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Whitney Unveils Some 'Recent Prints'
By James R. Mellow
NYT Sat. April 1, 72

The principal question about "Recent Print Acquisitions," at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Madison Avenue at 75th Street, is whether the show was worth doing at all. It is one of those stop-gap exhibitions, filling space and presumably paying off a few debts to some donor involved. 

It is made up of purchased prints and recent gifts from collectors, dealers, artists and print publishers and is extremely spotty in its value and interest. The items range from respectable, if not very distinguished, lithographs by George Bellows and Grant Wood to the works of the latest conceptual and optical artists. 

Space was evidently a problem: the show occupies the museum's small ground-floor gallery and a wall on the lower level, and it includes some 37 prints in a variety of media. Sol Lewitt's series of 16 color prints, obviously intended to play out a progressive formal sequence, has been held down to four examples. One of them, admittedly, anthologizes the series on a single page. But, having decided to exhibit it, why not show the entire series? 

A few of the selections may, indeed, fill some strange historical gap in the Whitney's print collection- a conventional 1930 lithograph of Lower Manhattan by Howard Cook, a dull 1927 European landscape by John Taylor Arms, a 19th-cntury etching of Herald Square in a snowstorm by Curt Szekessy (all of these gifts)- but it is difficult to determine what that gap might be. 

There are some thoroughly respectable offerings- works by Mon Levinson, Josef Albers, Robert Kulicke, Vincent Longo and Phillip Pearlstein among them- but for the most part, the Whitney has rushed to the walls with an odd assortment of historical fillers, gift horses, old standbys and weak examples of artists who might have been shown to better advantage.

Other exhibitions this week include:

Barbara Chase-Riboud (Betty Parsons, 24 West 57th Street): Sculptures, drawings and jewelry make up the exhibition. The sculptures are extremely well made- rather classy, in fact- with clusters of bronze elements, polished

[[image]] IN BRONZE AND SILK: "Zanzibar," by Barbara Chase-Riboud, is being shown by Betty Parsons. 

and gleaming, and plaits, braids, ropes, and cords of wool and silk, dangling in profusion. 

It would be difficult to select one work as more expertly handled than another, but "Zanzibar," in polished bronze with tentacles of tawny gold silk, would be my choice. The jewelry is even more expertly crafted and looks very expensive. The artist is obviously very talented, but the work is a bit too chic. 

Enrico Donati (Staempfli, 47 East 77th Street): Donati's paintings have a striking, almost hallucinatory, imagery. Sections of heavy impasto mixed with sand and quartz- shaped like ancient stones inscribed with unreadable messages or cryptic patterns- float against brilliantly colored flat grounds. 

Everything- structuring, texturing, the vivid optical effects- works here, and with a masterful professionalism, yet the idea seems slight and repetitious. "Point Zero," with its gray rock-form poised on slope of black paint, provided the most sustained interest in the show. 

Ray Ciarrochi (Tibor de Nagy, 29 West 57th Street): In these striking landscape and figure paintings, Ciarrochi cultivates flat, broad shapes and awkward drawing in a very knowledgeable manner. A field of sea-grasses against a row of trees and a patch of sky, for examples, is an almost abstract expressionist expanse of strokes and confetti-like daubings. 

Ciarrochi works best, I think, in a range of muted colors, but "Afternoon Shade," with its tanned figure sprawling in a field of hot red and against jazzily dappled ground of green and yellow, is a real tour de force in both color and composition. 

The small collection of water-colors also on view dispays a more realistic and more conventional style, but "Early Apples," with its bleached color and over-all paterning is especially impressive. Ciarrochi appears to be an artist well on his way to be acquiring a distinctive and engaging style.