Modern Primitive

Not far from Barre, Vt., the granite yard of Jones Bros, lies in a pleasant valley of the Green Mountains. Morning after morning four summers ago, the conductor and brakeman of a milk train which passed daily, noticed a brown-haired young Italian standing by the track before an easel, painting the granite yard. Landscape painters are no novelty in Vermont, but this young man also happened to be roaring the finale of Aida at the top of his lungs while he painted. One morning the train stopped.

"Hey!" shouted the brakeman, "you doin' that for Jones Brothers?"

"No."

"Who fer, then?"

"Just for myself."

"Oh, I see," mused the brakeman, "you're doing it just for the hell of it."

Because the singing painter, 35-year-old Luigi Lucioni, works not only carefully but excessively slowly, his view of the Vermont granite yard took over a month to finish, was later sold to Charles F. Stein of Baltimore. On display in Manhattan's Ferargil Galleries last week were 21 other painstaking canvases, most of which were already sold for fine fat prices. With only a trace of sarcasm, Critic Henry McBride, who disapproves of photographic art, opined that Luigi Lucioni was already the most popular U. S. painter since Gilbert Stuart. Other modernists, ready to blast a Howard Chandler Christy or a Philip de Laszlo, are kinder to Lucioni. Honesty is a virtue most admired in the 1930's. Artist Lucioni for all his painstaking medieval technique does not consciously prettify. He paints what he sees as he sees it. It so happens that his eyes see individual leaves on a tree at 100 yards. Of his work he says:

"I admire fantasy in art, but realizing that it is not in my makeup, I try more & more to create reality with the simplest means and with all essential detail. But I feel that all this should be part of a design, which I believe every canvas must primarily possess."

Because he has been drawing and painting continuously since he was 8, Luigi Lucioni's life has lacked incident. Son of a coppersmith, he was born at the foot of the Italian Alps, 30 miles north of Milan, arrived in the U. S. at the age of 11. He worked his way through Cooper Union and National Academy art classes, did portrait etchings for the New York Herald Tribune, became the star pupil of the Tiffany Foundation's summer school. Not until a second trip to Europe in 1929 did he discover the kind of painting that he felt most comfortable with: a complete return to the painstaking realism of the Flemish primitives. He likes to prop up a lily bulb, a china swan, a letter and a branch of coral, and, with camelshair brushes and layer upon layer of paint, to reproduce every glint of light, every crack and wrinkle. Working from 9 to 5 every day, he is able to finish a picture in about four weeks.

Singing and setter dogs are his outside interests. From his good friend Giovanni Martinelli he has learned the whole second act of Traviata, the last act of Aida. The three spotted setters he now owns are named Missy, Tosca, and Stanley Jr.

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