Like the montages of newspaper headlines that the old Hollywood directors employed to suggest a leap forward in the narrative, the piles of gallery announcements that flood our mailboxes in the early fall are a sure sign that things are going to start happening very fast. The variety of sizes and styles in announcements is fairly large and in a state of constant flux; raining down on us from the hundreds of galleries that crowd the metropolis, they form an information blizzard that is both exciting and disorienting. There’s nothing new about the appeal of a beautifully designed announcement or catalogue—standards set in the Thirties and Forties by the galleries of Julien Levy, Pierre Matisse, and Curt Valentin can be matched but scarcely excelled—and yet in the current period of unprecedented expansion what is chosen in the way of typography and design may be the result of calculations way beyond the imaginings of the dealers of a generation or two ago.

The color postcard announcing a show of paintings or sculptures is now pretty much out of favor, no doubt because the artist who presents his work directly and without guile risks appearing naively sincere. Full color reproduction is so ubiquitous as to strike many as banal. And who trusts a medium that has time and again drawn us to galleries where the art fails to live up to even the slim promise of the announcement? The color reproduction asks too much of a harassed and harried public—a