Art: Paolo & His Pen

Paolo Buttini is a 19-year-old Italian with a sure hand and a consuming desire to be a great artist. His first big exhibit in Milan three years ago drew record crowds and won wholehearted praise from Italy’s usually wary critics. Wrote Leonardo Borgese in the respected Corriere della Sera: “Buttini is no fake. If he has any fault, it is that of being too good.” Last week, with 114 of his pen & ink drawings on show at Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace, U.S. gallerygoers could understand the enthusiasm.

It was a striking exhibit for a 19-year-old. Paolo’s muscular sketches showed a smooth, well-developed style and a precise eye for detail. His best were natural subjects he saw at the zoo or the family farm: a furry, tongue-flicking anteater, a nursing calf, a spiny crawfish. In others, he had let his imagination roam, turned out such things as a ferocious sparrow, as seen from the eye of its prey, a beetle, a fantastic, cross-eyed cat, a panorama called Ancient Hunt, showing naked horsemen chasing terrified animals. His sponsors reported that 85,000 people have stopped to look at Paolo’s work in two weeks, and a Texas millionaire was so impressed that he offered to sponsor an exhibit in Dallas.

Paolo would rather go home to Carrara and get back to work. The son of a successful sculptor whose wife’s family owns some marble quarries, Paolo has been drawing since he can remember. At five he was copying animals out of children’s books, putting together weird composites, later ducked school to ramble around the countryside drawing whatever caught his fancy. He took no art lessons, shunned all advice. “He would never listen to me,” says his father, Aldo Buttini. Instead, Paolo read art books and tramped through museums soaking up the masters’ techniques.

For a while, when he was eleven, Paolo tried sculpture, turned out amazingly good busts of angelic children. But he soon tired of carving and went back to pen & ink drawings with single-minded attention. Outside art, his main pleasures are horseback riding and, latterly, whippeting around the Tuscan hills in a Fiat. Once during the war, Carrara was shelled and his family hid out for two months in a hillside cave. Paolo spent his time profitably, carving pictures on the walls, caveman style.

When he gets back to Carrara, Paolo Buttini plans to try a new medium. He thinks he is about ready to start working in oils. In about two years, Paolo thinks, “I will really have something to show people.”