Word: blume
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...best known American anti-Fascist painting, the face of Benito Mussolini is a bilious, terrible green. Last week Mussolini probably felt almost as green as Peter Blume had painted him. It was an appropriate week for Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art to buy (price unannounced) Peter Blume's The Eternal City...
When in 1932 Italy celebrated the tenth anniversary of Mussolini's March on Rome, Peter Blume was there. Traveling on a Guggenheim Fellowship, he saw among Rome's ruins many things that stayed with him, from a scowling papier mache image of II Duce to a tawdry effigy of Christ adorned with trinkets by Italy's praying poor. Back in the U.S., Blume spent two years pondering what he had seen, the next three years painting the vivid, swarming detail of The Eternal City with its popeyed Mussolini...
...Peter Blume's hopes and prophecies were clear enough on his canvas. Italian workers strove toward the sunlit Forum. Mounted Fascist officers, attempting to prevent them, were dragged from their chargers while the uniformed ranks showed signs of mutiny. But many critics seemed decidedly obtuse about The Eternal City. New York Times Critic Edward Alden Jewell declared: "The political aspects of this treatise are not altogether clear. We are left in doubt as to whether the propagandist considers this modern dictator a self-sprung megalomaniac or a figurehead manipulated by social forces...
...last week Peter Blume's undertaking would have been understood and applauded by almost any U.S. citizen. His painting, as painting-high drama rendered with almost photographic realism-has always had a very wide appeal...
...together seven highly rated paintings by well-known American painters (Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Peter Blume, Bernard Karfiol, Julian Levi, Katherine Schmidt, Charles Sheeler, Niles Spencer) that had never found a buyer...