Word: painters
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Born in Osaka, the artist was encouraged to take up painting by his father, a businessman who was also a Sunday painter. Shingu studied oil painting at Tokyo University of Arts, and in 1960 went to Rome's famed Academia di Belle Arti. For months he devotedly copied early-Renaissance masterpieces. Then abruptly he turned abstract, eventually took up mobiles because they can be placed anywhere, indoors...
...sculptures by Diego Giacometti and a collage by Clave. The exchange began by accident 14 years ago, soon after the mustachioed little tailor, an expatriate Italian from the mountain village of Bellona near Naples, and his wife Slava opened shop on the Riviera. One day the Florentine ceramist and painter Manfredo Borsi ordered a suit. "If you prefer," Borsi imperiously suggested, "I will pay you with one of my paintings." Sapone did not really prefer. "I had never looked at a painting in my whole life," he recalls. "I looked at women." Overwhelmed by Borsi's forceful manner, however...
Audacious Initiatives. One artist led to another. Poet-Painter André Verdet ordered a sport coat of grey velvet curtain material. Picasso took one look at Verdet's coat and was off to see the tailor. The two men hit it off instantly, and after Sapone had cooked Picasso some Neapolitan spaghetti, the artist gave him three lithographs and an order to "sew something...
Strutting Peacocks. Sapone's flourishing trade belies the image of the painter as a rather threadbare chap. The younger and more impecunious may seem indifferent toward clothes, but the more prosperous often prove to be strutting peacocks. Before Sculptor Jean Arp died in 1966, recalls the tailor, "he would walk through a party in Paris, twiddle with his lapels and say to people, 'Sapone, eh oui, un Sapone!' " The definition of un Sapone varies widely...
Sapone says that a few of his painter-customers "dress like bourgeois gentlemen" and concedes that he has trouble satisfying them. Joan Miró never did accept his suggestions for a suit, and Jacques Villon confided: "Sapone, I'm really too old for you to dress me." As Picasso told him: "Your suits are like my paintings. In the beginning people found them strange and extravagant. Now they admire them...