Brass in Brocade

Enrico Baj, 38, remembers as a teenager in Milan during World War II seeing resplendent Fascist generals swarming in the streets like Fiats. He has never liked military brass since, and is appalled by the way the world is again accepting "as reasonable and respectable the utterances and actions of these people," apparently drawing little distinction between Fascist and any other kind of general. His painting runs largely to poking fun at stuffed shirts in medal-festooned tunics.

On parade last week at the Manhattan gallery of Cordier & Ekstrom were half a dozen Baj generals, joined by other adroit spoofs in cloth, glass, paint and wood.

Baj's father, mother and sister are engineers, and in an effort to hold his own in such a professional household he trained for medicine and then switched to law. He practiced law desultorily, but much preferred to haunt the artists' cafes of Milan. In one of them, while sitting on a barrel with his feet in a basin of white wine, Baj (pronounced buy) met a painter named Sergio Dangelo. He dropped the law, took up art full time, and joined Dangelo in forming something called the "Nuclear Movement" in painting.

Baj, who nowadays keeps his shoes on, is a little embarrassed about the movement: "We tended to draw mushrooms."

But his youthful willingness to experiment led him to some novel materials for collage: broken glass, nails, bones, metal and cloth--cloth that reminded him of the brocaded chairs, heavy draperies, dust-catching wall hangings of a century-old villa in the Italian lake country, where his family used to spend the summer.

Cloth is the chief material for his generals. Some of them, like Portrait of a General (1961'), are uniformed in camouflage colors, their swollen chests decorated with real ribbons, braid and buttons. (The eyes are real watch faces.) The backgrounds, like those of most of his works, are remnants of fancy brocade, scraps of mattress ticking. He uses felt for faces, slopping on features with paint; sometimes the mouths have shards of glass for teeth, bits of lace for noses.

He also provides his generals with ladies. In one collage, Dressed Woman, a star-shaped collar of jet beads crowns a pompon fringe gathered around a rosette that might represent a nose. Look into My Eyes is a funny felt face with cut-glass-mirror eyes, a rose for a nose.

Last year Baj, touring Russia, happened to drop in at Moscow during a military celebration, and found it not unlike Milan during the war. "There they were." he chuckles, "all those generals again, with their chests covered in medals."

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