Gaucho Artist

About eight years ago the Compania Argentina de Alpargatas, a Buenos Aires shoe company, was lucky enough to sign up a 39-year-old artist named Florencio Molina Campos. The calendars which Artist Campos has been turning out every year for the Compania Argentina de Alpargatas are highly prized rarities in the U. S. and may well be collectors' items when the Compania's last shoes are worn to dust. Last week this distant reputation materialized in Manhattan in the form of an intent, sardonic, cigar-waving Latin and about 40 paintings, to be displayed this week at the English Book Shop in Artist Campos' first show in the U. S.

Florencio Molina Campos never had a drawing lesson and he swears he couldn't draw a straight line if his life depended on it. In a style which fairly often succeeds in being comic, epic and pastoral at the same time, he has done more than 600 tempera and watercolor drawings of Gaucho life on the pampas of Argentina as he remembers it from his own childhood. So crammed with vitality are his buck-toothed cowboys and hammer-headed broncos, thrown into relief by strong, earthy tempera colors, that Pio Collivadino, onetime director of the National School of Decorative Arts in Buenos Aires, has described them as major examples of "harmonious destruction." Good examples are The Last Gaucho (see cut) and How About It? (see cut) which the artist captions thus: "The food is going to be good, and maybe the man is hungry, but it is romance what he is after."

Not for the sake of a mere exhibition did Artist Campos come to the U. S. Landing in Manhattan in November, he and shy Senora Campos bought a small car and proceeded to jaunt over 17,000 miles of the Southwest, the West and Mexico, stopping off in Hollywood for two months. There Artist Campos and Cine-martist Walt Disney talked over the possibilities for bigger & better animated cartoons. Most fun Artist Campos has yet had in the U. S. was in Los Angeles, Calif., where he rode as a gaucho in the rodeo.

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