These works present nothing new to one’s notion of Thiebaud’s achievement, but they do maintain the level of guarded professionalism that has marked his last two shows. The excitement and sense of discovery present in his New York debut do not, unfortunately, reappear this time.

At this point, it seems that Thiebaud has decided to perfect his manner and leave all considerations of style alone, at least as far as painting itself goes. It is only his subjects that have a style, or styles, in the sense of “period.” Presenting (as he almost invariably does) a centrally placed image against a white

Neil Williams’s paintings at the Emmerich Gallery exhibit a clear family resemblance to Frank Stella’s work. The shaped, flat canvases, the divisions of the surface into planes and bands of color that respond to the directive of that shape, the plasticity suggested by the direction of the colored surfaces—all would indicate that Stella and Williams share not only a common vocabulary, but also a common vision. But where Stella labors to expel from his paintings any trace of “composition,” of balancing one element off against another, or any intrusion of manifest illusionism, Williams’s pictures

As advanced art has increasingly centered on the meaning of the observer’s act of looking, probing the nature of perception itself, retrograde art has tended to imitate it by parody. Erotic Art, at the Janis Gallery, represents such a parody. The awareness of one’s act of looking, which is heightened in confrontation with paintings by, say, Noland or Olitski is the subject of almost all the work in this show, but in a highly specialized sense. In Erotic Art one is confronted not with works of art but with occasions for voyeurism. As one is made to strain to piece together the images of nudes