Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’ 9781501330056, 9781501330087, 9781501330063

Citation preview

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Postwar Italian Art History Today Untying ‘the Knot’ Edited by Sharon Hecker and Marin R. Sullivan

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Sharon Hecker, Marin R. Sullivan and Contributors, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Untitled by Marisa Merz © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hecker, Sharon, editor. | Sullivan, Marin R., editor. | Untying ‘The Knot’ : The State of Postwar Italian Art History Today (Conference) (2015 : New York, N.Y.) Title: Postwar Italian Art History Today : Untying ‘the Knot’ / Edited by Sharon Hecker and Marin R. Sullivan. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017055775 (print) | LCCN 2017057375 (ebook) | ISBN 978150133063 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501330070 (ePUB) | ISBN 8791501330056 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Italian—20th century—Historiography. | Art criticism— History—20th century. | Art criticism—History—21st century. Classification: LCC N6918 (ebook) | LCC N6918 .P665 2018 (print) | DDC 792.45/0904--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055775 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3005-6 PB: 978-1-5013-6102-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3006-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-3007-0 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction  Sharon Hecker and Marin R. Sullivan

vii xi xvii 1

Section I  Reconsidering the Weight of Italy 1 2 3 4

“Yes, but are you Italian?” Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art  Laura Petican

21

Learning from Artists: Methodological Notes on Postwar Italian Art History  Denis Viva

37

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra: Crossing the Boundaries Between Theory and Practice  Silvia Bottinelli

53

Our Lady of Warka: Gino De Dominicis and the Search for Immortality  Gabriele Guercio

73

Section II  Re-­imagining Realism 5 6

7

Transatlantic Exchanges. Piero Dorazio: Non-­objective Art vs. Abstract Expressionism?  Davide Colombo

95

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6: The 1964 Venice Biennale, Renato Mambor’s “Thread,” and Pop as a Global Phenomenon  Christopher Bennett

113

Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture in the Early Works of Franco Vaccari  Nicoletta Leonardi

135

Section III  Rethinking Modes of Patronage 8

Buying Marino Marini: The American Market for Italian Art after World War II  Antje K. Gamble

155

Contents

vi

9

A House No Longer Divided: Patronage, Pluralism, and Creative Freedom in Italian Pre- and Postwar Art  Laura Moure Cecchini

173

10 Co-­research and Art: Danilo Montaldi’s Horizontal Production of Knowledge  Jacopo Galimberti

189

11 Shaping and Reshaping: Private and Institutional Patronage  Martina Tanga

207

Section IV  Reassessing Arte Povera 12 Isolated Fragments? Disentangling the Relationship Between Arte Povera and Medardo Rosso  Sharon Hecker

229

13 Gilberto Zorio’s Radical Fluidity  Elizabeth Mangini

245

14 Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII: Luciano Fabro’s Early Works  Giorgio Zanchetti

261

15 Transatlantic Arte Povera  Raffaele Bedarida

277



295

Index

List of Figures 2.1 Giulio Paolini, Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto (Youth Looking at Lorenzo Lotto), 1967. Photo emulsion on canvas, 30 × 24 cm. FER Collection. © Giulio Paolini. Courtesy Fondazione Anna e Giulio Paolini, Turin. 2.2 Salvo (Salvatore Mangione), San Martino e il povero (Saint Martin and the Beggar), 1973. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 285 × 190 cm. Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT—on a gratuitous loan to Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino e il Castello di Rivoli—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin and Rivoli. Photo: Studio Gonella, 2006. 3.1 Gianni Pettena, Laundry, 1969. Como, Campo Urbano. Courtesy Archivio Gianni Pettena. Photo: Ugo Mulas. 3.2 Gianni Pettena, Wearable Chairs, 1971. Minneapolis. Courtesy Archivio Gianni Pettana. Photo: Gianni Pettena. 3.3 Ugo La Pietra, Interno/Esterno. Un pezzo di stanza nella strada, un pezzo di strada nella stanza, 1979. Milan, Triennale. Courtesy Archivio Ugo La Pietra, Milano. 4.1 Gino De Dominicis, Untitled (Testa di donna sumera), 1977. Oil on color photography, 155 × 95 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of the Archivio Gino De Dominicis. 4.2 Gino De Dominicis, (Photo op) Seconda soluzione di immortalità (L’universo è immobile), 1972. Black and white photograph, 51 × 63 cm. Lia Rumma Collection. Courtesy of the Archivio Gino De Dominicis. 4.3 Gino De Dominicis, Il tempo, lo sbaglio, lo spazio, 1969. Human skeleton, roller skates, dog skeleton, leash, scheletro di cane, guinzaglio, rod, 400 × 220 (variable) × 170 cm. Lia Rumma Collection. Courtesy of the Archivio Gino De Dominicis. 4.4 Gino De Dominicis, Madonna che ride, 1972. Statue made of colored plaster 200 × 60 cm. Destroyed work. Courtesy of the Archivio Gino De Dominicis.

42

46 56 60

63

74

75

87

88

viii

List of Figures

5.1 Installation view of Loan Exhibition at the Museum of Non-­ objective Painting. First floor, third room, north and east walls. June 20, 1950. Exhibition records. A0003. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York. 6.1 Paola Pitagora, Renato Mambor, and Cesare Tacchi in front of Roy Lichtenstein, Big Painting VI (1965), at the 1966 Venice Biennale. Courtesy AAF—ArchivioArte Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena and Artwork. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo: CAMERAPHOTO. 6.2 Jannis Kounellis, Senza titolo (Untitled), 1960. Mixed media on canvas, 258 × 323 cm. Courtesy of Michelle Coudray and Sammlung Viehof. Photo: M. Baboussis. 6.3 Fabio Mauri, Marilyn, 1964. Photography and mixed media on canvas, 120 × 80 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Fabio Mauri and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Elisabetta Catalano. 7.1 Franco Vaccari, Le Tracce, Bologna, Sampietro Editore, 1966. Photo: Carlo Favero. 7.2 Franco Vaccari, Teleogryllus Commodus, 1967. Photo emulsion on canvas, 100 × 77 cm. Luigi Bonotto collection. Courtesy of Fondazione Bonotto. 7.3 Franco Vaccari, Photomatic d’Italia, 1973–4. Photostrips glued on cardboard, 50 × 70 cm, detail. Courtesy of Franco Vaccari and P420 Gallery. Photo: Carlo Favero. 7.4 Franco Vaccari, Viaggio sul Reno. Settembre 1974. Brescia, Edizioni Nuovi Strumenti, 1976. Photo: Carlo Favero. 8.1 Marino Marini’s Cavaliere (1948: 314b) seen behind actress Audrey Hepburn on the Larrabee Office set in Wilder’s Sabrina, 1954. © Paramount Pictures. 8.2 Installation view of Marino Marini’s sculptures in Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art, 1949. © MoMA, New York. 9.1 Herbert List, “Rome. Cesare Zavattini, Italian writer, in front of his collection of miniatures by great Italian painters at his home,” 1951. Herbert List/Magnum Photos. 9.2 “100 sguardi su Roma,” Collezione d’Arte di BNL Gruppo BNP, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale, July 17 to October 28, 2012. Photo of Sara Di Carlo, published in “100 Sguardi su Roma,”

101

118

123

126 140

142

145 149

156

159

176

List of Figures

Roma, www.sulpalco.it, July 16, 2012, http://www.sulpalco. it/2012/07/16/100-sguardi-­su-roma/.   9.3 Johnny Bergamini, view of Collezione Verzocchi, Palazzo Romagnoli, Forlì (Italy). © Palazzo Romagnoli, Forlì. 10.1 Giuseppe and Max Guerreschi with the “Rudi Dutschke,” 1968. © Max Guerreschi. 10.2 Giuseppe Guerreschi, Giovane profeta, 1969. Oil on canvas, 150 × 110 cm. © Max Guerreschi. 10.3 Giuseppe Guerreschi, Ritratto di Danilo Montaldi, 1972. Etching, 40 × 47 cm. © Max Guerreschi. 11.1 I Guerriglieri della Biennale, Il Secolo d’Italia, Rome, October 22, 1974. © Il Secolo d’Italia. 11.2 Immagini e parole dal Cile, 1974, Venice, installation photograph. © La Biennale di Venezia, ASAC, Fototeca, serie “Attualità e Allestimenti”—Libertà al Cile, 1974. Photo: Lorenzo Cappellini. 11.3 Mauro Staccioli, Scultura-Intervento, Piazza Galleria Manzoni, Milan, December 1974 to January 1975, installation photograph. Image courtesy of the artist. 12.1 Marisa Merz, Untitled, 2010. Mixed media on paper, 300 × 250 cm. Collection of the artist, with Medardo Rosso, Jewish Boy, 1892–4, wax cast with plaster interior, dimensions not given, collection of Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice. Installation for exhibition, Marisa Merz, Non corrisponde eppur fiorisce (Marisa Merz, It Does Not Correspond and Yet it Blossoms) at Fondazione Querini Stampalia onlus, Venice, 2011. Photo by Agostino Osio. 13.1 Installation view of the exhibition: Gilberto Zorio at Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery, 13 Via Cesare Battisti, Torino, November, 1967. Image provided by the artist. Photo: Paolo Bressano. 13.2 Gilberto Zorio, Piombi II (Leads II), 1968. Sheets of lead, copper sulfate, hydrochloric acid, braided copper wire, rope, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. © Gilberto Zorio, courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Philippe Degobert, Courtesy Galerie Albert Baronian. 13.3 Gilberto Zorio, Stella bruciata (Burned Star), 1977. Star cut by the artist into a brick wall with an oxy-­hydrogen flame. Dimensions variable. © Gilberto Zorio, courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Philippe Degobert, Courtesy Galerie Albert Baronian.

ix



177 178 197 199 201 208

214

217

238

246

248

255

x

List of Figures

14.1 Luciano Fabro, Attaccapanni (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 18–19. Courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan. 14.2 Luciano Fabro, Tondo e rettangolo (Circle and Rectangle, 1964). Nuove ricerche visive in Italia (Milan: Galleria Milano, 1966). Courtesy Galleria Milano and Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan. 14.3 Luciano Fabro, Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965). Courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan. 15.1 Germano Celant, Arte Povera (Milan: Mazzotta, 1969): cover. 15.2 Germano Celant, Art Povera (New York: Praeger, 1969): cover. 15.3 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Il Futurismo Mondiale (International Futurism),” 1924 as published in Fortunato Depero, Depero Futurista (Milan: Dinamo Azari, 1927), np.

264

270 272 282 283

289

List of Contributors Raffaele Bedarida is Assistant Professor of Art History at Cooper Union, New York. He holds a PhD from the Art History Department of the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, as well as MA and BA degrees in Art History from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. He is an art historian and curator specializing in art, politics, and cultural diplomacy between Europe and America. His publications have focused on Italian Modernism from Futurism to Arte Povera in the international context. In addition to his academic and curatorial activities, Bedarida lectures on modern and contemporary art topics at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and MoMA. Christopher Bennett is Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His studies principally focus on European, American, and Global Art since 1945 including the artists associated with the Italian Arte Povera group and postwar Italy. He has published writings in October, Artforum, and Art Journal. He has also been involved in curating and writing material for art exhibitions, both more local and international, including co-­curating a full-­ scale exhibition of the work of Alighiero Boetti at the UCLA Fowler Museum in Los Angeles in 2012 and offering essays for exhibitions of Pino Pascali and Marisa Merz in London and Rome respectively. He has received prestigious fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Getty Research Institute, and the Lemmermann Foundation. Silvia Bottinelli teaches in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Art—Tufts University. She received her PhD from the University of Pisa in 2008. Bottinelli’s first book, Un Premio Dimenticato (Florence, Edifir 2007) studies the Florentine Gallery of modern art’s Fiorino collection, which includes contemporary artworks acquired between 1950 and 1978 by the Pitti Palace. Her current research interests are diverse, and incorporate themes such as domesticity, food, materiality, and cultural translation in the history of Western art of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. Her articles have appeared in magazines and journals such as, among others: Art Journal,

xii

List of Contributors

Public Art Dialogue, Art Papers, Food Studies, Richerche di Storia dell’Arte, and Annali di Critica d’Arte. A recipient of a Center for Italian Modern Art Travel Grant and a Franklin Grant, Silvia received an Excellence in Scholarship Award from the Food Studies Research Network in 2016. Laura Moure Cecchini is Assistant Professor of Art History at Colgate University. Her work investigates the history and theory of visual culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the transatlantic cultural exchanges that gave rise to global modernism. She has a particular interest in the art, photography, and design produced in Italy from the unification of the country to the postwar era, with an emphasis on fascist visual culture and institutional history. She is currently working on a book about the contested legacy of the Baroque in Italian modern art, architecture, and criticism. Her research was supported by fellowships from the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Wolfsonian Collection, and the Italian Art Society. Laura’s work has appeared in The International Yearbook of Futurist Studies, Italian Studies, and Il Capitale Culturale, among other journals. Davide Colombo, PhD, is Research Fellow of Contemporary Art History at University of Parma and was Terra Foundation for American Art Fellow 2014. He is a collaborator on the research project “Art in Translation: The Reception of US Art in European Art Writing in the Cold War Era,” hosted by the University of Edinburgh. Colombo co-­curated the exhibitions Henry Moore (Terme di Diocleziano, Rome, 2015–16) with C. Stephens and Manzù. Dialoghi sulla spiritualità con Lucio Fontana (Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome/Museo Manzù, Ardea, 2016–17) with B. Cinelli, and he curated Eugenio Carmi. Appunti sul nostro tempo. 1957–63 show (Museo del Novecento, Milan, 2015–16). Recently he published the book Lucio Fontana e Leonardo da Vinci. Un confronto possibile, Scalpendi Editore, 2017. Jacopo Galimberti is Post-­doctoral Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on postwar art in Western Europe, and he is currently writing a book about operaismo, autonomia, and the visual arts. His articles have appeared in several journals such as Art History, The Oxford Art Journal and Grey Room. He is the author of Individuals Against Individualism. Western European Art Collectives (1956–1969), Liverpool University Press, 2017.

List of Contributors

xiii

Antje K. Gamble is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Design at Murray State University where she teaches classes in modern and contemporary art. Dr. Gamble’s research focuses on Italian modernist sculpture in the middle of the twentieth century. From fascism to the Cold War, her work examines how the exhibition, sale, and critical reception of Italian art shaped and was shaped by national and international socio-­political shifts. Gabriele Guercio is an independent art historian and critic based in Milan. Author of the books Art as Existence (2006), The Great Subtraction (2012), and L’arte non evolve (2015), he has published several essays on contemporary art and on the history of art theories. In 2010, Guercio co-­edited Il confine evanescente: Arte Italiana 1960–2010, a collection of essays on Italian art. Sharon Hecker is a leading international authority on Medardo Rosso. She is the author of A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (University of California Press), awarded the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. She co-­curated exhibitions such as Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, at the Harvard University Art Museums (catalog Yale University Press, 2004) and Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Sharon has also published extensively on Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro in edited volumes and academic journals such as Oxford Art Journal. For her work, she has received numerous honors from the Getty, Fulbright and Mellon Foundations. Nicoletta Leonardi (PhD University College London) is Professor of Art History at Turin’s Academy of Fine Arts and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Florence Study Center. Her research interests include the relationship between vision and technology in nineteenth century US landscape culture, photographs as material objects, and the role of photography as a tool for research and action within urban planning. Her writings have been published extensively in exhibition catalogs and volumes. She is the author of Fotografia e materialità in Italia (Postmedia, 2013) and Il Paesaggio americano dell’ Ottocento. Pitlori, fotografi e pubblico (Donzelli 2003). and co-editor, with Simone Natale, of Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century (Penn State University Press, 2018).

xiv

List of Contributors

Elizabeth Mangini is an art historian specializing in social histories of postwar and contemporary art. Professor Mangini is Associate Professor and Chair of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francsico. She serves on the editorial board of the Italian journal Palinsesti, and contributes to Artforum. Laura Petican, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art History and Director of University Galleries at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where her research is centered in a social history of postwar and contemporary Italian art with a focus on its relation to theories of national identity, cultural inheritance, Baroque historiography, and the intersections of art history and fashion studies. Her research has been awarded by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and published in a book titled Arte Povera and the Baroque: Building an International Identity, to be followed by Strings Attached: Contemporary Italian Art and the Persistence of the Baroque, and Fashion and Contemporaneity: Realms of the Visible, to be published by Brill in 2018. Petican has presented her research at the annual conferences of the American Association of Italian Studies, the Italian Art Society, the “Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues” global conference in Oxford, UK, and at the American University of Rome, Italy. Marin R. Sullivan (PhD, University of Michigan) is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Keene State College. Prior to her appointment, she served as Henry Moore Foundation Post-­doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Sullivan recently published Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism (Routledge, 2017) as well as articles in Art History, History of Photography, and Sculpture Journal. She is currently working on projects examining the relationship between American sculpture and architecture at mid-­century, and the impact of public sculpture on the urban renewal of Chicago during the 1970s, both of which have been supported by fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Sullivan is also co-­curating a major retrospective exhibition on Harry Bertoia, scheduled to open at the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2019. Martina Tanga is an art historian and curator based in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on public art, institutional critique, and social practice, with a specialization in Italian postwar art. She received her PhD from Boston University and her scholarship has appeared in Public Art Dialogue, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Art Papers. She has curated

List of Contributors

xv

exhibitions for deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Now + There Public Art, and Arlington Public Art. She is currently working on her book, Arte Ambientale, Urban Space, and Participatory Art, which is forthcoming from Routledge’s Advances in Art and Visual Studies series. Denis Viva is Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Trento and of Museum Practices at the University of Udine, Italy. His main fields of research are Italian Contemporary Art History, the remediation of visual resources in Modern and Postmodern Art, and the relationship between photography and the history of the art display. He’s the co-­director of the journal www.palinsesti.net and one of the researchers who founded the on-­line historical database for Italian art reviews www.capti.it. As a curator, he worked for Mart Museum in Rovereto, he was one of the curators of the Rome Quadriennale in 2016, with a project on “peripheral” artists, and he is the curator of Paradoxa (Museum of Casa Cavazzini, Udine), an annual exhibition about Contemporary Asian Far-East Art (2016–18). Giorgio Zanchetti, PhD is Professor of History of Contemporary Art and Head of Studies for the Master Courses in Archaeology, History of Art, Music, Theatre and Film, at Università degli Studi di Milano. His research interests are focused on Italian sculpture in the nineteenth century and in contaminations between different artistic languages in the twentieth century (from avant-­garde to Intermedia and Conceptual Art). He is member of the scientific committees of the journal L’Uomo Nero, of the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura collection (Mart, Rovereto—Museion, Bolzano), and of the Piero Manzoni Foundation; Head of the Scientific Committee of Archivio Luciano Caruso (Florence); member of the Management Board of Mufoco (Museum of Contemporary Photography, Cinisello Balsamo, Milano); curator of the relational-­art project Progetto Casina (Ministry of Justice, S. Vittore Penitentiary, Milan); scientific consultant for Italian and foreign museums; and curator of several exhibitions, among which: La parola nell’arte (Mart, Rovereto, 2007–2008); The Thirties. Art in Italy beyond Fascism (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2012–13); Yves Klein Lucio Fontana. Milano Parigi. 1957–1962 (Museo del Novecento, Milan, 2014–15).

Acknowledgements This volume developed out of a two-­day conference, “Untying ‘the Knot’: The State of Postwar Italian Art History Today,” which we organized in February 2015, but its origins really began two years earlier in the discussions we shared about the issues driving our own respective research—whether it focused on the means by which Italian art history articulated itself from Medardo Rosso to Lucio Fontana to Luciano Fabro, or the impact of materials like ceramics, steel, and plastics across sculptural practice, designed objects, and industry during the immediate postwar period. We wanted to get a better sense of what fellow scholars of postwar Italian art—on both sides of the Atlantic—were investigating, and how the field was changing. We were first given the opportunity to formalize and expand these conversations from the Italian Art Society, which put forward our session proposal to the College Art Annual Conference, and when that failed, encouraged us to “think big.” The resulting event, and this subsequent volume, would not have been possible without the enthusiastic and steadfast support of Vivien Greene, Laura Mattioli, Heather Ewing, and the entire staff at CIMA. The Center not only provided a home, but also graciously supplied resources that made the event infinitely more enjoyable. Over the course of two days, against a beautiful backdrop of sculptures by Medardo Rosso, the conference brought together participants and attendants from across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Italy at all stages of their careers, from academic and arts institutions. A two-­day program, however, allotted us more space than we had in assembling this volume. There were many wonderful speakers and respondents who participated in the conference and helped engender lively debates that for a whole range of reasons—none of them owing to the quality of their work—we unfortunately could not include here. We would like to thank and acknowledge the brilliant scholarship of Shantel Blakely, Fabio Belloni, Christian Caliandro, Leda Cempellin, Adrian Duran, Claire Gilman, Romy Golan, Teresa Kittler, Robert Lumley, Lara Pucci, and Paolo Scrivano. We would also like to acknowledge the contributors to this volume. They have proved patient and gracious collaborators, and their work is an example of the

xviii

Acknowledgements

high quality of scholarship shaping the field of postwar Italian art history today. Additional thanks are due to our Italian colleagues who undertook the additional work of translating their essays and adapting their writing styles to often-­ unfamiliar Anglo-American academic formats. Finally, we would like to thank Margaret Michniewicz, Katherine De Chant, Erin Duffy, and the whole team at Bloomsbury for guiding this volume to publication, and for their support of postwar Italian art history.

Introduction Sharon Hecker and Marin R. Sullivan

The year 2015 marked the thirtieth anniversary of The Knot: Arte Povera at PS1, an exhibition curated by the Italian art critic Germano Celant and installed at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 in New York.1 While some of the included artists had previously exhibited in the United States, in either small solo exhibitions at mostly private galleries, or in group exhibitions at a range of institutions, The Knot today is remembered for helping to introduce contemporary Italian art to American audiences. The exhibition was a continuation of Celant’s promotion of Italian artists he began in the late 1960s, and can be credited with laying the foundation for the ever-­growing interest that contemporary Italian art garners in the United States. The Knot, however, proved, and continues, to be problematic on several accounts. First, Americans were presented with a very focused vision of Italian contemporary art, framed through the lens of only one of its so-­called movements: Arte Povera, which emerged in Italy during the 1960s. Second, by the time Arte Povera had reached American shores in 1985, it had already existed in Italy for over twenty years and had been radically reshaped for this show. During the late postwar period, the label “Arte Povera” encompassed a loose group of heterogeneous, fiercely independently-­minded artists who advanced the newest forms of art being made both inside and outside of Italy, working in a spirit of dialogue and experimentation. The Knot presented these artists to American audiences in very different terms, neutralizing the original spirit of political contestation.2 The productive tensions and instabilities were stabilized, international influences and exchanges diminished, and the artistic output was repackaged in the form of a unified, nationally and culturally-­identified art movement whose conceptual framework by now appeared to be firmly consolidated.3 Celant has championed Arte Povera artists since the earliest shows in Italy and Europe, and is responsible for coining the label “Arte Povera”

2

Postwar Italian Art History Today

in the late 1960s as a way of understanding these artists through a common framework. Given Celant’s effort to strengthen and centralize these very disparate artists into a single narrative, it seems entirely apt that the title and central metaphor he came up with for the PS1 exhibition was that of the knot. He wrote at length in the catalog, There are various reasons why I am applying the image of the knot to a group of artists. Perhaps, I wanted to affirm a creative power of the imagination that has been tying and untying them for over twenty years—a “grand tale” based on autonomous and independent travels. Perhaps, I hit upon this figure of a knot because all ropes converge in a single point to establish the art that when untied reveals the essential experience of the knowledge of reality. Furthermore, the knot tends to be the sign of a ramification that rejects linear unfolding. [. . .] In its tangle of threads—material, historical, political, anthropological, and psychological—the knot implies a contiguity and continuity of languages and parlances. It is an orgy of colors and words, of technology and philosophy, alchemy and chemistry, forms and transparencies.4

The structure of the knot or perhaps more specifically Celant’s conceptualization and deployment of it as a curatorial strategy provoked confusion in US critics and induced suspicion from American audiences who seemed to see the included work as “Conceptualism and Minimalism, Italian-­style” being presented as a “uniquely Italian manifestation.”5 As New York Times critic Vivien Raynor wrote in her review, No one seems to know for certain why, not even the curator who came up with the name, although he allows it may have something to do with “the Gordian Knot of European art whose problems and invisible roots haven’t yet been disentangled and recognized.” Apropos the original knot, which tethered the Phrygian King Gordius’ wagon to a temple, it was said that whosoever managed to untie it would become lord of all Asia.6

Celant’s enduring promotion and support of Arte Povera and, more generally, postwar and contemporary Italian art, undoubtedly represented a major accomplishment. His efforts gave rise to an institutional internationalization of these artists, and he ably shaped the parameters of the scholarly debate—a task he continues to engage with through exhibitions and publications.7 At the same time, the critical framework of Arte Povera that Celant had put into place in 1985 continued to dominate the broader discussion of postwar Italian art for many years.

Introduction

3

Perhaps by reason of Celant’s towering presence, even in the immediate wake of the PS1 exhibition, few scholars in North America and the United Kingdom chose to take up Arte Povera or the subject of postwar Italian art more broadly. Nor did they attempt to question, refute, reshape, or amplify Celant’s narrative. Only much more recent exhibitions like Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972, organized by Tate Modern in London and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, spurred scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to seriously attend to the art created in Italy after World War II and to ask critical questions about it—an approach this volume seeks to continue and further extend.8 Our aim is not only to expand and re-­evaluate Arte Povera, but also to contextualize it within unexplored yet significant aspects of the broader field of postwar Italian art. Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying “the Knot” originated in an international conference co-­sponsored by the Italian Art Society and the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, where it was held in February 2015. In selecting our title for the volume, we decided to return to Celant’s seminal PS1 show and the idea of the knot, but to deploy the metaphor in a new way. We wished to take up Celant’s claim that in postwar Italian art, “everything is confused and interwoven [. . .] made up of memories and archaeological strata.”9 Rather than the heroic process of severing the Gordian knot from its sources, we return to Celant’s “tangle of threads,” taking an alternate approach to untying: disentangling the knot and closely examining its various strands. In doing so, we aim to present a cross-­section of the field that addresses the complicated, often unruly nature of postwar Italian art. Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying “the Knot” is the first edited volume to take stock of the parameters and impact of the field of postwar Italian art and its histories. The volume comprises a selection of essays originally presented at the conference, written by a broad range of early career and established scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The nationalities of the authors and the diversity of subjects within the pages of this volume alone tell us a great deal about the way the field has grown and developed beyond national borders and how it has matured to encompass diverse and often contradictory critical outlooks. Our volume builds not only on the PS1 and Zero to Infinity exhibitions of Arte Povera, but also on several important texts produced in English after 1985. These texts offered more comprehensive overviews of artistic production in Italy during the postwar period, thereby creating a necessary intellectual and art

4

Postwar Italian Art History Today

historical framework. The texts include Emily Braun’s now-­classic Italian Art in the 20th Century (1989) and Sandra Pinto’s A History of Italian Art in the 20th Century (2003) both published in English and Italian, as well as the catalog for the Guggenheim’s 1994 exhibition The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968— though in the case of the two former they did not focus exclusively on the postwar years and the latter was again heavily shaped by Celant, who was the exhibition’s co-­curator.10 The majority of recent scholarship on postwar Italian art has tended to focus on Arte Povera, building on the critical re-­assessment presented in Zero to Infinity—notably the 2008 multi-­authored special issue of October.11 Another approach taken by scholars has been to study a single artist who became famous during the postwar period, such as Anthony White’s Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch or the Guggenheim Museum’s recent exhibition Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting. Such studies have made valiant efforts to re-­situate and reintroduce postwar Italian artists within the established narrative of Modernism.12 Admittedly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Arte Povera still looms as a specter, a critical fulcrum to expand upon or react against, and our volume is no exception. There has been, in the last few years, an explosion of excellent new work done on Arte Povera’s best-­known artists and new private institutions dedicated to showing their work.13 Perhaps for this reason, we did not receive proposals for essays that exclusively examined the “big names” of Arte Povera: Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Nor did we receive essays on established figures from the postwar period before Arte Povera, such as Burri, Fontana, and Piero Manzoni. Instead, the essays in this volume and the other excellent papers included in the conference all reflect emergent interests in broader themes of transatlantic exchange; the burden of ancient and contemporary Italian history; the role of exhibitions, display, and patrons; the influence of activist and labor politics; the impact of urban spaces and industrial economies; and an attempt to reevaluate the parameters of Modernism in both an international and uniquely Italian context. That these new and more complex thematic strands should be emerging now is not surprising. A major boost has come from the increased accessibility of Italian archives. Additionally, more primary texts by critics, theorists, and practitioners have been translated into English or revisited by scholars. A rising number of museum and gallery exhibitions, conferences, and English publications have further expanded and complicated the history of postwar Italian art.14

Introduction

5

Numerous Italian artworks from this period have entered major public and private collections around the world, and the art market has followed suit, with prices growing exponentially for postwar Italian artists and both Christie’s and Sotheby’s introducing dedicated Italian sale auctions in 1999 and 2000. Today, Italian postwar art that once appeared to Anglo-American audiences and scholars as provincial, homogenous, or retrograde is considered a crucial art historical moment, bursting with distinct artists as well as radical groups and trends. At the same time, Italian scholars have begun to explore their own artistic legacy with a critical eye. European and American scholars in fields outside art history are starting to contextualize historically the complex dichotomies that defined Italy during the period. This research demonstrates that Italian artistic production was deeply informed by concurrent historical developments in science, industry, politics, literature, architecture, and film, and these fields have helped shape this new art historical turn. An international scholarly outlook on the art created in Italy during the postwar period has now fully emerged, and it is our hope that this volume can begin to take stock of it. The chronological parameters of the volume roughly adhere to the traditional boundaries of the postwar period, 1945–75. Our focus is neither contemporary Italian art writ large, nor the broader changes to the Italian art and design landscape that occurred later in the twentieth century, including Transavanguardia/Neo-Expressionist painting and Postmodernism—though some of the included essays look back to the postwar period from the vantage point of these later moments and the twenty-­first century. In focusing on the three decades following the end of World War II, the essays in this volume examine the impact of key historical distinctiveness of the period, characterized by social, political, and cultural developments that shaped art production. The impact of a devastating world war, the defeat of fascism in 1943, and the death of its leader, Benito Mussolini, in 1945 proved to be watershed moments for Italy. The period of reconstruction, significantly promoted by a heavy economic investment from the United States through the Marshall Plan, led to forty-­eight years of political rule by the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana or DC), with the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano or PCI) in opposition. An unprecedented period of economic growth, known as il miracolo italiano (the Italian Economic Miracle), emerged at the end of the 1950s. As historian Paul Ginsborg writes, In the twenty years from 1950 to 1970 per capita income in Italy grew more rapidly than in any other European country: from a base of 100 in 1950 to 234.1

6

Postwar Italian Art History Today in 1970, compared to France’s increase from 100 to 136 in the same period, and Britain’s 100 to 132. By 1970 Italian per capita income, which in 1945 had lagged far behind that of the northern European countries, had reached 60 per cent of that in France and 82 per cent of that in Britain.15

The rising left-­wing movement and enormous social unrest began to manifest the underside of this prosperity in the late 1960s. The period culminated in the sessantotto (1968), as well as revolts by jobless farm workers, occupations of universities by students, and social conflict in northern factories. An increased frustration with growing social inequalities came to the surface, with extreme left-­wing violent movements attracted to myths of guerrilla warfare based on the models of Che Guevara, the Uruguayan Tupamaros, as well as the cultural revolutions proclaimed by Chinese Maoists. The autunno caldo (Hot Autumn) of 1969 witnessed the occupation of the Fiat factory in Turin. The 1970s, later characterized as gli anni di piombo (the Years of Lead), were marked by numerous terrorist attacks, ranging from bombings to shootings, including the bombing in Piazza Fontana in Milan on December 12, 1969. By the mid-1970s, the political landscape had changed, and with it the conditions of artistic production. The issues addressed in this volume directly engage with the art and the artistic experiences produced during these turbulent times, in how artists and the artworks they created responded to, or avoided engagement with, these sweeping economic, political, and social changes. A central paradox or “knot” of the postwar period in Italy—to embrace the Italian heritage that stretched back to antiquity or to cultivate a new, modern Italy defined by its emergent status in the global consumer economy—was also at the heart of major artistic debates. As artists navigated through the burden of centuries-­old artistic tradition, a shifting relationship to Modernism as it emerged on both sides of the Atlantic, new institutional and patronage systems, the emergence of new avant-­garde “movements” or tendencies including Informale, Pop, Spatialism, Zero/Nul, Gruppo N, and Arte Povera, and connections to the booming fields of Italian design and architecture all shaped postwar Italian art. These issues, particular to the Italian context, enable us to extract often unexpected connections between the essays in this volume. The fifteen contributors nuance the notion of prewar and postwar periods as discrete historical and art historical epochs, adding new and different strands of complexity to the picture. Several essays in this volume uphold this distinction, whereas others trace subtle threads of continuity that can be perceived in the artistic production of the pre- and postwar years. The presence of both approaches throughout this volume, sometimes within the same essay, speaks

Introduction

7

again to the complexity and heterogeneity of the period and the scholarship that examines it. This methodological diversity is driven by the last decade’s increase in intellectual production by social, political, and cultural historians around the particularities of the postwar period. New scholarly contributions including Laura Petican’s Arte Povera and the Baroque: Building an International Identity and Gabriele Guercio’s The Great Subtraction, as well as Adrian Duran’s Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy, Jaleh Mansoor’s Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, and Romy Golan’s forthcoming Flashbacks and Eclipses in Italian Art of the 1960s have further encouraged art historians and critics to examine specific themes, such as the legacy of Italy’s artistic and craft traditions within the context of rapid industrialization, the impact of the so-­called “economic miracle” and American consumerism, as well as the profound and at times contentious dialogue with American art and its increasingly dominant market.16 In addition to complicating the established divisions of chronology, Postwar Italian Art History Today also explicitly brings together, for the first time, AngloAmerican and Italian scholars who are leading the conversation around the main issues of postwar Italian art history. We have involved both young and established scholars who draw upon different schools and methodologies to explore the artistic landscape of postwar Italy. These authors call for a systematic reconsideration of the artistic origins of contemporary Italian art, the terminology used to describe the work produced, and key personalities and institutions that promoted and supported the development and marketing of this art, both in Italy and abroad. The volume, finally, questions whether the concerns are the same for Italian and non-Italian scholars of different generations and also asks what role transatlantic exchange played in the art Made in Italy during the postwar period and in the subsequent study of that art. The volume is divided into four sections. In Section I, titled “Reconsidering the Weight of Italy,” we begin our study by examining ways in which artists of the postwar period grappled with, challenged, and revised their powerful and often cumbersome cultural heritage—both as physical place and traditional concept. Some of the essays in this section do not limit their analyses to the date range of 1945–75, but more broadly assess the legacy of postwar Italian art in the contemporary sphere. Laura Petican, for example, critically looks backs to this dynamic moment, evaluating Celant’s evocation of the metaphor of the Gordian knot as an image of cultural entanglement, crossed references, discontinuities,

8

Postwar Italian Art History Today

and contradictions. Petican contrasts this with the view of a more recent art critic and curator, Francesco Bonami, who instead characterizes this period as a unified, continuous, and identifiable “esthetic identity” rooted in a national context. She gives new meaning to the “knot” by seeing it as a compendium of self-­reflexive cultural references, finding a post-Arte Povera embrace of the aesthetic act as process-­based in works by contemporary artists working in Italy, such as Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, and Francesco Vezzoli. Petican’s essay offers a new methodology for understanding contemporary Italian art that accounts for the current hyper-­connected, global community in which it participates. Ultimately, she asks if italianità matters to those for whom a connection to the national environment is nothing more than a birthplace. She also launches a provocation regarding her own interpretative position as a non-Italian native who works on Italian art. Questioning methodology and the weight of tradition in a different way, Denis Viva challenges the long-­standing idea that postwar Italian art was characterized by its recurrent recourse to art-­historical references. Viva traces quotation, homage, camouflage, parody, and other metalinguistic strategies as commonplace in the works of Italian artists over the past thirty years. He finds these tactics beginning in the art of the Scuola di piazza del Popolo, which highlighted the “tourist identity” of the nation as compared to international Pop Art, and continuing up to the Transavanguardia of the 1980s, from Tano Festa’s pop, through the conceptual art of Giulio Paolini and Vettor Pisani, and the postmodern painting of Sandro Chia or Carlo Maria Mariani. Viva, however, counters the traditional viewpoint that this “quoting attitude” signaled an Italian reluctance toward acceptance of modernity, thereby suggesting another important “knot” to unravel. He contends that it reveals radical theoretical potential if read from the point of view of art history. This attitude, he claims, when considered as an art-­historical object of study, ceases to be a symptom of postmodern nostalgia or irony and instead poses a serious threat, for Italian artists directly meddle with art history by turning its method into an artistic dispositif. Viva finds that artists interfered with the iconic interpretation of the past insofar as they shared tools with art historians (photography, printed reproduction, captions) and operated in the same epistemological field, thereby creating a sort of meta-­language. Thus, Viva revisits the historical narration of postwar Italian art in methodological terms. Ultimately, he proposes a form of art history that can study objects that criticize art historical methodology itself.

