This was a Venice Biennale where the critics booed, the cardinal banned, the Americans beamed, and nearly everyone boozed. Apparently incensed by some rubbishy but relatively innocuous nudes, Giovanni Cardinal Urbani, the Roman Catholic Patriarch of Venice, declared the international art show off limits to all priests and nuns. President Antonio Segni thereupon absented himself as official host and prize giver. But this scarcely dimmed the carnival spirits of the cocktail set. Greek-born Iris Clert won the unofficial party-thrower prize by hiring a yacht, tying it up in the Grand Canal, and calling it the Biennale Flottante; inevitably, one of her guests was soon flottante too.
The real show was almost as predictable. With 3,000 paintings, 500 artists and 34 countries represented, the Biennale promised, as usual, to be an embarrassment of riches, and proved, as it often has, to be a mass preview of oblivion. Endless arid abstractions vied with the fossil art of mere representation. Into this esthetic drab land came some young Americans whose vision was fresh even if their art was not fine. The Biennale judges succumbed, and for the third time in the 69-year history of the show awarded the prize to an American, Robert Rauschenberg, 38, "the old master of pop art."*
Melting Typewriter. The canonization of pop art had been rumored for weeks, and Pop Art Dealer Leo Castelli had campaigned assiduously for the winner. Nevertheless, the European critics fumed. Paris' Combat said the prize to Rauschenberg was "an offense to the dignity of artistic creation." Rome's pro-Communist Paese Sera called it "a grotesque Biennale," and the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano editorialized on "the total and general defeat of culture."
The pop artists, a cool and casual lot, could not have cared less about their critics, or even about the rest of the Biennale, which few of them bothered to attend. John Chamberlain, a sculptor of automobile parts, slept on the Lido beach, declared the marble-patterned Piazza San Marco to be the "world's greatest hopscotch arena" and hopscotched around it like a great shambling bear. Claes Oldenburg, as softly pudgy as his sculptures of melting typewriters made of vinyl plastic, politely ate his way through the festival. Rauschenberg himself was busy at Venice's elegant Teatro La Fenice, working with Merce Cunningham's avant-garde ballet troupe, for which he designs props and occasionally does choreography. Since his suitcase had gone astray between Paris and Venice, he was using a safety pin to hold up his pants.