Mary Ewalt

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  print April 1964

  Sheila Ross

  Miss Ross shows many works in many media and it is the wittiest display in a long time. Miss Ross, in her quiet, unassuming way, sneaks up rather than flays the watcher with her cleverness and the variety of little things she has to say. There are a great many pictures on a great many subjects—from a memory of the Illinois Central Train Yard to a history of Cock Robin, and from a “Cloudscape” to a presentation of the Bahai Temple in Wilmette, made of decal cat heads and valentine flowers. There is a self-portrait of a lady—the artist herself—whom the viewer already wants to meet.

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  print April 1964

  José Ma Dena, Anita Chermoy, Louis Goodman

  José Ma Dena, a Mexican painter of versatile ability shows a predilection for egg tempera painting in the Renaissance style. His subjects range from children, Women with Bangs,  to a St. Paul, Seagulls and Roses. He has a line of the greatest delicacy and the flower studies are reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer. Anita Chermoy shows a series of theatre improvisations in wash drawings made during actual performances. Commedia dell’Arte figures are often discernible. In another group, Miss Chermoy does highly decorative semi-abstract and witty pen and ink pieces. The third artist is Louis Goodman who

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  print April 1964

  Pierre Sicard

  Sicard devotes almost the entire exhibit to recent paintings of a transparent Venice in carnival colors. Mr. Sicard, whose art originates in Impressionism, has simplified his technique by leaving out all but the quintessence; and in Venice, of course, the quintessence is light. These are striking studies of gondolas with water rushing backward, catching the double vision of the city beneath the sea, or gondolas in the sun with that golden molasses quality of Venetian water at noon.

  There is an unusual view of the Church of the Salute rising like a mirage in the desert of water, isolated by illusion

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  print February 1964

  “Early Modern Paintings by California Artists”

  It is good to realize how much was going on here before Los Angeles became either an art center or a market. The artists whose works appear in this show were obliged, in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, to ship their work East to show and gain recognition. Many of them are still painting here today and no longer have to cope with this problem. While the purpose of the exhibition may have been to present for our reconsideration certain concepts and tendencies that bear directly on the art of today, the shadow seems cast rather backward than forward. Though there is a clear continuum of style which marks

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  print January 1964

  Robert Andrew Parker

  Parker has an impressive roll call of exhibitions and is represented in many major collections. His work is of the greatest integrity and refinement. Morocco, a study of Arabs in intense heat and glare barely filtered by palm trees, is awash with light under opaque and transparent watercolor, reminiscent of certain works of Degas where the different colored layers of the dancer’s tutus are distinctly seen. There is a lovely homage to Brecht in opaline colors to match an opaline sky in Brecht’s poem illustrated by the artist in this delicate and emaciated work. Protected by his beard from public

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  print January 1964

  Arthur Millier

  A critic and etcher, Millier shows after twenty years of fruitful retirement that he has come back to his art with renewed spirit and undiminished skill. There is obvious continuity in Mr. Millier’s work. Some of the earlier works dating back to the 20’s are suggestive of the Japanese manner and fraught with the thanatopic longings usually associated with mountains and vast distances, whereas the more recent ones have developed more personal nostalgias. Mr. Millier has all the requisite delicacy of the etcher and also a romantic and sometimes illustrative touch. His recent scenes of a vanishing

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  print January 1964

  Robert Freemark

  For three years artist in residence at the University of Iowa, Freemark shows a series of large watercolor landscapes—coloring rich and somber, overlaid with charcoal—in which there is a persistent beat that makes itself felt in a bold up-and-down stroke. In a large oil entitled Tree House, Mr. Freemark changes his “beat” into oval configurations which are just as musical, filling the work with a joyful rhythm as of the childhood expectation of leafy isolation. Mexican Holiday, a large, bisected oil painting is a stunning piece of prismatic painting in which hills may be read into abstract forms

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  print January 1964

  Ernest Lacy

  A young painter who, until recently, had never been outside the continental United States. The present exhibition is the fruit of time spent in Mexico during which Mr. Lacy regaled himself with its churches and monuments. This is a kind of painting one rarely sees nowadays; it is illustrative and as smooth as a page from the Saturday Evening Post yet the canvases, upon close scrutiny, are beautifully textured. The artist has as peculiarly a static quality as a student of architecture: even his foliage, in almost every painting, is at rest. Temperatures are very evident, Mr. Lacy painting shade,

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  print January 1964

  “Drawings”

  A collection of drawings including a small composite Venice by Berman about which one is apt to say “I think I know just where that is!” because a piece of the Dogana is showing and a curlicue of the Salute; two works by R. Fukui which are partly silk screen, partly etching, one, of a bottle and a saucepan a. 1a Morandi, and one, a flower piece with cobwebs and cracks; a large Campigli lithograph of the artist’s version of an Amiens-like facade so beloved of Ruskin and Proust; a Leger lithograph in the familiar manner; an Ethiopian drawing on goat skin for the aficionado of this sort of thing—very

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  print December 1963

  Paul Horiuchi

  Large tempera and casein collages enriched by weathered tearings or diaphanous rice paper. The beautiful marbleized, stained, veined and grained effects which are reminiscent of bookbinders’ paper are never fortuitous. This is an art measured and noble, a blend of ab­straction and traditional oriental with all its gravity and quietude. Mr. Hori­uchi does not paint directly on his canvas, upon which some forty varieties of rice paper are applied after being dipped, splattered, painted and textured beforehand. He uses largely earth colors bled sometimes with gold, a technique which harkens back

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  print December 1963

  “Primitives”

  A rich collection comprised of Grandma Moses, Streeter Blair, Hirschfield, Eilshemius, Lebduska and others. The art public needs no more raptures about the Great Grandma. The Eilshemius works, ranging in time from 1884 to 1916, are little gems of the kind which chil­dren, if they had the sense, would notice on merry-go-rounds, those little dreamlike landscapes filled with Me­lies-like castles, sirens and benign mon­sters. Two of the paintings display golden mermaids in grottos, a third, little pink turn-of-the-century Bardots frolicking in a stream. The Lebduskas count a pair of Uccello-like

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  print December 1963

  Gloria Longval

  Miss Longval exhibits oils, pastels and draw­ings all in Rembrandt browns and rich golds. Her subject of choice is mother-­and-child in many variations, all sensi­tive and competent naturalistic paint­ings but lacking in excitement. Her best, a self-portrait, is strongly reminiscent of Kathe Kollwitz. Miss Longval remem­bers color but once, in her rich little still life of pears and pink apples. The social forces mentioned in the exhibi­tion brochure are manifest chiefly in the downcast glances of brown-skinned women of uncertain ethnic origin, and wistful, possibly hungry children. A study of