Introduction

9

The last two essays in this section consider how the heritage of Italy as physical place, and more specifically the highly politicized and deeply poetic urban space of the Italian postwar city, affected artistic production. This “knot” has rarely been addressed in the studies of the period. Silvia Bottinelli looks at the work of Gianni Pettena, based in Florence, and Ugo La Pietra, based in Milan, in order to examine the theoretical and artistic debates around the permeability of domestic and public urban spaces. Their works of the 1970s blurred the boundaries of the public and private spheres by appropriating urban spaces with improvised actions, such as hanging laundry in the historical city center or shaving in the middle of a peripheral field. As Bottinelli suggests, Pettena and La Pietra contribute to a wider discourse on the social complexity of urban habitats, which embodied the interplay of locational identity, class identity and subjectivity. The artists’ poetics align with theories developed by Italian and French thinkers Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau. Like the aforementioned thinkers, Pettena and La Pietra perceive the city as a reflection of institutional powers, which do not necessarily represent the needs of all the residents. For this reason, dwellers may feel extraneous to parts of the city such as the cathedral square or the historical center, which epitomize the values of the dominating class and represent its hegemony. Bottinelli argues that Pettena and La Pietra’s performative interventions try to subvert this dynamic by using public spaces in spontaneous ways, which are in contrast with coded habits that reinforce hierarchical power structures. The section closes with an unusual contrarian essay by Gabriele Guercio, who moves south to Rome and poetically uses Gino De Dominicis’ painting, Lady of Warka (1977), to question whether an artwork yields the possibility of reconstituting oneself after death—an argument that takes on greater weight when framed in the context of Italy’s cultural heritage. De Dominicis created Lady of Warka in 1977, a year of political struggle in Rome when police harshly repressed ongoing riots by students and workers who had taken to the streets. But rather than resonate with “contemporary” Rome, Lady of Warka, as Guercio argues, conveys a conservative nostalgic stance toward a long-­lost past. Beyond the simplistic polarities of politics lie other, more evocative “historical” clues that connect this work to the broader transatlantic context. For instance, in 1977 American science-­fiction writer Philip K. Dick related his encounter with an entity from another time in a public lecture; the following year he wrote the autobiographical novel Valis, in which a key feature of the

10

Postwar Italian Art History Today

narrative is the prospect of reconstituting oneself after death. This theme recalls the nexus between images, death, and immortality that anthropologists have traced back to prehistory, yet Lady of Warka takes these considerations a bit further. By painting over a photograph of an ancient Sumerian head and depicting her eyes, which are missing in the original sculpture, the artist ascribes a sort of perennial existence to the subject. Guercio’s evocative exploration of these theoretical, political, and formal themes of time and memory offers a different approach and proposes diverse solutions with respect to the volume. Section II is entitled “Re-­imagining Realism.” The essays highlight the debates around Realism and representation, especially in the context of international exchange between Italy and the United States during the postwar period. In the first essay, Davide Colombo questions the accepted historiography and reasoning of “isms” and the supposed antipodes of Abstraction and Realism during the 1950s. He links this understanding to the failed attempt to propose Italian postwar abstract art in the United States under the generic label Informel or Informale. Colombo contends that in this case, over-­simplification seems to want to remedy the inability on the part of the artists to “make a system” of the Italian scene during that decade, while at the same time reflecting a deep interest on the part of Americans in Italian modern and postwar art, as was evident in the Twentieth Century Italian Art exhibition held at MoMA in 1949. Colombo proposes a new lens through which to view the complex and often unresolved exchanges between Italy and the United States during the immediate postwar period. His essay thus represents yet another entangled question that is evident in numerous essays throughout the volume. He attempts to give a more nuanced understanding of why Italian art did not become established in America in these years despite numerous exhibitions of Italian artists and contemporary Italian art mounted there. Turning to the 1960s and focusing on one significant postwar Italian art movement or tendency, Christopher Bennett critically reconsiders Italian Pop, or la Scuola di piazza del Popolo, in relation to the Italian reception of American Pop Art at the 1964 Venice Biennale. Bennett examines Italian Pop’s engagement with the United States and incoming forms of American-­style consumerism through central issues pinpointed by Italian Pop artist Renato Mambor and paintings made by his closest peers, including Mario Schifano, Giosetta Fioroni, and Franco Angeli. Bennett highlights Italian Pop artists’ ambivalence toward incoming forms of American mass-­culture, which left artists struggling between critique and fascination, avoidance and immersion. He divides Mambor’s tactical

Introduction

11

summation into two steps: their emptying of the canvas to arrive at an opaque ground or “screen,” and their subsequent filling of the works with signs culled from mass culture and everyday, urban space. Nicoletta Leonardi’s essay, like Bottinelli’s, touches upon the work of Pettena and La Pietra, but does so within the context of their collaboration with Franco Vaccari and Global Tools, a multidisciplinary education program founded in 1973 by members of the Italian radical architecture movement. Leonardi examines Vaccari’s early works and theories. These include his notion of “conceptual realism,” which encompassed the core strategies of his practice including an interest in materiality, the overcoming of the traditional notion of the author in favor of the collective voice, the emergence of urban spaces as a privileged site for artistic practice, and the use of photography, film, and video as critical instruments of emancipation against alienation and massification. By reducing his authorial presence to a minimum, and by exalting the materiality of experience, Vaccari exposed public urban spaces and societal processes as complex semiotic and material networks in which human and non-­human actors move through space and time, interacting with each other and producing reality. Vaccari’s work has received little scholarly attention, but as Leonardi suggests, it helps create a more complete picture of Italy’s artistic scene during the late postwar period—one beyond the limited if dominating scope of Arte Povera and that directly engaged with broader social changes and their representation. Section III, entitled “Rethinking Modes of Patronage” is devoted to analyses of both recognized and lesser-­known figures who promoted and patronized Italian postwar art. Antje Gamble, like other authors in our volume, rethinks the relationship between the United States and Italy. Her essay points to numerous social, economic, and political questions as well as artistic ones. She sheds new light on the strong interest in the sculpture of Marino Marini on the part of American curators, critics, and collectors in the postwar period. Gamble contends that paradoxically, this interest emerged for the same reasons that American critic Clement Greenberg had used to criticize Marini as one of the new “Italian archaicizers.” Gamble, like Colombo, analyzes MoMA’s Twentieth Century Italian Art exhibition of 1949, which singled out Marini’s work as exemplary of a postwar archaic modernism. The familiarity of Marini’s subjects, such as dancers and equestrians, combined with his mastery of bronze casting, solidified the sculptor’s success with American collectors such as Nelson Rockefeller and Alexander

12

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Rosenberg. For Gamble, Americans understood Marini’s sculpture as a means to connect to Europe’s classical humanist tradition. She suggests that patrons utilized postwar Italian art, with its European humanist caché, as a means to legitimize postwar American culture. Therefore, the American market for Italian art, specifically Marini’s, functioned politically to solidify America’s claims to cultural supremacy over the Soviet Union. Thinking about the interwoven question of continuity and change from a different perspective, Laura Moure Cecchini returns to the prewar regime, with its policy of heavy investment and intervention in art, to show ways in which fascism provoked major changes in the relationship between Italian artists and the country’s economic system. It is in this sense that Cecchini notes continuities between prewar and postwar patronage of the arts in Italy. Her essay examines three private art collections created in the 1940s and 1950s, which she concludes resembled the artistic commissions of the fascist regime: the Caramelli collection of visions of Rome, the Zavattini collection of artists’ self-­portraits, and the Verzocchi collection of representations of labor. For these collections, paintings, with a fixed theme and fixed dimensions, were commissioned from stylistically diverse Italian artists who were given a fixed economic compensation. The only choice that they could exercise was the style and subject matter of their work. For Cecchini, these collections demonstrate that the fascist approach to patronage permeated postwar private enterprise, which is usually described as the liberal system par excellence. She demonstrates how the fascist state, too, encouraged stylistic diversity as a means of promoting itself as an enlightened patron of the arts, but also as a way of concealing that no political pluralism was possible under the regime. The Caramelli, Verzocchi, and Zavattini collections reveal that the idea that artists deserve creative freedom but that they must operate organically with the rest of society, with all the compromises this entails, was a constant in the relationship between patrons and artists before and after World War II. She contends that due to the ventennio’s claim for the inconsequentiality of style, fascist-­sponsored artists continued to work undisturbed in the postwar period and their art came to be included in collections such as those examined in her essay. Cecchini concludes that the pluralism of postwar Italian art is linked to changed political conditions as well as to the persistence of the patron-­artist relationship that was dominant in the prewar period. A key figure of the period is the focus of Jacopo Galimberti’s essay: the libertarian Marxist and independent intellectual Danilo Montaldi (1929–75). In

Introduction

13

the 1950s, Montaldi was among the first Italian activists to establish a contact with the anti-Stalinist French group Socialisme ou barbarie, although his contribution to the Italian new left was also methodological. Montaldi played a pivotal role in early operaismo: he and fellow activists such as Romano Alquati developed a working method, later called “co-­research,” that Montaldi applied to his ethnological/political inquiries into the shantytowns of Milan, the lumpen proletariat living on the banks of the Po, and grassroots militants. This approach had an important effect on Montaldi’s relationship to postwar Italian art, and Galimberti uses it to discuss little-­known aspects of Montaldi’s manifold intellectual activities: his meditations on art and with artists, as well as his role as a gallery owner between 1965 and 1975. Galimberti illuminates the epistemological implications of Montaldi’s idiosyncratic curatorial policies and critical writings, asking how Montaldi’s libertarian Marxism shaped his aesthetic persuasions, and how it is possible to interpret Montaldi’s collection of folk art. This differentiates Montaldi’s endeavours from those of another Italian critic, Carla Lonzi, around the same years. Montaldi’s interest in folk art emerges as a crucial element, embedded in contemporary discourses of the Gramscian notion of the “popular” and of Pop Art in Italy. Galimberti closes with an analysis of Montaldi’s writings about art, his correspondence with painter Giuseppe Guerreschi, and his indirect influence on the reconsideration of the epistemological status of the art critic that emerged through Lonzi and Celant in the latter part of the 1960s. The final essay in this section focuses on the impact of an institution rather than particular individuals. Martina Tanga examines the patronage of the Venice Biennale, at one of its most staggering moments of transformation, during the 1970s. She discusses how the Biennale went from a hierarchical organization that reflected art market trends to an institution that placed democratic values at the center of its mission. Critical pressure stemming from the 1968 uprising prompted the Biennale to reevaluate both its hoary mission laws dating from the Mussolini era and its primary role as a cultural arbiter. In 1973, the Italian government approved the institution’s new statute. Refocusing its efforts on democratizing the arts, the Biennale expanded its audience to include those whom elite cultural institutions had previously marginalized. Tanga uses two exhibitions years—1974 and 1976—to examine how artistic and cultural initiatives reshaped the Biennale. These two iterations provide strong examples of the exhibition’s newfound emphasis on social values, whether through a citywide denunciation by artists of General Pinochet’s coup d’état,

14

Postwar Italian Art History Today

which had occurred in 1973, or the continued decentralization of exhibition spaces in 1976, when the curator Enrico Crispolti introduced radically new artistic practices that centered on audience participation in the urban context. As Tanga argues, the Biennale’s outlook during these years exemplified a unique instance when an established art institution, the oldest biennial in the world, responded to the changing attitudes of an emergent generation. The conditions of the Biennale’s makeover reflected the institutional crisis many Italian museums—still haunted by a fascist patronage system—faced at this moment, and how, in turn, institutional patronage responded. The fourth and final section of this volume is entitled “Reassessing Arte Povera.” Whether understood as a codified movement, a casual tendency, or simply a convenient label, Arte Povera has come to dominate the field in recent years, but the essays in this section seek to expand on, complicate, and question its role within the history of postwar Italian art. As Sharon Hecker notes, Arte Povera is widely regarded as the most important avant-­garde art movement of the period in Italy, well known for its language of historical rupture, radical political outlook, and associated artists intent on attacking established institutional values. She suggests that a unified nationalistic narrative of the Arte Povera tendency needs to be reevaluated, and that many of its associated artists had entertained a multifaceted dialogue with ideas expressed a hundred years earlier in the work of Medardo Rosso (1958–28). Hecker highlights the ongoing resistance to closure or to a single-­mindedness of approach, contending that Arte Povera artists take up and reject strands of Rosso’s art and ideas individually and as they see fit, without feeling the obligation to inherit his project as a whole. Their process of flexibly mining an artist from the past keeps their work vital and relevant today. By their diverging approaches, these artists do not transform Rosso into a central or heroic voice of authority from the past. They thus disrupt uniform “genealogical” descriptions of Italian cultural continuity and national identity evident in the later narrative. Hecker discusses examples like Luciano Fabro’s reconfiguration of Rosso’s experimental photographic practices; Marisa Merz’s evasive visual “conversations” between Rosso’s sculptural heads and her own; Giuseppe Penone’s alignment of his process with the visceral quality of Rosso’s rough, abraded sculptural surfaces; Giovanni Anselmo’s conceptual sense of Rosso as a precursor of the opera aperta, the semiotically open text that allows multiple or mediated interpretations by readers; and finally, Giulio Paolini’s pondered refusal of any affinity with Rosso, which she interprets as a willful liberation from reliance on the authority of a

Introduction

15

“founding father” for contemporary Italian art. Such examples, Hecker argues, call for a more comprehensive methodological assessment of postwar Italian art’s roots. Elizabeth Mangini also considers the legacy of Arte Povera, though in her essay she focuses on how the critical conversation of the artistic phenomenon of 1960s and 1970s Italy remains mired in the language of its first apologists. Mangini unties and deconstructs one of the most enduring myths about postwar Italian art: its connection to alchemy. If one reads Arte Povera’s radical materiality as illustrative of alchemical principles it erroneously reinforces reductive understandings of this art as one of “poor materials.” Moreover, Mangini argues, such readings romanticize Arte Povera artists like Gilberto Zorio as magicians consumed by their individual pursuits with Faustian folly. In the context of “reassessing Arte Povera”—and reconsidering the interpretive frames of postwar Italian art—Mangini’s essay disentangles “alchemy” from the writings that have characterized Arte Povera in general, and the work of Zorio, in particular. Once unlocked from alchemical rhetoric, different aesthetic, philosophical, and political aspects of Zorio’s project come into focus. Her essay renders problematic the critical literature that reads Zorio’s art as alchemical, and argues for a new interpretive lens: one no longer claiming a mythical and iconographic interpretation of his project, but reading his art as a philosophical investigation that is rooted in its social context. For Mangini, the mutability and material instability in Zorio’s works signify philosophical research into the complex nature of being in the phenomenal world, repositioning the artist and his work as deeply engaged with human experience. Giorgio Zanchetti’s essay seeks to expand the constellation of artists considered in discussions of Arte Povera by examining the work of Luciano Fabro—an artist who consciously maintained a respectful distance from the Arte Povera movement while participating in some of its exhibitions. In particular, Zanchetti focuses on Fabro’s earliest theoretical writing, titled PseudoBacon—My certainty: my sense for my action . . . which Celant included in his landmark text Arte Povera (1969), and artworks such as Half Mirror–Half Transparent (1965) and All Transparent (1965). Both text and artwork were featured prominently in the group exhibition Arte povera + Azioni povere, which took place in Amalfi in October 1968. Though much of Fabro’s work was included in the most important exhibitions and events of Arte Povera’s history, Fabro’s impact and complex relationship to Arte Povera have been largely ignored. Zanchetti analyzes Fabro’s artistic activity in the mid- to late–1960s as a means

16

Postwar Italian Art History Today

to better understand Fabro’s connection to the Italian avant-­garde art of the period as well as to shed light on how Fabro’s own theories influenced the work of his contemporaries. In the final essay of this section and the volume as a whole, “Transatlantic Arte Povera,” Raffaele Bedarida returns us to Celant and his lasting impact on the reception and understanding of vanguard Italian artists in both Europe and the United States. Bedarida provides a comprehensive analysis of Celant’s landmark book, Arte Povera, attending to the implications of strategic and editorial decisions made in the simultaneous publication in Italy, West Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1969. The book did not simply introduce Arte Povera to American audiences, but also the critic himself, and as Bedarida suggests, ended up functioning as “the Trojan horse of an infiltration action,” meant to promote Italian art in America. Bedarida’s essay returns to Petican’s confrontation with the “Made in Italy” brand that opened our volume, suggesting that with Arte Povera, Celant was at pains to place Italian art alongside that of other vanguard tendencies at the time, especially those emerging in the United States, while acutely aware of the anti-American sentiment held by many of the artists he sought to promote. The paradoxical threads that Bedarida deftly pulls out of Celant’s project are the complexities that still run through postwar Italian art historical scholarship today. In concluding the volume with a section on Arte Povera, even when presented through essays that highlight artists who have perhaps been diminished within art history since the tendency emerged in the late 1960s, we acknowledge that Arte Povera remains the tangle at the heart of the knot and functions as only one of its many threads. Arte Povera and postwar Italian art were not simply “Conceptualism and Minimalism, Italian-­style,” nor some unique, isolated Italian avant-­garde manifestation. Instead, as Bedarida suggests, it is a tendency that can be understood as a sort of culmination of postwar Italian art, the first “expression of a newly Americanized Italian culture,” that continues to reverberate in the contemporary moment. Like the other essays in this volume, those of the last section are not meant to provide a unified or comprehensive vision of “Postwar Italian Art.” They may even appear quite idiosyncratic. Our intention was to present a cross-­section not of our own expectations or scholarly interests, but of the state of the field today. The resultant picture is neither neat nor exhaustive, but it does seek to avoid perpetuating the monolithic methodology that led to the closed framing of Arte Povera that has dominated scholarship for so long. Our aim was not to definitively present the postwar as distinct from

Introduction

17

prewar period, as a part of the linear narrative of modernism, or as connected to international avant-­gardes.We strove to show the complexities and contradictions that held together the cultural production of Italy within its own country and with the world. It is our hope that rather than cutting through or severing the knot, this volume highlights the myriad threads still in need of pulling.

Notes 1 The Knot: Arte Povera at PS1 ran from October 6 to December 15, 1985 at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York. Germano Celant, The Knot: Arte Povera at PS1 (Turin: Allemandi, 1985). 2 Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-­worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Art History 36, no. 2 (April 2013): 418–44. 3 Claire Gilman, “Introduction,” October, Postwar Italian Art, 124 (Spring 2008): 3–7; Nicholas Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-Nam: The Politics of Arte Povera,” October, Postwar Italian Art, 124 (Spring 2008): 8–30. 4 Germano Celant, “Prologue,” in The Knot: Arte Povera at PS1 (Turin: Allemandi, 1985), 2. 5 Vivien Raynor, “Art: From Italy, a Show of 12 called ‘The Knot’,” The New York Times October 18, 1985. 6 Ibid. 7 See, and this is only a small selection of the most recent publications and exhibitions, for example: Germano Celant, Thomas Demand, and Rem Koolhaas, When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969, Venice 2013 (Milan: Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina, 2013); Germano Celant, John Bentley Mays, and Didier Semin, Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013); Germano Celant, Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali (New York: Gagosian, Milan: Skira, 2012); and Germano Celant, Arte Povera: storia e storie (Milan: Electa, 2011). 8 Richard Flood and Frances Morris curated Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972, which opened at Tate Modern in London on May 31 and ran until August 19, 2001. The exhibition then traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (October 13, 2001 to January 13, 2002); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (March 10 to August 11, 2002); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (October 17, 2002 to January 12, 2003). 9 Germano Celant, “1968 An Arte Povera. A Critical Art. An Iconoclastic Art. Knot Art 1985,” in Celant, The Knot, 4. 10 Emily Braun, Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1900–1988, Munich: Prestel, 1989; Sandra Pinto, Italian Art of the 20th Century, Milan: Skira,

18

Postwar Italian Art History Today

2002; Germano Celant, The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994. 11 See for example, October 124 (Spring 2008); Friedemann Malsch and Christiane Meyer-Stoll, Che Fare? Arte Povera: The Historic Years, Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2010; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, London: Phaidon, 2005; Robert Lumley, Arte Povera. Movements in Modern Art (London: Tate, 2005). 12 Anthony White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, curated by Emily Braun, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 5, 2015 to January 6, 2016. Also see Sarah Whitfield, Lucio Fontana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), published in conjunction with the exhibition Lucio Fontana, held at the Hayward Gallery, London, October 14, 1999 to January 9, 2000. 13 The Magazzino Italian Art, showcasing the collection of Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, opened in Cold Spring, New York in 2017, and while not dedicated exclusively to Arte Povera, collectors Harold Rachofsky and the late Vernon Faulconer opened The Warehouse in Dallas, Texas to present their deep holdings in contemporary Italian art. These organizations join those like the Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany that have particularly strong collections in postwar Italian art. 14 Recent examples of exhibitions include Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017; Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2017; Return to Earth: Ceramic Sculpture of Fontana, Melotti, Miró, Noguchi, and Picasso, 1943–1963, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas in 2013–14. 15 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 16 Laura Petican, Arte Povera and the Baroque: Building International Identity (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011); Gabriele Guercio, The Great Subtraction (Brussels: ASA Publishers, 2011); Adrian Duran, Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014); Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Also see the related, Romy Golan, “Flashbacks and Eclipses in Italian Art in the 1960s,” Grey Room 49 (Fall 2012): 102–27.

Section I

Reconsidering the Weight of Italy

1

“Yes, but are you Italian?” Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art Laura Petican

Introduction When in 1985 Germano Celant pondered the legacy of Arte Povera as an anthology of “uncertain and changing signs,”1 the metaphor of the knot provided an image of cultural entanglement, crossed references, discontinuities, and contradictions. The artists associated with this group, based in “a strange and senseless geography,”2 he claimed, were paradoxically bound by the fragmentary postwar climate yet unified in a collective vision for the present. This “Knot Art” for Celant, the “multi-­aspect vision”3 that characterized postwar Italian art, however, has been subsequently viewed by figures such as Italian curator and writer Francesco Bonami as a unified aesthetic identity rooted in and determined by the national context, from past to present. As characterized in Bonami’s 2008 exhibition catalog Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, the relationship between past and present explored in Italian art made between 1968 and 2008 is continuous and coherent;4 this enduring relationship, this italianità or Italianness is perhaps a more identifiable image of the knot that has yet to be unraveled. The legacy of Celant’s knot may more accurately propose a trajectory of Italian art history that is both continuous and fragmented, local and universal, and inherently entangled. Indeed, the question, “Yes, but are you Italian?” posed to me following the presentation of a paper on contemporary Italian artists and fashion a couple of years ago,5 brought to mind the notion of Italianness and what it meant to art historiography. I wondered whether the nationalism and cultural specificity that seemed so irrelevant to a generation of postwar artists exploring the “degree

22

Postwar Italian Art History Today

zero”6 of aesthetic experience was now re-­emerging, giving meaning to a subsequent generation whose aesthetic concerns seem centered within careers that are, in many respects, international in scope. This question from an undoubtedly well-­intentioned conference delegate regarding relative authority over the subject matter related to my own ethnicity provoked a broader consideration of the ways we practice art history and how culture gets made. That is, for contemporary Italian artists, does being Italian matter? Does it matter for art history? Is an Italian art history possible? These questions arise in the context of the increasing prominence of Italian art, gastronomy, industrial design, and fashion on the international cultural scene over the latter part of the twentieth century. Celant’s “knot,” in this sense, can be seen to refer to an image of integrated cultural and social conditions that were intertwined, relative, and inherently interdisciplinary. In the mid-1980s, this alluded to an era steeped in the residue of post-World War II disorientation and disillusionment, assuaged by burgeoning capitalism and realized in familiar modes of cultural production in the form of painting’s return via the Transavanguardia7 and the rise of Italian cultural identity through popular consumption of mass-­produced goods (fashion, food, etc.). While a linear trajectory of progressive advance may have characterized the evolution of Italian art and culture at one point, the 1980s saw a different view with the rising interdependence of globalized communication, culture, and economics. From this perspective, one may observe that an account of postwar Italian art history cannot be one confined to the fine arts; rather, the “knot” includes a totality of cultural matter. From this inclusive and historicist perspective, this essay is concerned with the work of contemporary Italian cultural producers—both fine artists and practitioners—and includes analysis of art, fashion, and exhibition practice, in light of notions of Italianness, national identity, and the role of the past. It considers these as part of a broadly European, however, shifting, cultural dynamic, and their effect on the significance and viability of italianità in discussions of postwar Italian art history. Along with analysis of works by Vanessa Beecroft (b. 1969), Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960), and Francesco Vezzoli (b. 1971), I consider the exhibition Missoni Art Colour, recently held at the Fashion and Textiles Museum in London,8 and what may be understood as mixed messages regarding the relative importance of communicating a national, homegrown aesthetic centered in notions of inherited cultural legacy. These examples are chosen because the artists are Italian-­born, yet maintain careers that are international in scope; Beecroft, for example, has a British father, grew

Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art

23

up in the United Kingdom, and presently resides in Los Angeles. Their association, therefore, with the notion of italianità presents a compelling entry point for a consideration of the study of Italian art history. Missoni Art Colour similarly situates an Italian cultural producer within a national context, but aspects of its curation speak to a broader scope of influence and exchange. While it may be seen that artworks by the above-­mentioned artists evince a distinct relationship with the past by way of what I have termed “baroque-­ centric” traits,9 it may also be observed that due to their use of fashion, they participate in a more fluid cultural space where disciplines overlap and perceived influences become less identifiable. That is, the notable motifs—geometric patterning, vibrant palettes, for example—are less associated with a national context than with a general zeitgeist of a broader European context. The works may be distinctly Italian to some degree, but the materials they use—the fashion garments, materials, and patterning—suggest a wider network of source material. What I am suggesting, for example, is that in the case of the Italian fashion house Missoni, the trademark aesthetic and technique for which it is known— multicolored striped and zigzagged knitwear—stemmed not from an indigenous aesthetic sensibility, but from consequences of circumstance and the influences of a broad, European postmodern aesthetic rooted in experimentation, vitality, and an appeal to the senses. The intersections of fashion and art that underpinned the arrival of Op art and Missoni on the international cultural scene in the mid-­ twentieth century mark this dynamic. With garments dating back to the house’s beginnings in 1953 presented alongside master artworks of the twentieth century, Missoni Art Colour re-­articulated aspects of the nationalistic and hermetic “Made in Italy”10 merchandising initiative of the 1980s which took national identity as a methodology with which to promote an indigenous form of cultural production across fashion, food, furniture, and automobiles. Within this context, Missoni has become emblematic of Italian cultural identity, while characteristic of the hybrid cultural context within which it thrives. It is this cross-­pollination and interdisciplinary cultural exchange firmly established on both sides of the art/fashion debate that provides the framework for this study of Italian art history today. With this in mind, I suggest that the figure of the Gordian knot—in Celant’s vision, an aesthetic identity—bound and yet unknowable, is a reasonable metaphor for the familiar and nebulous realm of postwar Italian art and culture. Its frequency of self-­reflexive cultural references, at once universal and local, evolving and yet constant, has traveled forth with Arte Povera’s heirs and the

24

Postwar Italian Art History Today

industrial advances of postwar recovery. Italy’s contemporary artists are inextricably linked to their predecessors who began working before the 1970s, and their works exhibit a like-­minded elan centered in experimentation and historical perspective. The question remains as to whether the knot-­as-Italy that turns in on itself and is entangled in its own parameters, maintains its integrity when cut through with the blade of experimental practices and fluid cultural exchange in the early twenty-­first century.

Methodological approach and fine art case studies The notion that art and fashion might have colluded toward the propagation of italianità in the contemporary era can be explored in the work of several contemporary Italian artists. As I have explored elsewhere,11 artists such as Beecroft, Cattelan, and Vezzoli produce works that function along what I have called a “baroque-­centric”12 trajectory that connects their practices to their Arte Povera predecessors, as well as to seventeenth-­century baroque devices. Implicit in this observation is that Italy’s contemporary artists maintain a measure of italianità that links their work to the national context. But can such a historicist methodology, tangled in a knot of self-­reference, survive as a viable perspective from which to consider recent developments? Does Italianness matter to those for whom a connection to the national environment is nothing more than a birthplace? I have previously identified the baroque in contemporary Italian art by way of an historiography of baroque scholarship which includes the work of the poet and art critic Severo Sarduy (1937–93), who offers a conception of the baroque modeled on the seventeenth-­century resistance to symmetry and notions of perfection symbolized in the circle. His reference to Johannes Kepler’s ellipse as an alternate form with a directional axis is used to describe the effect of contemporary works conceived within similar concepts of alterity.13 The decentering effect of this shift from Galileo Galilei’s heliocentric universe to one without a discernible center carried ideological and social implications that Sarduy locates in the twentieth century as the neobaroque—manifested in instances of “dynamism, heterogeneity, and transgression.”14 The analysis of baroque influences in contemporary Italian art suggests an expression modeled on abstract baroque traits derived from seminal works of historiography by Heinrich Wölfflin, William Fleming, John Rupert Martin, Marshall Brown, and Giuliano Briganti.15 It relates to an artistic act rooted in

Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art

25

co-­extensive realms of space and time, one that functions on tension and theatricality, a heightened sense of materiality, and which implicates the spectator as a vital part of the aesthetic act. Contemporary baroque-­centric works engage the viewer in real space and time; their reach is international, but marked by the cultural legacy of the national context. Beecroft’s video work VB52 of 2003, performed at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, presents in dramatic foreshortened view, attendants at a dinner party. The fashion aesthetic articulated in styled wigs, shoes, and clothing affirms the event in modes of contemporary styling. The participants embody the dynamism associated with baroque works such as Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew, c. 1598–1600, whose figures, in a similarly foreshortened space, gesture beyond the picture plane to implicate the viewer in the event. For Beecroft, live bodies enact physical space and emphasize the fleeting nature of life as seen in the tradition of works such as Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, 1599, whose subject is in an imperfect, evolving state. In VB52, Beecroft has assembled clothing and accessories in a disorienting, coded system that suggests the open-­endedness of baroque works. The fashionability appeals to the viewer, but the items, inaccessible and out of context, open to alternate readings. The work, which unfolds over space and time, deconstructs the highly coded language of fashion and, using a repertoire of pictorial references, recounts a sacred event enacted in the present. Vezzoli also uses fashion’s imagery toward a destabilized vision. Clichés of glamor, excess, and spectacle are spun around worlds of non-­existent products, Hollywood movies, and the stars of Cinecittà, for whom he imagines fantastical cinematic events. Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula of 2005 is a video and promotional material involving a cast of Hollywood and European actors in a trailer for a remake of a movie that will never be made. The viewer is confounded by the performances of celebrities (Helen Mirren, Courtney Love, Milla Jovovich, etc.), and a cameo appearance by Gore Vidal as they recite bombastic prose, dressed as Roman goddesses in costumes designed by Versace. One’s experience of the fake trailer is destabilized by its high production value; it prepares for something that will never be and refers only to itself. As Sarduy explains, this type of self-­reference functions by “pointing out the work within the work”;16—a knotted process of accumulation that references the ancient and near pasts. Vezzoli’s interest in spectacle finds precedent in Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1645–52, in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, where the experience of the audience is part of its subject. As rays of light illuminate the

26

Postwar Italian Art History Today

dying saint through openings in the architecture, sculptural portraits of the Cornaro family gesticulate toward the miracle unfolding before them. The architecture is manipulated to simulate movement toward an experience in real space, implicating the viewer in the event. Vezzoli’s video works and promotional material function similarly on the premise of the real. As with Bernini’s sculptural group, the works’ narratives are incomplete and “open”; Vezzoli’s works, similarly open-­ended, leave the viewer hanging with the realization that the slick marketing leads only to itself. The work aligns with Cattelan’s interest in appearances and spectacle, and suggests the Italian artists’ savvy in areas of fashion and style. The men’s suit is a recurrent motif for Cattelan and has appeared in works such as Untitled of 2000, Him of 2001, Now of 2004, and We of 2010. The untitled work of 2000, rendered in felt and uninhabited, speaks to Cattelan’s interest in texture, finish, and proportion in clothing. A man’s wool felt suit is hung against a gallery wall from a wooden hanger, drawing upon a suit worn by the German artist Joseph Beuys, which Cattelan scaled down.17 Hung on the gallery wall and redolent of its creator, it evokes a certain pathos whereby a life force persists but is deflated. Like Beecroft’s stifled and controlled live bodies, Cattelan’s suit is immaculately rendered, but resigned and dysfunctional; it is as unconsummated as Vezzoli’s fake movie trailer. Its design suggests the luxury and functionality of Prada or Gucci, but Cattelan presents an inoperative would-­be commodity instead. The viewer is caught in a confrontation of expectations, lured by Italian tailoring and craft. Cattelan’s presentation of icons18 is countered by their unconventional appearance, articulated in the image of Kepler’s destabilized ellipse. Occupying the same time and space as the viewer, they disrupt the common order of everyday life. As the curator Francesco Manacorda writes, the works succeed by virtue of a “marketing of nonsense,”19 that problematizes the various forces at once compatible and conflicting. The accumulated repertoire of cultural icons and historical references is deployed in the destabilization of canons related to political figures, religious leaders, and the contemporary fashion/art star system.20 In their multidisciplinary works, contemporary Italian artists have launched an avant-­garde artistic practice that trades on the historical environment, industrial achievements, and the cultural caché of their national context. Beecroft, Vezzoli, and Cattelan employ an iconoclastic approach saturated with glossy images, elegant packaging, and slick façades. With the visual codes of private enterprise, fashion, and popular icons, these artists maintain a vision rooted in the past. As The Guardian art critic Alex Needham states with regard to Vezzoli,

Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art

27

he “has managed to find an unusual audience in both the academy and fashion worlds, a Prada-­clad pop kid pondering ancient civilization.”21 Needham echoes the earlier suggestion of an interdisciplinary cultural practice at work in Italy’s contemporary art, while reinforcing the persistence of italianità—a tendency that speaks to critics’ interest in perpetuating the national myth.

Op Art, Italian fashion, and art history The paradox presented, therefore, is whether in light of the Made in Italy campaign of the 1980s, such nationalism in cultural matters was undermined by what can be described in more accurate terms as artists’/designers’ participation in an international, or at least European, sensibility, tied to Modernist formalism? The costume historian Stefania Ricci explains with regard to the emergent fashion scene in Italy that, in an effort to distinguish themselves from the dominant French designers, Italian designers may have resorted to culturally specific techniques, “favouring those manufacturing processes and decorative repertoires that might suggest a link with the Italian tradition and conjure up historical memories or features of the country’s art and culture.”22 She contextualizes this tendency in the image of Italy as “the heir to the grand artisan and artistic tradition,” seen in “countless vestiges strewn in museums across the world.”23 From this perspective, however, if form led to content, could content have possibly been less Italian and more international, hybrid, and, as Missoni’s geometric patterns suggest, infinite and unbound, a knot of crossed references and cultural alliances? The question of italianità in this context has been considered by the design historians Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan in their introduction to the 2014 anthology Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design. They ask, “Why conduct a national study of Italian design here and now, in this increasingly global age?” and “Does it make sense to speak of Italian design, for example, at a time when ‘Italian’ cars may be designed by Britons and Brazilians and manufactured in Poland and Pakistan for consumption in Switzerland and Swaziland?”24 This is, in fact, the crux of this study, which questions the viability of such claims to a unified, ethnic, or inherited sensibility. I suggest that, taking Missoni Art Colour as a case study, Made in Italy represents not a strictly indigenous vision, but suggests a specific locale, populated with highly skilled artisans and designers—an incubator for visionary design and artistic output. As

28

Postwar Italian Art History Today

the cultural anthropologist Simona Segre Reinach characterizes it, Made in Italy is a “creative workshop and not a perpetuator of obsolete systems.”25 From a transhistorical and interdisciplinary perspective, Edoardo Guenzani, mayor of the town of Gallarate, (birthplace of Missoni in 1953), explained that the Missoni Art Colour exhibition was concerned with rediscovering the roots of the fashion house in order to establish its legacy in the present. He states that it “talks about a story in which creativity is intertwined with entrepreneurship, international success with the history of the region, art with design, practical artisanal work with the ability for abstraction. Drawings, colors, signs, shapes and matter are the elements in which we are asked to move to discover anew the roots and developments of the fashion house.”26 What this presents is an assertion of a localized aesthetic and technique informed by broader tendencies associated with an abstract visual language that traverses time but remains intrinsically connected to past eras. I suggest that the transference of color and shape among twentieth-­century artworks, textiles, and garments that found one of its early generative points within the political climate of 1960s London, marked the emergence of a vital conceptual aesthetic of European cultural production in the postwar era and which continues into the contemporary. That is to say, the works of Beecroft, Vezzoli, and Cattelan previously discussed, which according to a baroque-­centric methodology express a particular Italianness, could perhaps be viewed under the umbrella of a more osmotic and international cultural dynamic. From this perspective, they are in fact aligned with Made in Italy, if Made in Italy is a model for a creative incubator, a knot of crossed references and productive entanglement. In this sense, Missoni may be seen as a participant in an emergent, abstract visual dynamic linked to the legacy of European Op art, whose birthplace was London in the 1960s. Missoni’s graphic style and vibrant, Pop sensibility can be traced through the art and culture of the postmodern to contemporary eras and observed in other forms of cultural production. What is suggested, therefore, is an interdisciplinary conception of art historiography, which challenges traditional distinctions in the humanities where fashion, applied design, and fine art are concerned. It is a social conception of art whose visual language, its colors and its shapes, speak to artists’ interest in mastering the modes of modern industrial communication and production techniques intended for a mass audience. With contemporary Italian art and the legacy of Italian fashion design in the twentieth century in mind, this knot of Italian art history is transhistorical, interdisciplinary, and simultaneously local and international. In this regard, Lees-Maffei and Fallan explain that

Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art

29

[T]he quest to move beyond the Western bias of modernist histories has informed intellectual endeavours such as “world history” and “global history”, aimed at expanding the purview of historical scholarship, empirically and methodologically. As a corollary to this development, the tried-­and-tested framework of national histories has been increasingly criticized as unsuited to a new “global gaze” within which neither contemporary society nor historical narratives are to be confined to the geopolitical straightjacket of nations.27

The formal qualities of the Op aesthetic, as emblematic of a European Zeitgeist, provided a visual language that was adapted to the rise of fast fashion and the mass-­produced garment industry of Italy’s miracolo italiano in the era of postwar recovery and regeneration. Citing Paul Ginsborg, the fashion historian Nicola White explains that, “despite the pervasive fundamental problems of the Italian economy, ‘1958–63 saw the beginning of a social revolution; in less than two decades Italy had ceased to be peasant country and became one of the major industrial nations in the world’.”28 This industrial advance coincided with the apparent efficiency of the abstract visual language that characterized Missoni’s trademark aesthetic. In terms of explaining the somewhat avant-­garde leanings of a small, family-­owned and operated fashion house such as Missoni, Lees-Maffei and Fallan explain that Italy’s industrial structure, dominated by family-­owned companies, has fostered a design culture that is somewhat free of the traditions of other European industries that developed earlier.29 They write that “less tradition meant fewer obstacles and less baggage from the past, more freedom in innovation and, possibly, more daring experimentation.”30 This innovation was realized “through experimentation with new manufacturing methods, while embracing creativity in the loosest sense promised success in formal terms.”31 Lees-Maffei and Fallan explain that it was this inclination to experiment that allowed for technical and aesthetic advance; making Italy “a pioneer in radical modern design.”32 The design, however, was limited by the capacities of the found knitting machines used by Missoni founder and patriarch, Ottavio Missoni. As he explains, “the truth is that we had machines that could only make stripes. We can certainly say that we made stripes of all colors and sizes, using them not only horizontally and vertically, but also diagonally and even in zigzag.”33 As above, while “embracing creativity in the loosest sense,” Missoni marked the path for a particular approach to innovation and aesthetic considerations that were both local and international in character, forward-­thinking and rooted in tradition. The art historian María Fernández writes that the conceptual underpinnings of Op art found precedence in the earlier twentieth century, related to the

30

Postwar Italian Art History Today

properties of light, movement, vision, and sensory perception. She cites a 1968 essay by Jack Burnham, published in Artforum, titled “Systems Esthetics” which outlined the openness to interdisciplinarity in the late 1960s. She writes that along the path toward the de-­objectification of art, the idea of craftsmanship and art for art’s sake took a back seat to the notion of relations among the arts. She argues that, “This required emphasizing connections among the component parts of a work (thus revealing its organizing principles), as well as the interaction of the work with aspects of its environment,”34 and an interest in “scientific and technological progress.”35 The curator Paola Antonelli writes that in the “intensely emotional” years of the 1960s and 1970s, “Italy was able to mirror all those bouts of exhilaration and anxiety in the objects it produced,”36 which may be parlayed into the experimental and process-­based works of the Arte Povera generation and its non-­hierarchical approach to materials and aesthetic experience. Amidst the universalizing tendencies of conceptual and process art of the 1960s, it may be suggested that Op art’s abstract, conceptual, and sensory principles parlayed well onto the essentializing tendencies of the avant-­garde, but also with concurrent developments in Italian design. As the fashion historian Valerie Steele writes, Missoni has become “One of the landmark enterprises of modern Italian fashion”37 through a distinctive aesthetic of patterns, stripes, a mixing of new materials and a particular palette. That the essential elements of artistic production could be transposed onto Ottavio Missoni’s practical approach to the start of his own business using found knitting machines suggests an inherently interdisciplinary vision: the basic formal elements of line and color ultimately inhabiting and giving identity to functional forms and objects. In turn, these design elements, having been co-­opted by the nationalist Made in Italy initiative as markers of an indigenous cultural expression, have found their way into the visual vocabulary of artists like Beecroft, Vezzoli, and Cattelan, in works that use clothing and fashion in dynamic, baroque-­centric tableaux. The tropes of Italy’s fashion industry are used interchangeably as materials and subject matter in contemporary Italian art toward a reimagined sense of italianità that ties Celant’s knot somewhat differently.

