Miss Fein’s medium is egg tempera employed in the manner of the ancients, using only the yolks of fresh eggs, ground pigments and distilled water. The preparation and application of this medium alone involves a painstaking control germane to the meticulous ways of thought and the disciplined, sensitive artisanship which characterize Miss Fein’s work. However, this is artisanship at the service of art, for Miss Fein commands the full range of her medium to evoke in crisp and lacy linearities silhouetted arboreal arabesques or to conjure the subtlest translucencies of atmosphere in ethereal sunsets

Kirk Axtell, Terry Buckendorf, Robert Cuff, Fredrick Dalkey, Kurt Fishback, Dick Geer, Edward Rivera and Don Yee are represented by several paintings or sculptures each. Not enough pieces to really evaluate their works individually, since all are relatively unknown even in the burgeoning Northern California area.

It is not a promising show. Each artist is technically proficient, yet no one of them makes an independent statement. They do reveal, however, something of the varied approaches of their area: Cézannish landscapes, expressionistic landscapes, Ashcan genre, Bay Area figurative, and attempts

Ami Magill paints nuns, angels, horses, little boys and even a grasshopper. The nuns and angels are probably for Christmas. Beneath the sickeningly sweet exposition of subject matter, however, is some rather good draftsmanship. In fact, Mrs. Magill draws so nicely, using a soft, flowing line, that she would do well to abandon her marshmallow palette and the tripe she is painting and begin to look at nature more honestly.

—Joanna C. Magloff

Betty Guy’s sepia drawings are of historical sites in San Francisco, done in a professional style most commonly found in books and magazines. They seem to have very few concerns for an artist’s way of approaching subjects. Miss Guy’s total lack of feeling for subject matter is less evident in her watercolors. She seems to have an appreciation of colors, if not of what she is painting.

Win Ng’s exquisite pots are the best things in the crafts show, although there are several pieces that nicely avoid being “acceptable” to the market by presenting a sustained scheme of values. Several sculptors have

The exhibition, composed primarily of older works, leaves one with the feeling that whoever chose the individual paintings selected the worst available. Two paintings, one entitled Marine, by Ruth Armer and the other entitled Gee Forces, by John Saccaro provide the only solidity in the show.

—James Monte

Miss Hauck, currently studying in Mexico, was hardly ready for such a large show. In uniformly dull, muddy colors, she explores a considerable variety of directions, including figurative expressionism, pure abstraction, and symbolism. There is no exuberance, however, to her explorations, but rather an ambivalent tentativeness that conveys an overall mood of restless ennui and noncommitment. Mr. Caggegi, likewise, lacks artistic convictions. His collages, devised principally of colored transparent papers, indicate no concern for style or method: occasional pleasing results seem proportional only

In substituting white canvas for natural masonite as a support for his cloisonné style of painting, Bailey comes up with greater contrasts, and greater starkness, in his naturescapes. Though cold, these works are exhilarating in quality. He has severely abstracted his subject matter, yet seems to automatically work to a horizon line. Rock and shore elements are inevitable, and are further identified by his preference for a low-keyed palette of black, white, green and grey. Bailey obviously understands the bleak aspects of nature, interpreting them as an explorer rather than a documenter—seeing

Sacramento lies at the gateway of the Sierra Nevada mining country, where gold dredges have cut into hills exposing root patterns, rock pockets and subsoil structure. Thus physiography plays a strong part in the art expression there, with Mickey Kane, Gene Viacrucis and Don Reich all having had a go at studying out the exploratory line of growing roots, the insistent power of swelling bulbs and the cold, hard resistance of rocks—described with compressed circles, variable line and eloquent space.

Dangelo continues this study, extending it by indicating the vastness of the landscape which exerts

The California countryside abounds with elaborate old Spanish-style mansions of which San Simeon is only the ultimate fantastic extreme. Villa Montalvo, a more conservative venture, was the home of the late Senator Phelan and was bequeathed in 1930 as a “cultural center.” To judge from the academic watercolors of Kenneth Potter and the even more anemic pen and ink drawings by Melville Ray (some of which have been made into stationery) it might be ventured that the intention of the Montalvo Association is to preserve the arts as they were in California when the Senator was in his prime. This

The crafts show looks no better at Stanford than it did at the Oakland Museum where it originated. Presumably a museum holds a crafts show to indicate new artistic developments, but most of the work in this exhibit is either pointlessly arty or comfortably palatable. The great fallacy promoted by craft shows like this one is that a pot should either look like a piece of worked-over meat and have no bottom to it (arty) or it should be gooed up with the trickiest glazes imaginable and retain the bottom (palatability). Textiles and jewelry are usually far worse. What the crafts are doing under the

Recent 1 paintings by an artist who rose to prominence in the Federal Art Projects of the 30’s, and was associated with Siqueiros in his workshop, along with Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston. Rosen slipped out of the art world for a time, while he caught up on living by way of serving at a number of trades.

