Los Angeles Artists
The “American Masters Show” at The Feigen/Palmer Gallery covers the period from 1945 to 1966 and includes just about everyone who made it during those years. There are oils by Josef Albers, a fine oil and pencil drawing by de Kooning as well as a delightful small oil by Max Ernst. Morris Graves’ symbolic Bird Snake and Moon captures the eye along with Yves Tanguy’s macabre Unknown, both works coming out of the forties. Hofmann, Lebrun and Calder all show examples of their work during the fifties, and as the exhibition leads into the sixties, one begins to feel a creeping despair as ideas grow smaller and canvases grow larger. Warhol, Tworkov, Rivers, Kelly, and Lichtenstein, among others, are included in the artists representing America in the sixties. Now and then there appears an unusually bright spark of wit, as in the work of Joseph Cornell who exhibits his Fan Box done in 1965.
Harry Kramer in his first one man show in Los Angeles at the Landau Gallery says, “The hope of the Utopians to find here finally the art of the space-time age is absurd. Every slot machine is more complicated technically than all kinetic art. Kinetic art is more closely related to show business than to physics.” From one who seems to have hit the jackpot, this is a very telling statement indeed.
The predominance of wheels whirring and turning, sometimes with a slightly bored and faltering monotony, trapped in wire cages, amid flashing red and blue lights, while running water pours endlessly from old faucets and disappears down the drain in a frenzy of activity, all suggest the sense of futility and prevailing doom found in the work of Beckett and others of the Theatre of the Absurd; however, Kramer’s work which is deliberately sensational is no less futile in offering distraction and cleverness as a substitute for discovery and illumination.
In the Group Show at Ankrum, the work of four sculptors, all of them new to the gallery, is introduced. Three of them make use of industrial materials and much of their work is especially suited for display in public buildings. Robert Seyle’s all nail Relief (about 500 pounds) is an exceptionally large monument onto which the nails have been meticulously superimposed over carefully carved forms. Light reflecting from the massive structure adds a shimmering quality to the total effect. Al Garrett’s Symbols Of The Sea is a totem idea made up entirely of his own copper engraving plates and other materials used daily in his work as an engraver and printer. These he combines and orders into a structure that is cryptic as well as geometric. Jan Peter Stern’s anodized aluminum pieces are graceful and romantic abstractions that have a strongly linear quality. Melvin Schuler works in wood and his abstractions of large irregular blocks set in various esthetic arrangements make use of the natural beauty of the wood itself, and each piece is influenced to some extent by the wood of his choice.
Several of Lorser Feitelson’s serenely non-objective paintings have been added to the show along with the poetic and contemplative landscapes of Helen Lundeberg.
The Ceeje Gallery features recent paintings and drawings by Philip Pearlstein whose particular style of realism has a slightly stagy effect and displays Pearlstein’s considerable gift for showmanship. Of the drawings, Man and Woman Lying On A Couch comes off with the most punch and shows Pearlstein at his highest point of pictorial intensity.
The Group Show at Esther-Robles includes painters and sculptors. John Battenberg’s aluminum pieces, Spectre and Standing Ace, have a dominant quality, the latter being a rather large piece in a decidedly romantic vein. Robert Cremean’s Running Saint, which is somewhat reminiscent of de Chirico, also figures importantly in the group. Fletcher Benton shows pieces from his plexiglass “Synchromatic 660 Series” and Robert Thomas features his abstract sculpture to which color is also added as a further embellishment.
Of the painters featured, Richard Klix’s Symbol Structure is a rather cryptic lattice-work of blue paint oozed onto a plain red background falling more into the category of design. Samuel Clayberger’s Bride With White Veil features a very self-conscious, very pink nude carrying a bouquet of yellow flowers posed against a background of maroon and black fleurs-de-lis while Clayton Pinkerton’s baseballs Op their way to and fro as the case may be. Paul Jenkins displays a decorative abstract watercolor, Phenomena-Veiled Sky. Donald Bothwick’s canvases, Two Realities and Studies From The Book of Muybridge, have a quality of fantasy but their storybook sweetness fails to achieve truly poetic pungency. Thomas Bang’s Nowhere Tweeter, in its predominantly black despair embellished with a few zigzags of confetti color, just about sums it all up.
Paul Rivas shows both watercolors and drawings at Adele Bednarz. Many of the smaller pictures have been painted on the center section of paper doilies and the lace effect of the border design brings with it a touch of quaintness and originality.
At the Comara Gallery, George Geyer’s jars, vases and deliberately broken platters in their monotony of free formlessness offer little functional appeal except for a large samovar which looks as if it really could be used most practically for the serving of liquid refreshment.
––Estelle Kurzen
