If we didn’t know that Helen Frankenthaler is a very fine painter tures which she showed at the Emmerich Gallery were by a young artist subjecting himself/herself to severe restraint so as to make only subtle mistakes rather than gross ones. But we do know who she is, and we come away disappointed.

There are close relations between Frankenthaler’s sculptures and her painting. Heart of London Map, for instance, is much like the central motif of her beautiful painting Chairman of the Board (1971), subsequently mounted on a Smith- and Caro-like drumhead, which in turn rests on an open cylindrical

Charles Ginnever has three outdoor sculptures on Hammarskjold Plaza through February, two room-sized works and one large piece that seems designed for—or at least intelligently adjusted to—the site.

The last time I went to Hammarskjold Plaza it was for an Irish demonstration. I mention this because the sculpture site serves, I think, a certain worldly function. Hammarskjold Plaza is one rally terminus of a loop that spares the actual United Nations site the hassle of regular demonstrations, the other end being the small park below the Isaiah wall at 42nd Street. The outdoor sculpture setting is

How Boris Lovet-Lorski ever got to be made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor must be a question purely of social history, because it is not accountable to art. Lovet-Lorski was born in Russia in 1894; he emigrated to America in 1920 and was naturalized in 1925. I myself am not unmoved by the Art Deco style, but I had trouble swallowing this. The presence of Les Levine’s compelling documentary show on the Irish problem on the upper floor of the museum at the same time may, I admit, have affected my appreciation of Lovet-Lorski’s sculpture. It was as if this material had been shown simultaneously

Les Levine’s show, “The Troubles: An Artist’s Document of Ulster,” also at Finch College, was an exhibit more in the legal sense, or in that of pedagogical museums of history, than an art exhibition on the situation in Northern Ireland. Photographs of Catholic and Protestant working people and British soldiers, in the various situations in which they find themselves today, appeared behind screens of barbed wire like that of the concentration camps used to intern Irishmen suspected of I.R.A. activities or of violence. Other rooms provided printed materials used by the various political factions,

Once in the grip of the story of Eva Hesse, and just about everyone who knows her name knows her story, it is difficult to separate her art from her life story, and even more so by the evidence for their inseparability presented in the diaries she left and in Robert Pincus-Witten’s writings which make convincing use of the diaries. The point is not that it is necessary to separate Hesse’s art from her biography nor to argue against the case which has been made for inseparability, but rather that the interest I find in her art is in the art and not from the perspective of her biography. Eva

In his show at Weber, Fred Sandback continues to mark off corners of the gallery’s rooms by spanning them with elastic cord or by spanning them with hypothetical planes defined by elastic cords. Sandback has six pieces in this show, three of which amount to pairs of horizontal, parallel, colored elastic cords attached at each end to adjacent walls of a corner, and in two cases, the cords are parallel horizontally. The third case is a bit more interesting as the two cords are parallel diagonally. That is, the light blue cord about three feet closer to the corner intersection is also a few inches

Natalie Bieser’s work consists of tiny beads strung in clusters on threads which are suspended between two slight wooden strips fixed to the wall. In some of the works, the wooden strips are positioned vertically and parallel so that the two or three strands of thread simply hang loosely between them with the major clusters of beads gathering at the lowest point on the curve of the thread. In other works, the wooden strips are at right angles or crossed or simply in different positions forming different configurations and sometimes causing a gentle twist in the sequence of the strands of thread.

Stephen Greene’s show, “25 Years of Drawing: 1947–1972” at the Zierler gallery, demonstrates that Greene has mastered conventional drawing skills in enough styles to qualify as an eclectic. Roughly a quarter of the 40 drawings in the show are Renaissance-ish multiple sketches or studies on a page in pencil, sanguine, and ink representing the years 1947–51. What Barbara Rose, in a brief catalogue essay, calls paying “homage to the old masters” seems more like trying to be an Oki Master. It is not that Greene’s early drawings are simply conventional figure studies, but that his use of medium,