A contemporary, globalized italianità The idea of Italian artists’ awareness of their own cultural identity—and its international caché as commodity—has been recently challenged by Miuccia

Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art

31

Prada. The fashion matriarch subverted the value associated with the Made in Italy tag sewn into her company’s products, by replacing them with tags reading “Made in India” or “Made in the Philippines” as a way to highlight the artisanal quality and cultural “authenticity” of their design “collaborations.” Her proclamation, “Made in Italy. Who cares?”38 meanwhile does not diminish Italy’s reputation for sophistication in the realm of fashion and design, but rather emphasizes its (colonizing) power as a global producer/consumer of cultural goods. As the urban development scholar Andy Pike writes, “Prada is deploying a hybrid form of origination,” wherein brand and geographical locale are combined as a commodity.39 The cultural historian Vittoria Caterina Caratozzolo has characterized this interest in strategizing toward a national cultural production in the postwar era as a response to prior French dominance of the fashion scene. The effort to rebuild following World War II also registered the “idea of style as the merging of individual drives, collective attitudes and representations of national identity.”40 While Lees-Maffei and Fallan warn of the pitfalls of an overtly nationalistic framework for the discussion of cultural matter in a global context, they nonetheless concede that it is in this global context in particular that a national view of design history, for example, is imperative.41 The art historian Luciano Caramel concurs that, regarding Ottavio Missoni’s evolution toward an icon of Italian national identity, we should remember that we “also owe a debt to the natural context where he learned his métier,”42 citing Carpaccio, Veronese, and Titian among those in the same cultural realm. He goes so far as to align Missoni’s palette with “that glorious wealth of colors that crosses from Venice to Istria and descends along the coast of Dalmatia, diluting, softening and fading [. . .].”43 Rooted, paradoxically, in heterogeneity and the assertion of national identity, Missoni Art Colour locates the fashion house as a reference point in the articulation of Italy’s national identity in the postwar and contemporary eras. Bonami made a similar observation in Italics where he refers to the current generation of artists as operating in “An Ancient Contemporary Civilization.” He discusses the tendency in documenting Italian art to emphasize the impact of national artistic heritage on contemporary expression, insisting that “the great Renaissance tradition” is the backbone of contemporary art in Italy. Ricci writes that with regard to the major fashion houses that have come to characterize Italian fashion on an international scale, they are also born of the “rules of the ancient guilds” and of the traditions “handed down.”44 This is perhaps where the

32

Postwar Italian Art History Today

notion of an international, interdisciplinary, and transhistorical model for a revision of Celant’s knot may be proposed; one which includes the wide array of overlapping cultural production that characterizes Italy’s postwar and contemporary art and design as cooperative, co-­extensive, reciprocal, and osmotic. One is again reminded of the European Op art, systems-­based, geometric patterning that seems to have informed the aesthetic of Missoni’s iconic knitwear, while recognizing that this motif was a matter of happenstance. Yet, the company’s success is equally attributed to Italy’s industrial advances and mastery of high fashion techniques. We are also reminded that Made in Italy made household names of the nation’s leaders in the realms of fashion and design, expanding the repertoire of visual stimulus for later generations of artists. When Beecroft, Vezzoli, and Cattelan began their careers, their field of vision included the historical Renaissance and baroque works of the national context, but also the materials, garments, accessories, and spectacle of Italy’s prominence in the international arenas of fashion and design. I do not suggest that Italy’s artists consciously made use of their cultural heritage as capital in an effort to engage with a wider audience, but rather that art history has aligned them with a national context that may not have been part of their artistic agenda but has defined their identity as artists. As Manacorda summarized in the Italics catalog, artists’ relation to the past is two-­sided;45 it persists alongside a revolutionary impulse that both asserts and challenges national identity. The legacy of italianità in postwar and contemporary Italian art has evolved to propose an incubator model of cultural production wherein the past remains an integral part of a forward-­moving trajectory that responds to stimulus beyond its geopolitical borders and denies hierarchies and disciplinary constraints. It is a porous, entangled entity that builds upon the intricacies, invention, and historical depth of Celant’s knot.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Germano Celant, The Knot: Arte Povera (Turin: Umberto Allemandi & Co., 1985), 5. Ibid. Ibid., 3. Francesco Bonami, “An Ancient Contemporary Civilization,” Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008 (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2008), 25–31.

Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art

33

5 The paper in question, “Venice, Fashion City: The Intersection of Fashion, Art and Patria,” was presented on September 18, 2012 at Mansfield College, Oxford University, at the 4th Global Conference, Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues. 6 See Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, preface by Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). 7 The Transavanguardia, coined by Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, marked a return to painting in the late 1970s and 1980s with a neo-­expressionist style rooted in figurative painting, drawing, and sculpture. See Achille Bonito Oliva, Italian Trans-­avantgarde (Milan: Politi Editore, 1980). 8 This exhibition, curated by Dennis Nothdruft, was held at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum from 6 May to September 2, 2017, and was also shown at Museo MA*GA Gallarate, in Gallarate, Italy, from April 19 to January 24, 2016. 9 Laura Petican, Arte Povera and the Baroque: Building an International Identity (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2011). 10 The “Made in Italy” campaign was protected by associations such as the Institute for the Protection of the Italian Manufacturers and promoted an indigenous form of cultural production across fashion, food, furniture, and automobiles. 11 See Laura Petican, “Fashioning Baroque-Centric Identities: Vanessa Beecroft, Francesco Vezzoli and Maurizio Cattelan,” Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 2012): 21–44. 12 Petican, Arte Povera and the Baroque. 13 See Severo Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” Latin America in Its Literature 1 (1991): 115–32. 14 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, Editors’ note to “The Baroque and the Neobaroque” and “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler” by Severo Sarduy, in Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 265. 15 See Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1964); William Fleming, “The Element of Motion in Baroque Art and Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5.2 (1946): 121–8; John Rupert Martin, “The Baroque from the Point of View of the Art Historian,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 14.2 (1955): 164–71; John Rupert Martin, Baroque (London: Penguin Books, 1991); Marshall Brown, “The Classic is the Baroque: On the Principle of Wölfflin’s Art History,” Critical Inquiry 9 (December 1982): 379–403; and Giuliano Briganti, “Baroque Art,” in Encyclopedia of World Art, Vol. 2 (London: McGraw Hill Publishing Co. Ltd., 1960), 255–381. 16 Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” 286. 17 Katherine Brinson, “Catalogue [1989–2011],” in Maurizio Cattelan: All, Nancy Spector (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2011), 223–4.

34

Postwar Italian Art History Today

18 Francesco Manacorda, Maurizio Cattelan, ed. Francesco Bonami (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2006), 11. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 8. 21 Alex Needham, ‘The artist Francesco Vezzoli on the ancient world, celebrity and “Mrs Prada,” ’ The Guardian (January 4, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2016/jan/04/francesco-­vezzoli-art-­basel-prada-­italy 22 Stefania Ricci, “Italian Fashion: a Matter of Craftsmanship,” in Italian Glamour: The Essence of Italian Fashion from the Postwar Years to the Present Day, ed. Andrew Ellis (Milan: Skira, 2014), 17. 23 Ibid. 24 Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan, eds. Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1. 25 Simona Segre Reinach, “Italian Fashion: The Metamorphosis of a Cultural Industry,” in Lees-Maffei and Fallan, Made in Italy, 250. 26 Missoni Art Colour, exh. cat. (New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications Ltd., 2016.), np. 27 Lees-Maffei and Fallan, Made in Italy, 1. 28 Nicola White, Reconstructing Italian Fashion: America and the Development of the Italian Fashion Industry (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 18. 29 Lees-Maffei and Fallan, Made in Italy, 12–13. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 15. 33 Ottavio Missoni quoted in Emma Zanella, “They are museum pieces, but you can still wear them,” in Missoni Art Colour, exh. cat. (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2016), 34. 34 María Fernández, “ ‘Life-­like’: Historicizing Process and Responsiveness in Digital Art,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, ed. Amelia Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 564. 35 Anna Dezeuze, “The 1960s: A Decade Out-­of-Bounds,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, 42–3. 36 Paola Antonelli, ‘A l’Italienne . . .,’ in Il Modo Italiano: Italian Design and Avant-­garde in the 20th Century (Milan: Skira, 2006), 106. 37 Valerie Steele, Fashion, Italian Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 51. 38 Miuccia Prada quoted in Jessica Bumpus, “Prada’s New Label,” Vogue. Wednesday, September 29, 2010, http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/prada-­country-of-­origin-labels (accessed August 15, 2016). 39 Andy Pike, Origination: The Geographies of Brands and Branding (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 79.

Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art

35

40 Vittoria Caterina Caratozzolo, “Reorienting Fashion: Italy’s Wayfinding after the Second World War,” in Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945, ed. Sonnet Stanfill (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 46. 41 Lees-Maffei and Fallan, Made in Italy, 2. 42 Luciano Caramel, “Missoni, Art and Colour. Between visible and invisible,” in Missoni Art Colour, exh. cat. (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2016), 21. 43 Ibid. 44 Ricci, “Italian Fashion: a Matter of Craftsmanship,” 17. 45 Manacorda, Maurizio Cattelan, 61.

2

Learning from Artists: Methodological Notes on Postwar Italian Art History1 Denis Viva

When Germano Celant was curating The Knot in 1985, he was not just taking a stand against postmodern painting and its success.2 He had a broader aim: that of rejecting the whole historical paradigm of Transavanguardia and Anacronismo3—and all it entailed. Indeed, the revisionist consequences of these painting trends had already come to light on several occasions; not the least being at the Biennale of Venice in 1984, entitled Arte allo specchio (Art in the Mirror).4 On each of these retrospective occasions, which had the figurative painting of the 1980s as their predictable culmination, the historical hypothesis emerged that Italian art after World War II was characterized by its insistent recourse to art-­historical visual resources of the Western tradition, that is to the collective memory of its great artistic past. Quotation, homage, camouflage, parody, remake, and other metalinguistic strategies seem to have distinguished contemporary Italian art from international art, and to have reinforced the cliché about the inescapable influence of its past splendor: the Scuola di piazza del Popolo5 was often the first example given, when the touristic identity of Italy began to be highlighted in comparison to the more commodity-­related American Pop Art. This historical overview was usually continued by mentioning other Italian artists of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Giulio Paolini, one of the few artists who had preserved the art historical image from the iconoclasm of Arte Povera; and other artists such as Vettor Pisani, Salvo, or Luigi Ontani, whose peculiar and iconographic version of Conceptual and Performance Art characterized the Italian scene. The height of this predilection for the past in Italy was obviously the painting of the 1980s when Anacronismo, as exemplified by Carlo Maria Mariani, literally revived the Neoclassical style, or Transavanguardia reached its marked eclecticism, more heterogeneous and contaminated than other international painters, such as the German Neo-­expressionists.

38

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Certainly, these historiographical maneuvers aimed for a sort of retroactive effect; they tried, that is, to reveal something like a postmodern vocation of Italian art over the last few decades. But if we set aside the militant point of view of the critics of the time, and we start to consider this “quoting attitude” from a historical point of view, this attitude reveals a more radical potentiality, capable not only of modifying its own interpretation but also of affecting the very methodology of the history of contemporary art. Considered as objects of study, in fact, many of these artworks cease to be a symptom of postmodern nostalgia (or irony) and they begin to call into question some of the well-­established tools of art historical traditional methodology, such as its nineteenth-­century roots in connoisseurship; the comparison between different works of art, especially when formalist or purovisibilista; and many other aspects as well, I believe, which are beyond the scope of this essay.6 It is not possible to deal unequivocally with art history and its methodology, not even when considering the tradition of a single nation, and I think it is pointless to do so in this case.7 Contemporary artists do not think in these terms; nor do they have in mind a specific tradition to confront. The radical potentiality of their artworks as objects of study is often neither intentional nor methodical. In other words, their artworks pose problems both as new objects for art history (in terms of medium, theory, and so on) and because—and this is the topic I would like to address in this essay—they put some of the limits of this discipline to the test. So, I think that it would be worthwhile to change our perspective, and ask ourselves what we could learn from the artworks we are studying in terms of methodology. Consequently, I will try to retrace this postmodern line of Italian art from a methodological point of view, by dividing it into three different conventional periods: the 1960s, when art historical images reached an unprecedented circulation; the 1970s and the birth of an uncanny manipulation of art history by the artists; and the 1980s with the so-­called “return to painting” and its self-­evident art-­historical revival. Indeed, to define the problem, I should begin with one of the aspects in which both art historians and artists have mostly interfered with each other: the transmission of visual resources belonging to the Western art-­historical tradition. I am referring here to that interference which arose from a certain moment on—let us say from Pop Art to the present—in the common use of some techniques and work tools of image mediation (or remediation), of visual resources like printed and photographic reproduction.8

Methodological Notes on Postwar Italian Art History

39

Remediating masterpieces After more than a few editorial attempts, several series of books were published in Italy in the early 1960s on the history of art, reasonably-­priced popular works composed almost entirely of color reproductions. During the years that followed, many artists drew on the rich repertoire of images which these series offered, such as I classici dell’arte (The Classics of Art) published by Rizzoli (from 1966 on) or I maestri del colore (The Masters of Color) by Fabbri editore (from 1963 on), to conduct their own discourse on the status of the art historical image. Among the many artists, two of them could be considered as seminal in two different moments: Tano Festa, from the so-­called Scuola di piazza del Popolo, around the mid-1960s, and Giulio Paolini from Arte Povera, at the end of the 1960s, even though he was atypical for that movement. The series of Michelangeli—as Festa called them—mostly derived from the Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel and from the Aurora, a sculpture at the Medici Chapel in Florence. Begun in 1963, this series was realized by gluing the photographic reproductions of these masterpieces to the canvas, or by tracing their outlines with enamel, thanks to a projection or tracing paper. A statement made by Festa in 1967 has been quoted all too often, and has been interpreted as the manifestation of the difference between two consumer civilizations: “an American paints Coca-Cola as a value”; and “according to me, Michelangelo is the same thing, in the sense that we are in a country where we consume the Mona Lisa on chocolate candies rather than canned food.”9 However, in this interview Festa adds a relevant detail: “When I did these Michelangeli, I had never been to see the Sistine Chapel.”10 Before the advent of Pop Art a statement like this would have caused any self-­respecting art historian to turn pale; whereas nowadays it sounds perfectly legitimate. Festa makes it clear that his visual resource was not the original fresco, with which it is no longer comparable, but the many reproductions of it that circulated for different purposes (commercial, touristic, art historical). Indeed, the scholars who have studied this series correlated it with other kinds of mass-­culture reproductions like the first educational book series about art history in Italy11 or the initiatives for the celebrations of 1964, the fourth centenary of Michelangelo’s birth.12 Undoubtedly pertinent, these comparisons remind us that the works of Festa came out around the same time as the first Italian attempts to popularize art history on a vast scale, and therefore to its controversial entrance into the mass culture of the country. In any case, according to Festa, it is quite clear that

40

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Michelangelo no longer represented a model of proficiency or a paradigm to improve his own style as might have been the case in the past. What is at stake here, instead, is the way that the media (or the mass-­media) treat the master, the original. They subject masterpieces to their medial treatment in the culture industry: a kind of license to copy, to crop, to make bigger or smaller; even to the point of simulating some second-­rate effects like the over-­saturation of colors or contrasts (at the Biennale in Venice, Festa proposed two versions of this work: one in color and one in black and white).13 In Festa’s case this ambiguity between high and low, between graphic design and painting, is more shocking than in Roy Lichtenstein, where the formalist tradition of the avant-­gardes is still present. If we move from a formal reading to an iconographic one, this is even more evident: it’s one thing to choose the Aurora by Michelangelo based on the tradition of myth or allegory, and it is another to propose it as a metaphor of its celebrity, of Florence, or of the touristic Italian identity. And it is above all this last, in my opinion, the factor with far-­ reaching consequences. Festa—and we know this thanks to a letter—began to incorporate photographic enlargements of works of art shortly after his trips to London and Paris in 1963, from which he returned with postcards and souvenirs and with the idea of reproducing some of the masterpieces which he had seen in the museums there.14 According to him, being in a touristic situation was decisive. Indeed, Festa’s works imply a disturbing aspect of our experience of the artistic originals: from a certain epoch on it is practically impossible to defend oneself against contamination with the tourist experience. And this also affects the art historical study of visual resources, which will inevitably extend beyond the boundaries of the discipline to the history of marketing, to the myths of consumerism of the time and to the practices of the culture industry. Basically, the choice of a particular painting by Ingres, Van Eyck or Michelangelo is determined only in part by art historical reasons. Unlike the epoch of Raphael Mengs, for example, in which art history offered above all a historical narrative of reference for selecting one’s own visual resources, here the first contribution that one should consider is how art history has interacted with mass culture and how it could have set in motion myths over which it was no longer able to exert any influence: apart from the evolution of the disciplines, nowadays citing Michelangelo is inevitably—and will be for a long time to come—pop or kitsch. The second case I would like to discuss is that of Giulio Paolini, a cultured and refined artist, a creator of a meta-­language, that of art investigating itself, but

Methodological Notes on Postwar Italian Art History

41

through a historical awareness. Having said that, I think that his reputation as an “artist-­as-art-­historian” is due to some media aspects rather than theoretical ones. Even when his visual resources are popular—often taken directly from the aforementioned series of books—his use of photographic reproductions is equivalent to that of art historians: a front view, without any perspective distortion, evenly lit and with no shadows, preferably in black and white.15 The art historical journals, such as Paragone, or the highbrow book series like the “Saggi,” published by Einaudi, preferred black and white reproductions for a long time, mainly because of the expensive and unsatisfying print color technology.16 But Paolini’s acceptance of the protocol of art historical reproductions only apparently proves his supposed neutrality.Yet, I find this to be his main contribution to methodology: even the neutrality of art historical work tools and media has its historical importance. Nowadays, if one uses black and white, for example, it would certainly be considered more artistic, vintage, even nostalgic towards the old analog technologies. Paolini is showing that this neutrality, this transparency, tends to dissemble its own historicity in order to keep itself so. He himself, in fact, uses it in an atemporal, out of context way, and he resorts to mise en abîme effects.17 Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto (Youth Looking at Lorenzo Lotto a portrait by Lorenzo Lotto printed on a photosensitive canvas in black and white, the same size as the original) situates the observer in the same place as the painter, as perspective has done for centuries. Photography has inserted itself in this process without leaving a trace: the moment of the shot, or the date, is irrelevant for the artists’ artifice, and for art historians as well. Only recently have art historians begun to study the techniques of reproduction used by the art historians themselves, and in the captions now even the author of the reproduction is mentioned for copyright reasons. The act of remediation tends to be completely dissembled, especially in the relationship between painting and photography, giving the illusion of a transparency of the medium, which remediates the other. Many art historians have attacked this illusory recourse to photographs in place of the originals,18 but it is also true that Horst Bredekamp has explained how fundamental the use of slides has been in constructing a modern methodology for this discipline by allowing us to annul the spatial and temporal distance between two images.19 In the case of photographic reproductions, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, not only does the photograph annul the hic et nunc (the here and now) of the original, but it removes even its own. And Paolini makes use of this atemporality of the medium to create an effect which is

42

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 2.1  Giulio Paolini, Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto (Youth Looking at Lorenzo Lotto), 1967. Photo emulsion on canvas, 30 x 24 cm. FER Collection. © Giulio Paolini. Courtesy Fondazione Anna e Giulio Paolini, Turin.

anything but historicist or historical: a suspension, a circularity, an endless projection back and forth that flows through history almost like the metalanguage of Neoclassicism, rather than the meticulous periodization of an art historian. However, this metalinguistic kinship can reveal itself to be reciprocal: the historians may unexpectedly find they have something in common with Paolini.

Methodological Notes on Postwar Italian Art History

43

Arguably, no critic or historian has noticed two aspects of the work: if one compares the Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto to the reproduction from which it comes, one discovers how degraded its tones have become.20 The presumption of neutrality had kept anyone from a closer examination of Paolini’s second-­rate effects, or even his popular sources. It is almost like a transference: not only do we so often base our judgments on copies instead of the originals, but we pay little attention to the quality or the technical processes of these reproductions. What’s more, in the most obvious identification, or in the clearest caption, there may be a hidden tendentiousness that we are not always inclined to recognize. Now, perhaps the art historians should just accept the historicity and the limits of their working tools, rather than debating over the correctness of using them. And they should study them within a history of methodology.

Uncanny art history In the introduction, I referred to a specific generation of Italian conceptual and performance artists who had introduced an uncanny vision of art history during the 1970s. Obviously, it would be impossible to define an unequivocal tradition of art history for Italy and, consequently, improbable to think that these artists all had some common and clear art historical tradition to challenge at that time. Nevertheless, at least one common characteristic of Italian historiography seems to me sufficiently supported by the facts: in the Italian art history of the last three or four decades, the research of a psychoanalytic bent, or which concerns Gender or Queer Studies, has never had much luck. This dearth obviously does not constitute a value judgment, nor do I wish here to take upon myself the arduous task of explaining its absence in academic terms from the Italian history of the discipline. What interests me instead is how these Italian artists had introduced these theories into their poetics precisely around the time of the birth of these methodologies elsewhere, as if they were somehow compensating for the future scarcity of these ideas in their national art historical discipline. The works by Vettor Pisani, Salvo, or Luigi Ontani, to mention just a few among the best-­known cases, would be difficult to fit into the categories of Conceptual Art or of Performance Art. And yet their hybridization of media (text, body, image, etc.) seems to stem from the critical re-­visitation, deviant, uncanny even, of an art historical fact. A good example of all that could be found in the work of Luigi Ontani: around 1974 the photographs of his tableaux vivants,

44

Postwar Italian Art History Today

for which he himself posed, circulated as an original combination between a psychoanalytical vision of Mannerism (a view of German origin well known in Italy) and an ephebic reinterpretation of some gay icons in art history, such as Saint Sebastian, in this case in a version taken from Guido Reni.21 However, even more blatant cases than this exist involving the artistic historiography of a psychoanalytic approach. Among the first and most exemplary would certainly be that of the debut exhibit of Vettor Pisani, in 1970, at the La Salita Gallery in Rome: Maschile, femminile e androgina (Male, Female, and Androgynous). Incest and Cannibalism in Marcel Duchamp. It was a complex installation which, without citing or explicitly reproducing any of his works, represented a comment, a real critical act, not textual but visual, regarding Duchamp. The idea itself was very simple, an artist commented on the work of another by means of his own work; but such an idea could not avoid taking into consideration some bibliographic framework. In Pisani’s case, behind the exhibition of a chocolate bust of Venus de Milo, or behind some precise quotations of the Duchampian calembour, there was an exegetic text, rich in learned argumentation, written by Arturo Schwarz, a scholar of Duchamp’s work.22 Schwarz’s main thesis was that some works, such as the Grande Verre, were the incomplete allegory of an incestuous desire harbored by the artist towards his sister Suzanne, and sublimated then through art and alchemy. There is nothing new in resorting to erudite texts to devise an exhibit, not even if these texts regard another artist. Still, in the case of Pisani, the singularity consists in the fact that the artist seems to share the same purpose and the identical argument as the scholar, though expressed by other means and using other methods. But which discursive practice was Pisani trying to introduce in the artistic one? That of art criticism, or that of art history? Obviously, it is impossible to give an answer to this question which isn’t of a relative, historical, or contextual nature. One can say that both positions were represented among the most attentive commentators of Pisani’s work. For Achille Bonito Oliva, there was no doubt that the retrieval of the past, in a psychoanalytic key, could constitute a paradigm of militant criticism. This paradigm was first proposed in Bonito Oliva’s book L’ideologia del traditore (The Ideology of the Traitor), a book that, although inspired by Arnold Hauser’s vision of Mannerism, alluded to contemporary art.23 Instead, for Maurizio Calvesi, Pisani was the amplification of an essentialist iconographic reasoning that, as an art historian as well as a critic, he would apply to Duchamp during those years and later, not without heated controversy in academic circles, even to Caravaggio.24

Methodological Notes on Postwar Italian Art History

45

I cannot yet establish with precision what correlation there may be between these two facts, but it doesn’t seem entirely accidental to me that, from a historical point of view, the schism between art criticism and art history in Italy came about during precisely those years, when the artists seemed to draw the most on psychoanalytic art historiography for their works. Italy, up until that time, had had a good tradition of art historians, such as Lionello Venturi or Giulio Carlo Argan, who had also proven themselves in militant criticism, combining their own historical vision with the interpretation of art of their contemporaries.25 Undoubtedly the jobs of critics and historians had been complementary, but the methodological approaches could also have proceeded side by side. In the 1970s, instead, and for many other more influential reasons as well, such as the rise of the figure of the curator, the art critic and the art historian gradually became two distinct professions—Calvesi was probably one of the last to cover both roles for a time. Between the two, the profession of the critic was certainly the one more inclined to assume the risk of contaminating her/his own vision of history with that of the artists. On the other hand, no historian could subscribe to a similar operation without taking upon herself/himself important methodological responsibilities at the same time. This is perhaps only one of the many and complex reasons why historical research of a psychoanalytic or gender matrix in Italy remained a sphere of interest of the art critic for such a long time, with all the methodological consequences which that entailed. At any rate, the fact that its academic development and its evolution within art history was in some sense lacking was certainly not the artists’ fault. But, I would like to learn more about how Italian art history has rejected the attempt at metalanguage and self-­analysis of these artists in the realm of art criticism. Yet this rejection should not induce today’s art historians to go to the opposite extreme: especially nowadays that Gender Studies and Queer Studies, as well as other methodologies, have come such a long way since the 1970s. In other words, I wonder whether it is possible for art historians to study artists such as Ontani and Pisani from a queer point of view, or that of the psychoanalysis of art, without an invalidating form of complicity. To put it in another way: those methodological tools which the artists applied in a creative way towards the past, could art historians orient those same tools today towards their work without any consequences? Without running the risk of merely replicating the discourse of these artists? Could art historians write a history of an artist who is in turn reconsidering art history? Which is to say: how can they “untie” this embedded play of metalanguages? Shall they start from the

46

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 2.2  Salvo (Salvatore Mangione), San Martino e il povero (Saint Martin and the Beggar), 1973. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 285 x 190 cm. Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT—on a gratuitous loan to Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino e il Castello di Rivoli—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin and Rivoli. Photo: Studio Gonella, 2006.

Methodological Notes on Postwar Italian Art History

47

things they have in common with the artists’ approach toward the past rather than establishing boundaries beforehand? The best example that occurs to me to formulate this problem clearly is that of an artist who signed his name only as Salvo. He began in 1969 with a series of substitutions of his face inside of photomontages with famous people, or of his name in long lists of illustrious men. In 1973, Salvo extended this procedure to painting, realizing pictorial copies of some famous paintings of the past, with an intentionally clumsy and infantile style, into which he inserted his likeness in place of saints and heroes. This form of artistic narcissism, so obsessive as to appear almost a parody, seemed founded on very serious studies such as those conducted by Ernst Kris on the literary genre of the biography of visual artists, based on some stereotypes such as ‘the discovery of talent’ or on the comparison with other genres such as that of hagiography.26 Insisting on the same topoi, Salvo was thus the maker of a strategy as amusing as it was contradictory: on the one hand, he manifested a critical detachment towards the mythology which surrounds the figure of the artist; on the other hand, he became in turn recognized as an artist through this disenchanted operation. One of the most evident risks, if one were to study his case, would be that of concentrating only on theories of narcissism, or on the research of literary genres, which are at the same time the source of inspiration and the method with which one studies it (for example, the essays on the psychoanalysis of art), losing sight, however, of what is happening in the meantime. An artist is recognized as an artist in the moment in which he ironically self-­proclaims himself an artist (or a hero), demystifying the figure of the artist. My impression, just to give a concrete example, is that whatever method an art historian wishes to adopt for this sly case of exorcism, she/he must nevertheless consider the help of Institutional Critique. And she/he should start from a mythology of the artist quite different from that which Salvo parodied: in Art there is no longer a particular method to make an artist of someone, least of all that of the psychoanalysis of art in itself.

False revivals The two series of problems which I have discussed so far are certainly of a very different nature: the first regards a question of remediation, of neutrality, and of the popularity of a discipline; the second regards the positioning of this discipline

48

Postwar Italian Art History Today

within the various fields of artistic knowledge, and the conflict or the indecision that is created when another practice, that of the artists, for example, appropriates some of its tools. One would be tempted, however, to deal with these two problems together by means of media studies: in the first case, it is a problem of the treatment of the images, in the second, of interpretive interference, yet the fact remains that these practices were made possible thanks to the intermediality reached by art after 1960, and in particular thanks to the use of photography. Still, this synthesis of a medial nature is effective only in part. When, in the 1980s, in fact, painting once again became the principal medium, one more familiar to art history, the connection between the artists and their visual resources had already been irreparably altered. Two antithetical cases of Italian painters from the 1980s are quite emblematic in this respect: Carlo Maria Mariani, who was later included in Anacronismo, and Sandro Chia, a successful exponent of Transavanguardia in America. Around 1977, Mariani began to paint in a style deliberately similar to a certain Neoclassicism, which Robert Rosenblum might have defined as “Neoclassic Archaeologic.”27 This “Pierre Menard” of painting often availed himself of some accurate art historical documents in order to make paintings which were by now missing or unfinished live again by his hand, or to execute nearly literal copies of paintings from the eighteenth century, to the point of causing that same Winckelmannian distinction between copy and imitation to vacillate.28 In his case, we find ourselves confronted by a problem: it is the artist himself who provides documents, reconstructions, philological references; it is painting which now takes the remediation upon itself. Better still—and this is perhaps the essential point—the plain attempt to conduct this remediation again in the field of pictorial instruments is itself legitimizing in an epoch when the visual sources are to be found everywhere, thanks to every sort of technology. Thus, the stylistic analysis of the art historian is expected to comprehend why here no style has been invented, where instead the painter has opted for one already available, that of Neoclassicism, which she/he evidently considered sufficiently impersonal and cold to be able to counter photographic remediation—would it merely be a coincidence that, before this phase, Mariani had been a Hyperrealist painter? The case of Sandro Chia, a painter of the Transavanguardia, is emblematic in another sense, and his exemplary nature lies in the fact that it wouldn’t make much sense to dwell on a single example of his work. The range of quotations or parodies from art history is vast, and very diverse—in addition to being nonchalant. In his case, the visual resources are everywhere, and they are often not that easy to identify and to decode; as some careful studies have shown and

Methodological Notes on Postwar Italian Art History

49

as I have had cause to discover.29 They go from popular to erudite, from the Venetian Renaissance to sixteenth-­century Spain, from the avant-­gardes to some painters of the 1930s such as Ottone Rosai. As to just how disarming or bewildering this laborious research can be at times, the answer can be found in an interview with Chia in 1983. To the naïve question “Do you use live models sometimes?” the artist answered: “Yes, of course, if necessary. Otherwise I open an art book and look for an ally, a friend, an accomplice for a day; and so I begin.”30 Chia’s painting is surrealist above all for the randomness by which it arrives at its visual resources, and because it often subjects the images to associative processes at times simple, combinatory, uncanny, scurrilous, etc. And this brings us back to an age-­old question in art history about the intention of the artist and her/his artworks, which we can clearly extend to the problem of the choice of visual resources as well. In the epoch that contemporary art historians are all dealing with, the intentionality of a visual resource is becoming a new issue in many respects, and the rise of mass culture is just one of the aspects one must take into account. What is more, the activity of the art historians themselves complicates the question even further, because over the past few decades they have contributed a great deal to increasing the circulation of reproductions and of the artworks themselves, and have emitted a conspicuous quantity of contrasting interpretations of these works. For an art historian, the intentionality of an artist becomes more and more difficult to make hypotheses about precisely because of the development and proliferation of art history. In the second half of the twentieth century, it is not that hard to find an exhibition, a catalog, an essay, some events or cultural texts which could justify our hypothesis concerning the intention of an artist: she/he probably saw that exhibition, she/he read that essay. And all of this could have led to her/his choice of a particular visual resource. The history of art has also contributed enormously to the potential simultaneous presence and accessibility of all the epochs and artworks of the past in the culture of the present, to the point of inexorably complicating its own work tomorrow.

Notes 1 Translated from Italian by Ann Steinbrun. 2 Celant had written his most polemical text against the so-­called “return to painting” of Transavanguardia the year before: Germano Celant, “1968 un’arte povera un’arte

50

Postwar Italian Art History Today

critica un’arte iconoclasta 1981,” in Coerenza in coerenza dall’arte povera al 1984, curated by Germano Celant (Turin: Mole Antonelliana, 1984). Exh. cat. (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1984), 11–17. 3 Less well known than Transavanguardia, Anacronismo was one of the Italian movements which in the 1980s promoted an allegorical, pre-­impressionist and figurative kind of painting mainly inspired by the “Return to Craft” of Giorgio De Chirico or, sometimes, by a neo-­pompier style. See Anacronismo, Ipermanierismo, curated by Maurizio Calvesi and Italo Tomassoni (Monte Frumentario: Anagni, 1984). Exh. cat. (Venice: Marsilio, 1984). 4 Arte allo specchio. XLI Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Maurizio Calvesi (Venice, 1984). Exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 1984). 5 An artistic movement from Rome which had introduced a mass-­media and pop iconography in Italy around 1962–3, including painters such as Mario Schifano and Tano Festa, and sculptors such as Mario Ceroli. 6 Purovisibilismo is a specific and national tradition of Formalism, which in Italy was inspired by nineteenth century German art historians, such as Konrad Fiedler, and which was at the beginning commented on by the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce. 7 An overview on the Italian tradition of studies in art history: Laura Iamurri, “Art History in Italy: Connoisseurship, Academic Scholarship and the Protection of Cultural Heritage,” in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, eds. Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Matthew Rampley, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 393–406. 8 For the notion of remediation: Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999). 9 Tano Festa, “De Marchis e Festa,” interview by Giorgio De Marchis, Flash Art, June 1967, np. 10 Ibid. 11 Maurizio Calvesi, “Cronache e coordinate di un’avventura,” in Roma anni ’60: al di là della pittura, curated by Maurizio Calvesi (Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1990–1). Exh. cat. ed. Rossella Siligato (Rome: Carte segrete, 1990), 19. 12 Elisa Francesconi, “Tano Festa e Michelangelo: un episodio di fortuna visiva a Roma negli anni Sessanta,” Studi di Memofonte 5, No. 9 (2012): 91–120. Available online: http://www.memofonte.it/contenuti-­rivista-n.9/e.-francesconi-­tano-festa-­emichelangelo-­un-episodio-­di-fortuna-­visiva-a-­roma-negli-­anni-sessanta.html (accessed on May 31, 2016). 13 XXXII Biennale Internazionale d’arte di Venezia (Venezia, 1964). Exh. cat. (Venice, 1964), 144, nn. 1–2, fig. 92. 14 The idea of making an obelisk in wood as an artwork first came to Tano Festa when he visited Trafalgar Square in London. See Tano Festa, letter to Plinio De Martiis,

Methodological Notes on Postwar Italian Art History

51

London, December 12, 1963, in Francesconi, “Tano Festa e Michelangelo,” 113. While one of his first canvases quoting a masterpiece (the Grande Odalisque of Ingres) came after a visit to the Louvre: Festa, De Marchis, “De Marchis e Festa,” np. 15 On many of his visual resources from these books: Flavio Fergonzi, “ ‘Trasparenza etimologica.’ Per una rilettura di Una lettera sul tempo (1968),” in Giulio Paolini. Expositio (Milan: Museo Poldi Pezzoli, 2016). Exh. cat. (Balsamo: Silvana editoriale, 2016), 22–37. 16 However, the Director of Paragone, the prominent art historian Roberto Longhi, was in favor of the color prints; the journal started to publish just one or two color plates per issue (these reproductions were published along with the black and white version). For some notes on the controversial question of color reproductions in Italy, see Ettore Spalletti, “La documentazione figurativa dell’opera d’arte, la critica e l’editoria nell’epoca moderna (1750–1930),” in Storia dell’arte italiana, eds. Giulio Bollati and Paolo Fossati; Part I, ed. Giovanni Previtali, II (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1979), 479–82. 17 On the mise en abîme in Giulio Paolini: Denis Viva, “History en abîme. Literature, Photography, and the Past,” in Giulio Paolini. Il passato al presente (Mantua: Corraini Edizioni, 2016), 45–79. 18 See i.e., the translation of Erwin Panofsky, “Original and Facsimile Reproduction,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 57–8 (2010): 331–7. 19 Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” in The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices, ed. Michael F. Zimmermann (London and New Haven, CT: Clark Art Institute, 2003), 147–59. 20 Paolini’s photo has the same defects of the cliché used in: Mostra di Lorenzo Lotto, curated by Pietro Zampetti (Venezia: Palazzo Ducale, 1953). Exh. cat. (Venice: Casa Editrice Arte Veneta, 1953), 15, fig. 7; Luigi Coletti, Lotto (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1953), fig. 90. The only comment I found about the degraded effect of Paolini’s works is in Fergonzi, “Trasparenza etimologica.” Per una rilettura di Una lettera sul tempo (1968), 30. 21 Anna Mecugni, “A ‘Desperate Vitality.’ Tableaux Vivants in the Work of Pasolini and Ontani (1963–1974),” Palinsesti 1, No. 2 (2011): 94–116. 22 Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1969). 23 Achille Bonito Oliva, L’ideologia del traditore (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976). 24 Maurizio Calvesi, Duchamp invisibile (Rome: Officina, 1975). His study was very controversial: Id., La realtà del Caravaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 1990). 25 In the 1950s, Lionello Venturi strongly supported a group of abstract painters called the Gruppo degli Otto, which represented a form of continuity with the historical development of painting according to him. For Giulio Carlo Argan as art critic, see the essays Claudio Zambianchi, “Note su Giulio Carlo Argan e l’Informale,” in Giulio

52

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Carlo Argan. Intellettuale e storico dell’arte, ed. Claudio Gamba (Milan: Electa, 2012), 352–6; Simonetta Lux, “Giulio Carlo Argan: la militanza nel contemporaneo,” in Gamba, Giulio Carlo Argan, 367–86; Carla Subrizi, “Giulio Carlo Argan negli anni sessanta. Prospettive critiche, chiusure della storia,” in Gamba, Giulio Carlo Argan, 387–95. 26 Ernst Kris, Ricerche psicanalitiche sull’arte (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 58–78. 27 Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 24–5. 28 In 1977, he had a solo exhibition based on some letters of Angelica Kaufmann: Carlo Maria Mariani, Io non sono un pittore, io non sono l’artista, io sono l’opus (Rome: Galleria Sperone, 1977). 29 Fabio Belloni, “La mano decapitata.” Transavanguardia tra disegno e citazione (Milan: Electa, 2008). Denis Viva, “Post-­avantgarde in Italy 1977–1982: the Image of Painting at the Beginning of Postmodernism” (PhD diss., Udine: Universita degli Studi di Udine, 2008). 30 Sandro Chia, “Sandro Chia,” interview by Giancarlo Politi, Flash Art, June 1984, 17.

