Viewing page 25 of 48

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

AF Feb. 67
R Pincas - Witten

(which even Henry James was forced to admire), Homer had early a prodigious feeling for light and atmosphere, and he came to possess a remarkable knowledge of how to invest his works with them. It is this ability which infuses the austere structure of the Man with a Scythe (1867) with the critical interest that a good, if unpolished, Homer always has. The later Girl Picking Apple Blossoms (1879) contains a much subtler evocation of atmosphere, but never lapses into the niggling smudges so many plein-airistes felt was the true legacy of Corot and the Barbizons. Homer's bone-deep grasp of the necessity of a bold and forthright pictorial construction at all times would not allow him such solecisms.

This exhibition of smallish works should do much to reveal the core of genuine accomplishment in Homer that has been periodically obscured by prevailing tastes. His solid composition, his confident and varied handling, never tentative or aimless, and his successes with color and atmosphere will always merit appreciative attention.

-DENNIS ADRIAN

LARRY ZOX, Kornblee Gallery; ROBERT SMITHSON, Dwan Gallery; RICHARD RANDELL, Royal Marks Gallery; ART IN THE MIRROR, Museum of Modern Art.

The lessons broadcast in recent Stellas, or Williamses, and still others of a whole phalanx of classicists who refuse to regard color merely as a descriptive feature of shape and plane, appear to have been taken to heart in the handsome new paintings of LARRY ZOX. His present exhibition at the Kornblee gallery, of work from the past year, indicates a striking evolution in his compositional method. Preferring large, squarish canvases with stronger horizontal thrusts, Zox has revised his initially strictly-applied quadrant divisions (in swastika or pinwheel configurations) into something testier and more flexible. The four-part system is still visible through the antiseptic yet personal color, yet, now, it is used to establish geometrical patterns in which lozenge forms, and altered criss-crosses (of unprimed canvas) posit powerful and dense color halations or even optical morphoses. The color, in short, is now freed to act dramatically, dimensionally, while the enframing elements (the canvas paths) affirm two-dimensional experiences, or, at best, spatial schema securely anchored in two-dimensional conventions such as isometric perspective. Zox's supple, serial images owe much of their success to his considerable technical prowess and, reductive means notwithstanding, his new paintings reveal an accomplished artist of chaste vigor.

The key pieces of ROBERT SMITHSON's demanding exhibition at the Dwan Gallery are two sculptural groups, each containing ten elements, lined up in rows. The basic element of Alogon is a corner-like structure built of fifteen cubes. (In line, the formation is often met as an optical illusion.) Constructed out of sheet metal, each element is sprayed gun-metal silver. As one moves past each element one encounters a constant and regularly applied scale increment. The basic modular unit moves from a three-and-a-half inch cube to a seven-inch cube.

The second sculpture, Plunge, lines up ten works, the basic group of which is a cube, growing out of a cube, growing out of a cube, u.s.w., four times over. By regularly enlarging the size of each cube the work grows from an overall height of 22 inches in the first piece to 40 inches in the last.

Smithson is fascinated by the ritual possibilities of number. His catalog offers us a table of measurements arrived at by determining the "intersection areas to the total surface," the "Measurements of Visible Cubes," a "Code of Positional Changes" and the like. Despite Smithson's scientistic information his work attests to a highly quirky, Dadaistic temperament. This is not meant as a negative criticism. It only reminds us that much of minimal sculpture is a marriage of engineering and absurdity. Be that as it may, Smithson's handsome and astute work identifies him incontestably as a major figure of what may very soon prove to be a morganatic alliance.

RICHARD RANDELL is simultaneously investigating two kinds of structure. One, tautly skinned and light, like an air-wing section, was seen throughout last season at Royal Marks's laudable sculpture gatherings. These works transmit a sense of buoyancy as if, in truth, a vacuum actually were supporting their nimble crafted arc-slabs. At the same time the effervescence of these works is oddly neutralized by the vertically symmetrical axis which transforms them into formal and ritualized objects.

Randell's new works are concerned with "klapper" organizations - lanky structures which evoke the flipping card trick that so fascinated us as children. This latter group seems to me to be considerably more provocative than the former, since its active, industrial aluminum panels (which pleat up into the air or sprawl out across the floor, concertina-fashion) postulate the existence of controlling transparent and erratic columns of space. The lacquered, emblematic planes of the "klappers" slash through these "ultimate" columns. Although set at fixed positions the diagonal planes postulate sculptures which, if "opened," would be two-dimensional. They evoke a far more radical form than they take. 

Randell's sculptures are brightly painted in industrial patterns. The "klappers" particularly are handsomely bisected by a folded vertical strip which contributes to further articulating their springy structures, and to dramatizing their puzzling, potential flatness.

An instructive and arresting selection of works by artists who have employed old art for the creation of new has been assembled for the Museum of Modern Art by Gene R. Swenson. Swenson's working premise was that these works "reflect art itself, and its place in the world both as subject and point of departure." As might be expected from the organizer's earlier writings (notably last season's The Other Tradition, a catalog and exhibition for the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania) Swenson is attracted by works that "direct questions, insults and homages toward art" with the result that Art in The Mirror is extremely interesting as a reflection of the director's occasionally arch and Gongoristic sensibility.

Despite the catholicism of Swenson's choices his exhibition really holds together because of a highly personal optic. Moreover Swenson braved censure for including the works of several comparatively unknown young artists (Suzi Gablik, Alain Jacquet, Les Levine, Ray Johnson, Joe Raffaele, Paul Thek) whose work proved able to stand up beside that of the standard masters of modern art.

Despite interesting features not all of the forty-one pieces are especially challenging. Perhaps the tough-minded preciousness of Swenson's view-point tended to overemphasize the modest dimension. Not that scale alone determines the strength of a work. One could hardly charge the lovely Cornells with lack of impact despite their self-effacing proportions.

Swenson is a student of modern art who obviously delights in the arcana of this discipline. Does this slant additionally valorize Alain Jacquet's rotogravure blow-ups of sections of a friend-posed reconstruction of Manet's Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe? (I think so.) Did Swenson's sharp recognition of the affiliation of Marcel Duchamp (The Valise, 1943), Jasper Johns (Canvas, 1963) and Robert Morris (Box with Photo of Door, 1963) exaggerate the ephemeral contingency of the last named work? (I think so.) Some nifty steps reminded us that in Picabia's Tableau Dada par Marcel Duchamp, 1920, the artist forgot to include the Van Dyck featured in Duchamp's antecedent and nastily engaging L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, the famous "Mona Lisa's Moustache" which is the source of Picabia's broadside.

Mona Lisa gets a heady bit of mileage in many places including a version by Andy Warhol which Swenson rightly sees as a "symbol of mass culture and boredom." (Swenson has keen insights on Warhol generally. Of the Violin With Numbers he focuses the public on the element of "cheating amateurism of paint-by-number" which is parodied in this work.)

Perhaps the most unanticipated glimpse of Mona Lisa was the one afforded by Morris Hirshfield's Beach Girl of 1937. Painted over an older, pre-existing work (a technique employed also by Miro, Picasso, and several numbingly trivial Gottliebs) Hirshfield retained the Joconde face which smiles oddly out from a scrupulously over-convoluted child's summer suit, as feathery and crumpled as the landscape she moves in.

-ROBERT PINCUS-WITTEN