The exhibition of sculpture and reliefs by Jean Arp at the Sidney Janis Gallery has overlapped with the opening of the exhibition devoted to Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage, at the Museum of Modern Art. I would not say that the Museum representation contradicts or transforms one’s view of Arp’s achievement, as derived from the Janis show. It does, however, complement that view, inciting one to give some consideration to Arp’s relation to those two movements. For the Janis show, while including some work of the same style and periods, had curiously inflected Arp’s career in a very different

Sprayed various shades of gold (in, for instance, a pale silver gilt or a coppery gold), Paul Mogenson’s paintings at the Bykert Gallery have been passed off with little ado by some of this young artist’s critics. They are admittedly problematical works and are even at times intriguing, for certain contradictions make these rectangles arranged in arithmetic progressions a bit richer—but it is a richness which just makes it through the back door. I was bothered by a kind of dry intellectualism about these paintings, which takes form in Mogenson’s use of ordinary mechanical pictorial devices—devices

Jasper Johns, showing for the first time in two years, exhibits six paintings. They constitute two sets, most of whose overlapping elements are already familiar to students of Johns’s iconography. I do not propose, in the space at hand, to thoroughly investigate all the developments in the recent work. What I would suggest, however, is that these paintings (they are not entirely painted, for they involve the use of silk screen and other, unidentified, processes) are somewhat lighter in their burden of discourse. They do not, like Edingsville of 1964, seen in Johns’s last show, involve quite so

Ron Davis has extended the techniques and implications of his work of last year in a series of variations on a dodecahedron seen in partial elevation. He has increased the complexity and the range of relationships between color and surface, thereby enriching and clarifying the speculative and pictorial aspects of his effort to a degree which uncompromisingly defies the limits of the brief review.

Before considering, nevertheless, the manner in which this is accomplished, I should make clear that Davis represents, in my view, a fresh and supremely intelligent extension of a development central in

Sylvia Stone’s current exhibition, her best so far, synthesizes her flat, large-scaled geometric mural pieces with the much more intensely illusionistic aspect of a preceding period. In the latter, she had contrived, through strong hue contrast, to give an illusion of a continuous, ribbon like surface pleated or folded back upon itself. Her present work, of tinted Plexiglas and acrylic paint, has been taken down from the wall to stand on the floor, like screens. The intensifications and modifications of the illusionist project involve strategies of the following kind.

One large, stable rectangular

In 1959, at the time of a succession of triumphant campaigns across Europe, Lipchitz wrote of his “débuts réalistes et leur suite progressive vers cette ossification de 1915–1916” (Lipchitz to Sandberg, Director of the Municipal Museums, Amsterdam). It is this “ossification” and the evolution of “une sculpture aussi pure que le cristal” that above all else has been honored in the present near-comprehensive view of Lipchitz’s first Cubist battery. The exhibition traces the sculptor’s arresting (yet, for the period, orthodox) adulterations of Salon Motif plus Cubist rudimentariness to the open

“I want the work to be free of visual references because they are related to the idea of contemplation and I want a work that one can experience as one goes through it without having to ‘look’ at it. The spaces in the piece are constantly opening and closing as the spectator passes through it, so that one is constantly being physically reminded of one’s size, how one walks, and how one’s senses react to space.” These small, guileless reflections, spurred by Les Levine’s Clean Machine and Numbers Racket, are platitudes which have been insisted on ever since the secularization of art, but with

The occasional subtitles from Iphigenia in Aulis—homages to the recent performance of Irene Papas as Clytemnestra here in New York—have nothing to do with the distinct merits of Chryssa’s latest exhibition. It is a pretty sop to the Rag Business to imagine that they do. A Flock of Morning Birds, or Clytemnestra: The First Scream, described as the twisting of Miss Papas’s “body into a shocked S” (Chryssa to Chauncey Howell, Women’s Wear Daily, Feb. 23, 1968) are only fat “S” forms, punkt, and result naturally from her own earlier experimentation. The Gates of Time Square of 1965–66 meant, if

Like Chryssa, Antonakos also works in neon, but for the reasons which make Chryssa’s epurative work commendable, his seem notably stiff. This, despite a simpler and clearer means. There is an allusive feature to Chryssa’s sculpture which softens all the rigorous theory.

In Antonakos’s exhibition there is only one completed neon structure which is accompanied by several projects. If ever they were raised, they would doubtless be handsomer than the one exhibited. My favorite model is a kind of Lyman Kippian portal of orange rods—though the scale of the width of the neon tube is grossly violated.

Circles and squares, matte surfaces, stringent execution, axial symmetry, emblematic configurations, are all familiar enough and all central to Howard Jones’s work. In short, the format of Jones’s pieces are inflexibly traditionalist. Even so, let me not demean the diligence and impeccability of his performances which speak, as one says, for themselves.

The outstanding pieces to my mind are the ones which seem to me to break his constricting Miesian mold—two pictures for sound. One is a dull grey square. Exquisitely hung, it is illuminated on a dark wall by a square shaft of light which falls

One’s frustration with Robert Smithson’s work at the Dwan Gallery is of the same order as that with Mogenson’s. But Smithson, despite his scientistic pretensions, is quirky in a way that Mogenson is not. Smithson calls his white fiberglass sculptures “infra-perspectives” or “dimensional finite compressions” (relating to something like the 3-D artifice of latitude lines on the globe), since they represent fragments of imaginary perspective projections in compressed form. Infinite circles are transformed into finite straight lines, and all rotational progressions become static within this system.

It is clear from the look of Theodoros Stamos’s Sun Boxes, new paintings at the Emmerich Gallery, that this veteran New York School artist is trying hard to keep pace with recent trends in color field painting, still consonant with his own energies and disposition. Both the scale and achievement of his canvases are modest in dimension. Stamos is concerned with the creation of luminous color presences which suggest without describing the effects of atmosphere and weather. Perhaps because of the limitations of size, or perhaps because Stamos is not quite able to fill or even maintain a certain

Adja Yunkers’ Aegean Series collage paintings at the Rose Fried Gallery are spare yet lyrical and sensuous without being self indulgently so. In them Yunkers displays a taste and lucidity which is admirable for its lack of pretension and for its resourcefulness within deliberately narrow confines. In only a very few of the works does one have the sense that the compositions are worked out in a manner that strikes one as too set or contrived. In most of the paintings precisely cut out but freely formed pieces of white canvas are applied onto grounds which may be a slightly different shade of

The latest in the excellent series of shows of American painters that have been organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington is devoted to the early 19th century painter Richard Caton Woodville (1825–1855); it closes its tour at the Brooklyn Museum. Since Woodville died while still quite young, he has left only a small number of pictures, and those for which he is known are all pure genre scenes: Politics in an Oyster House, Waiting for the Stage, The Card Players and War News From Mexico are his most important things. Actually, these paintings are in themselves enough to assure