3

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra: Crossing the Boundaries between Theory and Practice Silvia Bottinelli

Having both studied as architects, Italian artists Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra have shown a particular sensitivity toward the matter of “abitare” since their early careers. The word “abitare,” that is “to dwell,” has frequently been used by Italian postwar critics to indicate the relationship between the residents and their environment—intended as the home and by extension the urban, the rural, and the natural space. Because of Pettena and La Pietra’s common interest toward the concept of “abitare,” I choose to discuss their practice in the context of the same chapter. This text analyzes a selection of artworks by Pettena and, subsequently, La Pietra in comparison to ideas proposed by contemporaneous thinkers. Such thinkers are not necessarily Italian, thus demonstrating that there was a circulation of ideas that transcended national boundaries during the 1960s and 1970s. By devoting a distinct section to each artist, I give the reader exposure to each one’s individual train of thought. However, the chapter consistently points to commonalities in the artists’ production, and the conclusions thoroughly discuss the similarities of their work. Even though they have neither collaborated on specific projects nor worked as a duo, both Pettena and La Pietra are associated by their connection with radical architecture. This label applies to a movement that, while not being exclusively Italian, had particular force in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. Radical architects questioned the very purpose and aesthetic of Modernist architecture. Pettena and La Pietra’s way of doing architecture was not functional nor rational, like postwar design cultures dictated. Their approach to art making was not representational nor abstract, meaning that it could not be positioned within the binary terms of much Italian modern art. Rather, Pettena and La Pietra’s work strived to intersect the realm of life itself, mainly by means of creating temporary spaces activated by common objects and the body’s movement.

54

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Pettena and La Pietra both conveyed similar ideas through works that employed the language of performance art, site-­specific art, and installation art. Their use of such neo-­avant-gardist mediums indexes the interest in stepping beyond the traditionally accepted boundaries of both architecture and art, implicitly questioning the crystallized power structures and economic mechanisms that funneled those disciplines. Pettena and La Pietra also contributed to the conceptual definition of radical architecture through their critical texts, editorial endeavors, and didactic projects that unveiled societal power dynamics and their embodiment in designed space. During the 1960s and 1970s, young generations questioned the fixed structure of social roles, thus pushing for a more fluid understanding of previously separated disciplines and positions. The artist could become also a theorist, the theorist an activist; the farmer taught the architect, the architect could be a writer, and so on. It must be noted that a similar blending of theory and praxis characterized the life of contemporaneous militant thinkers, not only artists. One notable case is Antonio Negri, who edited activist journals and participated in Marxist extra-­parliamentary groups while being a philosophy professor at the University of Padua.1 It is in this atmosphere of contestation that Pettena and La Pietra practiced, their work expressing concerns shared by philosophers. Even if my point does not concern Italian art specifically, it can be particularly relevant to Italian contemporary art history, which in some cases mechanically applies theoretical concepts to Italian artworks without thoroughly contextualizing their genesis; and, in other cases, focuses on attentive historiography instead of delving into theoretical interpretations. I argue that, when possible, looking at Italian contemporary art by constructing a philologically sound theoretical framework can facilitate in-­depth analysis and highlight the value of Italian contributions to international art discourses. Some of Pettena and La Pietra’s works from the 1960s and 1970s function as exemplary case studies that exemplify this chapter’s main goal: that of showing how artists may convey meanings that are as complex and groundbreaking as those articulated by contemporaneous critical theorists. Hence, scholars should look at their work not merely as a translation of certain theories, but as incarnations of theoretical points made by the artists themselves, in dialogue with other voices blended in complex milieus. At the temporary event Campo Urbano in Como—organized by critic and art historian Luciano Caramel, photographer Ugo Mulas, and artist-­designer Bruno Munari in 19692—we first encounter Pettena and La Pietra side by side. For this

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra

55

event, La Pietra created a prismatic structure that enveloped the main street of the city. The structure distracted pedestrians away from the consumer goods on display in the store windows bordering the road.3 The passage looked like an ephemeral shelter—a non-­functional, elongated tent of sorts in the middle of the built environment. Pettena, who visited La Pietra in Milan the day before Campo Urbano, was not officially invited to exhibit but followed his peer to Como. He eventually improvised a piece in reaction to what he witnessed. In the diaristic prose that characterizes his 1973 critical statement titled L’Anarchitetto, Pettena explains: Yet campo urbano (sic) [. . .] triggered my renewed unhoped-­for condition of rage come on how could we have a whole town I say and be in the position of doing whatever we wanted and NO just put little statues in the main square of the village [. . .]. Oh there was the city behind it’s true we had the city and nothing we chose the piazza, the cleanest, most uplifting place that curbs your shyness and gives prestige to your poop.4

Pettena was irritated by what he considered to be opportunism on the part of most invited artists, despite the alternative intentions of Campo Urbano. The choice of the main square as a site of display appeared to him to be aligned with the socio-­political status quo. Orderly and official, the piazza is traditionally the center of local power. In Como, this site hosts the cathedral (which symbolizes the strength of the Catholic Church) as well as the Broletto (historically associated with civil governance). Steps away from the piazza, Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio (1932–6) portrays fascist values in a balance between history and modernity.5 In 1969, fascism was just a memory, which Terragni’s building nevertheless continued to trigger.6 The architecture of the Casa del Fascio was not directly confronted by the artists of Campo Urbano. Romy Golan argues that this choice was a way to avoid a flashback to the fascist period, when crowds would occupy the space around the building during official events.7 By avoiding the Casa del Fascio, in spite of its vicinity to the city center, Campo Urbano implicitly acknowledged its painful association with a dark moment of Italian history. The Casa del Fascio, designed by Giuseppe Terragni in 1932–6, is an iconic building, whose presence is strong at the symbolical level. In fact, the building reinterprets the medieval town hall in a rationalist style,8 thus embodying the flirtation with tradition and modernity that was characteristic of fascist propaganda. Clearly, the organizers and artists of Campo Urbano perceived the Piazza del Duomo as a more harmless space,

56

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 3.1  Gianni Pettena, Laundry, 1969. Como, Campo Urbano. Courtesy Archivio Gianni Pettena. Photo: Ugo Mulas.

while Pettena found it particularly problematic in its incarnation of bourgeois values. To counter the stiffness of the city center, he decided to hang linens and underwear from clotheslines that he positioned across the square. This impromptu piece was titled Laundry. Hanging laundry is usually seen as informal and unofficial. Dirty (or wet) laundry pertains to the private sphere, as common sayings and social habits underline. The Italian adage “Lavare i panni sporchi in casa propria,” meaning, “to wash one’s own dirty clothes in one’s home,” refers to the appropriateness of solving one’s problems away from public awareness. Such sense of privacy should be as much a form of common sense as cleaning one’s dirty linens away from the public eye. Pettena was being deliberately inappropriate when he decided to hang laundry in the Piazza del Duomo in Como. This is how he described his intervention in an interview with me: It was extemporaneous. I was in Milan with La Pietra the day before Campo Urbano and I joined him in Como. I rang the bells of the apartments in the back streets of the centro storico and robbed the washing machines. I bought what was missing (bras, underwear) at the Upim, a department store nearby. I ruined the

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra

57

monumental flair that the other artists were looking for. I wanted to disrupt the “tuxedo effect”, in order to create a short circuit.9

The everyday collides with the representative values of the centro storico in a simple gesture of détournement that unveils hierarchical structures often taken for granted. It must be underlined that Pettena relies on buying some laundry items at the department store. This aspect of the artist’s process unintentionally indicates that even disruptive actions cannot exist outside of the consumerist system. Through his purchase, Pettena highlights how power dynamics are embedded in the urban geography and become so familiar that they are ultimately ignored by the wider public (himself included, in some cases). In a conversation with his American contemporary Robert Smithson, published in Domus in 1972, Pettena develops his critique to the architecture of the centro storico. “Every town, downtown, has nice, clean, rich buildings which are an expression of power and make you feel secure. But in the meantime you have to remember that this is generally a visualization of power.”10 Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony offers a useful theoretical frame for Pettena’s point. In Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, he argues that the built environment physically reflects the values of the dominant classes. Their view is seamlessly integrated into the city and thus in the everyday habits of the whole population, to such an extent that they become perceived as natural and “common sense.”11 For Pettena, the artist’s role is to subvert the pervasiveness of hegemonic power by revealing how hegemony is a cultural construct, not a natural given. Pettena’s work can be viewed through a political framework. In 1969, the artist was a member of the PSIUP (Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity), one of the leftist groups that originated from the 1968 student movement. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were a point of reference for late-1960s protesters.12 Gramsci’s legacy had gone through systematic reconsideration after Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti’s death in 1964. According to Stephen Gundle, Togliatti had subtly manipulated Gramsci’s ideas in order to align them with his own political strategy, despite the fact that Gramsci had been in conflict with the Communist Party and Togliatti himself since the mid-1920s. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, when Pettena started his practice, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were being re-­evaluated thanks to philological and critical studies,13 which contributed to the formation of alternative leftist positions outside of the main parliamentary groups.

58

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Herbert Marcuse’s thought was also highly influential in those contexts.14 Pettena was particularly fascinated with Marcuse’s idea that art enables forms of radical thinking. On the one hand, art inevitably depends on pre-­existing ideologies. On the other hand, it has the power to form pockets of criticality that can be the basis for revolutionary political actions. Pettena argues that, “art is the only way to speak out of metaphors, it is a space of permitted freedom where you do not need to lay out a strategy of self-­protection. Architecture, instead, depends on city codes and huge investments of capital that the architect needs to obey. To invent new spaces, you always depend on those cages. This is one of the main reasons why I did architecture through the tools of art.”15 Pettena, who majored in architecture at the University of Florence in 1968, made it a mission to completely revisit the role of architecture in society. This resulted in Pettena’s aforementioned book L’Anarchitetto, which was published in 1973.16 In this text, he describes the process behind his projects, intended as art pieces more than functional buildings. Pettena leaned towards conceptual and artistic modes of operation that would alter physical space and propose theoretical frames. His famous sentence “architects draw and artists build” is a provocative declaration that denounces contemporary planners’ bureaucratic attitude toward the city. To Pettena, architects remain at the abstract level of architectural drawing without understanding the fabric of the city, its communities, and society. Conversely, art offers the tools to intervene in physical space without limitations and, crucially, in a hands-­on and intuitive way. Pettena also argues that architects remain tied to sets of rules that are dictated by professional expectations and social structures. In L’ Anarchitetto, he claims that: Now architecture is a form of wealth, which is jealously guarded by the architects who, as good bourgeois, give (they can’t avoid giving) their small bourgeois interpretation of the small bourgeois categories encompassed by the small bourgeois system. ARCHITECTURE IN ORDER TO OFFICIALLY BE ARCHITECTURE IN ORDER TO BE PERMITTED HAS TO CORRESPOND TO CATEGORIES IT HAS TO FOLLOW RULES AND THAT’S IT.17

In contrast with such a pedantic understanding of architecture, Pettena nostalgically evokes pre-­industrial times, in which anybody could build their own house, based on experiential knowledge.18 Contemporaneously, French sociologist Henri Lefebvre constructed an analysis grounded in concepts that are very similar to the points expressed by Pettena, even

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra

59

though the two were not aware of each other’s work at the time. In The Right to the City (1968) and The Production of Space (1974), Lefebvre proposed a separation between the appropriation of space, achieved by living in a particular environment, and domination implemented by those who design the space. Lefebvre studied the pavillon, which is the single-­family house, looking at how that space becomes organized based on gestures and trajectories.19 Such movements lead the inhabitants to consider the site as a reflection of themselves. Lefebvre then projects this schema to the study of the city. However, he acknowledges that the process of appropriation is more complex here due to the fact that the city is not a ground zero. Appropriation needs to find forms of negotiation with ideological structures, such as the historical dimension of the urban layout.20 The separation between appropriation and domination is evident in Pettena’s work as well. By hanging laundry in the main square of Como, he makes the everyday practices of its residents collide with the ideological symbolism of the historic center. To borrow Lefebvre’s terms, Pettena champions the value of appropriation, in contrast with the supposed authority of domination. The idea of performance, key to the appropriation and production of space according to Lefebvre,21 is also crucial to Pettena. In this context, the term performance defines the practice of intimately owning an environment through the repetition of everyday gestures. The concept of performance is embodied by Pettena’s 1971 piece, Wearable Chairs in Minneapolis. The American location of this piece, among others, demonstrates that Pettena was not exclusively concerned with the Italian context. Rather, he was interested in a range of configurations of the public space in diverse cultural contexts. While Pettena often takes into account the specificity of the sites where he intervenes, his overall intention is to prompt social inclusiveness and a sense of personal belonging. The artist’s goal is to counter the ­hierarchical power structures, which are often embedded in the built environment, regardless of national boundaries. An artist in residence at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Pettena involved his students in assignments that were conceived as happenings in which the artist himself participated. In Wearable Chairs, ten students traveled around Minneapolis on foot and by bus, carrying foldable chairs on their backs. At times, they opened the chairs and sat. By stopping in public places—like storefronts, walkways, and stairs of public buildings—the performers reconfigured the chairs’ use in intuitive ways. We can see the parallelism between Wearable Chairs and Lefebvre’s thought. Pettena and his students appropriate the public space by using it to perform actions that are typical of the private habitat. Pettena defines the

60

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 3.2  Gianni Pettena, Wearable Chairs, 1971. Minneapolis. Courtesy Archivio Gianni Pettana. Photo: Gianni Pettena.

work as a promenade, a “derive” in the Situationist sense,22 a way to connect to the structure of the city beyond predictable routes. Furthermore, Pettena chose to give particular centrality to the chair: an iconic object for industrial designers that, as such, was deconstructed based on the countercultural stance of Radical Architecture. As maintained by Witold

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra

61

Rybczynski, chairs and armchairs are peculiar to Western cultures and became prominent starting in eighteenth-­century Europe with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Associated with comfort and status, chairs embodied ideas of privacy and pleasure,23 which were privileges awarded to an elite. In the mid-­twentieth century, modernist designers invested much effort in designing industrially-­ manufactured chairs, with the intention of democratizing access to comfort and efficiency. However, their innovative solutions were regarded as the products of the designer’s genius, thus becoming sought after and expensive rather than accessible to all. An indication of the piece of furniture’s symbolic status is Ettore Sottsass Jr.’s caustic text “La Sedia.” This essay sarcastically discusses the many cultures and situations that exist without the need for chairs,24 as a way to question the relevance of mid-­twentieth century design. Along the lines of Sottsass’s work, Pettena’s Wearable Chairs reinvents the role of the chair by proposing a very simple do-­it-yourself aesthetic, which denies the role of the designer in constructing functional objects. More poignantly, the chairs used for Pettena’s piece are not meant for the private space—the commodified home of the postwar years. The chair’s functionality and identity is reconfigured. This object becomes explicitly attached to the body. It is the user who gives it life through his/her action. As Pettena highlights, he and La Pietra shared an interest in the production of space through action.25 Enrico Crispolti links La Pietra’s concern specifically with Lefebvre’s theories, arguing that the artist’s work can be viewed as being in dialogue with contemporaneous sociological research.26 La Pietra described himself as a “cultural operator” and not simply an “artist,” a term that he associated with Romantic expectations of exclusive creativity and ingenuity. For La Pietra, creativity is inherently part of every human being, despite its repression by excessively rigid social rules. Martina Tanga explains the genealogy of the “cultural operator,” whose role was formalized by Crispolti in the 1977 book Arti Visive e Partecipazione Sociale.27 “[Crispolti] outlined how using the term Cultural Operator extended the sphere of ‘work’ to embrace culture more generally, including areas such as education and public life. This move mirrored the politicization of everyday life that was occurring at this time.”28

In the 1960s and 1970s, La Pietra mirrored the role of the cultural operator by avoiding traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture. He presented his observations through performance, installation, film, and photography. He also

62

Postwar Italian Art History Today

organized exhibitions, festivals, conferences, and editorial work for periodicals like IN, INPIÚ, Fascicolo, and Brera Flash. La Pietra’s concern with sociology and anthropological field work is evident in his art practice, which comments on contemporaneous power dynamics through its focus on the interconnection of private and public spheres. For example, La Pietra exhibited a project for a Telematic Home at the 1972 New York Museum of Modern Art show: Italy, A New Domestic Landscape.29 He envisioned the possibility of recording sounds and moving images at stations positioned virtually anywhere in a city. One could archive and access such stations telematically, in private domestic spaces. Videos and recorded sounds could also be sent from the home to the outside nodes of a network. In this way, the production of information was not unidirectional such as the case with traditional television transmissions. The palimpsest was not predetermined and censored by broadcasting companies. On the contrary, individuals were empowered by becoming active producers and distributors of knowledge.30 Since the 1960s, La Pietra had been exposed to the writings of the Situationists, whose approach I previously connected with Pettena’s Chairs as well.31 The Situationists used walkie-­talkies in Paris, Strasbourg, and Amsterdam to create simultaneous connections between different parts of the urban environment. In Telematic Home, La Pietra works at the conceptual level using photomontage and design to imagine complicated technological solutions to communication.32 This piece effectively shows the operator’s intention to break the boundaries between private and public sphere. Joanne Hollows has argued that, despite the conceptualization of separate spheres by the nineteenth-­century bourgeoisie in industrialized countries, the distinction between the private and the public is actually porous. We transition from outside to inside seamlessly, bringing ideas, memories, and discoveries with us; furthermore, we often practice activities of public relevance within the home and vice-­versa.33 La Pietra’s work contributed to developing collective awareness about the permeability of public and private, while recording people’s tendency to define and protect private space. A work like Interno/Esterno (1979) points to the dialogue between the interior and the exterior quite literally. The artist built a room-­sized wooden box, covering the outside walls with flowery wallpaper. The interior walls, in contrast, were pasted with life-­scale perspectives of a city street. A chair in the middle of the space suggests that individuals should have the right to inhabit the urban environment as if it were

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra

63

Figure. 3.3  Ugo La Pietra, Interno/Esterno. Un pezzo di stanza nella strada, un pezzo di strada nella stanza, 1979. Milan, Triennale. Courtesy Archivio Ugo La Pietra, Milan.

their apartment. On the ground, an indented panel indexes the presence of train tracks across the room, which implies that individual freedoms are at risk in the urban environment. In the 1978 text, “Sulla Strada,” “On the street,” La Pietra explains, “I remember that in my hometown, like in many small towns in the South, many individual and collective everyday activities took place in the street.

64

Postwar Italian Art History Today

The street was conceived as a natural dilation of the private space, as a favorable space for the encounter and dialogue of the residents.”34 In this quote, La Pietra shows that he perceives the loss of familiarity with the public space as a historical phenomenon linked to modern urbanization. Thus, the underlying goal of much of his practice is to bring the human-­habitat relationship back to a pre-­modern condition through a process of re-­appropriation of the city. This is a phrase that appears in La Pietra’s oeuvre through the years. The root of this idea must be traced back to the student movements of the 1960s, in which La Pietra, like Pettena, took active part. His first occupation of the public architectural college (Facoltà di Architettura) in Milan dates back to 1963.35 In this context, the students found themselves performing private everyday tasks—like shaving, brushing teeth, combing hair—in places that had been previously used for public purposes like lecturing or taking exams. Through behavior, or (using a term that I applied to Pettena’s work as well) performance, La Pietra and his peer student protesters changed the connotation of the buildings that they occupied. Similarly, La Pietra’s 1977 film The Reappropriation of the City, produced by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, intends to reclaim the public space.36 The film opens with a shot of the director, who shaves in the middle of the street using an unhinged door as a mirror. He then shouts the phrase: “Abitare é essere ovunque a casa propria (To dwell means to feel at home anywhere).”37 La Pietra repeats the scene in the middle and at the end of the film, a choice that indicates the strong symbolical meaning attributed to the act of shaving in public using found materials as props. His gesture is an iconic exaggeration that shows how one should feel at ease in the urban environment, to the point of attending to their body care routine in front of passersby and cars. The Reappropriation of the City proposes that the residents form their own relationship to the urban space, outside of the formal structure of monuments, city maps, and official routes. While Pettena focuses on the hegemony of the city center in Laundry, La Pietra looks at both the center and the periphery. A distinct section of The Reappropriation of the City compares Milanese landmarks—like the Central Station, the Cathedral, and the Monumental Cemetery, the Theater La Scala, and the Pirelli skyscraper—with lesser known corners of the urban fabric that are nevertheless imbued with personal meaning for the cultural operator. Peripheral sites are not loaded with cultural associations and can be reinvented more freely than the city center. While famous Milanese sites appear in the film, they are reduced to photographs and postcards. They lose

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra

65

three-­dimensionality to become mere representations, unable to have a concrete role in the everyday lives of the residents. Differently, the places of the everyday are portrayed as actual monuments, three-­dimensional places that are connected to the memory and identity of the residents. La Pietra’s own monuments are, for example, the Communication Factory (Fabbrica di Comunicazione) in the occupied space of the ex-Church of San Carpoforo in Brera; the club where La Pietra plays music with a band; the yard where he plays volleyball with friends; the bench where he reads a magazine; his building’s courtyard where he starts his car, as an old woman slowly walks across the space.38 The cultural operator encourages the viewers to follow his example by drawing maps that signpost their own everyday itineraries, as well as the sites where they experience emotions or gather information. Such maps seem much more relevant to the individual than printed ones, which represent the abstract vision of urban planners. La Pietra’s film points to the city center only to propose that the residents value their own personal spaces more than official landmarks. Similar concepts are conveyed by a 1973 issue of the magazine INPIÚ that was edited by La Pietra and included photographs by Pettena (among others).39 One strategy to “feel at home anywhere” consists of reassembling previously discarded objects according to a do-­it-yourself approach. As I previously noted, a DIY method informed some of Pettena’s projects as well, for similar reasons. By fostering non-­professional, spontaneous forms of building, one avoids dependence on standardized conceptions of space. La Pietra’s film documents the building process of small shacks (baracche) in the urban gardens (orti urbani). The shacks, which are located on occupied land, become the private space of those who build them with found materials. Inventiveness is at play, as those who inhabit the margins of the social system respond creatively to their environment as a practical solution for survival. The areas in which this operation becomes possible are those of the periphery, which lies outside the structures of power and decorum embodied by historical city centers. In an interview with me, La Pietra argued: In the case of Reappropriation of the City, performance was a way to exemplify that the public space was a space in which one could do the same things that they did at home, where we express our personality; it is at home that we leave the signs that make us feel the space as ours. In this way, we project our identity. Many instances of spontaneous architecture that I documented, for example in Cagliari, Sardinia, demonstrated that the striking sense of individuality of the

66

Postwar Italian Art History Today average Italian was a strong resource, beyond being a blame. Everybody wants a home that represents one’s own castle [. . .] maybe one from which to play pranks on neighbors!40

Based on the idealizing assumption that the home is a non-­conflictual space of self-­expression, La Pietra argues that the same level of comfort and liberty should be extended to the public space. He uses the model of the home to improve interactions in the community. However, his implication that the 1970s Italian home was a peaceful environment is optimistic. It is sufficient to think of the Fortuna Basilini law on divorce, which was passed in 1970 and confirmed by referendum in 1974, to be reminded that conflict between husband and wife wasn’t unusual.41 Even outside of the traditional family structure, the home is often a site of contestation, where individual interests are negotiated to co-­exist with other inhabitants, be they spouses, siblings, children, or roommates.42 It is apparent that La Pietra’s phrase “Abitare é essere ovunque a casa propria” intends to cast light on the absence of liberty within the public environment, rather than analyzing the complexity of private life in the Italian context. According to La Pietra, it is necessary to reshape our behavior in order to feel comfortable in the public space. Spontaneous architecture demonstrates that people can find their degree of freedom.43 The phrase “Gradi di libertà” (Degrees of Freedom) applied by La Pietra in many occasions to define the creative value of improvised architectures throughout Italy, is also the title of an artist-­book published in 1975.44 The project, which starts in 1969 and continues in the early 1970s, includes three components: first, the Situationist-­inspired promenades and derives in the periphery, which foster phenomenological knowledge of alternative ways of living; second, the documentation of those experiences through photography; third, the elaboration of the document via graphic design. This final stage, accompanied by creative and politically charged texts, is embodied by magazines and books. For example, in 1973–4 INPIÚ printed a series of photographs of Milanese working class areas, paired with drawings45 that highlighted the various paths made by the very walking of the residents. La Pietra documents and archives case studies that provide examples of creative adaptation. His attitude recalls that of a social scientist. While individual stories are not accounted for, the perspective of specific subjects are expressed by the particular architectonical solutions that they propose.46 La Pietra’s consideration of individual solutions distinguishes his method from the approach of mid-­twentieth century scholars, who viewed underprivileged communities as de-­personalized masses. In Italy’s Margins, David Forgacs

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra

67

discusses sociological studies of urban peripheries. He highlights how many sociologists reduced marginalized populations to objects of investigation that lost any subjective and critical identity. In the case of Milan, Danilo Montaldi and Franco Alasia’s Milano: Corea (1960) started to reverse the approach as it attempted to account for personal narratives. La Pietra’s 1975 book I Gradi di Libertà, which pays special attention to Milan, maintains an analytical and detached tone yet it illustrates specific constructions and uses them as positive examples. La Pietra identifies marginal parts of the city that defy the system of power, otherwise embodied by the physical environment of the urban center. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is again an important parallel for La Pietra as well as for Pettena. Also, Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of the Everyday, published in French in 1980 as a result of a research process that took place between 1974 and 1978,47 reflects on analogous issues. Like others, de Certeau defines the architectural structure of the city as the outcome of planned out strategies, but also recognizes that the residents navigate these structures tactically, finding their own actual and metaphorical shortcuts at the street level. His research concerns the “link that attaches private and public space. The mastery of this separation by the dweller, what it implies in terms of specific actions, ‘tactics,’ remains the essential foundation of this study: this is one of the conditions of the possibility of everyday life in urban space.”48 Like De Certeau, La Pietra believes that not only the artist, but also the residents (especially those of the peripheries) resist the rigidity of imposed structures through a constant reinvention of their own space. The relationship between the cultural operator and the residents is one of mutual exchange. La Pietra does not position himself as a teacher, his goal is not didactic. On the contrary, he values the inherent skills of the residents, which are echoed by his work. In so doing, La Pietra puts stress on everyday life at the outskirts of the capitalist system, imagining it to be governed by more genuine approaches to life. This concept resonates also in Pettena’s work, which pushes for a re-­evaluation of everyday objects, pointing to the meaning that simple things such as chairs or clotheslines gain through their users. Yet the question of the actual impact of Pettena and La Pietra’s temporary pieces on 1960s and 1970s society remains open. To tackle this issue, one must distinguish between two kinds of public. On the one hand, direct participants like Pettena’s students in Minneapolis and La Pietra’s interlocutors at the periphery of Milan may have been truly transformed by the interaction with the

68

Postwar Italian Art History Today

artists, like the artists were enlightened by interacting with them. On the other hand, the general audience, which experienced the artworks by witnessing them a-­posteriori or observing their documentation, was likely to be less involved. For example, Romy Golan reports that Campo Urbano, where both Pettena and La Pietra exhibited, was not entirely well received. The local press perceived it as a costly and pointless game by a group of avant-­garde artists.49 As this reaction may suggest, the public did not necessarily understand complex temporary pieces in a profound way. Imagining that artworks like the ones discussed by my essay could promptly change the viewers’ mentality seems utopian since, according to Lefebvre, the production of space happens through repeated actions that form the everyday. In fact, occasional exposure to individual interventions may have not helped all viewers interiorize the artists’ arguments. It takes repetition and direct experience to fully digest new ideas, especially if they question sedimented assumptions. Radical Architect’s relationship to the viewers is effectively defined by Ettore Sottsass Jr.: We did not feel like designers, nor artists, nor artisans, nor engineers for a public and even less in front of a public: we were not looking for consumers nor observers, we were not looking for consensus nor dissent that would not exist all within ourselves. All that we did found its completion within the act of doing it, in the will of doing it, and all that has been done, in the end, fit within one sphere only: life.50

In analogous ways, more than trying to didactically communicate with the general public, Pettena and La Pietra’s artworks seemed to address architects and artists of the previous generation. They appeared mostly concerned with deconstructing accepted dwelling cultures (“abitare”) in order to provide alternative views of architecture, urban planning, and power structures. Yet they also provided a model for the public. Ultimately, choosing whether to embrace it or not was the viewers’ responsibility. The artists’ power was limited to pointing to possible new ways of inhabiting the private and public space. The role of artists and cultural operators like Pettena and La Pietra was similar to that of some philosophers who were active in the same years. Even when intellectuals like Antonio Negri started a dialogue with factory workers to share Autonomist ideas and prompt action, they could not literally enact their predicaments on behalf of their readers and listeners. The diverse and hardly quantifiable reception of Pettena and La Pietra’s work does not alter the strength of their ideas. In the 1960s and 1970s, both La Pietra

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra

69

and Pettena came to participate in a theoretical conversation about the permeability of public and private spaces. They questioned the authority and authorship of recognized planners and politicians, valued the role of the everyday, and challenged disciplinary boundaries. Using the language of the avant-­garde, an extended conception of art as thought and behavior, they formulated observations that have a lot to share with those expressed by sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers active in their same years. Thus, instead of framing Pettena and La Pietra’s work as visual translation of others’ theories, it is fairer to view the artists as dynamic contributors to a sophisticated discourse.

Notes 1 Verina Gfader, “The Real Radical? Interview with Antonio Negri,” in The Italian Avant-Garde 1968–1978, ed. Alex Coles (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 202–19. 2 Luciano Caramel, Ugo Mulas, and Bruno Munari, Campo urbano: interventi estetici nella dimensione collettiva urbana: Como, 21 settembre 1969 (Como: Nani, 1969); Silvia Bignami, Luciano Caramel, and Enrico Crispolt, Fuori!: arte e spazio urbano, 1968–1976 (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2011). 3 Angela Rui, ed, Ugo La Pietra, Progetto Disquilibrante (Mantua: Corraini, 2014), 100–1. 4 Gianni Pettena, L’Anarchitetto. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Architect (Rimini: Guaraldi, 1973), 34–5. The translation from Italian is mine. 5 Lucy Maulsby, Fascism, Architecture, and the Claiming of Modern Milan, 1922–1943 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 106–11. 6 Diane Ghirardo, “Italian Architects and Fascist Politics: An Evaluation of the Rationalist’s Role in Regime Building,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 39. 2 (May 1980): 109–27; Diane Ghirardo, “Politics of a Masterpiece: The Vicenda of the Decoration of the Façade of the Casa del Fascio, Como, 1936–39,” The Art Bulletin 62.3 (September 1980): 466–78. 7 Romy Golan, “Campo Urbano, Como, 1969,” in Exhibiting Architecture. A Paradox? ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Carson Chan, and David Andrew Tasman (New Haven: Yale School of Architecture, 2015), 53. 8 On the symbolic power of Case del Fascio during and after fascism, see Lucy Maulsby, “Drinking from the River Lethe: Case del Fascio and the Legacy of Fascism in Postwar Italy,” Future Anterior 11.2 (2014): 18–39. Maulsby discusses the medieval inspiration of modern Case del Fascio (p. 22). 9 Gianni Pettena, interview with the author, Fiesole, Florence, July 8, 2014.

70

Postwar Italian Art History Today

10 Gianni Pettena and Robert Smithson, “A conversation in Salt Lake City,” Domus 516 (January 25, 1972): 53–4; republished in Emanuale Piccardo and Amit Wolf, Beyond Environment (New York: Actar, 2014), 74. 11 Joseph Buttigieg, “Gramsci, Antonio,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, accessed December 17, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline. com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0240. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 153. 12 Peter D. Thomas. The Gramscian Moment. Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 199. 13 Stephen Gundle, “The Legacy of the Prison Notebooks,” in Italy in the Cold War. Politics, Culture and Society 1948–58, eds. Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff (Oxford, Washington DC: Berg, 1995), 131–47. 14 Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, Herbert Marcuse. Marxism, Revolution and Utopia (London: Routledge, 2014), 50. 15 Pettena, Interview. 16 Gianni Pettena, L’Anarchitetto (Florence: Guaraldi, 1973). 17 Pettena, L’Anarchitetto, 26. The translation from Italian is mine. 18 Ibid., 27. 19 Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968); Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974). 20 Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 81–6. 21 Michael R. Glass and Reuben Rose-Redwood, “Introduction,” in Performativity, Politics and the Production of Social Space (New York: Routledge, 2014), 3. 22 Kristin Ross and Henri Lefebvre, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview,” October 79, Guy Debord and the Internationale Situationniste (Winter, 1997): 69–83. 23 Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986), 82–7. 24 Alison J. Clarke, “Ettore Sottsass Jr. The Design Ethnologist,” in Coles, ed., The Italian Avant-Garde, 72–8. 25 Gianni Pettena, “Il Progetto rivisitato,” in Ugo La Pietra: la sinestesia delle arti, 1960–2000, eds. Gillo Dorfles, Vincenzo Accame et al. (Milan: Mazzotta, 2001), 10–11. 26 Enrico Crispolti, “Per un comportamento creativo nei processi di riappropriazione dell’ambiente: analisi e interventi di Ugo La Pietra,” in Dorfles, Accame et al., Ugo La Pietra, 113. 27 Enrico Crispolti, Arti Visive e Partecipazione Sociale (Bari: De Donato, 1977). 28 Martina Tanga, “Artists Refusing to Work. Aesthetics Practices in 1970s Italy,” Palinsesti 4 (2014) http://www.palinsesti.net/index.php/Palinsesti/article/view/57 (accessed on March 24, 2015).

Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra

71

29 Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, ed. Emilio Ambasz (New York: MoMA 1972), 224–31. 30 Rui, Ugo La Pietra. Progetto, 103. 31 Ross and Lefebvre, “Lefebvre on the Situationists,” 73, 80; Dorfles, Accame et al., Ugo La Pietra, 58; Alessandra Acocella, “Abitare la città. La fotografia nel lavoro di Ugo La Pietra,” ArchPhoto (2014), 6, http://www.archphoto.it/archives/3288 (accessed online on February 5, 2015). 32 On La Pietra’s use of graphic design see Acocella, “Abitare la città,” 1–6. 33 Joanna Hollows, Domestic Cultures (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008). 34 Ugo La Pietra, Abitare La Città (Turin: Allemandi, 2011), 174. 35 La Pietra, Abitare, 220. 36 For a discussion of The Reappropriation of the City see Alexandra Brown, “Immersing, comprehending and reappropriating. Milan, unreformed, in the alternative architectures of Ugo La Pietra,” in Spaces of Justice: Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations, eds. Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir (New York: Routledge, 2017), 132–49. 37 Dorfles, Accame et al., Ugo La Pietra, 112–13. 38 Many thanks to Alessandra Acocella and Martina Tanga for helping with the identification of a selection of Milanese sites, which appear in The Reappropriation of the City. 39 “L’Uso della Città,” monographic issue edited by Ugo La Pietra, INPIÚ, no. 2 (December 1973–January 1974). I am grateful to Alessandra Acocella for noticing a parallel between this publication and the film The Reappropriation of the City (unpublished email message to the author, August 12, 2017). 40 Ugo La Pietra, interview with the author, Milan, July 17, 2014. 41 Lesley Caldwell, “The Family in the Fifties: A Notion in Conflict with Reality,” in Duggan and Wagstaff, Italy in the Cold War, 149–58. 42 Chiara Saraceno, Coppie e Famiglia. Non e’ Questione di Famiglia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2012), 7–9. 43 Crispolti, Per un comportamento, 113. 44 Ugo La Pietra, I Gradi di libertà (Milan: Jablik & Colophon Editori, 1975). 45 Acocella, “Abitare la Città”, accessed March 29, 2016. 46 David Forgacs, Italy’s Margins. Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 63–4. 47 Luce Giard, “History of a Research Project,” introduction to Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), XIII. 48 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 7–8. 49 Golan, “Campo Urbano,” 52. 50 Ettore Sottsass Jr., in Casabella 377 (1973), quoted in Stefano Pezzato, Gianni Pettena. Ritratto dell’Architetto da Giovane (Rimini: Guaraldi, 2010), 11. The translation from Italian is mine.

4

Our Lady of Warka: Gino De Dominicis and the Search for Immortality Gabriele Guercio

I am interested in what I call “temporal parallaxis”: the two-­psyche entity able to perform a double-­field superimposition and thus break free of time and causation. Philip K. Dick, June 19811 Over the course of his career, Gino De Dominicis (1947–98) was guided by the sense that drawings, paintings, sculptures, and works of architecture bear a special link to the mysterious dimension of time. Their goal is to capture an effigy, object, or landscape in an image meant to remain “just as it is,” despite the irreversible nature of the temporal flux. However unconsciously, an artwork channels the desire to exist now and forever, allowing us to ignore chronological sequence and link together many far-­flung moments. And so, one might say that works of visual art are harbingers or vessels of a time standing still, which can no longer be calculated in relation to changes in the body. Throughout his career, De Dominicis worked to demonstrate the reality of a time without evolution, which could be experienced through artworks. This went beyond merely recognizing that the creation of images is connected to the problem of death, since the attempt to forever pin down the vision of something or someone expresses an irreducible hope of escaping the impermanence of things and the fate of mortal beings. De Dominicis went so far as to claim that the motionless time of the artwork could offer a model for achieving bodily immortality. In other words, the body, whose appearance and existence are inextricably bound to a given timespan, could emulate artistic phenomena, while the latter could instantiate a different kind of corporeality, outside of evolution and measurable time.

74

Postwar Italian Art History Today

The idea that a quantum of eternity could be tied to the very presence of the artwork is a cornerstone of De Dominicis’s poetics of immortality. An emblematic example of this vision is a painting he made in 1977, exhibited in 1983.

Figure 4.1  Gino De Dominicis, Untitled (Testa di donna sumera), 1977. Oil on color photography, 155 × 95 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of the Archivio Gino De Dominicis.

Our Lady of Warka

75

As we will see, the work has more than one title, but for the moment I will refer to it as the Signora di Warka, or in English, the Lady of Warka. Due to its subject and the enigmatic way in which it was originally exhibited, the Lady of Warka suggests that a work of art can carve out a quantum of eternity and preserve it over time, becoming the vessel for an immortality that is not mine, yours, or anyone else’s, but which we nonetheless recognize, however unconsciously, as inherent to our species. By spurring this insight, De Dominicis offers another significant inflection of the link between the visual arts and the quest for immortality, already established beyond any doubt in 1972 with his Seconda Soluzione d’Immortalità (L’Universo è Immobile) (Second Solution of Immortality [The Universe is Immobile]). The Lady of Warka presents us with the image of a figure that seems immune to historical evolution and irreversibility, capable of bursting into any fraction of the present and placing itself in a multiplicity of nows. This omnipresence raises a series of questions. Above all, we must ask ourselves whether and in what sense

Figure 4.2  Gino De Dominicis, (Photo op) Seconda soluzione di immortalità (L’universo è immobile), 1972. Black and white photograph, 51 × 63 cm. Lia Rumma Collection. Courtesy of the Archivio Gino De Dominicis.2

76

Postwar Italian Art History Today

context and history may be perfectly useless when it comes to understanding artistic phenomena. But the even more inevitable question is whether and how we can become immortal, discovering some way to coalesce again after death, or project ourselves into a time unbounded by a body’s lifespan.

