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Robert Reid's[Alonzo; Nov. 10-28] latest paintings are based on beach themes—broadly interpreted. His sand may be blue and the sky sand-colored, but despite these reversals his compositions, with their clear horizons and rippling waves, are clearly seascapes. In place of bathers, Reid substitutes crowds of numbers and medieval reliquaries. Some of his buildings come nervously to the water's edge, as if afraid to get their stilts wet. J.G. ARTnews NOVEMBER 1970 November 10-28: "Figures on the Beach II" is a somewhat misleading title for Robert Reid's show, because the figures are not human but are numbers and letters on beaches. The moody depictions by this black artist are searching the sky, sea and beach for time-space relations, with soft color, delicate imagery close to landscape, sometimes with medieval overtones. Alonzo, 26 East 63 Street. BETTY CHAMBERLAIN THE PHILHARMONIC HALL PROGRAM •PARK EAST• Thursday, November 19, 1970 Reid at Alonzo Robert Reid is having a one-man show of paintings at the Alonzo Gallery. A feeling of spaciousness and calm pervades these almost abstract beach scenes with their vast blue and green expanses of sea and sky. And yet there is also the element of mystery emanating from the stylized enclosures or beach houses that appear in almost every canvas and in the symbolic groupings of letters or numbers huddled in the in the foreground. The latter are canvas cutouts used in collage and the artist generally places them in overlapping proximity as though to suggest a search for shelter and security. One cannot help noticing too that the numbers or letters are never mixed but always appear in homogenous groups, one kind at a time on a given painting. It is the artist's personal vision of the universe and his attempt to find meaning in it that are so eloquently expressed in Figures on the Beach, Dorothy Hall [[image]] Robert Reid, A Falling #4 (1970), oil and collage, 44" x 44". Courtesy Alonzo Gallery. mising statement about life and the range of her paints [[stamp]] ARTS MAGAZINE/November 1970 Gallery Reviews by Charlotte Lichtblau ring indi- completely incarnate -mentalized destiny of man she to portray. One artist who does achieve the full impact of unique vision is PHILIP PEARLSTEIN, whose most recent figure and portrait paint- ings are on view at the Frumkin Gallery (Oct. 31st-Nov. 28th). Pearlstein has been the subject of many reviews and articles, and viewers are probably familiar with the seemingly limited goals of his "Neo-Realism": the nude model totally exposed to the harshness of studio- lights, the dispassionate painter's eye seeing more "realistically" than the camera what is. What was purely polemic and dialectic in Pearlstein's Neo-Realist stance has served its and his purpose well, reasserting the validity of figurative painting. Now that that battle is over and won, some of Pearlstein's recent work speaks more eloquently than words. What this hard-headed, seemingly limited and modest ar- tist is really about remains to be defined. In the harshness of his studio lights, Pearlstein recently posed his daughter, dressed up in red party shoes, on a richly upholstered Victorian couch. There is also in this show a "mercilessly realistic" nude model seated in the total mys- tery of an American Victorian rocking-chair casting shadows. The "naked camera eye" of the "modest Neo-Realist" Pearlstein is begin- ning to render, with an almost gothic American matter-of-factness, the full human presence in all of its metaphysical space. Along with the inner content, richer color, differentiations of texture, and other traditional elements of the painter's craft are beginning to assert them- selves authoritatively. Less well known but also an authoritative voice is ROBERT REID, (Alonzo, Nov. 10th- 28th). His latest series of oils, Figures on the Beach, ought first to be seen and experienced, then talked about. For Reid is a subtle and deeply poetic iconographer. A clear translation into words would do violence to the viewer's joy of visual cognition of Reid's brilliant es- thetic symbolism. His utterly human figures are the letters of the alphabet and numbers, in- volved in the entire human destiny, before birth, after death. The cleansing realm is the sea. The apocalyptic and transcendental battle rages above and below it and on earthly shores. Reid's colors are really hues which ap- pear breathed on to the canvas in radiating light. This light curiously suggests dark shad- owy areas even where one seems to see merely light surfaces. It takes an enormous amount of intelligence, tact, certainty and craftsmanship to convey such total vision with such refined discretion.
