Viewing page 55 of 66
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
Art World Page 7 VICKIE LOU (Continued from Page 8) classical trim. Can you see any possible artistic objection to that? Isn't it just what the Renaissance architects used to do with the Romanesque churches of Rome? Mr. Graves's proposed new building is not a bit more bizarre or disruptive of the neighborhood than the existing one, and I think it's a shame that he and Mr. Armstrong have to spend so much time defending it. But that is the way with the arts in America. Creative genius is always rejected by the Establishment, and has to fight a hard, lonely battle for recognition. Poor Mr.Graves, my heart goes out to him, and I am determined to do whatever I can to help. The next time Cousin George starts sniggering about dog and pony shows, he is going to get a good, sharp crack on the skull. Your art-loving-niece, Vickie Lou SOLMAN (Continued from Page 1) twos and threes banging on gallery doors. The group "gave us heart and courage." Rothko pushed Gottlieb to change his style, reminiscent of an earlier group, The Eight, with Sloan and Luks, who stuck together "to bring in Manet." The Pollock, Gorky, Klein, and de Kooning group was never so congealed, Solman suggested. (In '54, with the Abstract Expressionist tide rising high, one response to Solman's portraits was "commissions, right?" "No.") Imbedded in Solman's portraits are concerns shared by Brancusi, Kokoshka, and Cezanne. In a '54 NYT article, Stuart Preston cited two "irreproachably modern painters, Joseph Solman and Larry Rivers. Here art is more visually inspired than it is intellectually, paradoxical as it may seem." Solman details his "abstract" thinking that goes into painting (portraits.) "The portrait is subordinated to color and pattern. I create new color schemes each time I paint; still making color choices pertinent to the sitter." One work ends up with a hand painted blue. Solman's mind had wandered into an abstracting still-life mode of address, wandered upon the necessity to paint the "shape" blue. Another portrait posits the knees pointing forward in a shaping that is intense "Brancusi" and straightforward realist portraiture at once. This converging of the matter-of-fact portraitist's "trade" with radical analysis subtly maneuvered into the bargain is Solman's hat trick. "Addenda" areas are apparently fair game for his modernist indiscretions. The Thirties saw portraits equivalent to his "street period", streamlined and simplistic with block outline firmness. The Fifties saw, when examined under a magnifying glass, multiple facets "planes of colors built up, with the sitter called in for sittings a week apart, each time for another color plane. The victimized sitter was impressed into the service of (modern) art. And, adding salt on the wounds, Solman insisted they sit for the background too. The concrete presence of the sitter ensured the portrait aspect of the painting was never abandoned for merely modernist considerations. It's possible. Solman's Sixties approach shifted to a flow of multiple colors managing to attain a single plane. This muted color jungle is a device defying facial physiognomy. His Funkadelic 60's portraits, with irradiated hands, are Pop Kokoshka. As with Goya, Velasquez, Rembrandt, and company, portraits can break out of the Limner's Trade. TASTEMAKERS Art/World Photos [[4 images]] Karen B. Cohen, Francoise Rambach, Paul Cummings, Gordon Hyatt, James Biddle, Sue and Stuart Feld, Jay Cantor and Mr. and Mrs. Raymond [[4 images]] Mr. and Mrs. Herman Merinoff, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Manney, Janice Levin, Zohar Ben-Dov, Arthur G. Cohen, Ian Woodner, Allen Adler and Frances Beatty at the Drawing Society opening at Hirschl & Adler. (Photos by Nancy Crampton) [[2 images]] Dore Ashton, Bill Lacy, Francesco Corrias, Consul General of Italy, Elizabeth Sverbeyeff Byron, Michael Sorkin and Peter Eisenman at the opening reception of "Antonio Sant'Elia: Drawings,"at The Cooper Union. (Photos by Steve Friedman) [[5 images]] Lucius Eastman, Mrs. Peter Sichel, Bonnie Burnham, Hilary Barrett-Brown, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Stern, Dr. Marilyn Perry and Barbara Lee Diamonstein, Peter Sichel, and Victor Hazan at the "Wine Tasting of New Italian Premium Reds" benefit for the World Monuments Fund at Mr. Sichel's apartment. Kurland, Kahn, Courtright By HOPE D. BROCK The Claude Bernard Gallery (at 33 East 74th Street to April 5) is having its first one man exhibition of the American still life painter Bruce Kurland - twenty six oils and watercolors. He paints small canvases with formidable technique. The subject matter is mainly flowers and fruit with the inclusion of a butterfly or some insect usually hovering over the vase or plate. One is reminded strongly of Rembrandt Peale in an outstanding painting of apples in a tile pan and another of white egg plants against a red background, with a dragonfly teasing from above. He is an honest painter, competent and imaginative as well as meticulous in his drawing. The Gimpel Weitzenhoffer gallery (1070 Madison Avenue to March 29) is exhibiting new works of the