A selection of forty-nine paintings. drawings, and collages, representing the fifteen year period from 1950 through 1965, is the bulk of the Robert Motherwell exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In an interview between Motherwell and Max Kozloff, published in the September 1965 issue of Artforum, some insight into the artist’s position can be gleaned. When asked by Kozloff: “Do you consider that American painting ultimately rejected the tenets of French culture, as manifested in painting, during the forties?” Motherwell answered: “The moment the Americans were able to participate

David Simpson has been a Bay Area resident since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1950 (formerly California School of Fine Arts) and receiving a Master of Arts degree from San Francisco State. A ten-year retrospective of his work recently closed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Simpson’s work begins within a tradition of landscape. His early paintings combine the now familiar horizontal stripes with variegated spots and strokes of pigment, setting up an all-over diversity of directions with the picture plane. In the early work Simpson had already subordinated the

Beside the Motherwell exhibition, two expressionist painters, John Koenig at Woodside Gallery and Masatoyo Kishi at Gump’s Gallery, were on view at the same time in San Francisco.

Both artist use complicated technical means to finish their paintings. Koenig uses a collage system where rice paper is glued over the canvas support and paint is applied over the paper as well as underneath. The generally thin, almost impoverished, look of the scrubbed paint is really the element that saves his work from becoming merely chic.

Koenig’s paint and paste technique is quite straightforward when compared to

Jerrold Davis’s new paintings at the Quay Gallery are somewhat reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence’s Male and Female Allegories of thirty years ago. Davis is an awkward draftsman and a better than average colorist. The paintings are very powerful and are saved from abysmal ugliness by thin color application, running from transparent blues to creamy off-white.

These current works differ from older examples in that Davis has decided to firmly render the figure rather than merely suggest it within the context of a basically abstract painting. Like Loran’s latest pictures, these seem transitional works

Fred Martin, the indefatigable collage-miniaturist of the Bay Area art world has, in recent months, devoted most of his energy to producing a series of etchings. The series was printed at the Crown Point Press in Richmond and bound in a limited number of handsomely designed books.

The artist’s proofs were displayed at Dilexi Gallery and augmented by a number of preliminary drawings as well as some unrelated drawings. The series is called Bulah Land and contains depictions of the mythical landscape, objects, flowers and other paraphernalia of this sentimental locale. The prints are rendered in a

William Wiley’s exhibition at Mills College Art Museum consists of paintings, constructions and poetry. The entire exhibition has an introspective feeling, but one is really unable to discern what form the introspection is taking. A piece entitled Art Through the Ages is made of that venerable history of art by Helen Gardner sewn up in a canvas bag and covered with beeswax. It is one of a series of constructed objects dealing with locked or sealed books. Wiley’s continuing concern for the paraphernalia of the art world is further exposed by a piece entitled The Red Easel. The easel in this case