Milk & Spinach

The sleepy village of Manchester, Vt. (pop. 325) sat up and took notice last week. White-haired ladies from porch rockers of the Equinox House, straw-hatted farmers, Green Mountain tourists and artists by the station-wagonload jammed into the red brick gymnasium where the Southern Vermont Artists' Association was staging its 20th annual show.

As usual, the crowd stamped first into the "25 Dollar Room" to grab up the bargains--small pictures signed by such big-name summer residents as Reginald Marsh, Clay Bartlett and John Koch. Summertime Vermonter Paul Sample had forsaken landscapes to paint a dingy backstage ballet scene; John Taylor Arms sent a sheaf of his architectural etchings. But such relatively individualistic efforts were exceptions to the show as a whole.

Far more typical of the 220 artists represented were two local landscapists whose work changes not a whit from year to year: Dean Fausett (TIME, Aug. 22) and Luigi Lucioni. Their crisp, slick pictures of red barns, cows, birches and green pastures were echoed with varying success from wall to wall, making an exhibition steeped in milk and spinach, the way the customers liked it. (The exhibiting artists sold $10,000 worth of pictures at last year's show, might do as well this time.)

Painter Fausett once took a fling at modern art, still likes some of it. "But," says he, "it doesn't belong inside a frame. It's decorative and that's all. Braque, for instance, is at his best in tapestries." Lucioni, who paints barns in a studio barn of his own, is too much awed by nature to tamper with it in his pictures: "When I'm out in the woods I have the feeling that I'm in an immense cathedral."

"I feel puny," he adds, measuring off a half-inch between his thick thumb and forefinger, "very puny."

Such modest conservatives, entrenched in their green hills, might hold off the moderns indefinitely. They hope to do more than that: to create a summer center as renowned in art as the Berkshires' Tanglewood festival is in music. Plans are under way for a huge, round exhibition hall and theater patterned on 18th Century Vermont's barns, to make next year's exhibition bucolic inside & out. Artist Fausett, who helped hang last week's show, was particularly pleased with the idea. In a round barn, he mused, no one could complain of being hung in a corner.

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