Fred Reichman’s startled fawn, flying squirrel, crabs, cranes, crows, stone and branch, drawn with monumental simplicity, sparsely disposed across softly painted white canvases decorate the comfortable chambers of Mrs. Rabow’s gallery. Though harmonizing dispersed details on an empty field is clearly part of the Far Eastern tradition in painting, these pictures are more specifically related to the. Japanese short poem, the Haiku, which formulates the universal in split second actuality: no pedantic study of creature parts, but its act or gesture. And not the whole environment, but only the most related object: woodpecker, tree, or mating crows, blossoming plum.
Aside from the paintings there are many small drawings which have the same soft haziness as the paintings, and several wood carvings––which one might call board sculpture, two-sided rather than three-dimensional––of a large-eared grazing fawn, hooting owl, swooping goose, etc. Reichman’s enthusiasm for the figure drawing of Milton Avery is clear, but he should be respectful of Avery’s patent, or appropriate it more shyly. Except this, the paintings are very much Reichman’s own.
—Knute Stiles
