Connor Everts shows drawings, paintings and graphics in his second one-man show at the Comara Gallery. The drawings and lithographs are crowded with messages concerning man’s lack of concern for his fellows. There is a deeply intentional philosophic content that pervades and possesses these graphic statements. By contrast the paintings are lyrical, idealistic, concerned with technical means and honest control of medium. Here the artist can give as much attention to a fold of bed linen as he can for man’s inhumanity in a drawing. The exhibit suggests a personal conflict in the artist between

An Australian living in Spain, Hodgkinson is exhibiting seventeen canvases, most of them large, numbered from seven to twenty-three, all bearing the appellation California, indicating a universality in the artist that is respectably lived up to in the pictures. Hodgkinson’s paint smolders rather than blazes; he favors ochers, umbers and sulfurous reds. There is little or no figuration in the work, but there is a pronounced imagery of a primeval, subterranean nature, linking the pictures to the work of New York artist Paul Jenkins, although there is not the cataclysmic regeneration implicit in

Bradley, a longtime Santa Barbara artist, is enjoying his second one-man show in the museum. A graduate of the Cate School and Harvard University, his work is as conservative as those two institutions, and this is not bad, at least not in his case. He does not pick recognizable shapes from a melange of accidental splatter, nor break them down after setting them in place. He sees a picture in a barn, or the shambles of a silo, and he paints it. Bradley’s art, as a matter of fact, is a continuation of the 19th century tradition, but before dismissing it as unstylish and anachronistic, remember

Efraim Modzelevich is showing oils and gouaches from the past two years at the Ryder Gallery during June. Born in Argentina and reared in Israel, Modzelevich shows an interest in the international style of anonymous abstraction which grows out of “good French painting.” His loaded brush strokes establish a ground color or harmony upon which he develops a linear scaffolding which takes on the perspective feel of a movie-set street. Often the colors are tastefully keyed in close harmonies. The surface is reasonably attractive and “painty.” The subject is bland, meaningless. Everything is terribly

Figurative graphic works, sometimes a trifle too eclectic but always highly skilled, tastefully executed and admirably controlled. Utilizing sensitive staccato lines which allow ample air to seep in, around, and beyond an otherwise enclosed torso. Subtle inventions—the manner in which a knee or a deltoid is improvised—make his distortions emotionally meaningful. His drawings are by far more distinctive and superior to his graphic-prints, particularly numbers 9, 22, and 25, in which tremendously powerful, free images fairly bristle with the dynamics inherent in black, white and grey, and in line.

Non-objective all-over paintings by a New York artist who uses distinctive warm and cool color keys in a topographical imagery as personal as it is rich. A festive textural celebration takes place in Landlock, where red marries green. Other works have sensitively figured-out color combinations which appear as translucent separations moving across one another so that each painting seems to have several simultaneous states. In the earlier oils, colors ooze as lava might, differing markedly in spirit from the most recent ones where the forms are clearly defined, flat, crusty and refined to a high

Using the paleness of his white canvas as an element into which his Slavonic-looking still lives and morbid women can plastically move or disintegrate into nothingness, Lubner caresses dry or oily, muddy, smudged, sickly color onto rather than into genre scenes. Defaced, wicked women, sometimes nude, are starkly painted in arrangement which barely tolerate decoration. This is not to put the artist down. On the contrary, he has something important, though disturbingly unattractive, to say. Perhaps the very ugliness of the pigment application is his point; perhaps this troubled offensiveness is

Dream-world Italianate landscape fantasies executed with refined, youthful charm and imaginative, motherly care, combine a tight, highly-finished picture surface with a seemingly naive penchant for the mysterious. The Piazza della Signoria and fragments of other familiar landmarks depicted as they might have been hazily remembered rather than seen. Smoothly modeled form and deep, razor-sharp, geometric edges of shadows work well with the bright, child like, joyous colors of Miss Chaves’ happy palette. Unpretentious, unprofound, uncomplicated and uncluttered, these architectural improvisations

