Page 56 - Studio International - June 1968

Top George Sugarman Two-fold 1968
painted wood, 96 x 54 x 37 in..
Fischbach Gallery, New York
Centre Robert Goodnough Ill L 63 x 204 in.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

Bottom Franz Kupka Study for Printemps cosmique
1912-13, gouache
Spencer Samuels' Gallery, New York

curves against straight edges, and seeking to ex-
ploit the play of light, or its absence, with his
surfaces. Starting as he did with so much baroque
profusion, Sugarman's simplifications have brought
him far, but not too far. There is still enough playing
off and arbitrariness to keep him lively and robust.

Richard Van Buren at the BYKERT GALLERY shows
some interesting and occasionally beautiful experi-
ments with fibreglass and wood. He too has
simplified, but in his case simplification has in-
volved renouncing a certain harsh object aesthetic
in favour of illusion.
Van Buren has found a means of molding fibre-
glass over wood in which the warmth of the wood
and its depth of colour—ranging from light amber
to oxblood—is accented by edges of textured fibre.
The resultant softly-glowing pieces have a sombre
beauty. In other pieces Van Buren covers planks
with transparent plastic. These become building
units. His low and elongated gateway is a strange
conception, strange enough to compel contempla-
tion and holding something of the old aggressive
quality Van Buren's work used to display.
Robert Goodnough, a painter who has stubbornly
mined the grand twentieth-century traditions,
always with respectable results, has brought him-
self into a new and greatly clarified position with
his large horizontal canvases at the TIBOR DE NAGY
GALLERY.
Goodnough has never been troubled by the
temporary enthusiasms and seasonal disaffections
of the art world. His slow explorations of cubist
doctrines covered many seasons and much pictorial
ground, bringing him naturally and with admirable
ease to the splendid simplicity of these canvases.
There is nothing new in the formal language. On
the contrary, Goodnough's old forms are retained,
but they are minus their grid-like containers, and
minus all embellishment. They glide across the
gleaming white canvases in stately rhythms. They
turn slightly, are made recessive very slightly, are
overlapped here and there, but essentially they
float in a very narrow foreplane, relating to one
another by means of their shapes. Goodnough's
draughtsmanship—for that, even more than the
clarity of his colours, determines his paintings—is of
a very high calibre. The buoyant, disarming sim-
plicity found here is a simplicity willed by a highly
experienced and sensitive draughtsman.
A painter of another period, Franz Kupka, is
receiving what I believe is his first major gallery
showing in New York at SPENCER SAMUELS' gallery.
Although Kupka's name appears constantly in the
art history books, for various reasons his works have
rarely appeared in New York. Even now, with this
impressive and fairly extensive show, there are large
lacunae. Nevertheless, Samuels has been able to
marshal enough early works, ranging from Kupka's
rather tasteless adaptations of art nouveau motifs to
his first tentative explorations of celestial rhythms,
to establish the imaginative force this curious artist
exerted in the movement toward abstraction.
Dore Ashton