This exhibit is a fascinating combination of the traditional Japanese techniques with contemporary overtones. Small but comprehensive, it is a survey of recent works by “62-So,” a group of artists from the age of 20 to 50 years, who organized in 1962. The movement began with a total denial of contemporary Japanese art: they believed modern Japanese styles, far from being original, were merely derivative. Stemming from traditionalism and cultural nationalism, artist-members of “62-So,” use “Iwayenogu” (Japanese paint), and, “Nikawa” (glue), as their main media. However, their philosophy is not

Of the three artists represented, Joan Maffei makes the best showing with her draw­ings. A few seem derivative of Miró but with a perspective that is all her own. Involved with the fantasy of children’s stories, or the ambivalence involved in children’s events, The Birthday Party is typical. Decorative forms and objects, particularly plant forms, take on a life of their own, often inspiring fear. Two large drawings in mixed media develop a vicious relationship between mother and child; the baby grasps in thwarted rage for want of the breast and the mother returns rage for rage in angry voice.

In

Re­fining the medium of collage to the ulti­mate of control, completion, sensitivity, and sparseness, William Dole assumes the direction begun by Kurt Schwitters. Whereas Schwitters felt a mission and compulsion for the medium, a zeal to establish the validity of new materials as an art medium, Dole attempts to discipline these materials. He distills his elements until not one item could be moved or removed. While Dole has spent years in this one direction, time has not caused over-refinement, bore­dom, nor decoration.

This particular showing of his works contains several done under the influ­ence

Veteran performer Lorser Feitelson has introduced a note of gracefulness to his hard-edge compositions which seems to demonstrate even further refinement than one might have thought possible. Take a solid panel of color—red, green, yellow, etc.—and bisect with one or more flowing lines of uniform width, insert a visible or implied accent of drama with a near-impact of the lines, and you have a fairly clear image of Feitelson’s new series.

The construction of these clinically sterile exercises requires the mathema­tical precision of an acutely tuned eye, so much so that the gallery visitor finds

This compen­dium of recent California hard-edge paintings includes works by Florence Arnold, John Barbour, Larry Bell, Karl Benjamin, John Coplans, Lorser Feitel­son, June Harwood, Frederick Hammers­ley, Helen Lundeberg, Dorothy Waldman and last, but hardly least, John Mc­Laughlin. The exhibit itself was ade­quately, though, perhaps by the nature of the painting, disconcertingly in­stalled. There is no doubt, however, that the idea was an excellent one. Directed by Jules Langsner, chief semanticist and mentor to the hard-edge idea, the exhibit provides a valuable re-focusing on what is considered

Genser’s mechanical constructions pre­sent the rotation of long rectangular planes on an axis, creating a flicker of rapidly alternating warm-cool and light­dark colors and horizontal-vertical pat­terns. As optical sensations they are slightly painful and test the viewer’s endurance. Speed and size seem not well coordinated. The most fascinating, B-4 moves farthest into a concen­trated warping illusion as it maintains a wavering and deceptive balancing act.

Genser’s flapping paddles are ideally suited complements to Soviak’s stately environment of string-wound, color­banded tubes. The group

A heterogeneous assortment of works by thirteen well-known names, includ­ing three bronzes by Emerson Woelffer and ceramic plates by Peter Voulkos. Ranging from such decorative whimsy in oil as Edward Newell’s Pink Pussy Cat, to Untitled, a satisfactory drawing with monotone wash by John Altoon, the display is unsettling, as the over-all effect is esthetically shocking, emphasizing the bizarre.

Dennis Hopper’s Presto, photo print technique with a live, working metro­nome attached is a sample, as are Antony Berlant’s construction paint­ings-a pink body shape wearing real black lace panties and a

Mr. Littenstein paints heads, distorted and fractured in a style which cross-breeds stained glass windows with Cubism. No doubt he is deadly serious. The paintings are very sad.

