print January 1967

The Age of Rembrandt

WHILE TITLING THIS EXHIBITION The Age of Rembrandt indubitably insured it enormous popular prestige and record-breaking public attendance at the three museums participating in its tour, the title is in many ways inappropriate and misleading. In the first place, any implication, no matter how oblique, that Rembrandt––at least in the individualism of the mature style with which he is most usually identified––is typical of his era, or that on the other hand, a preponderant majority of his contemporaries were so overwhelmingly dominated by the example of that characteristic style as to typify his

print Summer 1966

Ancient Egyptian Art at the Lowie Museum

DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS between the acquisitions gathered by Napoleon’s expeditions in 1799 (and ceded to the British after the French defeat at Alexandria in 1801) and the University of California’s excavations at Gizeh in 1899, Egyptian archaeology had been almost exclusively a European pursuit, and except for the Cairo Museum after 1858, the principal, or at any rate ultimate, beneficiaries of both private and institutionally sponsored excavation had been the great national museums of Europe, with the British Museum, the Louvre and the Berlin Museum definitely in the lead.

It is to Auguste

print February 1966

Jugendstile Expressionism in German Posters

DR. HERSCHEL B. CHIPP, WHO ORGANIZED the University of California’s 1963 exhibition of works by Schiele, Klimt and Kokoschka under the title “Viennese Expressionism, 1910–1924,” has come up with another outstanding success in “Jugendstil and Expressionism,” an exhibition of the poster art of Germany and Austria from 1893 to 1934.

Flyers, placards and playbills, in which small illustrative vignettes, trade symbols or monograms serve as subordinate embellishments to printed or lettered announcements and advertising tracts, were already commonplace by the last quarter of the 16th century. However,

print November 1965

Iranian Art

CURRENTLY TOURING THE U.S. is an impressive exhibition entitled “7000 Years of Iranian Art.”* This exhibition, circulated by the Smithsonian Institution through the cooperation of the governments of Iran and of the United States, consists mainly of objects loaned from the Teheran Archaeological Museum and the Collection Foroughi. The exhibition’s range of subject matter is highly diverse and comprises not only works of art, craft, and decorative artisanship representing the many cultural transitions experienced historically by the Iranian people, but also artifacts of peoples of other nations

print March 1965

Peter Hurd

This rather large retrospective exhibition of paintings by Peter Hurd occupies three galleries and could have been improved by some pruning. The earliest paintings in the show are from the mid-1920s: these works are in oil on canvas and depict atmospheric autumnal Pennsylvania landscapes with warm vibrant colors and bold swirling brushstrokes in a moderately heavy impasto, somewhat reminiscent of Van Gogh. After the twenties Hurd changed his locale, his style and his medium and concentrated on developing a Southwestern regionalism in egg tempera on gesso panel, and occasionally in watercolors.

print March 1965

Arne Wolfe

In a small selection of woodcuts which Mr. Wolfe exhibited in a corridor group show at the San Francisco Museum of Art last year he was preoccupied primarily with statements in black and white and with ornate calligraphy. While a few of the earlier calligraphic works are included in his present exhibition, the preponderance of wall space is given over to his newer works which are woodcuts on a very large scale teeming with vibrant color. These are all abstractions in which form and color are manipulated in a very free improvisatory way. While the work is not disdainful of such traditional devices

print March 1965

Masando Kito

These paintings display virtuosity, imagination and diligent meticulousness. Mr. Kito works in oil which he manages to manipulate so as to produce surfaces that have the texture of stone: sometimes moist and porous, sometimes dry and crumbling, and sometimes hard and weathered smooth. So compellingly are these effects achieved that one imagines the tactile properties of the surfaces presented. All of the colors employed are such as one commonly associates with complex organic minerals: copper greens, chalky reds, slate blues, and the carbon blue-black of basalt. The various shapes, graffito

print March 1965

Sergio Agostini

Mr. Agostini’s paintings are concerned with melancholy and usually autumnal agrarian landscapes. He creates a dreamlike quality by the use of horizons-at-infinity and furtive, starkly delineated figures frozen in irrelevant postures and gestures; sometimes, too, the sun is suggested as a black crescent. There are a number of variations on the subject of checkerboard fields with groups of people in the foreground holding aloft bright colored umbrellas. Mr. Agostini applies his color as densely packed, narrow parallel ribbons of paint, or, alternatively, applies a very thin pigment permitting the

print March 1965

Elizabeth L. M. Campbell

Mrs. Campbell explores the rectilinear color-grid idea not, however, in terms of the contemporary Hard Edge approach, with its emphasis on monotonous and optically hypnotic regularity, but well within the style and characteristic inflections of Mondrian, Glarner and the early Bauhaus. Even at this, her craftsmanship is hasty and amateurish and she brings absolutely nothing new to a method long since carried to its ultimate and most effective realization by others.

—Palmer D. French

print February 1965

Karl Benjamin

Mr. Benjamin exhibits crisp geometric abstractions in oil, exploring a variety of directions. In a series of paintings designated only by the Roman numeral VII, a rectilinear lattice or grid of black lines is superimposed, as it were, on a mosaic of color squares, the intersections of which are noncongruent with those of the lattice. The color tonalities are cool and aseptic. This series is reminiscent sometimes of Mondrian and sometimes of the geometricism of early exponents of Bauhaus theory. An isolated painting simply designated as “7” reduces to its essentials a formula of the early Cubists

print February 1965

William H. M. Weber

Mr. Weber is obviously a well-schooled, commercially oriented painter with a remarkably facile ability to turn out paintings of sensuous, decorative, or sentimentally pictorial appeal in an eclectic range of styles and mannerisms. His least offensive and perhaps most sincere essays are those which draw on French prototypes: a nude study in the pastel flesh tones and diffused light of Pascin, and a study of elderly men seated around a table in a manner paraphrasing Daumier. However, with somewhat less care and involvement, Weber has produced quasi-photographic portraits, slap-dash Expressionistic

print February 1965

Henri Lebasque, William Keith and Thaddeus Welch

For the most part this is an exhibition of period paintings from the gallery’s backlog of run-of-the-mill dealer’s items intermingled with a few works by contemporary artists who have had featured exhibitions here during the past year. The preponderance of wall space is, however, devoted to minor French and American genre painters of the turn of the century, also-ran Impressionists and a few diehard followers of Barbizon traditions. The eye-catcher on the main floor is a richly painted, buoyantly colorful still life of a fan and a bowl of fruit against an ornate Oriental tapestry by Henri Lebasque