Brickbat Biennale

The tidal bore of abstract art flows so overpoweringly these days that most critics find it profitless trying to swim against the current. But last week at the 30th Venice Biennale. 400 painters and sculptors from 33 nations exhibited some 3,000 works whose overall impression was so weird that the experts, almost to a man, rose in revolt. "It is not the world of art.'' said Turin's outraged La Stampa, "but a world of impenetrable moors and silent, sterile landscapes." Added respected Critic Leonardo Borghese, writing in Milan's Carriere della Sera: "Ridiculous, sad, terrible. So abstract are all these works that they are beyond critical judgment."

That Venice's venerable Biennale should hit an alltime low this year was no real surprise to Italian critics. Over the years, they have watched it shrink in artistic importance almost in proportion to its growth as a tourist attraction. They suspect that art is not so much the object as attention-getting shock appeal, and the scramble for one of the four $3,200 "official" prizes that automatically boost an artist's prices on the international art exchange. Said Milan's Corriere Lombardo: "The Biennale has lost its artistic heritage; it is of interest now only as a kind of stockmarket speculation."

Nevertheless, an international jury waded through the show and picked four first-prize winners:

P: Italy's Emilio Vedova, 40, whose paintings, said one critic, "look like blackboards beaten with chalk erasers." Vedova uses white splotches on black backgrounds to create a canvas of garish, swirling effects, which he sweepingly titles Image of Time 1959, Tyranny 1960. P: Italy's Pietro Consagra, 39, who uses acetylene torches, electric drills, wrenches and vises to turn out large, dugout slabs of metal that look like negative prints of abstract bas-reliefs. Two almost identical pieces bear the titles Colloquy with Wife and Colloquy without Wife; the other nine Consagras are also called Colloquies. (Those who know him say that Consagra is a silent man.)

P: France's one-legged Hans Hartung, 55, a native of Germany, who called all his entries T. One of Hartung's T's consists only of a black, curved strip over a small yellow square against a dull, grey-brown background.

P: France's Jean Fautrier, 62, who is represented in the show with no less than 130 drawings and paintings. A close friend of French Minister of Culture Andre Malraux, as well as adviser on Malraux's art books, Fautrier overcame his representational tendencies 30 years ago, is "freed from the limits of design" when he paints. Virtually indistinguishable from one another, Fautrier's paintings bear such titles as Bare Breasts, Landscape, Wa Da Da.

Wrote Critic Mario Monteverdi in utter exasperation* at the Fautrier prize: "It is fitting that Fautrier should have won . . . for his are the ugliest, most vulgar, and useless non-paintings in the entire show. Giving him a prize clears the way for a legitimate revolt which, if clamorous enough, might save the Biennale."

* Critic Monteverdi was not the only one to be exasperated; walking up to U.S. Abstractionist Franz Kline (himself a $1,600 prizewinner), Fautrier reportedly told him that his work "stinks." Kline's reply, so the story goes, was a realistic right to the jaw that dumped Fautrier on the seat of his pants.

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