His work fills three galleries here, and much of it falls into the category of social romanticism—groups of adolescents in moody blues, young thespians in dramatic gestures, some reminiscences of Weber’s sage prophets, all stated through a digest of accepted styles developed during the past

This small exhibit is a corridor filler. Mr. Wasserstein’s series of “Litho Episodes” entitled Trees are repetitive expositions of forest themes rendered in the woodcut manner of early 20th-century German Expressionism.

Mr. Wolf presents some decoratively clever exercises in both scriptographic and purely abstract calligraphy.

Mr. Hirss exhibits serigraphs that have the appearance of monotype color studies juxtaposing and superimposing simply stated and vaguely rectangular areas of color.

—Palmer D. French

This is the first exhibition of this nineteen year old, self taught painter. His drawing is not that of a primitive; he may have been influenced by fairly sophisticated draftsmen with whom he associated in Venice, California. The earliest piece here is a painting of an old man with Grecoesque distortions. Most of the others are concerned with the symbolism of the tarot deck, the cards of Cabbalists and fortune tellers, an enthusiasm which has captured the fancy of a growing circle of artists.

The production of the paintings in this exhibition parallels the gestation of the artist’s first born,

This year’s East Bay Artist’s Exhibition is largely an assembly of artists who manipulate a great variety of devices and design layouts more customarily seen in the applied arts. It is curious that much second-rate painting does not imitate fine art, but rather picks up weak features from commercial art.

Those who have not settled for contrivances are the best in the show, although their work is, on the whole, mediocre. Henrietta Berk’s landscape is possibly the nicest piece in the show. In this canvas she has handled color with a great deal of sensitivity, but the structure of her painting was

Joan Savo, lately an abstract-expressionist, who also would complete a limited number of figure paintings in any given year’s work, has reversed the procedures and is currently exhibiting a body of work depicting single figures surrounded by indefinite landscape or interior space.

Mrs. Savo’s painterly use of alternately warm and cool greys and blacks sustains these works in much the same way that the colors functioned in the earlier abstractions. In her best earlier work there was a specificity in the nonrepresentational shapes that made those paintings work in a peculiar manner—a kind of portrait

The exhibition at the Dilexi Gallery fulfills the same function as did the recently displayed “Directions: American Painting” at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Space considerations naturally limited the choices the gallery was able to make. The show, therefore, is composed of forty-six works made up of drawings, watercolors, collages and small-scale paintings.

Five ink drawings by Barnett Newman, possibly pre-dating his “Onement” series (1946), are quite important objects in the history of American art and should be treated as such. Their appearance in a private gallery in San Francisco is

The Eugene Delacroix exhibit consists of small lithographs (including a series of illustrations for Goethe’s Faust), watercolors and etchings borrowed from various California collections. No paintings are shown, but there are a few sculptures which seem to have been made to explore ideas Delacroix found in his painting and which have little independent life of their own. Delacroix seems to have taken no interest in realizing an idea through drawing. The drawings in this show are either shaded to look like paintings or (as in two notebook sheets owned by Vincent Price) are close to being doodles.

These paintings in oil are meticulous experiments by an adroit technician. Mr. Harvey, until recently, was concerned with nature and landscape in an abstract impressionistic vein having many similarities of style and execution with the work of Art Holman, also represented by this Gallery. In his current statements, however, Mr. Harvey is intrigued with juxtaposing the refractive auras of impressionistic paint handling with areas of hard-edged linearity. Frequently there is a central figure reminiscent of Bacon or Oliveira appearing, featureless and diaphanous, against a Victorian stained glass

This society feels that the San Francisco area has too few galleries, and seeks to rectify this situation by collecting paintings in a price range which they feel will be attractive to local collectors, and will at the same time give local museum-goers an insight into what the latest mode is in the outside world.

And, if we may judge what is happening by their findings, hard edge painters whose names are unfamiliar to us, are painting pictures we seem to have seen before—twenty years ago; someone else imitates Matisse; two others imitate Larry Rivers. The freshest note of topicality is provided

Mr. Henderson exhibits some old leather handbags mounted on weathered panels as wall plaques, and presents some allegedly sculptural essays consisting of worn leather jackets stretched over the tops of crudely carpentered stilt-like armatures in a manner inevitably suggesting the human head and torso. Here is merely an exposition of novel materials neither informed nor transformed by imaginative or intellectual processes. A more truly evocative transformation of the anthropomorphic contours of old clothing may be found in that eerie specter of rural twilight landscape, the farmyard scarecrow.

Tom Holland’s recent painting is more vividly colored and freely organized than his previous work, but it still retains its powerful totemic significance. Holland’s current exploration of asymmetry is one of his many ways of maintaining a balance between iconic and natural forms, a balance he has also expressed by juxtaposing motifs with constructions and ritual rigidity with mundane symbols.