Ernest Lacy is holding his annual exhibit at the Heritage Gallery with recent paintings and a group of drawings. Perhaps best known as a draftsman and printmaker, Mr. Lacy is pushing painting. The oils tend to appear as colored drawings. Paint is not handled with understanding. The forms are not conceived and executed in the paste but are found in line and then a color-substance is applied. As a result there is no life to the forms. Lacy’s drawings are much better understood. Michelangelesque figures pose in affected contrapposto. There is much hatching and shadow making and general playing with

However sinister the dreams of Brauner, who undeniably culls them as a connoisseur, the Rumanian-born artist’s humor remains intact. A Surrealist who was there when it happened, in Bucharest on his own and in Paris with the regulars, Brauner has maintained a stylistic integrity over the years. His thirty-four drawings and encaustics are a lively testament to his impeccable draftsmanship and ironic wit: His mechanical men, for instance, are not so much like Leger-type Wizard of Oz robots as they are like Chaplin’s famed cinema spoof of the man on the assembly line. His work is littered with the

A Latin term originally meaning cradle or birthplace, incunabula now applies to books printed before 1500 A.D. Printing is design, of course, and also art, needless to add. Superb proof of this is the exhibit here through the courtesy of Ferdinand Roten of Baltimore, Maryland. The collection, assembled over a forty-year period by Frederick Werther, also includes maps and illustrations.

—Larry Rottersman

The San Francisco version of what they are doing in New York is embodied in the work of 16 artists, whose pictures are here through the good offices of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, which assembled the exhibit especially for Santa Barbara. The work is mostly along the lines of abstract expressionism, not of Pollock and de Kooning, or the newer front of Larry Rivers and others, but maybe closer to Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, although they are a jump backward in time. There is a good deal of figuration in these canvases, which, happily, works most of the time. The quality is

Miniscule watercolor with pen and ink drawings by a 22-year-old San Franciscan in his first Los Angeles showing. Evocative, round and square, intimate landscape and figure allegories of discipline, skill, and a total lack of affection. The incredible cross-hatched, doodling, swirling detail vaguely reminds one of a colorful modern Beardsley illustration, only in the best sense. Van Aver disintegrates form and re-assembles it again with one visual swoop—and all there for the viewer to consume in one heaping glance, thanks to the small format of these glistening, structural, graphic, poetic

“Los Angeles Businessmen Collect Art—Rembrandt to Picasso” is the mouthful of a title for the Municipal Art Department’s current Barnsdall Park installation. 77 works are loaned by fifteen collectors and six corporations in addition to a group of photographs illustrating recent architectural commissions in eleven new business buildings. A great deal of the painting and sculpture is quite dull. Many of the great names included in the show are represented by works of mediocre quality. Highlights of the collections are the Rubens’ Portrait of Phillip IV, and the group of Rembrandt etchings. A

The Paul Plummer Gallery is devoting itself to a group of the stable’s artists with each contributing one or two canvases. The gallery is interested in a wide range of figurative and non-figurative work, including American and Japanese graphics. Of chief interest in the May selection are Donald Totten’s large landscapish abstraction, Robert Brawley’s decorative arrangement in grays with its rich surface handling, and Bill Dunning’s highly colored oil, Interior.

—Gerald Nordland

The Los Angeles Art Association showcased drawing in its recent exhibit. The association’s membership works in a variety of drawing materials and techniques. Much of the show is shallow and many works could be questioned as drawings. Joe Carmichael’s Vase is a simple thing and well executed. Elise’s little Kandinsky-like paper is a gem. Ejnar Hansen’s portrait is a high point in an indifferent exhibition which pretentiously claims high ideals.

