The Whitney has mounted a large exemplary retrospective exhibition of the sculpture and drawings of Elie Nadelman. It is the first comprehensive museum attention his work has received since the 1948 retrospective organized by Lincoln Kirstein for the Museum of Modern Art two years after Nadelman’s death. And that exhibition, like this one, also amounted to something of a rediscovery, since Nadelman neither sold nor exhibited work during the last 16 years of his life. Nadelman is frequently described as a charming, debonair man of impeccable taste and intelligence; he seems to have enjoyed artistic

Helene Aylon designates her recent work as Paintings that Change in Time. All paintings, like everything else, change in time, but Aylon is speeding up one process (of universal material deterioration) as she slows and extends another, the process of completion by which a work of art is made. Aylon works oil, dyes and paint into the back of large sheets of treated paper, until the materials start to penetrate the front surface. The sheets are then sealed in plexiglass and hung on the wall, where the process of seepage and cracking continues, ad infinitum. Her paintings never complete themselves,

August Sander’s subject was the German people of his time, and he immodestly called his project “People of the Twentieth Century.” Between the years 1910 and 1938 Sander (1876–1964) methodically recorded singly, in pairs and in groups, Germans of every class and occupation, from peasants and laborers on up through the petite bourgeoisie of German towns to rich industrialists, military officers and the intelligentsia of professors, musicians and artists. He was not interested in the individual, but in the gathering of types to yield archetypes. Many of these images, strictly grouped, became more

Nancy Rosen and Edward Fry have organized “Projects in Nature. . .” which is “. . . .Eleven Environmental Works Executed at Merriewold West.” Merriewold West is the Far Hills, New Jersey, farm and weekend retreat of Mary Lea and Victor D’Arc, who also financed this undertaking. Rosen and Fry considered the work of artists they knew and of artists who responded to ads placed in art magazines last winter. They finally invited six artists from New York City and five from elsewhere to participate. This exhibition was planned as an alternative to the usual “playground” effect of large objects scattered

Ten years ago Lucy Lippard commented that James Rosenquist seemed to stand on the verge of the nonobjective. His latest set of drawings shows him even closer to the nonobjective, and further away from the huge juxtapositions of Pop images which make up paintings like the F-111.

Rosenquist has always claimed to be concerned with avoiding collage; this movement away from the figurative in his work also may be part of the movement away from mere juxtaposition. Certainly the new sketches were unified more schematically than Rosenquist’s previous work. It was a unity more self-consciously painterly

To stay healthy, any art needs a continuous replenishment of its sense of magic, of energy, of lightness and play. At its best, Polaroid photography seems to provide this kind of nourishment to photography today. It is a technical innovation which also restores a vigorous crudeness and naïveté to the medium. It reduces the number of procedural variables; it intensifies decisions about the framing and timing of the photograph. It holds out the promise that anyone can achieve its results while at the same time allowing expert photographers to do things that are harder than they look.

Such at least

I went to Rosamond W. Purcell’s show expecting a Polaroid photographer. I found work which at first was barely recognizable as Polaroid photography. Purcell uses Polaroid black and white film, usually 4 x 5, and enlarges the negative. (Color, she says, seems to her “a whole different discipline.”) Her case seemed interesting because it showed a series of elaborations on the original Polaroid processes with which she began her photographic career.

Purcell learned photography with Polaroid materials—a fairly unusual case in itself—but now she seems to have become attracted to the large areas of

Though photography shows have been turning up quite often recently, they rarely attract large-scale public attention; their intimate ambience is not conducive to crowds, and they maintain, for the most part, a low profile. Richard Avedon, known to the fashion world through his work for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, assaulted this conventional diffidence when he crashed the gates of the art scene with a retrospective of portraits inaugurating Marlborough’s venture into photography. And quite a crash it was.

The installation alone was enough to disrupt traditional expectations, for whereas most

A.I.R. is a gallery that specializes in painting and sculpture by women. Many of the artists exhibiting there, including Anne Healy and Pat Lasch, worked with traditionally womanly materials such as thread and cloth. At one time it was thought that their primary aim in using them was to radicalize (as in radical feminist) art through their assertion that women’s activities were the proper subject/object of art. Partially because of a political/economic belief that it is wiser to move into the mainstream, some of the artists have tended to disperse into the art world at large. Unfortunately, they

Causing more commotion than was warranted or necessary, Hannah Wilke unfortunately felt she had to get on the bandwagon of artists’ “nudie” pin-ups with a vulgarly accessorized (i.e. unzipped blue jeans, hair curlers, etc.) rendering of her semi-nude flesh in 28 photographs from the S.O.S. Mastication Box, a 1975 performance at the Galerie Gerald Piltzer, Paris. Wilke’s act of physical display resembles Robert Morris’s and Lynda Benglis’s erotic publicity, but it is also a record, à la Acconci, Oppenheim, etc. of the ways she “crudded up” her “perfect flesh” with her personal portable leprosy,

Harry Bouras’s recent show of carved and colored hydrocal and cement wall reliefs seem like rediscovered artifacts from an ancient civilization. They invite the spectator to pursue a pseudo-archeology wherein the cunei-formlike carvings covering the surfaces must be deciphered. Although they are more abstract and less readable than the body of Bouras’s work, they continue his concerns with language and diagrams of societal relationships.

In 1971 Bouras exhibited a series of drawings and pages from his notebooks about the ways in which he saw people confined in the basic social matrix, the grid.

There is a certain playful fascination in trompe l’oeil illusionism, and its use in James Havard’s painting is no exception. Harvard’s paintings, however, are not representational in the usual sense; he fools our eye by using vocabulary taken from the traditional language of painting, such as brushstrokes and heavily smeared geometric shapes. This is done illusionistically by creating the projected shadows of these “pictorial objects.” As a result, they appear to float over the picture’s “real surface,” as if suspended on an imaginary transparent plane. If Havard’s paintings are to be interpreted

Mary Beth Edelson’s work at A.I.R. Gallery is avowedly feminist; it’s about fabricating and discovering images that glorify women. Artist as spiritual Prometheus plunges deep into her subconscious to bring back the dripping symbols for the new world. That’s what I gather from the archival quantity of material—including texts both boxed and bound, and large yellow paper collages bestrewn with pencilled quotes, strips of photos, symbological indexes, and larger motifs (mostly circles and wavy lines)—that she’s unloaded for this exhibition. Unlike ’30s Surrealists and ’50s abstractionists concerned