Page 46 - Studio International - May 1966

Kenneth Noland
Brown stretched 1966
Acrylic paint on canvas
7 x 24 ft
Andre Emmerich Gallery

Marvin Israel
Untitled
Oil on canvas
48 x 38 in.
Cordier & Ekstrom Inc.

play with painted v. real shape, and by certain formal
ambiguities that remain once the structure registers.
The question of colour which has been raised in irritat-
ingly vague terms in recent criticism (what, for instance, is
colour painting as distinct from painting?) is juggled most
equivocally here. Stella has chosen several screaming
fluorescent colours which are deployed without any visible
logic. A violent pink and a flagrant yellow seem arbitrary,
while a neutral tan or a grainy black do not visibly moder-
ate Stella's elements. It may be that in avoiding the laws
of colour, Stella is making yet another pronouncement on
what he is unwilling to do. But the paintings suffer.
For all that, Stella is always a measure ahead of his
imitators, always more daring and always worth thinking
about. Kenneth Noland, on the other hand, seems con-
tent to make variations on previously stated concerns with
increasing facility. His recent exhibition at the EMMERICH
GALLERY continued in the vein of last year's exhibition
except that he has chosen even more seductive colour with
which to play upon his surfaces in relatively simple terms.
Whatever tension is produced by stretching out the
lozenge-shaped canvas and running counter to its axis with
parallel bands is slackened by the graciously harmonious
colours plodding on in predictable progressions. Hand-
some canvases, but all too easy to digest.
A strangely compelling primitive sensibility is at work in
Marvin Israel's first one-man show at the CORDIER
EKSTROM GALLERY. I say 'primitive' because Israel is un-
concerned with most of the going aesthetics, although he
avails himself of current figures of visual speech now and
then. Mainly, Israel follows a peculiar vision of dislocated
human figures through a variety of climates. He sometimes
treats the figure as though it were a film negative, its out-
lines slightly shaded, and sometimes as though it were
merely a figure-shaped negative space lingering in the
narrow margin between two mirrors. Enlarged limbs cross
bland, abstract spaces, floating eerily in certain of the