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At Miami Art Center Now

'Eight Artists' Exhibition
Is Biggest of the Season

Continued from 1G

outer shell of the form and his devotion to the depersonalized prefabricated look remain constant, his abdication of sensuous reflective finishes for a crude, light-absorbent material lends the work a volumetric massiveness that is architectonic.
The Lichtensteins — if you think of him in terms of Pop Arts images — also will come as a shock. His 1960s style has been brought to bear on the art of others: "Still Life with Crystal Goblet and Two Lemons" as well as "Still Life with Crystal Dish" refer to Matisse. In "Studio Wall" and "Studio Wall with Sketch of Head," the ingredients of American 19th Century trompe l'oeil still life (nails, cards, letters, horseshoes) are present with details from Leger paintings.

[[Image to the Right]]

CY TWOMBLY'S characteristic slate-grey surfaces with their fragile white calligraphy are usually referred to as his "chalk-board" paintings. The term does scant justice to their delicate beauty, and while Whitney has chosen four of them to introduce the exhibition, two of these untitled works — one painted in 1967 from the collection of Richard and Brown Baker, the other done in 1969 and loaned anonymously — make it extremely difficult to leave the area.

The 1967 Baker painting suggest an architectural diagram of shifting vertical and horizontal shapes in which structure has been dissolved and shallow space created by overlapping lines and transparent surfaces. The 1969 oil contains only two short, quick lines through misty washes that give the ghostly atmosphere of a vaulting cave.

'Sant' Agnese' — 1973 Construction by Rauschenberg

Of the young group, Neil Jenny stands out in a series of five 1969 canvases epitomized by the hostile imagery, "crude" brushwork and harsh color of his most powerful painting, "Dog and Cat."
Jenny limits his palette almost entirely to thin, ugly greens and browns laid on flat in a broad staccato stroke that allows watery runs and "scrapes" across the canvas. Imagery is brutal and primitively meshed to the nervous surface with a few slashing lines that are as effective as a single stroke to the jugular.

In this powerful array of talent, Gary Stephan is unfortunately lost in paintings prior to 1973 when his tentative experiments to "construct" space and "editorialize" paint areas give way to a successfully cohesive format in "C" (Alkahest Series).
Dan Christensen's soft lyric abstracts are saved from being "pretty-pretty" (Peter Young's dot paintings are not) by a fine sense of color and handling of linear tensions typified in his 1968 airbrush acrylic "Draco," where glowing yellow arcs of "electricity" buzz against a velvety shade of magenta.
The Art Center exhibition of "Eight Artists," both famous and fledgling, is a knockout." As one observer who hadn't a clue about the installation put it, "like walking into the Whitney."

"Eight Artists": Judd, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Christensen, Jenny, Stephan and Young will remain at the Miami Art Center, 7867 N. Kendall Dr. through May 5. Gallery hours are Saturday and Sunday 1-6 p.m.; weekdays, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Monday through Thursday evenings, 7-9:30. Admission for non-members is $1, fulltime students 50 cents, children 25 cents. Catalogues for the exhibition are available at $1.50.