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PARTISAN REVIEW
at Leo Castelli Gallery at the same time as the Whitney's show. In the
new Johnses, an amorphous blob, apparently derived from an island map
but oddly reminiscent of a Philip Guston profile head, floats among
stylish David Hockney-style patterns. If someone had told me that they
were Hockney's versions oflate Guston, I would have believed it.
Dorsky Gallery's April exhibition,
Stanley Boxer: Forty Years of
Drawing,
was, unlike the Johns show, something of a revelation. Boxer's
juicy, increasingly uninhibited abstract paintings are well known. He has
even shown his meticulously crafted sculpture from time to timc. But af–
ter a lifetime of virtually compulsive, constant drawing, this was the first
time Boxer allowed the full depth and range of this central part of his
activity to be seen. It was worth waiting for. The pleasures of individual
works and particular series was considerable. Boxer has looked hard at
almost anything you can think of and transferred that attention into line
and color on paper; at times it seems as if the only way he can come to
terms with his world is by drawing it, nailing an imagc to the page by
daubing it with watercolor, carving it out of one sheet and collaging it
onto another, piercing its background to leave the image floating in an
unnameable space, or simply encapsulating it with a delicate, probing
line.
The show was chockablock full of agile nudes, ballplayers, soldiers,
and self-portraits; there were horseraces, vegetables, zoo animals, painterly
little landscapes, and much more. Sometimes Boxer's sources were evi–
dent. Some of the tiny landscapes were Klee-like ; some of the sensuous
nudes were informed by Bonnard, and a few of the frontal, overscaled
animals recalled the confrontational images made by the Innuit
printmakers of Cape Dorset, but the strongest impression was that of an
intense, unmistakable individual. Boxer is a natural draughtsman with a
great deal of natural fluency and facility. (My parents' friends would have
loved him.) As the show made clear, he can exploit that fluency or sub–
vert it, with equal success, but even this kind of judgment seems a little
beside the point, in the face of forty years' unbridled, vibrant, all-stops–
out activity. Such energy and dedication can only command our respect
and admiration.
The Drawing Center, which can be relied on to produce tightly
focused, imaginative exhibiti ons of distinction, lived up to its own high
standards with
Picasso's "Parade:" from Paper fo Stage.
The show examined
the cvolution of Picasso's celebrated costumes and decor for the leg–
endary ballet,
Parade,
the scandal of the 1917 season of Diaghilev's Ballet
Russe, on which he collaborated with Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and
Leonid Massinc . A host of sketches and finished drawings documented
the devclopment of the streetscape of the set and the poetic, circus-world
of the curtain. Most fascinating were the drawings that bore witness
to
