Miss Goldfarb exhibits thirty-six abstract oil-on-paper studies in traditional pointillism collectively leaving an after-impression of that strawberry-milk-mist atmosphere so reminiscent of Renoir. Individually, however, many of these miniatures present a sapphire microcosm of scintillating color rhythms and translucencies, for Miss Goldfarb’s perseverance in pursuing a narrow and exacting method has been rewarded with a command of its fullest range of possibilities; and it is with surprising rarity that she falls into the obviously courted hazard of producing a mere color fabric.

––Palmer D.

Remarkable Sybil Arata, a product of Mills College, has assembled work by 113 of her students at Pacific Heights Adult School and produced a show of astonishing inventiveness and variety. Although she is herself completely conversant with the most avant-garde developments in ceramics, none of this involvement is reflected in the works of her students, who are encouraged only to explore those facets of ceramic expression most native to each personality. The result is one of the few ceramic exhibitions to be mounted in the area which does not reflect immediately the influence of the style and

This exhibition displays three quite different forms of academic painting. Hans Skaalegaard illustrates sailing vessels with a regard for detail such as one might expect from a model builder. Alexander Lebedeff uses a palette knife exclusively to paint his pictures of Russian sunsets and Brazilian swamps. All of his paintings have a violet cast and a soft impasto paint quality. Hilda Kidder is an English academician with a loose sketchy technique and a brown tonal color concept.

––Knute Stiles

The drawings comprising this exhibition have been selected from a number of series. Each series was obviously a set of pieces devoted to a single theme such as “Roots,” “Stones” or “Carcasses.” This exposition of academic draftsmanship in methodically elaborated studies suggests a rather self-conscious and myopic pedantry which is, in fact, reiterated in every drawing, where the specimen under scrutiny is isolated, centered upon the paper, and executed with meticulous attention to detail. Here is a style which is indistinguishable from the format for illustration of mollusks, fossils, and the

Nepote has won an enviable number of awards in both oils and watercolors, and has done so without having changed either style or subject matter to any great extent for more than a decade.

The development of his present idiom was gradual. At first concerned with the scarred and tattered facades of abandoned buildings in the Mother Lode ghost towns, he abstracted them to near decorations, using wonderfully transparent water-color washes or black-lined oil stains. Yet he was seemingly frustrated by an inability to penetrate the subject. Then, he discovered the alpine level of the Sierra Nevada, with

Wilbur Curtis, Dwight Eberly, Jane Garritson, Jean Kalisch, Helen Landgraff, Gary Rogers, Frances Velasco Shinn and Don Yee are introduced with several recent works each, although for several of them this is not a first show.

Landgraff paints flags, to the point of chauvinism; Yee follows Gregory Kondos’ “bluish landscapes” and does it well; Curtis shows competent abstracts; Rogers is morbidly interested in vomit stains in grape-juice purple; Eberly’s Populated Silence, a sfumati rub-out reminiscent of Leonardo’s unfinished works, is spoiled by a too-glossy surface; Kalisch continues her house-top

Many years as newspaper illustrator, cartoonist, and “artist-correspondent” in the courtrooms, at the race track, and on the battlefield, developed in George B. Luks a predisposition for the quick, documentary panorama, the bold, thumbnail caricatures, and the blunt, linear implication of action. None of the drawings here shown are creations of painstaking draftsmanship, nor are they graphic compositions in esthetic terms; few of them are even the final, reworked sketches or cartoons as they would ultimately have been reproduced for publication. Rather are they “on the spot” memoranda and, as

The New Mission has hung a first exhibition by one of the Art Institute’s master program students. The paintings are of a naive surrealist-symbolist sort in raw colors without felicity of technique. The work is ambitious: Mr. Stiegelmeyer has tried to encompass crucifixions, orgiastic rituals, apocalyptic terror, dream demonology, somnambulist disaffiliation, etc, etc., all in each painting. In most of the pictures there is no room left, no negative space, no possibility of examining any one symbolism for whatever significance it might have; the paintings are also so numerous and so close together

