First Impressions: Early Prints by Forty-Six Contemporary Artists

A mix of the predictable and exciting, this catalogue is at its most rewarding in offering such images as Richard Bosman's Man Overboard , a pure expressionistic cry of anguish, and T. L. Solien's amazing, cartoon-like Three Sailors , with its invented characters in a landscape of the mind. Many celebrity artists are here (Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, etc.) along with figures like Jennifer Bartlett, Eric Fischl, Donald Sultan and Chuck Close. With 65 color plates and 38 duotones, the album documents a traveling exhibit that concentrates on the early prints of 46 artists. The biggest pleasures are serendipitous: a romantic moonlit landscape by Alex Katz; the fierce biomorphic abstractions of Elizabeth Murray; Ronald Davis's shimmering magic cubes, whose illusionistic depth is achieved by laminating the lithographs between sheets of mylar and plastic. (Sept.)