Every gallery inclines, more or less consciously, to a clientele. Seekers after disturbance or outrageous novelty rarely find satisfaction at the Galerie De Ville; it is located amid decorator’s shops. Their late group show assembled such confident pros as: Phillipe Marchand, Andre Vignoles, Corbellini, and Spazalli. A painting by any one of them could serve as the leitmotif for a splendid room.

Together, the pictures evoke memories of your trip to Paris—especially if you’ve never been. They console you with good taste. They are the bright, well-bred companions of many a weary, mauve afternoon. Here is Corbellini’s epicene Pierret, languidly seated like a Noel Coward lyric embalmed in candy. There are Smolders’ poetic subdebs, whose spirituality purges their Lautrec ambience. Here is Christian Title’s The Blond in Caswell’s Life, but it wouldn’t do for a room. It reminds you of Soutine and it insists on itself.

Dimitri’s polish is distinct from that of his neighbors. His diminutive fantasies bulge with absorbing riddles. They are the distant, domesticated nephews of Matta, made of shifting planes and peopled by amebic beings who materialize from still-lifes. Dimitri is, of all, most concerned in making whole pictures and leaving them to speak their own dumb, eloquent poetry.

If Diana Bryer sits uneasily in this company her malaise does her credit. Taken together with her neighbors her work must be Chagall uneasily set aright. Taken apart she is appreciated for the very young local artist that she is and for the candor of such utterances as her rabbi dancing with children. Her effects, unstriven for, grate healthily in this murmurous assembly.

A painting each by Gershgoren and Ben Frank are not definitive, but they too threaten to crack the note piped by the fastidious others.

—William Wilson