print October 1966

Los Angeles Artists

The “American Masters Show” at The Feigen/Palmer Gallery covers the period from 1945 to 1966 and includes just about everyone who made it during those years. There are oils by Josef Albers, a fine oil and pencil drawing by de Kooning as well as a delightful small oil by Max Ernst. Morris Graves’ symbolic Bird Snake and Moon captures the eye along with Yves Tanguy’s macabre Unknown, both works coming out of the forties. Hofmann, Lebrun and Calder all show examples of their work during the fifties, and as the exhibition leads into the sixties, one begins to feel a creeping despair as ideas grow

print March 1967

John Battenberg

John Battenburg’s imposing aluminum sculpture based on a World War I Air Corps theme is a powerful and moving indictment of war, and the artist’s gift for understatement adds immeasurably to its appeal. The high intensity of his style is sustained dramatically through Surrealism, and the viewer is made to feel the presence of the figure in his work all the more palpably by its absence. Looming larger than life, his strange and hauntingly rendered uniforms, helmets, goggles, and gloves seem to drape themselves over invisible bodies enveloping their spirits as once the uniforms themselves enveloped

print March 1967

David Glines, Les Biller, Ray Brown

Three local artists join in displaying new etchings and lithographs. David Glines’s black and white landscapes have vitality and feeling, but it is his large portrait of Faulkner which dominates his showing. Adhering closely to the character and likeness of the author, he displays an admirable gift for portraiture. Les Biller’s affectation of an Oriental style is glibly superficial. His most ambitious work, Fan in a Mountain Stream, is an involved medley of colors and lines that is “much ado about nothing.” With alienation as his theme, Ray Brown’s portraits confront the viewer through an

print March 1967

Tom Holland

Tom Holland’s “camp” confections are dished up with an eye to the current market and a brush dipped in a frosting mix of the most indelible Della Robbian hues. Gingerly jocose in their humor are his Blown Blooms, discreetly peeking in their daisy freshness from the nose cone of a moon rocket, which is about as far out as you can get with a few flowers, and now that the “way out” is the “way in,” there’s nothing left to do but turn ourselves inside out, hang the pictures upside down, and know that everything will come out alright in the end.

—Estelle Kurzen

print March 1967

Leonard Esbensen

Leonard Esbensen’s variations on the square as a square are the last word, and he manages to get a few in edgewise. Viewed right side Op or Op-side down, his Whiff, Sniff, Biff, and Wow, aside from their distance from one another (which is relative to their distance from the viewer) and their optional implications which are inner oriented, evolve through a whole spectrum of continuities which, broadly speaking, maximize the minimum. The earthiness of his sculpture is belied by the fragility of his materials, papier-maché treated with plastic resin. A plethora of prurient fecundity, his Yepigregrebl

print February 1967

Robert Cremean

Robert Cremean exhibits his most recent sculpture at the Esther-Robles Gallery. The show includes several large, elaborate, polytriptych wall panels that combine drawing, relief sculpture, and color. These open from equally embellished double doors to reveal four separate panels all joined in one large composition of figures placed against a strongly vertical and horizontal background. The effect is dramatic and the panels are skillfully executed. His reclining nudes of laminated wood appear partially as three-dimensional cutouts, and Cremean’s elaborations both in color and design on the

print February 1967

Nan Meyer

At the Herbert Palmer Gallery, Nan Meyer exhibits in her first one man show in Los Angeles. Using acrylic on transparent vinyl, she has painted her way “through the looking glass.” Her style is Expressionistic, but the great charm of her work lies in her exploration and discovery of this new medium. Her painting of a young girl, No. 9, offers a double floating image with two transparencies superimposed upon one another, and this, her latest painting, is also reversible and the most interesting of the entire series. The shadows cast by the painted images on the wall behind the images themselves

print February 1967

Modern Japanese Graphic

A selection of Modern Japanese Graphics are on display at the Sahersky Gallery. Including the work of a dozen or more artists, the styles vary from realistic landscape to Abstract Expressionism. Strongly influenced by Western art, the body of work is superb in its attention to technical detail as well as colorful and tasteful in its esthetic appeal. One is confronted at times with a flamboyant romanticism which is totally unexpected, combined as it is with oriental delicacy and exoticism.

—Estelle Kurzen

print January 1967

Peter Shoemaker and George Viacrucis

Showing at Adele Bednarz are Peter Shoemaker and George Viacrucis. For the collector who has everything, Viacrucis exhibits a form of pictorial upholstery employing oil painted vinyl which take their titles as well as titillations from the Dr. Seuss mystique. Colorfully zany forms are neatly sewn together, padded in places, and often protrude balloonlike from the picture’s surface in a jig-saw of animation that out-pops the weasel.

Shoemaker shows oils and collages. His large opaquely painted canvas, Two Pairs, achieves a dreamy effect; however, many of the large canvases strain toward a monumental

print January 1967

Martin Lubner

Recent paintings of Martin Lubner are shown at the Fleischer/Anhalt Gallery. Lubner’s efforts toward a pictorially dramatic lyricism have led him to experiment with a set of poly-triptych allegories that might be classified as a form of epic painting, and these pictures are among his most interesting in the current show. A thoroughly romantic stylist, Lubner employs at times an excess of painterly emotion, and many of the pictures could be classified as nostalgic, even sentimental. Paradoxically, however, these very excesses give his work its individual flavor and feeling. His portraits, where

print January 1967

Thomas Bang

At Esther-Robles another artist determined to have the high fashion world of art in stitches this season is Thomas Bang, whose basic blacks are dramatically trimmed with hoopy loops of wild color that stitch their way through the canvas in a pizzazz of rope-work that’s really feely if you’re with it. His ultra-contemporary table, Green You-Know-What Table, spouts a series of ominous looking knobs, and here and there squirts tangles of multi-colored rope in a combustion of nonsense that explodes “not with a bang but a whimper.” Showing along with him, Homer Weiner turns to the early days of the

print January 1967

V. Douglas Snow

At Feingarten, V. Douglas Snow shows a large selection of recent landscapes. Rocks and Foothills employs some of the painting techniques of the old masters and has a richness that many of the larger, more pretentious landscapes lack. In his reliance upon pictorial formula many of Snow’s pictures appear repetitious, and one realizes how the pressures of exhibiting often force an artist to do a whole series of potboilers on a theme that is pretty well exhausted after one or two tries.

—Estelle Kurzen