print March 1965

David Young-Allen

Primitives, as we have come to understand the application of the word to art, elaborate their ideas explicitly. Perhaps we should call this painter an untutored sophisticate. There is the usual over-modeling in painting the figure, and the drawing is primitive, but atmosphere is the-principal concern, and the people have developed character, and are not the primitive’s doll-like dummy who performs some mundane act, or registers one very specific emotion. One painting shows a sinister woman seated between two even more sinister silhouettes of male companions; the environment is a very flowery

print March 1965

Dimitri Grachis

Some of these paintings are entirely black. The definition of shapes has been obtained by using gravel in the black, which is to be positive: a disc of graveled black is seen in relief against the negative silvery black of smooth, thin paint. This is counterpoised against a graveled black square with the disc as a hole reversing the negative-positive relationship. Or the whole painting may be unevenly graveled with a scrived line as though a clam had moved from there to there. (If one is prone to literary simile only such modest allusions are allowable: the painter has scrupulously avoided

print March 1965

Karl Kasten, Elmer Bischoff, Herman Cherry, Hassel Smith, Sidney Gordin and John Haley

Karl Kasten is interested in the manipulation of paint, and setting colors in jewel-like relations; for example, small impastos of bright reds, blues and actually metallic gold with broad fields of black. Elmer Bischoff is also interested in paint quality; if the focus is on the subject of the picture, the brushing seems nonetheless to be the artist’s real interest, the inactive figures only vehicles for rich fat paint, opaque with white. Herman Cherry, who has recently come back to the University after several years absence, exhibits torn paper and scotch tape collages. Hassel Smith has just

print March 1965

Ben Langton

The painting “Sun, a Tree, Woman” charts an astrology of private fantasy, with the sun as the center of goodness and grace, the angelic woman symbolizing love and innocence, and the octopus as fear, uncertainty and suspicion; the tree is Langton himself. From this construction the painter branches out into pictorial revelations of each symbol. “Angelic Form” pictures a very womanly angel who is also the contours of the hills and mountains, and whose spread legs form a lovely pastel lake. The octopus in another painting has a telephone dial at its center with the angelic nude eyeing it apprehensively.

print March 1965

Prefete Duffault, Valcin and Philippe Auguste

Prefete Duffault invents imaginary cities with carefully tended vineyards growing up the steep hills to the castellations and saintly statuary on each summit. Each city is full of people, all walking, no one stands still, no one is actually with anyone else. Valcin has painted a group of cane workers who are pretending stalks of cane are musical instruments; they are dancing to the imaginary music. Philippe Auguste paints brilliant jungles, this one with combed-maned lion, escalloped-eared elephant, and a snake whose fluorescent fuchsia mouth is as poisonous as his long green body. The Haitian

print March 1965

Sokichi Suga

In the course of teaching blind children Suga devised a method of gluing wrinkled rice paper with lines in raised relief and occasionally collaged articles, which give tactile as well as visual pleasure to his paintings. Even the paint is applied with variety and consideration of the tactility of its surface. One piece has a smooth oval stone glued down; another has a mosaic of small bits of broken eggshell. He used no brushes or other instruments. Everything was applied quite literally by hand. The essential symmetry of several of these pictures is probably out of the tradition of Japanese

print February 1965

Charles Mattox

Tread on the electrical button and Mattox’s mechanical constructions stir into motion. Drive cranks and elbow and hinge frames are strung with wires to produce shimmering and changing moire patterns. Or a limp plastic noodle coming from the center of a disc, but trapped by a stationary loop on one side, flops itself in a most organic way when the disc begins to turn.

Demonstrating Newton’s law, “For every action there is a reaction,” has been the primary motive behind these inventions. A tall flexible rod topped by a ball and moving on an eccentric hub, sets another ball fixed to a rod in near

print February 1965

Ben Langton, Charles Gill, Eleanor Anderson, Robert Harvey and Beth Van Hoesen

The word “supernatural” may have been added to the title of this show to allow it to include Ben Langton’s “Angel Flying” which, however, has a more complete complement of natural equipment than most angels. Charles Gill’s “Nosebleed” is a naked lump of humanity on a morgue slab painted with Baconian grotesqueness. “The Invader” by Eleanor Anderson is painted with transparent polymer in bright violets, oranges, blues and greens; the figure is only nominally present, having been used as a point of departure for designing, like the compote in a still life. It is a beautiful abstraction. “Esther’s

print February 1965

Lovis Corinth

The soft, fast and cursive drawings of the “Deluge” series are at the end of a career which began in the 19th century with rather tight academic drawing with overtones of Art Nouveau subject matter (Bacchanalia, for example). Though his work parallels the German Expressionists, and he is generally included among them, he cannot be classified as a “Blau Reiter” or a member of “Der Brucke,” but was in fact an independent. Perhaps that is why his work has not been included in some of the tidily organized and well-circulated exhibitions of German Expressionism since the war.

The “Deluge” series,

print February 1965

Helen Breger

The very contrasty black and white aquatint etching is Mrs. Breger’s métier. The drawings and acrylic washes that form almost half of this show might better have been left in folio; they detract from the powerful prints. These engravings record the artist’s view of various scenes in Europe: a piazza in Florence with tiny pedestrians across a sunny expanse bordered with black Renaissance buildings, or a group of peasants from Greece, hard work and hard experience written into their faces. “The Beach” is a scene of many types, a hatted, bearded and coated man walking near a huge, briefly attired

print February 1965

Elaine Badgely

If one saw Miss Badgely’s drawings apart from her paintings one might assume that they were studies for sculpture. They have a monumentality and a simplicity of contour which would lend itself to working in stone or clay. The line is less sensitive or is obscured by the painting process. The suggestion of sculptural figures is flattened into designed shapes. This is probably the point at which a gifted draftsman has become more concerned with the resolutions of abstraction. The colors tend toward rich greens and purples which are effectively decorative.

—Knute Stiles

print February 1965

T. Mikami

Mr. Mikami lectures widely, writes popular treatments on oriental brush technique, is a TV personality, paints a prodigious number of pictures each year, and sells very well on three continents. These paintings are palette-knife sketches of trite scenes. They remind one of thousands of other paintings by thousands of other rather fluent scene painters.

—Knute Stiles