1 The Lady of Warka is a photo that the artist has modified using color oil paint. It is an enlarged picture of the so-­called Mask of Warka, or Lady of Uruk, a female head sculpted from alabaster that is in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. Scholars tend to believe it depicts Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of fertility, love, and war. Discovered in 1938–9 in the Eanna temple district of Uruk and dated to the end of the fourth millennium BCE, it is, as archeologist André Parrot observed in Sumer: The Dawn of Art (1960), “one of those masterworks of sculpture that, defying explanation, stand supreme on their own merits.”3 There was nothing nostalgic about De Dominicis’s interest in the Sumerian civilization, which was fueled instead by more personal ideas about the story of Gilgamesh. He believed this figure to be not only a king who stubbornly searched for the secret of eternal life, but an artist.4 Moreover, he was impressed by the seemingly miraculous inventiveness of the Sumerians, who were a step ahead of later civilizations in many fields: from urban planning, to commerce, to education, to the transmission of knowledge. Given the unprecedented leap it marked on planet Earth, the Sumerian civilization seemed to him like a sign of the primordial force whose influence is perennial, and which must spark other advents without any verifiable cause. The creation of the Lady of Warka seems like an attempt to touch the origin. Since the eyes of the sculpture in Baghdad have been lost, the artist performs an act of restitution, giving form and life back to that gaze by painting two huge blue irises within bloodshot corneas. Given that the subject of the work is a pre-­ existing sculpture that in turn portrays a pre-­existing woman or demi-­goddess, the new painted image invites us to consider the possibility that we are witnessing a return or resurrection of the ancient figure, or rather, the demonstration that its life never came to an end. The gaze of the Lady of Warka has an intensity that nevertheless becomes fleeting, as we realize that the two orbs are miraculously housed in a lifeless shell. Indeed, De Dominicis’s painting doesn’t seem meant to hypothetically

Our Lady of Warka

77

reconstruct how the sculpture might have appeared some 5,000 years ago, but to present a new entity containing a series of specific elements, combined with new ones that infuse it with life and energy. These additions make the Sumerian head and De Dominicis’s work a sort of artifice housing an ancient presence, alien and ghostly, yet very much alive in its alabaster “urn.” The association of the work with an urn is reinforced by how the artist presented the Lady of Warka at the Sprovieri gallery. Placed in a closed room, the painting could be seen only through a peephole in the wall. A beam of light, set above the work and aimed at the opening, dazzled the observer, while at the top of the woman’s head one could make out an eight-­pointed star, a symbol connected to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar and other female divinities of ancient Egypt and Greece. One had the sense of being, as Germano Celant noted, in “a holy place, almost a crypt, where the relic of an ancient culture is displayed.”5 Her apparition prompts us to question whether the world that houses her is really separate from the hereafter, or at any rate, a different world that does not contain us. Moreover, her animate eyes recall the portentous ones of a saint, the Christian martyr in the Moorish palace of Otranto, immortalized by Carmelo Bene in his novel Nostra signora dei Turchi (1966), which was turned into a movie in 1968. He too, like the Lady of Warka, is a motionless apparition. As Bene imagined him, “He was immobile, as in the lost urn, but unlike the other martyrs [. . .] he still had his eyes, so that the others saw him in an urn, while he saw them in another urn.”6 The clash of gazes that Bene describes between two urns, two irreconcilable worlds, turns up again in De Dominicis’s exhibition and painting. From the light that dazzles viewers, to the star that symbolizes the deity, to the entire mode of installation, everything underlines the extraordinary nature of the painted figure, which seems to be immune to bodily mortality, or to have somehow re-­formed after death. The fact that the Lady of Warka is visible only through a peephole might call to mind Etant donnés (1946–66), the complex three-­dimensional composition by Marcel Duchamp that was meant to be observed only through two holes in a heavy wooden door. Even through its title (“Given”), Etant donnés celebrates the existing fact and its irreducibility, reflecting Duchamp’s belief that making art did not necessarily entail producing something “new.” Instead, it can be a matter of appropriating and (re-)positioning pre-­ existing “readymades.” But this does not describe the Lady of Warka, who does not seem to have arrived in the gallery crypt through any clear lineage of evolution and transformation from past to present; her presence is a disjunctive one, springing or peering out of a dimension we can barely guess at. The woman’s

78

Postwar Italian Art History Today

eyes are a fiction, ensuring that we note the distance between the original sculpture and the artist’s painting, and between the painting and the exhibition context. Between these two poles of spacetime one glimpses not a fusion but a variance: a dynamic of reciprocal subtraction that allows us to identify one dimension precisely by seeing it is totally alien to or separate from the other. The Lady of Warka states a key principle the artist had suggested before with his “Letter on Immortality” (1970), which argued that “for things to truly exist, they must be eternal, immortal,” and not “mere occurrences of certain possibilities.” And the same goes for human beings, who “must stop in time, and thus finally begin to live.”7 This prospect of stopping in time and beginning to live sounds like a feasible implication of the Lady of Warka. The message is that a work of art not only interrupts the processes we usually perceive as a linear progression from before to after, but in itself offers a model for becoming immortal. And so, by emulating art, could human beings achieve immortality? It would seem that the woman in the painting has managed to reclaim her own quantum of eternity. But both as an artwork and as the effigy of an ancient goddess, is the Lady of Warka really separate from the world and historical context in which the artist produced her? Or is the work an entity capable of appearing in any present moment and illuminating and transfiguring it, precisely because it unconditionally establishes itself outside of consecutive time?

2 Although one may question whether the notion of the “year” can be taken as a valid historiographic unit of reference, there is no denying that some years become more symbolic than others, evoking pivotal events, the way 1789 calls to mind the French Revolution, or 1969 the moon landing. In a humbler sense, 1977 also stands as a sort of annus mirabilis. Through a series of warning signs, linked, of course, to problems that can be seen in the years both preceding and following, 1977 marked not only the implosion of the grand narratives of progress and democratization, but the onset of a political crisis in the so-­called Left, which proved increasingly incapable of fulfilling the promises of social emancipation that had been made over the course of the century. In Europe—or even worldwide, as gloomily announced by Le fond de l’air est rouge, the Chris Marker film that came out that very year—the struggles and aspirations that had hung on from the 1960s seemed to have reached an impasse.

Our Lady of Warka

79

In Italy, it may have been a growing sense of disorientation that fueled tensions. Over the course of 1977, there were more and more riots and protests in Italian cities, while new symbols of marginalization appeared: not just workers and students, but social outcasts, people who turned to heroin in protest, immigrants and unemployed intellectuals. Parallel to the escalation in precarious and immaterial labor produced by capitalism in its incipient post-Fordist phase, there was a mounting disenchantment with party and state politics. This sentiment guided both the drift into terrorism—1978 was the year of Aldo Moro’s tragic kidnapping by the Red Brigades—and visions of struggle that were less bloody but just as intransigent. Specifically, there was an emphasis on disobeying the laws of the labor market and channeling creative forces into realms untrammeled by hierarchies. Forsaking the world of bourgeois values became a strategy of rebellion, as well as a search for other ways of life. One is tempted to picture De Dominicis making the Lady of Warka at a time when the streets of Rome, especially that winter and spring, were invaded by groups of protesters not always content to just march and chant slogans against the government. The hope of peaceful transformation was giving way to fierce rebellion: more and more comrades were taking up arms, and the expropriation of private property became a common practice among militants. An overview of the new political agenda can be gleaned from Il dominio e il sabotaggio (1978) by Antonio Negri, who saw the struggles of 1977 as demonstrating how the self-­ valorization that accompanied the rejection of work spurred revolutionaries to directly combat the mechanisms of bourgeois society, practicing sabotage as a concrete way to undermine the hegemony of the ruling classes. The changes heralded by the “historic compromise” between the Communist Party and more conservative parliamentary groups, especially the Christian Democrats, were seen as illusory compared to the new experiments in direct democracy pursued by the Autonomia Operaia movement.8 Getting back to the Lady of Warka, it is natural to wonder how we should interpret what seems like a regressive attitude. Is it a nostalgic flight from reality? To be sure, the work is aloof to the tensions that shaped the social climate of its time: it has little or nothing to do with socialism and class struggle, while its allusion to the deathless nature of the Sumerian head seems to imply a very backward-­looking mindset. Could the Lady of Warka be a reactionary response to the very chaos of 1977? As Furio Jesi has argued, the “culture of the Right” is one where the past is used and abused at whim, often proclaiming unchallengeable values that demand capital letters, like Culture, Justice, Freedom, Tradition.9 Due

80

Postwar Italian Art History Today

to the associations and thoughts it summons up, the Lady of Warka seems not only to ignore modernity and progress, but even endorse the aspiration to preserve a secret yet enduring “tradition” of wisdom, a phenomenon of rightwing culture that had been studied by authors such as René Guénon in France and Julius Evola in Italy. It is worth noting, however, that in the 1970s the penchant for such ideas ceased to be the exclusive domain of the Right. Rather, it became widespread among intellectuals and leftists in general. In 1979, writing for the magazine L’Espresso, Umberto Eco noted that in contemporary Italy one could no longer rely on the historical categories of Left and Right, since they only work when there is a clear division between classes, and a belief in progress and historical direction.10 Indeed, for some time the cultural sphere itself had been seeing such distinctions begin to fade. A growing number of authors that had belonged until recently to the canon of the right—Heidegger, Nietzsche, Jung, Pound, Céline, Kierkegaard, Carl Schmitt, and Spengler—were not only being studied and discussed, but set free from the corral of unacceptable or reactionary thinkers.11 In such a context, one can easily slide into irrationality. And this drift is evocatively and mercilessly described in the Umberto Eco novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988). The novel, which stretches from the 1960s to 1984, tells of three editors in Milan who are preparing a new series on the occult; inspired by the conspiracy theories of their authors, they dream up a centuries old “Plan” by the Knights Templar. But one of the protagonists, Jacopo Belbo, ends up believing in his own inventions to the point that his life takes on tragic shades of paranoia. Presenting the X-ray image of an Italy where the identities, outlooks, and models employed by terrorists of the Left and Right blur together, Eco musters a parade of Freemasons, Kabbalists, Rosicrucians, mystics, magicians, poseurs, dupes, and self-­proclaimed immortals. In short, Foucault’s Pendulum describes the misadventures of those who succumb to the spell of naive visions. Yet one might say that the Lady of Warka wants us to do just that: to let our guard down and accept its paranormal existence. Should it therefore be written off as a curious hybrid of hermeticism and archeological fantasy? It is interesting to note that in Eco’s novel, Mr. Agliè claims he is the last reincarnation of the Count of Saint Germain, and De Dominicis strangely felt the need to deny he was in a work titled Non sono il conte di Saint Germain (I Am Not the Count of Saint Germain, 1970). Is Eco’s neo-Enlightenment attitude the only acceptable way to escape the snares of esotericism? Perhaps the book one should read as a counterweight to this

Our Lady of Warka

81

disenchantment is Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980) by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In theorizing a nomadic, schizophrenic mode of thought, on a collision course with the status quo and the diktats of societies of control, the authors also have the 1970s in mind, though they do not hesitate to draw some of their models from magic and drug culture. Mille Plateaux shows how the crisis of the Left runs parallel to a crisis in Western rationalism itself. Indeed, both are a symptom of deeper tensions: they indicate just how urgent it had become in that period to experiment with other methods of thought and struggle. That year—1977—therefore epitomized a time when the political conflict shed predetermined labels and moved into the arena of life itself, engaging the fragile realm of the mind and the emotions. In Italy, there was a significant increase in drug use among young people.12 However briefly, the exploration of altered states seemed to offer a creative ground for new forms of life and work. These not only ignored the coercive rules of commerce and the pressure to embrace a kind of progress that regimented everything and everyone, but were often shaped by transcendental experiences and mystical crises. Looking again at the Lady of Warka, one cannot shrug it off as a reactionary work of art for at least two reasons. First, because in the Italy of 1977, the terms “reactionary” and “progressive” had both become misleading. Second, because the Lady of Warka employs some of the very strategies that in that period, with the old political labels left behind, gained currency as a way to challenge the status quo and come up with alternatives. They involved refusing to accept a shared framework of mental and cultural references, actively standing apart within and from the overall context, and rejecting the idea of a single path of history, to embrace the notion of multiple temporalities. However imaginary, sublimated, distorted or spaced-­out, these other temporalities nevertheless prove capable of bursting into and influencing the world of today. Paradoxically, by pointing to an autonomous time and refuting the alleged univocality of the historical present, the Lady of Warka sheds light on the complexity of the forces that inform that present, eroding its seemingly monolithic quality.

3 The aim of this excursus was not to provide an exhaustive explanation of the Lady of Warka in light of its historical context. Rather, it was to show the ineffectiveness, or even error, of such an undertaking. So, if we are skeptical of any supposed link

82

Postwar Italian Art History Today

binding artistic phenomena to history, this raises the question of where the work can be situated. In this regard, it probably helps to recognize that both as an ancient bust and as an image restored in 1977, the Lady of Warka presumes to exist as an entity with a life of its own, capable of standing outside of time. There is no genealogy that can explain the birth and identity of this work, nor can one argue that our relationship with it is a determining factor in its existence. Rather, one gets the sense that the work does not even need an audience in order to exist. And so it challenges two great visions underlying our modern conception of space and time: those of determinism and co-dependent origination. By determinism, I mean a vision of phenomena where, in the field of physics as well as history and anthropology, events are interconnected in an invariable fashion, so that once a cause is identified, a given effect will regularly be seen to occur. And yet, eluding the certainties of natural law, the Lady of Warka suggests that its existence in the here and now is not something that could be foreseen based on statistics: it stands apart from any supposed chain of causes proceeding from past to present to future. Looking at the work, we are amazed at the absence of traces or indications of how and why this mysterious effigy has (re-)appeared there, in the gallery transformed into a crypt. Our belief in chronological linearity is replaced by a faith that events could occur through leaps and disjunctions. The Lady of Warka constitutes one of those events. We are led to reflect that there is no way to systematically calculate the emergence of things, thoughts, and/or actions: what takes place in spacetime may well often stem from spontaneous contingencies, and art confirms this. Since they emerge through creative acts, works of art point to the fact that they are as they are, yet they could have been different or never have been at all. Their manifestation is inseparable from the fluctuation that runs between being and non-­being. In the case of the Lady of Warka it is as if, by emphasizing its seemingly prodigious nature, De Dominicis wanted to replicate the sense of sudden newness that must have marked the formation of the galaxy and the appearance of life and of thinking creatures on Earth. Just as there is no point in trying to ascertain the provenance or lineage of the work, it is equally useless to suppose that our presence in front of it somehow influences its existence or gives it meaning. And so, just as there is no determinism, there is no co-­dependent origination when dealing with the Lady of Warka. This upends another major idea that is key to envisioning how phenomena occur in time and space. Co-­dependent origination implies that human beings and nature, subjects and objects, observers and observed,

Our Lady of Warka

83

reciprocally define each other. There are no regular causes and effects, let alone identities set in stone once and for all. It is a mutual encounter between the self and other-­than-self that co-­identifies both, rendering them what they are or become through innumerable metamorphoses. Cropping up even in quantum mechanics, the principle of co-dependent origination has informed the development of twentieth-­century philosophical phenomenology and Buddhist meditative practice.13 Moreover, it clearly plays a decisive role in the art of the twentieth century: one need only think of Duchamp and his famous statement that it is viewers who “make the pictures.” The intemporal nature of the Lady of Warka undermines this assumption of co-­identity, however. Insofar as the effigy belongs to a time radically different or removed from the present in which it emerges, the act of seeing does not demand that we draw on our own history, culture, experience, or life story. In some sense, we see without seeing ourselves see: there is no self that springs to life upon contact with the work, let alone a shared origin linking the Lady of Warka to those who enter its orbit from outside.

4 If there is neither determinism nor co-­dependent origination, how must one picture the way artistic phenomena occur? One might say that the existence of a work of art involves the formation of a dimensional rift or gap. Since it is potentially exempt from any need to obey the principles of causality and/or co-­dependency, artistic practice would seem able to generate something where nothing was before. A work of art can emerge in a given context—historical, art-­ historical, etc.—without necessarily establishing any contiguity, continuity, or reflection of it; without fulfilling expectations or following predetermined criteria of intelligibility, but instead generating breaks and unbridgeable gulfs between itself and everything else. So one might suggest that a work of art not only stands in a space of its own, but in a separate and independent time. Depicting an image that aspires to remain as it is, in a realm that proves parallel yet asymmetrical to our own, the work of art—be it a painting, drawing, sculpture, or building—manifests a time outside the time calculated in relation to bodily changes and measured through the cycles of nature, like day and night, or the birth, growth, deterioration, and death of organisms. This suggests that eternity is not something remote, but something that can touch us: intersecting with the here and now. It can be imagined as the

84

Postwar Italian Art History Today

unfolding of something atemporal within a given fraction of consecutive time. We therefore realize that identifying a work of art implies seeing and understanding an entity with an independent psychic reality, whose form or image is, was, and will be: it stands in the beginning as in this moment and forever. And this fact could place it closer to the origin; in some sense, it re-­evokes the mystery of the beginning of all things. Moreover, an important corollary to the idea that the work stands as an entity with its own psychic reality—in the beginning, now and forever—is that works of art exist in and affect every present. There is no reason to classify or understand the works of the past as something remote and separate from us. In the view of De Dominicis: Works of art are all contemporary. Otherwise it would be like seeing an automobile from 1920 come along but deciding to cross the street anyway in the belief you couldn’t be hit, since it’s a car from another time. Whereas that’s not true. With artworks it’s the same, they’re always “broadcasting live.”

No longer bound to a progression of styles, techniques, and concerns, let alone to the horizon of discourse in their era, works of art partake in what we could call the motionless history of humanity, expressing its hope for the absolute, and serving as points of subtraction and difference with respect to the time and evolution of specific cultures and histories. The idea that works of art are all contemporary is underscored by the Lady of Warka. In it, the living and the dead are intertangled, the animate eyes and stony head. It is as if the work existed on two planes of spacetime at once, or perhaps nowhere at all. Thinking back to the era in which De Dominicis made the work, one is tempted to cite Philip K. Dick. It was in 1977, during a talk held in Metz on September 24—often cited as the discovery of the Matrix—that the writer spoke for the first time in public about his experience of coextensive presents that intersect with his own time. As he said: “Often people claim to remember past lives; I claim to remember a different, very different present life.”14 Indeed, a similar experience is described at length in one of his novels, Valis, written in 1978 and published in 1981, where the reality and personality of the protagonist Horselover Fat are spliced together with those of Thomas, a Christian in ancient Rome, who has found a way to recoalesce after death.15 Although De Dominicis was probably unaware of Dick’s ideas, a similar recoalescence seems to have taken place in the Lady of Warka, which like Thomas in Valis is a coextensive presence. As an ancient sculpture, Sumerian goddess, and image restored in 1977, she inhabits a parallel universe: she is capable of (re-) appearing and living in the reality of the Piazza del Popolo gallery, as well as in other unpredictable worlds.

Our Lady of Warka

85

5 Hopes and promises of immortality recur in a range of eras and cultures. In the West, an idea dating back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (X [K], 7, 1177b, 30) argues that to become immortal, we must live in harmony with the loftier part of our intellect, relying on our power to perceive and conceive ideas and truths that exist beyond the biological limits of our own lives. So not only is intellectual activity linked to ethics and to the sphere of the divine, but an impersonal realm of eternity is envisioned, which human beings can nonetheless engage with. It is within this Aristotelian framework that it became possible over the centuries to picture immortality as the participation of individual minds in a universal mind, or as fame and enduring cultural importance, or even digital preservation of a mind’s distinguishing traits. And, what is more, some aspects of this outlook intertwine with those of the Jewish and Christian traditions, where bodily resurrection after death remains a subject of debate, but there is a general consensus on the doctrine of the immortal soul.16 On a different or even opposite front, immortality is seen as something organic and completely tied to the persistence of the species. This notion is rooted in the East; it was first formulated in the ancient Vedas, which established that individual and species, human and animal kingdom were one and the same; according to the doctrine of reincarnation, we live innumerable lives, taking on a new body each time. In the modern era, similar views were developed upon in a new way by Arthur Schopenhauer. In his supplements to The World as Will and Representation (1818–44), the philosopher argues that the cat we see in the present is, if not entirely the same, surely not altogether different from a cat that existed centuries before. This reasoning echoes Keats’s famous “Ode to a Nightingale”—written in 1819, though Schopenhauer was not aware of it— where the poet invokes the immortality of the nightingale as a species. Borges, connecting this ode to Schopenhauer’s thesis, evocatively suggested that both should be seen as affirmations that individual and species are in some sense one and the same. From this perspective, to become immortal, we must observe animals: individual animals are not aware of death, and therefore possess the full immortality of their species. Analogously, individual human beings can aspire to achieve immortality by increasing their awareness that they are an integral part of one great, undying body. In the Lady of Warka, the yearning to become immortal also reveals itself to have other, unexpected implications. While not primarily tied to the realm of

86

Postwar Italian Art History Today

ideas, neither is it connected to the identity of the species. Immortality seems inseparable from understanding the specific nature of works of visual art. They are unconditional demonstrations of an eternity that endures. Their unconditional nature does not necessarily imply we are unable to access dimensions outside the finitude of life bound to the body. One can therefore imagine a kind of corporeality that has not only ceased to reflect the transformations of nature, but has freed itself from the compulsion to express and extend itself through technology. The misguided nature of this irrepressible impulse is pointed out by Il tempo, lo sbaglio, lo spazio (Time, Error, Space, 1969), a work that consists in a human skeleton wearing rollerskates, with the skeleton of a dog on a leash. The sculptural group created by Dominicis shows the fallacy of a culture that struggles to evolve in time and space, relying on supplementary tools or prostheses meant to augment bodily features in the temporal sphere. These tools include the roller skates that distinguish the human skeleton from the animal one, allowing it to speed through space and shorten time. Yet the work shows that death has come nonetheless for man and animal alike. Indeed, prosthetic culture merely postpones or ignores the problem of death, assuming there will be unlimited progress in human affairs, and that nature and technology will adapt to each other in an all-­embracing, planetary timespan. The tyrannical imposition of a single progressive time can be countered, however, by works of visual art: they inspire us to recognize a range of forms of eternity, each disjunctive and impossible to understand in terms of causes or preconditions. The artistic struggle against a single temporality invites us to take a different perspective on one of our most ingrained taboos, liaisons between blood relatives. It prompts us to wonder whether incest, especially between parent and child, by opposing or negating intergenerational distance, is not a sort of claim on immortality. The question is especially valid in light of the invitation card for the 1983 exhibition at Sprovieri. It bears a sentence that also provides the title of the wotk which so far I have been referring as Lady of Warka: It was a summer night, my daughter said to me: “modern art could make a cow laugh, ancient art could make it sad, Art could make it weep,” and then we shared a long, passionate kiss.

With wry effrontery, this other title for the work invites us to imagine that incest is to human generation what creating a work of art is to the sphere of craft and meaning. In both cases, there is a desire for a time free of evolution, and a

Our Lady of Warka

87

Figure 4.3  Gino De Dominicis, Il tempo, lo sbaglio, lo spazio, 1969. Human skeleton, roller skates, dog skeleton, leash, scheletro di cane, guinzaglio, rod, 400 × 220 (variable) × 170 cm. Lia Rumma Collection. Courtesy of the Archivio Gino De Dominicis.

rejection of measurements or estimates of duration based on identifying time with a bodily lifespan. The theme of incest invites a brief digression on a work by De Dominicis that the artist later destroyed: his statue of the Madonna che ride, or Laughing Madonna (1973).

88

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 4.4  Gino De Dominicis, Madonna che ride, 1972. Statue made of colored plaster, 200 × 60 cm. Destroyed work. Courtesy of the Archivio Gino De Dominicis.

Our Lady of Warka

89

Its unusual iconography prompts the question of why the mother of God in human form is laughing, rather than appearing to foresee—as in most artworks that portray her—the tragic fate of her son. One might suggest it is a sort of comment on the Christian dogma of Mary’s virginity: a very Dantean one, considering that in Canto XXXIII of Paradiso, Dante addresses the Madonna as “Virgin mother, daughter of your son.” The poet’s famous words sum up incest as a beatitude, because it completes a circle confirming the perfect union of human and divine, past and future, parents and children. In corroborating the Dantean image, the laughter in De Dominicis’s work seems aimed at putting an end to the tragic conception, stemming from the Greeks, that sees incest as desirable as it is unacceptable and calamitous. Both the Laughing Madonna and the Lady of Warka therefore stand as figures freed from the progressive time of evolution. They are both blessed. Just as the Madonna does not die, but is instead miraculously taken up into heaven in her own body, the life of the Sumerian woman seems endowed with the remarkable power to regenerate itself and/or endure, as her reddened eyes attest. The message we receive from the Lady of Warka is not only that the dimensions of art and of the living intersect, influencing each other, but that we could even live and create as immortals. In other words, it is possible for both works and people to possess or acquire the ability to contain fragments of a time alien to bodily evolution. Works of visual art in particular can teach us something in this regard. Since they are motionless, mute, and radically indifferent to change, they reveal themselves to be entities capable of capturing, generating, and preserving fragments of an eternity that endures. Indeed, eternity should perhaps not just be seen as something very distant or separate from us, that never touches us and lies far above, representing everything whose progress is incommensurable. One is tempted here to borrow certain arguments presented by theoretical physicist Julian Barbour in The End of Time (1999).17 In Barbour’s view, time does not exist: it would be more plausible to speak of a range of times, or of scattered nows. Might one not just as well argue that instead of a single, ineffable eternity, there is a range of eternities? That is to say, could one imagine the formation of sections or segments of time that become frozen forever, and as such, can intersect with the now, enter into the temporal sphere of the present and let themselves be at least sensed, if not understood, as quanta of eternity? The Lady of Warka invites us to answer yes to both questions, suggesting that a work of art is a specimen of these enduring eternities. By establishing points of

90

Postwar Italian Art History Today

contact or proximity with works of art, human beings could therefore be inspired to linger on after their physical death. In this view, immortality seems like an event that could come about just like the leap or rift that at some point allowed a work of art to be made where nothing was before, and at a series of other points, rendered us “human,” “thinking,” and “mortal.”

Notes 1 The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, eds. P. Jackson and J. Lethem (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 769. 2 The relevant literature on Gino De Dominicis includes Gino De Dominicis: Flash Art International Special Edition, with essays by E. Mangion, B. Merz, A. Heiss, A. Bellini, L. Cherubini, G. Guercio, M. Abramović, J. Kosuth, and M. Senaldi, June 2007 (special edition published for solo exhibition curated by A. Bellini and L. Cherubini which traveled to Nice, Turin, and New York); Gino De Dominicis: L’immortale, with texts by C. Bartocci, A. Bonito Oliva, M. Donà, F. Franco, G. Guercio, A. Mattirolo, G. Pettinato, S. Chiodi, F. Sargentini, and I. Tomassoni, exh. cat. (Maxxi, Rome, May 30 to November 7, 2010), ed. A. Bonito Oliva (Milan: Electa, 2010); Gino De Dominicis: Catalogo ragionato, ed. I. Tomassoni (Milan: Skira, 2011); Duccio Trombadori, De Dominicis amico pittore: Storia e cronistoria di un sodalizio, (Falciano (RSM): Maretti Editore, 2012); De Dominicis: Scritti sull’opera e riflessioni dell’artista, ed. G. Guercio (Turin: Allemandi, 2014 [2001]), which also contains a bibliography up to 2012; Gabriele Guercio, L’arte non evolve: L’universo immobile di Gino De Dominicis (Monza: Johan & Levi, 2015). 3 André Parrot, “L’univers des formes,” in Sumer (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–1) (Vol.1), 86. 4 A belief confirmed in part by recent archeological studies indicating that Gilgamesh was definitely an architect, since sources attribute the design for the city walls of Uruk to him. I am grateful to Giovanni Pettinato for having discussed this point in conversation during the spring of 2001. 5 Germano Celant, “Gino De Dominicis” in De Dominicis, Scritti sull’opera e riflessioni dell’artista, ed. G. Guercio (Turin: Allemandi, 2014), 173. 6 Carmelo Bene, Nostra Signora dei Turchi (Milan: Sugar, 1966), 47. 7 Two versions of this document exist. Lettera sull’immortalità, Roma, 10 settembre 1970 and Lettera sull’immortalità, 10 aprile 1970 respectively appeared at the beginning and end of Gino De Dominicis, the catalog published by L’Attico for the artist’s second solo show at the gallery in April 1970, later reprinted in Gino De Dominicis: Catalogo ragionato, op. cit., 234–7; Gino De Dominicis: L’immortale, op. cit., 87–90; De Dominicis: Scritti, op. cit., 247–55.

Our Lady of Warka

91

8 Antonio Negri, Il dominio e il sabotaggio (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978). 9 See Furio Jesi, Cultura di destra. Con tre inediti e un’intervista (Rome: nottetempo, 2011). 10 Umberto Eco, “Indecisi a tutto. Incognite elettorali: come voterà il partito degli incerti,” No. 21, XXV, May 27, 1979: 8–13. 11 The situation has been described by Rita Tribodi: “Qua la destra!, dice Stalin a Nietzsche,” L’Espresso No. 25, XXV, June 24, 1979: 67–76. 12 Books widely read in the context of the former Left included The Grammar of Living (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) by David Cooper, who examined the use of LSD as a therapeutic experience. 13 On the dynamics of co-­origination, co-­dependence, and co-­arising as pivotal in overcoming dualistic models of knowledge and experience, see especially Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 14 Dick’s statement is quoted here from Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, trans. T. Bent (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), np. For Dick’s entire talk on September 24, 1977, see https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=KGyhT5nVsEU 15 In Valis, Dick often implies that “Thomas” may actually be Didymus Judas Thomas, the author of one of the sacred gnostic texts, discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 and published in 1959; see The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts Complete in One Volume, ed. M. Meyer (New York: HarperOne, 2007). 16 On the dichotomy between the immortality of the soul (for the Greeks) and the resurrection of the dead (for Christians and Jews), see the still valuable collection of texts Immortality and Resurrection, with essays by O. Culliman, H.A. Wolfson, W. Jaeger, H.J. Cadbury, ed. and with an introduction by K. Stendhal (New York: the Macmillan Company, 1965). See also Resurrection and Immortality: A Selection from the Drew Lectures on Immortality, ed. C.S. Duthie (London: Bagster, 1979). 17 Julian Barbour, The End of Time (London: Phoenix, 2000).

Section II

Re-­imagining Realism

5

Transatlantic Exchanges. Piero Dorazio: Non-­objective Art vs. Abstract Expressionism? Davide Colombo

By comparing Italian and American literature on Italy’s and America’s artistic panoramas during the 1950s, this essay proposes a critical analysis of the Italian artist Piero Dorazio as an effective and useful case study to understand the broader artistic relations between Italy and the United States, and to appreciate how the complexity of this transatlantic relationship has long been underestimated.1 As will be shown, after World War II and the end of “presumed” fascist isolationism, Dorazio set out to establish contacts with foreign artists, critics, and dealers to gain first-­hand experience of the most advanced international artistic practices, and thereby bridge a gap in knowledge concerning avant-­garde artists. Other young artists also undertook similar endeavours, but since Dorazio was one of the first and most active, his interactions with the American artistic panorama stand out as an ideal focus for this study. Indeed, Dorazio was able to create an exceptional network of relations with American artists, critics, dealers and collectors during the 1950s, even before he began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Fine Arts a decade later. This essay also explores Dorazio’s discussions with one of his first and most privileged spokespersons in US—Hilla von Rebay, the director of the Museum of Non-­objective Painting in New York, which played such an important role in spreading awareness of European avant-­garde and abstract art in the US.2 The essay then examines Dorazio’s support to Futurists’ research in the US, and concludes by evaluating the effects of the innovative American painting on this Italian artist’s works. The key point addressed in this chapter is that Dorazio considered the avant-­ gardes as the vital foundation for a perceivably urgent renewal of abstract painting in the postwar period. Furthermore, it will be revealed how Dorazio rediscovered the European avant-­gardes not only by looking at Italian artists such as Giacomo Balla and Atanasio Soldati, along with other European artists,

96

Postwar Italian Art History Today

but also through the lens of America’s mediation and reception of European abstract art. In fact, in his more advanced artworks of the late 1950s, Dorazio successfully merged European avant-­garde lessons with the essence of new American artistic ideas and languages. This study therefore aims to shed light on how, in Italy, innovative positions and examples originating from the US were able to take root in the updated reception and learning of the European (and Italian) art tradition of the early twentieth century. Thanks to various methodological and disciplinary contributions dating from the 1970s, the historical and critical literature on Abstract Expressionism has allowed a more intricate redefinition of American artistic output in the 1950s. Moreover, it has produced an assessment of the socio-­political implications concerning the production, communication, and circulation of American art and culture. These studies have increasingly challenged the canonical view of Abstract Expressionism, reconfiguring the understanding of the movement in a variety of postmodern directions. Indeed, no longer or not only do we study Abstract Expressionism’s style, technique, influence, and iconography, but we also adopt more theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches concerning psychological, gender- and class-­based, socio-­political, semiotic and deconstructive factors.3 Conversely, however, a similar analysis of Italy’s artistic scene after World War II has to be developed and expounded. This is largely because, for a long time, the Italian analysis was hindered by a historiography and reasoning by -isms and pre-­ packaged counter-­positions between Abstraction and Realism, which tended to present us with an overly compact and clear-­cut picture. In such a reading, the relationships of cause and effect appear direct and immediate, and the influences of different artistic systems and environments are clearly defined. However, Italy’s artistic situation in the 1950s was certainly more elaborate and complex than is usually imagined or suggested by the artistic literature. The very terms “abstraction” and “realism” are ambiguous. They have produced continuous misunderstanding and successive rigid clarifications, and they have also been influenced by non-­artistic and historical-­political factors.4 Specifically, we may recall the direct interference by the PCI (the Italian Communist Party) supporting the painting of Realismo.5 But it is also undeniable that Abstraction and, above all, Informale were used ideologically as an international response to Realism and its politics.6 As a consequence, the Informale lesson of abstract art production in Italy during the 1950s gained prominence over other abstract proposals. The word Informale—according to the French Informel—was first used in Italy by Toni Toniato in his article “L’arte possibile” published in I 4 soli in

Transatlantic Exchanges

97

July–September 1954. The term appeared in various texts from 1956–7, but it became prevalent after the monographic issue of Il Verri dedicated to “L’informale” in 1961.7 Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s there was an attempt to propose Italian postwar abstract production under the label of Informale,8 perhaps, in order to remedy the inability of Italy’s abstract art scene to “make a system” during that decade, in the sense of presenting itself on an international level. Ultimately, this Informale interpretation failed as it was too short-­lived and patchy, given that the artistic panorama was synergic and more complex, with an overlapping of artistic groups, movements and areas of research, all animated by great intellectual and emotional involvement. Gradually, the extensive and all-­ inclusive use of the word Informale deviated from an embryonic idea well explained by Calvesi. While rejecting any specific formal or stylistic features, he had proposed Informale as a critical and creative attitude that characterized a time of crisis and development such as the period after World War II. In his view, Informale represented a new awareness of art, a new relationship between artists and their work, as well as a phenomenal idea of form and space.9 Yet in more recent cases too, the distinctive features of Informale also came to be recognized in formal and technical elements—sign, gesture, and material—gaining an extensive, if not exclusive, value. Meanwhile, abroad and especially in the US, interest in Italian art was not selective between realism or abstraction, unless in the context of specific attention to either realistic or abstract art. Rather, it was the Italian identity itself that was at the core of this overseas attention by Americans, and it was connected to their great passion for historical Italian art and traditions, and with efforts to restore Italy’s war-­damaged monuments through the initiative of the American government with various institutions, such as the American Academy in Rome, the National Association for Restoring Monuments, the Italian Association for Italian War-Damaged Monuments,10 and the American Committee for the Restoration of Italian Monuments. We can also assume that the absence of any specific center of attraction— capable of excluding all others in America’s interest for Italian art—facilitated a narrative that undermined the international and US success of Italian art throughout the 1950s, while also fueling the reception and the literary fortune of Arte Povera. Nonetheless, after the Twentieth Century Italian Art exhibition held at MoMA in 1949, Americans’ interest in Italian modern art (and in postwar art too) gathered even more momentum, with many exhibitions on Italian art and

98

Postwar Italian Art History Today

design11 being organized by several US institutions, museums, and galleries. Between 1950 and 1965, for example, the American Federation of Arts staged more than forty traveling exhibitions around the US involving a number of Italian artists, as well as ten collective shows dedicated solely to Italian contemporary art.12 These were often organized in collaboration with Italian galleries, and were greater in number than the exhibitions dedicated to any other country. Despite this abundance of exhibitions on contemporary Italian art, many slipped into oblivion with the result that it was always the same familiar information that was circulated, even in the wake of other important contributions.13 With just a few significant exceptions,14 artistic literature usually falls short of grasping the complex nature of American interest for Italian art and the exchanges between Italy and the US during the 1950s and 1960s. The same can be said for the keen attention that many Italian artists—such as Afro Basaldella, Piero Dorazio, Giuseppe Santomaso, Toti Scialoja, and Tancredi Parmeggiani—reserved for the new American art, Abstract Expressionism first of all, which became one of their main points of reference for updating and rethinking their European avant-­garde tradition. For Dorazio, the avant-­gardes represented the essential starting point for a renewal of painting that was felt to be so urgent in the period after World War II, with the aim of outlining an exit strategy from the easy and decorative results that had undermined some abstract art. His rediscovery of the European avant-­ gardes occurred on two levels. On the one hand, he directly studied Italian artists such as Giacomo Balla and Atanasio Soldati, as well as other European artists thanks to contacts with young French artists and critics from 1947 onwards; and on the other hand, he absorbed an American mediation and reception of European abstract art. After World War II, several Italian intellectuals and artists left their homeland, driven by a desire for renewal that projected them towards the international cultural panorama, and Dorazio provides an exhaustive case in point. His insatiable thirst for knowledge is demonstrated by his contacts with foreign artists, critics, and dealers, as well as by his travels in Europe (to Prague in 1947, to France in 1947, 1948 and 1950, and to Germany in 1949) and also to the US in 1953–4 and during the 1960s. The historic premise motivating this aspiration is well known and perhaps also mythicized: the desire to renovate and gain direct experience of cutting-­edge international artistic projects, thanks to a “new Italian Renaissance” after the war and the end of fascist isolationism.15 These same

Transatlantic Exchanges

99

ambitions also underpinned a number of art magazines—for example AZ. Arte d’oggi (1949–52), MAC Bulletin (1949–53), Numero (1949–53), Spazio (1950–3), Arti Visive (1952–8), and Civiltà delle Macchine (1953–8)—which were thus inspired in their rediscovery and continuation of the example handed down from the European avant-­garde masters and the new international research. Furthermore, a similar impulse towards renewal and discovery also influenced the historical reconstruction produced by the Venice Biennale in the editions after World War II directed by Rodolfo Pallucchini (1948–56).16 However, fascist isolationism—a key component of the artistic and cultural debate in postwar Italy (but also in the US 17)—is perhaps a “false myth” fostered for historical and political reasons that should be re-­examined case by case, also taking into consideration the generation gap. After World War II, the overlapping of fascism and Italian modern artistic production was a problem to be neutralized due to its political and moral implications. But in the polemical wake of a long postwar period, from the late 1960s onwards attempts were progressively made to apply a genuine historical perspective in the analysis and understanding of Italian art during the 1930s.18 More recently, too, there has been a need for a renovated interpretation of the “supposed” cultural isolationism suffered by Italy at the hands of fascism. This new approach appears to have been anticipated in 1950 by the architect Gio Ponti, who, commenting on MoMA’s new collection of Italian modern art after the exhibition Twentieth-­century Italian Art, asserted a historical approach that could accept the chronological overlapping of fascism and Italian art during the 1920s and 1930s. For Ponti, it was a big mistake and a “historical lie” to avoid this overlapping, and he rejected the idea of artistic isolationism experienced on account of the regime.19 Similarly, the older artist Corrado Cagli—Italian painter of Jewish heritage who had fled Europe because of the racial laws—opposed this idea of a new Italian Renaissance on the grounds that there had been no lack of continuiy that would justify the necessity of a rebirth in art.20 Needless to say, the caesura of the war was highly problematic for the younger generations, as well as for Dorazio himself, who, on several occasions, asserted the thesis of fascist isolationism: “After 20 years of virtual quarantine, the exponents of the new culture delighted in debating the merits of existentialism, psychoanalysis, 12-tone music, cubism and expressionism, advanced concepts of city planning, and other movements which had maturated without their participation. The years 1946 and 1947 represented the beginning of a real renaissance.”21

100

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Dorazio felt a pressing need to keep abreast of international abstract art through the study of the European avant-­gardes and their re-­evaluation after World War II with new international experimentations. In his studio, Dorazio opened the Centro Italiano per la documentazione sull’arte astratta (CIDAA, or Italian Center for the Documentation of Abstract Art) at the beginning of 1949 to give as many young artists as possible the opportunity to consult photos, books, and magazines. Then, together with Mino Guerrini and Achille Perilli, he opened the small Age d’Or bookshop and gallery in Rome to exhibit abstract art, and he also published the Forma 2 journal dedicated to Vassily Kandinsky in June 1950. The Homage to Kandinsky publication included texts by Max Bill, Charles Estienne, Enrico Prampolini, Nina Kandinsky, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Hilla von Rebay, Dorazio, Kenneth C. Lindsay, Perilli, and Kandinsky himself. Dorazio’s text titled “Kandinsky According to Form” explains how Kandinsky successfully rode out the crisis in artistic language by proposing a new compositional system in which “the evocative shapes take on different and charming features of a world that lives again in the memory and they create a new plastic organicity.” Furthermore, Dorazio closely studied Der Blaue Reiter, the Bauhaus, the Ulm School, De Stijl, and Le Corbusier’s work to develop his own thinking on the synthesis of plastic art, as well as focusing on certain specific features and artists such as Piet Mondrian, László Moholy-Nagy, and Georges Vantongerloo, one of whose major exhibitions he curated at Fondazione Origine (from May 9 to May 25, 1953), showing works produced between 1927 and 1950.22 Fondazione Origine was an important art foundation based in Rome and directed by the artist Ettore Colla from 1952 as an evolution of his Galleria Origine opened in the previous year. With its interdisciplinary approach, this institution aimed to be a center for international documentation and information on abstract art, also publishing the art magazine Arti Visive (1952–8).23 For 1952–3, Dorazio was involved in the activities of Fondazione Origine and in the direction of the magazine with Ettore Colla and the artist Enrico Prampolini (who was director of the Arts Club in Rome), and he supported a specific idea of abstract art, that is non-­objective art. Consequently, he also curated the highly significant show of non-­objective works from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation held at Fondazione Origine from January 24 to February 25, 1953, presenting thirty works by Josef Albers, J. Jay McVicker, Robert Jay Wolff, Rebay, Ilya Bolotowsky, Lucia Stern, Jean Xceron, Florence Brillinger, Erich MüllerKraus, Rolf Cavael, Otto Hoffman, Lloyd R. Ney, and Albert Patecky.24

Transatlantic Exchanges

101

After several attempts, on July 6, 1953 Piero Dorazio finally arrived in the US—a much-­desired destination—to attend the International Summer Seminar, the exchange program of the Summer School at Harvard University established in 1951.25 For Dorazio, New York represented the new center of art after World War II. In fact, he made every effort to go there and to establish contacts with American artists, critics, and dealers. One of the earliest and most important of these figures was Hilla von Rebay, the director of the Museum of Non-­objective Painting, with whom Dorazio maintained a close correspondence.26 In their letters, both Rebay and Dorazio impressively supported non-­objective art that had its roots in Europe’s abstract art tradition. Rebay asserted that art had erased every reference to reality and objects, in favor of autonomous inner laws regarding shapes, space, and emotions. In several letters to Dorazio, she insisted on features of space, suggesting a profound study of the spatial interrelationship of forms through an independent spirit and vision. Indeed, it was the clarity itself of space that should inspire artistic creation.27 Rebay proposed a philosophical and spiritual interpretation of non-­objectivity as well as an existential condition that recalls Eastern concepts and theosophy: “What

Figure 5.1  Installation view of Loan Exhibition at the Museum of Non-­objective Painting. First floor, third room, north and east walls. June 20, 1950. Exhibition records. A0003. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York.