––Fidel A. Danieli

Jesus Leuus deals with the human situation, abstracting the figure to large simple forms. Groups of two or three people stand out in glowing, glazed and scumbled colors against rich dark backgrounds. The heads of the figures are reduced to a small circle containing only wide open expressionless eyes. The figures seem to speak without sound, and protect one another without tangible defenses. They neither wish nor act, but seem passive, apathetic, bewildered and somehow miserable. In a few, one seems to find one figure representing death. It is more massive than the rest and holds a power the

The School of Architecture and Fine Arts presents a somewhat skimpy assortment with a strong and not unexpected emphasis on design. The commercially acceptable wares of the ceramists, weavers, and textile designers, geared unmemorably o the marketplace, mark the applied arts with uninspired technical competence. The graphic designer, Debora Sussman, stands out in the area however, as a lively member of the “pointing hand and asterisk” school of jumpy typography.

Though the general view establishes a queasy sense of confidence, unusual examples are found in the repeated image prints by Wachsmann

This show is a sort of sketch book in relief of the artist’s recent trip to Greece. Zalusky has built up in plaster a loose liquid style bas-relief on fragments of stone, slate or marble. He represents parts of the great friezes of antiquity: the processions of horsemen, bull baiting, Athena, etc. If he intends to incorporate the feeling of unearthed remnants and a veneration for age, this is missed, for the majority of pieces have a feeling of brand newness of stone and applied artificiality of figure that is reminiscent of decorative tile work made for tract homes. However, in the best pieces,

A young painter who received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1961, Dvortcsak is an accomplished draftsman with a classical background. When he started painting he deliberately set out to lose the feeling of line with which he felt so secure. Consequently, he paints first with sponges. He then selects the significant images he wants to develop and incorporates them into the finished canvas.

He uses no hard edges but merges one form into the next by a soft transition of one idea to another. He is concerned with measuring the density as well as the surface of the page

The Warshaw Retrospective Exhibition is an impressive show of a large body of Warshaw’s work. It dates from the early 1940s to the present time and includes early surrealist paintings, sketches for set designs, delicate pen drawings, studies for his mural of the Odyssey and a group of recent silverpoint drawings. Many techniques are also included in the spectrum, including pen and wash, crayon, collage, pastel, mixed media as well as oil. The show is handsomely mounted and arranged in chronological order so that the viewer moves easily along with the continuing development of the artist’s unique

Here we have the inexplicable situation of a young girl living in Los Angeles and producing, from a very early age, a large body of small but beautiful primitive paintings. Engrossed in fairy-tale like fantasies, flowers, lovers, birds and dragons; but possessed of insights of which she is not consciously aware, she makes controlled and compelling paintings which go far beyond the decorative. Her portraits are direct and open, honest to the point of hurt ing by truth.

––Barbara Smith

One of the finest collections of primitive art ever assembled for sale is now at the Franklin Gallery. Handsome, and frequently major pieces from Africa, the South Pacific, and South America are displayed in a lavish installation.

Although pieces from these widely divergent areas exhibit different motifs and, configurations which readily identify the origin, it is not the differences but the similarities that are remarkable. Each piece originally had a magic and/or spiritual function––either to keep away bad spirits or court the good ones. Even functional items, such as drums, hooks for suspending

A definitive monograph of Callahan’s work is being published by El Mochuelo Gallery of Santa Barbara Callahan is a superb photographer and artist. In his hands the most common-place subject is transformed into exceptional pictures. Head of the Photographic Department of the Art Institute of Chicago for a number of years, he is now teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

He uses varied techniques to arrive at his photographic discoveries, including straight photography, multiple exposures, shifting broken rhythms and interpenetrating planes. He creates new images by isolating

This first one-man show represents a three-year output, and reveals a continuing preoccupation with composition and detail. The canvases are meticulously painted, leaving the viewer with the impression that each work was intellectually conceived and executed without the slightest twinge of emotion. His figures stand or remain seated, they are all identically proportioned and costumed, and only their facial expressions and hands vary slightly in an act of looking, listening, concern, or supplication. Frozen in space, posturing against a timeless stage-setting, the statuesque creatures seem to be

The three one-man shows dedicated to the work of Japanese-born Shiro lkegawa at the Comara Gallery since 1961 have proven to be successively more impressive. The most recent exposure of work from the presses of the thirty-four year old artist would seem to suggest that the intaglio processes have reached some kind of ultimatum in his hands. Surely physical textures in printing have rarely been put to such extremes and the stresses placed upon the papers receiving the image must be nearly unendurable. However awesome these productions may be from a technical aspect, they do not obliterate the

A selection of flower subjects includes the fine hand-colored engravings from the “Botanical Almanac” of 1611 and 18th-century Dutch still life oils. For sheer bravura of linear beauty, such botanical illustrations are unrivaled within the print tradition. Their rigorous attention to detail and insistence on accuracy of rendering meet esthetic as well as scientific demands.

