At least two major currents of American art unite in the work of Edwin Dickinson. On one hand a Whistlerian Impressionism emboldened by Chase, Henri and Hawthorne, and on the other, the intractable factualism epitomized by Eakins. One provides an immediate sensuous outpouring (which in Dickinson resulted in a large body of painting “au premier coup”) and the other a consuming humility before the thing in itself, for portraiture and for parascientific procedure. Like Eakins before him, Dickinson has a passion for perspective.

Two figure pieces dominate the early selection, Interior (1916) and An

The art of Harold Stevenson, like that of Andy Warhol, is in great part one of collusion between artist and public. The difference of course is that Warhol is a major artist while Stevenson is not. Stevenson’s crippling deficiencies are easier to enumerate than his virtues. Above all else he cannot draw. He is scarcely a colorist, a lack disguised behind merely passable value painting. Sensuous exploration of color, of surface, of facture still evades Stevenson’s reach, although in the present exhibition there has been an improvement along these lines.

Were these inadequacies all there is to

At this moment, when precociousness is at a premium, the first major exhibition of an artist in his forties is, in itself, something of an event. If the vision is convincing then the possible defects of a late start are effaced. Robert Bart has made a brilliant entry on the New York sculptural scene at a single stroke. His language of forms is familiar (conceivably influenced by a stint in the Air Force during the Second World War) and is firmly rooted in engineering, our ultimate rationalist refuge. Bart inclines to simple large masses amazingly composed out of a multitude of modular units

Knoedler & Co.’s excellent exhibition, “Synchromism and Color Principles in American Painting” provides an ordered survey of a most important and long-misunderstood current in twentieth-century painting. Figures who flicker about the periphery of “main events” in most accounts of the epochal developments of the first quarter of the century here receive the share of the spotlight they deserve; how many of us have heard Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald Wright discussed as pickers of crumbs from the tables of the Cubists, the Futurists, Delaunay, and others as well? As William C. Agee’s model

H. C. Westermann’s exhibition of new works at the Allan Frumkin Gallery continues the level of truly distinguished accomplishment that has marked his one-man shows since his 1958 debut. Westermann stands for the total commitment to “unedited” expression and superb craft which can give artistic production an integrity coeval with an ethical act. Wedding his technique at every point with the form of his imagery and the nature of his content, it is impossible to conceive of any piece apart from the specifics of the materials Westermann has chosen for it. This union of the image and its material

A group show of contemporary sculpture at World House points up an unsettling aspect of newer sculpture; almost every artist represented looks better in company than alone. As a whole, the show holds to the clean-form, constructed, polychrome approach. The feeling throughout is jazzy and knowing, but what is known seems to be how to cut a good figure in public rather than how to make good sculpture. The best pieces are by those artists with some experience and maturity in their styles. A very simple and wacky Di Suvero is just a hanging sheet of brass, snipped, curled, and bolted. With one

Nathan Oliveira’s show at the Alan Gallery is a disappointment. Instead of the meaty paintings struggling to get around Giacometti’s figures in De Stael’s space seen before, the present works are mostly collage-painting with that “potent myth” kind of subject matter patented ages ago by Lebrun and Baskin. Titles such as The Magnificent; The Absurd underscore this embarrassing fumble into bathos. Several pictures deal much too freely with nudes toppling manneristically into space in poses of dejected anguish. A great deal of sloppy overpainting in matte and shiny black over obscured collage

Frank Gallo’s exhibition at Graham gives the public a better look at this figurative sculptor’s work than it was possible to get at the Whitney group show of younger artists this past spring. His widely-reproduced figure of a girl literally sinking into a butterfly chair is of course considered his chef d’oeuvre, and is a masterpiece of winking anecdotalism. His present show gives this lemon one more squeeze. This time it’s a clothed man sitting in a chair. This image (as a type) is competing out of Gallo’s league. Manzu’s neurasthenic seated woman in the Museum of Modern Art deals so masterfully