Sao Paulo Harvest

Brazil’s booming industrial center of Sâo Paulo (pop. 3,650,000) likes to boast of itself as the locomotive that pulls all the other Brazilianstates. Ten years ago Industrialist Francisco (“Cicillo”) Matarazzo Sobrinho* decided it was high time Sâo Paulo got up enough steam to become a center of the arts as well. Stoked by Matarazzo’s enthusiasm and backing, the city fathers and state officials financed a multimillion-dollar series of exhibition halls in the city’s suburbs, organized a biennial show of international art designed to rival Venice’s. Last week Sâo Paulo opened its fifth Bienal, with more than 4,000 creations by 1,200 artists from 46 nations round the world.

But 46 nations did not produce 46 styles. In the brave new world of widely circulated reproductions, painters and sculptors are busier keeping abreast of trends than developing distinctive characteristics of their own. Overwhelmingly, the trend was abstract expressionist, in both painting and sculpture. Confronted by much that was grandiose, more that was trivial, the jury of 17 experts, predominantly directors of their own national museums, had to give up the search for jewels, settle on their choice among the semiprecious offerings available.

Almost by default, the grand prize (worth $4,000) went to Britain’s Barbara Hepworth. Sculptress Hepworth, 56, once had her studio near Henry Moore’s, and has stayed in his long, pierced shadow. Her smoothly involuted forms look like Moore’s women without the womanliness; they are more like analytical geometry than like people. More powerful are the forged iron abstractions of Italy’s Francesco Somaini, at 33 a newcomer to the big time, who won the prize for the best foreign sculptor. Rough, inelegant for an Italian, Somaini produces work resembling meteorites and mountains, full of energy but at the same time monumental.

To the open annoyance of many jurists, first prize in painting went to Spain’s Modesto Cuixart, 33, cousin but proclaimed rival of Spain’s Antonio Tapies (TIME, March 16). Cuixart makes elegant mudpies, the blackest and heaviest in the notably gloomy Spanish exposition. Black may always be in fashion, especially in Spain. Yet the spirit of Goya is clearly not with Cuixart. He makes despair chic.

The U.S. painting and sculpture exhibits, financed by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, featured Sculptor-Welder David

Smith and Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston. Both finished out of the big prize money. But as a whole, the exhibition proved that the modern, peculiarly American idiom of abstract expressionism has become the lingua franca of art the world over. Murky and only half articulate, it is nevertheless spoken everywhere. The idiom has plenty of champions, and may yet find its poet, too.

*First cousin to Sâo Paulo’s Multimillionaire Francisco (“Chiquinho”) Matarazzo Jr.