Better Than Mink

About the nicest compliment Savo Radulovic ever got was a letter from a suburban housewife who came to see his paintings in a Philadelphia gallery last week. Before her visit, the lady wrote, her greatest ambition was to have "a mink stole and a sterling silver coffee service." Now, she would rather own a Radulovic.

To have his art valued above material luxury was sweet praise for Radulovic, who knows the appeal of luxuries from having been so long without them. As a boy in Montenegro, Savo tended sheep. After his family emigrated to the U.S., he had to take a job at the age of 16 in an Illinois coal mine. Following a stint as a tool grinder in a Detroit auto plant, he attended night classes at Washington University's School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, got a fellowship to Harvard. He had his first Manhattan show in 1940, and the critics hailed his down-to-earth pictures of Midwestern life as evidence of a promising new talent. But this still did not put food in the artist's larder. After war service as an Army combat artist and two years in Italy on a Fulbright grant, Radulovic came back to the U.S., had to take a job as a private detective to support himself in a Manhattan studio.

On view in Philadelphia last week were 24 paintings, gouaches and drawings that showed how far Radulovic has moved from the corn field realism of his earlier work toward a more abstract use of form, line and color. Radulovic's own favorite was a huge, dragonlike, earth-digging machine in deep oranges, reds and whites.

Organ Grinder showed a lonely street beneath an "El" station, with a solitary cyclist pedaling between the strangely elongated shapes of an empty city. Among Radulovic's most successful combinations of abstract forms with recognizable objects: Anesthesia, a big oil of grey, white and blue in which the surgical team is seen in triplicate by the almost anesthetized patient, and the last moment of consciousness is represented by a spiral nebula of whites and blues.

Critical and public reaction to Radulovic's new show gave him hope that he might now be able to devote himself full time to painting--and still eat. The Art

Digest thought that the Radulovic canvases "bear the marks of passion and power," and the Philadelphia Inquirer praised his ability to begin with a pictorial concept, break it up and rebuild it on his own lines. Better yet, four of the paintings in the show were sold at the opening, one for $300, and nobody seemed outraged at the $1,000 price tags on some of the pictures. Exulted Savo. now 42: "This means I'll never again have to be a private detective."

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