—Gerald Nordland

An incredible pastiche of Eskimo-Mexican folkcraft was baked into sweetly rendered ceramics by Coronel, who can cook a mean potboiler, no doubt about it. His Jinete and Mujer, two women, one might guess Eskimo and Mexican, respectively, are slick mannerisms of folk images with a glossy overlay gleaned, it would seem, from a walk around the garden sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On the other hand, Jardin Encantado, a figure imprisoned by a cross hatching of bars, is comparatively strong, but this is not being generous, really. Coronet’s craftsmanship is apparently first class;

The Dwan Gallery has moved to a new location in Westwood Village during May and has opened with the assemblages of the French “Nouveau Realiste” Arman. The artist is best known for his “accumulations”—plastic fronted boxes enclosing many examples of a single kind of object, automobile horns, alarm clocks, medicinal ampules, toy six-guns, ink wells or ladies’ shoes. The very simple power of repetition found in the massing of these forms works a strange magic, as if of incantation. In the “Furies”—objects destroyed or transformed by a furious instant of action and preserved in their transformation—one

The major exhibit of sculpture and drawings by Bourdelle (French 1861–1929) is a refreshing and overdue re-examination of the romantic sculpture of a bygone day when important artists still reckoned with the Greek ideal, or at least admitted to the involvement.

Bourdelle’s style is credited with fostering the sentimental statuary found in parks and public monuments. The difference between sentiment and sentimentality was scrupulously observed by him, however, even though his imitators did not.

Rodin, a contemporary of Bourdelle, overshadowed his genius but did not deny it, declaring in a much-quoted

Author Thorn Smith’s delightful young ladies have been reincarnated with wit and an attentive eye for gesturing detail that gets down to the many bottoms of the matter. Poucette, a 27-year-old French artist, who uses no first name, bejewels her pictures with phosphoric-white girls, whose size would not inhibit them from slipping through the necks of wine bottles. They cavort in fountains, languish in bordellos, and wage war with whimsey and disarming charm. Tired businessmen will find in them new entertainments; but they should not be left entirely to the boys. Poucette is an intensely personal

Friedensohn’s pictures are large, predominantly of the figure, and monochromatic. His figures are usually male, muscular, vacuous, and possibly come from the Lonely Crowd, as seen one by one. Their presence, perceived out of cloud-like masses of freely applied paint, is unobtrusive, only slightly disconcerting, and one wonders why Friedensohn bothered with them in the first place. An art instructor at Queens College, he has had seven one-man shows.

—Larry Rottersman

Hibbits is a widely known artist in Santa Barbara and Buellton, where his fame might be attributed to his popularization of modern art from 1905 to 1945. His work is by turns Cézannesque (Autumn Festival), Picassoesque Yellow Bird), and just plain picturesque. His approach in starting indicates semi-automatic methods in which the paint is free-falling and scrambled, then tied into decorative packages with figurative designs, usually pretty, which often are scrawled with scarcely any connection to the rest of the work. His pictures are sunny-bright, decorative, serving a need no doubt, but hardly

Lobdell, a second generation abstract expressionist living in San Francisco, murmurs with a slight New York accent, but has his own way of speaking, too. His pictures are tightly organized, despite their heroic sizes, and are named after calendar months. Clusters of brain-outlined colors and amoebic chains flit across creamy surfaces, with purpose and direction. Positive spaces seemed to be carved into position although Lobdell handles paint relatively thinly.

—Larry Rottersman

It was announced that Miss Hedda Hopper was on hand at the opening of this group show of work by John Broadhurst, Jerry Edlund, George Magnan, Bruce McCracken, Richard McKenzie, Poko Petek, Ann Spencer and Jean Wilson. Maybe Miss Hopper found something appropriate to say of the rampant cheerfulness evidenced in the exhibit.

—Larry Rottersman

This 26-year-old artist’s landscapes and figures are best when he avoids theatrical decoration. The smudged colors and fuzzy edges of his forms are attractive enough, except for one or two examples, but his subjects depend dangerously on corn for appeal. Hitesman is plentifully talented but should acquire more respect for his work and his potential.

—Arthur Secunda

Seeing this exhibition one quickly comes to realize that Broderson is an artist of tragic innocence. Tragic, because one is struck with the immediacy of a profound pictorial loneliness and a rare, pure, deep-welled search for spiritual understanding. Innocence, because both on human and formal levels, he is a child seeking a soul. He tries to objectify what his visions report. To his advantage, and a fortunate consequence of this dilemma, is that he interprets this world without moral judgement, and his commentaries are based on conviction that is a joy to behold. The exhibition, an enormous

In this well-known New York artist’s second show in less than a year here, light oils, gouaches and drawings of city scenes and children are only appetizer fare. Heavily outlined forms and rather dry, earthy, somber colors, modify semi-cute subjects. The exhibition somehow seems to be the remains of a good show, something that was perhaps left over rather than specifically selected. One would hope for more careful editing in Kleinholz’s next viewing here.

