print November 1964

Fabergé: the High Art of Luxury

TO SURVEY ANY COMPREHENSIVE selection of the decorative objects produced by the House of Fabergé between 1870 and 1915 is to become enraptured with a veritable wonderland of elfin-miniature creations of dazzling brilliance and opulence. Here are to be found, in lavish profusion, varicolored alloys of gold, as well as precious and semi-precious gems combined with enamels and glazes in a facile diversity of techniques to produce a rich spectrum of subtle translucent colors.

The House of Fabergé was founded at St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1842 by Gustav Fabergé, and had acquired only a modest prestige

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 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 February 1968

Arlo Acton

Early last fall the Hansen Gallery presented a retrospective exhibition of work by the San Francisco sculptor Arlo Acton. That show contained no immediately recent work and was, in bulk, comprised of those large, somewhat neo-Dadaist, found-object assemblage-constructions (predominantly of wood) which occupied Acton during the early sixties (see Artforum, Vol. III, No. 1), most of which have received sufficiently frequent local exposure over the past few years to have become quite familiar to the majority of Bay Area gallery-goers and museum habitués.

Recently, the Hansen Gallery staged the second

print February 1968

Charles Mattox

Kinetic showmanship with some buffoonery also held sway at the Quay Gallery, which featured a veritable carnival of bright colored, noisy devices contrived by Charles Mattox. In contrast, however, to Acton’s vaudeville slapstick and burlesque double entendres, the Mattox exhibits were all good clean fun for the kiddies, and the show as a whole exuded the seasonally appropriate atmosphere of a novelty toy shop before Christmas: here was Mattox’s kinetic wizardry in its most jovial and Harlequinesque aspects, together with a few elaborate gadgets resembling the more imaginative sort of stage props

print February 1968

Mark Shroeder

The newly opened A.L.A. Gallery (Arlene Lind Associates) presented the first one man show of paintings by Mark Shroeder, a recent graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts. These exhibits comprised a series of rather morbid biomorphic fantasies combining sexual and pathological anatomical allusions in a manner definitely not designed for comfortable contemplation by the squeamishly impressionable; for here was a kaleidoscope of imagery that seemed like the nightmares of a hypochondriacal nervous breakdown—imagery obviously inspired by medical illustrations of organic deformities,

print February 1968

William Dubin

The Dilexi Gallery sustained the predilection for ornamental crafts which has characterized its current season in an exhibition of small wood carvings by William Dubin whose sculptures are for the most part somewhat decorative essays in organic freeform executed in highly polished exotic hardwoods.

—Palmer D. French

print April 1964

Wesley Chamberlain, Richard Graf and Robert Bechtle

Mr. Chamberlain’s representational lithographs, such as Still Life for a Catholic Vintner and Sunday’s Ladies, comprise a tour de force of the draftsmanship and technical virtuosity employed with more range and imagination in his intaglio collages and tusche drawings. In Tuttle Flowers and in the Morning Objects series one finds sensitive explorations of “tonal” and morphodynamic space.

Mr. Graf, turning to the rich heritage of North European Expressionism, essays lithographs and drawings evoking erotic fantasies and eerie, dreamlike architectural interiors, and demonstrating a consummate grasp

print April 1964

Williamson Mayo and Francis de Erdely

In Mr. Mayo’s oil paintings a torrid and colorful treatment of Tahitian landscape and people veers from a Folk-Primitivism (that is more West Indian than Polynesian) in such statements as Three Tahitian Churches to a Fauvist handling of landscape rhythms and colors in “Glade Near Papete,” and then careens into a Gauguinesque exposition of figurative themes. To all of these assimilations, however, Mr. Mayo adds an individual transformation derived, according to the gallery statement, from his virtuosity and experience as “one of the best living poster artists.”

Co-featured is a small selection of

print April 1964

“New Art and Design of Sweden”

A large part of this exhibition takes on the character of a decorators’ show, participated in by various importers, and promotive of Swedish housewares, furniture, office equipment and items of industrial design—all of superb quality and attractively elegant.

On the less utilitarian side, a hollow, quadrilateral glass shaft corrugated with polyhedroid configurations, designed by Sven Palmquist, achieves a scintillating prismatic beauty, and an abstract tapestry by Alice Lund exploits textures and luminosities of color uniquely within the domain of fabric surfaces and textile dyes.

The Fine Arts

print April 1964

“Decorative Art of the Young Balinese”

These are charming paintings of Balinese village life sensitively executed in the busy opulence of color and foliate rhythms that characterize the decorative and illustrative arts of Southeast Asia. Within the conventions of a traditional style, each of these young artists nevertheless achieves an individual expression. There are marked personal preferences in both choice of subject matter and tonality of palette. The exhibition is small but rewards perusal.

