Virtuosi of the Paint Brush In a Scattering of Shows
Written By: Alfred Frankenstein
Several virtuosi are introduced in the rather curious scattering of exhibitions that was placed on view last week in the public and private galleries. The San Francisco Museum has the edge in all of them, what with its shows by Mauricio Lasansky, Matthew Barnes and Hugo Steccati.
Lasansky is an Argentine print-maker now living in New York. At first glance the gallery of his works at the San Francisco Museum produces a rather confused effect, but when you go over the pictures and sort them out according to date, they fall into a very consistent pattern.
Lasansky’s early woodcuts and drypoints are all on peasant themes and they are done in a rather dark and dense and primitive style. For him primitivism seems to be realism, and it is a very effective kind of realism indeed. Later he would seem to have abandoned the primitive for an imaginative, somewhat surrealistic style full of reminiscences of the Renaissance and the baroque.
His big etchings in this manner are, if nothing else, remarkable feats of technical skill, at times bordering on trickery. Perhaps the most extraordinary of them all is the work called “La Rosa y el Espejo” (“The Rose and the Mirror’־) with its reflected, interpenetrating images suggesting a kind of sly collaboration of Leonardo, Duerer and Dali. The latest of the Lasanskys are about equally influenced by the textural experiments of Sidney Havter and the horses of Picasso's "Guernica.” They are highly tense and powerful things; just where they are going, and where Lasansky is going, is a question I do not propose to answer.
The exhibition of paintings by Matthew Barnes in the room adjoining Lasansky brings together an exceptionally large representation of one of San Francisco's most individual artists. Barnes told me once that he was brought up ׳on old Scotch folk tales, and this fact is quite clearly apparent in the eerie, noctambulistic atmosphere of his paintings.
Barnes is inclined to paint a little according to formula, forwhich reason one or two of his pictures are likely to be a bit more impressive than a whole group. He loves icy moonlight, lowering, bulky shadows, and high places that seem in the night like the ultimate edge of the world. There are strange gleams and phosphorescences in the stillness of his blue and black masses, wherefore the pictures shine out and carry at a distance in a most extraordinary fashion; as Dr. Morley remarked, “they sing on the wall."
At times Barnes deserts his square, boxy houses, his restless lakes and legendary moons for purely introspective fantasies like the thing called, “Playful Snakes,” but these are not Barnes at his best. On his own ground he belongs with Ryder and Mattson and the finest of the American romanticists.
In another gallery adjoining Lasansky is a collection of watercolors and oils by Zahara Schatz, whose brother, Bezalel, also had a show at the San Francisco Museum some time ago. Miss Schatz’s water colors come through easily. They are crisp and rhapsodic at once. They are full of vigor and life and deft understatement, speaking as much through the white space as through the color. Her oils I find completely, baffling. There are hints of Klee and Miro, but the pictures are not like Klee and Miro. They exploit little climbing and tumbling shapes which say nothing in particular to me, and I am quite willing to admit that that is my fault rather than the artist’s.
'San Francisco Chronicle'
Virtuosi of the Paint Brush In a Scattering of Shows
Written By: Alfred Frankenstein
Several virtuosi are introduced in the rather curious scattering of exhibitions that was placed on view last week in the public and private galleries. The San Francisco Museum has the edge in all of them, what with its shows by Mauricio Lasansky, Matthew Barnes and Hugo Steccati.
Lasansky is an Argentine print-maker now living in New York. At first glance the gallery of his works at the San Francisco Museum produces a rather confused effect, but when you go over the pictures and sort them out according to date, they fall into a very consistent pattern.
Lasansky’s early woodcuts and drypoints are all on peasant themes and they are done in a rather dark and dense and primitive style. For him primitivism seems to be realism, and it is a very effective kind of realism indeed. Later he would seem to have abandoned the primitive for an imaginative, somewhat surrealistic style full of reminiscences of the Renaissance and the baroque.
His big etchings in this manner are, if nothing else, remarkable feats of technical skill, at times bordering on trickery. Perhaps the most extraordinary of them all is the work called “La Rosa y el Espejo” (“The Rose and the Mirror’־) with its reflected, interpenetrating images suggesting a kind of sly collaboration of Leonardo, Duerer and Dali. The latest of the Lasanskys are about equally influenced by the textural experiments of Sidney Havter and the horses of Picasso's "Guernica.” They are highly tense and powerful things; just where they are going, and where Lasansky is going, is a question I do not propose to answer.
The exhibition of paintings by Matthew Barnes in the room adjoining Lasansky brings together an exceptionally large representation of one of San Francisco's most individual artists. Barnes told me once that he was brought up ׳on old Scotch folk tales, and this fact is quite clearly apparent in the eerie, noctambulistic atmosphere of his paintings.
Barnes is inclined to paint a little according to formula, forwhich reason one or two of his pictures are likely to be a bit more impressive than a whole group. He loves icy moonlight, lowering, bulky shadows, and high places that seem in the night like the ultimate edge of the world. There are strange gleams and phosphorescences in the stillness of his blue and black masses, wherefore the pictures shine out and carry at a distance in a most extraordinary fashion; as Dr. Morley remarked, “they sing on the wall."
At times Barnes deserts his square, boxy houses, his restless lakes and legendary moons for purely introspective fantasies like the thing called, “Playful Snakes,” but these are not Barnes at his best. On his own ground he belongs with Ryder and Mattson and the finest of the American romanticists.
In another gallery adjoining Lasansky is a collection of watercolors and oils by Zahara Schatz, whose brother, Bezalel, also had a show at the San Francisco Museum some time ago. Miss Schatz’s water colors come through easily. They are crisp and rhapsodic at once. They are full of vigor and life and deft understatement, speaking as much through the white space as through the color. Her oils I find completely, baffling. There are hints of Klee and Miro, but the pictures are not like Klee and Miro. They exploit little climbing and tumbling shapes which say nothing in particular to me, and I am quite willing to admit that that is my fault rather than the artist’s.
'San Francisco Chronicle'