Expressions and Images

...it is reminiscent of the enchanted forest in Snow White, but it falls far short of Disney standards...

...The show features "man," Margaret Mead says in the introduction, "as object rather than subject," and includes paintings and sculpture expressing the many "styles" of man within the Western tradition, plus other civilizations' views of him...

...Hesse's main achievement was the expression of a distinctive vision through modern materials: plastics, latex, string, wire, metals, and so forth...

...The portrait is touching for its gentleness, conveyed by slightly crossed, bleary eyes and a tentative smile...

...The show would have lost nothing by the omission of an appalling picture by Roland Penrose, the writer and friend of Picasso (who, incidentally, is represented by a de-coupage of a faun...

...and a 19th-century wood-carving from Madagascar...

...At that time Surrealism was raging through the Western world, but for his generation in England, he explained...

...Engulfed in an Army overcoat, he is sitting on the ground smoking a pipe and painting what appears to be an abandoned hansom cab in a field...

...The audacity and scale of the American work shook him...

...Regardless, as others have already pointed out, it is both an entertaining event and a good idea that could profitably be expanded, perhaps to a museum scale...

...This gallery, well-known for its elegant ambience and the diversity of its displays, never looked better-?the space being grand and the pieces relatively few, 28 in all...

...The pieces range from ladder like constructions and groups of translucent plastic canisters to ropelike webs strung like tangled hammocks...

...Things dangle, lean against the wall or lurk on the floor, and we see a progression of colorfrom early blacks and grays to late yellows and off-whites...

...One of the webs looks as if it were made of mucus rather than fiberglass...

...After the war, Ben Nicholson became a rallying point for many of the older painters...

...The face is more or less a disc with vestigial features, topped by human hair bound with a headband...

...In their divergent ways, all of them have of course drawn inspiration from Surrealism, possibly feeling an affinity with its passive female qualities...

...Some canvases are amusing: Richard Linder's The Academician, popeyed and very pink in his nakedness, wears a cocked hat, carries a ceremonial sword and seems ready for a bit of extracurricular "discipline...

...being born at the wrong time is less dramatic but no less poignant, and to be born British may be the ultimate handicap for an artist...

...Clearly, man has gone through as many bizarre self-images as woman...

...a costumed Ibo figure from Nigeria, circa 1900...

...Eva Hesse was already a success when she died, and it is no great gamble to say she was heading toward even more powerful work...

...The current exhibition at the Guggenheim (through February 11) covers only the last five years of her production...

...One sticklike arm gestures sideways, the other points upward as if directing traffic...

...it seemed too far removed from the reality of the times of two million unemployed and the rise of Fascism in Europe . . . a sort of escapism" (an amusing rationale, considering the Surrealists' efforts to hook up with Communism...

...The artist was 33 before he could resume painting full-time...

...The results are gray squares of different tones, a kind of cross between Josef Albers and Georges Seurat...

...They are fairly large, placid compositions of simplified kitchen shapes...

...The early examples are very pretty in their compulsively neat patterns, including half-a-dozen sheets of graph paper on which the tiny squares have been laboriously filled with circles, crosses, etc., as if by a small girl anxious to please with her neatness...

...The last pictures are near abstract-expressionist blurs of gray or color...

...Hesse shows traces of the influence of such contemporaries as Jasper Johns, Lucas Samaras and Claes Oldenburg...

...They are not great, and some will find them as tedious as did the young English painters of the 1950s...

...Moreover, her combination of beauty and disagree-ableness is a trait shared with quite a few women sculptors, notably Lee Bontecou and Marisol...

...Coincidentally, the show's most attractive personality is also the most desirable work of art: a Peruvian grave figure 34 inches high and a couple of inches thick...

...Carved like a quick drawing, it leans at an angle paralleling the wood grain...

...even Louise Nevelson has a touch of it...

...that woman gets the nominative case and man the accusative may or may not be significant...

...The blues and greens that were once Scott's "signature" have given way to warm colors and beiges...

...it also convinced him of his Europeanness...

...the younger ones were beginning to hammer out kitchen-sink realism or were looking to Francis Bacon and even Ben Shahn...

