Art: Good Red Draftsman

A ragged, angry-eyed youth rushed into a Rome art gallery one day six years ago, and thrust a portfolio full of drawings at the startled proprietor. “You must buy these,” he said. “I don’t have enough to eat!” The dealer accepted the portfolio, pressed a few dollars’ worth of lira notes into the stranger’s hand, and got rid of him. Then he looked at his purchase.

The drawings, done in squiggly pen lines and ink washes, pictured the battered buildings and tattered people of Portonaccio, a slum on the eastern outskirts of Rome. Sharp and bitter as Italian black coffee, they sold out in two days. Next time 20-year-old Artist Renzo Vespignani dropped in at the gallery, he got a hearty welcome.

Since those days, rank & file Communist Vespignani has supplanted Renato Guttuso as Italy’s top Red artist. Guttuso (TIME, Oct. 2) had painted too abstractly to please the commissars, then switched and painted too posterishly to please the connoisseurs. For Vespignani, there has been “no need to change.” In fact, he seems to regard Moscow as happily in step with Vespignani instead of vice versa. Says he: “I’ve always thought, and my own life has taught me, that art must have social content.”

The rich, as well as the Reds, backed Vespignani; he soon moved from Portonaccio to a high-priced apartment in the center of Rome. One-man shows in Paris, Stockholm and Manhattan earned him an international reputation. The reputation is based largely on his drawings rather than on his paintings—the paintings often have the color and texture of dried mud.

Last week a Manhattan gallery staged an exhibition which fairly well proved the power of Vespignani’s draftsmanship. It also showed that at 26, Vespignani is getting a bit weary, for some of the drawings were as bad as others were good. Among the worst were railroad yards briary enough to be mistaken for bad etchings of French cathedrals. Among the best were two drawings of a girl named Grazielle, done with such directness and bite that Goya himself would not have been ashamed of them.