Nicolas Carone of the younger painters of the “New York School” still seems to me the most consistently interesting, and most gifted in terms of painterly sensibility. His most recent exhibition at the Staempfli Gallery, proved how masterfully he can lay down a plane, how elegantly he treats congruent edges, how satiny his surfaces can be, how refined his sense of tonal relationships.

But it also proves that Carone’s masters throw long shadows and he has yet to wrestle with them.

In this, his most resounding exhibition to date, Carone presents confluent spaces — those horizontal juxtapositions of perspective familiar since the war in New York painting — with breathtaking assurance. His adaptation of the idiom cannot be quarreled with. He is good at it, masterful in fact.

But his most ambitious pictures are the least personal. A film lies over them. In working toward mastery, Carone has sacrificed his autographic impulse it seems to me. Perhaps his drive toward perfection is premature. I found the small casual oil studies with their minor imperfections, their piling up of idiosyncratic forms, their willingness to express directly and without regard for convention (even that of the “New York School”) more interesting. Strictly speaking, the small paintings are nowhere near as disciplined, as effective as the greater ones. Yet, in them one can read a particular temperament and it is a satisfying reading. Still, it is only a matter of time no doubt, before Carone will emerge the leader of his generation here.

– Dore Ashton, Art & Architecture Magazine, January 1960