—Palmer D. French

print May 1964

“The Square Drawing”

While the San Francisco Art Institute would appear all too willing to accelerate confusion in the nomenclature of Art by its elastic definition of the word “drawing,” the simple and specific limitations it imposed upon works to be submitted for this juried exhibition stimulated some of the most crisply economical and highly individual statements in black, white and grey that one has seen locally for some time. Jacques Fabert’s Finlandaise (oil) is a singularly powerful figure study, heroic in its mannerism but without bravura affectation or Expressionist cliche. Sonya Rapoport’s abstract Dream

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 September 1968

San Francisco’s Summer Season

Drawings from various eras provided the dominant theme of featured museum exhibitions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area during the summer season, with the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the University of California’s Berkeley campus concurrently vying for the spotlight in presenting extensive major exhibitions of Old Master Drawings, while the summer schedule at the San Francisco Museum of Art seemed to follow suit in a preponderance of shows dealing with modern graphic techniques, as well as with contemporary extensions and revivals of historic master

print December 1964

James Grant and James Melchert

The syncopated plastic rhythms, sharp spatial transitions, and “dissonantly” juxtaposed shapes and color contrasts that so strongly characterized Mr. Grant’s collage-paintings, exhibited a year ago at the De Young Museum, are nowhere to be found in his current show. He has, to be sure, retained a few stylistic mannerisms from his earlier work, but the vitality has considerably waned. Most of the recent work here shown essays related colors in like tonal values; color masses and linear configurations are distributed in such a way that each work is a study in composed static equilibrium and tonal

print January 1965

Fletcher Benton and John Ihle

Mr. Benton’s “Kinetic Paintings” are sophisticated mobile geometric montages in the crisply economical symmetries and black, white, and primary color palette of the Hard Edge school. In a modern spirit Mr. Benton has turned to the mechanical principles underlying the famous automata of the great 17th and 18th century horologists, executing colorful compositions on a metal plaque or “face” equipped with various sliding bars, squares and panels, the synchronized movements of which are predetermined by an essentially “clockwork” type of mechanism encased behind the plaque. Technologically the only

print September 1963

Hugh Curtis, Paul Pernish, Robert Brotherton, and Joe Clark

Mr. Curtis and Mr. Pernish are apparently sympathetic with one another’s methods and have, in fact, collaborated on one painting in this exhibit. The vernacular of their idioms aligns them with the so-called “Pop Art” movement. Mr. Curtis’ dominant theme is the motorcyclist. The typical mode of treatment consists in goggles, helmets, moustaches and primitive cartoon-physiognomies stated as black geometries against white, elliptoid, “face-blank” cartouches which are defined as negative space, “cut,” as it were, from flat, massive “blocks” of violent red or yellow on billboard-size canvases.

print September 1963

Group Show

Fear that a policy of artistic commitment will “narrow the market” is reflected in the average “unlimited” fare of many little pantapoloia of art, but never more depressingly than in the off-season cluttering of walls with the dregs of the bins. One wearies of group shows that have no theme, that present neither a sequence in the evolution of a method nor a coherent essay in significantly juxtaposed parallels or contrasts, but that seem merely an attempt to display a “little of something” for every conceivable taste (including the most banal) that might be found in a random sampling of

print September 1963

Raymond A. Whyte

This odious rubbish which purports to be “academic” in terms, here, of the “fin de siécle” studio “trompe-l’oeil,” and there, of the architectural motifs and perspectives of the Tuscan Manieristi, can hardly be taken seriously enough to merit discussion. In addition to the copy-easel themes already mentioned, there is a quasi-Flemish Interior, a quasi-Barbizon Pastorale, and some quasi-Pre-Raphaelite Damoiselles. If one wishes to affect this sort of Boston dowager Traditionalist pedantry, one should at least have the ability to draw well, which Mr. Whyte does not. One glance at a few calendar

print October 1963

Dorr Bothwell, Nancy Genn, and James Grant

Miss Bothwell exhibits kaleidograms entitled, Watchwords and pictorial motifs entitled, Mendocino Fences. In a manner sometimes reminiscent of tapestry and sometimes of mosaic, the Watchwords present busy geometric patterns, distinctly Byzantine in color and character: woven in the intricate traceries, or obscurely stenciled in the interstitial “negative spaces” are stylized letters spelling such words as, “Love,” “Peace” and “Joy.” One gathers from the gallery statement that Miss Bothwell fancies this treatment is novel and constitutes a positive use of the principles of subliminal