Palmer D. French

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  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

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  print November 1964

  “Chinese Paintings”

  In surveying the ancient art works of a remote culture it is sometimes difficult for the uninitiated to “see the trees for the forest.” Individual differences of style and departures from traditional norms are easily obscured by that long historical perspective which tends to emphasize the stylistic and esthetic assumptions which all the artists of a given culture held in common and to minimize differences which, albeit within the common frame of reference, must in their time have seemed radical. The contrasts here might have been brought into sharper focus for us had this selection from the R.

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  print November 1964

  Koshiro Onchi

  Appreciation and evaluation of the Japanese graphicists of the first half of the 20th century has been to date the exclusive province of a few collectors who first brought these artists to the attention of American museums. The bibliography of this period of Japanese printmaking is dominated by the names of Oliver Statler and James A. Michener. The Achenbach Foundation in its promotion of this exhibition seems unhesitatingly to have swallowed Michener’s evaluation of Onchi as “the genius of this period of printmaking,” and thus are perpetuated the articles of faith that come to constitute the

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  print November 1964

  Robert Harvey

  Mr. Harvey's second exhibition at this gallery in less than a year is presumably justified by the fact that he has undergone a radical change of style and viewpoint since his show of last winter, which was preoccupied with figurative themes in a manner obviously influenced by Nathan Oliviera. Mr. Harvey's current exhibition is comprised of a large number of oil paintings, predominantly in sepia tones, collectively entitled “Family Album.” The statement in a gallery circular that these paintings reflect the “realism” of old album photographs is not altogether fair to Mr. Harvey, since these works

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  print November 1964

  Jack Carrigg, Masando Kito

  This small gallery on Polk Street, like many of its kind, seldom presents formally organized exhibitions but rather shows a fairly diversified range of works in a perpetual and slowly rotating group show. Outstanding in the more recent repertoire here are oil paintings by Masando Kito, a newcomer, and by Jack Carrigg, a gallery regular whose work has taken a new direction since last season. Mr. Carrigg continues to be fascinated with colored vertical stripes, but instead of the thick wavy lines, modulated surfaces and color transitions that characterized his earlier studies, he has abruptly

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  print November 1964

  Group Show

  For the opening of another little gallery on Sausalito’s Bridgeway waterfront to be anything but a statistical and a commercial commonplace, it would have to present something a good deal more noteworthy than the mediocre fare that comprises the initial exhibition offered in this somewhat cramped and overly-partitioned room above the locally legendary No Name Bar. Heading the constituency of the present exhibition are three of Sausalito’s old regulars: Serge Trubach, Varda and Art Grant. Trubach, a painter of considerable merit, has elected to be represented here with some hastily contrived

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  print November 1964

  Ralph Du Casse

  Mr. Du Casse exhibits nine canvases with titles that are the names of familiar animals. This barely recognizable zoo is transparently an affected attempt to combine esoteric humor with graphic subtlety in contrived flamboyance and oblique references. Mr. Du Casse likes slick textures, balanced syntactical rhythms and flatly applied lush color. The way in which two paintings entitled Raindeer and Baby Deer, decoratively elaborate stylized antler shapes is embarrassingly trite. In fact, all of these paintings remind one of the sort of thing commonly seen on chic ceramic tiles. In addition to the

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  print September 1964

  “Summer Exhibits”

  This is perhaps the most significant of recently organized galleries, primarily devoted to the younger group of Bay Area painters and sculptors. Among the painters exhibited here during June and July were Boyd Allen, Charles E. Gill and Patrick Tidd. Mr. Allen’s vib­rant canvases amply demonstrate that there are still challenging possibilities of invention and individuality of style in Abstract Expressionism, while Mr. Gill and Mr. Tidd are well into the frontiers of post-abstract expressionist and post-new imagist explorations. Mr. Gill’s canvases are somber and reflec­tive, amalgamating elements

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  print September 1964

  “Summer Exhibits”

  The past season has been a succession of undistinguished one-man shows at this gallery; Frank Kleinholz whose work, strongly influenced by Max Beckmann, is a late survival of the social com­mentary expressionism of the WPA era; Alba Heywood who essays cloyingly sentimental idyllic landscapes (with male nudes) and interior scenes of old rustic houses; and, finally, Robert Wat­son whose commercially successful banalities are about on a par with the work of Walter Keane. Of redeeming merit. however, have been Mr. Maxwell’s steadily solid and distinguished dealers’ exhibitions, which, among other

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  print September 1964

  Nancy Clark

  Mrs. Clark exhibits a dozen abstract variations on a vaguely figurative theme with some­what erotic overtones, entitled Leyen­das. With the gradual progression re­miniscent of cinematic film frames, a pair of formal motifs (one dark and shadowy, one in tentative flesh tones) is slowly processed from cool tonalities and syntactical placidity to a high-keyed palette and a frenzy of compositional turbulence. Technically the work is un­even in quality from canvas to canvas. Of primary interest, however, is the evolving sequence as such, and probably the artist would agree that none of these paintings,

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  print September 1964

  “Summer Exhibits”

  The season’s outstanding show at this in­timate graphics gallery was an unusual array of prints from William Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Inferno and the Book of Job. Of the two most famous sets of illustrations to Dante’s theo­logical epic, Dore’s and Blake’s, Blake’s tends more to a mystical austerity and mannerism (that is occasionally mere­ly barren) while Dore’s interpretations are more expressionistic and dramatic­ally macabre in conjuring the horren­dous abysses and grotesque tortures of purgatory and the inferno. It is in the Book of Job that Blake displays his highest powers of

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  print September 1964

  “Summer Exhibits”

  Marjorie Allen, who exhibited at this gallery in early June, is a native of Massachusetts and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She conjures nebulous abstractions in gossamer colors with oblique and spec­tral figurative references. Her works abound in idyllic prettiness suffused with overtones of euphoric mystical surrealism. Later in the season Chap­man Kelley exhibited some delicately contrived views of rotting piers along the Provincetown waterfront executed in a misty neo-Oriental manner reminis­cent of Whistler’s Nocturnes. Some nude studies by Mr. Kelley amply demonstrate