The dealer’s exhibition in the main gallery features a selection of European and American marine paintings. Americans are represented mainly by 19th-century “rock-and-wave” genre pieces including, inevitably, an Edward Moran. Of anecdotal interest to San Franciscans are Charles R. Peters’ charming 1885 view of Fisherman’s Wharf and Telegraph Hill and Coulter’s rendition of the San Francisco regatta of 1875. Outstanding artistically, however, is Bierstadt’s Rainbow. This unique study of the rainbow effect to be seen in the mist generated by a waterfall is a little off the sea theme of the

This is an intimate presentation of one or two paintings each by members of the gallery’s small regular stable, a few of whom have had one-man shows during the past season. Since last year’s group show, most of these artists have begun to explore new directions or have discovered expanded possibilities in their established methods. Gordon Onslow-Ford has introduced a sparing use of color into a still predominantly black and white palette. He has abandoned those crustily busy systematic constructions of ringlets, spirals and splintery lines, for a refreshingly fluid mobility of shapes and rhythms

The Western figurative painters usually work on fairly large canvases; this member of the group feels more at home painting small pictures, though his paintings have the same concern for deep space. He differs from the other painters whom one associates with this mode also in his use of rich, luxurious color. Indeed, in other matters than color, his imitation of Diebenkorn, Oliveira, etc., is all too apparent.

Sometimes, when the gifted artist who has not yet developed his own metier borrows the devices of others and adopts the vogues of the moment, his merit is nonetheless apparent, or at least

The Beerbohm is the sort of exhibition that is more pertinent in a library corridor than in a museum gallery. As a graphic satirist Mr. Beerbohm was certainly no Daumier, no Dore, but an amateur in those traditions of slapstick grotesquery and crude, formula draftsmanship which originated with Rowlandson and which, as crystallized in Punch,  became popularly identified as the English national style of journalistic cartooning. The wit and audacity in such an idiom is not intrinsically graphic, but must, perforce, rely heavily on literary and topical context or upon the celebrity of personages

This exhibition of Fletcher Benton’s new work was seen briefly at Gump’s Gallery on April 1, 1964. Like some mad April Fool’s game, the exhibition was summarily taken down, to vanish into the artist’s studio as if it never existed, within four hours after the announced month-long show opened. As yet, the gallery has given no official explanation for its actions. The unofficial one—that the exhibition somehow did not come up to the “tone” of the Gump’s establishment—is simply too fantastic for belief. While the position of the artist in San Francisco may not be what it should be, the city has

Wilson, one of Gump’s regular exhibitors, is also an ornithologist, which gives his paintings of bird life an air of authenticity. But unlike such predecessors as Audubon, Wilson does not dwell upon detail. Nor does he merely catalog fact. With a minimum of means he depicts the life of birds and small animals in their natural habitat, depending upon characteristic gesture and shape for identification of species.

Wilson is a master of placement. He foregoes aerial and linear perspective in favor of the Oriental’s climbing perspective, and in doing so gives his forms a dramatic and pleasing

Mrs. Springs wooden foods bespeak the little girl who used rocks and roots as playhouse foods, and, growing up, retained a sharp eye for food associations in natural objects. She also retained a sense of humor and enough courage to indulge her seeing eye. She has no inhibitions about her concern with food—as a wife and mother she must deal with it constantly.