102

Postwar Italian Art History Today

you should study is mental physics and the power of breath control—to better contact God’s desires, through art expression, since Non-­objective is God-­ objective.”28 In the important letter dated February 2, 1952, Rebay concludes her analysis of the historical development of non-­objective art, offering a detailed and quite mystical examination of the concept of “non,” which recalls certain notions from the negative theology of God: “The word ‘non’ in itself is of spiritual essence as all mystery of life because it includes the vastness of the universe in its very deep double meaning of denial and content.”29 In a subsequent letter dated February 8, she continued to develop these ideas: “I feel that we should all unite on one simple clarification and realise that ‘non-­ objectivity’ is a most remarkable word, because of the mystical, deep and spiritual meaning of the ‘NON’ itself, as a documentation on the universe which is also NON, as is God, of whose rhythmic power of thought and love we are a part and not in opposition. Because all is itself part of the UNI-verse, and not a MULTIverse, which it would be, if God’s Art and me were two.”30 Rebay recalled that each great and true art—from primitive man to today—is spiritual, religious, and mystical. Accordingly, Dorazio agreed that art is the only creation of man that should be compared with God’s creation by way of nature. Man comes into contact with God through nature, which is God’s creation, as well as through art which is man’s creation: “Therefore art is a vision of the world and of the spirit; it is a religion and not a profession.”31 However, he avoided Rebay’s spiritualistic excesses, as well as her linguistic absolutism. Between 1949 and 1951–2, Dorazio’s painting evolved away from “abstract-­ concrete” art—where works essentially do not derive from objective reality or exterior nature, but from the composition of the artists’ inner qualities and the exterior laws of plastic form, thus creating a new objective reality. In this period, instead, Dorazio moved toward a painting where the composition of space is based on non-­objective and rhythmic laws of counterpoint, as Rebay told Dorazio on several occasions, and as we can see from his presentation in the collective exhibition Tic-Tac of Space at Galleria Origine from June 7 to 20, 1951.32 Dorazio’s new research was to focus on creating an interrelationship between colors, lights, forms, and space; and a re-­thinking of Futurism was the way to go about achieving it. From his familiarity and careful study of paintings by the Divisionists— including Giovanni Segantini, Gaetano Previati, and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, whom he was able to appreciate at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome—Dorazio learned the principal role of color in the composition, using brush strokes to animate the pictorial surface, and even keeping a homogeneity

Transatlantic Exchanges

103

of the plane. He also admired Medardo Rosso’s sculptures. Finally, from Futurists such as Gino Severini (whom he met in Paris in 1947) and especially Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, Dorazio acquired the principles of plastic dynamism: the painting’s surface as an energy field; line and color intrinsically connected together (shape-­color); and color as force and light. Over the 1940s and 1950s, Futurism attracted fresh, profound interest and studies both in Italy and abroad. In July 1950, architect Luigi Moretti dedicated the first issue of Spazio magazine (Rome, 1950–3) to Futurism, publishing an article by Ardengo Soffici titled “The Historical Value of Futurism,” plus a “Homage to Boccioni” written by Christian Zervos and Mario Sironi accompanied by many photos.33 Issue number 4 of Spazio in January–February 1951 presented an inquiry on international non-­objective art introduced by Moretti’s foreword titled “The State of Non-Objective Art,” and also featured important contributions by Giulio Carlo Argan, Michel Seuphor, Léon Degand, and Louis Döry, as well as a panoramic view of the European and SouthAmerican situation described in short editorial texts, and Milton Gendel’s article on “Abstract Art in America.” Finally, the complete and articulate presentation of the history of “Forty Years of Abstract Art in Italy,” written by Severini, Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli, Umberto Bernasconi, and Angelo Canevari, began to point out an important role of Futurism in the history of abstract art, asserting that the Futurist renovation was not only about iconography but also about formal concepts.34 Futurism and, in particular, Giacomo Balla represented the Italian approach to abstract art for Dorazio and the members of the forthcoming Fondazione Origine, together with Atanasio Soldati, an example of constant research into musical modulations and rhythmic cadences within a unitary vision. Indeed, Galleria Origine organized the first important Homage to the Futurist G. Balla show which opened on April 14, 1951. Subsequently, during the autumn of 1952, the magazine Arti Visive—published by Fondazione Origine (1952–8) and initially edited by Colla, Dorazio, and Prampolini—printed Ettore Colla’s article “Abstract Painting and Sculpture by G. Balla,”35 accompanied by several images of iridescent interpenetrations. Furthermore, in the spring 1954 issue, the magazine presented a foreword with the title “Registry for Heroes,”36 which considered Balla and the Lithuanian artist Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis as “heroes” because they were among the first abstract painters. Here again, this critical statement was complemented by Balla’s Compenetrazioni iridescenti (“Iridescent Interpenetrations”)—studies of light through abstract compositions.

104

Postwar Italian Art History Today

On several occasions, Dorazio recalled that he had heard from the sculptor Edgardo Mannucci that Balla, who had been forgotten by the art world, was still alive and residing in Rome. Dorazio began visiting Balla regularly and studying his paintings, drawings, and notebooks, and also became his mediator for overseas contacts. This was especially true for Balla’s presence in the US: thanks to his friendship with Georges Vantongerloo, who interceded with a heartfelt reminder,37 Dorazio was able to propose a Balla exhibition to Rose Fried. Dorazio was thus also introduced to the Fried Gallery circle, where Fritz Glarner and Hans Richter persuaded the dealer to host a solo show of Dorazio’s new works in her gallery. The exhibition The Futurists Balla, Severini 1912–1918 at the Rose Fried Gallery (from January 25 to February 26, 1954)38 was immediately followed by a major collective exhibition on Futurism at the Sidney Janis Gallery from March 22 to May 1, 1954, featuring important artworks from MoMA, Zurich Kunsthaus, and the Loeffler, Mattioli, and Jucker collections.39 Reviewing both exhibitions in the newspaper Momento Sera, Dorazio highlighted their success and the value of Futurism in the present scene of artistic research, but also its profound cohesion with the qualities of America’s contemporary way of life.40 The show at the Fried Gallery presented fifteen paintings and drawings by Balla and nine works by Severini, who had already been contacted by Rose Fried in 1950 after the Twentieth-Century Italian Art exhibition at MoMA, and who had also been encouraged by Glarner.41 This growing interest in Futurism in America during the 1950s reached its height at MoMA in 1961–2 thanks to the extensive Futurism exhibition curated by Peter Selz,42 and the solo show titled Umberto Boccioni: Drawings and Etchings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harry L. Winston, curated by William Lieberman and Elaine Johnson.43 After the exhibition, Luce Balla, the daughter of the Futurist master, entrusted Dorazio with the task of taking a group of later Futurist paintings back to Italy.44 He was also involved in the organization of a second Balla solo show at the Fried Gallery, which, however, was later cancelled. In his book La fantasia dell’arte nella vita moderna (The Fantasy of Art in Modern Life)—written between March 1952 and April 1953, but published in December 1954—Dorazio said about Futurism: “In a complex image they aimed to paint the new concept of space, which time and human emotions establish and connect to the perception of shapes moved by this inner vitality of the world showing itself through the light. Time, space and the human perception and feeling of reality are all tied together with a mutual relativity [. . .] because reality is life itself on the move. [. . .] Forms and matter are a combination of active

Transatlantic Exchanges

105

energies in space as well as human sensations that are modulating this universal according to their perception and their states of mind. [. . .] And isn’t this space— created by multiple and simultaneous points of view of movement that become emotions—similar to today’s art that aims to recreate the poetry and the artist’s vision of the world through an abstract image and a pure plastic emotion?”45 In the series of white reliefs he called Cartographies and exhibited at the Rose Fried Gallery in New York from April 27 to May 22, 1954, Dorazio developed a contemporary drawing style with few lines in empty spaces. In this sense, he was almost physically renovating Boccioni’s idea of “line-­forces,” or certain dynamic lines, flows, and convergences from Balla’s paintings of 1913, without forgetting the influence of specific paintings by Vantongerloo and the impact of Ben Nicholson’s white reliefs. Dorazio made Cartographies by attaching pegs and boards to rectangular wood panels, which in turn were covered with gesso (apart from a few colored points), producing shadows in abstract patterns. The physical light producing the shadows became an architectural element of the composition and the space. Dorazio thus surpassed the two dimensions and the frontal view of the painting: “Here the relationship of forms and colors is not only perceived in a frontal view, but also as if the spectator were above, under or facing the image all at once.”46 A number of reliefs were purchased by important collectors and artists such as Sylvia Pisitz, Leo Lionni, Enrico Donati, Bernard Rudofsky, Kay Hillmann, and Lydia Winston, and Dorazio’s works were subsequently included in the extensive Collecting Modern Art exhibition of the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lewis Winston, which opened at the Detroit Institute of Arts and travelled to several cities in 1957–8. Two years after his solo show, Dorazio’s works were again presented at the Fried Gallery in the great International Collage Exhibition, featuring eighty-­five works by early European and American masters, and including the other Italians Alberto Burri, Alberto Magnelli, Angelo Savelli, and Severini. Thanks to his ability to maintain relationships with artists, dealers, and critics, Dorazio enjoyed many important and fruitful exchanges in New York, and he became a landmark for transatlantic exchanges and relations between the US and Italy. During 1954, Dorazio wrote several articles for Momento Sera about the American way of life and its social and economic effects, its extravagances and potential, and about American architecture and New York’s skyscrapers. In July 1954, his text “New Italian Art: A Promise” appeared in Art Digest, composed as a sort of reply to the Younger European Painters show curated by James Johnson Sweeney at the Guggenheim Museum.47 Later, a more in-­depth analysis would

106

Postwar Italian Art History Today

be included in the collective book The World of Abstract Art, published by Wittenborn in 1957.48 In New York, Dorazio thus encountered artists such as Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly (who were known in Italy in 1951), as well as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and many other Abstract Expressionists, whose artistic research he greatly appreciated. In addition, in a text dedicated to American and European painting published in the magazine Il Punto on October 10, 1959,49 while orienting critics towards lesser-­known elements of European art, Dorazio asserted that American art revealed original artistic features and techniques. For Dorazio, the new American art provided an innovative way to rethink the European avant-­gardes. American painters had sought and discovered a new dimension and a fitting expressive language beyond European painting. The great vitality and energy of American painting stemmed from an authentic attitude of revolt manifested by the spirit, in reaction to society’s conformist tendencies, which were progressive in economics, but overtly prudent and conservative in culture. The fresh and genuine technique of American painters was functional, too, not just as a matter of practical invention, but also as a painting method that naturally conformed to its own vision. Their new expressive freedom allowed forms to appear spontaneously as the data of a phenomenon. As a result, the visual values of painting—color and space—could now be found in hitherto unseen forms, features, and rhythms. More than other Italians, Dorazio’s analysis seems to approach the theoretical considerations of Clement Greenberg concerning modernism and flatness as a specific feature of modern painting. Dorazio met Greenberg in New York in 1954 and their written and spoken exchanges continued for many years, especially during the 1960s, when they were united by a great appreciation for Noland’s abstract painting. Abstract Expressionist works not only prompted Dorazio to search for a freer use of abstract elements, but also for a new methodological approach in the mid 1950s until 1958–9, when he arrived at his own, mature artistic language. Thus, an analysis of the formal development of Dorazio’s work is useful to better understand how different approaches and ideas of art were merged together. During this process, Dorazio learned from the Americans the concept of painting space as an open and energetic field. In this conception, an all-­over repetitive pattern covers the pictorial surface, creating an abstract and emotional image based on the overlapping and stratification of colors, shapes, lines, signs, and

Transatlantic Exchanges

107

gestures, a trait we can also identify in Rothko, de Kooning, Motherwell, Mark Tobey, and so on. In 1955–7, Dorazio was still striving to develop these features in his own work, repeating and testing formal solutions used by American painters such as Glarner, de Kooning, and Motherwell. He continued to produce his last three-­ dimensional experimentations until 1956, before devoting himself solely to painting and focusing on the specific features of this medium. In this phase, he identified a way to rethink and connect Abstract Expressionism and Futurism, starting from a mental familiarity with the geometric organization of the composition inspired by non-­objective art. Finally, thanks to the example of Abstract Expressionism and Greenberg’s theoretical thinking on color-­field painting, Dorazio was able to conceive a formal solution to what he had grasped from Balla’s artistic idiom when he reviewed the Balla and Severini exhibition at the Fried Gallery in Art News in 1954. Indeed, for the first time, Dorazio interpreted Balla’s iridescent interpenetrations as “a series of purely geometric abstractions (resembling spectroscopic analyses).”50 In this way, Dorazio merged Balla’s lesson on the interpenetration of light and motion as the essence of reality with Rothko’s lesson regarding the stratification of flat color layers in an energetic field and expanded space. He replaced Balla’s mechanical interpenetration of planes, lines, colors, and light (mindful of his mechanical conception of time in his Futurist beginnings) with a vibrating and open stratification of planes, lines, and color-­ light. At the same time, however, he did not overlook the effects of using the chromatic method pioneered by the Divisionists and Futurists. With the structure of his Reticoli—his works executed from 1958–9 and based on chromatic relations defining space and image—Dorazio identified his own formalist and modernist language, seeking to introduce a strict discipline to possible improvisations. Indeed, although complying with order, the signs of color retain some autonomous development, to avoid both standardization and decorative patterns, as well as unnecessary results. Dorazio was searching for a prevalent chromatic light as a synthesis of colors, reducing the thickness of pictorial matter to make light vibrate more freely. And finally, before intersecting and then juxtaposing, he applied brush strokes that created a regular and diagonal rhythm. The stratification of wefts establishes a chromatic and structural vibration on the painting’s surface, suggesting effects of both depth and flatness through the liquidity of color itself and the style of the tangle. And here, Balla and Rothko also very much spring to mind.

108

Postwar Italian Art History Today

In this way, Dorazio accomplished his developmental path with principles derived from avant-­gardes and non-­objective art, which were rethought in a new light and from different points of view. He then merged these principles with the new basics of Abstract-Expressionist studies in the US, which were connected with a new idea of space. Dorazio evolved a mature expressive language that fell within the renewed debate surrounding monochrome, the primarily emphasis on the visual, as well as perceptual tendencies in abstraction between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. In the light of this analysis, it is clear that the example of Dorazio effectively demonstrates how exchanges between Italy and America were mutual and bidirectional, physically and theoretically: a round-­trip between Rome–New York. In Dorazio, innovative art originating from the US was able to take root just in his updated reception and learning of the European and Italian tradition of the early twentieth century (also thanks to an American perspective). At that point, a redefined idea of space—imagined as a dynamic field—became the new protagonist of his abstract language, where form, color, and gesture were necessarily conceived in close relation to the space itself.

Notes 1 The research for this essay was largely made possible thanks to the Terra Foundation Travel Grant 2014. Thanks are also due to Karole Vail (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, currently at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice), Francine Snyder (Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York, currently at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York), and to Joy Weider (Archives of American Art, New York). 2 See Karole Vail, ed., The Museum of Non-Objective Painting: Hilla Rebay and the Origins of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009). 3 See, among others, Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: the Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); Serge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999); Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ellen G. Landau, ed., Reading Abstract Expressionism. Context and Critique (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2005); Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of

Transatlantic Exchanges

109

American Art, 1940s–1980s. A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate, 2015). 4 Flavio Fergonzi, Lessicalità visiva dell’italiano. La critica dell’arte contemporanea 1945–1960 (Pisa: Scuola Normale Press,1996), XIII–XV. 5 See Antonello Negri, Il Realismo. Dagli anni Trenta agli anni Ottanta (Bari: Laterza, 1994). 6 See Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948–64. Italy and the Idea of Europe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007). 7 Fergonzi, Lessicalità visiva dell’italiano, XXIV, XXXI–XXXII. 8 See “L’Informale,” in Il Verri No. 3, June 1961; Maurizio Calvesi, Dario Durbé, and Giacinto Nudi, eds., L’informale in Italia fino al 1957 (Rome: De Luca, 1963); Maurizio Calvesi, Le due avanguardie (Milan: Lerici, 1966); Enrico Crispolti, L’Informale. Storia e poetica (Assisi and Rome: Carucci, 1971); Renato Barilli, “Dall’informale caldo all’informale freddo,” in Renato Barilli, Gillo Dorfles, and Filiberto Menna, Al di là della pittura (Milan: Fabbri-Bompiani, 1975), 1–32; Francesco Arcangeli, Dal romanticismo all’informale (Turin: Einaudi, 1977); Renato Barilli, Informale, oggetto, comportamento (Milan: Feltrinelli Barilli, 1978). 9 Calvesi, Le due avanguardie, 204–7. 10 Emilio Lavagnino, Fifty War-­damaged Monuments of Italy (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1946). 11 See Handicraft as a Fine Art in Italy, curated by C.L. Ragghianti at House of Italian Handicraft, New York (1948) and, above all, the great exhibition Italy at Work. Her Renaissance in Design Today, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and circulating around the US between 1950 and 1953: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Minneapolis, Houston, St. Louis, Toledo, Buffalo, Pittsburg, Detroit, Baltimore, and Providence (Meyric R. Rogers, Italy at Work. Her Renaissance in Design Today [Rome: Compagnia Nazionale Artigiana, 1950]). 12 Contemporary Italian Paintings, 1951; Five Contemporary Italians, 1952–3; Major Works in Minor Scale: Paintings and Sculpture by Major Italian Artists, 1955–7; Italian Art of the 20th Century, 1957–8; Painting in Postwar Italy, 1958–60; Contemporary Italian Drawings and Collage, 1959–61; The New Generation of Italian Art, 1960–1; Modern Mosaics of Ravenna, 1961–2. 13 See Germano Celant, Anna Costantini, Roma-New York 1948–1964 (Milan: Charta, 1993). 14 See, for example, Maria Grazia Messina, “Il collage negli anni cinquanta. Una storia americana (o quasi),” in Collage/Collages dal Cubismo al New Dada, eds. Maria Mimita Lamberti and Maria Grazia Messina (Milan: Electa, 2007), 300–20; Davide Colombo, “ ‘Arti Visive’ e Ann Salzman: un ponte tra Italia e America sulla scena artistica degli anni Cinquanta,” L’Uomo nero, VIII, No. 7–8 (December 2011): 86–107; Raffaele Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance: Italian Art at MoMA,

110

Postwar Italian Art History Today

1940–1949,” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 135, No. 2 (June 2012): 147–69; Francesco Tedeschi, New York New York. La riscoperta dell’America (Milan: Electa, 2017). 15 On this topic see Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance: Italian Art at MoMA, 1940– 1949,” 147–69; and Davide Colombo, “1949: Twentieth-Century Italian Art al MoMA di New York,” in Tedeschi, New York New York, 102–9. 16 See Maria Cristina Bandera, Il carteggio Longhi-Pallucchini. Le prime Biennali del dopoguerra 1948–1956 (Milan: Charta 1999). 17 See, for example, what Alfred Barr Jr. and James T. Soby wrote in the catalog of the exhibition Twentieth-­century Italian Art: “The climate for art is propitious in Italy just now, with the shackles of Fascist isolationism rusting empty on the ground, and we have sought—again without claim to finality—to indicate what directions the newer creative impetus is taking” (James T. Soby and Alfred H. Barr Jr., “Foreword,” in Twentieth-­ century Italian Art, eds. James T. Soby, Alfred H. Barr Jr. (New York: MoMA 1949), 5. 18 The first attempt to study and evaluate this complicated and controversial passage of twentieth-­century Italian art appeared in 1967 with the important exhibition titled Arte Moderna in Italia. 1915–1935, held at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and curated by C.L. Ragghianti. More recently, this critical perspective was developed in the exhibition Anni ’30. Arti oltre il Fascismo, curated by A. Negri with S. Bignami, P. Rusconi, G. Zanchetti, and S. Ragionieri at Palazzo Strozzi in 2012 (Antonello Negri, et al., Anni ’30. Arti oltre il Fascismo (Florence: Giunti, 2012). 19 Gio Ponti, “The Italian Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York,” Domus, no. 250 (September 1950): 59–62, 64. 20 Corrado Cagli, “Today’s ‘Italian Renaissance’,” Harper’s Bazaar (March 1948): 233–7. 21 Piero Dorazio, “Culture in Transition,” New Republic, Vol. 129, No. 10 (October 5, 1953): 21. Part of the issue was dedicated to the arts in Italy with texts by Nicola Chiaromonte, Eric Bentley, Parker Tyler, and Dorazio; the contributions were also briefly reviewed in College English, Vol. 15, No. 3 (December 1953): 187–8. 22 See “G. Vantongerloo,” Arti Visive, I, No. 4–5 (May 1953). 23 See Davide Colombo, “ ‘Arti Visive’ e dintorni”, in Claudio Parmiggiani, Emilio Villa. Poeta e scrittore (Milano: Mazzotta, 2008), 285–97; Barbara Drudi, Giacomo Marcucci, Arti Visive: 1952–1958 (Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2011); Davide Colombo, “ ‘Arti Visive’ e Ann Salzman: un ponte tra Italia e America sulla scena artistica degli anni Cinquanta,” in L’Uomo nero, VIII, No.7–8 (December 2011): 86–107. 24 See Piero Dorazio, Mostra Fondazione R. Solomon Guggenheim (Rome: Fondazione Origine, 1953); Piero Dorazio, “Mostra del museo S.R. Guggenheim alla ‘Fondazione Origine’ di Roma,” in Arti Visive, I Series, No. 4–5 (May 1953). 25 See Report of the 1953 Harvard International Seminar, International Seminar: general records, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, and two letters to Hilla von Rebay on 9 August 1953 and 23 August 1953, Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York.

Transatlantic Exchanges

111

26 The correspondence between Piero Dorazio and Hilla von Rebay, held at the Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive, Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York, consists of seventy-­seven letters written between June 25, 1948 and October 12, 1957 (bulk 1948–53). Furthermore, Dorazio presented a number of non-­objective paintings at the Loan Exhibition no. 43, Museum of Non-Objective Painting, New York, from June 20 to October 9, 1950. 27 See the letter from Hilla von Rebay to Piero Dorazio, New York, August 24, 1949, Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York. 28 Letter from Hilla von Rebay to Piero Dorazio, New York, August 29, 1952, Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York. 29 Letter from Hilla von Rebay to Piero Dorazio, Franton Court Greens Farm, Connecticut, February 2, 1952, Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York. 30 Letter from Hilla von Rebay to Piero Dorazio, Franton Court Greens Farm, Connecticut, February 8, 1952, Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York. 31 Letter from Piero Dorazio to Hilla von Rebay, Rome, February 11, 1952, Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York. 32 See the letter from Piero Dorazio to Hilla von Rebay, Rome, June 23, 1951, Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives, New York. 33 Ardengo Soffici, “Valore storico del Futurismo”; Christian Zervos, “Omaggio a Boccioni’; Mario Sironi, “Omaggio a Boccioni,” in Spazio, I, No. 1 (July 1950): 9–16. 34 Luigi Moretti, ed., “Punto dell’arte non obiettiva,” in Spazio, II, No. 4 (January– February 1951): 17–54. 35 Ettore Colla, “Pittura e scultura astratta di G. Balla,” in Arti Visive, I Series, No. 2 (September–October 1952). 36 “Anagrafe per gli eroi,” in Arti Visive, I Series, No. 8–9 (Spring 1954). 37 See the letter from Georges Vantongerloo to Rose Fried, Paris, July 1, 1953, Rose Fried Gallery Records. Archives of American Art, New York. 38 The Futurists Balla, Severini.1912–1918 (New York: Rose Fried Gallery, 1954). With a text by Venturi, Lionello from the book Italian Painting (Paris: Skira, 1952) and a text by Maritain, Jacques. 39 Futurism (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1954). With a selection of texts by Sidney Janis, Sources in XX Century European Painting and Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944). 40 Piero Dorazio, “Il Futurismo a casa sua,” in Momento Sera (May 1954). 41 See the letter from Rose Fried to Gino Severini, New York, August 19, 1950, Rose Fried Gallery Records. Archives of American Art, New York. 42 Joshua C. Taylor, Futurism (New York: MoMA, 1961). 43 William S. Lieberman and E. Johnson, Umberto Boccioni: Drawings and Etchings from the Collection of Mr. & Mrs. Harry L. Winston (New York: MoMA, 1961). A reduced version of the show Umberto Boccioni: Drawings and Etchings from the

112

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Collection of Mr. & Mrs. Harry L. Winston (held at MoMA in 1961) circulated in the Netherlands, England, and Scotland between 1962 and 1965. 44 See the letter from Luce Balla to Rose Fried, Rome, May 10, 1954, Rose Fried Gallery Records. Archives of American Art, New York. 45 Piero Dorazio, La fantasia dell’arte nella vita moderna (Rome: Polveroni e Quinti, 1954). 46 Piero Dorazio, Cartographies (New York: Rose Fried Gallery, 1954). Dorazio showed seven drawings, two paintings, and twenty reliefs produced between 1952 and 1954; Hans Namuth photographed some of them. In the review of the show published in Art Digest, the author of the text praised the more complex structures and the flexible visual perception modulated by the physical changes of light and shadow [A.N., “Piero Dorazio,” Art Digest, XXVIII, No. 15 (May 1, 1954): 19]. 47 James J. Sweeney, Younger European Painters (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1953). Dorazio commented on the show Younger European Painters and the corresponding one Younger American Painters (James J. Sweeney, Younger American Painters (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1954) in “New York: Deux Expositions d’Art Contemporain,” in Art d’Aujourd’hui, No. 4–5 (May–June 1954). 48 See Piero Dorazio, “Recent Italian Painting and Its Environment,” in The World of Abstract Art (New York: Wittenborn, 43–52). 49 Piero Dorazio, “Pittura americana e pittura europea,” in Il Punto (October 10, 1959). 50 Piero Dorazio, “The future that ended in 1915,” in Art News, Vol. 52, No. 9 (1954): 54–5, 84–5.

6

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6: The 1964 Venice Biennale, Renato Mambor’s “Thread,” and Pop as a Global Phenomenon Christopher Bennett

I was overwhelmed by and curious about the explosiveness of consumerism, although I didn’t want to have any part in it. Renato Mambor, “On Pop Art,” 20061 The 1964 Venice Biennale constituted a watershed within the broader Italian reception of American Pop Art. That year, Alan R. Solomon, director of the Jewish Museum in New York, grouped together works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Chamberlin, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg (alongside Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland) for display at the former American Consulate on the Grand Canal and, separately, the Gardens at the Biennale’s main site. Solomon, as Luigia Lornadelli has noted, “wanted to promote a cohesive movement as the expression of a clear, well-­defined cultural identification.”2 That year Rauschenberg was also awarded the Grand Prize for combine pictures (such as Third Time Painting, 1963) and silk-­screened works featuring patently American imagery including bald eagles and (the recently assassinated) John F. Kennedy speaking. The confluence of Solomon’s highly unified “American” display and Rauschenberg’s award, which for many symbolized a shift in power in the art world from Europe to New York,3 generated a cultural storm: the 1964 Biennale would quickly become associated with the coming of the “Americans” to Italy and Europe like a tornado.4 Italian art critics and journalists, such as Antonio Del Guercio, Berenice, and Fortunato Bellonzi, writing for outlets like Rinascita, Paese Sera, and Nuova Antologia, denounced the intense American presence and “Pop-Art” at the Biennale, and in such coverage these two things were largely treated as one and

114

Postwar Italian Art History Today

the same.5 Historically, in a blanket way, such voices conflated works like Rauschenberg’s Tracer (1964), Dine’s White Bathroom (1963), Oldenburg’s Soft Telephone (1963), Johns’s Three Flags (1958), and Chamberlin’s Exciter (1963) into a single, incoming vector of “Pop.” Never mind (and more astute critics like Pierre Restany or Gillo Dorfles remembered such things) that Rauschenberg’s combines, with their tenacious engagement with gritty, day-­to-day realities, material sensuousness, and ties to Neo-Dada, or, similarly, the production of Dine, Chamberlin, or Johns, never fit unproblematically into the kind of classic “Pop” aesthetic pursued by Andy Warhol or, a primary figure at the next Biennale of 1966, Roy Lichtenstein. The press’s generalized conflation of “America” and “Pop” was symptomatic of Italy’s social and historical circumstances in the early to mid-1960s. At this time Italians were being rapidly transformed into mass consumers (with the United States and its own variety of mass consumerism looming large on the horizon); transitioning from a predominantly agricultural to an increasingly urban society; and experiencing tremendous internal migration. Indeed, as Lornadelli has aptly observed, “it is worth pointing out that everything new in those years was referred to as ‘American’.”6 What is lesser known is that by the time of the 1964 Biennale a concerted appraisal among Italian artists of American cultural formations, including varieties of Pop, had already begun to take shape. That year in the central pavilion, the Roman art historian and critic Maurizio Calvesi organized a display of what is now broadly known as “Italian Pop” or La Scuola di piazza del Popolo (The School of Piazza del Popolo) including paintings by Giosetta Fioroni, Mario Schifano, Titina Maselli, Tano Festa, and Franco Angeli. As early as 1960, Schifano, Festa, and Angeli had presented their research into urban life at 5 Pittori-Roma ’60 (5 Painters-Rome, ’60) at Gian Tommaso Liverani’s Galleria La Salita, a primary venue for Italian Pop alongside the most important of all places for such work, Plinio De Martiis’s Galleria La Tartaruga. De Martiis had run Tartaruga for some time but in 1963 moved the gallery to Piazza del Popolo. In February 1963, De Martiis inaugurated Tartaruga’s new location with Tredici pittori a Roma (Thirteen Painters in Rome), an exhibition including Angeli, Festa, Fioroni, Renato Mambor, Jannis Kounellis, Fabio Mauri, and other Italians alongside Cy Twombly, who had been living in Rome since 1957. Between 1960 and 1963 a number of the protagonists of Italian Pop were living off Via Tuscolana far from the city center and, after trekking into town, would regularly meet at Café Rosati in Piazza del Popolo.7 When De Martiis opened Tartaruga’s

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

115

new post in 1963, it was located just across from Rosati, and soon these artists became identified, as a “School,” with this particular piazza. “Italian Pop,” however—like parallel artistic trends in America—was never as easily classifiable as this designation makes it seem, and part of the point of this essay is to argue for a fluid view of Italian Pop itself. Although Italian artists linked to this category were cognizant of Pop Art in the US and, moreover, developed their own parallel lines of investigation, what seems to have influenced many of them was less their work’s relationship to American Pop per se than the very system of art production and distribution the US seemed to embody.8 In the early to mid-1960s, Mambor, for instance (alongside Sergio Lombardo), attempted to differentiate his and his peers’ experiments from the activities of leading American Pop artists, who he viewed as participating in a definitively different system of artistic production and dissemination. Recently, there has been some fresh investigation into Italian Pop, such as Claire Gilman’s exhibition and catalog devoted to Fioroni at The Drawing Center in 2013.9 Examples of Italian Pop were also featured in two recent exhibitions situating Pop within a more global context, the Walker Art Center’s International Pop (2015) and Tate Modern’s The World Goes Pop (2015–16). Yet there is still little published about these artists in English. This essay, in addition to providing translations of portions of an important study of Italian Pop by the Bologna-­ based art historian Andrea Tugnoli,10 delves further into this topic. At first, it does so in a deliberately broad-­brushed way before moving to ideas expressed by Mambor, which, in my view, provide an accessible “way in” to Italian Pop and its complex facets. The “thread” referred to in my title has two main parts: first, this essay looks into Mambor’s verbalization of a foundational ambivalence felt toward “America” and incoming forms of consumerism roughly between 1960 and 1966; second, it explores Mambor’s own unusually succinct, incisive summary of the artistic procedures his generation pursued. Regarding the second part of Mambor’s “thread,” the artist articulates two specific steps. First, he and his peers emptied the canvas to arrive at a monochromatic ground or opaque screen. Second, thus emptied or voided, they filled the picture with signs culled from everyday, urban life and the contemporary mass media. With respect to Italian Pop’s fluidity, my discussion of this last two-­ step procedure includes some artists typically thought to fall outside the main circle of Italian Pop (as represented at the 1964 Biennale, for example) but whose tactics roughly between 1960 and 1966 overlap with Mambor’s summary, such as the earlier works of Pino Pascali and Kounellis, two figures typically associated

116

Postwar Italian Art History Today

with Arte Povera after Germano Celant’s coinage of this term around August 1967, or Enrico Castellani. This essay also refers to lesser-­known figures loosely aligned with Italian Pop such as Mauri and Umberto Bignardi (and there are others worthy of further investigation including Gianfranco Baruchello, Cesare Tacchi, and Gino Marotta).11 Overall, the second part of Mambor’s “thread,” I argue, ends up casting light on a crucial facet of Italian art around the time of La Scuola di piazza del Popolo, namely, its phenomenological insistence on painting’s having a presence in the physical, material world, and its being derived from the shared space of everyday life. The essay concludes by examining Italian Pop within a more global context, extending beyond the 1960s and Italy so as to open a broader view of Pop less as the product of any single nation and more as an aesthetic option available internationally that might prove appropriate and suggestive in certain social and political conditions.

