Now moved to the La Cienega area, the Martin Janis Gallery offers a variety of paintings and prints by a number of big names: Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Berthe Morisot, Kandinsky, Matta, Miró, Pollock, Motherwell, Gottlieb, de Koening, Guston, Albers and Grandma Moses, an un­expected companion. Two featured pieces bear the signatures of Blume and de Chirico, yet neither exhibits the real vitality of which the artists were capable. Neither the magic in which Blume enveloped his romantic realism, nor the nostalgia that pervaded de Chi­rico’s works is present. Granted, the de Chirico piece refers to his period after the mid-twenties when the artist drifted into a curious romantic treatment of classic themes that have not been seen as historically equal to his earlier meta­physical work, yet some of these pieces are quite worth re-evaluating.

—C. P.