This in­teresting group of three graduate stu­dents and a recent deserter from the Art Institute do not hold that they were victimized, but say that they feel their work deserves a showing. However, at least one of them, Karl Rosenberg, the non-graduate renegade, believes that there is little encouragement from es­tablished artists for beginners who want stubbornly to find their own way, with­out guidance from the experts.

Rosenberg apparently likes to solve his problems one at a time. He is trying to learn again to draw so he draws on his paintings with unfortunate conse­quences for the paintings. He is inter­ested in the figure so he treats his back­grounds summarily. Rosenberg may eventually get somewhere this way––he certainly is trying hard enough––but he sacrifices immediate results to do it.

Milton Komisar is a graduate student at the University of California. His color is strong and effective but he owes too obvious a debt to the German Ex­pressionists and, in his recent, more lyrical work, to Matisse. Komisar is an experimenter but unlike Rosenberg he is concerned with the total painting. He likes to set himself difficult spatial problems like the awkwardly twisted leg of the woman in New Year’s Day. (In this case he has reached an admirable solution to the problem but unfortu­nately this area does not work with the rest of the painting.) Curiously, his sub­mission to the jury, Harry’s Breakfast, is one of his least adventuresome works. It was rightly rejected but Komisar has real ability which should begin to ful­fill itself before very long.

Elizabeth Murray exhibits two large, loosely painted oils in which assorted insignia are scattered about a solid-­colored ground. (The green one seems to be a somewhat amorphous landscape.) The color is inept and the organization considerably too slack but somehow there is an integrity of purpose that in­dicates Miss Murray may yet develop into a painter of value.

Barbara Scales’ paintings of Broken Plumbing in Oakland are daring at first glance but tamed by her color which works like black and white. Her other paintings are in actual black and white. They are organic abstracts, good student work.

—Helen Giambruni