Howard E. Hack

Asphalt #18, oil on canvas.
Lent by the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Daniel A. Ritter

Wally Hedrick

T.V.
Lent by Mr. David Packard

The Pop Art works produced by Hedrick make us think of industrial design which exhibit a deadly sameness. The viewer senses the noncreative character of such rhythms, his experience tends to be wearisome. In painting "Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2" by Marcel Duchamp makes the same point, as does Hedrick. An enormous amount of visual materials is reproduced to communicate, persuade, entertain, sell, or decorate - hamburgers and hot dogs, soft drinks, automobiles; and their images saturate our surroundings, greeting us on television. Hedrick has chosen this world as the source of his own imagery; the elements are determined to make us see what our nervous systems have mercifully managed to suppress.

George Herms

New York Yankee, assemblage. Lent by the artist

The artist has chosen assemblage as perhaps an unconscious effort to return to tribal modes of artistry, particularly in the equation of the tactile with the visual. But instead of using seeds, shells, stones and fiber as raw material for his imagery, Herms employs commercial garbage --especially the abundant rubbish of the found and discarded object. The purpose they serve are internal to art; to get away from abstraction, calculation, deliberate design and cerebral form -to reestablish the status of things as things.

Raymon Howell

L.A. Freeways, oil on canvas.

John Hultenberg

Don Quiote, 1950, enamel on copper.
Paul Hammer-Hultenberg, lent by Lawence L. Hultenberg Fine Art

In Hultberg's work, as in life, mythmaking goes on continually. Whereas narrative types of mythmaking are employed in literature, this painter uses plastic fantasy --invention of strange forms, or strange associations of known forms. The artist has often willingly relied on hidden, mysterious sources for the determination of his work. Surrendering to fantasy is not abandoning truth: it is a way of gaining access to a special type of truth --a type which civilization does not value highly but which nevertheless explains a great deal about our behavior. It is curiously interesting that Hultberg employs the illumination and modeling we would expect in a conventional painting of still life.

Bob Kaufman

Laura la Foret Lengyel

Pompeii, carved gypsum, 1965.
Lent by Paul D. Langley

Robert Loberg

Untitled, oil on paper, 1961.
Lent by the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Staempfli Gallery

Richly textured small shapes of contrasting vivid colors, painted so energetically that they tend to decompose the subjects and suggests additional abstract shapes. By giving his work a freer more organic and abstract look Loberg moved in the direction of Gorky, Baziotes, Gottlieb imagery. And like them, his world is filled with mystic connotation which depicts a ferocious and fantastic mechano-biomorphic transfiguration.

Jack Micheline

For Franz Kline, oil on masonite, 1965.
Lent by Alix McQueen

Sutter Marin

Lady with the Green Hat, oil on canvas.
Lent by The Sutter Marin Estate

Lynn Pollock Marsh

Unfolding Nude, drawing.
Lent by Lynn Pollock Marsh

Don Martin

We Don't Roll..., 1950, lacquer.
Lent by Don Martin Estate

The painter's portrait of Albert Einstein has a slightly unfinished sketchy look and the subject seems to look lonely its isolation. The most striking thing about the subject is that its eyes seem to stare out at you with a searching haunted look. The eye is man's way of understanding what is known about one's self and others.

William McLean

Untitled Abstraction, oil on canvas.
Lent by Oakland Museum of California, gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Bolles

Influenced by Willem de Kooning, McLean is especially known among painters as one who practiced the loaded brush, wet-in-wet technique. In this context, an artistic concern with permanent technique seems to be an anachronism. Consequently, the physical durability of forms in the painting ceases to be a crucial concern. We want to know whether they will live as a vehicle of sustained aesthetic interest. Our interest in this kind of survival is not rooted in the artist's technique so much as in his capacity to make original statements through his medium.

Arthur Monroe

Shipibo, 1970, oil on canvas.
Lent by John Howe

Now that pigment is being displaced, inventing problems with materials becomes an unconscious expression of the burden of painterly freedom. Surfaces like the tribal clothes of the Amazon peoples with whom he visited effects this work. Although the medium is oil paint, the feeling is that every part of the structure is magically alive. The intent is to get at anonymity and the chance interaction of natural and man-made things.

Ann Morency

Untitled, 1954, oil on canvas.
Lent by Ann Morency