Friday, Jan. 17, 1964

MIDTOWN

FIRST INTERNATIONAL GIRLIE EXHIBIT--Pace, 9 West 57th. Fun and games pop out on the walls, making the Mona Lisa look like a sedate frump and some of Toulouse-Lautrec's old haunts seem like a meeting of mah-jongg players. Ben Johnson's voluptuaries are in the pink, Mel Ramos trots out jungle queens in tiger-skin bikinis, Marjorie Strider shows paintings that project into the 36-Dimension, and Herb Hazelton delights in garish girdles from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Andy Warhol's Blue Girlie (9 ft. by 6 ft.) has a room all to herself, not out of modesty but because she only comes out in ultraviolet light. Through Jan. 25.

JAMES ROSENQUIST--Green, 15 West 57th. This former billboard painter is quite accustomed to seeing and painting things larger than life: his latest three-dimensional work is unfortunately a gross exaggeration. The flat canvases with their toothy grins and giant tire treads had more shock; his newest "new realism" suffers from artificiality. Through Feb. 8. Down the street at Janis, 15 East 57th, Rosenquist, Jim Dine, George Segal and Claes Oldenburg create "Four Environments." Each artist has a room of his own: Oldenburg, for example, a bedroom, Segal a movie theater. Through Feb. 1.

KENZO OKADA--Parsons, 24 West 57th. When Okada came to the U.S. in 1950 with a full-fledged Tokyo reputation, he turned to abstraction "the Western way." Now he executes his paintings with knives, fingers, rollers and brushes, but their pale images still have a Japanese serenity. Through Feb. 3.

AUSTRIAN EXPRESSIONISTS--St.Etienne,24 West 57th. A good peek at the southerly, softer version of Teutonic expressionism: 67 watercolors, drawings and prints by Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Laske, L. H. Jungenickel, Anton Faistauer, and Herbert Boeckl. along with a rare Self-Portrait by the late gifted Richard Gerstl, the second work of the posthumously discovered artist ever to be on view in the U.S. Through Jan. 25.

ON THE MOVE--Wise, 50 West 57th. Throwing switches and turning on paintings is an esthetically cold, if ingenious, game, but a dozen U.S. and European artists amuse themselves anyway by applying physics to esthetics. Things like Len Lye's tingling, kinetic steel Fountain and Agam's movable painting, Le Grand Cercle. Through Feb. 1.

JACKSON POLLOCK--Marlborough-Gerson, 41 East 57th. The largest assembly--152 paintings and drawings--of the titanic American abstract expressionist ever shown under one roof (see ART). Through Feb. 15. At Griffin, 611 Madison Ave. at 58th: ten of Pollock's early, representational works, most of them painted in 1934. Through Jan. 25.

BEN KAMIHIRA--Durlacher, 538 Madison Ave. at 54th. Few artists use pure stagecraft more effectively or pack their interiors with such sultry silence as this Japanese-American figure painter. Twenty-one recent works include new excursions into landscape, inspirations of a trip through Spain. Through Feb. 1.

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