Does Easy Do It?

All season, Manhattan galleries had bulged with abstract art done in the latest, or devil-may-care style. Some weeks, four and five such shows were running at once (TIME, Feb. 20). Serious and respected practitioners had taken to dribbling paint onto their canvases from buckets; others seemed to be painting blindfold, with bent spoons. The effects were startling, and in some avant-garde circles, awe-inspiring. Here, a few critics maintained, was the art of the future.

If so, the mild, mellow, delicately tuned abstractions that one Manhattan gallery put on display last week would soon become passe. Done by a 38-year-old Italian who signs only his first name, "Afro," they made an interesting historical footnote to the season's splashier shows.

"In my family," Afro says, "art is a disease." His father and uncle were painting partners who decorated the ceilings of Venetian mansions with flowers and figures, and Afro's two brothers are sculptors. At eight, Afro joined the family business, painting imitation marble walls. He progressed to ceilings at 14, later studied in Venice and Florence, and taught at the Academy of Venice. His evolution from decorative art through traditional painting to abstraction was slow.

Composed of interlocking planes of soft, clear color, Afro's abstractions look rather like shattered Venetian glass seen through a watery film. His colors are very much his own, but his compositions are not; when reproduced in black & white they appear to rest solidly on the cubist experiments of Braque and Picasso. Afro's close harmonies of color and texture also reflect his long apprenticeship as a decorative artist. His delicate yet decisive lines and contrapuntal arrangement of shapes show a draftsmanship that comes only from long study.

Afro has developed the hard way, never cutting loose from the ties of tradition or the works of older moderns. His results are not spectacular and they point no new paths for art, but, painting for painting, they are rich enough to make the works of a lot of more free & easy abstractionists look flat and pretentious.

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