print February 1966

Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin produces a world as valid as a psychologist’s graph yet delicate as sheer veils. Reductive in form and color these paintings deal with the infinite variations of nature. Her work promotes intelligent refinement of graphic structures and superb color limitations. She uses only pure, pearl whites, deep chalky whites, and light yellow whites, applied in thin washes with a sympathy for the nature of canvas. The drawing of precise yet ever-changing lines on canvas creates an overwhelming unity of structure.

As rich and as personal as these paintings are internally, they deal successfully

print February 1966

Arlo Acton

Arlo Acton’s first one man show in Los Angeles presents an enormously difficult undertaking, grand in physical considerations, but remarkably unresolved for so large a body of work. Acton has consistently chosen to work with found objects of wood and metal, handled and worked to create an organic special entity. His attempt to create a continually growing sculptural configuration has left certain basic sculptural questions unanswered. How can these jutting forms, so frequently seen in recent San Francisco sculpture, exist in, or come to terms with, their environment? This question is most

print January 1966

Lance Richbourg

Richbourg’s romantic, literary paintings pose as up-to-date illustrations for Brett Harte short stories, with hip elements of Pop and funk. The paintings are illustrative of our over-glamorized “Wild West”; one cannot help thinking of Hollywood and Knott’s Berry Farm. They form a series of violent and humorous incidents, but the visual stories are as corny as the manner in which they are painted. Mr. Richbourg is well trained in the use of foreshortening, perspective and rendering, upon which he builds a style of Pop attitudes, Surrealism and personal garish taste. These are violent power-packed

print December 1965

Mel Ramos

Steps towards refinement are apparent in Ramos’ first one-man show in Los Angeles. The larger, newer paintings distinguish themselves from four earlier (1964) paintings also shown. Not only is he drawing better (why do his clumsy foreshortenings, taken from photographs, “work”?), but also his game of visual puns promotes a stronger irony. Seemingly devoid of bite, these paintings project a particularly Americanized fantasy: the suburban pseudo-playboy’s dream girl, displayed as an art object, ready to be sold alongside her all-American product. Although possibly not the most successful formally,

print November 1965

Linda Levi and Joan Jacobs

Closing the “Summer Program” Linda Levi, a young local artist, shows a grateful awareness of the plexiglass neo-Constructivist school forming in southern California. Using acrylic colors, plexiglass, canvas, and masonite, she forms layered boxes with semi-imagined fruit suspended in space. Much thoughtfulness has gone into this young lady’s series. Her last two pieces, one a strong green and the other a red organic shape, are by far the most resolved. The earlier pieces border too much on nice “kitchen” drawings mounted in a box.

Also in this last “Summer Program” showing is Joan Jacobs, another

print November 1965

Group Show

Noteworthy among the seven artists in this show is Max Finkelstein with his aluminum relief Square by Hex. Individual hexagon figures form a larger hexagon shape, containing negative patterns and placed on a black aluminum square. Prisms of light run along the fine ridges which form the surface of the hexagons. Square by Hex is a strong piece which shows considerable development from a bronze, serpented, plant piece also shown.

Balcolm Greene and Allan Blizzard are more thoroughly represented than others in the show. Greene paints wintery, Impressionistic landscapes and figures. His accomplished

print November 1965

Rikio Takahsashi

Takahashi is another Japanese nature boy who has maintained his traditional heritage while mastering the art of woodcuts. He has sublimated the ego into nature with various scaled, delicate forms. The compositions are handsome, the textures elegant, and the colors subtly well-done. In many of these prints he enlarges leafy particles of nature on strong landscaped backgrounds. The most successful are the large circular prints which become a paradox of a large dynamic shape composed of intricate textures. The artist must have been more involved with these shadow-patterned, circular life embryos

Susan R. Snyder