The 1964 Biennale continued and Mambor’s “Thread,” part I The charged atmosphere at the 1964 Biennale stemmed from a number of factors. Initially, battles emerged around the well-­established debate regarding figuration (or socially committed Socialist Realism) versus abstraction. American Pop, though often figurative or featuring recognizable imagery, was aligned in the far Left or Communist contingent’s view with “abstract” trends due to its “disengagement” from overt political matters and the apperceived decadence of its themes.12 After the American display opened and news of Rauschenberg’s award spread, attention quickly shifted, however, to the dominance displayed by the US and what many took to be a political and cultural invasion.13 Upon seeing the American display, the art historian, representative of the Italian Communist Party, and at one point mayor of Rome Giulio Carlo Argan stated “I would not hesitate to consider these patently useless everyday objects [. . .] a demonic presence: we have in front of us a ‘banquet of nausea’.”14 In addition to the Communists’ censure of the new Pop experiments— American, and, by implication, Italian as well—it was soon announced that the Catholic Curia in Venice, who deemed the Pop subjects scandalous, had banned Catholics from visiting the latest Biennale. Italian newspapers across the political spectrum such as Rinascita, L’Unità, il Giornale d’Italia, Gente, and Paese Sera roundly rejoiced upon hearing this news.15 Sealing a consensus between Communist, Catholic, and centrist forces against the latest trends in American

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

117

art and Pop, the Curia’s ban likely impacted Antonio Segni’s decision, as the President of the Italian Republic, not to attend the Biennale’s opening ceremony.16 Much of the American work at the 1964 Biennale made its way to Italy, no less, stowed in a US Air Force jet.17 That year Calvesi praised Italy as “the only [European] country presenting a certain renewed vitality.”18 At the same time, he spoke of the American presence as amounting to a “dictatorship of sorts.”19 The French newspaper Arts ran a review titled “America . . . launches Pop to colonize Europe.”20 Other Italian voices such as Paolo Rizzi and Enzo Di Martino suggested the American advent was the result of a commercial operation, a takeover by artists well positioned in the art market and those represented by Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend in particular.21 Italian art critics’ responses to American art of the late 1950s and 1960s in general, however, were by no means monolithically disapproving: as early as 1962, Dorfles had praised Rauschenberg for “placing himself in front of [American media imagery] with an adequate attitude: neither excessively cynical, nor [. . .] excessively dominated.”22 Nor was the Italian Pop artists’ display in 1964 necessarily geared toward evoking the US as much as it was, as Lonardelli has contended, creating “a general atmosphere of reverie [. . .] [in which] it was not so much the United States that was evoked as the powerful process of symbolization at heart of much of the new US imagery that was permeating Italy.”23 Lichtenstein went on to represent the American Pop contingent at the next Biennale in 1966.24 That year Castelli helped put Lichtenstein in the spotlight. Lichtenstein had had his first exhibition at Castelli’s New York gallery in February 1962 and, notably, all the works sold. As a dealer, Castelli’s prowess is famously commemorated, of course, in Johns’s Painted Bronze (1960): according to Johns, this sculpture was sparked by someone telling him that Willem de Kooning had said that you could give Castelli “two beer cans and he could sell them,” and, after hearing this, Johns made a sculpture of two beer cans and gave it to Castelli, who then, in turn, promptly sold it.25 At the opening of the 1966 Biennale, two Italian Pop artists, Mambor and Tacchi, seized the moment to meet Lichtenstein. In photographs taken that day, as a couple, Mambor and actress Paola Pitagora looking at once star-­struck and bemused, stood before Lichtenstein’s Big Painting VI (1965).26 Now, to be sure, Italian Pop’s appraisal of American-­style consumerism and Pop Art itself was profoundly ambivalent. An important part of this, of course, is the presence, historically, of a strong Left in Italy including an active Socialist Party, or PSI, and Communist contingent, or PCI. In postwar national elections

118

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 6.1  Paola Pitagora, Renato Mambor, and Cesare Tacchi in front of Roy Lichtenstein, Big Painting VI (1965), at the 1966 Venice Biennale. Courtesy AAF—ArchivioArte Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena and Artwork. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo: CAMERAPHOTO.

of 1946 and 1948, these parties together won 30–40 percent of the vote.27 Closer to the advent of Italian Pop in the early 1960s, in 1960 local elections brought gains to the PSI, which afterward drifted center in an allegiance with the Christian Democrats, or DC.28 By January 1964, this trend gave way during Aldo Moro’s first government with Segni’s backing to a rupture in the Socialist camp: 30 percent of PSI supporters peeled off to form the PSIUP, or Partito Socialista di Unità Proletaria, while others entered the Communist trade unionists comprising the CGIL, or Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, founded in 1944; deadlock ensued until August 1964, when the Socialists, mobilized by Segni’s summoning of General de Lorenzo, head of the Carabinieri, to the Quirinale in July, creating trepidation about a possible neo-­fascist coup, joined Moro’s second government in earnest, which cohered until 1966.29 Talk of reunifying the Socialist camp got a boost in December 1964 when Socialist Giuseppe Saragat replaced Segni as President of the Republic.30

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

119

Italy’s historically strong Left and atmosphere of critical thought informed by Marxism and anti-­capitalist offshoots primed young Italian artists, like Mambor, Angeli, or Schifano, to be skeptical of and assert a distance from American-­style mass culture and consumerism. Schifano’s Propaganda of 1962 including a Coca-Cola logo or Angeli’s paintings of the Half Dollar from 1965–6 incorporating a spray-­painted veil feature recognizable American emblems but keep them at a remove. While Schifano shows the Coca-Cola logo partially, Angeli’s veil, in his words, “acts as a sort of filter, making the images appear as though relived through memory rather than verified from a real point of view, and to some extent ideologically celebrated.”31 As that last bit of Angeli’s statement seems to suggest, American formations and consumerism, while calling for a putting at a distance, also possessed a certain attraction. Speaking broadly, many young people in Italy in the early to mid-1960s, including the Italian Pop artists who were mostly in their early thirties around 1964, likely found aspects of the new consumerism appealing and wanted to take advantage of some of the real freedoms it presented. Washing machines freed up time for other activities; automobiles, which in Italian advertising of the 1960s represent individual freedom, along with the newly completed autostrada, allowed for greater mobility and more rapid travel within the peninsula. Mambor completed a painting as early as 1961, in fact, consisting of sixteen views of signage along the recently expanded autostrada.32 This, then, is what is meant by ambivalence: a suspicion of, but also a fascination with America’s films, music, and art, and some of this country’s emancipatory energy and individualism versus sleepy old Italy, or a life—as Tugnoli has said of Rome in the 1960s—that “was frenetic and immobile at the same time.”33 This ambivalence comes out strongly in a discussion about Pop Art between Mambor and Pitagora in 2006, in which Mambor, looking back on the 1960s, comments (as at the start) “I was overwhelmed by and curious about the explosiveness of consumerism, although I didn’t want to have any part in it.”34 Very much attracted to the “explosiveness of consumerism,” as a principally “American” formation—to the degree of Mambor’s visiting New York in the sixties and writing back to Pitagora, “New York is like a great knife that allows . . . [one] to cut . . . free. [. . .] This is my personal, solitary adventure, my quest for the other in order to solve and to put an end to my dissatisfaction”35—but also not “want[ing] to have any part in it” either. This antithetical mindset Mambor verbalizes is indicative of a broader ambivalence at Italian Pop’s nerve center, although such two-­fold attraction/

120

Postwar Italian Art History Today

aversion, admiration/resistance, toward American formations was not itself new.36 Also, as Hal Foster has noted, these pairs can at times collapse into one another and become confounded.37 Nevertheless, any attempt to elaborate how Italian Pop channeled American Pop and artistic trends toward critical awareness rather than sheer affirmation, or an expression of reality and joy in the daily environment and “normal acts of perception,” as the art historian and phenomenologist Renato Barilli put it writing on Fioroni in 1963, rather than illusion and disembodied spectacle, has to contend with such unresolved contradictions of consciousness.38 As Andreas Huyssen queried of rechannelings of American Pop toward critique in Germany during the student, anti-Vietnam, and labor movements of 1966–9, which Italian Pop predates, and frame the transition around 1966–7 to Arte Povera, “how is it possible that an art expressing sensual joy in our daily environment could at the same time be critical of this environment?”39 While from a strictly logical viewpoint, the Italian Pop artists therefore, as Anna Maria Torriglia has suggested in a different context, become “victims to a critical fallacy, for [they] remained fascinated by the culture [they] wanted to criticize,”40 I would, by contrast, tend to see plain discordance rather than fallacy; indeed, much of the resonance of Italian Pop’s attempts to envisage distinctive patterns of thinking and art-­making lies in the very absence of an effective reconciliation between genuine fascination and refusal, qua foundational and constitutive undecidability—that is to say, there might not be any Italian Pop worthy of the present level of attention if it were not for this undecidability.

Mambor’s “Thread,” part II In an interview with Tugnoli in 2003, Mambor summarized his and his peers’ approach in two basic steps.41 First, they emptied the canvas to arrive at a kind of monochromatic screen. As he put it, “once the painting became a self-­referential object [. . .] an opaque surface,” thus reaching a kind of degree zero of painting— or, as Tugnoli has put it, “a tabula rasa of representation [. . .] in which the canvas was no longer a mirror that represented reality, but an object that represented or pointed back to itself.”42 Second, they “put onto the canvas symbols, signals, and linguistic, urban codes that already existed in reality [. . .].”43 Both steps are evident in Mambor’s Uomini statistici (Statistical Men) of 1962 in which there is typically a paring down to a monochromatic ground (bright or dull red, dark green, or light blue, for instance), and a filling of the picture with bald, besuited

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

121

figures strolling through urban space. Between 1960 and 1966, Italian Pop also followed a similar overall trajectory, beginning between 1959 and 1961–2 with research focused on the monochrome followed by production from 1962 to 1966 featuring imagery culled from urban life and mass culture, although in practice things were not always as tidy as this schema suggests. This second phase beginning around 1962 stretches to 1966–7 when, in Tugnoli’s estimation, “the experiences of La Scuola di piazza del Popolo can be said to be concluded, with the exhibitions at [Rome’s Galleria] L’Attico initiating Arte Povera [especially Fuoco, Immagine, Acqua, Terra (Fire, Image, Water, Earth) in June 1967], but that’s another story.”44 Mambor’s overview also provides an entry point to some artistic trends in Italy between 1960 and 1966 falling outside Italian Pop. As La Scuola di piazza del Popolo was taking shape, Castellani, for example, in works such as Grande superfice blu (Large Blue Surface, 1963), was exploring a form of art that in a way stops at “step one.” To the reduction of the picture to an opaque surface, Castellani often added protuberances to the back of his canvases that pushed the painting forward into environmental space. One of the most prominent Italian Pop artists, Schifano, produced monochromes between 1960 and 1962, such as Grande verde (Large Green, 1960), that arrest things at this first “stage.” In the same time period, Schifano also placed stripped-­down designations into monochromatic grounds. In 1960, in N3, for instance, he inserted the designation “N3”—a bit like a string of letters and numbers glimpsed on a pipe in an urban stairwell or parking garage—and its mirror inversion at the center of a bright yellow monochrome that, due to a use of offset stretcher bars, dips inward running along the left and right sides by about an inch.45 A year later in Indicazione (Indication, 1961), he positioned two pairs of yellow lines like those demarcating traffic lanes out in the street within a solid black, asphalt-­like ground. Or in Indicazione grande no. 1 (Large Indication, no. 1) dating to 1962, he partitioned the painting into rectangular sections reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s abstractions around this time yet, cutting across the top center, added a jaunty, yet simultaneously deadpan dotted white line like those found, again, on the street. Meanwhile the prominent white and orange drips and the dry brushing in grey within the “road” communicate how the materiality of the painting process and the work’s derivation from a concrete, intersubjective space of daily life count for a lot. In 1962, Schifano began incorporating commercial logos into his paintings, starting with Esso and Coca-Cola, and by 1963 had worked his way to a signal

122

Postwar Italian Art History Today

painting titled Tutta propaganda (It’s All Propaganda) in which Esso, Philips, and Coca-Cola logos appear amidst an active, gestural ground. Beneath these logos, the artist also stenciled in, in silver capital letters, the blunt, ill-­tempered phrase, “IT’S ALL PROPAGANDA.” The Philips and Coca-Cola logos, respectively, exemplify how Schifano’s treatment of such symbols is frequently partial and deliberately sketchy and imperfect. There is a pervasive sense of these logos as self-­consciously approximated—that is to say, their standing as approximations, all, of reality. Such emblems appear as if glimpsed by a human subject rather than purely objective and externalized, alluding to a space of mobile, embodied perception in which subject and object are compresent and partly overlap, or, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it in Signs (1960), to “the body as a ‘perceiving thing’, a ‘subject-­object’.”46 As Lornadelli suggests, “If anything, the framing resembles one’s sidelong glance when passing a poster—the urban experience of a transient gaze,”47 and in Schifano the results are often quite lyrical. In Ai pittori di insegne (To Sign Painters) from 1964, Schifano’s dedication to commercial sign-­painters also connects to a broader theme in American Pop, that is, its celebration of commercial billboard painting (James Rosenquist, for example, supported himself from 1957 to 1960 as a billboard painter and later incorporated techniques from commercial sign painting, such as its handling of scale, into works like F111 (1964–65)). In Schifano’s Ai pittori di insegne unfilled, overlapping Coca-Cola logos appear beside a color bar in which each hue ends with a cursive flourish, thus directing attention, in a self-­reflexive mode, back to the contents of the painting itself. Mambor’s general outline is also relevant to Pascali’s and Kounellis’s activities in Rome between 1960 and 1965. Pascali’s debut exhibition took place at Tartaruga in Piazza del Popolo in January 1965, and, while exploring Mediterranean imagery, the works unveiled there, such as Omaggio a Billie Holiday (Homage to Billie Holiday), were broadly viewed as belonging to the orbit of “Pop.”48 In Pascali’s Homage, there is first a reduction to an opaque black ground. Shaped stretcher bars at the sides cause the canvas to dip inward, resulting in a surface that oscillates between reading as utterly literal (glossy black paint spread over canvas) and as potentially illusionistic: the depression at the bottom center, for instance, could double as the cradle of Holiday’s voice, which Pascali likely encountered through the Italian mass media including TV and radio.49 Second, the upper portion of the canvas is filled with Holiday’s emblematic, lip-­stickcoated lips (to get the bulging at the top, Pascali went so far as to position two inflated beach balls behind the canvas that, to this day, have to be periodically

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

123

reinflated to keep the surface from sinking inward and potentially cracking).50 Pascali’s Homage also bears a striking resemblance to a painting by another artist linked to Italian Pop and exhibited at Tartaruga, to wit, Bignardi’s multi-­panel, horizontally spread out Clairol #3 from 1964, in which, among the many vertical registers, each containing a woman’s face, there is a single frame to the right containing a deep black visage with bright red, lipstick-­coated lips.51 In June 1960, Kounellis had his first solo exhibition titled “L’Alfabeto di Kounellis” (The Alphabet of Kounellis) at Tartaruga’s first location consisting of early “letter and number” pictures, and, although Kounellis would eventually, after the emergence of Arte Povera, reject any association with Pop (especially American Pop), such works produced in the early sixties up to around 1964 did loosely belong to the nexus of La Scuola di piazza del Popolo. To make these paintings, Kounellis would first coat a canvas, cut to match the literal parameters of the wall on which he was working, with Kemtone, a white industrial enamel. He then filled the white ground with letters, numbers, and other insignia at times

Figure 6.2  Jannis Kounellis, Senza titolo (Untitled), 1960. Mixed media on canvas, 258 x 323 cm. Courtesy of Michelle Coudray and Sammlung Viehof. Photo: M. Baboussis.

124

Postwar Italian Art History Today

derived from everyday, urban space, such as arrows, dotted horizontal lines, or, as seen slantwise along the top of Senza titolo (Untitled, 1960), the bars typically used to indicate a pedonale or crosswalk. Kounellis added a performative component as well: he would don a paper miter, drape an unstretched painting of this same type over his shoulders, place extensions over his hands, and “sing out” the numbers, letters, and insignia as he painted them in.52 Ritualistic, yet self-­consciously ludicrous (the verbal component and costume seem to allude to Hugo Ball’s outfit for the recitation of his Dada sound poem Caravan at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1917), Kounellis enacted this routine on site at Tartaruga in 1960. A fascinating aspect of Kounellis’s approach here resides in his treating language proper in a way that proactively forecloses or cancels its typical meanings— collapsing established rules of syntax, for instance, so as to put language at the service of a poetics and/or artistic subjectivity, something Kounellis says he learned from James Joyce, about whom he once stated “his is the personality and [. . .] extreme work which caused me to become a painter. They’re indispensible.”53

“Research” and other distinctions In contrast with their American counterparts like Warhol, who sold out his first exhibition with Castelli in November 1964 consisting of twenty-­eight, silk-­ screened paintings of flowers, the Italian Pop artists also inhabited a more modest market.54 As Giorgio Franchetti, De Martiis’s partner and a loyal buyer from Tartaruga, has explained, “there was, by contrast, in Italy ‘un mercatino’ (‘a small market’) of occasional public interest, sustained by a few collectors,” and such patrons likely felt involved in something decisively different from the American art system (although things were rapidly evolving toward a market-­ based model like that of the US).55 The smaller market and scale of production led Mambor and Lombardo (the latter entered the 1960s producing monochromatic, collage-­based abstractions) to claim that while their works were a form of “research” based on “experimentation,” those by leading American Pop artists were based on “production” per se.56 In 1964, Schifano, who sold the most work in the group, visited New York for the first time. There, he wrote back to Angeli about Warhol. Expressing excitement about meeting a curator (Henry Geldzahler) “friendly with everyone [. . .] above

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

125

all Warhol,” Schifano then amusingly describes “this last,” Warhol, as “a true façade-­talent-cynic-­queer-sweet painter very much in vogue.”57 Although I am not, in light of essays by Tom Crow on Warhol’s Disasters including the Civil Rights-­era Race Riots and Richard Meyer on this artist’s subaltern identifications in the Most Wanted Men, someone who sees Warhol’s work as one-­dimensionally affirming the mainstream, “affluent society” of postwar America,58 in comparison with the scope of Warhol’s production around 1962–5, most Italian Pop artists still largely produced their works themselves by hand and in smaller, “prototype”-like batches—thus imbuing their work with a more artisanal dimension.59 To this artisanal aspect, one can add a lyrical and at times elegiac, or melancholy and mournful, quality. Distanced observation and awareness of the image’s synthetic, constructed character intermingle with feelings of the palpable contingency of the artist’s mark-­making procedures (the at-­once arbitrary and calculated drips encountered in Schifano’s paintings or those along the bottom of the twin frames in Fioroni’s Doppio Liberty Piccolo (Small Double Liberty, 1965), for example, depicting actress Elsa Martinelli), and of tenderness and pathos regarding the human figure’s susceptibility to physical and emotional harm and domination from without. Fioroni has spoken of her wish to imbue the mostly anonymous female personages in her paintings appropriated from mass-­market magazines, for instance, such as the Ragazze TV, or “TV Girls,” with an “artisanal sympathy” that involves her slightly deviating from her source images and imbuing them with “a sadder and more ethereal expression.”60 The Italian Pop artists had anxieties, too, about the objectification and standardization consumerist image-­culture seemed to entail, sensing in it not just new freedoms but the potential effacement or disappearance of the human subject—the person behind a stock pattern of feminine beauty, say. On this note, the lyrical turns brusque in Mauri’s Marilyn of 1964. Following Warhol’s precedent since 1962 of painting Marilyn Monroe, in Mauri’s Marilyn attempts to encounter the figure’s gaze are interjected by a black, horizontal bar with rounded edges that projects forward in relief into real space by about an inch. Lastly, in Italian Pop “contemporaneity” is strikingly qualified by awareness of Italy’s extensive, often pre-­modern cultural past. Festa’s Del peccato originale n. 2 (Of the Original Sin, No.  2, 1966), for example, stages a collision between a contemporary Pop aesthetic reminiscent of Lichtenstein and a revisitation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Yet, as Denis Viva has observed, what

126

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 6.3  Fabio Mauri, Marilyn, 1964. Photography and mixed media on canvas, 120 x 80 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Fabio Mauri and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Elisabetta Catalano.

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

127

matters here is not Festa’s going to Michelangelo per se but Michelangelo as filtered through postcard reproduction and mass-­tourism.61 Or as Festa himself, who exhibited a similar painting at the 1964 Biennale, stated: “When I made these Michelangelos—and I’d actually never been to the Sistine Chapel—they were something deeply linked to Rome, to the sort of image that is consumed here.”62 To pivot away from Italian Pop to a work of special significance to the Arte Povera artists to emerge in 1966–7, Carla Accardi has discussed the inspiration for Tenda (Tent, 1965–6), which carried her project up to that point further into the realm of fully three-­dimensional experiment, along similar lines. More specifically, Accardi has spoken of Tenda as largely deriving from a visit to Ravenna to see the medieval mausoleum of Galla Placidia and her sense there of the mosaics, or the “art,” suffusing the surrounding architectural space.63

Conclusion: Italy and global strands of Pop Notwithstanding Foster’s account in The First Pop Age (2013) of previously neglected facets of British, American, and German Pop, Italian Pop is a reminder that there is still more to the global Pop picture, including underexplored Pop from the US, Western and Eastern Europe (the work of Czechoslovakian artist Jana Želibská, for instance, such as her astonishing installation first constructed in 1969 titled Kandarya-Mahadeva), South America, the Middle East, and Asia.64 As Chris Dercon emphasized regarding The World Goes Pop, which included Schifano and Lombardo, “Pop [. . .] was a global movement, with artists from many different regions joining in, creating a political, feminist, subversive, language of protest, as well as a reflection on a shifting societal order and a combined rejection and idolatry of mass consumption [. . .].”65 Until recently, such previously understudied strands of Pop, including Italian Pop, as Jessica Morgan has noted, along with their “intentionally equivocal position,” have “largely been [. . .] dismissed as an (often belated) [case of] artistic influence rather than as a complex, ambiguous, and self-­reflexive response to contemporary culture.”66 A feature now getting attention includes how different global Pops not only emulated American Pop prototypes, but also transformed them, at moments “adopting,” as Morgan states, “the signifiers of [a] dominant cultural ideology in order to outstrip it.”67 In Tutta Propaganda, for instance, Schifano emulates a process of symbolization at the heart of American mass culture and to a degree

128

Postwar Italian Art History Today

revels in it. At the same time, he labels his efforts “It’s all propaganda,” as if to assert his neither being a part of the American system of production and dissemination nor his fulfillment of the expectations of what it means to be a socially and politically committed artist in his home city (from Argan’s point of view, for example); within the international corpus of Pop, paintings like Tutta Propaganda or Lombardo’s silhouettes of Kennedy or Nikita Khrushchev attest to how political matters are nevertheless still at issue. In Schifano, much of the “outstripping” of hegemonic formations resides in how when logos like Esso and Coca-Cola appear, they do so as filtered through a subject’s perception, conveying a notion of perception proper as partial and developing from one moment to the next. For Alberto Boatto, one of Schifano’s supportive critics, this feature distinguished his approach from mainstream American modes of experience: “[Whereas in America] the object dominates and [. . .] the subject is treated with suspicion,” Boatto pointed out, Schifano grasped how a “solution” resided in establishing “a dialogue between the subject and the world that considered the way in which this world is formulated and received by individuals within it.”68 After the experience of fascism, postwar artists like Schifano felt compelled to assume a distanced perspective on both subject and world, choosing, as Gilman has observed, “contemplative distance over irrational spatial flux and thereby clarifying a way of facing the world.”69 For Italian Pop, this meant facing consumerism and its imagery as a new reality in its own right and often critically redoubling it. The Italian Pop artists also exhibit a distinctive investment in the materiality of the artistic process and its derivation from day-­to-day life: indeed, here there are convergences with artistic trends in the US, such as Rauschenberg’s combines. Italian Pop’s pronounced sensuousness, which is often stripped-­down and literal, but also vivid arguably for this very reason, has led Lonardelli to speak of its being “excruciatingly attached to reality.”70 Overall, my position is that the ambivalence or undecidability Italian Pop exhibited toward “American” formations was itself a legitimate response to the circumstances they inhabited. Recently other scholars have zeroed in on this feature as cutting across multiple strands of Pop. Morgan has gone the furthest intellectually: after identifying “the dialectic of pop,” namely “its immersion into a commodified environment while at the same time providing a language [. . .] with which to critique and negate it,” she has noted how “Pop carried within it what Jürgen Habermas called a ‘performative contradiction’ [. . .] that the denunciation of an ideology employs in its critique the very language of that

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

129

ideological power.”71 Or, apropos Italian Pop and its stance toward “America,” something Benjamin H.D. Buchloh recently noted about German artists’, and specifically Gerhard Richter’s and Sigmar Polke’s, reception of American Pop in the 1960s could apply, too, to any of the artists touched on here: “there’s a very peculiar desire [vis-à-­vis formations coming out of the US like Pop and Minimalism] to be both part of the game and criticize what is being brought in.”72 Italian Pop thus turned a negative conundrum (pace Mambor, “I was overwhelmed by and curious about [. . .] consumerism” but “didn’t want to have any part in it”) into a methodological opportunity. My focus on Mambor specifically has stemmed, above all, from the clarity with which he articulated the binds and tactics of his generation. By enacting this ambivalence in artistic form, these artists lent substance to the polarities of attraction/aversion, immersion/distancing, and participated in the larger arguments of their time, including attempts to differentiate their production from that at the forefront of the American art-­market system. Indeed, here something Reiko Tommi said of Japanese Pop in the 1960s could be said equally of La Scuola di piazza del Popolo, “If Pop art has any substance, that’s intellectual paradox [. . .].”73 In 1964, having shifted away from the Uomini statistici, Mambor envisaged a particularly resonant painting titled Regina Coeli (1964). Named after the famous prison in Rome, three bands in the upper register, set against a brownish-­gold, monochromatic ground, are filled with dense groupings of people. A single, freestanding figure breaks loose from the bottommost band, nearby two other pairs of figures circulating below. All the figures have been at least partly washed out or elided. They could represent inmates and others circulating within Regina Coeli yet could just as easily conjure anonymous civilians circulating through everyday urban space. Whichever it may be, the various personages resonantly represent individual subjectivity largely by evoking its erosion and loss.74 The word “gleaning” in my title is meant to acknowledge this account’s introductory character. One last lesson imparted by Italian Pop, in my view, is that circumstances in which a strong Leftist tradition coincides with an incoming tide of consumerism, be it in Italy in the early to mid-1960s or elsewhere, “conflicting,” as Pierre Macherey would say, “more than they unite,”75 can be especially conducive to making compelling art. The existence of such socio-­economic circumstances is not necessarily limited to any one decade, era, or nation. In China in the 1990s and early 2000s in a culture characterized, albeit broadly, by a similar collision of anti-­capitalist awareness and new forms of

130

Postwar Italian Art History Today

incoming consumerism, recourse to a Pop aesthetic (overtly reaching back to Warhol and other exemplars) proved productive for a number of “China-Pop” painters grappling with their country’s increasingly hybrid Communist/capitalist economy following Deng Xiaoping’s extremely consequential market reforms of 1978. In this last way, seeking a platform of discussion for such aesthetic matters beyond the 1960s and Europe and America alone, it seems appropriate to end with an evocation of this more recent generation’s forays into Pop, such as the unmitigated clash of appropriated Communist Party imagery and high fashion logos or corporate brands, like Chanel or Disney, in Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism series. Indeed, staking out terrain where critique and fascination cross paths without being reconciled, it seems fitting as well that Feng Zhengjie’s large-­scale bright red, day-­glo pink, turquoise, and pearly white paintings of chiseled, consumerist goddesses set against empty grounds like Chairman Mao in Social Realist portraits of old—strategically alluring, yet evidently more than a little vapid and empty—end up staring back at us with tiny pupils shooting both ways.

Notes 1 Paola Pitagora, “On Pop Art,” in Venice 1948–1986: The Art Scene, Luca Massimo Barbero, ed., (Milan: Skira, 2006), 170. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 2 Luiga Lornadelli, “ ‘How It Was That I Stopped Painting’: Attempts at Distancing in 1960s Italian Art,” in International Pop, eds. Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 154. 3 Ibid., 160. 4 Ibid., 154. 5 See Luca Massimo Barbero, “1964 1968,” in Barbero, Venice, 131. 6 Lornadelli, ‘How It Was,’ 152. 7 Ibid., 150. 8 Ibid., 160. 9 Claire Gilman, Giosetta Fioroni: L’Argento (New York: The Drawing Center, 2013). 10 Andrea Tugnoli, La Scuola di Piazza del Popolo (Florence: Maschietto Editore, 2004). 11 For a survey of thirty-­four artists associated with Italian Pop (a list that includes early Pascali and Kounellis, Mauri, Bignardi, and even Piero Gilardi), see Walter Guadagnini, ed., Pop Art Italia 1958 1968 (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2005). 12 Lornadelli, “ ‘How It Was’,” 156. 13 Ibid.

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

131

14 Ibid. 15 Barbero, “1964 1968,” 131. 16 Lornadelli, “ ‘How It Was’,” 156. 17 Godfre Leung, “International Pop: A Visual Chronology,” in Alexander and Ryan, International Pop, 45. 18 Barbero, “1964 1968,” 131. 19 Ibid. 20 Leung, “International Pop,” 45. 21 Ibid., 130–1. 22 Gilman, Giosetta Fioroni, 17. 23 Lornadelli, “ ‘How It Was’,” 158. 24 Barbero, “1964 1968,” 133. 25 Randy Ludacer, “Painted Bronze,” at www.beachpackingdesign.com; accessed March 30, 2016. Johns also recounts this story in Emile de Antonio’s documentary Painters Painting (1973). 26 See Barbero, “1964 1968,” 168. 27 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, Society and Politics 1943–1988 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 118. 28 Ibid., 264. 29 Ibid., 274–6. 30 Ibid., 279. 31 Lornadelli, “ ‘How It Was’,” 152. 32 The author thanks Greta Boldorini for sharing her thesis (Roma Tre, Università Degli Studi, 2013) on Mambor, in which many rare works are compiled. 33 Tugnoli, La Scuola, 34. 34 Pitagora, “On Pop Art,” 170. 35 Ibid., 171. 36 For analysis of this dichotomy within fascist policy in the 1930s, see Anna Maria Torriglia, Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 85. 37 Hal Foster, The First Pop Age (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), 7. 38 Gilman, Giosetta Fioroni, 18. 39 Andreas Huyssen, “The Cultural Politics of Pop,” in After the Great Divide (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 142–6. 40 Torriglia, Broken Time, 152. 41 Tugnoli, La Scuola, 40. 42 Ibid., 38–40. 43 Ibid., 40. 44 Ibid., 45.

132

Postwar Italian Art History Today

45 My comments about things glimpsed in a parking garage are supported by a corpus of critical writing about Schifano, including texts by Schifano himself, that mention his preoccupation with signs and signals in the “the urban landscape”; see, for instance, Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, “L’occhio di Schifano,” in Schifano 1960–64. Dal monocromo alla strada, Giorgio Marconi, ed. (Milan: Skira, 2005), 69. 46 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964 [1998]), 166. 47 Lornadelli, “ ‘How It Was’,” 152. 48 Dario Micacchi, “Mostre di Giovani ‘Pop’ a Roma, Una Neo-Metafisica degli Ogetti della Città, ’L’Unità (April 10, 1965): 6. 49 In an early piece of criticism from 1966, Celant, for one, interpreted Pascali’s early themes as partly deriving from his exposure to mass media; see Germano Celant, “Con un repertorio di immagini sociali Pino Pascali aggredisce la ‘retorica’,” Il Lavoro, Genoa (December 20, 1966): np. 50 The author thanks the restorers at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna for sharing this detail with me in 2004. Pascali’s Homage brings with it charged issues related to race and gender. Pascali expressed to Carla Lonzi a rather romantic identification with “African” art and culture yet, at the same time, had a habit of letting on his knowledge of the very absurdity of this identification, telling Lonzi, for instance that though he would like most of all to live like a “savage” à la the “African people,” Tarzan, or Robinson Crusoe, he was also aware that he, as “an Italian living in Rome,” actually couldn’t do such things (see “Pino Pascali in conversation with Carla Lonzi,” in Pino Pascali (Otterlo: Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, 1991), 15). Also, as Pascali made clear to Mambor when the latter encouraged him in a letter to join him in New York, he had no interest in leaving Italy long-­term. It is unclear, however, whether Pascali’s irony makes the stereotypical and eroticized features of Homage any less problematic. In Homage, with the fetish quality of the lips and so forth, Pascali seems interested in exploring how contemporary mass culture produces its own myths or totems. 51 I am indebted to the curator Walter Guadagnini for drawing together this rare work by Bignardi and those produced by many other understudied “Italian Pop” artists at an exhibition held in Modena in 2005 titled Pop Art Italia, which I was lucky enough to see in person; for a reproduction of the Bignardi painting bearing the specific segment resembling Pascali’s Homage to Billie Holiday, see Guadagnini, Pop Art Italia, 91. 52 Simone Facchinetti and Giuliano Zanchi, “Intervista a Jannis Kounellis 1a Parte,” accessed March 30, 2016, https://youtube.com/watch?v=MHSwlvKIuls. 53 Mario Codognato and Mirta d’Argenzio, eds., Echoes in the Darkness Jannis Kounellis Writings and Interviews 1966–2002 (London: Trolley Books, 2002), 314.

Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–6

133

54 Patrick S. Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor: Michigan Research Press, 1988), 209. 55 Tugnoli, La Scuola, 34; the last part of this sentence draws upon Lornardelli, “ ‘How It Was’,” 150. 56 Tugnoli, La Scuola, 44. 57 Mario Schifano, “Lettera a Franco Angeli da New York,” in Schifano 1964–1970 Dal paesaggio alla TV, ed. Giorgio Marconi (Milan: Skira, 2006), 12. 58 See Crow’s Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 49–65, and Meyer’s Outlaw Representations (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 95–157. 59 For more on “prototypes,” see Tugnoli, La Scuola, 55. 60 Gilman, Giosetta Fioroni, 30–2. 61 See Denis Viva, Learning from Artists. Methodological Notes on Post-­war Italian Art History, Chapter 2 in this volume. 62 Lornadelli, “ ‘How It Was’,” 158. 63 Laura Cherubini, “Conversazione con Carla Accardi,” in Carla Accardi opere 1947– 1997, Claudio Cerritelli, ed. (Milan: Charta, 1998), 33. 64 For a reproduction and rare documentary photographs of the first install of Kandarya-Mahadeva, a work tinged with an evocative, powerful feminism, see Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri, eds., The World Goes Pop (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 18–19. 65 Chris Dercon, “Director’s Foreword,” in Morgan and Frigeri, The World Goes Pop, 9. 66 Jessica Morgan, “Political Pop: An Introduction,” in Morgan and Frigeri, The World Goes Pop, 27. 67 Ibid., 17. 68 Claire Gilman, “Mario Schifano: Beyond the Monochrome,” in Mario Schifano 1960–67 (London and New York: Luxembourg & Dayan, 2014), 13–14. 69 Ibid. 70 Lornadelli, “ ‘How It Was’,” 160. 71 Morgan, “Political Pop,” 27. 72 See Benjamin Buchloh’s comments in “C. 1976: An Interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh,” in Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010, Kathy Halbreich, ed., (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 200. 73 Reiko Tomii, “Oiran Goes Pop: Contemporary Japanese Artists Reinventing Icons,” in Morgan and Frigeri, The World Goes Pop, 95. 74 Morgan, “Political Pop,” 21. 75 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (Routledge: London, 2006), 69.

7

Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture in the Early Works of Franco Vaccari Nicoletta Leonardi

This essay analyzes the early works of Franco Vaccari, from his experiments with visual poetry in the mid-1960s to his participation in Global Tools, a multidisciplinary education program founded in 1973 by members of the Italian radical architecture movement. By looking at the production of an artist who has so far received little scholarly and curatorial attention, my goal is that of providing a more complete picture of Italy’s art scene in the 1960s and early 1970s, almost exclusively known for the artists internationally promoted by Germano Celant under the label of Arte Povera. As I will demonstrate, Vaccari’s cross-­media explorations in the early stages of his artistic career were of crucial importance for the development of the themes and strategies that characterize his entire oeuvre: the overcoming of the traditional notion of the author in favor of multiple voices, the direct participation of the viewers in the “making” of his works, the emergence of urban space as a privileged site for artistic research, the acknowledgement that photographs are not just images but also material objects and social agents that can be used as critical tools of emancipation against alienation. Despite sharing some of his artistic strategies with Arte Povera, Vaccari distanced himself from Celant’s narrative because of what he deemed Poverism’s ultimate incapability of moving beyond objecthood, of fully acknowledging the impact of the media on society and of immersing artistic practice in everyday realities.1 Overall, his work testifies to the thus far neglected presence in Italy of cross disciplinary practices operating in the wake of social and political activism both inside and outside the art realm, in which photographs as material objects and social agents circulating across society appeared as tools of communicative intervention providing visions and ideas for action at the intersection of different

136

Postwar Italian Art History Today

art and cultural forms, including film, theater, literature, architecture, and participatory urban planning, graphic, and industrial design. Vaccari was a young artist in the Italy of the “economic miracle” (1958–63), a period of momentous change in society and culture that turned the country from a poor, mainly rural nation into a major industrial power profoundly affecting everyday life, consumption habits, and leisure-­time activities.2 Faced with these transformations, a great portion of artists and intellectuals pondered about how the country’s cultural forces should react to and eventually resist capitalism. During those years, the Italian literary and artistic neo-­avant-­gardes were strongly influenced by philosopher and literary critic Luciano Anceschi, founder of the influential journal Il verri, who combined neo-Kantianism with Husserl’s phenomenology through an anti-­dogmatic and anti-­idealistic approach, advocating the dialogue among different art and cultural forms.3 Umberto Eco’s notion of opera aperta (open work), which gained widespread popularity in the 1960s, is an expression of this cultural climate.4 A member of the neo-­avant-­ garde Marxist and structuralist literary movement Gruppo 63, Eco argued that aesthetic codes always stem from a given reality so that any change in society is reflected within their structure, and that contemporary art is an open and structurally ambiguous form of interpersonal communication that offers a plurality of interpretations which require the reader/viewer’s active intervention and operative choice. Convinced that culture and the arts could create an effective form of resistance, and taking into consideration McLuhan’s arguments about how new technologies shape cognition as well as his notion of the global village, neoavanguardia poets, writers, visual artists, as well as architects and designers belonging to the radical architecture movement, aimed at re-­establishing a non alienated language by producing works of social critique based on a convergence of literature, the visual arts, architecture, and design with semiotics, structural linguistics, Gestalt psychology, and information theory. Building their work on Luciano Anceschi’s and Enzo Paci’s notion of an anti-­ solipsistic subject open to inter-­subjectivity, practitioners in the areas of concrete, sound and visual poetry belonging to Gruppo 63 and Gruppo 70 argued for a “riduzione dell’io” (reduction of the self), which questioned the existence of subjectivity prior to actual experience and argued for the suspension of the subject as an autonomous cognitive agency in favor of a subject understood in terms of a phenomenological “being in the world.” Along the same lines, as indicated by militant art and literary critic Renato Barilli, who was a member of Gruppo 63, the neo-­avant-garde Italian visual arts were imbued with

The Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture of Franco Vaccari

137

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, with early Sartre, Paci and Anceschi, with Dewey’s pragmatism. According to Barilli, being based on banal and contingent aspects of everyday life, and utterly opposing the geometrical abstraction of rationalism, Informale perfectly embodied the epistemological, ethical, and affective assumptions of the idea of being in the world conceived as a process of transactional interactions among people and their environments. These transactional interactions were “felt [. . .] as an unmediated contact that flows through naked channels, as a primary elementary anthropological condition.”5 And yet, although the material and gestural approaches of Informale spoke for the artists’ need to project their practice into the world outside the canvas, they actually never broke out into real space. It was only starting from the 1960s that “the art object—be it a painting or a sculpture—is no longer self-­ contained and starts invading the concrete spaces of reality.”6 Barilli wrote of a new, open, and mundane Informale emerging within Italian artistic productions such as arte povera, body art, and conceptual art, taking the form of environments, happenings, performances, and behaviors of sorts. Not only these new artistic strategies, which Barilli defined as an “expanded Informale,” were projected into real time and spaces, but they also adopted technological instruments such as photography, film, and video. Vaccari’s early work emerged from this cultural context. His positions were close to Barilli’s, who between 1967 and 1968 repeatedly criticized Celant for not fully embracing “openness,” for keeping his “Arte Povera” within the rigid schemes of US minimalism.7 Vaccari practiced and theorized openness by looking at photographs not just as images but as material objects with their social lives, by emphasizing the material dimensions of poetry, by conceiving visuality as part of the material forms of social actions.

