Art: Cheese

The little (pop. 10,000) North Italian town of Suzzara has long been known for its fine Parmesan cheeses. Last week it was an art center as well, staged one of the biggest shows of Moscow-style art yet seen outside the Iron Curtain.

Suzzara had packed its exhibition jury with Communists, found room for the works of 420 painters and sculptors, 80% of whom employ the flatly realistic picture-book style that Stalin knows and loves. Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which had all passed up Venice’s big “Biennale” exhibition (TIME, June 26 et seq.), gladly contributed to this one.

Top prize—a 150-lb. calf—went to a Bologna leftist named Armando Baldinelli. His oil of peasants parading with pitchforks was straightforward enough, but it was also as pedestrian as it was proletarian. Other artists carted off such prizes as an irrigation pump, a pony, fertilizer, tomato paste, sausages, and of course cheeses.

Best-known painter in the show was Rome’s 38-year-old Renato Guttuso, who once painted abstractly and was spanked for it by the party (TIME, Jan. 24, 1949). A recent jaunt behind the Iron Curtain put his art on the left path. Guttuso’s posterish picture of a woodcutter with a hatchet contemplating a sawed stump struck even Communist critics as being rather “too elementary.” But it did win him a wood-burning stove.