—Arthur Secunda

Sunset Strip is an appropriate setting for the sexy religious subjects of a Mantegnesque Italian with a tweak of La Dolce Vita. Surreal by intent, Pagliacci juxtaposes Eros with Jesus, risqué party girls at the mockery, bulls with Roman portals and flaming, hearty hi-ho Silvers with stately cathedrals. This sort of protest, if that’s what it is, is old hat. The best of these paintings are quite good—when the artist settles down to making a picture and forgets about banal theatricality. The peculiar blend of Freud, the settecento, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Donizetti’s Paglicco make up too sweet a

Leonard Cutrow is holding his first one-man show of drawings at the Santa Monica Gallery during June. Long recognized for his painting, draftsmanship and teaching, Mr. Cutrow is a dedicated craftsman and virtuoso experimenter. His show is the product of a continuing search for communication through symbol and technique. The artist utilizes a broad vocabulary of materials and ideas—papers, cloths, boards, ink, pencil, charcoal, wash, three foot stick-pens. None of these tools or materials are used for themselves but as vehicles to free the artist from cliche and standard habits of the skilled

Everett Ellen is showing a remarkable collection of drawings by the late Arshile Gorky. Spreading from 1929 to 1947, the year before the artist’s tragic suicide, the selection of pen, pencil and crayon works could hardly be improved upon. The patent reference to the work of Picasso, Leger, Matta and the surrealist expatriates are candid and significant in Gorky’s development. At his best, and he reaches this apex many times in the show, Gorky was one of the most powerful and seminal influences on the developing “new American painting.” Held in conjunction with the publication of Harold Rosenberg’s

Dean of Irish painters and the brother of poet William Butler Yeats, Jack Yeats, who died in 1957, was influenced early in life by French Impressionism. Turning to a kind of Kokoschkan Expressionism which suited the intensity of his frenetic moods, Yeats began to acquire a world-wide reputation during the years of the Irish struggle for independence. As his work evolved into the famous romantic style of his 1933–55 works, (many excellent examples of which are on view at Landau’s) it was not long before he helped to stimulate a rebirth and re-interest in Irish art. His loose forms, sunlight

A mixed-up, uneven group show marks the debut of yet another gallery. The works of Shlomo Mokady, Esther Peretz, Mane Katz, Johanan Simon, Esther Lurie, Mario Russo, B. Pomey, and Delacroix (no first name, no relation to Eugene) are featured among others. Mme. Delacroix is a kind of French Grandma Moses, painting ceramic-like, highly textured still-lives of deep personal conviction and honesty. Mokady, on the other hand, is a strongly disciplined draftsman from Israel whose subtle, evocative, isolated figures are dramatic interpretations in the French Romantic tradition. Katz’ simple rendering

Varied works covering a span of almost ten years by a highly skilled draftsman who shows himself to be equally at home in many mediums and styles. Indeed, in his paintings at least, this may be his undoing: the self-conscious insecurity of not feeling at home with any one personal idiom, (even taking the retrospective nature of his exhibition into consideration). His sculpture is executed in galvano bronze, which allows him free play with materials of varied malleability, texture and character. Though small in format, monumental in concept, especially the better pieces such as Saint France and

Roy de Forest is holding his first local one-man show at the new Dilexi Gallery—the southern branch of the well known San Francisco establishment. A veteran of Bay Area and local group shows, de Forest has unveiled a new technical means in this show. He utilizes an impasto surface that adds variety to his work. Occasionally the chaos of shapes, relief forms, painted strings of dots and stripes falls together with some success, as in the Diary of a Flapper. This work has a unity in vulgarity that recalls Max Weber’s Chinese Restaurant, Severini, and other radicals of 40 years ago. More often,