Many of us travel thousands of miles to visit the cave paintings of southern France and northern Spain, and yet remain com­pletely ignorant of the great wealth of prehistoric art to be found here in North America. Surprisingly enough one of the least known aspects of this art are the prehistoric and proto-historic rock drawings and paintings. Slowly though, an increased interest is being shown for this art, not only by archae­ologists, ethnologists and art historians, but by collectors and the pubIic at large. This exhibition of 25 reproduc­tions of prehistoric Chumash Indian cave paintings

This mish-mosh fiesta exhibi­tion seems to feature anybody who wants to hang a picture on the wall. Nevertheless, several good works are included, almost as if by accident. Wil­liam Hesthal’s dramatic, calligraphic drypoint Small Big Crowd easily stands out as the finest work in the show. Of special note also are Margaret Hart’s free watercolor improvisation Dave Brubeck #2, and Gary Chafe’s strangely evocative family scenes, executed in pencil and gaudy poster colors.

––Arthur Secunda

This all-oil show of original hand-­painted paintings is made up of ef­forts by Charles Bragg, Richard Mc­Kenzie, Jerry Edlund, John Broadhurst, Mel Brenner, Nadine Hoskins and Geoffrey Lewis. Meadow, a Hopper-­like sun-bathed landscape by Lewis seemed to be the only work of more than average interest in a decidedly average show.

––Arthur Secunda

Intimate, lyrical graphics and wash drawings of figures and land­scapes, sometimes a trifle too charm­ing, sometimes both sensitive and penetrating (as in Cabeza), by a Chilean, Paris-trained artist, are exe­cuted with a high degree of technical facility and a keen sense of drama. Miss Senoret walks a tightrope between the banal and the profound.

––Arthur Secunda

This overcrowded exhibi­tion of small paintings should have been a small exhibition. If it had been more carefully edited down to include Helen Lundeberg’s Studio­ Night, Aimee Bourdieu’s Festival, Ruth Rothstein’s Landscape, Ernest Velardi’s Poet’s Dream, Max Bailey’s Two Rocks, J. B. Thompson’s welded sculpture entitled Bird Machine, plus a very few others, it could have been a first-class show.

––Arthur Secunda

An exhi­bition of Italian and Dutch drawings and prints features varied works by lesser known artists of the 17th and 18th centuries. Highlight of the show is a pen and wash rendering, executed over a preliminary charcoal drawing, by Genoese artist Alessandro Magnasco (1677–1749). Though the setting of this drawing is a peaceful mythological genre scene, Magnasco’s romantic fer­vor is nevertheless in strong evidence.

––Arthur Secunda

A respectable but inauspicious group exhibition of paintings, drawings, watercolors and sculpture by artists in the gallery’s stable is notable for its homogeneity if not for its high level of quality. Saburo Nakayama’s juicy landscapes, Walter Cleveland’s sensual imagery in The Kiss, Dean Spille’s wistful Lake, and sculpture by Marcus White and Ken Glenn, merit special at­tention.

––Arthur Secunda

This group show is uneven. Of some interest are the rather bold Impressionist and Post-Impressionist (Cézanne) related oils by Charles Ranson, a teacher of English History at Yuma, Arizona. Es­sentially a statement in color, the rather fresh Figure by Walter Quirt of the University of Minnesota deserves some attention as a water color sketch. Ray Moyer’s New York success could be at­tributed more to fashion than merit. There are others but interest centers on the featured work of William Dole and Marie-Anne Poniatowska. Perhaps the most impressive of Dole’s works here is Sign for Foggy Night.

The first one­-man show in Los Angeles of the works of Ralph Johnson is a little disappoint­ing, probably because it has caught the artist in a period of transition. The Burning Bush of 1960 is a fine canvas; against it, most of the 1962 paintings are less convincing. Ralph Johnson has, for some time, taken his inspiration from nature but whereas the relation to the physical world was, in the earlier works, a tenuous one, it is now more immediate. It is in moving away from the almost totally abstract toward a condensation of the particular that the artist has been faced with new issues.

The first group of sketches is comprised of a series of cubist-inspired works dating from 1915 to 1917, a period when Miró belonged to the Sant-Lluck Circle in Barcelona. These drawings are lusty, subtly mod­eled and highly formalized. They rep­resent the work of a man searching for form, order, and a relationship with the external world. The torsos are mobile, solid, angular. They reflect an academic attitude in their logic of con­struction. The Old Man is a Poussin­esque Neptune whose limbs are pic­torially dissected in a manner not un­like the way Cézanne might have drawn after the old master.

