These paintings and drawings reflect, in a variety of media, the artist’s essentially lyrical and poetic vision.

Darrow is at his best in the skillfully rendered charcoal, ink wash, and pencil drawings. His draftsmanship is sure, and his knowledge of the subtleties and intricacies of these materials is impressive. Some of his oil paintings retain the essential character of these drawings; forms emerge from layers of thin, transparent oil washes applied almost like watercolor. Working with opaque, undiluted oils, Darrow is less successful; the compositions tend to disintegrate and become messy.

In this exhibition, an annual show of the Society’s members, one can see unfortunate proof of the idea that nobody is very interested in watercolor nowadays. More than half of the entries used opaque media in a manner that might just as well have incorporated oils; others used collage elements to detract from the medium, and transparent watercolors without regard to their unique properties. In no instance did a participating artist attempt to explore the possibilities of the watercolor medium.

The entries by Clinton Adams, Stevan Kissel and James L. Odgers stood out from the general anonymity of

Carillo’s paintings and polychrome wood sculptures usher us into an eerie, timeless world where space capsules land in Beverly Hills swimming pools, snail-size dinosaurs cavort on garden walls, and tomorrow never comes.

In both sculpture and painting, Carillo works with thin, translucent washes of brilliant color, then lacquers the surface to a high gloss. His obvious ease in the medium, plus courageous color sense produce jewel-tone surfaces of remarkable beauty.

His imagery encourages comparison with other artist-fantasts—Hieronymus Bosch, for one. They seemed to have tapped the same inner source

This is one of the best installed poor exhibits one is likely to ever run across. Mentor Huebner’s mundane oils have all the wit and verve of a Woolworth’s postcard, but unfortunately reduce their locale (California, Paris, Spain) to some place without interest or life. Sando’s very usual, decorative, welded metals of iron flowers and paralyzed bird’s wings offer nothing, and Renée Groch’s “good draftsmanship” results in subject matter only a notch above wide-eyed moppets, clowns and all that.

—Clair Wolfe

Collector and photographer Bob Willoughby has put together a fascinating exhibit based upon the incredible range of the word “primitive.” Of course, by no stretch of the imagination can Grandma Moses, Eden Box, Peyronnet, Vivin and the like have anything to do with African Dance Masks, Ipugaw ritual figures, Peruvian clay sculptures, or rare Cameroon Bronze Masks, but Willoughby did it and it worked. Bouncing about from Peyronnet’s stiffly isolated and moving figures in Le Picnic to Jaliscan stone figures turns out to be an infinitely rewarding journey. One is left with a rare appreciation for

Apparently parently aimed at the holiday trade, this young out-of-the-way gallery has virtually plastered the walls and loaded the shelves with paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, ceramics and jewelry, all priced below $50. For the most part trivia, there is one member, of 15 shown, Philip Lewis, whose small but handsomely executed pencil and pen drawings are head and shoulders above anything else in the place and who will be blessed with a one-man show on these premises in the near future. Also on hand are photographs by Lou Jacobs, a sensitive portrait of a young boy by Joseph Ma Dena,

A most incredible group of painting-collage-sculpture-things is the current fare at Ernest Raboff Gallery. Pebbles, sand, seaweed, driftwood, seashells, and, yes, starfish combine with the more traditional materials of oil paint and canvas to produce a batch of brilliantly colored, primitive figures that dance, run, twist, turn, and even seem to pop off the picture surfaces.

At times, these are really fun. In the surrealistic Emergence of the Siren, for example, fanciful figures cavort against a Dali-like landscape of orange sun and navy-blue ground. A huge driftwood club projects from a tiny

For an artist to be able to sequester himself artistically, if not physically, from the brutalities of our contemporary world is a sometimes enviable accomplishment. Painter Leonard Creo, American-born but currently working in Italy, has managed this neatest of tricks by isolating his gentle but impersonal vision on only the most ingenuous of subjects, children at play in the streets, in the marketplace, in school yards, and in just plain space. The obviously organized groupings are seemingly observed from on high by Creo acting as some sort of a hovering guardian angel recording in oil the

Miss Chaves, a sophisticated self-taught painter, fortunately does not suffer from that quaint condition of horror vacuii narration which many find to be the sole saving grace of primitives. Rather, hers is a clear-eyed, bright-hued, paper cut-out view of lively-shaped objects often set before a hard blue sky. While the sail boats and groups of nuns are more easily light hearted and decorative in intent, her limited still lifes possess the gay lapidary qualities of a surrealist “pietre dure”—the organization of a few brilliant bits of intarsia bounded by an architectural frame of forced and

A collection of drawings including a small composite Venice by Berman about which one is apt to say “I think I know just where that is!” because a piece of the Dogana is showing and a curlicue of the Salute; two works by R. Fukui which are partly silk screen, partly etching, one, of a bottle and a saucepan a. 1a Morandi, and one, a flower piece with cobwebs and cracks; a large Campigli lithograph of the artist’s version of an Amiens-like facade so beloved of Ruskin and Proust; a Leger lithograph in the familiar manner; an Ethiopian drawing on goat skin for the aficionado of this sort of thing—very

The bulk of this show is composed of drawings and paintings made by Warshaw in conjunction with the execution of his mural of Ulysses at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also showing a series of drawings which are illustrations done for a book by Stephen Lackner and recently published in Munich.

