George Segal’s grim monuments intensify the beauty inherent in the transient commonplace. His figures are completely unselfconscious. A nude girl indifferently expresses some triviality to her fatigued partner resting on a bed’s edge. An old woman observes the horizon outside her window. A nude girl brushes her hair. A luncheonette waitress distractedly pours coffee. A nude girl stretches out in bed listening to her record player. The kosher butcher’s wife unthinkingly dresses a heap of slaughtered chickens.

Segal has an uncanny gift for seizing the exact, pregnant detail. Marcel Duchamp notes,

Joe Raffaele’s ability to fix the obsessional image of empirical reality is bewildering and, at this moment, entirely unexpected. He makes one think of Gérome or the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, one without the trappings of a sclerotic Neo-Classicism, and the other omitting a Christian Sermon.

The most unnerving aspect of Raffaele’s work is his refusal to imbed it within an esthetic matrix. Rather, he participates in that esthetic of the absurd animating so great a portion of contemporary art. Yet, Raffaele’s work is as difficult to categorize as are the many nuances of absurdity. Unlike the

Jack Youngerman’s recent paintings rarely go beyond an arresting elegance. His work is large, airy, extremely handsome, but occasionally it aspires to a humanistic ethos which it cannot convincingly sustain (e.g. Elegy for a Guerilla).

Working within a familiar two-dimensional idiom whose inflections were first those of Arp and then of the much larger twentieth century collage tradition, Youngerman has further sharpened his already keen sense of the figure ground dialogue. The paint has grown thinner, the color more saturated, the brush-stroke more diagonally active, the paint fields (duplicating

Five works are an entire year’s production of sculpture for Robert Hudson. Small wonder they are so few since these welded, polychromed works are infinitely complex mazes. Violently garish, the powerfully composed sculptures make every attempt to deny their sculptural massiveness and try every trick to be pictorial. Basically welded out of steel the works often have a boneless inflated grace which makes one think of the buoyant figures of Lachaise or the delicate balloon transfers of Agostini. The works are absurd and extremely moving, paralleling, in part, the comic-strip vulgarity of Peter

Among the more remarkable aspects of Joel Brody’s exhibition is the fact that it was ever mounted. Joel Brody’s sculpture is not in the least Hardboiled, New York, In. No fashionable carapace protects these vulnerable bronzes. Nothing would be easier than to reproach Brody. In so many respects his work is derivative—the figure type of Arturo Martini, the classical nostalgia of the Novacentisti, the ancient patina affected by Marini, the arrested adolescent worldweariness perceivable in even so analytic a group, the Scuola Metafisica, and yet others infinitely worse. Still, beneath these easily

For all their apparent exuberance, Allen Jones’s battalion of painted and sculpted figure pieces are remote and grotesque, kin to the human flotsam seen cruising Times Square. Jones’s Men, Women and Hermaphrodites are as pathetically isolated as the figures who criss-cross Giacometti’s bronze piazzas. But there all similarity ends.

Several of the bodies of Jones’s Men are squiggly solids—dollops of toothpaste from some giant square-lipped tube. Others, the most admirable, are constructed out of plexiglass cases; transparent coffins in which are interred the fetishes and tattered remains of

Man Ray groups a number of his best-known vintage Surreal and Dada objects with some very recent collages and constructions, revealing the artist still very much at the top of his irreverent form. Largely sight gags in concrete form, the pieces range from the menacing “Object of Destruction” to the deadpan wit of “Architexture: Tip Your Hat.” Man Ray’s objects have always attested to his ingratiating gift for unlikely juxtapositions. The classic “Cadeau” (a flatiron with its working face vertically bisected by a row of nails pointing out) epitomizes the perceptual disorientation at the root of

The Orozco exhibition at Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art has the unfortunate effect of minimizing the real accomplishments and emphasizing the shortcomings of an artist whose position is at best equivocal. Before treating the works themselves it must be pointed out that the installation aggravates this impression to an inexcusable degree. All difficulties presented by the building aside, the shabby treatment given this show is the latest example of a pernicious slovenliness in presentation which has repeatedly marred temporary exhibitions at the Gallery. One comes to wonder whether

Not-so-naive mythologies are what Bob Thompson presents in his new paintings at Martha Jackson’s. He is still using his tropical hot color in rigidly localized areas, fitting together the compositions like those jig-saw puzzles that have some pieces in recognizable shapes. In his previous shows, large paintings didn’t quite make it because the scale showed up serious weaknesses in drawing. The present group of pictures sticks to a more manageable format, and the resulting gain in both clarity of form and spatial construction raises Thompson’s achievements well above his previous exposures.

The

Sidney Goodman’s Ausstellung includes drawings and watercolors as well as sizable paintings. Some of the latter were seen earlier in a Whitney show of works by artists under thirty-five years old. There are no further revelations in the current show. Goodman’s abilities as a draftsman become diluted and lost in his big canvases, which reveal a shocking poverty as a colorist. Despite elaborate distractions offered by murky allegorical suggestions, his chilly acid palette and limited range of values cannot be made to support a Sense of Meaning. Compositionally the paintings are faultless and

James Weeks’ new paintings make another strong show by this Californian, though the seriousness of the problems stated in these works perhaps surpasses the degree of successful resolution reached in any single picture. Weeks again and again runs head-on into the difficulty of maintaining the structural integrity of his compositions on the picture plane while using pictorial schemes that involve reckless excursions into deep landscape space. His high color, tending to angular areas, sacrifices volume in his forms to compositional arrangements curiously at variance with the plasticity implied by

Patrick Heron’s current exhibition of oils makes a more forceful statement of his own abilities as an abstractionist than did the reverent curtsies to Gottlieb and Rothko seen in earlier shows. Heron has tightened up his form a great deal, now letting the contours pursue a course of sensitive irregularity with discernible purpose rather than poetic vagueness. Block slabs of color are pierced with roughish circles of contrasting hue that are sometimes a background color and sometimes that of another adjacent area. Intricately locked together by their common perimeter, the big main forms have a

A group show of one work apiece by four sculptors at Royal S. Marks makes it clear that the quality and interest of current sculpture continue to press toward higher standards within the straight sculpture approach of form and volume disposed in space with a minimum of associative meanings.

Roger Bolomey, who has been more than usually libeled by the unsatisfactory nature of photographic reproduction, is represented with a large Wind Gate of polyurethane and aluminum. Meant to be set against a wall, this piece unfurls two large waves of blackish material, seemingly wind-formed, which almost meet