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 Johnson the nostalgia is erotic whereas Pettibone seems concerned with a very personal view of 19th-century Americana. Abstract expressionism is represented (by Matsumi Kanemitsu, Philip Guston, Franz Kline and Sidney Gordin) at its best considering the diminutiveness of all the examples. Sculpture is well represented by two New Yorkers, Harold Paris and F. Vredaparis, who are both now living in Berkeley. Mrs. Paris, while indebted to her husband and mentor in the works on display, is one of the freshest and most resolved talents among the younger practitioners in Northern California.

––James Monte