The thematic paintings, results of the mural, are of unusual interest; they lend additional scope and insight into the development and evolution of mural and its final form. These paintings however also stand alone, complete and forceful entities. Warshaw worked them out frequently as

The compositions are grimly serious intellectualizations, likened to music, in inventions and variations concerning processes of change: every step of the convolutions of a progression. The major efforts (with all the accompanying strain which that word implies) are elaborated rhythms of arabesques, sharp angles (preferably diagonals), and organic patterns. Accompanied by their orchestrations of a full color and value range, and maximum two-dimensional plasticity, they recall the controlled chaos of decorative modernism so fashionable circa World War I. This because Ball’s path retraces, in

A young painter who, until recently, had never been outside the continental United States. The present exhibition is the fruit of time spent in Mexico during which Mr. Lacy regaled himself with its churches and monuments. This is a kind of painting one rarely sees nowadays; it is illustrative and as smooth as a page from the Saturday Evening Post yet the canvases, upon close scrutiny, are beautifully textured. The artist has as peculiarly a static quality as a student of architecture: even his foliage, in almost every painting, is at rest. Temperatures are very evident, Mr. Lacy painting shade,

Corzas’ paintings depict calm troupes of brigands with a softened debt owed to Goya’s late period House of the Deaf Man murals. Built by glazed blushes of low key earth colors, silhouetted before a broad expanse of sienna rear lighting, his figures possess a faintly melancholy but imposing presence by establishing direct contact with the viewer. With their generalized bodies and caricature faces of broad lips and wandering, walleyed stares, they seem harmless enough. But by their very structural vaporousness, materialized as if from the dusky glow of a regional, romantic twilight of past glory,

For three years artist in residence at the University of Iowa, Freemark shows a series of large watercolor landscapes—coloring rich and somber, overlaid with charcoal—in which there is a persistent beat that makes itself felt in a bold up-and-down stroke. In a large oil entitled Tree House, Mr. Freemark changes his “beat” into oval configurations which are just as musical, filling the work with a joyful rhythm as of the childhood expectation of leafy isolation. Mexican Holiday, a large, bisected oil painting is a stunning piece of prismatic painting in which hills may be read into abstract forms

This painter has the technical ability to capture the visible moods and aspects of the sea in the format of the 19th-century landscape artists. While his paintings are consistent throughout, no doubt perfectly sincere in their regard for the power and beauty of the sea, and will appeal to the general taste, they are little more than decorations. A sensitive viewer would soon cease to find them challenging, and they would blend into the surrounding decor as nonentities. Mr. Bradbury while competent, cannot be called an innovator, because he uses old and thoroughly developed approaches to his

The recent work of Larry Bell reveals distinctly the amplification of a simple but profound visual truism: a mirror reflects. And, on to its frightening corollary, that two or more parallel facing glasses reflect each other endlessly.

Beginning at a point of traditional, painted geometry (albeit the canvases were twisted to the isometric proportions of a lozenge), a first step was the insetting of a painted mirror and glass panel within the “frame” of a painting. (It would, we note, have been comfortable for this young artist to have tarried at this point, and perfectly reasonable for him to have

A critic and etcher, Millier shows after twenty years of fruitful retirement that he has come back to his art with renewed spirit and undiminished skill. There is obvious continuity in Mr. Millier’s work. Some of the earlier works dating back to the 20’s are suggestive of the Japanese manner and fraught with the thanatopic longings usually associated with mountains and vast distances, whereas the more recent ones have developed more personal nostalgias. Mr. Millier has all the requisite delicacy of the etcher and also a romantic and sometimes illustrative touch. His recent scenes of a vanishing

As was stated in the forward to the exhibition catalog, Ben Abril does not worry overmuch about the esthetic problems. There are, nevertheless, few artists among the many Southern California scene painters who so obviously enjoy their profession and also manage to convey this exuberance to the observer as does Abril. Whether his subject is taken from the rolling hills, beaches, sunlit slums, or suburbs, he makes swift bold statements in pure blazing colors that emphasize his enthusiasm as well as his often injudicious composition. He apparently accepts his vision without question, recording what

Twenty-six pieces of stoneware sculpture consisting of various concatenations of thrown, pulled, built, and cut elements, glazed and unglazed. Interesting at the craft level but evidencing little conceptual vigor or ability to qualify the comfortable perimeters of studio pottery.

