Digestible Moderns

Italy's annual invasion of Manhattan's art galleries was under way last week, and some of the early arrivals were a change from what the U.S. had come to expect. On view at one 57th Street gallery were 14 pleasantly light and digestible paintings by three modern artists which were as different from the familiar abstractions as red wine from white. The three:

GIORGIO MORANDI, 62, who won international attention when he took first prize for painting at Venice's 1948 Biennale. One of Italy's favorite parlor painters,

Morandi has been preoccupied with empty bottles of all sizes and shapes for most of his adult life. This time, only one of his creamy pictures is of bottles. The other two: a still life of oyster shells, a landscape as calm and peaceful as the countryside around Morandi's native Bologna.

MASSIMO CAMPIGLI, 57, a Florentine whose Byzantine-looking paintings of young girls have toured the world's art capitals, hang in many of its best museums. His round-faced girls sit rolling yarn, fixing necklaces, posing nude; each with a happy expression, a pair of bright sloe eyes and not a care in the world.

ANTONIO Music (rhymes with do stitch), 43, who was almost unknown until a Paris show last year set critics cheering. Brought up on an island off Dalmatia's coast, where "everyone has his own donkey," Music paints spectral quadrupeds and hilly landscapes in dusty roses, blues and ochers, almost as if he sees them through a sandstorm. Music was a more realistic painter when the Nazis arrested him in 1943 as a partisan sympathizer, later sent him to Dachau. Says he: "Perhaps the ugly things of the concentration camp have brought me toward poetry. There is more mystery in me now."

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