
Milton Komisar
Venus Gallery, Oakland
Komisar, who has just won a $2,000 award from the Louis C. Tiffany Foundation, is the second artist of the Venus Group to present a one-man show, his first. The quality is high.
Komisar is a figurative painter with definite thoughts on the place of man in the urban art which is today’s environment, thoughts which he sometimes projects through the figure of his dog, Harry, much in the manner of the novelist, Jack London. Harry Sometimes Dreams of Far Off Places is the literary title of one of his paintings—a blue shepherd dog stands at the window in a dark and richly-hued blue room, staring wistfully out at a stretch of sunlit forest beyond a rushing stream. A banal subject. But Komisar has lifted it into the realm of the extraordinary, infusing it with such undisguised longing that he stirs the latent instinct in all of us for the strong swim, the wild chase, the sunny bask, the prowl through the forest. Harry is a not quite happy captive of too much security, and one unconsciously identifies with him.
The figure and its action contained within a framework of architectural rectangles is the simple gist of Komisar’s composition. In his latest body of work, a waterfront genre of the industrial city of Oakland, he is less philosophical. He uses broad brushstrokes, strong color and intense light in the architectonic manner of the late David Park.

