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

print November 1967

Jack Bush

Jack Bush’s show at the Emmerich Gallery features large-format rectangles which are divided into triangular wedges or diagonal, horizontal and vertical segments. These areas contain parallel bars in a variety of widths and colors. Although he uses a broad array of bright, intense chroma stained into the raw canvas, neutral olives, greys and browns are also favored. In Soft Left, Bush employs this mixed scheme, with the two side sectors striped in tertiary greens, ochres, rusts, and pink. Though these flanking areas are the stronger forms structurally, their tones fall away to reveal a center

print November 1967

Donald Kaufman

The group of Donald Kaufman’s canvases exhibited at the Feigen Gallery is a fine record of the artist’s maturing and increasingly refined sensibility. His paintings possess a quietly pleasing and non-assertive authority, whether they span an entire wall, or are reduced to a thin horizontal bar. The interlocking rectangles which make up his compositions are colored with muted tones, variations on grey and white, with some earlier experiments in more brilliant, intense colors. Kaufman aims to work with hues that are as closely valued as possible, without getting into the area of the “invisible”

print November 1967

Charles Pollock, Sam Gilliam, Frank Viner, Mel Henderson, Neva Hansen, Gianni Colombo, Charles Frazier, Sidney Butchkes, Roy Colmer and Tal Streeter

The A. M. Sachs Gallery opened in new quarters with a group of works representing lesser known or unaffiliated artists, selected by an impressive roster of collectors, critics and museum curators. Despite the prestige of those who helped put together the exhibit, the pieces were often disappointing, although the choices were hardly unexpected in terms of the tastes they reflected.

Clement Greenberg and Barbara Rose picked two color-field painters, echoes of the Louis and Noland methods not to be neglected. Greenberg’s choice was Charles Pollock, whose ochre stained canvas is inflected with navy

print October 1967

“Drawings in Series”

At the East Hampton Gallery, a refreshingly varied selection of “Drawings in Series” by seven accomplished draftsmen will be shown this month. The group features Isaac Abrams’s and A. Sklar-Weinstein’s “visionary” and more subjective interior “landscapes”; Lenore Laine’s optical patterns; Nelson Howe’s densely textured studies, along with Sonia Gechtoft’s and T. G. Haupt’s energetic, yet orderly abstractions. They are all of consistent quality, and there is no amateurish note in this show.

A certain ingenuous awkwardness in Sacha Kolin’s white pastel silhouettes is balanced by the gentle precision

print October 1967

Jim Dine

Twenty-seven of Jim Dine’s delightfully “mod” costume designs for A Midsummer Night’s Dream have been on view at the Museum of Modern Art this month. The drawings are wittily labeled, and emphasize the bawdy, improvisational aspects of Shakespeare’s play as it was produced by the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop in 1966, for which the designs were created. (See Artforum, May 1966.)

Dine’s sketches aptly echo the bold, anti-traditional and contemporary style of the production in their use of simulated textured fabrics (naugahyde, vinyl, army camouflage, fake fur, etc.) or in the superlatively obvious

print October 1967

“Contrasts”

The summer “Contrasts” show at Marlborough-Gerson was an end-of-the-season potpourri ranging from early Lipchitz and dull Henry Moore bronzes to some fine recent Motherwell collages and new Lee Krasner (Pollock) oils, with random samplings from the gallery’s international roster. Granted, it would be difficult to make a coherent statement about as diverse a group of artists as Marlborough represents, but the distinct feeling was that many of the pieces were leftovers, pulled out of the gallery deepfreeze and arranged to fill up the endless rooms available for use. Consequently, the “contrasts”

print April 1965

Recent American Painting

This show consists of assemblages, silk-screens and paintings by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist and Wesselmann. All the selections are taken from private collections in the Los Angeles area, and although most of the selections are typical works of the artists, they do not give the full range or depth of any of them. Rosenquist is represented by three widely diverging canvases which are not among his best. The best of Lichtenstein’s comic-strip works is “Scared Witless,” a painting of a sweating, crawling soldier in combat. The bulging of the muscles on his hand, the jagged rendition of his

print April 1965

Robert Hartman

Hartman’s collage-paintings are done in acrylic paints and cut-out photos of early gliders, which are reproduced by a photocopy process uniquely his own. The process allows him to reproduce a photo and control the delicate tonal values of light and dark, which he varies in his final images. The results are airplanes which are ghostly and evocative shadows of shapes, blurred and indistinct apparitions with only their birdlike silhouettes visible. Usually they are placed on top of luminous washes of thin acrylic paint. Some areas are painted with a dry, wispy brush-stroke; other sections of paint

print April 1965

Architecture, Plan and Environment

Of particular interest to students of architecture and critics of the new Los Angeles County Museum is this selection of designs and plans for the new Museum, which range from the earliest schematic sketches to final detailed drawings. The creative evolution of a monumental building is often taken for granted by the public; seeing this exhibition gives the lie to the misconception that a plan must spring, full-blown, from the brain of some Wrightian genius. Rather, the building is seen as a hybrid of ideas forged into a whole; the Museum might be said to have sprung from the multiple heads of

print April 1965

Robert Moore

Moore, a native Californian working in New York, is having his first show on the West Coast. The execution and composition of his work is clear, confident and strong, and seems to express his intention of painting “the primal forces of nature.” It is an elemental nature, generated by the sun and rooted and fertilized in the earth. Most of his images are forces of generation and of continuance: the sun, a seed, the earth, a growing plant. His most successful paintings are his later ones, in which he applies his pigment thinly and utilizes his massive shapes (reminiscent of Gottlieb) in a free

Emily Wasserman