Her show here comprises sculpture and assemblages of wood burls, knots and roots which have been selected and refined into the shapes of common food item—hams, hot dogs, cakes, cookies, bottles of cola drink, even vitamin capsules—then

Among the artists who have thrown in their lot with the vibrant color and simple image school of painting, Alan Lynch has developed one of the more unusual palettes so far. The colors are minor-key terra cottas, and not only the ochres, umbers, and siennas ordinarily associated with that term, but plums, violets, dusty rose, lichen green, with a few brilliant hues which perform a dramatic role in that context, jumping like seeds from a pod. The after images obtained with the pale terra cotta vibrants, on the other hand, do a slower shift and fade. And Lynch has occasionally written in a line,

This annual exhibit gets better each year. Formal abstraction is handsomely represented by just one painting of Kenneth Noland’s, dealing romantically with an inverted cadmium orange triangle on a yellow ground within which are two circles—one red, the other blue, so as to make the painting very literally read like a personal chromatic scale. The paintings of John Grillo have the same warmth and intensity of color as Noland’s but without the high formalism. Ben Johnson, Richard Pettibone and William Copley all paint figures whose common denominator is a persuasive nostalgia. With Copley and

Bernice Bing, born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, has been living at the Mayacamas Vineyards this past year, and is just beginning to come to terms with the rugged landscape there. Her 12 paintings, selected from 20 recently completed, are something of a biography. The earliest works, though competently painted, are completely detached views of the expanse of valley from a mountain top—lifeless, without the foil of a figure. But in #12 and #13, done in October and November of 1963, Miss Bing begins to see the landscape as environment, and to enjoy it as such. She loses the dry, still-life-of-mountains

Only one artist of the six exhibited, Charles Mattox, realizes what the importance of edges are to his work. The only other artists who belong in the show, Keith Boyle and David Simpson, are, one hopes, desperately struggling to establish a uniform object-ground relationship in their work that is meaningful both intellectually and, more important, esthetically. These two artists fail curiously enough at just that moment—the edge. Simpson blurs and equivocates at the point where stringency and rigor are called for. Boyle fails with his pictures by failing to resolve too many leaps from color to

Both of these artists are looking at nature through their similar but different kaleidoscopes. Robert Kabak’s paintings are composed of a mosaic of triangles; John Axton’s a myriad of rectangles. The edges of Kabak’s triangles are married tight together and Axton’s rectangles are separate but overlap. Both artists paint very large canvases of panoramic landscapes, often autumnal in color, and since the museum’s chamber is good sized, one can look at these pictures from sufficient distance to overcome the geometric method and view them as realistic pictures of distant views without any sharp

108 outstanding art items highlighting the culture of American and Canadian Indians, selected by Dr. Frederick J. Dockstader, Director of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York City, and circulated under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts.

The point is made that Indian art from about 900 A.D. to the early years of the 20th century was traditionally functional. Art for art’s sake is a recent concept, most notable in the form of watercolor paintings—six of which are included here. Decoration was obviously of tremendous importance to Indian art. In many cases it

Holland’s show is undoubtedly one of the most exciting ones in the Bay Area so far this spring. Entering it has some of the aspects of stumbling accidentally into a primitive tamberan house. The effect is electric. Nick Wilder has purposely crowded the show, even to hanging one panel on the ceiling, where the visual impact exceeds anything possible with a traditional vertical arrangement.

Holland, exploring the possibilities of stretching canvas over zoomorphic frames, in the manner of Japanese kite-makers, has even stretched a gigantic mask for painting. His color, always strong and usually

While the San Francisco Art Institute would appear all too willing to accelerate confusion in the nomenclature of Art by its elastic definition of the word “drawing,” the simple and specific limitations it imposed upon works to be submitted for this juried exhibition stimulated some of the most crisply economical and highly individual statements in black, white and grey that one has seen locally for some time. Jacques Fabert’s Finlandaise (oil) is a singularly powerful figure study, heroic in its mannerism but without bravura affectation or Expressionist cliche. Sonya Rapoport’s abstract Dream

A single painting by Boyle is bound to be noticed even in a large group show, because the vibrant and fluorescent color combinations are constantly twitching and winking, and expressing the painting’s image like an insistent commercial sign. The image is likely to be a gauge or meter (simple in its original form, but further simplified). A whole room of these devices, such as the de Young exhibition, subjects the eye to a very energetic exercise. “The color must work!” seems to be as axiomatic with painters of Mr. Boyle’s persuasion, as the constant reiteration during the early “Muck” phase of