Patron of the Arts

To show Italians that "we are good citizens and a serious company," Jersey Standard Oil's Italian affiliate decided to run an art contest with $3,000 in prizes. Last week Esso Standard Italiana picked the winners, handed out the prizes for the best paintings on "Art and the Petroleum Industry."

"We didn't tell the artists what to paint," explained Dr. Aldo Alberti, Esso's contest director. "We just gave them hints. After all, oil is part of every landscape. A gasoline pump to the modern eye is like a tree."

Thirty-four canvases, submitted by some of Italy's best painters, ranged from complicated abstractions of Esso's big Italian refineries to rural landscapes dotted with Esso signs. Nino Caffe, who paints nothing but pictures of priests (TIME, Feb. 5), turned in one of two black-robed clerics scurrying past an Esso station.

Esso judges divided the $1,500 first prize between Franco Gentilini, 42, who did a lively brown and green oil of a refinery (see cut), and Renzo Vespignani, 26, a onetime pupil of Gentilini's, who painted a striking night-time scene of a smoke-shrouded refinery.

Vespignani, a card-carrying Communist, has no scruples about taking money from U.S. capitalists. "After all," said he, "every painting is a kind of record, a statement that something exists. These oil refineries exist. And anyway, there was nothing in my painting that said 'Go out and buy Esso gasoline.' "

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