Larry Rottersman

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  print September 1962

  William Dole

  Dole’s recent collages are the subject of his fourth one-man show in the Museum of Art. His bits and pieces of paper, mostly of exotic origin, gain an intrinsic value when passed through his hands. He apparently banks them as some do money, with miserly glee, and is correspondingly sparing and economical in their use. The papers, varying from ricepaper thinness to the heft of solid rag, were ordinary once, but only in their individual context. Dole understandably regards them as collectors’ items and he arranges them meticulously, surely, and with tortuous consideration. Japanese calligraphy

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  print September 1962

  Horst Gottschalk

  It seems only a coincidence that Gottschalk’s collages overlapped the exhibit of Dole’s work. More excitement would have been generated if the shows were more closely related in time and space, since each has considerable merit, if for opposite reasons. Gottschalk’s collages are virile, forcefully executed works, filled with a bursting vitality. A native of Hanover, Germany, now living in Berkeley, Gottschalk integrates his paper and paint skillfully with unity and balance. His pictures are illuminated with shaved planes of light—something like Feininger—that are curiously independent of his

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  print September 1962

  Karl Benjamin

  A hard-edge painter, Benjamin carries on in the tradition of de Stijl, a well-traveled road, whose traffic, oddly enough, seems to be increasing of late. His paintings are strikingly delineated with strips of black tape. The form, basically rectangular, is precisely and adventurously thought out, filled with chrome yellows and smoldering blues and greens. Benjamin’s pictures are busier than most of their kind and seem rather ingratiating.

  ––Larry Rottersman

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  print September 1962

  “Photography in the Fine Arts, II”

  An unfortunate number of the photographs, and there are 176 of them, imitate bad paintings and, worse, slick magazine advertisements. Bad paintings, on the other hand, usually imitate good paintings, and this may be the difference between snapping pictures and painting them. However, according to A. Hyatt Mayor, curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the traveling exhibit originated, and one of the 12 jurors, the crucial difference is something else. He said that no photographer can control the grain and texture of his work as thoroughly as a painter. “A snippet cut out of

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  print September 1962

  Gary Chafe

  Chafe may have returned from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, speaking some Spanish, but his paintings, drawings and monotypes do not. He shunned the influence that might have been expected, instead came back with work that is slightly surreal and Ben Shahn-like in its commentary. But for Chafe, a young artist, this is an improvement over his previous work, distinctly cubistic, and is clearly a step forward in his development. A facile draftsman, Chafe is looking harder and loosening his pencil grip. His drawings are freer, although economical, and sure. His print of a bride and bridegroom and a drawing

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  print September 1962

  Group Exhibition

  A safe exhibit not calculated to scare away tourists. Four artists from Japan, Poland, Mexico and Czechoslovakia, respectively, are represented with their work. Their smiles, however, will not turn one away, for if they may bore a little, they won’t offend. They are Matabee Goto, Stella Popowski, Angel Bolivar and Jan Lehner. Especially pleasant are a delicately rendered charcoal black and red nude on fabric by Lehner and two still-lifes by Miss Popowski.

  ––Larry Rottersman

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  print July 1962

  Emile Antoine Bourdelle

  The major exhibit of sculpture and drawings by Bourdelle (French 1861–1929) is a refreshing and overdue re-examination of the romantic sculpture of a bygone day when important artists still reckoned with the Greek ideal, or at least admitted to the involvement.

  Bourdelle’s style is credited with fostering the sentimental statuary found in parks and public monuments. The difference between sentiment and sentimentality was scrupulously observed by him, however, even though his imitators did not.

  Rodin, a contemporary of Bourdelle, overshadowed his genius but did not deny it, declaring in a much-quoted

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  print July 1962

  Poucette

  Author Thorn Smith’s delightful young ladies have been reincarnated with wit and an attentive eye for gesturing detail that gets down to the many bottoms of the matter. Poucette, a 27-year-old French artist, who uses no first name, bejewels her pictures with phosphoric-white girls, whose size would not inhibit them from slipping through the necks of wine bottles. They cavort in fountains, languish in bordellos, and wage war with whimsey and disarming charm. Tired businessmen will find in them new entertainments; but they should not be left entirely to the boys. Poucette is an intensely personal

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  print July 1962

  Forrest Hibbits

  Hibbits is a widely known artist in Santa Barbara and Buellton, where his fame might be attributed to his popularization of modern art from 1905 to 1945. His work is by turns Cézannesque (Autumn Festival), Picassoesque Yellow Bird), and just plain picturesque. His approach in starting indicates semi-automatic methods in which the paint is free-falling and scrambled, then tied into decorative packages with figurative designs, usually pretty, which often are scrawled with scarcely any connection to the rest of the work. His pictures are sunny-bright, decorative, serving a need no doubt, but hardly

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  print July 1962

  Frank Lobdell

  Lobdell, a second generation abstract expressionist living in San Francisco, murmurs with a slight New York accent, but has his own way of speaking, too. His pictures are tightly organized, despite their heroic sizes, and are named after calendar months. Clusters of brain-outlined colors and amoebic chains flit across creamy surfaces, with purpose and direction. Positive spaces seemed to be carved into position although Lobdell handles paint relatively thinly.

  —Larry Rottersman

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  print July 1962

  Victor Brauner

  However sinister the dreams of Brauner, who undeniably culls them as a connoisseur, the Rumanian-born artist’s humor remains intact. A Surrealist who was there when it happened, in Bucharest on his own and in Paris with the regulars, Brauner has maintained a stylistic integrity over the years. His thirty-four drawings and encaustics are a lively testament to his impeccable draftsmanship and ironic wit: His mechanical men, for instance, are not so much like Leger-type Wizard of Oz robots as they are like Chaplin’s famed cinema spoof of the man on the assembly line. His work is littered with the

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  print July 1962

  “Incunabula”

  A Latin term originally meaning cradle or birthplace, incunabula now applies to books printed before 1500 A.D. Printing is design, of course, and also art, needless to add. Superb proof of this is the exhibit here through the courtesy of Ferdinand Roten of Baltimore, Maryland. The collection, assembled over a forty-year period by Frederick Werther, also includes maps and illustrations.

  —Larry Rottersman