...Like so many of his contemporaries, Scott turned to "a kind of primitive realism" and was beginning to make headway when World War II broke out...

...Throughout this period, Scott was steadily building a reputation for variations on table-top arrangements of fish, eggs and cooking utensils...

...The recent Scott canvases on display at Martha Johnson (through February 10) represent a graceful synthesis of influences encountered in his travels and an intelligent awareness of the limitations exerted by his time and place...

...Her later working drawings, some of them bold plans for sculpture, are rather studied in their nonchalance A decorative blend of sketches and written notes for what she called "repeations" and what the museum has less picturesquely titled "repetitions...

...An anglicized Cubism eventually gave way to a phase of abstraction, stimulated no doubt by Nicholson and Nicolas de Stael, and to some extent by a visit to the U.S., where he met members of the New York School...

...white on white with some shapes outlined in a fine black line...

...On the other hand, some of the small objects call to mind food as it must often look before industrial processingthat is, before being injected with coloring and given texture to make it seem both edible and appetizing...

...Eva Hesse died in earlier "SHE" exhibition, Cordier Elstrom is now presenting "HIM" (through February 10...

...There are two fine Indian carvings from the 3rd-4th and 11th centuries, respectively...

...As usual with Surrealist-derived art, associations are very much up to the viewer...

...Despite the sound of promotional wheels grinding away in the background, her distinctive voice remains audible today...

...On Art EXPRESSIONS AND IMAGES BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Eva Hesse died in 1970, at age 34, having hadApart from an art education that culminated in a BFA at Yale A working life of only 11 years, though she apparently showed enough talent at 18 to win a magazine award for her illustrations...

...on the contrary, it is as if she would have lacked the vehicle for her ideas had these substances not been at hand...

...The last piece is outstanding, especially in the treatment of the head: Hair is simplified into knobs, and a slight disjunction between head and neck allows the jaw to jut in a most lovely way...

...On every level, it is a knockout...

...William Scott began his studies at the Royal Academy Schools in 1931 and was quite soon drawn to the genre of still life...

...I was caught up," he remarked of this period, "in the wave of the English watercolor nationalist romantic patriotic isolationist self-preservation-alist movement...

...Silhouettes of pans and bowls are laid on flat grounds: white and black on gray...

...But for those who have exhausted the possibilities of shock, there will be something calming about their stolid good taste and the indisputable integrity of the man who did them...

...Abstract Expressionism was just around the corner...

...reds and browns on ocher...

...Her development is most visible in her drawings, for toward the end of her life her illness forced her to employ assistants to do sculpture...

...Reproductions suggest he was affected by Mark Rothko, but he was scarcely a competitor in the field...

...Two diagonal forms, slashing down and across the cheeks, are filled with red paint...

...Her sculpture in particular is extremely sophisticated and, for someone cut off so early, strangely complete...

...To get the most out of the show, it is a good idea to look first and read the catalogue afterward, for the well-meant documentation by Robert Pincus-Witten and Linda Shearer is fairly boring and has a somewhat diminishing effect on the work...

...Done in 1938, Penrose's The Veteran is a gnarled tree-figure wearing medals and a sporran...

...In Hesse's case, one is made acutely aware of an artist struggling to express a modern kind of sensuality...

...There is no suggestion of experimentation for neurotic experimentation's sake...

...While devoid of obvious symbolism, the pieces nevertheless do convey, variously, the erotic, the clinical and the fetishis-tic...

...Among the paintings, Romare Bearden's collage of a black priest-figure against a background with Egyptian references is the best, though it does not exactly fit with the show...

...He continued to do watercolors when he could: The catalogue from a recent Tate Gallery retrospective has a moving, beautiful and preposterously British picture of Sapper Scott, with hair cropped down to white sidewalls...

...Without doubt the sculpture has it over the painting...

...The contrast between the Ming cal-ligrapher standing at peace with himself and the French circus rider, fluffed out with bombast and spangles, is enough to suggest two separate genera...

...Other notable works are a small bronze Noguchi wrestler and a Ptolemaic mummy cartonnage, involving only the head of the mummy and the engraved gold coverings for the body...

...Premature death is an obvious tragedy...

...a young football player, by Jean Metzinger, can only be described as Leger-effete...