A medium-sized, lukewarm show, lacking in esthetic point as much as in quality, this putatively comprehensive survey of contemporary Los Angeles sculpture makes the current scene look unduly morose. Partially to blame are the cheerless interiors of the gallery and a poor installation, characterized by reckless disrespect for rear views. The primary shortcoming, however, and the one which immediately establishes the nugacity of the show, is that the most original sculpture now being done in Los Angeles is simply not represented (though, in all fairness, the invitation list may not necessarily

This is the first American exhibition of work by a 25 year old California painter who has been living and painting for the past two years in Rome. The general conception of his work is figurative, but tends to be divided between two different approaches to the figure. In the pictures of 1964, figures are most often buried among tightly knit, convoluted forms and set into a painterly abstract space. In the 1965 pictures, though, the subjects dominate and are surrounded by various elements drawn from the history of twentieth century art.

Burchman’s real subject, thus, must be seen in terms of an

An impressive group of artists of contemporary talent are included in this interim gallery show. The dynamic, enthusiastic Joan Ankrum and her partner William Challee, have selected a group of works by several painters that reflects a wide variety of contemporary styles, approaches to painting, philosophies, and images. Included in the show are Lorser Feitelson, his wife Helen Lundeberg, Arnold Mesches, Robert Frame, and Shirl Goedike.

Unlike the recent show at the Phoenix Art Museum, “Of Time and The Image,” which included two works from each artist—one early painting and one recent painting—the

Closing the “Summer Program” Linda Levi, a young local artist, shows a grateful awareness of the plexiglass neo-Constructivist school forming in southern California. Using acrylic colors, plexiglass, canvas, and masonite, she forms layered boxes with semi-imagined fruit suspended in space. Much thoughtfulness has gone into this young lady’s series. Her last two pieces, one a strong green and the other a red organic shape, are by far the most resolved. The earlier pieces border too much on nice “kitchen” drawings mounted in a box.

Also in this last “Summer Program” showing is Joan Jacobs, another

Included in this extremely interesting show are a group of small lithographs by Sam Francis done in 1963 at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Francis creates loosely massed areas made up of a multitude of kidney-shaped forms, which float like pools of oil spread on water or run down the canvas in slow drips and trickles. The lithographs throb with alternately brilliant and sullen tones.

Miyasaki, a Professor of Arts and Crafts at the University of California, exhibits a lighter, erotically humorous group of lithographs. He transmutes the ancient process into a Pop idiom via Playboy Magazine.

Fluttering with unorchestrated and mottled color, these inarticulate acrylic paintings obsessively follow dab by dab the ignis fatuus of reflected color: on ice, through air, in water, over skin; winter, summer, sunlight, clouds; desert, garden, lagoon, and park. In a series of empty vistaed landscapes, Pinto just barely marshalls his chaotic flecks of color into semiabstract impressions of horizon, sky, and foreground. His floral and forest-scapes, such as Amazon Flora, are even more distressing, however, in their use of insensitive line for the definition of cliché botanical hybrids and in

With the intense revival of sculptural activity dominating the scene there will be more and more sculpture shows and surveys. This one at the Bear Gallery ranges from major sculptures such as Jack Zajac’s Big Skull in Two Parts, a compelling, powerful piece in the heroic tradition, to novices’ work.

The exhibition consists of 13 artists, several in and of the Santa Barbara area. Robert Thomas comes off particularly well with seven pieces of sculpture, the most interesting his recent polychrome wood sculptures that are interchangeable and can be moved about and rearranged to produce a variety of

For those who love love, a suite of 42 lavish color lithographs by Chagall illustrating Longus’ Daphne and Chloe produced by Teriade in Paris in 1961, accompanied by the muted and unpretentious woodcuts of Aristide Maillol on the same subject, executed by Maillol for a French edition of Daphne and Chloe published in 1937–38.

Chagall has done it again. Although there is nothing new added, these striking lithographs bring with them all that is familiar and admired in his work as once more, with brilliant virtuosity, he reiterates his endless theme of love and ecstasy. For the collector who is with

Noteworthy among the seven artists in this show is Max Finkelstein with his aluminum relief Square by Hex. Individual hexagon figures form a larger hexagon shape, containing negative patterns and placed on a black aluminum square. Prisms of light run along the fine ridges which form the surface of the hexagons. Square by Hex is a strong piece which shows considerable development from a bronze, serpented, plant piece also shown.

Balcolm Greene and Allan Blizzard are more thoroughly represented than others in the show. Greene paints wintery, Impressionistic landscapes and figures. His accomplished

Takahashi is another Japanese nature boy who has maintained his traditional heritage while mastering the art of woodcuts. He has sublimated the ego into nature with various scaled, delicate forms. The compositions are handsome, the textures elegant, and the colors subtly well-done. In many of these prints he enlarges leafy particles of nature on strong landscaped backgrounds. The most successful are the large circular prints which become a paradox of a large dynamic shape composed of intricate textures. The artist must have been more involved with these shadow-patterned, circular life embryos

Though strongly derivative of Giacometti, the welded sculpture of Robert Del Monte has an energy and exuberance that is all his own. He is at his best in capturing the immediate gesture, and among the best examples of this are Acrobats, Dancing Horse, and Diving Woman. There is also humor and satire in such pieces as Male Torso, so reminiscent of a tailor’s dummy. His more abstract work is weaker structurally and does not come off as well. Spatial, Rooftops, and Peaks fall into that category. These appear too arbitrarily constructed and do not have the organic unity of his figurative pieces.

