Italian Comet

In Manhattan last week was a handsome, vivacious brunette of ample presence whose Roman and Catholic distinctions are as the sands of the sea. A niece and godchild of Pope Leo XIII, Countess Anna Laetitia ("Mimi") Pecci-Blunt received her first communion at the hands of the Pontiff himself. Her father, Count Camillo Pecci, was Commander of the Noble Guards of the Vatican and a leader of the "Blacks" who, before Conciliation with Mussolini in 1929, upheld the Papal Court in Roman society against the "Whites" who honored the King. Her mother was the Spanish Marquesa des Bueno, descendant of an illustrious 15th Century defender of Granada against the Moors. In 1919 a Papal legate in Paris performed the ceremony which united "Mimi" with an Englishman named Cecil Blunt, ne Blumenthal, who straightway became a Papal Count by appointment of Benedict XV. In Rome the Pecci-Blunts own the ancient Palazzo Malatesta at the foot of the Capitoline. Their country house in Tuscany is the Villa Reala de Marlia, world-famed for its hedge carvings. In Paris they entertain with suitable splendor at the 18th-Century Hotel de Ligne. In the U. S. the Countess' mission is that of a torch bearer for Italian art.

Director of the Cometa Art Gallery in Rome, which gives exhibitions and encouragement to the pure artists of Italy, the Countess not long ago acquired second floor rooms on 52nd Street and the patronage of the Italian Ambassador, Mrs. James Roosevelt, Mrs. Vincent Astor, Lucrezia Bori and a host of other socialites for a second Cometa gallery in Manhattan. Thrilled and happy was the Countess last week to preside at an opening "Anthology of Contemporary Italian Painting" which gave Manhattanites such a view of Art under Fascism as they would not otherwise have found in the U. S. except in the Italian room at Pittsburgh's Carnegie International. Except for the unaccountable absence of paintings by Felice Carena. a graceful and accomplished Italian counterpart of America's John Carroll, it was a comprehensive though not a highly selective show. The 100 paintings included works by private painters as well as painters on whom the Corporate State has set the seal of official approval by commissioning them to do frescoes for public buildings and for the Italian Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition last summer. Among artists represented were Severini, a onetime Futurist who has come back to Tuscany; Pirandello, son of the playwright; Carra, another Futurist who now paints slablike figure studies; Campigli, a respected abstractionist and fresco painter; Cagli, who uses with more talent than most the prevailing umbers, reds and sombre blues of the Italian school; Casorati, winner of this year's second prize at the Carnegie; the eminent metaphysical painter de Chirico and his funny brother Savinio.

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