Page 52 - Studio International - January 1966

viable modern traditions visible in this exhibition, particular epoch. Like Matisse, his wellsprings remain
perhaps Matisse's is still the most renewable. ever viable.
Happily, the historical aspects of the show are not At the Marlborough Gerson Gallery, Arnaldo
salient, but it is easy for those so inclined to establish Pomodoro's massive sculptures, primarily cast in
a whole universe of analogies and historical precedents. bronze, reflect not a few of the modern traditions
Within this show almost all (with the exception of forcefully. Clearly Pomodoro looks to modern science
German expressionism) modern tendencies are posited. for inspiration. He frankly titles some of his disks and
It is a history of modern art in nuce. one curving screen 'radars', and uses massed small
details to suggest the endless and complicating govern-
ing devices in some of our more advanced instruments.
But Pomodoro is not an illustrator. He has a sculptor's
instinct for scale, and a sculptor's judgment concerning
contrasts of surface light and relief shadow. The larger
pieces are truly massive. Pomodoro plays elegantly
with the effects of a smoothly-polished curving wall
interrupted somewhat violently with jagged relief just
below the surface. His keyboards of small relief forms
are usually well integrated into the large, often
generalised mass, serving to emphasise the sheer
weight and audacious size he prefers.
In quite a different tradition is the work of H. C.
Westermann at the Allan Frumkin Gallery. Westermann
occupies the terrains vagues between authentic folk
Miro art and dada. He is a remarkable craftsman whose
Solitude 1111111 29/4/60
Oil on cardboard sculptures and constructions range in tenor from witty
29 1/2 x 41 1/4 in. to corny, from fantastic to commonplace. In this
Pierre Matisse Gallery
New York exhibition he exhibits a number of striking tours de
force: sculptures carved out of single blocks of hard
N. C. Westermann
Nouveau Rat Trap 1965 woods, among them mahogany and teak, in which he
Finnish Birch Plywood and cuts a linked chain or a ball within a rectangle.
Brazilian Rosewood
12 x 34 x 7 1/2 in. Many of Westermann's jokes are elusive, some are flat,
Allan Frumkin Gallery, New York
but some are so marvellously apposite that his status
as a folk artist is challenged seriously. Certainly his
Nouveau Rat Trap, in which the bentwood forms were
laminated with his own hands (prodigious labour with
perfect results), is a sophisticated burlesque. On the
other hand, The Ball and the Jack, which figure in a
number of American folk songs, are given a dimension
of mystery by the mere handling.
Nathan Oliveira, a Californian expressionistwhose work
has always engaged my interest, showed recent paint-
ings and drawings at the Alan Gallery. Although the flow
of Oliveira's imagination is still impressive and his range
New York of idiom (from symbolism to pure expressionist abstrac-
Living history, or as some prefer, that which is beyond tion) is still wide, his new work does not have the
the confines of history, is seen in the most recent Miro immediacy he was once able to command. There
exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. is too much repetition, too much loose collation of
The effortless mastery Miro displays in his 'cartones' fragments, too much dependence on the ambiguities of
leaves me speechless. Even the humble Spanish card- expressionist paintings. Only one of the large paintings
boards on which Miro traces his timeless mythologies struck me as fully effective : a dark rumination on masks
alone impress me. Only a great master could have full of intimations of primitive rites. The smaller works,
been so casual and yet so precise. both collage and watercolour, are, as always with
For this series of paintings, covering a span of about Oliveira, at once fragmentary and expressive of a
three years and including several from 1965, are not volatile, ceaselessly-active temperament. Perhaps this
mere vagaries of an off-duty genius. Many of them are is simply a slack moment for Oliveira, one in which he is
serious reprises of important Miro themes. Among the moving out from his expressionist and symbolist
most poignant are those in the Solitude series, washed sources in a no-man's-land that he has not yet
over with warm whites through which the tan card- successfully identified for himself.
n
boards can be read, and marked with few forms. These
clearly relate to earlier fantasies of sky-like spaces, of
flying and isolation undertaken in the middle 1920s
and recapitulated a few years ago in the magnificent
series of 'Blue' paintings.
Other themes recurring forcefully in this show include
the recurrent motif of woman and bird, handled
sometimes playfully, sometimes lyrically, sometimes
with impressive primordial force. Miro's hand is not
stayed by time, nor is his imagery anchored in a