Claes Oldenburg’s current show at Janis presents another maddeningly sensible group of his metamorphosed objects. More than any other artist currently engaged with the fascinating perplexities of the simulacrum, Oldenburg consistently follows through with each of his extraordinary images to a definitive form. He is so keenly aware of the vast number of conventional associations we all make with certain materials and with even the isolated qualities of materials that a frank disregard of the function of almost any object can lead him to create its familiar form in a material which has only one

Under a buoyant rain of blue balloons, a small group of diverse talents have assembled together at the Graham Gallery. Calling themselves Abstract Inflationists and Stuffed Expressionists their hi-jinks just managed to deflate the real merits of the demonstrators.

The stuffing—half farce and moitie-farci—holds true of Philip Orenstein and Jean Lindner. Orenstein paints liquitex semaphore signals on the inner lining of transparent vinyl pillows. All hot air. More ambitious, Jean Lindner works in stuffed canvas units like biomorphic paraphrases that roll the unpleasantness of horsehair sofas, the

For reasons having little to do with her work, Suzi Gablik’s qualities were not illuminated at the Photographic Image exhibition recently held at the Guggenheim Museum. The delicacy and sensibility of her art was lost in the vast Wright spiral. Although four of her works were shown there (they reappear in the present exhibition) they scarcely made an impression. In the Alan Gallery, however, a room in proper scale relation to the smaller dimensions of her work, one could be struck by Gablik’s command of paint and collage and her literary turn of mind. The close reading of her paintings made

Lawrence Alloway must be praised for his selection and installation of a difficult exhibition, a survey of post-Second World War European Drawing. Difficult, because drawing shows normally are only barrel scrapings, makeshift affairs thrown up before a “real” exhibition of painting and sculpture arrives. Alloway honors these drawings by treating them like paintings and sculptures.

European Drawings plays down the role of the individual artist, but emphasizes the work as representative elements in large progressive configurations. Accompanied by an alert text, the catalog includes arresting

Although this excellent exhibition contains works from the late thirties and early forties, a study of a woman’s face and a portrait of Jeanine (both marked by fretful sentiment), it really begins with the works painted toward the end of the Second World War. In 1944, Nicolas de Stael was still attracted by a wayward Cubist framework, filling in angular shapes produced by criss-crossings. It is already evident that de Stael at thirty was a natural painter in accord with the easy, ingratiating principles established in Paris between the two wars. He would become a still more personal colorist,

Mary Frank’s new exhibition at the Stephen Radich Gallery gives a very full idea of the range and variety of her art. Her sculpture (both reliefs and free-standing pieces) in wood and bronze are conclusive demonstrations of a rare ability, that of being able to double-clutch smoothly and with no loss of momentum from modeling to carving along a single course of imagery and expressive concerns. Stirred by a personal vision rather troubling in its grave poetry and sustained by a firm, developed craft, Mrs. Frank’s work is the statement of an artist who hasn’t hustled her development, but let it

At Paul Rosenberg and Co. Robert Keyser shows fifteen visionary landscapes and interiors of a highly specific order. These fantasies are not concerned with the tidy transcription of inner emotional experiences but with the ambiguities of our analogical visual structurings of reality. The strange atmosphere of these oils comes not from the dream-made-vivid practice of orthodox Surrealism but from the apparent contradictions that arise when a picture contains, inextricably mingled, more than a single visual system.

The perils of this approach have of course defeated many artists who, from the time

Tom Doyle’s show at the Dwan Gallery consists of just two large polychrome sculptures, but has ample satisfaction for all this limitation. His recent work is a move away from the attenuated whittled volumes of his former style to an exclusive concern with huge planes of simple configuration bent and sprung through space. The traditional preoccupations of sculpture with the disposition of massy volumes is no longer a part of Doyle’s approach. The smooth colored surfaces he favors are flung billowing out grandly or flopped across struts to remain poised or slack, expressing energies and states

In his current exhibition at the Allan Frumkin Gallery Peter Saul shows a series of very large drawings in colored inks and crayons. Skirmishing with the topics of Vietnam and the wild vulgarities of present-day American life, these drawings reach a pitch of eye-blistering ferocity touched on in his show of oils last season.

