print Summer 1968

Patrick Tidd and Harry Lum

The Berkeley Gallery introduced new trends in the work of two Bay Area artists in its successive presentation of exhibitions of paintings by Patrick Tidd and by Harry Lum. Tidd, whose work of five years ago presented the viewer with an interesting ferment of ambivalent experimental groping which could have developed in any of a number of quite divergent directions, seems now firmly and rewardingly set on a course which has already produced an ample aggregate of thoroughly engaging canvases, falling into two groups: (1) hard-edge, “abstract charades” of strangely juxtaposed imagery and visual

print Summer 1968

Barbara Rogers

Barbara Rogers, recently exhibiting paintings, drawings and mixed media graphics at the Michael Wallis Gallery, combines highly sophisticated techniques of painting, sensitive draftsmanship, and an extremely personal, perceptive wit in delightful, quasi-Surrealistic charades fusing social satire with subtleties of psychological mood. Egyptianesque hawk-headed people in cocktail party conversational stances and other playfully absurd zoocephalic humanoids populate Miss Rogers’ paintings and drawings; a lion-headed nude female figure, reminiscent of the Theban goddess Sekhmet, rendered in an

print Summer 1968

Robert S. Neuman

Opening at the Wallis Gallery as this goes to press was the first West Coast exhibition since 1954 of work by the Harvard-based Robert S. Neuman. Mr. Neuman’s paintings in oil on linen of four and five years ago present a survival of Abstract Expressionism, intellectualized, tempered and suffused with a mellow, no-doubt Harvard bred, academicism; some more recent mixed media drawings (1966–67) have, however, engaging vitality. Crisply stated geometric shapes and astringent linearities are skillfully manipulated in two series entitled, respectively, Mirage Studies and Voyage Drawings. In these

print May 1968

Mariano Fortuny, Gauguin, Bonnard, Aubrey Beardsley, Karl Koepping, Ludwig Hofmann, Paul Hermann, Jules Cheret, Alphons Mucha, Toulouse-Lautrec, and more

Two well-paired exhibitions, an extensive feature show entitled The Art Nouveau and a concurrent secondary installation captioned A Remembrance of Mariano Fortuny, initiating the spring season at the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, together highlighted the recent wave of interest in the design styles which dominated art, artisanship, decorative crafts and fashions at the turn of the century. Broadly considered, the style trend expressed in, and inclusive of, the manifestations popularly designated by the term Art Nouveau, was, like the Rococo, the Baroque, and others of the long

print April 1968

Jack Levi, Robert Combs, Bruce Conner, Gerald Gooch, Richard Graf, Norman Stiegelmeyer, Joan Brown and Susan Hall

The San Francisco Art Institute’s Annual Invitational Drawing Show was, as usual, interesting and stimulating. Keen intelligence in exploring the resources of various graphic media was a hallmark of most of the work exhibited. By tradition the designation “drawing show” adheres to this event, although its scope has been broadening over the years to encompass an ever greater range of graphic media, including painting on paper, collage involving the use of paper and/or textile materials on almost any ground, and, of course, most recently, various uses of polymer materials (other than as paints).

print April 1968

Vienna School of Fantastic Realism

An exhibition entitled Vienna School of Fantastic Realism at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art purported to survey “significant impulses” from Austria, and was comprised of work by 15 painters. The ostentatious and trite promotional rhetoric in Alfred Werner’s preface to the shabby little catalog being circulated with the exhibition was futile advocacy in view of the blatant mediocrity and intellectual bankruptcy evident in the majority of the works shown. Ernst Fuchs stands alone in the sad company of his co exhibitors as representing at least a respectable degree of artistic integrity

print April 1968

Marvin Lipofsky and Keith Boyle

The Hansen Gallery recently featured free forms in blown glass by Marvin Lipofsky, a pioneer in the contemporary revival of free blown glass as an art idiom, and who was chiefly responsible for the organizing and equipping of a glassblowing studio foundry at the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

Professor Lipofsky’s exhibits seem chiefly interesting for the truly impressive diversity of unique colors and textures achieved by combining glass with various metals and other pigmentive materials. In form the pieces are all basically bulbous or tubular. Esthetically the most intriguing

print March 1968

Joseph Turner, Francois Boucher, William Blake, George Inness, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Renoir, Everett Shinn, Sir Jacob Epstein, Ivan Opfer, Wyndham Lewis, Feliks Topolsky, William V. Krausz, Marsden Hartley, Chester Harding and more

A large and heterogeneous selection of paintings, drawings and small sculptures from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. T. Edward Hanley of Pennsylvania was recently exhibited at the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Although this collection would appear to range over a large percentage of the most illustrious names in the art history of England, France and the United States, roughly from early in the last quarter of the 18th century through the first quarter of the 20th century, it is, except for a very small scattering of choice items, relatively undistinguished—the great names

print March 1968

John Altoon

An exhibition of paintings and graphics by John Altoon organized by Gerald Nordland for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was shown there during December and at the Pasadena Art Museum in January. Fifty out of the 66 items which comprised this exhibition were graphics executed during 1966 and 1967, and of this 50, 35 were works in ink and watercolor on board from the Harper Series (Artforum Vol. V, No. 6). A mere scattering of 16 works in various media from Altoon’s prolific output between, and inclusive of, the years 1959 and 1965, was shown in an adjoining gallery, presumably to supply

print March 1968

Paul Cotton

The Berkeley Gallery featured an environment designed by Paul Cotton entitled Drawing Room for the Self. A long, corridorlike segment of the gallery with a wall pattern of whitewashed bricks (real on one side of the room and in part simulated for the occasion with painted wallpaper on the other) was divided along its length into two mirror image vestibules by a partition, perforated with regularly spaced rectangular apertures and used as the axis for a bilaterally symmetrical distribution of simple, uniformly shaped black cushions and austere columnar pedestals. As a consequence, a persistent

print February 1968

Barbara Barengo

Another young artist’s debut show was featured by the Michael Walls Gallery in presenting paintings by Barbara Barengo, whose lyrical abstractions in subdued, opaque colors, expounding highly involved, composed relationships of well defined shapes, color masses and linear rhythms, represent not only a rejection of Abstract Expressionism but likewise a turning away from the rigid and quasi technological schematism associated with Op and Hard Edge techniques, toward a re examination of some of the approaches to the esthetics and dynamics of abstraction that prevailed a half century ago.

In such

print February 1968

Frederic Hobbs

At the Bolles Gallery, Frederic Hobbs exhibited drawings, mixed media graphics, and paintings on paper, together with a small selection of molded fiberglass sculptures. Hobbs is a good draftsman; his ink drawings and sepia-toned acrylic/ink gouaches are powerful and articulate. Their larger than life, expressionistic bravura repertoire, religious, mythological and Bacchanalian imagery, in juxtapositions at once poignant and sardonic, present a compelling revival of the spirit, themes and style of Heinrich Kley. Here, too, but slightly metamorphosized, is Kley’s cloven-hoofed and taloned Witches’

Palmer D. French