The numerous large canvases by Norman Stiegelmeyer recently exhibited at the San Francisco Art Institute, while unquestionably impressive by reason of the ambitious muralesque scale of their refined elaboration of extravagantly colorful and ornate fantasmagoric designs, failed lamentably to fulfill the promise of the simple, powerful drawing which the artist executed for the exhibition’s announcement poster, and in general, disappointed expectations engendered by his small-format graphic work seen in previous years at the Institute’s annual drawing shows. This earlier graphic work by Stiegelmeyer

Susan Hall, in a commanding exhibition at the Quay Gallery, is also occupied, albeit in a manner differing considerably from that of Mr. Stiegelmeyer, with an essentially graphic approach to painting. Bold caricatures, cartoons and contour drawings in thin lines of color often stated against fields of a single contrasting color distinguish her present style, in which, while drawing from the currently fashionable, youthfully obstreperous vernacular of combining Pop hyperbole on mass-media advertising and comic-strip art with some of the spirited impudence and rowdy obscenities of Funk, she yet

Ben Langton, in a group of paintings recently shown at the Bolles Gallery, essays a return to the exuberant, heavily impastoed, vividly pigmented landscape styles of late 19th-century European artistic ferment, as seen through that long historical perspective conducive to amalgamating stylistic devices and mannerisms from Van Gogh, Gauguin,Munch and Nolde—and from the Fauves, Der Blaue Reiter and a host of independents peripheral to these movements—much as they have now become embraced by the same melding perspective under the general heading of Expressionism.

However, Mr. Langton’s telescopy is

The Berkeley Gallery initiated its new quarters—a spacious two-story, light-manufacturing-shed type of structure, located in the warehouse district south of Market Street, and reminiscent of the gallery’s original home on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley—with a large, Neo-Dada-caper sort of exhibition called the “Repair Show,” announced as a sequel to this gallery’s purportedly “historic” Slant Step show of three years ago, and largely comprised of patently impermanent, random assemblages of assorted objects and debris-like materials, casual junk sculptural constructions and the like. While some