Charles Mattox builds sculptures that react to sound or other stimuli by performing remarkably beautiful hypnotic gyrations. From string, plywood, ball weights and a considerable sympathy to the beauty of

Kasten’s artistic mentors seem to have relaxed their pressure on his recent work. The slackening of Hofmannesque tension turns into a gentler expression, dealing with forms in landscape atmosphere.

The increase in scale over the paintings shown at his last exhibition (in 1962) seems to be totally justified. The clusters of forms surrounded by deep tertiary color favored by the artist are more closely locked together in this show than the last. The extra space around the forms is a positive asset when deeply worked, as in these paintings, and quite distinct from its rather flat decorative use in

Serio-comic paintings by a young artist who sees deeper than most pop artists yet retains a sense of humor, in a newly expanded gallery which is now the nerve-center of Sacramento’s struggling art world.

Ogden combines heraldic symbolism and rococo imagery with flat, uninteresting color and an individual approach to genre to sum up the cornball situation of America’s middle class public—its self-conscious chauvinism, self-generated regimentation, its “star” cult and peculiar interpretation of freedom. He treats these subjects with a penetrating mixture of anger, impatience, ridicule and sympathetic

The Albers show at the University is actually part of a publicity scheme on the part of Yale University Press to promote its exorbitantly-priced book on color theory by Albers. (No one needs to spend $200 (plus tax) for a treatise on color theory. What Yale Press actually seems to be trying to sell is an enormous portable collection of Albers’ work.) However, it is a convenient way to acquire a rather good Albers show. The exhibit is made up of paintings and plates from the book, some of which were seen in a show at the San Francisco Museum. If this exhibition is any indication, much of Albers

This is an impressive exhibition of 55 works by 11 contemporary Dutch artists, assembled by Dr. W. J. H. B. Sandberg at the instigation of the Netherlands Ministry of Education Arts and Sciences, and sponsored on its American tour by the Smithsonian Institution.

Jaap Wagemaker essays collage paintings of extraordinary sensitivity. Ridged crater-like depressions in pumice-colored granular surfaces, covering an entire panel or emerging, in relief, from a black ground, suggest, in form and texture, telescopic lunarscapes. The eldest of the eleven exhibitors is Gerrit Benner (b. 1897). In purely

Lundy Siegriest’s artistic dossier runs well over five single-spaced typewritten pages. The ten-year period covered by the current exhibit begins with a painting entitled West Oakland Past and Present. As the title indicates, it is full of a romantic nostalgia hung on a structure bolstered by the remnants of Cubism. From this point of departure until 1955 Siegriest explores in depth the peculiar turn Cubism took in the hands of many American artists during the 1940’s. His color, always a strong point, remained unabashedly decorative with many references to atmospheric space.

In 1955 Siegriest

Clay sculptures and some distinguished pots by one of the West Coast’s most controversial ceramists. Arneson derives a sensual pleasure from the feel and sight of clay. (And apparently accepts the premise that, since man was fashioned from it, it is subject to the same treatment as a person in that it can be used or abused, shaped or broken, toughened or warped, transformed or transfigured.) He transforms far more than he transfigures it. These are not idealized shapes. Rather they suggest life beaten to a pulp and forced to reshape itself along primitive lines as a means of physical survival

Harry Lum’s painting is a strong, full-bodied image that connotes the figure by suggesting its bulk and physical reality rather than by painting it directly (although he occasionally does resort to the form of the body as well as its substance). In some places Lum seems to be picking up from Bacon and Giacometti.

Abstract expressionism has generally shown an insistence on physical and visual values. Lum accepts these values and carries them over into his loosely figurative subject matter more successfully than many New York painters, notably Elaine de Kooning, have been able to do.

However, Lum

The Museum has gathered together small paintings, and constructions by artists who ordinarily work on a much more grand scale. It is interesting to note that Faralla has a couple of wood reliefs here which are more original than those we have seen in shows of larger pieces. The new direction, if it is such, looks something like the bark of trees. David Simpson’s horizontal line color paintings are simplified in this size, and are painted on unusual shapes (arches, crosses, etc.). Diamond Back is indeed a diamond, and has an inch-and-a-half edge painted like the front, green between purple

Things, places and events are clues to the sources of Locks’ sculpture. The piece entitled The Brown Moon, for example, is truly a place—a place with a blue plateau which looks like a cheap cotton throw rug, upon which rests a wooden disc with copper appendages. The wooden disc doubles as the moon, which is in turn a thing resting on the blue carpet, which is a place.

Earlier examples of Locks’ sculpture were distinguished by the obsessive manner in which he covered the entire surface with nails, spikes, wire, etc., achieving an optical effect of feverish mobility in which one’s visual perception