Lively Proof

We must draw our inspiration from the tangible miracles of everyday life, from the iron net of speed that envelops the earth, from ocean liners, from dreadnoughts, from marvelous flights that plow the skies . . .

The Italian artists who composed that manifesto in 1910 called themselves "Futurists" and thought they had hit upon the makings of a modern renaissance. One of the best, Umberto Boccioni, sculptured a figure that aptly symbolized their program: a striding man transformed into a flamelike tangle of whipping air currents.

Both Boccioni and the Futurist movement died in World War I, but not the idea of breaking with the musty past. That persisted even during the Fascist passion for neoclassicism. Last week, visitors at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art were getting their first good look at what the Italians had been up to all those years.

Foreshadowings. The exhibition went back to Futurists like Boccioni, included two of his more famous contemporaries who had followed highly individual paths of their own. One of them, Giorgio de Chirico (who has since become a crusty academician--TIME, May 16), was represented by some of his striking early work foreshadowing the Surrealists. The other was Amedeo Modigliani, a much-loved, short-lived alcoholic who was at his best painting tender nudes and portraits based on African sculpture.

Among the many newcomers was 41-year-old Sculptor Giacomo Manzu, who had executed a provocative bas-relief of the Crucifixion in which the traditional Roman legionary had been replaced by a gross and swaggering Nazi.

Another exhibitor was Giorgio Morandi, considered by some Italian critics as Italy's best living painter. Morandi's specialty is bottles, preferably empty bottles. He has been arranging them on tables in his dusty Bologna studio for most of his 59 years, painting them as undramatically as he can, in pale, dry colors. The show contained examples of his endless variety: bottles grouped like ballet dancers, like factory chimneys, or just like bottles.

More to Come. Then there was 37-year-old Communist Renato Guttuso. His painting of a peasant wood chopper being shot in the back gave a broad hint of why Guttuso's Italian fellow Communists now object to his work. The poster-bright colors and the shapes which looked as if they had been hacked out by a hoe were reminiscent of Comrade Picasso's art, but like Picasso's they deviated from the "realism" the party presently admires. At the opposite extreme was 52-year-old Antonio Donghi's meticulous The Hunter, which had the quiet dignity of a procession.

Two of the best artists in the show were among the youngest. Twenty-five-year-old Renzo Vespignani's melancholy pen & ink drawings of the debris of Fascist Rome, and 23-year-old Marcello Muccini's Bull, as sharp and simple as a pair of murderous horns, held their own beside the work of their elders. Italian art had survived Fascism, the exhibition proved beyond a doubt. It was at least as lively as that of the U.S., Britain and France; and, on the evidence of the younger painters, there was more to come.

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