Bel Canto Painting

What Greece was to classic Rome as a fountainhead of art and craftsmanship, Italy for more than 500 years has been to Western Europe. Temporarily cut off by Mussolini's Fascist regime, Italian painters, sculptors and architects have rebounded in the postwar years to make Rome a serious rival of Paris as Europe's art capital. At year's end in Milan and Manhattan, two of Italy's leading painters showed that in painting, as in music, a bel canto lyricism is still a trademark of Italian art.

Elder of the two is Fausto Pirandello, 58, son of Italy's late, famed Dramatist Luigi (Six Characters in Search of an Author) Pirandello, and one of Italy's most decorated and honored artists (first prize at the Sixth Quadriennale, Taranto Prize in 1949, Fiorino Prize in 1953 and 1956, Gold Medal from the President of the Republic last year). For his first one-man show in seven years. Pirandello lined the walls of Milan's new Galleria Blu with 20 paintings which showed that as an artist he is haunted by the great styles that make up the 20th century artistic breakthroughs and yet has a recognizable stamp of authority and color mastery all his own. Homage to Soldiers (see cut) owes a debt to Miro; his Four Bathers carries echoes of Picasso and Braque. But Pirandello's interest in the human form (he first studied to be a sculptor) keeps them well on this side of abstraction. Says Italian Critic Lionello Venturi: "He is the most human painter in postwar Italy."

Always the Memory. Painter Afro, 45, now showing 19 of his latest works at Manhattan's Viviano Gallery, is the best of Italy's new postwar generation. Winner of the Grand Prize for Italian painting at Venice's 1956 Biennale, he is about to spend six months at California's Mills College, where his main assignment will be a 10-ft.-by-20-ft. mural for Paris' new UNESCO headquarters.

Afro's memories go back to his childhood at Udine, near Venice, where his father was a decorator-painter. The youngest of three artist sons of the Basaldella family. Afro decided to use only his first name to distinguish himself from his elder brothers. Sculptors Mirko and Dino Basaldella. In a rigorous academic training at Venice, Afro studied the Venetians Giorgione. Titian and Tintoretto, incorporates their delight in light effects in his paintings with such mastery that the colors seem to float ambiguously before and behind the canvas surface.

Most Poetic. The outstanding painting in Afro's current exhibition is his 5-ft.-by-6 1/2-ft. L'Uccello del Tuono (Thunder-bird). The title did not come to Afro until after four months of work on the canvas, when, he says. "I saw something flying, something thundering. I thought of flying, of a witch; then I realized it was a kind of bird." Afro depends on his memory to service him with poetic imagery, finds that not only themes but colors seep in from his surroundings (the grey-green of Serene Stone comes from Florentine tombstone; the red and blue of First Day from the 18th century walls of his last summer's studio). For him every painting is an attempt "to come into contact with the mystery"; success depends on the artist's power. Says Afro: "If you have authority to say it, and urgency, you are no longer decorative but creative."

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