Knute Stiles

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  print January 1964

  Robert Harvey

  These paintings in oil are meticulous experiments by an adroit technician. Mr. Harvey, until recently, was concerned with nature and landscape in an abstract impressionistic vein having many similarities of style and execution with the work of Art Holman, also represented by this Gallery. In his current statements, however, Mr. Harvey is intrigued with juxtaposing the refractive auras of impressionistic paint handling with areas of hard-edged linearity. Frequently there is a central figure reminiscent of Bacon or Oliveira appearing, featureless and diaphanous, against a Victorian stained glass

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  print January 1964

  Arran Blackburn Stephens

  This is the first exhibition of this nineteen year old, self taught painter. His drawing is not that of a primitive; he may have been influenced by fairly sophisticated draftsmen with whom he associated in Venice, California. The earliest piece here is a painting of an old man with Grecoesque distortions. Most of the others are concerned with the symbolism of the tarot deck, the cards of Cabbalists and fortune tellers, an enthusiasm which has captured the fancy of a growing circle of artists.

  The production of the paintings in this exhibition parallels the gestation of the artist’s first born,

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  print December 1963

  Bruce Conner

  The Neallie Sullivan award of $1000 to a working artist has been awarded this year to Bruce Conner, and the Institute has hung an exhibition of his collages, paintings and drawings to celebrate the event. (This prize is an annual bequest from the estate of the late San Francisco sculptress, Adeline Kent, and is not a grant for some de­fined project, nor the result of some competition, but is awarded without strings to a deserving artist; an admir­able method of bestowing prizes which deserves to be imitated by all prize committees.) Bruce Conner is one of the luminaries of what might be called

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  print December 1963

  Fred Reichman

  Fred Reichman’s startled fawn, flying squirrel, crabs, cranes, crows, stone and branch, drawn with monumental sim­plicity, sparsely disposed across softly painted white canvases decorate the comfortable chambers of Mrs. Rabow’s gallery. Though harmonizing dispersed details on an empty field is clearly part of the Far Eastern tradition in painting, these pictures are more specifically re­lated to the. Japanese short poem, the Haiku, which formulates the universal in split second actuality: no pedantic study of creature parts, but its act or gesture. And not the whole environment, but only the

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  print December 1963

  Raymond Howell

  Raymond Howell has developed a new method of painting in low relief using gauze fabrics, plastics and paint. The subject matter is sombre, tragic or sometimes sinister: death heads, a wraith in golden helmet with a wooden sword collaged into the picture, a whole charnel house of grotesque nudes; even one of the apparently more innocent pictures, Two Sisters, little girls in ballet costumes, has a mask quality with dark holes for eyes. His Cock Fight is not between roosters as we know them, but huge primeval fowl; Shopping News has a newspaper col­lage background for manikins with masklike heads

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  print December 1963

  Johnny Friedlaender

  Johnny Friedlaender had his first one man show at the Locke Gal­lery several years ago, and has subse­quently exhibited internationally, and has organized his own school of en­graving in Paris. His present exhibition contains several of his recent etchings, his first lithograph, and a large selec­tion of work by his students from the Atelier Friedlaender.

  Friedlaender’s own works are of de­signed and abstracted forms in an un­defined atmospheric space. There are accents of color, but the principal tones are textured greys. Each print contains a quantity of gravure methods all done with great

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  print December 1963

  David Bennett and Durthen Kampman

  Two youthful art­ists, David Bennett, 26 year old tapes­try maker, and Durthen Kampman, 21, sculptress, exhibit their recent work in a joint show. Mr. Bennett worked and studied at the looms of Aubusson, tra­ditional tapestry center of France. Miss Kampman is the daughter of an artistic German family. Both are skilled journey­men in their respective crafts, and the birds and beasts of cloth and clay share the same rooms happily. Bennett’s most ambitious hangings are Andromeda Nebula, a black and white vortex of stars with vibrant after-images playing across the black passages, and an Ocean of

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  print September 1963

  Joseph Albers

  Early in his career as an artist, Joseph Albers worked with glass and plastics in line with the Bauhaus enthusiasm for new materials and meth­ods. With the advent of Naziism in his native Germany, he moved to the United States, teaching his first classes in America with the aid of a translator. During his first decade in America he took to oil painting, but used a palette knife, primarily, and painted a rigorously architectural delineation of space, with persistent examination of the possibili­ties within the limitations of black, white and grey.

  This is an ironic beginning for an ar­tist whose