Loafer With Heart

At 25, 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 in it.

Nearly all of the twelve oils on display were done since Muccini's marriage last fall to a girl named Leda. Marriage takes money, so Muccini has stopped being "self-unemployed" and started working "almost hard." Hit of the show was his violet-toned portrait of Leda, a study both tender and exact. "I like to paint women," Muccini observes with a frown, "because of the great, curious attraction they have for me." He is little more articulate about his second favorite subject: "The bull attracts me as a theme in that it is always associated with a wall.

The wall is white and the bull is dark."

Muccini likes contrasts of light & dark better than color contrasts. He uses mostly whites, greys, dusty blues and blacks, thickly applied and precisely outlined. His draftsmanship and his sense of placing are extraordinary; by projecting a few sharply focused figures against a barren background he gives both full play. Part of his power stems from the directness of Muccini's approach to art. He had no early contact with art schools and theories, learned his craft by the simple process of painting layers of pictures on both sides of what little canvas he could afford.

Like his better-known friend Vespignani, Muccini is a working Communist, but he does not paint to propagandize. "I want an art which is tied to life," he says. "At the same time I don't want to make it polemic. My pictures have a social content, not a political one." Muccini has painted many Christs, never a Stalin.

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