Saul’s artistic vision combines a manic wackiness of formal invention with a scatological imagery so ingenious and hysterically varied as to invite comparison with the most colorful tableaux described in Sade’s Justine. Saul’s characters however are all in modern dress; each

Frank Stella’s move away from a surface of continuous parallel stripes echoing the shape of the Support to the paintings, as shown in his current show at Castelli Gallery can be seen both as a development of the implications of his recent work and as a negation of one aspect of that very production. That is to say, Stella’s new paintings address themselves in part to the problem raised by the increasingly complex and convincing illusion of the picture’s surface as literally folded and sectioned—an illusion which finally in the last of the striped paintings came perilously near to suggesting that

Leland Bell’s new paintings at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery continue to score more deeply the channels his expression has run in now for some years. His genres are standard ones; still life, the nude, and portraits. For Bell, these subjects represent a rough kind of organizational construct wherein he gets down to the real business at hand; the structuring of three-dimensional form in its essential aspect. Any subject will do since the appearances surrounding him are but things to be whittled down with the brush and reformed into elements manageable in the context of exclusively pictorial

At Tibor De Nagy Robert Goodnough’s current show marks another of his periodic turns to statements of great reduction and economy. Goodnough’s work for some years has been involved with the manipulation of formal elements stemming from the simplistic phase of later Cubism, presented either as abstract constructs of great density and impact or as elaborated compositions using these same elements to deal with a generalized subject of some kind. Both of these approaches have retained a Spartan aversion to decorative richness through a range of colors which never stray far from primary hues plus

This month the Allan Stone Gallery shows a group of recent de Koonings, mostly drawings, together with a few medium-sized oils. All deal with women in the mocking and provocative guise combining sexuality and aggressiveness into possession that Euripides treated of in The Bacchae. Most of the drawings are in charcoal or black chalk and show a return to linear concerns that reflect the general firming up of forms detectable in de Kooning’s work since 1962. Big swipes with the side of the chalk still give the expressive blurring that contributed so much brio to the earlier Women of nearly fifteen

In what is to date the most extensive discussion of Jack Bush’s work, Andrew Hudson pointed to the relevance of Matisse’s art for any analysis of Bush’s style (Art International, February 1965). This seems entirely correct, for Bush comes nearer than almost anyone else painting in a post-Cubist mode, to the kind of openness within defined limits that one finds in Matisse of 1911–17. In the paintings of Bush’s latest show at the Andre Emmerich Gallery, the horizontally banded shapes which extend from the upper and lower edges of the canvas are framed by vertical bands on either side, but this “

At the Richard Feigen Gallery Castro-Cid exhibited machines that control jets of air on which clear plastic or gold enameled balls ride, powered by the whimsy of a photo-electric beam or by other circuitry that arranges seemly unpredictable beginnings and endings to the machines’ play. The artist’s ideas rest on art becoming meaningful through a presentation of bottled randomness, a palpable demonstration of the modern subject’s lack of control over the object. However in Castro-Cid’s packaging of this experience, an incredible kind of triteness creeps in. The machine’s cases are painted with

The paintings in Sven Lukin’s latest show at Pace Gallery fall into line behind a type of solution set up by Ellsworth Kelly three years ago, adding nothing to it besides a great deal of modish styling. In Kelly’s art of the late 1950s and early 1960s, one sees an impressive series of paintings which intend to drain off the connotations of the spatiality of the figure-on-ground relationship found in late Cubism, thereby creating images in which every segment of the canvas would be given equal forward thrust. When his palette changed from strong contrasts between very light and very dark areas

The best paintings in Adolph Gottlieb’s recent show at Marlborough-Gerson seemed to be those that recapitulated his way of working in the 1950s, by placing one or two neatly bounded circular forms over a profusion of painterly, ragged shapes at the lower edge of the canvas. Two Discs of 1963 is one of these, and Roman Three #2 (1963) is another, but a work which demonstrates a reduction in Gottlieb’s means, for in this canvas color differentiations are largely eliminated and black oils make the distinctions in facture necessary to determine divisions within the painting’s field. But Gottlieb