The first drawings by Raymond Saunders that I remember seeing were in “Thirty Contemporary Black Artists,” organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1968. At the time I had wished Saunders would push harder. More flash, more vigor, more something. He has just had a one-man show at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and although I still wish he were doing something different, I have feelings of great warmth for what he has actually done. He reminds me of Giorgio Morandi and Julius Bissier, who worked in small scale, as Saunders does—the most common size in this show was 6 1/4 x 8 1/2

In a group of paintings at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Ernest Posey seems to be displaying his acculturation to the Northern California way of life. Since his last one-man show in San Francisco, at the Galeria Carl van der Voort in 1968, Posey has become more flamboyant in his use of color and hipper in form.

Two pieces from the earlier period, #155 (1967) and Four Ellipses (1968) were in this show. Their typical form is an ellipse painted in a light color on a dark background,part of the perimeter flattened, with straight lines radiating from one of the foci. Even when the

Joe Overstreet’s paintings were in front of the walls but not really on them, secured by ropes passed through grommets in the canvas. The kinetic sculpture of Fletcher Benton looked far better as an environment at the Berkeley Art Center than the same pieces had at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Most recently, a light-and-sculpture show entitled “Shadows,” by Alan Eaker, took advantage of the gallery’s many corners and added a few installed by the sculptor.

Eaker fabricates tubular objects in polyvinyl chloride plastic, fills them with air, sets them at the intersection of two walls, and arranges

One of the loveliest places for the exhibition of art in San Francisco was the Michael Walls Gallery in Ghirardelli Square. For economic reasons, Walls has had to move from that vast room to the smaller though still impressive space on Clay street where he first opened for business in April 1967. Walls’s last show at his Ghirardelli Square location presented seven paintings by the New York artist Donald Kaufman. They are quite different from the work for which Kaufman is well known. Instead of the single ‘X,’ horizontally composed, that sometimes made me think of him as the Jasper Johns of the

At the William Sawyer Gallery we have had the first one-woman show of Diane Sloan, who presented a group of horrific paintings Sawyer Gallery and drawings she calls the Trophy Series. Her subjects are muscular men in the poses one sees in bodybuilding magazines. By calling these men trophies and by certain formal devices, Sloan asks us to see them as objects of sympathy. Her musclemen are not long-haired innocents whom we must consider beautiful on pain of being taken for Spiro Agnew; they are examples of proletarian beauty taken from an earlier America that still exists, although its citizens

Peter Rodriguez, whose work has been seen in the past at some of Northern California’s better galleries, has had a show of paintings at the Galeria de la Raza, which exhibits the work of Chicano artists of established reputation as well as newer artists whose work might not otherwise be seen at all. In his palette Rodriguez reminds me of Robert Natkin; in line and composition he is completely different. Where Natkin tends toward the rectilinear and classical, in a gently brushed way, Rodriguez uses circles—many of the paintings are tondi—both as pictorial elements and as devices for organizing

The Berkeley Gallery has done a giant retrospective of drawings by the cartoonist Robert Crumb, creator of Zap Comix and other publications that have given much tasteless amusement and, in the view of some policemen and district attorneys, probable cause to arrest booksellers. The show was just for fun; nothing was for sale. Many familiar pieces were there as original drawings: Zap covers, Lenore Goldberg and Her Girl Commandos, Mr. Natural, and more. Much more.

I suppose what put Crumb’s comic books in trouble with the law was their anatomically explicit sex, which could hardly be considered