Men, Women & Horses

Heroic subjects are not fashionable among U.S. artists. But exuberant Jon Corbino, who this week opened an exhibition of turbulent canvases on Manhattan's 57th Street, loves to paint conflicts and catastrophes, swarming canvases in which full-blown nudes and horses writhe and rear in the throes of floods, shipwrecks, stampedes. And gallery-goers like his smoldering color and sweeping draftsmanship, which make the most innocent New England landscape seethe with dramatic struggle.

Corbino, born in Sicily 37 years ago, was brought to the U.S. as a child of eight, reared in Manhattan's lower East Side. What Painter Corbino learned of the Renaissance and Romantic painters of Europe, to whom he is often compared, he got entirely from U.S. museums and reproductions. He worked his way through Manhattan's Art Students League and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts taking jobs as a dishwasher, cook and soda jerker, kept on painting in his own way, modeled his methods not on the French Impressionists or the U.S. Realists, but upon Delacroix and Tintoretto.

When, five years ago, Manhattan's Macbeth Gallery gave him his first big metropolitan one-man show, critics were surprised by such old-worldly gusto in a young U.S. painter. But they had to admit that Jon Corbino was not afraid of big subjects, and that he was one of the soundest draftsmen in the U.S.

Today collectors and museums clamor for his canvases at $300 up, and he is a member of the haughty National Academy of Design (TIME, Jan. 12). With his at tractive brunette wife, seven-month-old son and two dogs, he lives in an elaborately furnished studio in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, spends his summers at Rockport, Mass., where he helps run an art school between laborious sessions at his easel. Though he is an inveterate pencil sketcher and a hawk-eyed observer of nature, he uses few models, does all his serious painting at night.

Not primarily a portraitist, Corbino concentrates on the sweeping gestures and bodily movements of the men, women and horses that he paints. Attendant weakness of Painter Corbino's work is that his classically muscular people and horses lack individuality, look very much alike. Though he belongs to a generation of revolutionary painters, Painter Corbino snorts scornfully at modern art.

Says he: "To create an art unrelated to the art of the past is like trying to achieve, singlehanded, a literature with a language which none but yourself understands and which you must first teach others. Even your mother has to talk to you in the language which her mother taught her."

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