Revels Without a Cause

Italy's wispy President Antonio Segni had just arrived for the grand opening of the Venice Biennale when a scruffy little man with a ragged little beard rushed up to him and dramatically emptied the contents of a briefcase at his feet. The President's guard, ever on the alert, quickly drew his sword, but all that he saw was a half-dozen grey mice scampering for safety. It turned out that the intruder was a Venezuelan artist who has a passion for mice, paints pictures of them again and again, and thinks that the Biennale neglects them shamefully. The Biennale--the world's biggest and flashiest art show--managed to open just the same.

As usual, the Italian press refused to be caught praising the show. One critic wryly suggested that to give money to the prizewinners was irrelevant, and should be immaterial: a symbolist should receive a symbolic prize, an impressionist should be given the impression of having received a prize, and an abstractionist should get something more abstract than cash. Yet many seasoned observers joined in being critical: the big show was, as far as the exhibitions were concerned, one of the tamest since the first Venice Biennale, in 1895. The great abstractionists had taken their place in history, and there seemed to be little new to generate a comparable excitement. Thus dealers and collectors were unusually hard put to search out the big names of the future and snap up what they hoped would be bargains.

Man from Oklahoma. As always, the Biennale was one party after another. The ineluctable Peggy Guggenheim gave a series of luncheons and dinners at her palazzo on the Grand Canal. Entertaining at a Tiepolo-lined rented palazzo was the flamboyant Greek-born beauty, Iris Clert, whose far-out gallery in Paris is credited with discovering Jean Tinguely, inventor of machine-operated sculptures that destroy themselves, and the late monochromist Yves Klein, who used his nude models as "living brushes." Her star discovery this year was Harold Stevenson, a young man from Idabel, Okla. He dresses from head to foot in white and sports a white flower in his buttonhole. His portrait of an English lord is done in 25 scattered panels, so that "each of his lordship's grandchildren can have a piece." Iris Clert calls Stevenson "a new Michelangelo. I adore him.''

Iris gave an open-palace party that was attended, if sometimes only briefly, by "everybody."' The next night, the Chicago collectors Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Maremont chartered a vaporetto to take 130 guests to dine on the island of Torcello. After dinner, a band was brought in and everyone did the twist, including British Sculptor Lynn Chadwick and Rene d'Harnoncourt, the chief dignitary from Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

New "Sensations." As for the art, there were the customary acres of mediocrity, but a number of artists became what Biennale veterans call "sensations." One was Sculptress Louise Nevelson, whose "wall furniture," made up of bits of wheels, old banisters, ax handles and boxes, occupied three dazzling rooms at the U.S. pavilion, one all white, one all black, and one all gold. Another "sensation" was Austria's 33-year-old Friedrich Hundertwasser, whose luminous mazes have no top or bottom because he paints them on the floor. A grim-faced man who has a red beard and a stunning Japanese wife. Hundertwasser rented a floor of a palazzo on Giudecca and converted it into a Japanese house.

The visitors played the Soviet pavilion for laughs: the same old proletarians were there striking the same old noble poses. The Japanese pavilion seemed imitative and about ten years behind the times. At the British pavilion the idol-like sculptures of Hubert Dalwood aroused interest. The Spanish pavilion was dominated by 22 brooding, eagle-like bronzes by Pablo Serrano. The official brochure stated that ''man is at bottom no more than an animal looking for a hole to hide in"--an extraordinary statement, it seemed, to come from the cultural section of the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Roman Catholic Spain.

Top Artists. From the start, of course, a chief topic of conversation was: Who would win the grand prizes? In painting, rumor had it that the French Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle would win. And there were hopes, not confined to Americans, that Louise Nevelson would win in sculpture. Instead, the big international prizes of $3,200 went to the honor-laden veteran Alberto Giacometti, whose brilliant whittled-down figures have become almost as familiar as the rocking chair, and to Painter Alfred Manessier of France (see color), whose canvases are controlled and meticulously painted in bright colors that glow like stained glass. It was among the Italian winners, a distinct category at Venice, that names not widely known elsewhere appeared (see opposite):

> Giuseppe Capogrossi, 62, a descendant of Sicilian aristocracy who abandoned figurative painting some 14 years ago, deliberately set out to find a symbol that would be his personal alphabet. After two years, he hit upon a sort of comb-like image--sometimes so small that it looks like an insect and sometimes so large it looks like parts of a giant machine--which he has used ever since.

>Ennio Morlotti, 50, a former accountant, whose paintings at first look like abstractions but are actually closeups of nature-green cornstalks, fields of wheat, bunches of artichokes. Morlotti overpaints and overpaints again, until his pigment lies an inch thick on the canvas. He then gouges out strong lines to reveal the basic structure of his subjects.

> Umberto Miliani, 49, sometimes begins a sculpture by working with corrugated paper, which is then molded in plaster before casting. His bronzes have a fluid look, may suggest anything from a piece of torso to a fragment of a melting grille.

>Aldo Calo, 52, can turn out spiky sculptures that look like giant cacti or a cluster of forms tailored to elegance. But he also has a passion for "the free gesture." He often punches his fist through a plaque of wax, which is then cast into bronze. Another "free gesture'' was achieved by smashing a hole through a triangular piece of wood with a sledge hammer.

But if the Biennale was notable for anything, it was for the fact that the "free gestures" were a good deal rarer in the works of art than among the patrons. The artists seemed to be in a state of indecision after the great days of postwar abstraction; instead of thrills, they offered only suspense--the suspense that comes from not knowing what will come next. And so, as if in compensation, the patrons took to partying a bit more compulsively than ever before.

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