circles are transformed into finite straight lines, and all rotational progressions become static within this system.

print May 1968

Theodoros Stamos

It is clear from the look of Theodoros Stamos’s Sun Boxes, new paintings at the Emmerich Gallery, that this veteran New York School artist is trying hard to keep pace with recent trends in color field painting, still consonant with his own energies and disposition. Both the scale and achievement of his canvases are modest in dimension. Stamos is concerned with the creation of luminous color presences which suggest without describing the effects of atmosphere and weather. Perhaps because of the limitations of size, or perhaps because Stamos is not quite able to fill or even maintain a certain

print May 1968

Adja Yunkers and Leo Manso

Adja Yunkers’ Aegean Series collage paintings at the Rose Fried Gallery are spare yet lyrical and sensuous without being self indulgently so. In them Yunkers displays a taste and lucidity which is admirable for its lack of pretension and for its resourcefulness within deliberately narrow confines. In only a very few of the works does one have the sense that the compositions are worked out in a manner that strikes one as too set or contrived. In most of the paintings precisely cut out but freely formed pieces of white canvas are applied onto grounds which may be a slightly different shade of

print April 1968

Larry Zox

The notion that Larry Zox is a “color painter,” or that he is what you might call a sensual colorist seems to be a mistaken one. Zox is now using several kinds of paint: he varies two types of surfaces within one canvas by alternating epoxy resins, which have a leathery sheen, and acrylics, which are applied more flatly. He also combines bright primaries or cosmetic pastel colors with tertiaries (grey-greens or acidic yellows) and achromatic shades (black, greys, whites, browns). In spite of these new chromatic variations, his thinking is still much more in terms of light dark value, which

print April 1968

Tony Smith

Nobody is going to want to admit that Tony Smith’s show of the Wandering Rocks at the Fischbach Gallery—five relatively small pieces fabricated in a dull, grey finish steel—is really about theater, more than it is about sculptural form, but that is indeed what the arrangement boils down to. Of course Smith has not abandoned his unpredictable and refined use of volume and geometry, nor the poetically expressionist implications of his enterprise, despite the modest scale of these works. The five separate pieces, Crocus, Dud, Shaft, Smohawk, and Slide sit on the floor of the dimly-lit gallery in

Emily Wasserman