If its occasional bombs were carted away, the 1966 “20th Century Realists” exhibition at the Fine Arts Gallery would be one of the best annuals yet arranged by San Diego Fine Arts Festival, which has gathered some 80 paintings and a few drawings by 16 prominent past and present American realist artists. The exhibit’s biggest coup is Andrew Wyeth, who is represented by an interesting early tempera, Coldwell’s Island, and six superb watercolors. Also excellent are two large oils by Reginald Marsh: Subway––14th Street, a vivid, satirical painting, and Ten Cents a Dance, of a group of gaudy, garish women. There are also four fine Marsh ink-and-wash drawings of New York’s people and places.
A series of oils by Childe Hassam is most disappointing, save for the tiny Victory Parade. The semi-abstract landscapes of William Palmer are lusciously colored (green and blue, mostly) and textured, and no more than merely decorative. Dark and dreary are the words for several repetitive still lifes by Luigi Lucioni that the show could well do without. The single striking work among a hodge-podge of Morton Roberts canvases is the huge, sketchy Grand Marshal, a splendid dark figure against a vibrant yellow-ochre field. Hard-edge realist Paul Cadmus comes out provocative with a strange, Surrealistic scene of three nude people and an outdoor shower, a strongly symbolic still life of three tissue boxes titled Family Group, and three excellent, traditional figure drawings. Adding some welcome color to the generally dark exhibit are the well-composed, textured canvases of Robert Philipp, a traditional impressionist. His paintings of rosy, robust young women combing their hair and arranging flowers are charming and old-worldy, with delightful blues, greens and yellows. Conservative Henry Gasser has several good, straightforward, purely pictorial watercolors of New England farm and European city scenes.
The most powerful and controversial paintings are Billy Morrow Jackson’s three provocative, highly emotional, brilliantly composed and painted figure studies––The Divorcee, Jill and Who Is Sylvia?––a precise, curious watercolor of dried weeds and paper bags; and the strong, brooding Dark Side, one of his Negro protest pictures. Hot on Jackson’s heels is Paul Gorka with two wonderfully weird (if somewhat confusing) still lifes that verge on trompe l’oeil; The Cave, in which a horizontal human figure is dwarfed by mammoth rocks and an angry sky; Crucifixion, a mysterious symbolic-religious figure composed of a bloody white-yellow sheet; and an ominous foggy landscape with dark-clad men standing back to viewer.
Oils, watercolors and drawings by three of Philadelphia’s Tyler School group––Neil Kosh, David Levine and Burt Silverman––are an interesting group. All employ a soft, painterly, old-masterish technique, warm browns and muted earth colors, luminous darks and opaque lights. Best in this group, Kosh’s oils of young women at mundane matters are sensitive and rather poignant. Levine’s misty brown watercolor sketches are fragile, moody and exquisite. Silverman’s loosely rendered, fluid oils and drawings of sad and pensive people in momentary repose are wonderfully moving; he also has a lovely vista of Verona in the show.
Two other younger artists in the exhibit are less “significant” than their contemporaries, but still display painterly virtuosity. Oklahoman Jack Vallee has several simple, straightforward watercolors of New England scenes and subjects that are often Wyeth-like, and an imposing oil of a lone autumn leaf fallen lightly on a massive, subtly toned cobblestone field. Alba Heywood, the only Californian in the show, is represented by a number of introspective landscapes and interiors.
John Marin And Marsden Hartley, two of America’s foremost early 20th-century painters, have been splendidly joined in an outstanding two-man exhibition at the La Jolla Museum of Art. Marin’s works are both oils and watercolors, most of them of his adopted Maine, a few of New York and New Mexico. Best in both media are his semi-abstract interpretations of Maine’s rugged coasts and waters. The watercolors are loose and sparingly colored, with muted blues, greys and greens predominating and alternating with white paper and slashing black lines. Simple yet strong, there is great mood and movement and a feeling of fresh excitement in Marin’s wild waves, wind-ravaged rocky highlands and bounding boats. Equally appealing are a fragile green landscape and a delightful, fairly representational depiction of Machias, Maine, and some soft, delicate scenes of New York and its harbor.
