One cannot help but feel how closely the poet and artist are joined in the work of Jean Arp, and included in this showing are a small group of his drawings, reliefs and collages. “Torso Regard,” a masterpiece of understatement, is a perfect example of Arp’s fluid and lyrical style. In this drawing as in most of his work, the image is distilled into the idea of its being, evoking more in the imagination of the beholder than what is immediate to itself. The intuitive aspect of Arp’s work is what gives it its poetry, but along with that, his work has an intellectual sophistication that is particularly relevant to the life and culture of the 20th century.

Also in the upstairs gallery is the work of surrealist Patrick X. Nidorf. This Augustinian priest, who first began painting seriously after ordination states, “Most of my paintings are not religious in the strict or liturgical sense. They are moral paintings, portraying life as it exists, with the hunger, pain, and love in man’s soul.” In “Search” the figure floats on what appears like a diving board in a space that contains a myriad of floating walls. Each painting is executed in a carefully detailed manner; however, they function more as ideas than as paintings, and in that sense are illustrative rather than esthetic.

A group of lively and humorous primitives by the English artist Vincent Haddelsey adds variety to the gallery’s current display, and in the downstairs gallery, E. Kanarek, a Polish artist now residing in Los Angeles, exhibits his romantic and impressionistic paintings, many of which show the influence of Bonnard.

—Estelle Kurzen