In Congress' Library

Blazing color and exuberant draughtsmanship last fortnight took their place among the symbolic nudes and frock-coated historical celebrities frescoed on the walls of Washington's rambling, rococo Library of Congress. The new murals, in a vestibule of the Hispanic Foundation section, swarmed with furiously mobile figures dressed in loud check shirts and billowing pajamas, working, gesticulating and lolling about in lush tropical landscapes and seascapes chemically blue. The man who had painted them was Candido Portinari, diminutive Brazilian, South America's foremost painter.

Commemorating "the work of the Spanish and Portuguese in the New World," Portinari's new murals told a fourfold story: 1) The Discovery, a wriggling shipboard setting in which sweating, brown-skinned sailors heaved at ropes; 2) The Pioneers, a forest landscape with husky, ham-armed men and scared-looking fauna; 3) The Search for Gold, a group of wedge-nosed prospectors in the middle of a fish-and-gold-laden river; 4) The Catechism, a rural landscape in which priests and Indian natives converse while a speckled cow solemnly looks on. Though Painter Portinari last fortnight made his last brush stroke and signed his name, the murals will not be publicly dedicated until next week.

Begetter of the murals was the Library of Congress' Poet-Director Archibald MacLeish, at whose gentle inquiry President Vargas of Brazil put up $4,000 to send Painter Portinari to Washington. Another $4,000 was raised by Nelson Rockefeller's good-neighborly committee.

Portinari brought with him to the U.S. his equally diminutive wife, his blond, roly-poly three-year-old son, his plump, blue-eyed sister Inez, his 25-year-old brother Loy. While Brother Loy mixed glue and hot water, handed up brushes and paint pots, Muralist Portinari, perched on a scaffolding, did the painting.

The job, done in "dry fresco,"* took him only seven weeks. Painter Portinari adamantly refused to have an audience while he worked, admitted only his wife, his infant son and Brother Loy. Said he: "The goodneighb' is the good neighbor, but art is art."

*Dry fresco, unlike wet fresco (where the pigment is laid on wet plaster and cannot be changed or painted over once it is brushed on), is done on a smooth, dry plaster surface, can be worked over and repainted as readily as an oil painting. Contrary to widely held belief, many of the famed frescos of the Italian Renaissance are "dry."

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