The title of this serial group show seems inordinately pretentious in view of the fact that many of the works shown have been spasmodically shuttling between the walls and the bins of this gallery for a year or more. None of the work exhibited presents any new trend in the methods of the exhibiting artists, all of whom are well-established members of Gumps’ regular stable. “Directions I” re-exposed some recently seen landscapes by Walter Snelgrove and some familiar Howard Hack paintings from the “Window” series. Possibly new was a wall-plaque by Faralla in his familiar method of assembling elaborately moulded mill-ends that seem like fragments from Victorian “gingerbread.” The current installment displays Art Holman’s paintings Ebbing and Purple Heart (which were seen in Mr. Holman’s show at the De Young Museum in 1963), some work by Gregory Kondas, whose flatly painted landscapes in receding horizontal striations have an affinity with Fletcher Benton’s recent landscape idiom, and, in a side room, some drawings in pastel crayon by Art Holman. Apparently not officially part of the “Directions” show, but on display in the gallery foyer are some rather good neo-Cubist mixed-media graphics by Mona Beaumont full of intriguing spatial and geometric improvisation with lively colors and rhythms. Miss Beaumont has for some time been reviving abstract idioms of early 20th-century European vintage, but she is here doing it with a good deal more animation and invention than heretofore. Also on foyer display are some serigraphs by the ubiquitous Sister Mary Carita lately given to a restrained employment of Hard Edge and Pop Art mannerisms.

—Palmer D. French