The wealth of “Op” art to be viewed in museums and galleries these days predicates the possession, if not the actual use, of Mother Sill’s as standard art tour equipment. The need is less pronounced than usual at the Comara Gallery which offers a pair of “Op” art specialists whose mathematical presentations seem interesting though restricted. Arthur Jacobs constructs shallow boxes which feature painted geometric compositions as backdrops for the lacing of taut white strings an inch or so off the picture plane. Precisely planted brass brads assist in changing the direction of the strings as they

A small exhibition of dominantly realistic sea-landscapes, the overall show is somewhat lacking in esthetic merit. Two of the most notable exceptions, however, are a perfectly beautiful Marin seascape and a sensitive little Whistler shop scene. They can almost make one overlook the garbage art of such people as Eliot O’Hara.

—Charlene Steen

Covering the first five years of NASA’s activity, these photographs are of primarily documentary historical interest. Photographers Allan Gould, Maurice Louis, A.C. Summerville, and George Tames have captured almost all aspects of the space program in their primarily color photos, from genre training pictures to typical rocket blast-offs to scenes featuring various mechanical devices. There’s even an arty shot here and there, such as Bugeyed in the Blockhouse, an oval, distorted view. But these are too few and far between.

—Charlene Steen

Typical of most group shows of this type, a wide diversity of styles and abilities are shown. Strongest selections are those by John Altoon, Walter Bock, Hilda Levy, James Strombotne, Gerd Koch, Alexander Nepote, and Walter Leather Jones—primarily the more well-known artists.

—Charlene Steen

The three-decade-old spectre of sociological propaganda rises again in Agins’ woodcuts and intaglios. The latter, awkward and message-filled, are a sad disaster; the technical process of etching is beyond her. The human form is rendered as a group of static, bulbous lumps contorting in sentimental, involved attitudes, completed by eyes turned heavenward. The figures are outlined by an imprisoning, heavy line which attempts to rescue them from a swamp of aquatints. Her ineptitude evidently prevents her from making even a cleanly wiped plate.

Superior broadsides as American Family, At Water’s Edge

A familiar and prevalent calligraphic style is recast with success by Ott. Based on a strong compositional cluster at the center of the canvas, a de vice inherited from Cubism, his active brushwork, hot color, and structure of positive and negative shapes have their sources in second generation Abstract Expressionism.

While his figures are generally weaker, but for The Actors, any number of landscapes as the two Night Gardens, Sunset Reflection, Yellow Landscape, and the large interior Orange Compote are turbulent constructions of lively solids placed against juicy gaps of space. The fullest

Carpenter makes the most of her collage materials; colored transparent tissues, layered and blotted, torn and cut, stained and transferred. Structured into columns or more often massed at the center and surrounded by pronounced contrasting accents, they strike a pleasing balance between the informal and tasteful. The vivacity of the color and the controlled randomness suggest a spirited gaiety. A smaller, serious number are denser with painted newspaper. Her arrangements of spots and dots makes a reappearance in abstracted and invented ink drawings.

Brockmann’s earlier welded assemblages are

Henny Marks constructs lyrical but planally developed figures in a slow motion dissolve of Bonnardesque color in a method similar to Balcolm Greene. Rich and high key knots of sumptuous pinks, tints of orange and turquoise pervade the loose but accurately purple patch drawing. Rather than a simple record of domestic scenes and friends, the figure for Marks is an anonymous scaffold for the play of a personal light.

The active acrylic geometrics of Eli Karpel are compositions formed of slim, irregular, compound planal structures in masses. The repeated wide value range is the paramount controlling

A wide-ranging selection of prints and drawings begins with Kollwitz’s Beratung (1898) and Nolde’s Self Portrait (1907). Both with their smoldering darks demonstrate a visionary aspect which links them and their fellows to 19th-century Romanticism. The harshness and brutality of the 20th makes the projection of charged emotions possible upon any subject. Atmosphere becomes attitude, psychological insight replaces exoticism. Corinth quietly, clinically inspects himself before a mirror, and Grosz conjures up anarchical, montaged sequences from street scenes. Dix’s Der Greis and Beckmann’s examples

This four-man show, featuring works by Marcus White, Gordon Wagner, Jerome Kirk, and Jari Havlena, is both well chosen and effectively presented. Swinging mobiles, standing sculptures and prone paintings combine in a most complementary fashion. The individual selections, however, are of variable quality.

Strong are the welded and assembled metal sculptures of Marcus White. Completely constructed of automotive parts, they successfully transcend their mundane origins to become cohesive sculptural units, as in the shimmery, undulating, amorphous welded bumper entitled Swing Low Sweet Cadillac, or

The hard edge exhibit features the paintings of Karl Benjamin, whose one-man retrospective is being shown concurrently, plus Florence Arnold, Max Bailey, Rod Briggs, and John McLaughlin in quite a well-rounded view of the differing abstract classicist approaches.

