Engineer's Boy

Locomotive Engineer Luigi Cremonini, who flies from Rome to Milan, is an art-minded man, and his fellow workers call him "the Professor." During station stops he makes a habit of sketching in his cab. When his son was born 28 years ago, Luigi Cremonini hopefully named the boy Leonardo Raffaello. Father and son spent days off together painting by the green-scummed Navile Canal, which connects their native city of Bologna to the Po.

After four years' formal art training in Milan, young Cremonini began to show signs of fulfilling his father's dreams. At 26 he won a' French government scholarship to study in Paris. Cremonini has never yet had a major showing in Italy, but this week a startling exhibition of his. art opened at Manhattan's Catherine Viviano Gallery.

The main element of Cremonini's paintings is force. His father cultivates a gentle sensibility while coaxing locomotives up to 75 miles an hour; the son works up power standing before an easel. Among his early subjects were slaughterhouse carcasses--gleaming slabs of meat and bone which caught his eye in the local abattoirs. Later came the fishermen and bathers of Ischia, where he is living, and rock-hard women like the one at right. He works on as many as 20 canvases at once, explains that "they are all slowly maturing."

The same may be said of Cremonini himself. He still limits himself to simple shapes, smooth textures and cold colors, expresses little besides pity and terror. But Cremonini's art has the growing vitality eventually to crack its own limitations. Once the clumsiness and harshness that now constrict him are thawed away, the engineer's boy may well start highballing down the artistic track.

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