Combining the spirit of Leger’s “art mechanique” with the compulsive for­mal clarity and minute detail of the surrealists, Greenough tightly models crystalline shapes and warm tapestry-like colors into remarkable fantasies, the contexts of which are surprising and, perhaps, Freudian. Occasionally, his gaudy brilliant yellows, reds and blues are vulgar, but when they work, they are exquisite in the Grand man­ner. Greenough’s large major opus, entitled The Klansmen, is made up of vibrant, ephemeral, flame-like shapes which melt into one another. Composed around a monumental triangular struc­ture,

Arleen Goldberg and Maxwell Hendler form a man-and-­wife team for exhibition at the Ceeje Gallery. Both come out of the graduate school of the University of California at Los Angeles, both are concerned with the image and both have merit in the direct boldness of statement to be found in their painting. Of the two, there is greater consistency in the work of Arleen Goldberg even though she has many problems yet to solve. The vitality of color and vigor of painting, natural assets of the artist, do not compensate for a lack of structure. Curiously one is reminded of Matisse but in a maverick

This show represents the artist’s first one-man exhibition at this Museum. Secunda treads a deliberately precarious path in seeking to amal­gamate several diverse elements found in contemporary art. For in his paintings he has brought together two rather distinct traditions, that of a loose, free and highly spontaneous technique char­acterized by the use of a heavy im­pasto, and a very disciplined division of the picture plane into precise rectil­inear forms. Thus one is confronted on the one hand with a technique which comes very close to being the very subject matter of the work and on the

Metamorphozing the substance of earth into clearly de­fined but fragmented emblems via highly textured, elemental formal sym­bols, Herold paints and carves painting­ reliefs (assemblage and dessemblage) with self-conscious nobility. Seemingly inspired by medieval visions, he relates the mystical nature of nature to a som­ber, mat and shiny, tomblike imagery as rich in pictorial inventiveness as it is full of poetic reverie. Derived from the contemporary mannerism of “art brut,” Herold’s totemic objects are physically cut, incised and severed in such ways as to allow images from one plane to peek

Bettina Brendel, who was born in Luneburg, was invited to show with the first group of abstract painters in post-war Germany in 1951. That same year she came to the United States. Her canvases at the Pasadena Art Museum date from 1960 when she was involved in an over-all horizontal and vertical orientation of rectangular screen-like areas. The ground was flat and the negative space almost non­existent. In 1961, particularly in the “Density” series, the screen pattern be­comes one of sticks in tension. In Den­sity VII there begins a kind of re­versal in the ground where color areas and pattern

The selective eye of Felix Landau, which has characterized his gallery choices for some time, is again evident in the exhibition of Recent Acquisitions. To single out outstanding works is to admit honestly to personal choice; even so, exclusion is difficult. There is a Lachaise pencil drawing, Female Nude, and a Henry Moore, Study: Heads in water color and ink. Both have tremendous sculptural form, suggested by different means but equal­ly enthralling. There are two fine Ben Nicholson pieces, a 1953 oil and pencil on wood and an oil wash, September 1960 which echoes much of Ozenfant. There are

This ex­hibit consists of two separate exhibi­tions: the paintings of the nineteenth century California artist William Keith (1838–1911), and the Robert B. Honey­man, Jr. collection of early California art. The two exhibitions represent the Museum’s contribution to the annual Santa Barbara old Spanish days cele­bration. The value of the Honeyman collection rests almost entirely in the world of history and ethnology and per­haps to a certain degree in the realm of Folk Art. As paintings, few could very well stand on their own feet. The only marginal exceptions are two small oils by Alver Bierstadt,

Perhaps the nature of the “Big Show” dooms it from the outset. Individual paintings want to live their own individual lives; from the time of their birth they were never intended to be artifacts com­peting in popularity contests. High-minded, all-embracing goals of patrons and juries do not guarantee satisfying results. The pleasure of communicating intimately with paintings rarely has any­thing to do with whether we are wit­nessing a “trend,” “direction,” “tend­ency,” or “masterpiece.”

Hallmark Card Company, with the help of the Wildenstein Gallery in New York, has been putting on showcases of