print December 1969

San Francisco Artists

Clayton Pinkerton, exhibiting recent paintings in acrylic on masonite at the Arleigh Gallery, pursues the same themes of political and social comment which provided the content of his exhibits in the San Francisco Museum’s “Arts of San Francisco” survey of two years ago, with some modifications of style and approach. The slapdash cartoon style of his earlier phase has been supplanted with a variety of more restrained and painterly methods, while blatancy of statement has been superseded by irony—sometimes in the form of the anecdotal picture with delayed-action visual-charade “punch line” not

print November 1969

San Francisco

“Nathan Oliveira, Works on Paper, 1960–1969,” at the San Francisco Museum of Art, consisted of 124 small-format works of the class specified, ranging from casual sketches and graphic improvisations through serially evolving studies for paintings and prints, to carefully finished drawings. While drawings, gouaches, watercolor and acrylic studies predominated, a few lithographs were included, but only in the context of numerous prior hand-sketches leading to the finished conception.

The nine-year span encompassed by this specialized retrospective show revealed various phases of Oliveira’s development

print October 1969

San Francisco

The Vorpal Galleries provided an interesting selection of entertaining mobile assemblages and ingenious junk-sculptural machines by Robert Gilbert. Mr. Gilbert’s largest and most elaborate pieces are in a comical vein, in which his basic procedure is to construct a large supportive frame or armature from such choice junkyard finds as oddly shaped sections of antique cast iron grillwork. From these he suspends elaborate Rube Goldberg networks of moving parts, in which ludicrously extensive relays of cogwheels, rotor-belts, elbow pivots and the like terminate in some such trivial function as the

print September 1969

Richard Fiscus, Robert Maki, Connor Everts, Matt Glavin and Donald Campbell

The GALLERY REESE PALLEY afforded San Francisco one of the most genuinely enjoyable gallery shows of the summer season in exhibiting a large selection of recent paintings by RICHARD FISCUS. In these paintings, which elaborate landscape themes in linearly defined, two-dimensionally schematized form-simplifications, relatively dense, overall meshes of linear patterning, emphatically stated in heavy, flat ribbons of black paint, engendered a mosaic of fragmentary interstitial shapes, each of which is “filled in” with a single, uniformly applied color. The compositions make oblique reference to the

print Summer 1969

Norman Stiegelmeyer

The numerous large canvases by Norman Stiegelmeyer recently exhibited at the San Francisco Art Institute, while unquestionably impressive by reason of the ambitious muralesque scale of their refined elaboration of extravagantly colorful and ornate fantasmagoric designs, failed lamentably to fulfill the promise of the simple, powerful drawing which the artist executed for the exhibition’s announcement poster, and in general, disappointed expectations engendered by his small-format graphic work seen in previous years at the Institute’s annual drawing shows. This earlier graphic work by Stiegelmeyer

print Summer 1969

Susan Hall

Susan Hall, in a commanding exhibition at the Quay Gallery, is also occupied, albeit in a manner differing considerably from that of Mr. Stiegelmeyer, with an essentially graphic approach to painting. Bold caricatures, cartoons and contour drawings in thin lines of color often stated against fields of a single contrasting color distinguish her present style, in which, while drawing from the currently fashionable, youthfully obstreperous vernacular of combining Pop hyperbole on mass-media advertising and comic-strip art with some of the spirited impudence and rowdy obscenities of Funk, she yet

print Summer 1969

Ben Langton

Ben Langton, in a group of paintings recently shown at the Bolles Gallery, essays a return to the exuberant, heavily impastoed, vividly pigmented landscape styles of late 19th-century European artistic ferment, as seen through that long historical perspective conducive to amalgamating stylistic devices and mannerisms from Van Gogh, Gauguin,Munch and Nolde—and from the Fauves, Der Blaue Reiter and a host of independents peripheral to these movements—much as they have now become embraced by the same melding perspective under the general heading of Expressionism.

However, Mr. Langton’s telescopy is

print Summer 1969

William Wiley, Bill Geis, Bob Arneson, Manuel Neri, Robert Kinmont, Peter Saul, Bruce Nauman, H. C. Westermann and Martial Westburg

The Berkeley Gallery initiated its new quarters—a spacious two-story, light-manufacturing-shed type of structure, located in the warehouse district south of Market Street, and reminiscent of the gallery’s original home on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley—with a large, Neo-Dada-caper sort of exhibition called the “Repair Show,” announced as a sequel to this gallery’s purportedly “historic” Slant Step show of three years ago, and largely comprised of patently impermanent, random assemblages of assorted objects and debris-like materials, casual junk sculptural constructions and the like. While some

print May 1969

San Francisco

An engaging selection of polymer-media painted wall plaques by James W. McManus recently exhibited at the Ala Gallery (Arlene Lind Associates) resembled large, flat, ingeniously conceived cutouts, while their surfaces provided the grounds for dynamic geometric designs in automobile paints and lacquers, exploiting in novel and inventive ways tensions generated by optical counterpoint with the complex edge-shapes or two-dimensional “silhouettes” of the plaques. Within the simple limitations of this plaque format, McManus demonstrates keen resourcefulness. In much more than the edge-pattern or

print April 1969

Patrick Tidd and Paul Pernish

Patrick Tidd and Paul Pernish, exhibiting jointly at the Berkeley Rotary Art and Garden Center in Berkeley, provided the Bay Area with one of the better shows of what has proved to be a dull midwinter season. In continuing to explore the directions he established last year in his “Game Paintings” and in his muralesque treatment of subject matter relating to astronomy, astronomical observatories, and optical instruments, Tidd has consolidated thematic and syntactical ideas from these two earlier series in a new group of untitled paintings in acrylic, in which allusions to the appearance of

print April 1969

David Teachout and David Simpson

Continuing its interest in representing artists with a preoccupation with rigid geometry and schematism the Galeria Carl Van Der Voort recently exhibited consecutively, first a series of eight “target” paintings by David Teachout and then a series of schematic canvases by David Simpson. The “targets” by Teachout consisted of large canvases, each essaying a target-like pattern of concentric rings of color. The colors employed in the concentric bands were so plotted optically in relation to each other and to the field that they gave the illusion of being suspended in front of the canvas at different

print April 1969

Robert Arneson, David Williams, and Werner Jespen

The Albreaux Gallery recently opened at the Cannery with a group show largely devoted to funk art and, in the main, pieces previously exhibited by artists associated with the regular stables of other galleries. Setting the tone of the show was one of the ceramic toilets executed half a decade ago by Robert Arneson who, as a painter and graphicist rather than as a ceramicist, just opened an extensive exhibition of recent work at the Hansen Gallery.

The Hansen show finds humor and sophisticatedly flamboyant satire continuing to form the basic mood of Arneson’s work. A large series of canvases are

Palmer D. French