Anything Goes

With a resounding pop, Italy blew off the lid that Mussolini had clamped on modern sculpture more than a score of years ago. At Varese, in the first all-Italian sculpture competitions in many a year, top honors went to a thin-faced, little-known Venetian named Alberto Viani for one of his highly abstract nudes.

Because of Fascist art censorship, 43-year-old Viani had never dared show his radical variations on the human form before 1945, although for 16 years he plugged away at them in the privacy of his Venice studio, smoothing their voluptuous plaster curves with wire brushes. At the end of World War II, he brought his work out into the open for the first time, won recognition at the big Venice Biennial show last year.

Last week critics were arguing bitterly about his lounging plaster female with a breast like a precariously balanced baseball. Some liked it almost as well as Englishman Henry Moore's pachydermic pinheads or German Joan Arp's egg-smooth abstractions. Others contended that it could not be compared with the high standards in postwar sculpture set in more conventional works by Milanese Artists Marino Marini (TIME, May 30) and Giacomo Manzu (TIME, July 18), who have been winning praise in both Britain and the U.S. but for lack of new work to exhibit were not represented in the Varese show.

Whether the liberties Viani took with the female body were modern Italy's greatest sculpture or not, last week's award satisfied everybody of one new wonderful fact: in Italian sculpture, after long years of a dictator's regimentation, anything goes once again.

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