ART: Image of Italy

In the 17th Century a gifted French expatriate, Claude Lorrain, discovered a landscape of great melancholy possibilities in the Ruins of Rome. Ever since then, few romantic artists on conventional pilgrimage to Italy have failed to turn out one or more studies in the grandeur of ancient Rome’s denuded masonry and shattered marble. How differently from such artists one contemporary U. S. painter sees, feels and works, could be observed last week in the most interesting treatment of Rome’s Ruins yet produced in the 20th Century. It was on view at the Julien Levy Gallery in Manhattan as a one-man, one-painting exhibition, and most critics, whether they liked it or not, agreed that there was enough in the one painting for several ordinary shows.

The Eternal City is not a large canvas (45½ in. by 59½ in.), but it took the artist two years to conceive, three years to paint. Stalwart, tranquil Peter Blume was 26 when he got a Guggenheim fellowship, took his young wife Ebie to Italy in 1932. They stayed eight months, lived in Florence for a while and then in Rome. Like other travelers in Italy that year they ran into a great deal of marching in celebration of the loth Anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome. They met smart Italian officers in powder-blue caps and capes and farm boys from up-country who resented doing militia service for “this damned Fascism.” Everywhere they went the visage of Il Duce made jowls at them from stencils on walls, effigies in street parades. In the Church of San Marco in Florence Peter Blume noted an older icon—a cheap statue of Christ crowned with thorns and bedecked with gift trinkets.

Back at home in Gaylordsville, Conn., Artist Blume settled down to paint and to train his bird dog, Sammy. In 1934 an old painting of his, South of Scranton, won first prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition and Peter Blume became one of the most talked-of U. S. artists (TIME, Oct. 29, 1934). South of Scranton was the result of driving a flivver in that direction one spring, through Pennsylvania’s hills of coal and slag into the Blue Ridge Mountains and east to Charleston Harbor. From what he remembered most vividly Blume made a composition of contrasts : trains crawling in industrial valleys and a German cruiser’s crew doing exuberant calisthenics in the sea breeze off Charleston. To show how exuberant they were he made one or two of them appear to be taking hurdles as high as the crow’s nest. His prize-winning picture was therefore thoroughly panned by every unimaginative critic in the U. S., and Blume became known as a surrealist about as soon as he became known at all.

In November 1934, quiet Peter Blume began The Eternal City. The picture which had taken form in his mind was a composite image of Italy, made up of the images he remembered best. It was also a symbolic picture, and this time Blume wanted his symbols to be publicly clear. From his own thinking and from talk with such literate left-wingers as Malcolm Cowley and Kenneth Burke, Blume had found reasons for his feeling that Fascism in Italy was both oppressive and essentially hollow. To show this and also to show the startling omnipresence of Il Duce’s face, he painted a jack-in-the-box Mussolini of enormous size popping up out of the ruins of the Coliseum. Beneath the papier-mache effigy a fat Italian financier rubbed his gloved hands in satisfaction and a blackshirt gangster grinned.

Working to the left and around the canvas clockwise, Blume painted a diseased beggar lying among fragments of ancient marble, godlike torsos diseased by weather. In a gloomy grotto at the left he put the figure of Christ he had seen in Florence, lit by a sick electric radiance, loaded with soldiers’ epaulets, dress swords and trashy jewels. In the middle foreground the artist painted the crumbling tunnels of the Coliseum. Out of them and away from both jack-in-the-box and grotto, he showed Italian working people struggling toward a sunny plaza. Mounted officers who opposed them were dragged from their horses while common soldiers stood by. In the background a peaceful Italian town lay along a valley of olive orchards, a willow tree tossed in a fresh wind, distant mountains were silky blue.

All this, organized with great care and painted in brilliant detail down to the last brick and willow branch, gave Manhattan critics something to chew on last week. New York Times Critic Edward Alden Jewell was severe: “We are left in doubt as to whether the propagandist considers this modern dictator a self-sprung megalomaniac or a figurehead manipulated by social forces that have taken control of the situation in Italy. . . . Scarcely more convincing is the religious symbol employed. . . . There is nowhere evident the great transfiguring principle itself of Christian love and Christian sacrifice. . . . The Eternal City is painted, especially with respect to detail, in a brush manner that commands respect and often admiration.”

Critic Henry McBride of the New York Sun was sour: “He won, it seems, a Guggenheim fellowship, and went to Italy nominally as an art student but actually as a political spy, and returns with a picture that pretends to mock Mussolini. This, of course, is an odd undertaking for an American artist. . . .”

Meanwhile gallerygoers stood in line to look at Peter Blume’s version of the Ruins of Rome. To those who believed that the quality of art has something to do with its value as propaganda, the picture was either very good or very bad according to their own political views. To others who did not give tuppence for propaganda it was still a pertinent, powerful picture, and many of them grieved that Peter Blume by making his picture deliberately “literary” had invited literary rather than artistic criticism.