Dutch flower paintings of the late 17th and 18th centuries, including a particularly fine one by Jan van Os, are especially admirable. Meticulous overpainting of translucent jewel-tone colors on top of murky underpainting

The paintings included in this display arrive as a mild surprise since the name of Moses Soyer has been associated with the banal illustrative style appropriate to the New York figure painters of the thirties and forties. In recent years Soyer’s work has taken on a much more textural and poetic surfacing. The newly manifested freedom of his brush stroke has initiated both intimacy and vibrancy. Though the loss of his former precision has added drama, it is, unfortunately, still only skin deep.

In spite of the maturity of execution now in evidence, Soyer only occasionally penetrates to where he

Having recently achieved official Hard Edge recognition, Waldman is discerned amidst change and expansion of her themes. The older works can be likened to connecting bridge structures with possible perspectival implications. These probably have their source in the total field and value orientations of Motherwell and Kline, assimilated at some earlier point in her development. The newer reveal a growing repertoire of broad, flattened, terminal inventions as the extremities of her former limb networks. All are cropped to suggest a detailed portion of a larger complex shape. Though reversals of “

Alongside the most prominent current art styles, Arakawa’s artistic attitude is another approach that seems to be emerging within the context of contemporary Western painting. This approach may be likened to Duchamp’s schematization of concepts; that is the use of a visual context as pure device, or merely the solidification of a perceptive concept. It is on the basis of this approach to esthetic interpretation that so much of contemporary art is attacked as essentially anti-art, anti-visual, and even anti-human. Of course nothing could be further from the truth, yet one cannot deny the manifold

The changes that have evolved in Baker’s work since his initial showing at Landau Gallery in 1960 are of primary importance. The carefully composed metal structures have been endowed with a jewel-like richness of surface––polished refinements in brass, bronze, copper and aluminum. Baker has sensed and enlarged on the royal elegance and grace of art nouveau but has ignored the tiresome extraneous activity associated with that movement. The highly reflective surfaces employed here rely as heavily on the mirrored space for their aerial quality as they do their own undulating forms.

While never

This exhibit is another interesting compendium of works related not by style, school, movement, time or place, but by a technical device. It has provided the interested Los Angeles audience with a rapid summarization of relatively recent developments by, for the most part, relatively recent talents. Unfortunately the best of those who paint sculpture were absent. This specifically includes John Chamberlain, Kenneth Price, and Larry Bell.

The upsurgence of painted sculpture originates in two sources. The first is an almost automatic and inherent color sensibility stemming from the assemblage of

This large show of Haitian, Cuban, and South American so-called primitive painting and sculpture, with its concerns and methods so different from those we ordinarily encounter, is certainly the most impressive such exhibition to be assembled on the West Coast in recent memory. It poses certain problems of definition. To call “primitive” all this stylization of odd animals in brilliant grasses, or these religious objects swarming through scenes that are really minds naive, is merely to define primitive and naive as meaning narrative. Every piece in the show is telling a story, funny or serious,

The coincidence of the premiere West Coast showing of the prints, drawings and paintings of Jacob Landau with the opening of Zora Gallery’s new quarters on La Cienega proved to be an exhibition block-buster. Easterner Jacob Landau employs an incongruous prismatic palette while depicting the staggering tumult of mankind’s less commendable activities. The bright rainbow hues enhance the most disturbing performances and set one’s esthetic teeth on edge. The sense of drama is both compelling and repelling. The heavily populated conceptions embody the most corrupt and violent things man is capable

This assembly of recent paintings states exactly what former displays of this artist’s work have stated. That isolation is a fact in our lives, and that it may contain an element of despair. Whereas the artist’s previous work expressed the same conception through use of large, textured, single-colored oils set as backdrop for a painted milk bottle, these works use a sketchy pencil drawing of a house implanted against a medium-sized, single colored, sometimes varied textured background encased in an aluminum frame.

The houses, which are sometimes trimmed in an outline corresponding to the house-shape,