Edition: U.S. / Global

ART VIEW; A Flawed Retrospective for a 'Peasant Mondrian'

By Michael Brenson
Published: April 8, 1990

Giorgio Cavallon is the kind of painter that art institutions have a hard time with. He was not a revolutionary. He did not have the ferocity and ambition of other first-generation Abstract Expressionists, like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. He did not have the kind of pictorial imagination that knocks you off your feet with its invention and sweep.

Cavallon - who died in December at the age of 85 - was a shy, almost taciturn, man who distrusted words, and his work does not need language to complete it. Throughout his welcome but badly flawed retrospective at the Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut in Storrs (through May 20), there is a sense of an artist who almost never allowed himself to be pressured. He cultivated paintings over months and years. He always seemed to know where he was going, but he never seemed to be in a hurry to get there.

Cavallon loved the slow, firm movement of the paintbrush and the secrets and disclosures of paint, loved what happened when he entered his studio alone and began putting one color here and another there until his gardens, villages and cities of color were complete. He painted because he had to, and it often seemed that he did not care whether anyone saw the results. Like all artists he was responding to voices, but by the end of his life that they were so distant and inaudible to everyone else that he seemed to be painting for himself alone.

''Giorgio Cavallon 1904-1989: A Retrospective View'' was originally scheduled for 1991 but was moved up in the vain hope that the ailing artist might be able to see it. There are 91 works - 58 paintings, 25 watercolors and 8 ink drawings - spanning Cavallon's career, from the realism of the 1920's and 30's, through the explorations of Synthetic Cubism and Mondrian, to the paintings of the last 30 years, in which Cavallon managed to give Italian classicism a tenuous yet stable modern form.

Cavallon was born in the village of Sorio in the northern Italian province of Vicenza in 1904. His father, Augusto, was a cabinetmaker who worked both in Italy and in the United States and served in the Italian Army during World War I. Cavallon spent the war on a farm, where he passed his days in the fields, tending oxen, scratching drawings in bomb casings, and shapes and patterns in the earth.

He immigrated to the United States in 1920 and worked as a mechanic in Springfield, Mass.; he would also work as a carpenter. He moved to New York in 1926 and spent five years at the National Academy of Design. He studied in Provincetown, Mass., with Charles W. Hawthorne, who, Cavallon said, ''never believed in drawing; he believed that if you put the right color in the right place you didn't need to draw.'' He was also a student of the Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher Hans Hofmann - one of the many European refugees who, like Cavallon, began as figurative artists and then converted to abstraction with the faith of a true believer.

Cavallon does not really fit anywhere. His feeling for an irregular pictorial grid, for the way the color white can both veil the surface and seem to draw from some deep well behind it, and for a dynamic yet flat space reflects his awareness of fellow first-generation Abstract Expressionists like Arshile Gorky, de Kooning and Hofmann.

Yet his work is uninsistent and modest. It is neither heroic nor anti-heroic, metaphysical nor anti-metaphysical. Except during the last few years, Cavallon never seemed to be trying to be poetic. His poetry, like that of his Italian compatriot Giorgio Morandi, seems to emerge naturally at the end of the pictorial process rather than direct it from the beginning.

In his abstract paintings, Cavallon had one foot in Italy and one in the United States. His respect for craft was Italian. He built his stove, refigerator, sofa and fountain. He constructed his stretchers. The chalky luminosity and throbbing glow of his color would probably not have been possible if he had not made his own paint.

The show includes a realistic 1928 portrait of his father and a 1930 ''Italian Landscape'' of soft rolling hills that Cavallon kept with him. His feeling for geometry and light was rooted in the houses and farmland of Vicenza. His soft, eloquent brushwork and suffused light suggest Venetian art.

The whites for which he was well known also suggest Italy. In an untitled 1957 painting from the Guggenheim Museum, white fills space like steam, smoke or clouds, or like a morning mist over an Italian plain. A scaffolding of color pushes through the surface like the words and images of a poster whitewashed on a village wall.

His work was no less affected by New York, where he took small, villagelike blocks of color, moved them around and built them into a pictorial edifice in which architectural compartments and plots of land seem as mobile as a deck of cards or a juggler's balls. Like city crowds, his shapes shoot forward and pull back, lean against and jostle one another. The clusters and clumps of shapes and colors suggest both huddling together and creating elbow space, needing to be with others and struggling to be alone.