Printmaking has provided Picasso with as potent an auxiliary medium as drawing, collage, sculpture, and writing. At once peripheral to the main core of painted production—oils producing the major motifs for graphic reproduction––his prints are also essential to these theses, and, at their most concentrated, high caliber individual statements.

The sequence of sixty years of work in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition impresses by its staggering volume. Through some 540 examples, less than one-fourth his total production, a clear comprehensiveness of the broad range of differing

In the light of the values introduced into sculpture by the movement that has somewhat carelessly been termed “minimal art,” older, Abstract Expressionist-derived sculpture is seen through reconditioned eyes. A lot of it, especially in northern California, begins to look very decadent, like uncontrolled spatial growths, or tumors. Gabriel Kohn’s wood constructions survive all of this hindsight evaluation. His pieces are well-made, loving in their detail, and hold up on such objective grounds as comparisons and contrasts between straight and curved, interlocking shapes and dubious, but possible,

At Silvan Simone, Erik Gronborg’s recent sculpture displays a humor and lightness that is often whimsical. His taste and technical skill are evident in all the pieces, though one feels at times an over-emphasis on the purely decorative aspects of a style that is unusually versatile. Experimenting with various combinations of materials, Gronborg uses ceramic and wood as well as ceramic and steel, and these almost nakedly simple forms embellished with strips of color are joined together with a care and finesse that is expertly detailed. Pam Pam is a wall relief with a single shell-like form of

Showing at Adele Bednarz are Peter Shoemaker and George Viacrucis. For the collector who has everything, Viacrucis exhibits a form of pictorial upholstery employing oil painted vinyl which take their titles as well as titillations from the Dr. Seuss mystique. Colorfully zany forms are neatly sewn together, padded in places, and often protrude balloonlike from the picture’s surface in a jig-saw of animation that out-pops the weasel.

Shoemaker shows oils and collages. His large opaquely painted canvas, Two Pairs, achieves a dreamy effect; however, many of the large canvases strain toward a monumental

Recent paintings of Martin Lubner are shown at the Fleischer/Anhalt Gallery. Lubner’s efforts toward a pictorially dramatic lyricism have led him to experiment with a set of poly-triptych allegories that might be classified as a form of epic painting, and these pictures are among his most interesting in the current show. A thoroughly romantic stylist, Lubner employs at times an excess of painterly emotion, and many of the pictures could be classified as nostalgic, even sentimental. Paradoxically, however, these very excesses give his work its individual flavor and feeling. His portraits, where

At Esther-Robles another artist determined to have the high fashion world of art in stitches this season is Thomas Bang, whose basic blacks are dramatically trimmed with hoopy loops of wild color that stitch their way through the canvas in a pizzazz of rope-work that’s really feely if you’re with it. His ultra-contemporary table, Green You-Know-What Table, spouts a series of ominous looking knobs, and here and there squirts tangles of multi-colored rope in a combustion of nonsense that explodes “not with a bang but a whimper.” Showing along with him, Homer Weiner turns to the early days of the

At Feingarten, V. Douglas Snow shows a large selection of recent landscapes. Rocks and Foothills employs some of the painting techniques of the old masters and has a richness that many of the larger, more pretentious landscapes lack. In his reliance upon pictorial formula many of Snow’s pictures appear repetitious, and one realizes how the pressures of exhibiting often force an artist to do a whole series of potboilers on a theme that is pretty well exhausted after one or two tries.

—Estelle Kurzen

As opposed to the dedication to flatness and deductive structure of, say, Noland or Stella, a group of painters, deriving perhaps most directly from Mark Rothko, and including such artists as Robert Irwin, Jules Olitski and Agnes Martin, continue to work within the confines of a tense, only partially resolved, shallow three-dimensional space. William Pettet’s paintings, in his first one-man show, fall into this latter category.

Like Olitski, Pettet shifts the emphasis to the possibilities of a structure based on color alone. One sees, at first, a group of monochromatic green spray paintings,

Gabor Peterdi exhibits etchings and monotypes for the first time on the West Coast at the Sabersky Gallery. A superb technician, Peterdi is often submerged in method and means. The later work is highly elaborate technically but loses some of the simplicity and directness of the early black and white landscapes which, in spite of their more literal imagery, are far more imaginatively conceived.

––Estelle Kurzen

Alexandra Bokhara shows a large and varied selection of watercolors, gouaches, and several oils from landscape to fantasy at the Bognar Gallery. Her flair for illustration is her strongest point though even within that area her work is somewhat inconsistent in quality.

—Estelle Kurzen

The display of paintings, prints and sculpture by Robert Hansen involves us in Robert Hansen involves us in illustrations of a personal, religious mysticism. Figurative white shapes work against a traditional field of black in the lacquered masonite panels, but the visual tools of form and color are here secondary to the artist’s monastic, narrative concern. Along with figuration, Hansen is concerned with an adapted, diluted calligraphy somewhat reminiscent of the early work of Gottlieb and Tomlin. Their symbol-oriented calligraphy, however, wedded itself to a taste for the painted image, absent