Word: calcagno
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Dates: during 1955-1955
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That Painter Calcagno remains emphatically from San Francisco is demonstrated by his semiabstract paintings, saturated with rich California earth tones and the shifting, fog-ridden horizons of the Pacific Coast. Says Calcagno of his European adventures: "With the death of Matisse, the great, great tradition of French painting is about worked out. There are still major figures like Picasso and Braque, but they are no longer dealing with the immediate thing. The younger painters are seeking a way out. Some of them think...
...Backyard. Calcagno himself was born just one remove from Europe. The son of Italian immigrant parents, he grew up on a cattle ranch in California's Big Sur country, first tried his hand at watercolors in New Orleans while on a furlough from the U.S. Air Force. Says he: "I got a big kick out of taking things, shuffling them up, putting in yellow skies." The surprise came when a New Orleans gallery picked up his work, gave him a show. Thus encouraged, Calcagno took a leisurely painting tour of Mexico after World War II, then showed...
...moment Calcagno signed up, the California School, under Painters Clyfford Still and Mark Rotako, was the center of abstract painting on the West Coast. Students cut out the preliminaries, went straight to work slapping paint on canvas "to get through to an immediate sensory perception...
...were like kids isolated in our own backyard," Calcagno recalls. "We made up our games and the rules to go with them. Painting became an end in itself. We were fighting and protesting for self-liberation. The danger is that protest becomes an end in itself." The school produced its eccentrics, including one student who wound up in a mental hospital. But working alongside Calcagno were several of today's foremost younger moderns including John Hultberg, top prizewinner of this year's Corcoran Biennial (TIME...
Left Bank Protest. Moving on to Paris, Calcagno checked in with the Paris art schools, but continued to paint his own way. He went to Italy and drenched himself in Renaissance art; another winter he spent living in a peasant's house on Elba, and worked directly from nature. When his money ran out, he went to Casablanca, signed up as a paint spray-gun operator, working side by side with Moroccan laborers at U.S. air bases. Back in Paris with money in his pocket, he found himself elected chairman of a group of fellow Left-Bank expatriates...