print January 1964

Harry Lum, Tio Giambruni

Harry Lum’s painting is a strong, full-bodied image that connotes the figure by suggesting its bulk and physical reality rather than by painting it directly (although he occasionally does resort to the form of the body as well as its substance). In some places Lum seems to be picking up from Bacon and Giacometti.

Abstract expressionism has generally shown an insistence on physical and visual values. Lum accepts these values and carries them over into his loosely figurative subject matter more successfully than many New York painters, notably Elaine de Kooning, have been able to do.

However, Lum

print January 1964

Josef Albers

The Albers show at the University is actually part of a publicity scheme on the part of Yale University Press to promote its exorbitantly-priced book on color theory by Albers. (No one needs to spend $200 (plus tax) for a treatise on color theory. What Yale Press actually seems to be trying to sell is an enormous portable collection of Albers’ work.) However, it is a convenient way to acquire a rather good Albers show. The exhibit is made up of paintings and plates from the book, some of which were seen in a show at the San Francisco Museum. If this exhibition is any indication, much of Albers

print January 1964

Group Show

Tom Holland’s recent painting is more vividly colored and freely organized than his previous work, but it still retains its powerful totemic significance. Holland’s current exploration of asymmetry is one of his many ways of maintaining a balance between iconic and natural forms, a balance he has also expressed by juxtaposing motifs with constructions and ritual rigidity with mundane symbols.

Charles Mattox builds sculptures that react to sound or other stimuli by performing remarkably beautiful hypnotic gyrations. From string, plywood, ball weights and a considerable sympathy to the beauty of

print January 1964

Delacroix, Ralph Du Casse, Robert Dhaemers, Sundet

The Eugene Delacroix exhibit consists of small lithographs (including a series of illustrations for Goethe’s Faust), watercolors and etchings borrowed from various California collections. No paintings are shown, but there are a few sculptures which seem to have been made to explore ideas Delacroix found in his painting and which have little independent life of their own. Delacroix seems to have taken no interest in realizing an idea through drawing. The drawings in this show are either shaded to look like paintings or (as in two notebook sheets owned by Vincent Price) are close to being doodles.

print November 1963

Print-Sculpture Annual

This show is so attractively mounted that its insipid contents are all but obscured. Both the sculpture and the prints display a higher standard of technical proficiency than imaginative insight.

Fred Sauls shows an unusually fine blue and black welded metal structure, done while he was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. “Crazy John” has a well-considered point of view and is balanced and controlled in execution, an approach he seems to have since put aside.

Robert McClean’s wooden “sailing machine” is much better than those in his recent Berkeley Gallery show. His work has a

print November 1963

Clayton Pinkerton, Morris Yarowsky

Clayton Pinkerton was formerly a competent and lyrical abstract expressionist. About three years ago he began to interest himself in the social context of the world around him. What is now known as pop imagery started to appear in his work and the quality of his painting radically worsened. The quality is coming back up, but the critical problem still remains.

Pinkerton shares with many other painters in suburban northern California (and in other parts of the country) an interest in the massive symbolic material pouring out of urban information centers. The pop artists (of whom very few come from

print November 1963

Keith Boyle

Some of the finest painting done in northern California this year is in Boyle’s show. Nearly all his canvases display that tense brilliance he has suddenly come on to in the past several months. He works with a semi-symbolic subject matter set into a cock eyed geometric composition. His larger canvases are more successful than his small ones and he probably would do well to use even more space. In his curious fascination for the formal and the common Boyle has a predecessor in Stuart Davis. They both share an attraction for big-city symbolism tied to an international formal art style. For Davis

print November 1963

All-Campus Faculty Show

Since the University of California is such an incredible educational warehouse, it is possible, using only its faculty, to hold 51 another “Artists’ Environment: West Coast” show. This exhibit is, in fact, just as regional as Frederick Wight’s earlier effort, only this show is a crashing bore, largely because the best artists working for the university are only instructors and the space was limited to professors. The display in the University Art Gallery is supplemented by a Berkeley-campus-only show in the art building. The advantage it gives to Berkeley is probably fair, since Berkeley has,

print November 1963

Lewis Carson

This young collagist’s one-man show is decidedly hesitant and perhaps premature. Carson nails metal, cloth and wood to boards and then paints the objects over in the somber colors associated with the San Francisco idiom. As assemblages these pieces fail to work because there is little interplay between materials and almost no interest in them. However, these constructions do not make very exciting paintings either, because the surface is divided up into sections that are all roughly the same size, thereby eliminating any center of interest. Beyond all this, a work of art uses the materials at

Three California Artists November 1963

Three California Artists: Keith Boyle

KEITH BOYLE WAS BORN IN 1930 in Defiance, Ohio, and received his B.F.A. from Iowa State College. He lives with his wife and two children in Palo Alto, where he teaches at Stanford University.

Until last year, Boyle had experimented with almost every contemporary idiom, until he arrived at a format that is at the same time novel and within the mainstream of 20th century painting. Using neon acrylic paint to offset the geometric material he manipulates, Boyle effects an electrically exciting sign-scape. He opens up the canvas by refusing to balance the forms; his painting always reads from side

print November 1963

Three California Artists: Tom Holland

TOM HOLLAND WAS BORN IN 1936 in Seattle, Washington. M.F.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied with David Park and, finding himself sympathetic to Park’s ideas, absorbed them to produce excellent, close-valued figure studies and landscapes in that tradition. Awarded a Fulbright Grant in 1960, he spent one year working in Santiago, Chile. Persuaded more by his own inner vision than by the Indian environment around him, Holland completed, in the last few weeks of his stay, six paintings in which he totally and permanently changed his approach.

Holland’s subject can be

print September 1963

Patricia Oberhaus, Kay Armstrong, Harry Crotty, and Richard McLean

Shades of Arthur B. Davies! Patricia Oberhaus exhibits a large number of small cartoons, elaborately framed and dated circa 1898. As a serious art effort they are negligible, but as humor, whimsy and cornball nostalgia they come off just fine.

Harry Crotty is from the airy cubism (Herbert Ferber) generation of sculptors and carries on this style without much feeling, but with considerable craftsmanship and technical know-how. His cut-out shapes are assembled in an architectural fashion and remarkably balanced. The sharp points of the upper pieces are inserted into grooves, this balance being

Joanna C. Magloff