Even sturdier are the Maine oils. These have the same subdued grey colors, and are bold and painterly. Highlighting this group are two green-blue canvases of Cape Split, a sketchy piece entitled The Lobster Fisherman, the exquisite blue Bathers and the pale, lively, rather abstract Boat and Sea in Greys. In both oils and watercolors, composition and line set the tone and establish the theme, while color is used primarily to accentuate forms and atmospheric effects. Basically, Marin’s pictures are more drawn than painted.
A Maine native, the less exuberant Hartley preferred to paint the land and the people of the land and sea, with robust, rugged, solid––and sometimes––stolid results. There is just one sea picture in the show: the superb grey and white After the Storm. An impressive piece is a simple, striking painting of a yucca cactus against a beautiful blue background that looks for all the world like Cézanne’s. Another strong work is Boots, a dark, brooding thing that recalls the early Van Gogh (Hartley’s pictures often remind one of someone else).
His figure paintings convey a sombre sense of tragedy and suffering. Especially excellent among these are the canvases of Nova Scotia fishermen and their women.
At the University of California, San Diego, Art Gallery are seventeen gigantic, somewhat overpowering landscapes by New York-born, Berkeley artist Robert Kabak that are comprised entirely of flatly painted triangles of assorted shapes and sizes, all of them tiny. They’re a sort of enlargement and intensification of the techniques of Monet and Seurat. Viewed close up, they are a hodge-podge of scattered geometrics, but from several feet away they take on wonderful forms and color areas that do indeed suggest the California mountain and valley vistas they represent. In the best of them there are strong light-shadow, brooding-bright contrasts, and their color combinations (pastels predominate, with now and then mono- and multichromatic arrangements of intense red, green, blue, orange and yellow tones) are effective, sometimes even spectacular. In many canvases, there is a sense of tension and movement created by the opposing directions of the multitudes of triangles.
The first exhibition on the West Coast of the recent bronze sculptures of Judith Brown is at the Jefferson Gallery. Executed by the new Shaw process of lost-wax casting, these works range from little to large and, with the exception of a couple of reddish-patinaed pieces, are uniformly black-and-brass-toned and richly and marvelously textured; many are almost rococo in their striking light against dark surface effects. Sculptress Brown combines human, animal, plant and landscape motifs––sometimes all at once––to make fantastic abstract-figurative forms. Her “human” figures, frequently headless, have wing or leaf-like arms (either one or two) and often seem to be soaring or about to soar. Or, as is the case with Baritone and Regina, they sit, stand, or stride in billowing robes. Always there is a lyrical sense of movement and life. Other sculptures have flower, leaf, mushroom and seashell themes, and there is a weird devil figure and two superb variations, big and tiny, of an eviscerated deer. Curiously, a strange miniature landscape cityscape abstraction is repeated in many of the works––on a leaf or wing, anywhere at all; it almost seems to be a signature. Complex and vibrant, all these pieces illuminate an artist’s world of fantasy and the beauty that can belong to bronze.
Two striking series of large oils and some small collages by rapidly developing San Diego artist Norma McGee make a splendid one-man show at Southwestern College. The “bigger” series is fascinating and provocative, with the backgrounds of all eight canvases geometric blocks of thin, flat red, yellow, blue and sometimes orange pigment separated by strips of white canvas in patterns only slightly varied. Dispersed around these bright fields are figurative images drawn in black, some of which reappear in several paintings. These include a quartet of tiny bicycle riders, falling and leaping humans, painted film strips of a nose and a broken egg, and white and black silhouettes of figures, legs, hands and heads against fragile black stripes or spare swaths of color.
—Marilyn Hagberg
