Art: The Non-Beatniks

You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking . . . You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.

“It sounds like a swell life,” I said. “When do I work?” —The Sun Also Rises In high-ceilinged studios and sunny flats littered with children’s toys, a new kind of American-artist-abroad is at work in Italy these days. Scorning the cognac-and-champagne antics of Hemingway’s Lost Generation the American in Rome shuns a beard, rope shoes, and pants held up by a length of clothesline, prefers a walkup on Rome’s outskirts to a garret on arty Via Margutta ( “too expensive and too phony”) Work for Kicks. There are an estimated 500 U.S. painters, sculptors and writers in Italy today. Living on shoestring savings and slim scholarships (average annual grant: $2,500 to $3,000). most are trying to stretch their pennies into more time for their art. They have nothing but scorn for their beatnik contemporaries of San Francisco, and they cold-shouldered shaggy, beatnik Poet Gregory Corso. who stormed into Rome recently bawling.

“You gotta sleep in the Colosseum; you gotta eat the dirt of the Colosseum.” and accosted prostitutes by asking. “Are you my mother?” Says George Garrett,

former Princeton football player (’52) and writer: “They have missed a fundamental aspect of American life—work.” Most of the U.S. artists are drawn to Rome because it is cheaper to live there. Their down-to-earth approach is reflected in their art: painting includes recognizable images, sculpture often mirrors the human form, prose and poetry tend to be lucid, coherent and direct. Few have qualms about accepting commercial commissions. Cracked one sculptor: “For a thousand dollars I’ll do a head of grandma —guaranteed to look just like grandma!” Wives for Models. Typical of Rome’s new expatriates is Detroit-born Zubel Kachadoorian, 35, who formerly worked part time as a construction worker, while his artist wife, Irma Cavat, padded out the budget as a waitress. Now, with a Prix de Rome and a Fulbright between them, they are both fulltime painters. San Francisco-born James Leong, who supports his wife and children on concurrent Guggenheim and Fulbright grants, rediscovered his own Chinese heritage in Rome, now turns out paintings of figures that one critic noted “look as though they are wrapped in dry leaves. If they moved, you could hear them crackle.” In contrast with the age-old tradition of hiring a model and making her a mistress. St. Louis-born Sculptor Allen Harris, 34, who last year won Philadelphia’s Da Vinci Gold Medal, uses his own shapely wife as a model. Minnesota-born Paul Granlund, 33, has sold enough work to pay for casting nearly 100 figures. Like most of his colleagues, he plans to return to the U.S. Said Granlund. “Minnesota is a real live place.”

Rome is as happy with them as they are with Rome. After a ten-man show of U.S. artists opened at the Palazzo Venezia. II Messaggero hailed the Americans in Rome as part of “an important contemporary artistic movement.” added with pride: “Hundreds of young Americans have come here in recent years without going to Paris first.”