—John Reuschel

Parker has an impressive roll call of exhibitions and is represented in many major collections. His work is of the greatest integrity and refinement. Morocco, a study of Arabs in intense heat and glare barely filtered by palm trees, is awash with light under opaque and transparent watercolor, reminiscent of certain works of Degas where the different colored layers of the dancer’s tutus are distinctly seen. There is a lovely homage to Brecht in opaline colors to match an opaline sky in Brecht’s poem illustrated by the artist in this delicate and emaciated work. Protected by his beard from public

This little gallery dies this month with a lively showing of James Fuller’s paintings and Mrs. Elizabeth Fuller’s tapestries. Fourteen oils, the meat of the show, though varied and in some cases influenced, have a unity and vitality which speaks of the search and integrity of the artist. Two large works, A Mortal’s Altar and Phoebe Bust with Flowers, are Braqueish in their subtle earthy colors and still-life conception but nevertheless personal and well done. Two others, Blooming Cereus and Song of Blighted Flowers, are experiments in which closed forms trap warm colors and painted surfaces in

In unique bronzes cast by him at the foundry of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Thomas continues a metamorphosis of structural forms and poetic allusion. Working directly with malleable wax, he combines multiple symbols: an upward flared thrust can become in turn a gesturing hand, a tattered and fluttering figure, or an open mouthed blossom. Rippling sheets take on the aspects of dented wings, sharp petals or thick draperies, and a severe vertical shaft may be read as a crucifix or a ceremonial staff, a totem or a flower stem. As well, there are the embalmed hollows of animal skulls

Schnier abandoned the figurative, representational approach some years back when he concluded that the reliance on nature objects was too limited. He is now more involved in the basic abstract vocabulary of sculpture; volume, line, balance, opposition, repetition, and the manipulation of mass in space. The mood that emerges from this approach varies from the gentle to the destructive. The orchestration of his chosen theme is disciplined but endless in its variations.

Schnier is a professor in the art department of the University of California at Berkeley. He is a California artist and a graduate

The Los Angeles Printmaking Society, first group of printmakers to be organized in Southern California since the second decade of this century, opened its initial members’ exhibition Oct. 20 in the Society’s permanent galleries at 818 S. Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles with a showing of 52 prints (not all were cataloged) by 30 of the 36 founding members: A series of monthly print exhibitions is planned through September, 1964.

Two floors of the downtown building have been turned over to the new society for two years by the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lewis. The lower floor has been converted

Despite ever present currents of “new figure painting” the sudden appearance of a set of flower-hatted and bejeweled nudes on the gallery scene reveals a continuing vein of sensuous hedonism for which we may be thankful. Having dealt exclusively with the figure since 1950, Johnson shows in these images the witty products of editing (poster-popish) to immediate essentials: a solid contour encloses barely modeled, massive female volumes in a schematic titillation offered as close as is possible to the surface of the picture plane. There are serious aspects of formula to these studio pose souvenirs—the

The La Jolla Art Center’s annual show, although short on history, was on its way to becoming an important annual event. Open to all, and juried by men artists could accept as competent to eliminate the worthless or frivolous, it has been characteristically excellent. This year’s show consists of two parts. First, an invitational section of twenty-six selected by three-man juries in San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Then an open juried section in which a team formed by one man from each of the area juries ruled on the admissibility of the several hundred entries submitted. This second

This first-rate collection of drawings and small watercolors by what are for the most part second-rate French and English artists from 1860 to 1920 is as refreshing as a long-overdue Spring rain. Some of the artists selected for inclusion by the genial Mr. Evans possess names of considerable stature, such as Rossetti, Burne-Jones, John, Sargent, and Legros while less celebrated are Guillaumin, Harpignies, Loiseau, Lhermitte, Sickert, Luce, Orpen, Shannon, Winterhalter, and others.

A review of this discerningly selected display encourages second thoughts about some of the artists represented and

The prime value of these seven almost identical pictures lies in their ability to appear important, while avoiding every obvious method of visual seduction. The viewer is allowed no easy cue to enjoyment or understanding, rather he is asked to make a decision to take the trouble to contemplate the paintings in hope of finding some esthetic projection.

At a glance these paintings appear to be large solid black squares containing no image, surface interest or color. But, upon longer inspection, this is seen to be pure illusion arrived at by the extremely facile manipulation of dark, subtly colored

The majority of the Picasso sculptures in this show are tiny bronze figures made around 1945 in limited edition casts. They are all cute little confections from the artist who, since the Second World War, seems to have become a novelty factory, mass producing statusy knick-knacks and expensive autographs. This point is painfully highlighted by the inclusion in this show of two early (1901 and 1905) bronze heads that relate to the artist’s painting of the time, and maintain a particularly beautiful sculptural quality. The small 1901 male head has a special formal presence unusual for the period.

This exhibition of 1,000 works is imbued with charity. Organized by the Cedars-Sinai Fellowship Council with the unquestionably good intentions of raising funds, one is reminded that the attitude toward charity should be charitable. Therefore, it is not the misleading title, the hectic installation, or the seemingly endless rows of mediocre daubs that are most objectionable. What is intolerable is the considerable misrepresentation given to an exhibit that obviously encompassed little more than rounding up all available painting from Rancho La Cienega along with myriad flea-bitten strays, and