Joan Hugo

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  print April 1963

  Berthe Morisot

  Delicate, charming, the pastels and drawings by Berthe Morisot are things of beauty and a joy to behold. Currently in disfavor, pastel as a medium was much admired by the color-sensitive Impressionists, whose skill with it was dazzling. Berthe Morisot was a sensitive, even brilliant draftsman; the line is firm, the faces full of light. Some of the sketches were preliminary studies for paintings, others are quick notes to record an attitude or gesture. Her own daughter, as well as other children frequently served as models for these perceptive sketches. As Elizabeth Mongan says in the catalog to

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  print April 1963

  Bertil Vallien

  The ceramic sculpture of Bertil Vallien, although small in scale, achieves a certain sense of monumentality through an understanding of proportion, form, and the play of light and shadow. He is faithful to the medium, yet able to subordinate craftsmanship to serve a sculptural, rather than a utilitarian or destructive end. This may seem obvious, but so much ceramic work remains on one or the other level, and so much current ceramic sculpture is willfully self-conscious, that it is refreshing to find someone who is willing to accept the limitations of the medium and achieve something in his own

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  print April 1963

  Anya Fisher

  Anya Fisher’s paintings, though competent and colorful, seem undecided between form and line. Her written statements dwell on concepts of “the organic.” Perhaps her work would gain authority by a simplification, which would permit form to dominate her painting as it does her thought.

  —Joan Hugo

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  print April 1963

  Richard Whorf and Paul Jasmin

  Fortunately Richard Whorf, prominent in motion pictures, has taken the trouble to qualify himself as an amateur; it would be unfair to see his work in other terms. But showing in a commercial gallery, and, to judge by the little red stars, selling like hot cakes, his work bids to be taken seriously, although it doesn’t measure up to serious standards. Painfully derivative (Hopper, Wyeth), they reflect a nostalgia for the finite. Paul Jasmin takes an almost obsessive delight in patterns (checked, flowered cloth) and flat draped folds. He makes no attempt at modeling the figures; they are reduced

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  print March 1963

  “Graphics”

  A handsome show of the graphic works of some modern masters, Picasso, Dubuffet, Miró, Chagall, Giacometti, and some local artists, Brice, Strombotne, McGarrell. There are some early Picasso etchings, including La Soupe and some of his recent, brilliant linoleum cuts. There are some good Chagall samplings.

  James Strombotne’s suite of ten lithographs of “Women” is in the realm of cartooning, with humor in about the same vein as Abner Dean; the work is messy. James McGarrell’s work seems pretentious; perhaps self-conscious is better. His work is unclear, as though he were preoccupied with the “

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  print March 1963

  Leonard Edmondson

  This is Leonard Edmondson’s first print show in four years and certainly marks a turning point for him. While his earlier work tended to be pale, busy jig-saws or Hayterish linear exercises, this new work is beautiful, clear, strong, unhesitating. The blacks are thick, velvety, the colors glow like butterfly wings, but most remarkable is his use of white areas as a single, positive, unifying element. Aquarius, Taurus, Cloisters, Garden of Eden—the titles are simple, evocative, the prints are bold, eloquent, sure, revealing their maker as a man of enormous resources, maturity and skill. The

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  print March 1963

  Raymond Parker

  Light, watercolor essays by Raymond Parker; singly they are inconsequential, as a group, they provide an interesting insight into his work.

  —Joan Hugo

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  print March 1963

  Roger L. Majorwicz

  Majorowicz is a young sculptor, now teaching in Illinois; the work shown covers a period of several years and apparently represents an evolution of style. Time spent in Italy on a Fullbright seems to have made a difference in his approach. Early work is based on a warrior theme in bronze, with frequent use of flying shapes, wings and draperies, as a foil for fairly static figuration. Then a new phase, work in wood of elaborate, rounded, perforated columns in which this baroque taste now comes fully to the fore. If the work remains somewhat aloof, it is nevertheless the work of someone of

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  print February 1963

  Jose Luis Cuevas and “Nueva Presencia”

  “Recollections of Childhood,” a remarkable set of twelve lithographs by Jose Luis Cuevas, together with preliminary drawings, is the subject of the show at Simone. Drawings by a group representing the “Nueva Presencia,” dominated by Arnold Belkin and Jose Munoz, are exhibited at Zora’s. Although Cuevas’ work is highly autobiographical, and thus, in a sense, limited in scope, there is such an obvious kinship between him and the Nueva Presencia group that it might be rewarding to consider them together.

  While it would be simple to dismiss Cuevas’ work as “grotesqueries” and Nueva Presencia as

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  print February 1963

  David Rosen

  David Rosen handles transparent oil glazes almost as though they were washes and restricts palette to blacks, greys, umbers, ochres and much white space. This gives his work a certain graphic quality, heightened by a shallow picture plane; the figures tend to fill and even overflow the canvas top to bottom and edge to edge. The glaze wash is beautifully controlled. Perhaps the content is too specific, however, too topical, to have the kind of universality one would like to see his work achieve.

  —Joan Hugo

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  print February 1963

  Group Show

  A scattered sampling: a nice little Camille Bombois, two Marchands, a still life by Pierre Bisiaux, paintings by Ganne, Caffe. But a luminous painting by Saul Bernstein was the most vital thing to be seen here. The gallery now represents those artists formerly with the Parsons Gallery.

  —Joan Hugo

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  print December 1962/January 1963

  Marc du Plantier

  Marc du Plantier is a French artist now living in Mexico City. This is his first Los Angeles show. Accustomed as we are to a surfeit of cleverness, his sculptures and paintings are, at first, disarmingly simple. Wall in Mexico, Burning City, and a series of fantasies on the space theme––Spatial Geol­ogy, From Outer Space––the simple titles belie a deep interest in the essen­tial images of the New Realism. The sculptures use mineral sources, bronze, gemstones, mica. They are static, to­temic, with emphasis on shape, texture, and relief, without developing volumes. The paintings also rely on relief