books February 1968

Paul Strand, The Mexican Portfolio, Paul Caponigro, and Photography in the Twentieth Century

Paul Strand, The Mexican Portfolio (Da Capo Press For Aperture, Inc.), 20 hand-pulled gravure plates, 4-page text in portfolio with slipcase, 12 1/2” X 16”, edition of 1000 numbered and signed copies.

Paul Strand’s Mexican Portfolio, an incredibly beautiful group of photographs taken during the early thirties, was issued in 1940 in a limited subscription (250 copies) edition. The volume has been unavailable in any form since that time. This year, Aperture, Inc., publisher of the quarterly of photography, has produced a new signed edition of 1000 copies for the Da Capo press. The portfolio includes

print February 1968

Oscar Bluemner

The Graham Gallery honors the centennial of the birth of Oscar Bluemner with a provocative and pleasing selection of his oils and watercolors. One-time architect Bluemner is known particularly for his expressionistic and irrational use of color; he was dubbed the “Vermillionaire” due to his use of the startling red in almost every one of his paintings. As a color theorist, his concepts owed as much to Byzantine mosaics, medieval stained glass and illumination, or Oriental painting, as they did to the ideas of Delaunay and the American Synchromists. Unlike these moderns, however, Bluemner chose

print February 1968

Bill Bollinger

To accuse a pared-down plastic expression of lacking interest simply because its formal components are few, or because it defies critically exhaustive description, is not to attend it with due credit. Bill Bollinger, showing at the Bykert Gallery, still works with simple manufactured metal units, but he is articulating space and surfaces in a new and more complex way. This is not to say, however, that the recent works, which are composed of jointed aluminum pipes, are entirely or vitally successful. They are certainly not as lethally attractive as the slender angled shafts which he has exhibited

print February 1968

Elliot Offner

Shifting from the Bykert Gallery to Elliot Offner’s sculpture at the Forum is to experience a swift and obvious emotional disjunction between two not so distant generations. Bollinger is understated and cool in his approach to materials and forms, as Offner is emotionally committed and involved in a kind of precious artisanship which no longer interests most of the youngest sculptors. Although the two are at extreme opposite poles, neither Offner nor Bollinger seems to represent the finest that either attitude would have to offer. Offner’s show is composed of thirty carved or cast plaques,

print January 1968

Pat Adams

Pat Adams’s oils and small gouaches at the Zabriskie Gallery please without challenging, and subdue by tasteful consonance, rather than jolt the eye with a bright blast of color. The sixteen gouaches are detailed Schwitters-like visions from which the oils seem to have been distilled and enlarged. They usually contain diagonal bands of wood-grainy or flecked textures played off against swatches which suggest textile samples and fabric designs. Many of these tiny studies are characteristic of Adams’s reserve and spareness, despite their decorative fillip. Others are filled with surprisingly rich

print January 1968

Billy Apple

Billy Apple’s U.F.O.’s (Unidentified Fluorescent Objects) at the Howard Wise Gallery launch us into ostensibly new rainbowed realms. In a flash of technical wizardry these flickering, whirling, pulsing and buzzing missiles surround the viewer with an eerily brilliant fantasy. Their impact is dulled, however, for anyone who is familiar with Times Square, which seems to have beaten Mr. Apple to the punch, and a few decades in advance of him, at that. The quivering vapors within the glass rods and spirals tend to become too associated with the commercial neon signs which are their predecessors.

print December 1967

Dan Flavin

Once again Dan Flavin presents his unsentimental bars of fluorescence at the Kornblee Gallery. This year the whole show is green. All of the paired, eight-foot-long rods of light are set at diagonals onto the walls, extending from baseboards to door frames, moldings or corner angles. One is almost put off by the sheer intensity of the emerald glow when entering the room, but once inside, the color fades to an eerie pallor. The unrelenting light bleaches out shadows, dissolving even the silhouette of the glass tubes which contain it. Perhaps the most unintentionally dramatic effect is induced by

print December 1967

Conrad Marca-Relli

During the years between 1952 and 1967 Conrad Marca-Relli has experimented with many variations on the theme of large-scale collage as a “complete pictorial system.” His recent Whitney Museum retrospective is a clear exposition of an exceedingly cohesive and sound development. If Marca-Relli’s work is not distinguished by a totally original approach to form and figuration, it is certainly the record of a fine and commandingly tasteful sensitivity to the substance and material of his oeuvre.

A cue to all of Marca-Relli’s production, in distinguishing it from that of his Abstract Expressionist

print December 1967

Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle’s show at the Dwan consists, quite largely, of one major sculpture which spans most of the gallery’s length, looming close to the ceiling. Doyle juxtaposes disparate polychromed masses, whose off-axis dynamics and individualized shapes represent a current, but also retrospective antithesis to the unifying, non-relational designs of primary structures or the singularity of “specific objects.” The open volumes and extended, interrelating parts clearly refer to Doyle’s foundation in the gestural, romantic spirit of Abstract Expressionism, yet an updated instinct for broadened, simpler

print December 1967

Lennart Anderson

Lennart Anderson’s tiny still lifes, portraits and landscapes are quiet testimony to a gentle and ordered outlook on nature and the commonplace objects of domestic life. All of his canvases are intimate, unperturbed views, casual, yet never simply chance arrangements of items or forms, and uniformly pervaded with a melancholy starkness. Studio nudes in chaises-longues lie inattentive and lax; rivers glide smoothly beneath cloudy skies, as if waiting for some mercurial event to grace them in passage. Even factory chimneys can become a kind of pastorale, rising smokeless and barren from unpeopled

print December 1967

Gene Davis

Gene Davis shows four of his largest wall-sized striped canvases at the Fischbach. The expansive possibilities of this mural scale are offset, however, by the use of excruciatingly thin half-inch vertical bands in at least two of the works shown. Their uniform opacity and chromatic congestion create, at times, some disappointingly compressed spatial situations, given the otherwise lively brightness of the paintings.

Dr. Peppercorn, whose one-inch wide stripes in an “edible” palette of magenta, cherry red, orange, and vegetable green, and Raspberry Icicle are certainly less acidic in their overall

print November 1967

Edward Epstein

At the Spectrum Gallery, Edward Epstein’s first New York showing of paintings and prints is a refreshing alternative contrast to the purist rigors and often narrowing terms of the minimalists’ thinking. His luxuriantly colored and painstakingly drawn mandalas offer a multiplicity of visual experiences.

The show includes works from the past two years, done in New York and Spain, and reflects an increasing maturity gained during this period. Source, one of the first round paintings (1965), relies on matte colors and clean edges, which define successive layers of flat planes. However, the central

Emily Wasserman