ABSTRACT
Critic and publisher Bruno Alfieri was one of Italy’s earliest commentators on American art after the Second World War. Modern American art has never been well known in Europe. Exhibitions of works by French artists were seen initially to influence the New York milieu before enticing and interesting Americans in the study of these artists who, like the Fauves, Picasso, Utrillo, Braque, and Chagall, are worthy of entire chapters in the history of European art in their own right. The metallic, mechanical masses of a painting by Fernand Leger were powerful and impressive but nothing more. Like the fabric of a multicolored tie, they examined European paintings from a distance, as an effect of elegance, or from close-up under the microscope, as if they were a cold game of compositional elements. And so the United States has sent strange and disconcerting paintings to the Biennale in which we can admire nonchalant exercises inspired by Picasso, Klee, Chagall, Rouault and Matisse.
