William King’s genial giants at the Berkeley Gallery pose in their naugahyde skins as if they stepped out of a Vogue pattern with a detour stop at a cartoonist’s studio. Their bodies, in some cases ten feet tall, have flat, square torsos and enormously long thin arms and legs. The embracing couple entitled Just Friends have a Byzantine distance between their giant presences and the spectator. In spite of the scale of the works King has not succumbed to the obvious and made theatrical golems. On the contrary the sculptures have a certain humanness in spite of their size.

The naugahyde material

Don Potts, a sculptor currently exhibiting five large pieces at the Hansen Gallery, continues to explore an increasingly mature and unique artistic vision. The path Potts has chosen to explore parallels in some respects the large and extremely reductive sculpture being done by Robert Morris, Donald Judd and John McCracken. The piece titled Up Tight out of Sight typifies his work in general and also points out some basic concerns of the post-expressionist generation of English and American sculptors. The piece is a bare two feet off the ground and spreads out seven or eight feet from tip to tip

The manic activity in Bay Area galleries and museums increases as the flu-ridden populace rattles and hacks with rheumy eyes fixed on heretofore sacrosanct bastions of culture. The latest scandal, like the thirteenth chapter of The Perils of Pauline, broke over San Francisco’s oldest museum, the M. H. De Young, located in the center of Golden Gate Park. The controversy stems from the resignation of Charles and Miriam Lindstrom, ex-director and ex-co-director of the education department in the Museum. Their letter of resignation asserts that works of questionable authenticity are included in the

Jason Schoener’s latest exhibit at Gump’s Gallery is the result of a year’s sabbatical leave spent in Greece. Schoener’s neo-Cubist approach to painting has not changed much in the last few years although it loosened somewhat when he applied it to the barren, sun-filled landscapes interspersed with ruins. His forte has been and remains his use of color. This exhibit is typical in the sense that the viewer is struck by the color-light the paintings emit when the show is taken as a whole. The show is fine as far as it goes, but one would like to see Schoener make larger statements giving freer

Manuel De Arce, a Spanish artist having his first exhibit in the Bay Area, is by far the best artist exhibited at Pomeroy Galleries in some time. His thick granular paint surfaces have a genuine obsessive quality lending themselves to the depiction of the Spanish countryside. The heavy paint makes for a stylized drawing quality when the figure is attempted. A bathroom scene where a woman is ascending from her tub while a pajama-clad male is intently shaving presents, deadpan, a very amusing situation. De Arce’s sense of the very appropriate and his subtle sense of humor are lagniappes in many

Daniel Shapiro’s latest exhibit at Arleigh Gallery includes paintings, sculpture and drawings. In the paintings Shapiro compartmentalizes in comic strip fashion a series of biomorphic images based on the structures of human and animal forms. In some instances the color appears local, i.e., flesh tone on colored grounds. The forms are drawn in with charcoal with a kind of lost and found line under, over and into the flat form, creating sculptural illusion. The largest and latest of these works is by far the best in the exhibition. Rich purples and reds as well as lighter hues are painted over

The recent paintings by Arne Hiersoux, which fill the spacious Mills College Art Gallery with more than just square footage of canvas even though they are huge in size and sometimes irregular in shape, would seem to dramatize those responses shared by all forms of organic life to the point at which they become emotions. From that point on, he specializes in the intricate and sophisticated problems of the human being. The attraction of male to female is indicated, but his biological symbolism is so generalized that it could relate to flora as well as fauna. When he designates the human experience,

At the Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento is a 2-gallery exhibition of landscape and figure paintings by William Theo Brown. Brown has developed the Bay Area style of figurative painting into a near-classic idiom. His Man and White Horse has overtones of both Cezanne and Gauguin, but the statement is one related to northern pastures under cool light. Despite the nude figure and romantic reference, one’s response is spiritual. It is the small painting of Bacchanalia that is most provocative, however. It gives no indication of the drunken revelry that the title would imply. Nude men and women, in