KAREN WILKIN
485
the artist's works drawn from American private and public collections. Not
only have there been few comprehensive Braque exhibitions in this coun–
try since then, but some of the finest works in the recent New York show
haven't been seen anywhere since that 1964 homage; the Mitchell-Innes
&
Nash retrospective was a welcome corrective to this deficiency.
Two elegant galleries that opened in the 57th Street area this fall pro–
vided solace of another kind, by reminding visitors of the high standards
and serious aspirations of the glory days of the recently vanished Andre
Emmerich Gallery. (Both of the new ventures involve people wi th historic
links with Emmerich Gallery.) Ameringer-Howard offered a splendid sur–
vey of American post-war abstraction with a group of radiant "signature"
canvases by Hans Hofmann, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and their col–
leagues, providing vivid testimony to just how ravishing-and how
fresh-the work of these painters can be. A block away, the work of one
of their distinguished contemporaries (albeit not an Emmerich alumnus),
Richard Diebenkorn, inaugurated the unexpectedly dazzling, skylit new
space of Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Arts. A fine selec–
tion of works on paper and canvases from the Ocean Park series
emphasized subtle differences between these minutely varied pictures, cre–
ating the illusion that Diebenkorn was working out the permutations of
his carefully adjusted bands and blocks of color while we watched. (At cer–
tain times, on bright days, however, these nuances were sometimes all but
drowned in the brilliant wash of overhead light.)
If
the sheer excellence of
just about everything at both galleries is an indication of future directions,
they are welcome additions to the scene.
Another welcome addi tion came in the form of a footnote to the his–
tory of postwar American art. Until now, Edgar Levy has been a name
familiar mainly to those of us who have spent years probing the formative
years of his close friends, who include such luminaries as David Smith,
Adolph Gottlieb,John Graham, and Milton Avery. What makes Levy espe–
cially interesting is that his (now better-known) colleagues of the 1920s
and '30s seemed to respect him highly, crediting him with something they
were eager to achieve themselves: a sophisticated understanding of
advanced French art. Srnith's first wife, the sculptor Dorothy Dehner,
described Levy to me as someone with "a real understanding of Picasso, a
real intellectual," and in his cranky, fascinating 1937 book,
System and
Dialectics
if
Art,
Graham listed Levy as one of the "young outstanding
American painters," along with Stuart Davis, Max Weber, Willem de
Kooning, Avery, and Smith, whom he deemed "just as good" or "better
than the leading artists of the same generation in Europe." (Graham also
included in this category the Czech-born Cubist,Jan Matulka, who taught
Smith, Dehner, and Levy at the Art Students League.)
