ON NATIVE GROUND

NOT for 25 years, wrote Milan's weekly Epoca, had Italy seen an exhibit that "offered such a wide and original panorama of Italian contemporary art." The 192 paintings and sculptures were only visitors to their native land, and some Italians were inclined to complain about that. But by this week, as it opened in Rome after eight weeks in Milan, the show of U.S.-owned 20th century Italian works, sponsored by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, had won a special kind of favor. To Bologna's II Resto del Carlino, it was clear "evidence of the attention and love with which a discriminating American public follows Italian contemporary art. We should be grateful."

The fact that the show opened first in Milan was only fitting, for it was there that in 1910 five rebellious painters issued a manifesto to the young artists of Italy. "We propose," they declared, "to exalt every form of originality, even if reckless, even if over violent." The futurist movement never became quite so reckless as its manifesto sounded, but for a time, at least, it did have Italy on the brink of artistic civil war.

Benches & Dreams. When three of the manifesto signers--Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Carlo Carra--held a "Futurist Evening" in Turin, they set off a riot. In Bologna, Carra was nearly killed when an exasperated antifuturist hurled a bench at him, and in Treviso the three painters had to be rescued by the police from a mob. But the searing colors and frenzied designs of the futurists had their purpose: to depict not the surface world but the latent powers asleep within.

From those early years on, Italian painting fluctuated wildly between violence and serenity. Even as the futurist wave gathered momentum, Modigliani began painting his delicately attenuated figures, and Italy's art moved on through Giorgio de Chirico's dream-like surrealism, the almost eerie quiet of Giorgio Morandi's still lifes, and finally into the boiling seas of abstract expressionism. To show the full sweep, the Museum of Modern Art lent 46 of its own works, went to 17 other U.S. museums and such private collectors as Joseph Pulitzer Jr., Peggy Guggenheim, John D. Rockefeller III, Oveta Gulp Hobby, Henry Ford II. Before the show's sponsors were finished, they had gathered the works of 45 artists, including 17 De Chiricos and no fewer than 18 Modiglianis.

Force & Humor. None were received with greater interest than the paintings of the rebellious futurists of 1910. Boccioni's famous States of Mind: the Farewells (see color), owned by Nelson Rockefeller, is a cascade of form that suggests a world about to be overwhelmed by a snorting, blazing force that cannot be named. But of all the works in the exhibit, the one most affectionately greeted was Leash in Motion, by Boccioni's great teacher and fellow futurist, Giacomo Balla, master of both movement and humor. "We had not seen it," sighed Rome's Momento-Sera of the painting that is now owned by A. Conger Goodyear, "since 1912, when it was last exhibited here. All these works return for a brief while to please us."

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