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The most fascinating exhibition in Paris, France a collection of primitive art in artists collections at the Musée de I'Homme, offers parallels with "The Sculpture of Picasso," the show that has just opened with great fanfare at the Museum of Modern Art Simply as a demonstration of taste, particularly among the Surrealists, the Paris event was a revelation of how far the genuinely primitive, in the shape of frightening fetishes and totems. has come to look handsomely decorative. The works that Pablo Ruiz Picasso and Braque collected earlier were more schematic and less potent examples of their kind, but one had the impression that for their owners they opened up a world of such forcefully broken and blunt forms that, in comparison, all later views of the primitive seem a bit housebroken.

The article presents the author's comments on the practice of art in California. The author says that as simple orientation, one might do worse than note the tendency of recent California art to separate itself into two opposed strains whose bases are far more physiological than stylistic. The author provisionally calls them "Sterilized" and the "Sweaty," though they are at best imprecise categories. Further, there are artists who have practiced both, and one important sculptor who transcends them. Though each camp has philosophical premises, both are most critically engaged with bodily sensations and visceral reactions, to which they have developed a nervous openness.

The article presents information on art. People are in the process, these days, of reassimilating what had once been known as the artistic "machine." In the 19th century everyone knew that the "machine" was a gigantic painting in heroic style, generally of academic or Salon origin, a history picture, official, sometimes a mural and always a rhetorical demonstration of the artist's engagement with ideas and the exposition of his skill. The word, of course, is derogatory: it seizes upon the mechanism and pretentiousness which were the features of many, but by no means all, the works of art which have since then aspired to grandeur. Twentieth-century artists have generally been unable to work on this scale without some fundamental irony or displacement of energy.

Two writers, observing the same art, not even disagreeing very much on what is seen, find themselves on opposite ends of the evaluative pole. It is a common enough occurrence. But what distinguishes this particular tiff is that it was initiated by the unwitting founder of modern art. This article comments on artistic skills of impressionist painter Edouard Manet. What Manet seems to have done was to expose the whole question not of any specific conventions but of aesthetic credibility. His work pivoted the spectator's attention away from the reception of various messages, visually embodied, to examine the way artistic meaning itself could be plausibly formulated.

If one were to list artist Edvard Munch's various claims to attention, a great range of achievements would come to mind. Claiming first place might be the historical change he effected when his exhibition of 1892 created a storm in the German avant-garde, and generated not merely the Berlin Secession but modern Expressionism outside France as well. At one stroke it showed that nascent art nouveaun could be far more emotive than decorative, and that a visual crystallization could be fused between Symbolist aesthetics and Scandinavian theatre.

The article presents comments on Francis Bacon, a painter. According to the author, Francis Bacon is probably the only major contemporary artist over fifty who can claim an extraordinary breadth of vision and who is yet, quite aside from being without followers or substantial influence, estranged from, all developments in postwar painting. Bacon defies categorical habits of mind a life too forceful for his reputation to be an easy one. He has the most unlikely affinity with the Italian Futurists. Aside from a few coincidences of subject matter, he shares with them the technical problem of finding equivalents in paint for tracks, or sometimes even tremors, of motion.

This article reports about the Museum of the Modern Art, an exhibition of sculptures and paintings, which the author had attended in the year 1962 and his experiences related to them. He found two aspects in the previous year striking, one was the exceptional vitality of sculptures and second, development and changes in the painting styles. According to the author, among older sculptors, he found two old sculptors disappointing and four young sculptors outstanding. The author says that the museum had used the assemblage show, which is a new concept.

Over the past four years, a persistent gallery goer could not fail to notice such restlessness with conventional media among young artists as to constitute a revolt against art. To object to this, as the New York newspaper critics have done, is all very well, although it amounts to nothing more than protesting against the anti-artistic in anti-art. Unabashed, the young artists go right ahead and paste the New York newspapers into their work. It would be much more relevant to ask what function a disgust with paint and bronze, and the whole formality of museums, is trying to serve in the first place.

The article describes the work of Canadian artist and photographer Robert Walker citing his photograph of Times Square in New York city. Observers claim that each of Walker's frames depicting Times Square constructs a tableau to be an inevitable, yet surprising, order. His photographs demonstrate his love of color, not because of its sensuous presence but because of its iconographical effects.