In the best known American anti-Fascist painting, the face of Benito Mussolini is a bilious, terrible green. Last week Mussolini probably felt almost as green as Peter Blume had painted him. It was an appropriate week for Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art to buy (price unannounced) Peter Blume's The Eternal City (see cut).
When in 1932 Italy celebrated the tenth anniversary of Mussolini's March on Rome, Peter Blume was there. Traveling on a Guggenheim Fellowship, he saw among Rome's ruins many things that stayed with him, from a scowling papier mache image of II Duce to a tawdry effigy of...
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