Return of the Prodigy

The landlord was restless about the rent; the grocer had already refused further credit; and for the Argentine couple, who had come with their young son to live in Paris, things were getting desperate. Then one day in 1958, while the parents were having one of their quarrels, the son tucked some gouaches he had been doing under his arm, slipped out to peddle them at the Left Bank cafes. The first painting he offered went for $1 -- and that was the beginning of the astonishing rise of Aldo Franceschini, now 15.

He had started painting when he was four on the day that his mother, a dogged but unprosperous artist, gave him some paint and old brushes and told him to "go away and amuse yourself." At eight, he was picked out of 5,000 contestants to illustrate a book of Argentine tales. Though pleased, neither his mother nor his perpetually jobless father seemed to take their son's accomplishment too seriously; they even left Aldo with friends for a year while they traveled in Europe. But when they at last decided to move to Europe for good, they took Aldo along.

He was a strange, melancholy child who could spend hours in the corner of his mother's attic studio turning out nightmarish scenes of dark-skinned, contorted people and wild-eyed, gaping crocodiles and owls. He kept a dead bird hanging above his workbench, and when he was not painting, peddling or going to school, he endlessly read Gide. In time the sad-faced boy in checkered shorts became a familiar sight at the Cafe; des Deux Magots. From $1, his price slowly rose to $150.

He won first prize in a contest sponsored by the Renault company. Raymond Duncan, the monkish brother of the late dancer Isadora, gave him a one-man show at his Rue de Seine gallery. He was the subject of a TV film, and articles about him began cropping up in Belgium, West Germany, Denmark, Norway and Italy.

Last week he was back home alone for a triumphant one-man show in Buenos Aires. The curator of the embryonic Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art greeted him at the airport ("Welcome to our great little painter!"). And at the show, Aldo, dressed in corduroy pants and polo shirt, seemed as at ease as an old pro. "This boy is a complete painter!" said the critic of the morning Clarin. "He justifies all expectations," declared the man from El Mundo. Lapping it all up, Aldo grandly announced that he had come home to stay, even though his parents would remain in Paris. "I must break all fetters," he said. "I cannot paint as I want when my mother calls me 'Nene' and wants me to drink hot milk before going to bed. Yesterday, Aldo, the infant prodigy, died. Today, Aldo, the painter, is born."

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