Three artists working from different sources and backgrounds have populated the O.K. Harris Gallery downtown with a grisly assortment of human tableaux and animal viscera which are sometimes as startling as they are studied in their effects. Duane Hanson is a Minnesotan who had worked on his figure groups for about four years in Florida before coming to New York; William Stewart is a Texan who recently turned from some film-making to his current preoccupation with animal/ material constructions; and Yehuda. Ben-Yehuda is an Israeli who has done stage design and kinetic scenery, splitting his

At the Goldowsky Gallery, Jo Baer shows a 1967–69 set which comprised part of the “Spectrum” series seen at last year’s Corcoran Biennial, in addition to a new four-part group of 36 by 39 inch paintings. While I am still mostly unmoved by the rigors of Miss Baer’s sets of white, banded-edged panels, her work nevertheless looks uncompromisingly single-minded, even tough, in the present context of loose, lyrical color painting.

The three larger works of the “Spectrum” group consist of greyish white fields (each 6 by 6 feet) bordered on all four sides with 3-inch wide black bands, lined on their

Looking at Edward Ruscha’s latest collection of illusionistic word paintings at the Iolas Gallery, one is forced to deal with the inflections of a very private, odd, and wry sense of humor, which, however, is based on a straightforward, almost dumbly systematic method of collecting, enumerating, and recording selected material and images. This treatment of his subjects is in the surreal tradition of René Magritte, but commercial art techniques are also injected, so that the humorous jolts are often as unsettling in their own genre, as the Belgian master’s more fiercely psychological imagery. If

The early watercolors by Charles Burchfield made up a remarkable show. Burchfield is a very attractive personality, and this, plus the familiarity of his style, has tended to conspire against any very searching analysis of his work—one’s critical faculties are charmed, as it were! The watercolors in the present show were painted between 1915 and 1917, and for the critic they have the advantage of being similar enough to Burchfield’s mature work to be related to it without difficulty, but at the same time different enough to allow one to gain some perspective on the artist’s style. In the last

At André Emmerich was a small group of paintings by Hans Hofmann, two of them dating from the late forties and the others from the last ten years of the artist’s life. By now Hofmann has been explicated into the ground, but we do not seem to have much to show for all this exegetical effort, and at the risk of appearing anti-intellectual I think that one reason for this is the entirely formalistic nature of the exegeses. In the two earliest paintings in this show (both date from 1947 and are in the artist’s familiar Cubist style) lines are not always the edges of planes, in spite of the derivation

The show of paintings and drawings by Guy Pène Du Bois was worthwhile, even if it had nothing very new to tell. It was worthwhile because it was so very representative. Pène du Bois is a type of minor artist: not a strong enough artistic personality to achieve anything individual, yet good enough to assimilate everything around him. The mannerist drawing is like what one finds in Marsh and Benton. Occasionally it is combined with the color of Venetian mannerism (as it was especially in Benton), and where this occurs a style of (potentially) high decoration is the result—the mural painting of

What to say about Man Ray? His production was among the first to require of the critic an approach that has become increasingly frequent—one must talk less about the work as artifact than about the issues it raises; but what is often forgotten is that this is the point of the work. Or, to put it differently, the interest of the work is not at all in its formal or technical qualities, and even I, although I think Ray is often spectacularly weak in these respects, seldom find this weakness so great as to block off other ways of relating to and experiencing the work. In this regard, such a

In a paradoxical way the recent painting of Edward Corbett may have had a measure of interest. I personally have never much liked Corbett’s work: it has been eminently synthetic, with just the right dose of figuration and of abstraction, of poetry and of intellectualism. . . . In trying to be everything it has never seemed to me to be much of anything, and the artist’s very limited gifts as a draftsman and a colorist have seemed entirely appropriate to a nondescript style. But while the work might have been tepid, it was certainly respectable, and the present work is not, or is barely so. Is it

Philip Wofford’s exhibition is so beautiful that it little matters just how much Olitski and Poons there is in these paintings. The central issue for Wofford is the fat field as it has emerged so brilliantly and rapidly these past two years. The pictures, with their vivid and dense impastoes, sudden shifts from sheer evanescence to bulky clot and crust, are sensuously dizzying and satisfying. In addition to the highly variegated surface and private range of geyser-like, soft colors, Wofford employs a very tricky kind of canvas shaping. Edges arc, sway, shrink back—but only just slightly, so as

Ronald Bladen’s new piece is a vast, deeply curving wall which fills out the large exhibition space of the Fischbach Gallery. Constructed out of plywood and painted a matte white and black, there is nothing especially odd about it except the grandiosity of its scale and certain of its proportions. The outer wall, the black one, falls perpendicular to the floor while the interior wall slopes inward and upward so that the top collar is thinner than the bottom one. Well, there is no “bottom,” really, as the work has been constructed to rest on a barely visible inner scaffolding which lifts the

For the most part the works in Allen Jones’s show consist of monstrously dead effigies representing a highly specialized fantasy female—the svelte, cone-breasted, impersonal dominator of the male. Dressed in skin-tight rubber or leather garments which set off her breasts and buttocks and exaggerate the length of her legs (enslippered in shoes with the glossiest, spikiest heels and tied with milli-lacetted boots), the Dominatrix demands total subjugation and slavishness from the male or possibly from another female votary. Since we all have read the personal advertisements in the underground

For the young artist presently engaged in finding himself, several issues which emerged in the period of 1963–1967 regarding the new pictorial nature of sculpture must seem irresistible. With the advent, in 1963, of Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and Rosenquist’s slashed environmental paintings, it became apparent that sculpture could be soft, that it could be pegged upon the wall to respond to little else than the tug of gravity, and, in addition, it could incorporate the kind of soaked-in, washed-out coloration which prevailed in the period’s high abstraction. Sculpture could, in part, act like