Clearly the most fundamental selections are those of McLaughlin. Basic rectangular units or vertical strips (rectangular units themselves) almost symmetrically divide up the large, simple canvases. Color is held down to monochromatic black and white with the occasional addition of a single hue. The resultant effect is one of purity and

This show includes woodcuts by Daniel Eisman, new sand and screen paintings by Cetone Starr, works by Mae Babitz, Burr Singer, Leonora Portney, and Claire Read.

Daniel Eisman’s woodcuts comprise the largest part of the current exhibition and reveal the artist as primarily an illustrator. His hackneyed proliferation of female nudes are the least interesting of all his work on display. Two small woodcuts that catch the eye, Predator and a horseman (untitled) are the most arresting things he has to offer.

Burr Singer shows several large paintings and her work, which is very ambitious, is still somewhat

A first Los Angeles showing of the work of this young artist born in Catalonia, Spain, and now residing in Mexico. She has already received considerable recognition in her adopted country and was commissioned to do a mural for the National Mexican Art Fair in Tijuana.

This exhibit includes paintings and graphics and gives a very full representation of her style and accomplishments. The show includes a large triptych Cuerpos Verdes y Guitarres of which the center panel is somewhat taller, adding to the interest of the overall design. It is predominantly in shades of green and blue and reveals a

Veteran artist Margo Hoff has effectively substituted brush-strokes with similarly shaped pieces of colored paper and with infinite care mounted them bit by bit on panels creating a surface not unlike a type of pointillism. She obtains a surprising variety of effects with this medium, but no less surprising is the range of subjects which receive the treatment. Many artists exhaust all possibilities inherent in a single idea before approaching another. Once expressed, Miss Hoff seems impatient to get on to some other problem. This disinterest in exploiting themes for all their worth could be

A wistful romanticism prevails in the work of Carole Carrozzo whose style, if somewhat mannered, is dignified by the obvious sincerity of her efforts. The quality of her work is generally very even, and although there is variety of subject matter, it always remains subordinate to the painting itself. Colors and textures are most sensuously expressed in the paintings where images are diffused and appear lost in an after glow of memory. One of the most vividly memorable is Bewildered. This and her lyrical paintings Birds At Dawn and With the Wind are the most deeply personal of all the works

Gonzalez’s pictures look like Indian tapestries produced under the influence of Adolph Gottlieb. Mainly monochromes crammed with pictographic symbols stained into the canvas fabric, they are both sophisticated and tasteful as decor. As to their meaning—one does eventually read through their fabric-design surface to persistent either or symbols. Whether these denote I-Thou, He-She, or Yin-Yang, is problematical. At any rate such compulsive tendencies as prompt us to search all art for meaning leave us, in this case, vaguely embarrassed—as if we had foolishly expected a lovely Vogue model to

This art has the same quality of surprise as one might sustain upon seeing Adolph Menjou walking today in Place Vendome. It manages to put the viewer, rather than the painter out of time. Lachman is a survival of Impressionism. They say he was convinced of it in his youth and has stuck to his plein-air easel at Someplace-sur-Seine despite all shocks of art-bombs going off in Paris. Remarkable tenacity for a man to remain so dedicated to Impressionism while its rascally inventors went off at odd angles. Lachman continues to record an endless full blown summer afternoon in specks of color. These

Cleveland-born Lynn Hershman is a very pretty young lady, an adroit draftsman, and a particularly keen observer of people and their daily doings. Mixing light flakes of fluorescent reds and greens with delicately penciled figures arranged on vast areas of naked canvas, Miss Hershman offers droll and/or satiric comments about fellow humans who are sick, hot, mad, asleep, hungry, proud, pensive, damned, disturbed, expectant, or just plain dead. They are all pertinent, carefully executed pieces each communicating but a single uncomplicated concept yet arresting enough in execution to demand a bit

This debut one-man showing was more than usually marked by characteristics exposing the artist in a state of search. The search, in this case, is less bent on finding ways and means than in plumbing for a coherent view of the self.

Lewallen has means in hand. There is no question that he can draw, compose and color. The mechanism is complete, the question is where to drive it. The exhibition steered various directions. One group of work mounted cut-up dolls on boards along with other bits of flotsam. The whole, painted grey, made odd effects of atmosphere and soft powdery drawing, creating

Two years ago Williams showed a group of large, organic wall constructions that seemed to relate to a kind of timeless biomorphology. Now he presents us with a totally different approach—large, sharp-edged, formal paintings that combine large curvilinear shapes with fragments of billboard-sized lettering, and in some of the pictures, objects, generally glass-fronted boxes containing objects shaped similarly to the painted image, affixed to the canvas.

The paintings and constructions fit the contemporary mold. They derive, in part, from Arp, Ellsworth Kelly and certain other hard-edge painters.

