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THE NEW YORK TIME FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1957

Art: Tripartite Exhibition

Shadow-Box Constructions Mixed With Sculpture, Paintings at Stable Gallery

Three shows at once combine in the pre-holiday attraction at the Stable Gallery, 924 Seventh Avenue. The painting section includes an intrinsically decorative abstraction by James Brooks, admirable in its controlled color; a canvas with decided impact by Biala, more abstract than most of her previous work; a luminous and imaginative portrait freely executed by Daniel Brustlein and work chiefly in abstract idioms by a dozen others.

In the lower gallery are sculptures by Noguchi, who is one of the four sculptors commissioned to do work for the American Pavilion at next year's Brussels World's Fair. Among the pieces are the towering "Chronos" in wood, the "Unknown Bird," represented in a kind of ungainly grace through skeletal strips of metal, and several pure abstract forms in various materials. There is a lively play of fancy throughout in these highly diverse pieces. Also shown are a number of the slender, aspiring and beautifully finished vertical forms characteristic of Louise Bourgeois' work.

The third part of the exhibition is made up of the very clever shadow-box constructions by Joseph Cornell, teasingly appealing in their suggestive world on the border between dada and surrealism. "Hotel de l'Etoile" presents a simple whitewall and a pillar, with a tall vertical aperture in the wall through which one glimpses the deep blue beyond with its Milky Way haze and specks. 

One contraption called "Bleriot," for the first man to fly across the English Channel, has a spring device that moves toward the observer in a suggestion of flight. And there is a most ingenious device based on the hourglass principle with a stream of sand pouring in meticulous accuracy from the back wall into a cup below that overflows, the overflow forming a shadow behind the cup. All clever and thought-teasing ingenuities.   H.D.