In his first Los Angeles one-man show, Williams shows a group of paintings made between 1963 and 1966. The earlier works use a basic parallelogram-shaped canvas with interior cutouts or sides cut into jagged streamlined directions, and an image structure composed of repeated sets of a single shape (designed to relate to the canvas shape) and to conform to a somewhat mathematical order. These are all of a single color on a contrasting ground.

The more recent pictures assume shapes that are more arbitrary, based upon superimpositions of different sized and angled rectangles. These complex fields

Hans Hofmann is the grand master of the New York School. This is clear from the kind of interpretive writing his work elicits from the citadels of even the safest tastes: “Every scrap of Hofmann’s painting, and every premise of his theory, points toward a timeless art, transcendent and monumental.” (William Seitz, “Hans Hofmann,” Museum of Modern Art, 1963.) It is clear from the reverential tone of the crowds filing in and out of the Kootz Gallery to see his latest paintings. Most importantly it is clear from the canvases themselves. They are productions by a master, not only in the sense in

Larry Zox’s paintings at Kornblee Gallery seem to be an attempt to expand the flat, hard-edged, heraldic painting into a mural idiom. The works from his “Scissors Jack” series are made up of V-shaped wedges which fit together to affirm not so much the flatness of the canvas, but the continuity of the wall along which the paintings’ eleven-foot widths are stretched. The wedges themselves are made up of wide bands of color whose horizontal edges are discontinuous from one wedge to the next, promoting a reading of the wedges as parallel to, but at varying distances from, the wall surface. Zox means

Downtown at the Park Place Gallery a two man show offers sculpture by Mark Di Suvero and paintings by David Novros. Di Suvero’s work is now sufficiently good that the inclusion of two rather playful pieces here does not detract from the essential gravity of his accomplishments. His “New York Dawn: For Lorca” is a massy accretion of “experienced” wood, beams, and bolts, cramped together in preservation of their sense of other, past functions and identities. Set lightly atop unobtrusive slender beams of black steel, two such elements warily approach one another. A thin steel pole topped with the

Lester Johnson’s show of “the Milford paintings” at the Martha Jackson Gallery consists of both figure pieces which continue and enlarge upon the big and simple statements of his last exhibition, and a group of still-lifes that essay new but not altogether unrelated painting questions. The figure paintings aim at a classical monumentality that would seem, on the surface of things, to be hopelessly at odds with his marled pigment, splattered and dribbled upon in the course of its manipulation with the knife. However, it is not a classical form which Johnson tries to construct, but rather a

At the Alexander Iolas Gallery Cply (William Copley) has a biggish show of paintings under the heading “Projects for Monuments to the Unknown Whore.” The pictures are all fantastic projections of erotic imaginings flavored agreeably with mild fetishistic elements. With one or two exceptions the compositions are scenes in which the artist’s personages (a blank-faced Kurvy Kutie with Bardot hair and an equally faceless gent in a herringbone tweed suit and a bowler) enact some tender drama. These gentle encounters, so nostalgically amorous, allow the observer to savor voyeuristically bordello idylls

Barbro Ostlihn at Tibor de Nagy Gallery shows a group of meticulous symmetrically composed oils slightly obsessive in their treatment of recognizable objects in an unlikely scale and fiercely anal-compulsive in their elaborately titty-pooed renderings.

“Dahlia” presents a huge image of this flower, hovering just clear of the limits of a square canvas. The countless scarlet petals glow to yellow at the edges, suggesting a scorching blossom of incandescent steel floating in its field of blue. “91 Allen Street” has a Sheeleresque rendering of a complex hydrant-like form that elaborates itself into

At the Howard Wise Gallery Julio Le Parc makes his solo debut in America after an earlier appearance here with the “Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel.” His present showing is a series of mobiles and constructions that makes much use of mechanization and intricate lighting effects. These works depend to varying degrees on random movements produced by the intermittent action of a motorized element on different kinds of movable parts. Several of the pieces suggest gadget-games like vertical Japanese pinball machines. “Jeu Visuel: Rouge-Bleu” is a circular wall-mounted box containing two ping-pong

Duayne Hatchett, at the Royal Marks Gallery, deals in grim totems. His cleanly forged steel pieces are static, symmetrical along the vertical axis, and look for all the world like the idols of some machine cult. The bodies of Hatchett’s figures—they lend themselves to biomorphic reading despite the artist’s pronounced gift for abstract reduction—are composed of two units, one comprising the head and chest, the other a leg-like base.

Hatchett favors a constant relationship, namely the circle side by side. The upper unit is frequently based on this double formation, signifying, possibly, eyes,

Mon Levinson’s smart moire boxes contribute still more artifacts to the stockpile of Antiques-For-The-Future. Levinson has distinguished himself for some time now by his knowing graphic design cum art-object. Being neither outrageously good nor outrageously bad, but just right, Levinson continues to sell his gifts short. He postpones his Actuality to a quarter century hence when “In People with Responsive Eyes” will undertake the building of a collection of optical art of the Sixties. Any crucial issue that Levinson is more than capable of attacking now will by that time be smoothed over by his

In the midst of fancy optical tactics, collegiate post-Surrealism, structures of minimal geometry, Jacqueline Gourevitch’s cloud paintings at the Roko Gallery cast cool shadows. While hardly an innovator, Gourevitch is nevertheless an artist of diffident conviction and sensibility, who continues a tradition come down to us from Constable and the English water colorists, with occasional refurbishings at Boudin, at Monet, and the Ruskin “Of The Truth Of Skies.” The list suggests a forthrightness and vigorousness that is not Gourevitch’s stock in trade; a pleinairiste Redon perhaps is the apposite

Unlike Lloyd Goodrich, most of us did not know Hugo Robus personally, and are therefore less open to the emotional blackmail that one imagines to have resulted in the catalog essay which accompanies the present Memorial Exhibition at the Forum Gallery. Hugo Robus died in 1964 at the age of 79. The selection of 25 of his works makes it amply clear that Robus’s sculptural contribution was non-existent––that if ever a pasticheur got by on the merits and fame of a single piece (the 1939 “Girl Washing Her Hair,” in the sculpture collection of the Museum of Modern Art), it was Robus. To say, as Lloyd