Word: vespignani
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...Marcello Muccini is one of Italy's best living artists, but until last week he never had a one-man show. The reason is that Muccini paints so little. A lean, troubled product of the same slum that produced his friend and fellow painter Vespignani (TIME, Jan. 29), Muccini often loafs for months on end. When he does work, as last week's exhibition proved, he puts his heart...
...drawings, done in squiggly pen lines and ink washes, pictured the battered buildings and tattered people of Portonaccio, a slum on the eastern outskirts of Rome. Sharp and bitter as Italian black coffee, they sold out in two days. Next time 20-year-old Artist Renzo Vespignani dropped in at the gallery, he got a hearty welcome...
Since those days, rank & file Communist Vespignani has supplanted Renato Guttuso as Italy's top Red artist. Guttuso (TIME, Oct. 2) had painted too abstractly to please the commissars, then switched and painted too posterishly to please the connoisseurs. For Vespignani, there has been "no need to change." In fact, he seems to regard Moscow as happily in step with Vespignani instead of vice versa. Says he: "I've always thought, and my own life has taught me, that art must have social content...
...rich, as well as the Reds, backed Vespignani; he soon moved from Portonaccio to a high-priced apartment in the center of Rome. One-man shows in Paris, Stockholm and Manhattan earned him an international reputation. The reputation is based largely on his drawings rather than on his paintings-the paintings often have the color and texture of dried...
Last week a Manhattan gallery staged an exhibition which fairly well proved the power of Vespignani's draftsmanship. It also showed that at 26, Vespignani is getting a bit weary, for some of the drawings were as bad as others were good. Among the worst were railroad yards briary enough to be mistaken for bad etchings of French cathedrals. Among the best were two drawings of a girl named Grazielle, done with such directness and bite that Goya himself would not have been ashamed of them...