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

print April 1968

John Stephenson

John Stephenson makes his debut at the Royal Marks Gallery with an adroit group of aluminum and steel planes rhythmically bent or lapped into form. His work is involved with the articulation of continuous hard surfaces and “soft“ fluid spaces, rather than with the establishment of some single volumetric object or image. His thinking is more in line with the open, simple forms of Robert Murray’s work (some drawings by Stephenson point to solutions similar to Murray’s), than with the Judd/Morris attitude. Stephenson uses long metal ribbons with rounded ends (giant flexible tongue depressors), or

print April 1968

Martin Canin

The hot end of the rainbow glowed from the walls of the Graham Gallery during Martin Canin’s first New York show. In his large scale oils Can-in lines up narrow one-half to one-inch luminous strips, graduated from pale yellows through sunny golds to hot pinks or tangerine orange. He phases these bands in irregular sequences, and boxes them in at the top and bottom edges of the canvas, so that a succession of concentric, rectangular “coffins” take shape out of the melting radiance. All of the gold and orange-keyed paintings emit a soft, suffused, buttery light, while the small felt pen drawings

print March 1968

Lee Krasner in Mid-Career

THAT LEE KRASNER WAS THE wife of Jackson Pollock has been at once the greatest single advantage and the greatest handicap to her career as an independent painter: an advantage, because the experience of living and working intimately with Pollock served as a crucial catalyst to her own work—a disadvantage, especially since his death in 1956, because in one sense, she has had to labor against her relationship to Pollock. To the extent that Miss Krasner has increasingly expunged from her paintings an allegiance to his style, without giving up basic sympathies and conceptions about the process of

print March 1968

Richard Tuttle

Richard Tuttle’s show of hardly definable canvas octagons at the Betty Parsons Gallery was impressive in the quietest and most radically undermining way. His crumpled, then flattened-out pieces of canvas, hemmed along their irregularly proportioned contours, and dyed through both faces of the fabric—stretched without armature onto the walls or placed on the floor—are not paintings in the narrowest physical sense, nor are they sculptures, nor even “hangings.” They defy pinpointing (as all art of high quality probably should), and challenge one’s preconceived notions about what constitutes “

print March 1968

Victor Vasarely

Victor Vasarely, in his first showing since 1965 at the Sidney Janis Gallery, proves that he is the adroit and unrivaled master of a fashionable though largely superficial kind of “abstract trompe l’oeil” painting, which has been commonly called “optical art.” The exhibition is organized around two new series, the Ion and the Deuton panels, also including many other single experiments, some columnar sculptures, and three-dimensional plexiglass constructions. In the Ion suite, Vasarely fits together hexagonal segments which are trisected into parallelograms and painted in carefully graded values

print March 1968

Brice Marden

Brice Marden’s current set of gradations from charcoal grey to deep mauve at the Bykert Gallery, pushes his concern with edge to the very brink of inconsequentiality. And yet, one hesitates to admit that as a group these paintings still have a certain appeal. All together, their effect is like the kind of overwhelming quiet which fills an empty, darkened room, or like the contemplative starkness of a monk’s cell. One’s attraction to them, then, is on the order of such a subdued, though slightly pleasant sensation. At the same time, their insistent greyness flatly denies a response even as strong

print March 1968

Kenneth Snelson

Kenneth Snelson’s attractive stainless steel tube and wire-strung constructions at the Dwan Gallery are of interest mainly for their demonstration of an expensive and tasteful idea, rather than in terms of real plastic or sculptural significance. As examples of a certain kind of superficial structural “mathematics,” or as monuments to a svelte, modern look, they show how accomplished craftsmanship and a stylish intellectual skin are made to appear really Important.

Three large pieces and several small maquettes were exhibited, but the great differences in scale do not appreciably change one’s

print February 1968

Whitney Annual

The Whitney Annual’s 165 item supermarket (commonly known as its biennial show of contemporary American painting) opened with a mixed bag of both very good and appallingly inferior works, representing everything from hard edge geometric and minimal, “Op,” “ Pop,” and shaped canvases, to kinetics and rock bottom traditional easel painting. Nevertheless, there is enough to make it a worthwhile visit. A Ford Foundation grant enabled the Museum’s directors and curators to travel throughout the country surveying and selecting paintings. If this permitted, on the one hand, the procuring of some first

print February 1968

Darby Bannard

It had been remarked lately that Darby Bannard’s too-palatable use of cosmetic or decorator colors runs against the grain of prevailing tastes for styles of reductive monochrome, non-relational, systemic, or serially repetitive composition. This actually says more about the inherent Puritanism of our own responses, than it does about the ambitious complexity of Bannard’s newest paintings, shown at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. There is a deceptive mildness to his Jordan Almond colors, and a sweetness which challenges us by its very surfeit to override even this kind of psychological association.

print February 1968

William Copley

At the Alexander lolas Gallery William Copley’s (or CPLY as the signature goes) mock innocent illustrations pay homage to the Yukon ballads of Robert W. Service, a vagabond bard who was born in 1874. Cply’s pictures are titled with verses from these narrative jingles about the region’s legendary taverns and brothels. With a small vaudevillian cast of faceless mounties, provocative blondes and barmaids, or men in bowler hats and herringbone suits, he illuminates the waggish humor of the rhymes, and in a broad decorative style that enhances the subject matter while it turns us away from any (

Emily Wasserman