Under the Four Winds: Under the Four Winds

From Venice, TIME’S Art Editor Alexander Eliot cabled: THE world’s biggest and best roundup of contemporary art occurs every two years in Venice. Last week red-cockaded carabinieri paraded, a splendid procession of gilded gondolas wound across the lagoon, and officials made speeches as the 27th Biennale opened in Venice’s Public Gardens. In the tree-bordered pavilions bordering the lagoon, a jury representing nearly all of the 32 participating countries mulled over the thousands of paintings and sculptures.

They pondered a chamber full of half-reptilian horrors and nocturnal landscapes by slick old Surrealist Max Ernst, and voted him one of the three grand prizes of $2,400, presumably for the importance of being Ernst. Another grand prize went to a roomful of gay blobs and squiggles done in primary colors by the artful Catalan, Joán MirÓ, who has made a career of painting like a five-year-old, only better. The grand prize for sculpture was awarded to playful and mysterious Alsatian Jean Arp and his crowd of polished bronze and marble lumps, each looking like a kernel of popcorn magnified many thousands of times.

Approached country by country, the exhibition demonstrated not so much national characteristics as the internationalism of modern art. Except for Indonesia, which showed a roomful of brilliant portraits and figure studies by self-trained Affandi, none of the small nations contributed any startling talents. Only the U.S., Great Britain, France, Belgium and Italy offered artists of unmistakably major stature.

The U.S. pavilion, which the Museum of Modern Art bought this year from the Grand Central Art Galleries, offered the works of only two painters—Social Realist Ben Shahn and Abstract-Expressionist Willem De Kooning. A two-man affair by deliberate museum decision, it made for a forceful though far from representative showing. Shahn, whose art had its roots in proletarian fury and has now become fashionable, topped the list of lesser prizewinners with an $800 award. Many exhibitors, notably those of the Iron Curtain countries, seemed stifled by their messages. Shahn, on the contrary, is lost without one. Shahn’s earliest work on exhibition was a wonderfully gentle idealization of Sacco and Vanzetti done in 1932.

In the 19405, Shahn combined social and individual commentary in such fine works as the war-haunted Red Stairway and the wryly idyllic Spring (opposite). At peace with the world in recent years, he has been overtaken in his later work by his weakness for arty picture-making of an allegorical sort.

De Kooning’s expressionistic abstractions of the 19403 looked like angry snarls of tar, snow, syrup and a little blood dexterously applied with a bent spoon. But lately, De Kooning has become obsessed with a creature he calls “woman.” It bears some resemblance to the Mom made infamous by Author Philip Wylie. De Kooning’s women (opposite) are certainly the most violent and perhaps the most powerful paintings in the entire Biennale. If the purpose of painting were, as some have claimed, simply the release of emotion, De Kooning would have to be accounted great.

The British pavilion was dominated by another specialist in horror and violence: Francis Bacon (TIME, Oct. 19). Bacon’s screaming, purple-robed cardinals and half-shaped machine gunners are crudely painted and unfeelingly colored, yet convincing, as blurred snapshots can be. Bacon was balanced by Ben Nicholson’s abstractions, as dry and cold as a well-made Martini.

France featured a group show of such grand old men as Rouault, Matisse and Derain, together with a raggle-taggle of young abstractionists clearly unfit to maintain the greatness of the School of Paris.

The Belgian pavilion offered Surrealist René Magritte, whose charm lies in such odd notions as painting a night scene under a noonday sky. Less appealing was another major Belgian entry. Surrealist Paul Delvaux, whose careful rendering of a Crucifixion and a Pietá peopled entirely by skeletons seemed in needlessly bad taste.

Italy’s huge pavilion showed up glaringly a sorry falling off from the years just after World War II. Then Italian art bubbled with joyful experimentation. Now it has gone comparatively flat. Even the major painters cadge ideas from each other as casually as cigarettes. In fact, art ideas are at such a premium in Italy that one man who paints only reflections, another who pictures nothing but mist, and a third who contents himself with poking dainty holes in canvas, are honored with special shows.

But if contemporary Italian art seems lacking in strength, it does often show great decorative grace. A special show of contemporary Murano glass put most Italian paintings in the shade, and some flamboyant ceramic figures of working girls by light-fingered Leoncillo Leonardi outshone more pretentious sculptures. As best Italian painter, the jury picked Giuseppe Santomaso for his pleasantly decorative abstractions, which resemble swatches of colored silk and black thread in a stiff breeze. Prize for best Italian sculptor went to Pericle Fazzini (who makes a living by conservative church commissions), for some mildly sexy contortionists in wood and bronze.

In general, the show boxed the compass under the four strong winds of realism, expressionism, surrealism and abstractionism. All summer there will be muttering in a dozen tongues about the jury’s verdicts, for the Venice Biennale is nothing if not controversial; it attempts nothing less than a summing up of art now. And today’s art, as the Biennale proves, has neither a dominant style nor authoritative quality.