No Room

Every morning, when Education Minister Oscar Ivanissevich comes to work, he goes through a little ceremony. First he bows deeply before the portraits of President Peron and la Senora. Then, flinging open the French windows, he fills his lungs with 100% Argentine air. Finally he shouts ecstatically: "Good morning, my Fatherland!"

Thus fortified, he proceeds to his job of setting Argentina's cultural tone. Minister Ivanissevich (a surgeon by profession, a guitarist and poet by avocation) also heads a secretariat of culture which has inquired in the past year into such matters as anti-religious sentiment in comic strips, the faulty patriotism of newsreels, and the alleged immorality of lyrics to certain popular tangos. Last week Oscar got around to art.

At the spring opening of the government-sponsored National Salon of Plastic Arts, he noted that a new museum devoted to surrealism and abstract painting had recently been opened in the capital. No Peronista, he let it be known, would have any truck with such decadent trash.

"Failures in art," he said, "take refuge in abstract art, in morbid art, in perverted art--in short, in infamous art. These failures are like a leper who . . . insists on exhibiting his awful ulcers . . . [They] stimulate themselves with cocaine, morphine, marijuana, alcohol and snobbism . . . There is no room for abstract or morbid art in . . . the Peronista doctrine, for Peronismo is a doctrine of love, of perfection, of altruism, which soars with a superhuman quality into the skies. Peronismo is a doctrine of the virtues of a people . . . who know what is beautiful and what is ugly, who can distinguish . . . the natural from the unnatural, the living from the cadaverous."

To clinch his point, Poet Ivanissevich concluded with one of his own compositions :

Among Peronistas there is no room for

Fauvism or cubism

For abstractions or surrealism.

A Peronista is a being

Of definite sex Who admires beauty

Within its full context.

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