sculptor Robert Courtright, well known for his paper collages. Recently he has become known for his masks made from paper and now bronze. Mostly circular in shape they enchant the eye with their humor and originality. A brown striped bronze mask is the most important piece, but they are all original in feeling and execution. The Grace Borgenicht gallery (724 Fifth Ave. to March 29) presents the first pastel show of the well known Wolf Kahn. The landscapes are a bit too misty, but the drawings are good. In his book Kahn writes that pastel in the dust is butterflies' wings. It is the milkiness of the haze over Venice or the dark of a barn's interior on a brilliant summer day. Pastels render the sharpest contrasts and the subtlest delicacy. It is the most permanent and unchanging medium of all. The powder on the wigs of the 18th century portraits is as white today as the day the artist sprinkled it on with his chalks. The show will be particularly enjoyed by lovers of pastels as a medium. Portraits By BARNABY RUHE A bright show of drawings by Kelly and Hockney, and water-colors by Clemente, these are sketch portraits that are brisk, engaging, even surprising. The first surprise, we all know, is Kelly doing portraits. His terse strong line is decisive, yet, of the three, the most personalized and revealing psychologically. It's great to see his quirky line that manages expressionist distortion within portrait parameters. (Blum Helman, 20 West 57, to March 29). The Clemente's are a shift from his portraits at Castelli last year. Here we see "Double Exposure" effects, and triple. Three mouths, two right eyes, in an alarming psychic penetration, except that, as a stylistic redundancy, the disturbance is only really a mask face. Or it is Clemente's side of the portrait exchange. The painter views his victims through such a lens. Hockney's are again surprising. His self portraits are clearly rendered, but diffused and uncertain in mood. They are vulnerable, to a point. The soft pencil marking is personal in intent, though he is still a bit reserved in what he wants to present of himself. It is some of his more honest work. Myths By MICHEL DURCOS The idea of myths has sustained, elevated and engrossed humans since the age of the primeval cave. Today more than ever in an apparently plastic, highly mechanized and materialistic society we are still searching for and enamored of myths. The more we are discovering explanations, reasons, proofs, the more myths haunt us and mystery is the faithful companion, the protector perhaps of a myth. This is the reason I found the theme of the current exhibition at Fordham University (Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Columbus Ave., to March 8) provocative. It held my curiosity if not my expectation completely. Robert Sander's "Woven Ready Motives" consists of collage photo reproductions of well-known paintings cut in narrow strips to build a strange reality, creating his own version of a legend. His homage to Velazques reminds one of Ravel's "Pavane pour une infante defunte" sung by Boy George or Prince. The myth goes on through the centuries. Jack Bolen's drawings are based on the "False Floor" image, an architectural element found in the Egyptian Pharaonic tomb to help the deceased's soul to escape. With charcoal, graphite and for two of the drawings, collage and dechirage, Mr. Bolen creates the phantom of the 3 dimensional door. Erasing, tearing, displacing, even scribbling on parts of the drawings, he denies the symbol to recreate and reinforce it with bars (vertical, horizontal, curved) placed apparently in front of (or over) the --3 dimensional False Door-- the illusion is rendered stronger by casting shadows from these bars to appear on a flat, 2 dimensional surface. All these different factors are untied in the blending of the mythic, ancient past with the immediacy of a increasing haunting present. Also shown are works by Carol Cade, Shirley Kramer, Joan Watson Price. JACK GOLDSTEIN Metro Pictures 150 Greene St. to March 29 These new works continue to display the artist's obsession with natural phenomena. Moving on from explosion and lightning bolts, Goldstein's new paintings explore motifs such as melting snowflakes, cigarette smoke, flowing lava and even computer generated energy. These blown up images in bright blues, oranges and purples, are airbrushed onto his canvas. Unlike earlier works, these look less like photographs of the environment and more like objects viewed under a microscope. Laura Joseph ESTHER GYROY Schiller Wapner 1 E. 61 These are hot-hued shimmering fantasies with floating trolls, demons and faces articulated into a credible wonderland out of amorphous paint blots. They don't violate the lush scrims on which they cavort, making them immune to one's initial judgement as naive or folk simplicities. In the presence of "Playground of the Future," "The Rooster Play," "Fiddler in the Night," "The Celestial Circus" I felt ancient resonances from the Mittel European soil, a music and poetry as unforgettably inevitable and haunting as the working folk tunes Bartok and Kodaly made into monuments with our age's atonal dignity. John Hultberg
