The biggest news to be heard this month in San Francisco is the appointment of Gerald Nordland as the director of the San Francisco Museum of Art. The directorship, vacant for eight months, will be filled ably by the new director if he is given the support, cooperation and power to reorganize the SFMA from top to bottom.
Mr. Nordland comes to the museum with perhaps more first-hand knowledge of California, its art scene, its artists and its problems than any person in a position to accept the post. Mr. Nordland’s experience within the art community has been of the broadest nature. At various times since his college career in Southern California he has written criticisms for a daily newspaper in Los Angeles, as well as for numerous monthly magazines. His latest critical endeavors were for Artforum in Los Angeles, where under his editorial leadership the substance and quality of the magazine truly reflected the kaleidoscopic art activity in the Los Angeles area.
Before receiving the post at the Gallery of Modern Art in Washington, D. C., Mr. Nordland was the Director of the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. His wide experience as teacher, lecturer, writer and administrator is much needed and very welcome in the Bay Area art community.
Boyd Allen, a member of the cooperative Berkeley Gallery, opened the gallery’s new space on Sansome Street in San Francisco. Years of trying to make the old premises on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley’s run-down West End work in terms of sales and attendance proved fruitless. The new quarters on the fringe of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast within walking distance of Bolles, Pomeroy, Dilexi, Quay and Hollis Galleries should prove to be a boon to the 20 artist-members.
Allen’s new paintings show off to great advantage in the combination of daylight and the discreet addition of artificial light of the gallery. His paint handling is less brushy and ambiguous in this exhibit than in either of his earlier shows in 1963 or 1964. There are large areas of simply stated greens, red-browns and reds making or breaking thrusting spatial planes leading in and out from interior to exterior. In the spatial sense they are akin to the Flemish primitives whose lack of what we now call scientific perspective led them to another system built around tightly woven design patterns and up-tilted and awry space development. Allen has arrived at this patterned quality through sophisticated means rather than visual naivete. The difficulty in this partially modeled, partially flattened system he employs is that in the hands of most artists it either recalls the Cubist pictorial architecture of Leger, Braque or Picasso of Analytical Cubism, or the later synthetic variety in combination with the former, or, as is more the case at present, a variety of lifeless neo-archaic picture-making drained completely of the animus so necessary for the life of the original art object. Allen avoids these pitfalls and imbues his work with a natural painterly tension largely unforced and unselfconscious. The only criticism Allen’s new work deserves on its own terms is the fact that in many of the paintings certain areas seem underworked in relation to neighboring passages, and even this criticism is minimal since it is a very natural result of an artist working with complicated design structures, intense color and large supports, in combination with new imagery.
The Quay Gallery in cooperation with the David Stuart Gallery is showing the new work of John Altoon. Altoon’s recent work falls in an area somewhere between painting and drawing and in so doing takes full advantage of the artist’s animated pen and ink line as well as the painterly nuance of pastel. The third element in the work is a sprayed look, probably obtained either from a pressurized can or atomizer and perhaps both. As usual Altoon gives the viewer a veritable feast of inventive forms in sly, erotic and highly amusing juxtapositions. Altoon is an absolute master at suggesting uncanny and improbable situations occurring within the forms painted and drawn on the large illustration board supports. Because of their independent liveliness his forms never cease becoming other things. The viewer ceaselessly reads into them at every turn, only to discover that they can’t be pinned down in any way.
Pat Lamerdin’s paintings and Gilbert Dellinger’s sculpture at the Horizon Gallery in Sausalito are so close in sensibility as to be made for each other, as the cliche goes. Mrs. Lamerdin’s paintings of automobiles, flowers, living rooms, chairs, commodes, and bathtubs are interpretations of things and places she is attached to and is at ease with, and yet they are rendered in bright flat colors remaining as unsentimental as one can be and still retain homey subject matter. The formal problems, for instance, of how to paint cornflowers in a green vase seen above and integrate the objects within the four edges of the picture support, are uppermost in the artist’s mind rather than the specific nuance of the flower petals. In concentrating on silhouette form, sometimes outlined in black and always acutely adjusted to the adjacent space coloristically, Mrs. Lamerdin has avoided the usual pitfalls of modern genre painting and has instead produced works of great decorative strength and beauty.
Gilbert Dellinger, an art student at San Francisco State College, arrives on the exhibition scene with a full blown sense of sculptural whimsy. He is intelligent enough visually (a rare characteristic in student work) to realize his humor will work only if the scale of his objects are exactly adjusted to their absurd function. For instance in a piece titled Golden Eagle 1965 the structure of the piece follows the intended function of a mobile bird cage, or people-cage if necessary. The size and conceptual flagrancy of the work attract one on the visual level as well as a literary plane, as if the piece were a three-dimensional illustration of what Dorothy used to journey in from Kansas to the Land of Oz.
Jack Carrigg’s latest exhibit at the Triangle Gallery’s new Sutter Street location is very impressive and shows dramatically the carefully articulated growth of a young artist within a strict formalist esthetic. The forms within a vertical, roughly four by five foot canvas are of various widths but of the same lengths, as in Carrigg’s last exhibit. The rigid parallelism is broken by bending the edges of the color bars either in toward the center or out toward the edge setting up an uncanny dissonance when reading the forms from right to left. In some of the pictures the effect is rather like watching one string plucked on a bass violin and attending closely to its movements in relation to its static neighbors. This is a secondary visual effect and probably not sought by Carrigg. His primary concern, as before, seems to be the acutely sensitive adjustment of space and color intervals of thick to thin, dark to light and color to color in increasingly perceptive relationships.
At the Arleigh Gallery Edward Handelman’s new collage paintings are at once larger and overtly figurative. Handelman exploits the torn affiche with all its inherent graphic memories coupled with a rich paint surface usually functioning as indeterminate deep space. The torn papers are arranged to suit the single or grouped figures depicted and don’t function as extra-visual protest. All the works have a lyrical quality arrived at through careful manipulation of paint and paper without falling into the cheap sentimentality so often seen when faceless figures are placed in spatial voids. It is to Handelman’s credit that he has avoided the trap but one would like to see more articulated space around the figures and behind them. Perhaps a reason for this desire to “see more” is the richness of the medium itself. The figures seem trapped when so many pictures present themselves in roughly the same manner. At any rate Handelman has proven he is capable of increasing the scale of his collages without losing the richness and delicacy of the smaller works.
Takami Sakuri, also showing at the Arleigh Gallery, proves to be a collagist of great merit but of an entirely different order than Handelman. Sakuri builds boxes and decorates them in true Surrealist fashion with improbable delights such as false eyes, mouldering bread (under glass and yet one can’t help fantasizing the unmistakable smell), fish and dinner ware. Sakuri’s collage vision, complete with compulsively painted small motifs on the edges and sometimes covering a whole piece, is far superior to anything seen at the exhibit of modern Japanese art at the San Francisco Museum a few months ago.
Ynez Johnston opens another new gallery on Sutter Street with an exhibition of oils, watercolors and prints. The Stewart-Verde Gallery also maintains a store front on Union Street specializing in graphic work. Miss Johnston shares a linear fantasy with John Altoon although she uses it in a different manner. Her fantasies are more architectural than the viscera Altoon depicts. The beautifully rendered watercolors that become complete environments are the most memorable works of this ex-San Franciscan now residing in Southern California.
––James Monte
