Like a flash of calculated good taste and class, the first painting opens out on the periphery like a high dynasty Chinese scroll. The familiar wide-tracked areas of water splashed with aqueous color skew across the immaculate white with energy and grace. If you are an artist looking for a great mix, that’s one of the best. SAM FRANCIS’ elegant composition would be more indebted to Kline if it didn’t seem so easy and offhand. There is little room here for constant, meticulous adjustments, especially with Francis’ noncorrectable stain and spread techniques. The simplifications, the changings of

As everyone must know by now, there are artists who “simply” stopped bothering with an “art style” and present “science,” not as “science as art,” but as “thing.” I write “art style” because it is not art which is eliminated (never is art more present than when it has been done away with) but the seduction of its style. BERNAR VENET has always seemed to want to be as little the artist as possible, and in this ambition he succeeds quite well. However, in Jan van der Marck’s “Bernar Venet and the Rational Image” (Artforum, Jan, 1979), one can learn that Venet is in the process of taking “a second

Into this history falls LYNN UMLAUF. Both Peri’s and her shapes are impossible to describe although they feel “right.” Geometric in the widest, most fluid sense of the word, the shapes approach the figural and the movement of a figure without losing their identities as “just shapes.” Umlauf’s “reliefs” are very flat, made of paper laid on canvas tacked nonchalantly to the wall so their material irregularities give an illusion of volume without depth. Peri achieves a complex under-over, flapping hide-and-seek, front-and-back intrigue by a puzzling figure-ground play of simple color and odd, spikey

GORDON HART’s “new” paintings look like his last ones—colored fields with bars coming out from the sides at regular intervals. There is one with three panels where the fields and the bars are black with differences between them indicated by the contrasting dullness or shininess of the paint surface. There is a three-panel painting with blue fields and bars, all of which look identical to me. There is a two-panel painting which looks Rothkoesque—the variations are spelled out in very close-valued and intense reds and red-oranges. There is a small painting with blue, smokey pink and