Moesle was a fellow student of Kitaj and Borthwick at Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Art in England. A figurative painter, practically all of his paintings have some kind of allegorical social comment. His paintings are not as bright, colorful or bold as his fellow artists’ but he has the same energetic drive to extend his art outside a merely formal frame of reference. This new show adds penetration and depth to his skillful watercolors and embarks on oils with a new concept. Recently returned from Paris, where he has been working for the past three years, he now lives in the Santa Cruz

This new gallery-boutique-restaurant is a West Coast version of New York’s successful Serendipity. The decor of the upstairs boutique and the outdoor “Artists Pavilion” is opulent and unique, the walls of the surrounding buildings having been painted to simulate a French street scene around the cafe. The boutique contains a lavish collection of novelties and objets d'art.

The one-woman show currently in the gallery features the paintings and lithographs of Yvonne Cole Meo, who calls herself a “chemical painter,” as she works exclusively with her “secret” mixtures of plastics, melted vinyl, and

A full gamut of subjects again shows that Attridge changes styles as one might change clothes. This group of oils, more coherent for its limit of numbers and types, concentrates on nimble-fingered palette knifings and fuzzy strokes, rendering still lites in diaphanous high key hues. Objects blend and float as in the all-over watercolor bouquets. To mention their feminine qualities of structural looseness, lightness and effervescence belabors an obvious appeal.

Aldrin is shown to have origins in Duty. Twenty year old canvases display a timid transfer of that master’s characteristics to American

“Interpretive Environment Painting,” a phrase used by the artist himself in 1963 to describe his creative endeavors, still is the best description of his current abstract acrylics, which indirectly capture the mood of the Laguna shore. In a large percentage of the paintings, the framing has been incorporated as an integral and essential part of the composition, turning the entire work into a painting-bearing construction. This framing takes varied geometric shapes, often different than that of the inner picture, and consists basically of rough, tinted boards, arranged in a pattern, which serve

Assemblages both freestanding and wall-hanging, composed predominantly of metallic found objects and often overpainted either with color or more frequently a metallic paint comprise an interesting, if not terribly original, show. Sardonically parodying the fundamental concerns of contemporary mankind, Secunda seems to be repeating what a number of others, such as Kienholz and Tinguely, originated a decade ago. Such constructions as Capsule and The Busy Housewife are nonetheless well-constructed and successful in making their point, while others like Ovoid and The Great Seal are esthetically

A mixed selection of woodcuts, serigraphs, and drawings fulfills the gallery’s intention of presenting the figurative image; the merits beyond that are few. Humble and modest in scale and attitude, the competency of Mil Bard and the homeless illustrations of Aron, Sharf, and West are lost amid the thumping pyrotechnics of Gershgeren. His prints are complex overlays of transparent brilliant hues and sharp value contrasts quite out of measure with the pedestrian nature of his subjects. His heightening of effects to melodrama suggests he is the only member aware of the paucity of the theme or its

Known for tasteful and cloyingly textural urchins along a sophisticated Keane line, this Spaniard has been sidetracked to a series of grotesque variants. The studies, flesh-colored monochrome oil isolated on dark paper, are shallow caricatures of stunted and limited actions; parodied attitudes of standing, sitting, listening, etc. Not without coy wit, the artist’s evident poverty of formal, anatomical, and compositional invention is only confirmed. Montanes is serving up swift distortions of his own mannerisms. The earth colors and slippery full modeling suggest their final realization as ceramic

After a several­-year absence, Kaplan has returned to the southland gallery scene with his same romantic figure studies. Realistically and sensitively rendered in char­coal and rust conté and engulfed in mist-like washes, they have unfortu­nately been ruined by an unsuccessful gimmick. Ostrich feathers have been glued to the surface in random spots. They stick out most unpleasantly, ap­pearing corny and contrived. The only selection to achieve successfully the bizarre, mystic quality evidently striv­en for is “Eos,” a female figure draw­ing superimposed upon a lithograph of seashells. Otherwise,

Well-composed photos of faces, genre and occasional sunsets and re­flecting waters comprise an exhibition more interesting as a travelogue than as an artistic endeavor. This is not to condemn photographer Wallace C. Mar­ley, for he is an able craftsman with a selective eye. However, no inventive or imaginative techniques nor peculiar vision remove the pictures from the realm of the documentary.

—Charlene Steen

“Father of serigraphy,” Maccoy has unfortunate­ly reduced this art medium to a decor­ative formula of loose, descriptive lines over free color blotches. Unimaginative seascapes are the usual result. The ac­rylic paintings are considerably better, however. Despite stylistic inconsisten­cies, they manifest a greater freedom and spontaneity of approach. The in­nate iridescence of the pigment is used to advantage to produce active, open-formed abstractions of consider­able vitality, and even occasionally the suggestion of a unique iconography.

—Charlene Steen

San Francisco Figurative and New York Abstract Expressionism are the dominant styles used in this tedi­ously, overly-derivative show. Although the paint handling is quite professional and lack of unity is attributable to a time variation, a more personal, con­sistent and expressive approach is in order.

—Charlene Steen