print December 1965

Minna Agins

The three-decade-old spectre of sociological propaganda rises again in Agins’ woodcuts and intaglios. The latter, awkward and message-filled, are a sad disaster; the technical process of etching is beyond her. The human form is rendered as a group of static, bulbous lumps contorting in sentimental, involved attitudes, completed by eyes turned heavenward. The figures are outlined by an imprisoning, heavy line which attempts to rescue them from a swamp of aquatints. Her ineptitude evidently prevents her from making even a cleanly wiped plate.

Superior broadsides as American Family, At Water’s Edge

print November 1965

Irma Attridge and Anders Aldrin

A full gamut of subjects again shows that Attridge changes styles as one might change clothes. This group of oils, more coherent for its limit of numbers and types, concentrates on nimble-fingered palette knifings and fuzzy strokes, rendering still lites in diaphanous high key hues. Objects blend and float as in the all-over watercolor bouquets. To mention their feminine qualities of structural looseness, lightness and effervescence belabors an obvious appeal.

Aldrin is shown to have origins in Duty. Twenty year old canvases display a timid transfer of that master’s characteristics to American

print November 1965

“Summer Graphics”

A mixed selection of woodcuts, serigraphs, and drawings fulfills the gallery’s intention of presenting the figurative image; the merits beyond that are few. Humble and modest in scale and attitude, the competency of Mil Bard and the homeless illustrations of Aron, Sharf, and West are lost amid the thumping pyrotechnics of Gershgeren. His prints are complex overlays of transparent brilliant hues and sharp value contrasts quite out of measure with the pedestrian nature of his subjects. His heightening of effects to melodrama suggests he is the only member aware of the paucity of the theme or its

print November 1965

Jose Montanes

Known for tasteful and cloyingly textural urchins along a sophisticated Keane line, this Spaniard has been sidetracked to a series of grotesque variants. The studies, flesh-colored monochrome oil isolated on dark paper, are shallow caricatures of stunted and limited actions; parodied attitudes of standing, sitting, listening, etc. Not without coy wit, the artist’s evident poverty of formal, anatomical, and compositional invention is only confirmed. Montanes is serving up swift distortions of his own mannerisms. The earth colors and slippery full modeling suggest their final realization as ceramic

print May 1965

Kurt Schwitters: Retrospective at UCLA

KURT SCHWITTERS IS A FOCAL REPOSITORY of the revolutionary developments of this century’s first two decades. In his own right he is a free and indomitable contributing spirit, and, as well, a generative resource for recent contemporary developments. The retrospective of 163 entries at the UCLA Art Galleries, drawn primarily from the artist’s estate and Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, points up the first two roles; the third is now more clear.

The paintings executed before 1918 set an acute background. The first, an academic still life (1910) would be dismissed as an ordinary school study did it not

print March 1965

Louis I. Kahn

By means of sketches, plans, models, and photos of nineteen projects over the last dozen years, the intent is, in the words of Director Brewer, “to reveal the art of perhaps America’s most significant architect to a Western audience.”

Kahn’s office complexes (Richards Medical Research Building, Philadelphia; U.S. Consulate, Luanda, Angola, Africa; and Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla) deal with the vocabulary of fairly conventional modernity. Stressed with particular conscientiousness are considerations for the site, light, and temperature. Large extended screens or light shafts,

print March 1965

Pavel Tchelitchew

Among the most contortive exploitations the figure subject has ever survived was that received from the fertile imaginative wanderings and probings of Tchelitchew. He possessed a surplus of academic skills, but seems to have been too radically effusive a personality to maintain a clear direction; each drawing then is a succinct performance, one of a series. How, examining each random sample from a span of twenty years, could this Humpty Dumpty go back together?

Equally at home with pen, wash, pencil, or gouache, there is always flair or polish. “Boy’s Back,” “Pansies,” the circus dressing room

print March 1965

Jose Clemente Orozco

A selection of seventy studio works (drawings and temperas from family and private collections, seen for the first time in the U.S.) was marked by several rare treats, but, only after wading through a miscellaneous majority of bitterly satirical Expressionist allegories from the last decade of his life. One would rather remember his solid achievements, the frescoes of the late ’20s and early ’30s. The small, final working tempera “Zapata” (1930) sums up his mural power—Giottoesque simplicity. Severely architectonic, the group is kept to a narrow stage of planes, developed in a limited warm-cool

print March 1965

Alberto Collie

Whatever merits exist in the paramount idea presented by this young Venezuelan design student are lost in diverting claims and justifications and a shuffle of failings. His black and white paintings are rather obvious graphic layers of flowing band patterns, and the several reliefs are adequate asymmetrical arrangements of spheres in a dished backing—all serving to distract from the “sculptures.” These, his major technological achievements, a series called “Spatial Absolutes,” are an all too tentative investigation into the power of recently developed magnets to cause a form to float above its

print March 1965

Philip Van Aver

In a showing of ink and watercolor miniatures (5 by 7 inches is usual) he has wrought scenes of artifice of a scale and dedication almost beyond belief. Certainly he is contenting himself in an indulgent, private backwater in combining the patience associated with the East with the allover tangibility of the Italian Quatrocento and manuscript illumination.

Fashioning still lifes, luscious bouquets, languorous women in interiors, and winter landscapes, they are cut off by elaborately decorated frames, each object covered with (indeed, made up of) varieties of these same ornaments. The color is

print February 1965

Richard Hunt

Hunt’s work, welded sculpture from salvaged materials, is marked by a high degree of professional competency and ambition. His strengthening development is traceable in samples from the last four years. The earliest, “Extending Forms with Arc” (1961), “Organic Construction” (1961), and “Standing Form III” (1962) serve to define the general area and intent of his abstract, mute formalism. The eye is forced to survey slowly, so controlled and serious are his statements. Empathy is all. Set are the motifs of linear linkage, a tidy concern for detail and appropriate terminating endings, and his

print February 1965

Robert Harvey

Because he paints from family album photographs (circa World War I), nostalgia should spring immediately as this San Francisco artist’s goal. However, Harvey’s cool and sophisticated detachment, his edited but direct translation, and easily flowing, paint back technique suggest his figurative intentions lie in an anonymous Caravaggist tradition. A frozen romanticism (but not sentimentality) is the gripping force.

Bold value statements in white, brown, and black within white bordered formats adhere to Pop Art’s flat source premise; his severely stylized abstracting continually enforces a strict,

Fidel A. Danieli