Ugo Mulas

Milan photographer Mulas ( New York: The New Art Scene ) died in 1973 at age 45, leaving a duotone archive reflective of the international artistic ferment of the 1950s and '60s. This superbly printed companion work to a retrospective exhibit shows Muras in successive periods and preoccupied with sundry subjects: ``the ordinary flow of ritual'' at a Milan artists' bar and the Venice Biennale; animated portraits of Chagall, Giacometti, Calder, Miro et al.--and in New York Johns, Dine, Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Warhol and many others. Also included are brooding scenes in Sicily, Moscow and New York, and original scenography for avant-garde theater. Mulas himself likens his 36-frame portraiture to a musical ``score,'' a poetic experience. And as a tribute to Niepce, the ``inventor of photography,'' he observes in a series of darkroom pictures the miracle of film, lens, paper and chemicals. Celant is contemporary art curator at New York's Guggenheim Museum. (Dec.)