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Adolph Gottlieb. Azimuth, 1965. Oil on canvas, 92 x 144 inches. Marlborough-Gerson Gallery.

symmetrical rendering of this scheme. Ping, 1964, is a deep blue disc centered over a larger expanding red disc with pale nimbus, and then over a thin darker red bar. The line-up is direct and compelling, the colors and spatial relationships just and complex. But instead of continuing in this direction, Gottlieb keeps returning to what has become his sky-over-sea-or-land cliché, now resembling in its weariness Max Ernst's use of the same general idea. When Gottlieb does use the disc alone on a solid color field, he feels it necessary to dainty up the lower right corner with little slabs of color, like a color chart or key to the main scheme. These may be intended, like Olitski's similar dots, to add scale and accent to a surface or image that is felt lacking in itself. The little bars are very pretty and unworthy of an artist who can produce the lyrical finality of a Ping. The three 1965 paintings are downright distressing. Azimuth is a quasi-Zen, quasi-Miró use of self-consciously "spontaneous" signs on a white ground; despite the manoevering of drips and spots it is sprightly rather than lively. Two huge canvases present the latest solution - a solid dull green "earth" with a white "sky" full of irregular bar and disc units, lined up in regular rows across the top; the rows reach to the horizon line in one case, are separated from the green by a white band in the other. Gottlieb is still capable of luscious color, like the green disc with yellow nimbus on yellow ground, but now he has abandoned all chromatic vibrancy (the colors are somber and matte in one, falsely bright in the other). He is left with a great static silence. These two paintings do not seem the logical outcome of Gottlieb's development and one hopes that this "crisis" will pass. The regular, almost compartmented units distantly recall the ideograms from the forties, which remain among Gottlieb's best work; an additional hint of such nostalgia: the disembodied eye symbol scratched onto a small shape in the otherwise undistinguished Interplay, 1963.

Robyn Denny's exhibition at Robert Elkon several months ago was accidentally not covered in these pages and should be mentioned in retrospect as a puzzling experience. One of the most intelligent and open of the British generation now in its thirties, Denny is a respected figure. The little work I had seen (mainly in reproduction) was rigorous and contemplative, as was this exhibition - to some extent. It was puzzling because most of the paintings seemed so weak. Once one has seen and admired Ad Reinhardt's work it is difficult not to compare darkly colored, close-valued geometric paintings to his. Denny stays strictly away from monochrome and contrasts his pale chalky color with dark browns, olives and grays, but sections are often muted to the point of chromatic extinction. The configurations are ambiguous and seem crowded, closer to some of the minor Neo-Plasticists than to current geometric work. Yet they have a contemporary illogicality in the best cases; for instance, two elements of a strictly rectilinear and symmetrical figure will turn off in identical "breaks" or odd angles incongruent with the rest and, having done so, continue on a regular path as though nothing had happened. The thinly painted, blotchy surface doesn't help though, and for the most part these ideas, basically provocative, have been bypassed by recent developments.

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A "circuit environment" is what Marta Minujin calls El Batacazo (The Long Shot), a vinyl phantasmagoria at the Bianchini Gallery. The spectator, shoeless, is directed through a labyrinth of modernistic erotica lit by flickering neon, pervaded by the strong stench of several caged rabbits lining an upper section, and padded underfoot in a variety of slippery plastics. The whole business is encased in clear vinyl so it can be enjoyed from the exterior after one has climbed the stairs, manoeuvered the passages and shot down a slide onto an immense stuffed effigy of a reclining nude. A tape, recorded by the artist's husky, heavily accented voice, gives directions, and when the nude is being traversed, it pants and moans; the rabbits are presumably fertility symbols. The carnival atmosphere is augmented by the domination of pink, blue and

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