Art: American from Paris

Time was when every young American painter dreamed of making the pilgrimage to Paris, where he could shape his style under the influence of the great French masters. Today a growing number of U.S. expatriates are coming home convinced that there is no longer much contemporary European painting worth the compliment of imitation. Most recent example: San Francisco-born Lawrence Calcagno, 39, whose first one-man show in New York was on exhibit last week at the Martha Jackson Gallery.

That Painter Calcagno remains emphatically from San Francisco is demonstrated by his semiabstract paintings, saturated with rich California earth tones and the shifting, fog-ridden horizons of the Pacific Coast. Says Calcagno of his European adventures: “With the death of Matisse, the great, great tradition of French painting is about worked out. There are still major figures like Picasso and Braque, but they are no longer dealing with the immediate thing. The younger painters are seeking a way out. Some of them think we’ve got it.”

In the Backyard. Calcagno himself was born just one remove from Europe. The son of Italian immigrant parents, he grew up on a cattle ranch in California’s Big Sur country, first tried his hand at watercolors in New Orleans while on a furlough from the U.S. Air Force. Says he: “I got a big kick out of taking things, shuffling them up, putting in yellow skies.” The surprise came when a New Orleans gallery picked up his work, gave him a show. Thus encouraged, Calcagno took a leisurely painting tour of Mexico after World War II, then showed up at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts to cash in on his G.I. Bill of Rights.

At the moment Calcagno signed up, the California School, under Painters Clyfford Still and Mark Rotako, was the center of abstract painting on the West Coast. Students cut out the preliminaries, went straight to work slapping paint on canvas “to get through to an immediate sensory perception.”

“We were like kids isolated in our own backyard,” Calcagno recalls. “We made up our games and the rules to go with them. Painting became an end in itself. We were fighting and protesting for self-liberation. The danger is that protest becomes an end in itself.” The school produced its eccentrics, including one student who wound up in a mental hospital. But working alongside Calcagno were several of today’s foremost younger moderns including John Hultberg, top prizewinner of this year’s Corcoran Biennial (TIME May 2).

Left Bank Protest. Moving on to Paris, Calcagno checked in with the Paris art schools, but continued to paint his own way. He went to Italy and drenched himself in Renaissance art; another winter he spent living in a peasant’s house on Elba, and worked directly from nature. When his money ran out, he went to Casablanca, signed up as a paint spray-gun operator, working side by side with Moroccan laborers at U.S. air bases. Back in Paris with money in his pocket, he found himself elected chairman of a group of fellow Left-Bank expatriates who staged their own exhibition when French sponsors backed out (TIME, May 4, 1953).

Now in the U.S., where he has a teaching job at the University of Alabama, Calcagno still has his sights cranked up to infinity: “Artists are like scouts sent out ahead of the wagon train. Society moves slowly, as it must. But we must break out of the ideal form, reinterpret our environment, focus on a new attitude toward man himself. .The whole flux has begun to produce something else again. But here, not in Europe.” As for Paris, Calcagno shrugs and says: “In another hundred years it will be just another dead museum city.”