Art: Four Galleries Present Group Exhibitions

Weekend, The New York Times, Friday, September 9, 1983
By Vivien Raynor


Some group shows, like those now at Davis & Langdale, 746 Madison Avenue, at 65th Street, and Schoelkopf, 825 Madison Avenue, at 69th Street, are essentially profiles of the galleries' stables. Others are composed around themes, as in "Paintings of the 50s" at Marilyn Pearl, 38 East 57th Street, while still others are miscellanies -- for example, the collection of 19th- and 20th-century prints at Fitch-Febvrel, 5 East 57th Street.

But any way it is sliced, the group show generally demands more of viewers than the carefully orchestrated solo does, just in the way it can temporarily alter the balance of esthetic power. Major reputations represented by so-so works can be outstripped by minor figures doing their best, and even obscurities can be stars for a while. Between-season groups aren't exactly flea markets, but they are welcome touches of anarchy in the otherwise stringently regulated world of art.

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These painters [previously mentioned] can be taken in at a glance, if need be, but not so the three dozen or so printmakers at Fitch-Febvrel, who come from both sides of the Atlantic and range from Symbolists like Odilon Redon to contemporary landscapists such as Gunnar Norrman. Still, for those who are not print specialists, most of the names will be obscure, and it isn't always possible to estimate the period they are working in either. A large etched landscape where mountains have metamorphosed into fortresses, a stagnant river winding between them, is a fantasy not of the 19th century, but of the 1970's. Moreover, its author is not German, but a young French-Moroccan, Erik Desmazières.

Other strangers to this observer are Mark Whitcombe and Peri Schwartz. Mr. Whitcomb's hand-colored etching of a crumbling house teeming with figures and laundry lines, and with an equally ramshackle sailboat perched on its roof, is reminiscent of the whimsies of the British cartoonist Emmett. By contrast, Miss Schwartz's dramatic black-and-white monotype of a potted philodendron is a rare exercise in blunt realism.

All in all, there is a strangely remote quality to these prints, but for sheer weirdness you have to go back to the end of the previous century -- to items like Max Klinger's nude nymphet swinging in mottled aquatinted space or Richard Müller's etching "Rivalen." Epitomizing the salacious side of the Belle Epoque life, this is a well-drawn image of a woman, naked save for stockings and garters, reclining between two birds her own size on a nest made from Art Nouveau whiplashes. Though not without its clinkers, this is an engrossing show.