Dead or Alive

The lively Italian art world likes nothing better than a slug-and-slam free-for-all. Last week Italian artists were having the time of their lives. The occasion: the big government-run Rome Quadriennale, after the Venice Biennale Italy's most important art show.

Quadriennale officials, with 90 million lire ($145,000) to spend, set out to make this year's show the biggest & best ever, took over Rome's sprawling marble Palazzo delle Esposizioni to house it. To fill the 2 1/2 kilometers of wall space they arranged a big retrospective of 19th and 20th century Italian art, asked Italy's 250 top painters and sculptors to send an average of four works apiece, issued a blanket invitation to every other brush and chisel wielder in Italy to try his luck with the show's jury.

Almost immediately, artists began drafting manifestoes denouncing the show as reactionary. Half the invited big names, including Painters Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Renzo Vespignani and Sculptor Marino Marini, flatly refused to exhibit, and 50 of them dispatched a violently worded protest. Their big objection: the Quadriennale, traditionally a show of contemporary art, was devoting entirely too much space to the works of the dead. Countered exhibit officials: "After so much modern art, the visitor needs a hall or two in which to rest. To reproach us for this is like reproaching an exhibition for having a bar."

The show finally got under way, two weeks late. Despite the boycott and an abundance of mediocre canvases by what critics blasted as "pathetically stubborn anonymous youngsters" and "wall swallowers," there was still some topflight work among the 2,000 sculptures, paintings and drawings. Roman Sculptor Pericle Fazzini displayed a handsome streamlined angel, Milanese Sculptor Giacomo Manzu a series of 25 brilliant figure sketches for works in bronze. Among the pictures were powerful drawings of fishermen by Roman Marcello Muccini, several robustly expressionist nudes by Fausto Pirandello, son of Playwright Luigi Pirandello, and a half-gallery of ex-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico's latest neoclassical horses, nudes and knights in armor.

At week's end the excitement was dying down a bit. The government, apparently bearing no grudge for the snubs, had issued invitations to 50 of the dissident artists to exhibit in the Venice Biennale, scheduled to open this June.

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