print February 1964

Edmund Teske: The Camera as Reliquary

THE CAMERA IS a reliquary for Edmund Teske, a box preserving vestiges of what the eye venerates. Fragments of tactile experience are focused through the psychological aperture of homage, and the outsider, observing Teske’s results, asks himself why these particular photographs hold so much wonder. It is Teske’s love for the secret clues profusely scattered in life, those shadowings which lead men to trace themselves within alien contours until they come to sites of their own initiation. A romantic among direct-print photographers, and an inventor among those manipulating development procedures

print February 1964

First Annual Advent Exhibit of Liturgical Art

Most of the objects comprising the exhibition seem to have been included by reason of subject matter, function, title or vocation of their maker, categories indifferent to the spirit of a work. Yet it is to the spirit, seemingly, that an Advent art exhibit would wish to direct itself. But liturgy denotes public ritual, not sacred experience, and the show honestly enough was labeled “liturgical art.” Taken literally this perspective indicates that the exhibit’s most moving works should not be there, for Chagall’s colored lithographs of Saul and David through the faithful sweetness of an ear

print December 1963

Annita Delano

A California garden may contain at the moment of our perception, forms of all the phases in the great cycle of living, just as the iris crowns a single stalk with budding and marcescent flowers. Annita Delano paints from a gardener’s wisdom, her abundant and fluctuating images bear witness that immortality is a dynamic capacity for renewal rather than an immobile identity. The exhibition as a whole and the individual works themselves show the re-use, emergence and completion of living memories happy to return to seed again in the artist’s consciousness.

The present exhibition is Miss

print December 1963

BLINK

A “Pop” event whose purpose ostensibly was not publicity but “stunt.” Sissor initiators of the BLINK stencil, Alison Knowles, George Brecht and Robert Watts took an increasingly anonymous role in the manufacture and assembling of BLINK products. BLINK postage stamps, cigarettes, kerchiefs, bridal photo, undies, “Thrift Table,” pickings from Pasadena junk shops were Nelson additions to the New Yorkers’ shipment of pus-colored square canvases, bedspread, bathing suit, sweatshirt and harem pillow stenciled BLINK. Anonymity was available to all by a BLINK stamping service. The whiff of

print December 1963

Hans Burkhardt

To both the elect and the electorate, who are jaded by the pro I iteration of novelties in 20th-century art, it is a cultural hardship to be a good follower and not a popularizer. Burkhardt’s portion is the bottom crust because his talent for assimilating and complementing Gorky’s achievements in loose-field symbolist painting, can be appreciated only by those who see a painting in front of them, not an object for classification. Limbo expresses aggressive futility in girder, wrench, and key shapes clamped into shackling adjacency within slithery paint handling. The color transitions: greys

print December 1963

Carl Morris

Many writers have solemnized a union in Carl Morris’ paintings, of Northwestern America’s topography and the no-time mental state of Oriental wisdom literature. Certainly he agglomerates chunky components into images readable as landscape. Yet for all their massivity and wedging, an intrinsic emptiness is lodged at the core of the images. The hollowness palpable within the experience of these works mocks the painter’s pastiche of monumentality. This is because Morris directs his art toward the apparent rather than the essential and functional. He seems oblivious of the Chinese maxim: “Idea

print December 1963

John Hunter

Brazen color and grizzled personages populate Hunter’s first West Coast exhibition. Presently on a Fulbright in Florence, the painter studied at Claremont. His avowed theme is The Human Comedy, but since Balzac could hardly be blamed for such cardboard characterizations, the painter’s allusions must be personal or literal esoterisms. Among these barbarously ugly paintings, French Gloves displays a flaccid female segmented by her clothing into striped legs and arms, the nude yellow torso is garroted by a red dog collar, a pencil fillip provides the belly-button. Hunter’s straight from the tube

print December 1963

Yehoshua Kovarsky

Each painting reiterates in form, color and concept such unflagging pretentiousness that the viewer being railroaded through Kovarsky’s Picasso-land, turns citron. Rancid turquoise spot lights an ameboid Adam and Eve; a fried egg is served upon a rubbery leaf; it is the dawn of temptation. Outlines separate from their colored centers with some rather absurd results. In Canaanite, the contour of the breast declares: “they went that-a-way” while its lavender fill-in acts as a hub-cap. Kovarsky is equally unsuccessful when checkering his brush strokes or frosting the canvas by palette knife.

print December 1963

Alexander Canedo

To spare the foolish notions, there ought to be a law requiring dates for the quotations embellishing exhibition announcements. Seeing as others see requires the same site, and the distance between 1932 and 1963 affects one’s vision. In a literate world where Picasso and Matisse as well as Holbein and Rembrandt are known to so many people and are available in so many reproductions, the following quote taken from the current Canedo announcement is flavorsome: “Canedo is a draughtsman in the old master tradition. I can’t think of no (sic) other living man who surpasses him in the purity

print December 1963

Harold Frank

An exhibition covering paintings from the past three years; through layers of overpainting and scratching upon previous studies, Frank is attempting a blend of elements from Diebenkorn, De Kooning and Picasso. Since he is so productive, a few of the works attain a healthy plastic animation, but this seems to accord with the law of averages.

—Rosalind G. Wholden

print November 1963

Thirty-Four Sculptors

Mr. William Hill, functioning as the new director of the Long Beach State College Art Gallery, opened the fall exhibition season with a show devoted to sculptors who he felt had defined an image for themselves. Thirty-four were chosen, a number with no particular significance. Half of the sculptors are from southern California, the other half from northern California, barring a light sprinkling of northwest sculptors and one Canadian. Approximately half of the sculptors are teachers.

Two works were outstanding. Oliver Andrew’s “Figure,” a brand-new piece in bronze and mahogany combined two

print November 1963

David Simpson

Elegant, horizontally striped wall hangings in which Simpson deftly plays upon subtleties of color gradation, stripe-size and implied sequences of space to provide the viewer with facades of visual experience blind to any passageway into dimensions beyond the sensuous. “Speckled Bands” of 1961 includes amid the painter’s favorite blue-violet to red tonalities, matte and impasto black smudges and dabs. In 1962 Simpson used turpentine washes irregularly bleeding across otherwise halcyon surfaces of sienna, ochre and salmon stripes. The most recent works experiment with variations in canvas shapes.