Agnes Martin’s six recent paintings at Nicholas Wilder are all 72 x 72”. It is not easy to discern a hierarchy of importance among them on any grounds but the most purely subjective ones. Each functions precisely, in its own terms, exactly as one feels it must. The very existence of paintings by Martin in a public place implies that they are already selections from, or completions of, an unknown number of experimental works leading to their final states. Not only does she in fact destroy many works, but the works present have an almost incredible air in themselves of being culminations. Confronted

From the days when Irving Blum’s hand figured importantly in the exhibitions at the old Ferus Gallery (briefly, before its demise, the Ferus/Pace Gallery), the presentations there were characterized by a consistent economy of works, legible installation and rigorous standards of quality. Accordingly, the opening of the new Irving Blum Gallery has been awaited with high expectation, and in fact almost everything about the present exhibition justifies this optimism. The choice of artists—Stella, Flavin, Judd, Irwin and Kauffman—is unexceptionable; the decision to show only one work by each artist

When one gets right down to it, the old Bauhaus notion that the artist is obligated to respect the “integrity of the material,” whether it be wood, paper, steel or stone, not only isn’t an inviolable dictum but means very little until it is violated. This, at any rate, is the most diverting reflection occasioned from Amalia Schulthess’s current exhibition of sculpture at Esther-Robles. We have seen Schulthess’s progress over the years in a fairly even, if diverse, formal direction. Because she clings basically to the tried and true vocabulary of modern European sculpture, she is able to make

If anything, Mel Ramos’s women of 1967 are even more luscious, more unabashedly coy, and more perfectly composed than ever. They are not, however, quite so campy. Ramos has sacrificed a certain amount of his 1950-ish California kitsch for the sake of staying abreast of last year’s commercial sex-symbolism as opposed to last decade’s.

The main body of his new relief paintings shown at the David Stuart Gallery are about as chic as well-filled out females can be these days. Pucci Pants is a direct mockery of the ubiquitous angular postures of contemporary fashion models; against a lush yellow

The story of the late Elizabeth Allen’s discovery by art students in her modest London home, of how her untutored patchwork pictures were brought out of obscurity early in 1966 in an exhibition at the Crane Kalman Gallery, where they immediately caught on and were bought by the score—and finally of her death this year at the age of 84, during the very apex of her belated success, savors of the distinctively English gusto for unearthing neglected “genius.” Andre Kalman, who was instrumental in her exhumation and who has brought a selection of her works to the Fleischer-Anhalt Gallery in Los