In its current exhibition entitled The Search, Lytton Center for Visual Arts presents a group of ten leading California artists. The selection of work is such that each artist is shown retrospectively, enabling the viewer to follow his individual growth and development.

Helen Lundeberg’s style, which has grown more lyrical and free as she has become less literal, still retains the purity which gave her early work its compelling power and substance. John McLaughlin, in search of the “miraculous void” of Zen, exhibits a series of bare rectangular paintings derived from Mondrian and the Suprematists.

At David Stuart, James Strombotne exhibits recent painting and sculpture, all of which attest to his high spirits and wry humor. The paintings are documents of cliche, stamped with The Good Picture Painting Seal of Approval. Strombotne parodies his own Muse and the result is often more amusing that it is painting. His nude statuary, inspired by living dolls and dead Egyptians, runs the playful gamut from hot to cool both colorwise and otherwise, the coolest being Woman With Fan and the winner being Pomona 1966.

—Estelle Kurzen

At the Comara Gallery, a tribute to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the theme of William Minschew’s exhibition of new forms. Mr. Minschew is in fact the first artist-in-residence at N.A.S.A., and this show represents the beginning of his experimentation with an entirely new medium, vacuum-formed plastics. In his attempt to present the viewer with his impressions of environmental forms to come, Minschew has chosen not only a new medium but a totally new type of subject-matter as well. The exhibition is accompanied by telemetry sounds recorded at Goddard Space Center, and

At the Herbert Palmer Gallery there are a large group of color lithographs by Leger which are among the very last things he did before his death. Originally they were to illustrate a book he planned called La Ville, dedicated to Paris, and the work represented here covers the last years, from 1953 to 1955. Unfortunately Leger never lived to see these prints which were all stamped after his death and authenticated by his widow. The mood of the show is gay and nostalgic, and all the characteristics of Leger’s style are eminently on display.

—Estelle Kurzen

Richard Boyce exhibits his work for the first time on the West Coast at the Felix Landau Gallery. Paradox pervades the work which is often grotesquely beautiful. In Aged Hercules II one feels the powerlessness even of the gods to evade the consuming ravages of time. Man creates his gods in his own image, and these gods and goddesses in their pain and ecstasy are all victims. They are born out of a fire that simultaneously consumes them, in the process creating mysterious and awesome mutations.

—Estelle Kurzen