Irma E. Desenberg

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  print September 1963

  Ninth Annual All California Show

  This year, the All California show, arranged by the Laguna Beach Art As­sociation, and housed on the grounds of the Laguna Arts Festival, was not an in­vitational show, but a juried one. The award money was increased to $500, $300, and $200. Two well known jurors were imported from New York: Thomas M. Messer, of the Guggenheim Museum, and Robert Brackman, painter and teacher. There were two Categories for the 1300 entries: “Realistic” for Mr. Brackman, “Abstract” for Mr. Messer. (This absurd division was carried so far that each selection in the catalog was initialed “m” or “b”. Both men gave

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  print July 1963

  Helen Lundeberg

  “Every­thing points to the conclusion that the phrase ‘the language of art’ is more than a loose metaphor” (Goldscheider). Accepting this premise Miss Lundeberg speaks a language that is at once subtle and understandable. She has refined and honed down the surrealism which was present in her earlier pictures (i.e., the pictures of mirrors, fruit, lightbulbs of about 10 years ago). Her edges are clean, unblurred and her color covers large areas with great evenness, show­ing no brushstroke. Every once in a while she seems to use masking tape to block off different tones. She uses no gradations of

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  print July 1963

  “The Stieglitz Circle”

  Exhibition chairmen, Mrs. Robert Barnes and Mrs. Dottie Ahmanson, brought this circulating show from New York and supplemented it with loans from Cali­fornia collections. (It was originally or­ganized by the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y.)

  More than anyone else, Alfred Stieglitz (born in Hoboken, 1864; died in N.Y., 1946) gathered around him, encouraged, exhibited, wrote, lectured and lived the best in art, and stands at the helm of America’s entry into the artistic avant­garde. Or, looking at it from another viewpoint, he is one of those rare men at the beginning of this century who, through

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  print July 1963

  Group Show

  Composed of 6 “Transparent Watercolorists” (an unfor­tunate term) who showed 4 works each, the long shadow of Millard Sheets and Emil Kosa hangs over this exhibition. George Gibson has least gotten away from this, and Edward Reep the farth­est. Reep’s After the Rain is a fine, semi-abstract composition of dark blues and blacks, as is Storm Transition. Barse Miller has come a long way from being the social realist painter of the thirties and has remained faithful to his first love, watercolor. Monehagan Landing is a simple clean composition of a few large color areas that seems very solid, though

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  print December 1962/January 1963

  Marc Chagall

  Mr. Donald Brewer of the Art Center in La Jolla has worked, on and off, for two years to assemble this exhibition. The last major Chagall show was in Pasa­dena in 1957, to commemorate the then-70 year old painter. In 1959, the largest Chagall show ever was held at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris where there were some 350 paintings and about 50 graphic works on display. The unity of visual, as well as intellectual concept, was overwhelming, then as it is now. The Violinist (1911–14), The Birthday (1915–23), The Auto­biography (1933), The White Cruci­fixion (1938), have made their way from

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  print December 1962/January 1963

  “Eight Figurative Painters from Los Angeles: Fine Arts Patrons of New­port Harbor”

  For many years the Newport Beach area has been a place known to boating enthusiasts and beachlovers. The only art event of any importance was the annual Newport Harbor High School Art Show, an all-southern California juried event, which has become increas­ingly interesting in scope over its past 18 years of existence. Now there is a permanent gallery in a most unusual location. The second floor of the Pavil­ion, located in the center of the Newport peninsula, used to be a ballroom in the 1920’s and 1930’s. After years of lying fallow, art patron A. Ducommon turned it over to the Fine Arts Patrons.

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  print December 1962/January 1963

  Francis de Erdely

  “The art of Francis de Erdely is positive, clear, logically constructed and powerfully stated. It is the visual testi­mony of a witness of the human condi­tion in his time, explicit, without a shred of mystery. We see what he saw and feel what he valued. His passionate nature gave great force to his pictorial state­ments. His disciplined and cultivated in­tellect gave them great clarity.” The words of Arthur Millier clearly cannot be improved upon in writing about this late, great artist. The 31 paintings and draw­ings comprising a small, but well-chosen retrospective bear witness to the lasting