In preparing this show, Gilberg must have cut up every oil painting, drawing, print, watercolor and necktie he has, and rearranged them into some forty small assemblages, each an exhibition within itself. Which could be fun, or, as in these carefully prepared works, exceedingly tedious.
The linear purity of the bits of drawings and prints isolates them from the total pattern in the better ones, and would seem to indicate that Gilberg is particularly gifted in this field—and that his debt to Picasso is not inconsiderable. One wonders how much the croppings have improved them. They are crisp, clean fragments from plates still sharp. Surely no artist in his right mind could so mutilate his works unless he felt they were partly unrealized. Or, perhaps, was in a hurry to put a show together.
—E. M. Polley
