Thomas H. Garver

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  print April 1971

  Milton Avery

  This small exhibition of the late paintings of Milton Avery has been organized by John Coplans for the University of California, Irvine. Of the twenty-two works in the exhibition most were executed in the years 1958–1960 (Avery died in 1965).

  One’s first impression of the exhibition is its unpretentiousness. By contemporary standards the paintings are small and profoundly simple. Almost clumsy at times, Avery’s paintings are always “something,” a kernel of subject matter which is always available in even the most abstract works. In Avery’s earlier paintings there were sometimes clashes between

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  print April 1971

  Frederick John Eversley

  Frederick John Eversley’s recent exhibition of cast resin sculpture at the Jack Glenn Gallery embodies for me most of the vices of high-class Los Angeles plastic light art.

  The bulk of the exhibition consisted of a number of centrifugally cast-plastic resin discs, approximately two feet in diameter and six to eight inches thick. These discs were of several configurations, rather like lenses. One configuration was a double concave lens producing a powerful reducing effect as the eight-inch rim thickness diminished to an inch or less in the center. Another configuration was plano-concave—one surface

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  print April 1971

  Peter Plagens

  Peter Plagens, well known to the readers of these pages, exhibited four large paintings in a loft called “Dawson Aircraft” in downtown Pasadena. Plagens, who for some time has been working with large sheets of paper (including roadmaps) pasted together and then painted, has in this exhibition turned (or perhaps returned) to a classical format; large horizontal canvases, five feet high by twelve feet long. The four works are formal and direct, very much in the high road of American non-representation. Large flat geometric areas of color are interspersed with smaller portions of intense painterly

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  print February 1971

  Venice In The Snow

  Substantial attention is being paid to forms of exhibitions of art alternative to the usual gallery/museum experience. One of those forms has been wall painting, which has received no attention at all, at least in the official art press in Los Angeles, where a group of four artists, Victor Henderson, Terry Schoonhoven, Jim Frazin and Leonard Korin, recently completed their third major painting, Venice in the Snow, on the side of Jackie Greber’s and Ed Moses’ studio on the oceanfront in Venice, just south of the Venice Pavilion.

  The Fine Arts Squad began informally some two years ago when Schoonhoven,

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  print January 1971

  Los Angeles

  Although artists are what count in the long run, the styles, tastes, and fates of the galleries are at least semi-crucial in a scene as continually precarious as Los Angeles. A couple of months ago, I ungenerously labeled Eugenia Butler’s establishment an emporium of “ideological entertainments”; since then the character of the shows (at least the last two) have changed in that the art has gotten more physical, visual and, I think, better. Richard Jackson is basically an Abstract Expressionist painter, but he’s been influenced by a number of things, among them anti-art (or, anti-pretty art) in

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  print December 1970

  Donald LeWallen and Dennis Ashbaugh

  Late last spring, Jack Glenn, a businessman transplanted from Kansas City, opened his gallery in Corona del Mar, a sun, fun and surf community south of Los Angeles. Eschewing La Cienega Boulevard as too smoggy and about to be bisected by a freeway, Glenn felt that anyone wishing to buy the sort of art he handles wouldn’t mind the hour’s drive from Los Angeles. Glenn’s Gallery is a bit of chic appreciated by the California south of Los Angeles—hip deep gray carpet-ing and beige suede cloth on the walls to which pictures are attached by Velcro strips. Esthetically, the gallery has the flavor of

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  print December 1970

  William Tunberg, Laddie Dill, Allan McCollum, Andrea Brown and Mary Kutila

  The “Venice, California” exhibition has been organized by Josine lanco, ex-director of the late Lytton Center of the Visual Arts. William Tunberg is a fetish builder, combining sexual funk and other odd bits of urban detritus, fake fruit, eggs, shoes, etc., etc., within boxes of “display stands” finished in the true hot rod manner with silky smooth pearlescent surfaces. Tunberg’s work relates to both San Francisco and Los Angeles esthetics, but has never been very well received here. His craftsmanship is impeccable and he is perhaps most successful in the pieces which do not emphasize either

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  print May 1970

  “Dimensions of Black”

  “Dimensions of Black” is a curious. sprawling exhibition documenting the work of black artists both contemporary and historical. It was organized in a major group effort by Jehanne Teilhet, an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, and a large number of students, black and white, from the University. Teilhet and her students raised about $40,000.00 for the exhibition from private and foundation sources, selected the work, assisted in the installation, and wrote much of the catalog (which at this writing has yet to be published).

  The general premise of the

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  print May 1970

  Billy Al Bengston

  Billy Al Bengston’s exhibition at the Mizuno Gallery is his first since a major retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968. The installation of the County Museum exhibition was so arranged as to destroy Bengston’s paintings as objects of Kunstwissenschaft. The present exhibition’s presentation heightens the sense of mystique one felt at the County Museum. Of the dozen or so works exhibited, all but three could be seen only by candlelight, a makeshift gesture with makeshift candelabra which serves here only to obscure the luxuriousness of

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  print May 1970

  Donald Eddy

  Donald Eddy is a figurative painter, a “new realist” who airbrushes his paintings. For the past several years Eddy has been living in Hawaii, and this exhibition deals with the old people, retired or on vacation, who frequent the islands. Like the work of Joseph Raffael of a few years ago, Eddy isolates his forms and figures against a white grounds, although Eddy’s paintings deal with only one object and are not juxtapositions of disparate forms. The old people serve as foils for the objects within their environments, although these objects (picnic tables, park benches, automobiles) would seem

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  print March 1970

  Michael Todd

  Michael Todd, who has been on the faculty of the University of California at San Diego for the past year and a half, has been given the central courtyard of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla as an exhibition space for an indefinite period. It is a curious setting for sculpture. The building designed by Louis Kahn is “perfect” in its form and detail, a massive and calculated medievalism set on the bluffs above the Pacific. The two four-story blocks of offices and laboratories constructed of concrete and weathered teak fall upon an open court, paved with slabs of travertine,

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  print March 1970

  Eric Orr and Howard Flemming

  About two years ago, Eric Orr, a sculptor who describes himself as an environmentalist, began a modest experiment with the class of high school students he taught at the Los Angeles Junior Art Center. Orr had become fascinated with the structural and spatial possibilities to be found within controlled sound sources and sound inputs. Demonstrating that it was possible to define shapes and spaces quite precisely if impalpably with standing waves and patterns of interference of one sound source operating against another, Orr proposed to his class that a tunnel be constructed which would be lined