For some reason contemporary sculptors have had remarkable success in maintaining their individuality. While in painting it is difficult to think of an important artist without immediately associating him with a movement, style or progeny, our leading sculptors—Giacometti, Moore and Lipchitz, for example, leave enormous spaces about themselves.

If Jack Zajac does not quite yet belong in the same room with them, it is equally true that none of them deserve to share quarters with the others. They demand to be taken singly if for no other reason that they have subverted contemporary historicism.

Steps towards refinement are apparent in Ramos’ first one-man show in Los Angeles. The larger, newer paintings distinguish themselves from four earlier (1964) paintings also shown. Not only is he drawing better (why do his clumsy foreshortenings, taken from photographs, “work”?), but also his game of visual puns promotes a stronger irony. Seemingly devoid of bite, these paintings project a particularly Americanized fantasy: the suburban pseudo-playboy’s dream girl, displayed as an art object, ready to be sold alongside her all-American product. Although possibly not the most successful formally,

Like most other transitory enthusiasms which seem to periodically engulf the world, such as flagpole-sitting, wars, hoola-hoops, and poly unsaturated fats, the collection of original works of art has reached frightening proportions. The overly successful public relations job performed by the profession in selling culture to the man on the street has resulted in a flood of original pieces in all media, low priced, imported and domestic, good and bad. To possess a “Collection” today means very little indeed. How many pieces constitute a “Collection” or how large an investment must it represent?

In this first Los Angeles exhibition of a fairly well-known San Francisco artist, we are presented with a group of Op Art collages combining optical toys of the blinking eye genre into conventionalized, usually geometric configurations.

The work, generally of quite small dimensions, makes use of gaily colored dots that change as the spectator moves, multi colored wheels that seem to spin, and foils that glitter. These combinations are handled with a deliberate lack of finish that refers back to the West Coast assemblagist tradition (in which indeed, Grant had long worked). The basic problem,

The Colorado Memorial Center Art Gallery has prepared a touring exhibition which features the experimental works of four aggressive artists who are working with acrylics, polyester, polyvinyl, polyurethane, epoxy, polystyrene and other all but imperishable materials. The results are not always esthetically convincing but certainly the endeavors of these four artists to apply the newest media with which to solve contemporary pictorial problems is commendable.

Of the four participants, Los Angeles’ own Jack Hooper appears as the most inventive and most dramatic. Primary Form I and II are quite

Since two small works of hers were shown to advantage here last fall with a group of young British painters, Miss Riley has been included in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Responsive Eye” exhibit, has had a noisy New York debut, and has suffered an avalanche of attention in the popular press. The current exhibition of thirteen austere emulsion-on-board paintings and one fun-house walk-in “environment” is a selection from the period 1962 to 1965. Though she claims small science and less math, her manner throughout seems cerebral and scientistic, all intuitional decisions masquerading as inevitable

The current mode in art evaluation seems very much to favor the innovator. The quality of the created object has become either secondary to, or confused with, the creative act or idea. The romantic ideal of personal combat in the canvas arena, and the formalists’ demand for fecundity, as called for in the critical literature of the past decade, have seen to this.

Those artists whose work appears to derive from the current work of other artists, or tends to deal with the ideas of recent innovators, are often deprecated as chic or fashionably avant-garde, a position which ignores the drama of that

Brilliantly heroic sculpture for a non-heroic age, Nova Albion, constructed this past year on the beach at Point Reyes, California, has enough Whitmanian amplitude and Bunyanesque audacity to make that cross country sweep. With great “muscle and pluck,” Di Suvero flings huge pallid logs, splintered beams, gnarled telephone poles, and yellow metal girders upward into an architect’s vision of space. Like some giant crane from a new world dock or the scaffolding of a sinister Piranesi prison, this Brobdingnagian 18 1/2 feet high and 28 feet long construction juts up through a forced opening in the

An ambitious and vigorous program is inaugurated at this new University branch with a necessary survey of this century’s sculpture. Such an effort has not been seen locally since the circulation of selections from the Hirshhorn Collection, with which this could hardly attempt to be compared for number of examples, diversity of sizes, and sheer scope. The aim here has been the mounting of local and readily available examples for critical inspection and didactic exposition.

Twenty sculptors are presented. The sizes range from miniature to unassuming. At the small-scale extreme, four early capsule

Here the sculptor’s intellectual as well as emotional power is given full expression, and there is much that reflects the beauty, terror, and the humor of our times. His dramatic use of symbols and his articulate awareness of their potential in terms of his medium add poetic dimension to his work which is also highly structured and technical. In Recluse the figure conveys his loneliness and isolation inside the narrow-boxed tower of his psyche, and one feels with him the prison of his immobility. Tracery is a lacy jubilant dance on a thin stem that for all of its metallic bulk has the fragility