“Photography in California 1945–1980,” a traveling exhibition featuring 250 photographs by 50 photographers, is a poor attempt at a historical survey. Organized by this museum (an institution that has collected and shown photography since the ’30s), the exhibition is inexplicably bereft of historical perspective, connoisseurship, and the most basic art-historical scholarship. Though conceived as a survey of the past three and a half decades, the show consists predominantly of works made after 1975; the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s are dealt with as a mere introduction to the creative apogee that Louise

The critical response to this Bay Area artist’s paintings (and previously to her ceramic sculpture) displays a common ambivalence toward what art historian Robert Goldwater has termed “emotional primitivism.” Carnwath’s repeated focus on a single female figure, in fantastic environments and surrounded by symbolic elements, exudes a darkly obsessive air which at once suggests an infantile state of self-absorption and the projection of an intelligent artist struggling to clarify her consciousness of being in the world. Those unwilling to delve into the ambiguities of the unconscious or to decipher

Why does so much of this sculpture look vaguely familiar? Not because it has been exhibited in the Bay Area or, in the case of most of the artists, elsewhere in the United States; nor has much of it been discussed in the American art press. Yet many of these 10 sculptors work within well-known conventions of “ . . . American Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, the European developments of Arte Povera of the ’60s, and the earlier schools of Constructivism, Surrealism, and Neo-Plasticism,” as listed by guest curator Michael R. Klein in the beautifully designed and well illustrated catalogue. Organized