The Personal Touch

Among the artists who exhibited at the first Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit of 1932, the man who was to become most famous was Jackson Pollock, grand mufti of action painting. But that year the top prize of $50 went to an artist of quite a different sort. A birdlike little (5 ft. 2 in.) man with a realistic style and an irrepressible sense of humor, Louis Bosa, 55, has always been fascinated by "the silly human things people do. I play detective all the time." Last week a bit of Bosa's amiable detective work won him first prize ($1,000) at the 25th annual show at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.

One of ten children, Bosa was born in Codroipo, a sun-drenched town of 2,938 just 15 miles from Venice. For generations his family had been turning out sculptures to adorn the great villas and palazzi. Young Louis seemed destined to follow the tradition. But when he was 18, he became disgusted with Mussolini's Italy, set out for Canada and then the U.S. He worked as a house painter, as an interpreter at Manhattan's Pennsylvania Hotel, then as a waiter while he studied art under the great realist John Sloan. In time, such museums as the Metropolitan, the Whitney, and the Worcester Museum of Fine Arts owned canvases by him, and Bosa himself became head of the advanced painting department of the Cleveland Institute of Art.

He will paint Coney Island or Central Park--any place full of people. But his favorite subject has always been the nuns and monks of Venice. He paints them riding motorcycles, hurtling down a hill on a toboggan, carrying chickens under their arms, or lazily fishing in a canal (see cut). His colors run to the rich pinks and purples of Venetian palazzi, but his artistic credo is disarmingly simple: "I think art should be personal."

At the Butler show, the entries were divided about fifty-fifty between abstract and representational; yet all 20 prizes went to representational works. One reason is that Butler has such a strong reputation for conservatism that most top abstract expressionists will not submit their work. Bosa, however, wonders whether there might not be another reason for the lopsided awards. "There is a movement toward bringing the figure back that you can almost feel. I have no objection to abstract art, but I find it cold. My objection is that we now have an academic style of abstraction, and that's just as bad as any other forms of academic art. Some of the painters say the figure has no business on the canvas. I think perhaps they hate people, and maybe people hate them."

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