From street to page, and back Born in Modena in 1936, Vaccari started experimenting with photography and film in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while at the same time studying physics at the University of Milan. His main references at the time were neorealist cinema, Paul Strand’s and Cesare Zavattini’s photo-­essay Un Paese (1955), William Klein’s crude and direct books on New York and Rome (1956 and 1959), and Mario Carrieri’s book on Milan (1959), itself strongly influenced by Klein.8 In 1963, while in Rome to perform his military service, Vaccari read literary magazine

138

Postwar Italian Art History Today

antipiugiù, founded in Turin by concrete and sound poet Arrigo Lora Totino.9 Advocating the overcoming of single authorial figures through the creation of collective poems, the magazine was a powerhouse of concrete poetry conceived as an impersonal, “objective” and immediate form of communication resulting from the relationship between the semantic, spatial, graphic, and oral components of language. Another important source for Vaccari was the Italian translation of The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, one of the first bestsellers on Buddhism, and a sort of Bible of the counterculture movement of the 1960s.10 Through Watts’s book, Vaccari became acquainted with the haiku poetical form. What fascinated him most about it was its brevity and essentiality, as well as its capacity to suddenly generate micro-­awakenings devoid of any conceptualization. Haikus became a poetic model through which Vaccari could observe the reality of Italian cities in the 1960s. Most importantly, the artist applied the haiku model and techniques not only to words, but to photographs as well. Using newspapers, illustrated magazines, and printed advertising material, he cut out words and bits of sentences, threw them out on a table, and reassembled them to form poetic compositions. In the meantime, he explored urban spaces, photographing what he defined as “found poetry”: graffiti on city walls and in public toilets, tears, scribbles and drawings on billboards.11 In 1965, after coming into direct contact with Italian visual and concrete poets, particularly with Adriano Spatola, Vaccari published Entropico, a collection of visual poems.12 The book’s title makes direct reference to what artists and intellectuals of the time considered as the entropized system of the mass media, characterized by a reified language rapidly moving toward a loss of meaning. As a form of resistance against mass culture enacted through a critical awareness of the mechanisms that regulate communication, Vaccari manipulated and rearranged advertising messages and slogans of sorts with the aim of recovering a non-­alienated meaning for words and images. In parallel with working on the book, he produced a series of montages in which he brought together his photographs of graffiti and fragments of billboards, along with cut-­outs of photographs, graphics, and texts from a plethora of printed media. He considered these works visual poems, just like the ones published in his book. Yet, these montages did not fit the canons of Italian visual and concrete poetry. Because they did not contain overtly explicit political messages, they were not well received by the Florentine Gruppo 70, founded in 1963 by artist and writer Eugenio Miccini along with visual poets and literary critic Lamberto Pignotti.

The Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture of Franco Vaccari

139

Inspired by British pop art’s ironic treatment of mass and popular culture, but also aimed at bonding poetry with Marxism and political activism, poets belonging to Gruppo 70 considered their activity as “semiological warfare” against consumer society. Accordingly, they deconstructed slogans and icons of the mass media through desecrating and demystifying montages in order to produce messages of revolt and activate forms of social and political protest. Because of their figurative elements, Vaccari’s montages could not be assimilated to the work of concrete poets such as Arrigo Lora Totino and Adriano Spatola, who treated the page as a pictorial surface upon which they located typographic characters and words along the lines of a geometric and minimalist abstraction. The criticism Vaccari received from both visual and concrete poets is not surprising. As a visual artist simultaneously experimenting with poetry, photography, and film, Vaccari’s montages expressed his need to break the self-­ contained dimension of the page by transforming it into a living stage to be filled with everyday realities, with the material and multi sensorial experience of walking the streets of Italian cities. It is indeed precisely through his inter-­medial experiments with neo-­avant-garde literature and the visual arts that Vaccari could actuate his flight from the confines of books towards the lived spaces of city streets. In other words, once he had brought the materiality of street into the spatial and graphic components of the page he could do the reverse, that is bring the material bases as well as the graphic and semantic possibilities of language into the street, exploring environment, happening and performance. Le Tracce (Traces), a book Vaccari published in 1966, offers an emblematic example of the artist’s consistent interest in the urban environment. 13 The volume contains only photographs, and almost all of them are graffiti-­related images that the artist took in various Italian cities during the first half of the 1960s. With his gaze decisively turned toward material culture, Vaccari collected fragments of urban reality and relocated them into the book. The materiality of walls, paint-­stains, and drippings on his graffiti photographs bear the signs of Informale. At the same time, the photographs show the effects produced on the Italian landscape by the rapid process of modernization and the pervasive invasion of consumer culture in a country where the lines separating urban life from rural traditions were still blurred. This interest in the relationship between past and present, in the persistence of rural, local, and dialectal realities within spatial and social environments increasingly characterized by globalized modernity, has its roots in neorealism.

140

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 7.1  Franco Vaccari, Le Tracce, Bologna, Sampietro Editore, 1966. Photo: Carlo Favero.

In perfect tune with the legacy of Informale, and with the “reduction of the self ” advocated by the literary neo-­avant-­gardes, Vaccari conceived photography as a multi-­sensory jump into the world, an unpredicted encounter with what one does not know. His intention was not so much to create images, but to immerse himself in the base reality of everyday life, recording the rich interplay of fragmented voices echoing from the walls of Italian cities. Le Tracce depicts graffiti as instruments of emancipation from and resistance to both the code of conduct prescribed by the Catholic Church and the stereotypical myths that the society of mass consumption amply diffused by the media during Italy’s economic boom, notably through advertising posters being pasted on city walls. The writings and drawings illicitly scratched or scribbled on the walls of buildings

The Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture of Franco Vaccari

141

along the streets or inside public toilets, as well as the tears and drawings on advertising posters, offer an anthropological, sociological and psychological portrait of the country during the economic miracle and at the dawn of the 1968 contestation movement. Toward the end of the 1960s, while progressively turning his practice to environments and happenings, Vaccari continued producing works that can be placed within the area of visual poetry. He reproduced pages from books (primarily his books) on canvas or plexiglas through photo-­emulsion screen printing. Teleogryllus Commodus (1967) offers an example of this cross-media practice where the page is taken out of the removed and private boundaries of the book and transformed into a larger and more spatially engaging object: a work of art to be hung on the wall. The artist reproduced on canvas a chart on crickets’ songs taken out of a scientific book on insects. The chart was created by using a magnetic-­tape recorder and an audiospectograph, a device used starting from the late 1940s as a research tool by ornithologists and entomologists for charting out the recorded chants on paper.14 Illustrating the range of frequencies pertaining to the sound crickets produce in the mating period, between males, and between males and females, Teleogryllus Commodus presents as poetry a communicative event that does not belong to the human realm, but to the animal one. By showing that insects communicate, and that their language contains emotive elements, Vaccari took away the human being’s prerogative as the sole protagonists in a world of communication and social action, and presented animals as social actors, thus rejecting deeply rooted anthropocentric ideas. Vaccari took a final step towards the spatialization of poetry when, in 1968, he was commissioned by Modena’s Civic Gallery in a project inspired by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. At the time, experimental theater had made its way to Italy via the Living Theater, Grotowski, and Kantor, raising great interest among visual and performing artists, as well as cinematographers and writers. Vaccari appreciated the non-­narrative and informal dimension of experimental theater in general, and of Cricot and Kantor in particular, and was especially struck by Artaud’s emphasis on physicality, i.e. the way actors and objects appear on the stage, not as a representation, but as a real presence. Inspired by Artaud, Vaccari brought the materiality of the city’s waste into the museum’s exhibition hall. He built a labyrinth using objects taken from Modena’s dump: doors, cans, wooden tables, and street-­signs. He also used six big letters made of cement, A, R, T, A, U, D, which he found in a warehouse of the city of Modena. The letters

142

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 7.2  Franco Vaccari, Teleogryllus Commodus, 1967. Photo emulsion on canvas, 100 × 77 cm. Luigi Bonotto collection. Courtesy of Fondazione Bonotto.

The Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture of Franco Vaccari

143

were placed haphazardly throughout the labyrinth, so that they would at first appear as material objects, and only at a second time the viewers would start combining them as parts of a word for them to figure out. With this multi-­ sensory installation, which brought together old and mouldy and smelly wooden boards, creaking doors covered with graffiti, a broad range of heterogeneous items, and large letters lying halfway between the verbal and the iconic—albeit assuming a strong physicality—Vaccari transferred the model of visual poetry to the exhibition space. This experience led him straight to the conception of his “exhibitions in real time.”

Photography’s materiality in real time Vaccari’s exhibitions in real time are open and collective projects that break the traditional confines between museums and urban spaces. They are temporary works in which the artist no longer acts as original and autonomous author, but as the trigger of an event whose results he does not control. The work takes shape in real time and real space, it develops in relation to the ways in which the spectators/participants, emancipated from the status of mere viewers, perceive it and react to it, strongly contributing to the shaping of its form and meaning. By reducing his authorial presence to a minimum level, and by exalting the materiality of experience, Vaccari exposed public spaces and societal processes as networks in which human and nonhuman actors—such as photographs— move through space and time interacting with each other and acting upon reality producing effects.15 Vaccari’s first exhibition in real time, entitled Maschere (Masks), was held at the Civic Gallery of Varese in 1969. During the opening, the artist distributed to visitors about one hundred copies of the same black and white photographic portrait of US Republican senator Barry Goldwater, a conservative man who ran against Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential elections. Mounted on a thick cardboard with a handle at its base, the portraits of smiling Goldwater functioned effectively as masks. Once the distribution was over, the lights in the gallery were turned off. Shortly afterwards, Vaccari began exploring the darkened space with a flashlight in one hand and a camera in the other. He turned the flashlight on and off, casting it upon people and taking their pictures. Mimicking the search methods used by the police, he attempted to drag each individual out of the indistinct crowd hidden in the darkness of the room. Turned into main

144

Postwar Italian Art History Today

protagonists by a flashlight that singled them out from a crowd, the exhibition attendees had a defensive reaction. As though protecting themselves from some threat, they instinctively responded by hiding behind their mask, using it as a way to return to anonymity. Functioning both as images and as material objects and social agents, Maschere was centered upon the use of the participants’ re-­appropriative and paradoxical use of the photographic image as an instrument of defence against photography itself, that is to say as a means of resistance to surveillance and the excesses of individuation typical of most institutional applications of the medium. Significantly, Vaccari used photography not as a document faithful to reality, but as a tool of farcical theater, fiction, and dissimulation. The portrait of a famous political figure was presented as a serialized mask, a false representation of a subject deprived of all individuality and interiority. The participants were caught in their instinct to protect themselves against the panoptic, voyeuristic impulses of social taxonomy and control explicitly evoked by the cliché of the policemen’s flashlight in the dark. Yet, the only means at their disposal was a mask bearing a stereotypical public substitute of subjectivity. Through this strategy, Vaccari addressed not only the conditions of subjectivity in the society of spectacle, but also their related practices of portraiture, characterized by anonymity and assault, often in terms of an intrusion into the privacy of an alienated existence, be it the hidden victim or the spectacularized star. The emphasis on photography as a material object and a social agent that plays an active role in a ludic act of re-­appropriation of self-­portraiture is at the center of the exhibition in real time no. 4 at the 1972 Venice Biennale, Lascia su queste pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio (Leave on This Wall a Photographic Trace of your Fleeting Visit, 1972), and of its follow up, Photomatic d’Italia (Italy’s Photomatic Kiosks, 1972–4). In 1972, Vaccari was invited to participate in an exhibition curated by art historian Francesco Arcangeli and Renato Barilli, held at the Italian Pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale. Entitled Opera o comportamento? (Work of Art or Behavior?), the exhibition showcased the passage from the work of art conceived as a finished and autonomous object to the work conceived as an open and unfinished behavioral process. Tracing a direct genealogy from Informale to Arte Povera, conceptual art, environment and performance art, the show comprised paintings by Giuseppe Guerreschi, Pompilio Mandelli, Mattia Moreni, Ennio Morlotti, Giulio Turcato, and Vasco Bendini, along with works by Gino De Dominicis, Luciano Fabbro, Mario Merz, Germano Olivotto, and Franco Vaccari.

The Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture of Franco Vaccari

145

Figure 7.3  Franco Vaccari, Photomatic d’Italia, 1973–4. Photostrips glued on cardboard, 50 × 70 cm, detail. Courtesy of Franco Vaccari and P420 Gallery. Photo: Carlo Favero.

In his allocated exhibition space, Vaccari placed a commercial self-­service photo-­booth for ID pictures. A message directly addressed to the public—and translated into four languages—appeared in large black font on one of the walls delimiting the monumental exhibition space: “Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit.” Once again, Vaccari’s artistic strategy was centered on displacement. The photo-­booth, an object typically belonging to urban public spaces (such as railway stations and sidewalks) and normally used for the production of multiple low-­cost images, was placed in the prestigious and auratic exhibition space of the Venice Biennale. Such an act was clearly meant as a critique of the art system with its self-­referential aesthetic criteria of authorship, originality, and economic value. The mechanical and non-­authorial instrument of production of cheap stamp format portraits was presented by Vaccari as the source of a flood of images gradually accumulating on the walls of the Biennale exhibition space, usually reserved for great artists. The photo-­booths operated

146

Postwar Italian Art History Today

exactly like when commonly used in the streets: those who wanted to take their picture had to pay the price normally paid for ID pictures. And yet, instead of following the logic of identification and surveillance, at the Venice Biennale ID pictures were transformed into recreational and liberating tools for the re-­appropriation of the everyday, as well as for the overcoming of the separation between the self-­referential spaces of the art sphere and public urban spaces. Many visitors were happy to comply, and photo-­strips quickly covered up the white walls of the exhibition space.16 Right after the Biennale, Vaccari decided to expand the photo-­booth project, transposing it to the urban context. He asked the leading provider of photo booths in Italy—the same that had lent him the photo-­booth for the Biennale— for permission to use for one year all the photo-­booths across the country, which amounted to about 1,000. Placed on the exterior of the photo-­booths, the posters invited users to leave their photos in a tin box specifically designed for the purpose and appended to the original structure. Accessible on a 24-hour basis, the booths offered, in Vaccari’s words, a “moment of self-­consciousness, a pause in the rigid chain of life’s events [. . .] a private space within a public one, which they could use in complete autonomy, and where they could freely express their dreams and desires.”17 When the project came to an end after about a year, the artist had collected thousands of photo-­strips from all corners of the country. Put together according to the geographical provenience, the gestures, the clothes, the hairstyles, and the attitudes of the sitters, the photo-­strips offer a social anthropological representation of Italy between 1973 and 1974. In full coherence with his exhibitions in real time, and in perfect tune with the 1960s and 1970s cultural and political climate, Vaccari considered himself an aesthetic operator engaged in the activation of processes rather that in the production of art objects. His artistic practice stemmed from the need of engaging with reality, it was the result of a dialogue with the viewer and had the dimension of social practicability. In the early 1970s, these positions led him to start a dialogue with Italian radical architect, designer, and artist Ugo La Pietra, resulting in his participation in the Global Tools project.

Vaccari’s narrative conceptualism Founded in January 1973 by architects and designers Archizoom Associati, Remo Buti, Riccardo Dalisi, Ugo La Pietra, 9999, Gaetano Pesce, Gianni Pettena, Ettore

The Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture of Franco Vaccari

147

Sottsass Jr., Superstudio, UFO, Zziggurat, and the editors of architectural magazines Casabella and Rassegna, Global Tools was an attempt to carry out an experimental, dispersed educational program, far from the institutionalized educational model of the university.18 Inspired by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971), where the Austrian philosopher theorized the ineffectual nature of institutionalized education and the potential of self-­education supported by advanced technology to create learning webs based on sharing and exchange, the informal and experimental workshops organized by Global Tools aimed at making life an experience of permanent education capable of stimulating “the free development of individual creativity.”19 When Global Tools was founded, the Western world was hit by a major global recession after almost three decades of uninterrupted economic growth. Between January 1973 and October 1974 one of the worst stock market downturns in modern history took place. Also, a peak in the Western countries’ production of oil combined with an embargo imposed by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries led to the so-­called 1973 oil crisis. These events produced a shock in global economy and politics, and brought the industrialized countries face-­to-face with the intrinsic deficiencies of a development model based on the exploitation of an alleged endless supply of energy and resources. In the wake of the liberal Marxist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Italian radical architects and designers theorized that, as a consequence of the crisis of capitalism, new survival strategies had to be developed. Strongly criticizing consumer society, and advocating ecological and environmental themes of sustainability, they challenged the capitalist development model based on continuous exponential growth and alienating production. Global Tools gave voice to this need to redefine the role of architecture, urban planning, graphic and industrial design within society, and advocated radical architecture’s call for the “destruction of the city” in favor of an anti-­capitalistic return to nomadism, to archaic technologies and to survival practices. Based on do-­it-yourself practices, promoting the importance of the applied arts and handcrafts as liberating tools and focused on the spontaneous contributions of the participants, the Global Tools project was not aimed at transmitting a culture to be learned, but at triggering a cultural process focused on the recovery of the creative faculties of individuals atrophied by mass industrial production and consumption. The workshops were organized into five thematic groups: the body (dance, tattoos, dress design, somatic communication, mimicry, ergonomics, behavior); construction, with a focus on all those activities linked to humble or

148

Postwar Italian Art History Today

traditional technologies (carpentry, woodworking, leatherworking, pottery, paper, glass, plastic, weaving, spinning); communication (photography, lithography, typography, cinema, videotape, theatre, and music); survival (agriculture, exploration, camping, gastronomy, meditation); and theory (religion, meditation, contemplation, ideology, cosmic theories, reductive processes, prayer). Together with Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena, and Guido Arra, Vaccari was part of the Communication Group. In a report dated October 1974, the members of the group stated that their goal was to analyze the tools of communication and their alienating and subjugating effects upon individuals with the aim of possibly reinstating some forms of spontaneous relationships among individuals, among individuals and their environments, among individuals and the tools they use to communicate. To attain such results, the group called for the elimination of what they defined as the deforming representational filters produced by communication media and for a more direct, unmediated relationship between individuals and reality, for the overcoming of the dichotomy of the passive message receiver and the active message sender, for direct individual participation in communication networks and for an increased awareness of the power dynamics operating within the spatial and social environments in which we live and work.20 To test their theories, in September 1974 the members of the group went on a cruise trip along the Rhine from Dusseldorf to Basel on a boat named France. The cruise boat trip was selected as the most monotonous and least adventurous possible, the passengers being confined within an extremely homogeneous and stable space for a relatively long period, where the most repetitive and coercive form of living took place. Arra, La Pietra, Pettena, and Vaccari were convinced that, in such an environment, their mental and physical automatisms would be amplified. They thought that, because of boredom, isolation, and the lack of any distractions, they could more easily observe and elaborate on their own patterns of behavior. Furthermore, through the exercise of awareness and criticism, they sought to de-­activate their habitual thinking processes and to achieve more spontaneous forms communications. Out of this experience, Vaccari produced a narrative art project entitled Viaggio sul Reno. Settembre 1974.21 The work, published as a book in 1976, is a travelog composed of deliberately amateurish and technically imprecise color snapshots, along with a text describing the situation from a perspective that does not match the images, providing a surprising, funny, and surreal point of view:

The Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture of Franco Vaccari

149

Before long, we’ll be at the second lock where the ship will be raised in a very brief span of time some twenty or thirty meters; it’s incredible the amount of water that erupts from the sluice gates. For a short while, it will be like being inside an enormous shoe box and you’ll see only the cement wall sliding so close as to be able to touch it, then all at once, your eyes will be at ground level and the landscape will explode all around you as far as the eye can see [. . . .]. Having seen the average age of the passengers, I asked a waiter if it ever happened that anyone died during one of these cruises; he said yes and that the body is put ashore when everyone is sleeping [. . .]. We have paid a lot and therefore we should eat a lot and the open-­face sandwiches pass through our systems just as like we are passing up river. Far removed from here there are some people, the ship’s owners, that in some way it’s as if they are feeding themselves on us while on the “France” we are being transported along the Rhine [. . .]: we are their open-­face sandwiches.22

Intended for deactivating our habitual mental and behavioral mechanism, the book offers a somewhat melancholic reflection on banality and passivity, on the claustrophobic, highly-­structured, and repetitive nature of life on an organized cruise trip. Establishing a slightly surreal dialogue between individuals, objects, and the environments surrounding them, Vaccari presents us with a “soft,” colloquial, and sensorially engaging form of conceptualism. Just like the exhibitions in real time were aimed at avoiding pre-­determination and triggering spontaneity and direct participation, Viaggio sul Reno was conceived by the artist as a liberating tool of self-­consciousness with the goal of a better understanding of the complex semiotic and material networks we inhabit.

Figure 7.4  Franco Vaccari, Viaggio sul Reno. Settembre 1974. Brescia, Edizioni Nuovi Strumenti, 1976. Photo: Carlo Favero.

150

Postwar Italian Art History Today

A major figure in the Italian art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, Vaccari had a strong impact on the country’s photographic culture. His cross-­media explorations and accent on materiality influenced the work of Luigi Ghirri, and dialogued with that of other less well known figures who deserve more international attention such as Mario Cresci and Guido Guidi, shaping the interest in the urban spaces and the built environment developed by photographers in Italy in the past forty years.

Notes 1 Dentro e fuor di metafora: Altamira, Guerzoni, Isgrò, Parmiggiani, Patella, Vaccari (Varese: Tipolitografia Manfredi, 1976). For a lengthy discussion of the relationship between sculpture and conceptual art in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s see Marin R. Sullivan, Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism: International Experiments in Italy (London: Routledge, 2017). 2 On the social and cultural history of the Italian economic miracle see Guido Crainz, Il paese mancato. Dal miracolo economico agli anni ottana (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 1983). 3 Paulo Chimburolo, Marco Moroni and Luca Somigli, Neoavanguardia. Italian Experimental Literature and the Arts in the 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 6–11. See also Renato Barilli, La neoavanguardia italiana: dalla nascita del Verri alla fine di Quindici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995); John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theorectical Debate and Poetic Practices (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); and Lucio Vetri, Letteratura e caos: poetiche della neo-­ avanguardia italiana degli anni sessanta (Mantova: Edizioni del Verri, 1986). 4 Umberto Eco, Opera aperta (Milan: Bompiani, 1962). 5 Renato Barilli, Informale, oggetto, comportamento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), I, 8. Barilli’s notion of Informale as a phenomenological and mundane act appeared for the first time on Il verri in 1964. 6 Ibid., II, 5. 7 For a recent discussion of Barilli’s positions see P. Famelli, “L’arte ‘a gesti’: dall’informale al contemporaneo. Intervista a Renato Barilli,” in FormeUniche (2017). 8 Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini, Un Paese (Turin: Einaudi, 1955); William Klein, Life is Good and Good for You in New York (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1956); and Mario Carrieri, Milano (Milan: Lerici Editore, 1959). 9 antipiugiù was published in Four Numbers in Turin between September 1961 and November 1966. 10 Alan Watt, The Way of Zen (New York: Pantheon, 1957). The book was published in Italy by Feltrinelli in 1960.

The Photography, Visual Poetry, and Radical Architecture of Franco Vaccari

151

11 Vaccari used this terminology in 1970, in the context of the Florentine magazine Techne, founded by visual poet Eugenio Piccini. Franco Vaccari, “Poesia,” in Techne (Florence, 1970). 12 Franco Vaccari, Entropico (Bologna: Sampietro Editore, 1965). The book was published by Sampietro with an introduction by Gruppo 63 writer and artist Emilio Isgrò. Between 1965 and 1970, with Adriano Spatola acting as editor in chief, Sampietro was a leading publisher of the Italian literary neo avant-gardes. On Sampietro see Mauricio Osti and Enzo Minarelli, 3 editori storici d’avanguardia (Pasian di Prato: Campanotto, 2012). 13 Franco Vaccari, Le Tracce (Bologna: Sampietro Editore, 1966). Sampietro published the book with an introduction by Adriano Spatola. 14 W. Rounds, “Birds Write Their Musical Score on Tape,” Popular Mechanics (March 1957): 132–4. 15 For a complete catalog of the artist’s exhibitions in real time see Franco Vaccari, Exhibitions in Real Time (Macerata: La Nuova Foglio, 1973). 16 On the use of ID photos within contemporary artistic practices see Ferferica Muzzarelli, Formato Tessera (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2003) and Clement Cherouz, Sam Stourdzé, Anne Lacoste, Derrière le Rideau. L’esthique Photomaton (Arles: Editions Photosynthèses, 2012). Vaccari’s work is discussed in both volumes. For a specific analysis of the artist’s use of the photo-­strip see Nicoletta Leonardi, “Photography and the Representation of Subjectivity,” in Vaccari, Exhibitions in Real Time. 17 Vaccari’s description of Photomatic d’Italia quoted in Renato Barilli, Franco Vaccari. Opere 1966–1986 (Modena: Cooptip, 1987), 55. 18 On the Global Tools project see Valerio Borgonuovo and Silvia Franceschini, Global Tools 1973–1975 (Istanbul: SALT, 2015). 19 Global Tools Bulletin, no. 1, Document-­o No. 1, “The-La-Co-­n-stitu-­z-t-­ion-e,” Edizioni L’uomo e l’arte, Milan, June 1974, reproduced in Borgonuovo and Franceschini, Global Tools. 20 Global Tools—Communication Group. Report by Guido Arra, Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Petena, Franco Vaccari dated October 11, 1974 reproduced in Borgonuovo and Franceschini, Global Tools. 21 Franco Vaccari, Viaggio sul Reno (Brescia: Edizioni Nuovi Strumenti, 1976). 22 Ibid., np.

Section III

Rethinking Modes of Patronage

8

Buying Marino Marini: The American Market for Italian Art after World War II Antje K. Gamble

In 1948, Museum of Modern Art curator James Thrall Soby wrote to Director Nelson Rockefeller: “[there is] a sculptor named Marino Marini who is among the best sculptors of our day[. . .]”1 By the mid-1950s, American excitement about the Italian sculptor Marino Marini (1901–80) had risen to a fever pitch.2 With the invaluable support of his German-American dealer Curt Valentin, Marini’s sculptures were sought by America’s elite to occupy their homes and the prestigious museums they patronized. Marini created an American collector base that included the likes of the New York architect Ed Bullerjahn, President and Chairman of Levi Strauss & Co. Walter A. Haas, modern art collector Eleanor “Lallie” Biddle Barnes Lloyd, and Director of the St. Louis Art Museum Perry T. Rathbone.3 By the mid-1950s, Marini’s series of cavalieri (mounted knights, commonly translated as “horse and riders”) and Pomona (a fertility deity with Etruscan origins) had become seemingly ubiquitous within the American visual landscape—one work found its way into Billy Wilder’s 1954 Hollywood production of Sabrina, starring Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.4 Marini was born on February 27, 1901 in the Tuscan city of Pistoia.5 At sixteen, he and his twin sister both enrolled at the Academia di Belle Arte in nearby Florence. Often traveling to Paris in his formative years, Marini ultimately established a studio in Milan and later secured a teaching position there at the Accademia di Brera. By the war’s onset in 1939, he had already established his career as a premier sculptor in Italy, winning the first prize for sculpture at the 1935 Quadriennale di Roma. After taking refuge in his wife’s native Switzerland after Allied bombing destroyed his Milanese studio, his career took off again in the wake of World War II. His sculptural forms that combined humanist ideas with modernist aesthetics appealed to the rebounding postwar art markets in both Europe and the United

156

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 8.1  Marino Marini’s Cavaliere (1948: 314b) seen behind actress Audrey Hepburn on the Larrabee Office set in Wilder’s Sabrina, 1954. © Paramount Pictures.

States. Italy was a focus of American tastemakers not only because of the country’s political import to the fight against communism but also because of its position as the inheritor of the humanist tradition.6 In the immediate postwar moment, Marini’s new place as exemplary European sculptor put his work center stage of the so-­called “Cultural Cold War.”7 Nationalist politics, at least in part, drove the postwar battle over the fate of modern sculpture’s Euro-American legacy in the mid-1950s. As art historian David Getsy explains, the nature of these debates was not simply limited to arguments about formalism, or haptic verses optic approaches to sculpture.8 Since sculpture was traditionally a public and politicized medium, coming from the long humanist tradition of public monuments, debates about sculpture were coded with the rhetoric of Cold War “soft power.”9 The Trans-Atlantic politics of the Cold War played a central role in the period’s debates about sculptural theory and, in turn, influenced American collectors’ buying practices. Therefore, Marini’s sculpture was part of the macrocosmic “battle [. . .] for the public face of modernism.”10

Buying Marino Marini

157

The year 1948 was a watershed moment in both Italo-American relations and also for the broader development of the Cold War. After Italy’s Civil War (1943– 5), democratic elections reflected the shifting political landscape of the new Republic. There was a real concern in the US that the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano or Italian Communist Party) would gain the Premiership.11 If the PCI had won, the balance in Europe would have shifted—Yugoslavia had already sided with the Soviets, and Moscow was focused on Italy’s strategic Mediterranean shipping and naval location. In the end, the American-­backed Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats) prevailed. As a result, by the spring of 1948, the country received $25 million in loans and another $133 million in “direct grants” from the US, with over $555 million committed for the rest of 1948 and 1949.12 In particular, the US State Department supported domestic cultural production and highlighted Italian cultural goods in US exhibitions.13 Through such displays, museums and galleries engineered American collector demand for Italian fine art. Since Italy served as a source of cultural capital for the United States, it held an important place within the Cold War. By 1950, this Cultural Cold War drove the rhetoric of exhibitions of Italian art in the United States serving both as economic stimulus and political maneuvering. Inasmuch as the US strove to create stronger ties between itself and Italy in their accelerating fight against Communism, the rhetoric of these exhibitions made this point explicitly. Terms like “work,” “individualism,” and “freedom” were codes—not so thinly veiled—for the ideal state of democratic cultural creativity. Thereby the US strove to gain cultural “soft power,” marketing postwar Italian cultural renewal as sparked by American democratic money and ideals. This strategy fought against the Soviet-­propagated image of the United States as “culturally barren, a nation of gum-­chewing, Chevy-­driving, Dupont-­sheathed philistines [. . .].”14 As it was with Hitler’s courtship of Mussolini in the 1930s, so it was on the part of the Americans after World War II, Italy was seen as the true holder of the classical lineage of high culture. These cultural stimulus programs were organized to “reveal how much the country [USA] and Europe resembled each other on the cultural level.”15 Through a variety of programming, American art was exported to Europe, and European art was correspondingly imported to the US to strengthen cross-­cultural ties.16 Both high art and handicraft from Italy amplified the effects of this exchange for the Americans because of Italy’s cultural cachet. Italian modern art became a proxy for cultural knowledge and classical heritage, and, at the same time, a surrogate for American culture. These programs were products of the American anxiety about a lack of rich cultural

158

Postwar Italian Art History Today

heritage as compared to either Europe or the USSR. The reverberations of this Cold War political rhetoric later became imbedded in the art historical legacy of modern Italian art.17 While many Italian artists like Marini had collaborated with the fascist regime at some level, the political shift at the end of the war that ousted Mussolini and brought Italy into the fold with US and British forces allowed artists to overcome their past allegiances and claim a new postwar innocence.18 Artists staged a reclamation of their artistic practice based on war’s physical devastation.19 Marini and his contemporaries rehearsed the familiar Futurist rhetoric of generative destruction in order to shed their fascist connections. American collectors and curators easily appropriated this understanding of Marini, seeing him as free of fascist entanglements. Their keen interest in supporting the objectives of the Cultural Cold War no doubt had a role to play.20 For Marini’s critics, “his sculptures of before 1945 looked like relics of another civilization.”21 Just as the armistice in Europe was being negotiated, Monroe Wheeler, Director of Exhibitions and Publications, began planning an exhibition of contemporary Italian art for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with oversight by Charles Rufus Morey, the newly appointed American cultural attaché in Italy and Acting Director of the American Academy in Rome.22 By the next year, 1946, the plans for an exhibition of contemporary Italian art had been approved, and Twentieth Century Italian Art would showcase over 250 works of painting, sculpture, and works on paper.23 Though it focused heavily on earlier-­twentieth-century artistic developments, including work of the Futurists, Scuola Metafisica, and the Novecento group, a number of post-World War II works were included. Contemporary Italian sculptors garnered particular attention. Marini, Giacomo Manzù (1908–91), Arturo Martini (1889–1947), Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), and others were showcased in the exhibition—the exhibition included six sculptures by Marini, along with a number of drawings.24 By representing a new Italy as having broken the “shackles of fascist isolationism” with the help of American intervention, the exhibition’s language was steeped in Cold War rhetoric. As it was described, this newly found, democratically-­inspired freedom allowed for vibrant creativity. Curators Soby and Alfred H. Barr Jr., then Director of Museum Collections, championed Marini in particular, saying that his “presence in Italy today is an extraordinary asset in the resurgence of creative impetus among the younger men.”25 Marini was singled out among the living sculptors working in Italy for consideration by American audiences.26

Buying Marino Marini

159

Figure 8.2  Installation view of Marino Marini’s sculptures in Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art, 1949. © MoMA, New York.

Part of the success of Italian artists in the US market after the MoMA show built on some preexisting American collecting interest in modern Italian art.27 Marini in particular benefited from the climate for collecting, becoming a symbol of postwar European Modernism as well as democratic Italian modernity. Alongside Henry Moore, who had already been widely exhibited and collected during the war, American collectors wanted works by Marini to round out their collections of European modern art.28 German-­born, New York-­based artist Margit Fischer foreshadowed the trend for Marini’s work when she wrote to Mercedes “Marina” Marini, the sculptor’s wife, saying that “the Italian ‘vogue’ is on right now” and that “in the same measure Moore is going down in demand, the Italians and Marino will go up.”29 Marini’s new collectors included “Lallie” (MoMA co-­founder) and her husband Henry Gates Lloyd (Deputy Director of the CIA 1954–64), Alexandre Rosenberg, and A. Conger Goodyear (MoMA’s founding Chairman); and the sculptor produced numerous commissions, including half-­a-dozen portrait busts, and sold existing works to dozens of prominent American collectors to

160

Postwar Italian Art History Today

complement their modernist homes, designed by the best contemporary architects. For example, department store owner and philanthropist Edgar Kaufmann—his son Edgar Jr. was Director of the Department of Industrial Design at MoMA from 1946–8—had his Cavaliere installed at his brand new house, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.30 Wright himself placed Kaufmann’s Cavaliere at the Bear Run stream under the house’s cantilever.31 Likewise, Blanchette Rockefeller’s “little modern house” in Manhattan displayed another Cavaliere by Marini—Blanchette Rockefeller would become MoMA President in 1972. The “little modern house” was a guesthouse designed by Phillip C. Johnson, who was also Director of the Department of Architecture at MoMA, built with the express interest to both display her collection of modern art and, at the same time, entertain guests.32 For a time, Marini became the it sculptor to own for public and private collectors, at least in part because he represented the most advanced European contemporary art. Marini’s works possessed an added allure, as compared to his European contemporaries, because they represented a clear connection to a long humanist tradition connecting American cultural habits to those of the Renaissance and ancient Rome. It is clear that to these collectors Marini symbolized the refinement of the American elite.33 His works reflected connections to democratic high culture and (just because he was Italian) to a tradition of so-­called “Western Culture.” Though the United States perceived itself as the heir to this tradition, the nation was only just beginning to generate contemporary artists who were accepted as equivalent to their European counterparts. Therefore, at this nascent moment of the Cold War, Marini’s work represented, for American collectors, their important participation in high culture. Building upon the success Marini found in the wake of the MoMA exhibition, Curt Valentin capitalized on the momentum with Marini’s first solo show in the United States in 1950. At Valentin’s New York Buchholz Gallery, Marini’s work in two- and three-­dimensions was showcased. This show only heightened the sculptor’s popularity among collectors. For the opening, Marini and his wife “Marina” traveled to New York, dining with Nelson Rockefeller, dining with Blanchette and John D. Rockefeller at their Manhattan Guest House, visiting Louisa and Alexander “Sandy” Calder at their Connecticut home, and staying with the Kaufmanns and the Sobys at Fallingwater—Marini was caught, in the middle of the night, chiseling at his Cavaliere by Bear Run Creek.34

Buying Marino Marini

161

Valentin, a German-Jewish immigrant who came to the United States in 1939, continued his pre-­war support of the so-­called “degenerate” artists. Most importantly, he championed the efforts of European sculptors trying to find a place in the American market. He was even described as having sparked the “renaissance [in] the appreciation of sculpture in America.”35 Valentin’s exhibition of Marini’s work was no exception and he presented the sculptor’s most recent production. Twenty-­seven bronzes, one Cavaliere in wood, and almost two dozen drawings and lithographs, all created between 1942–9 were exhibited. Marini’s portraits, his bread and butter, were heavily represented in this exhibition. Those chosen reflected the bull market for these types of works in the United States. For example, multiples of Marini’s busts of famous European personalities would be cast and recast in bronze, like those of the artist Carlo Carrà, the critic Lamberto Vitali or the composer Igor Stravinsky—the latter two included in this show. At the same time collectors commissioned unique portrait busts for their collections. Included in the Buchholz show, the Portrait of Nelly [Soby] was a commission by the MoMA curator, likely on his first tour of Italy in 1947. The Portrait of Nelly, like many of Marini’s portraits, referenced the early sculptural innovations of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928)—particularly evident in the modeling of the hair, creating a frontality to the work.36 Marini’s handling of the medium reflected his engagement with broader experiments in sculptural modernism. As with Marini’s other portraits, there is a sense of naturalism, presenting a recognizable image of the sitter, coupled with an interpretation of her personality. Nelly Soby’s prominent nose is slightly lifted, giving the portrait a sense of style and presence. The Buchholz Gallery catalog text, written by none other than MoMA’s Twentieth Century Italian Art curator James Thrall Soby, gave a new look at Marini’s American persona. Soby wrote, “we were talking in Marini’s modern apartment in Milan, a city which favors his intense working schedule because it provides a surrounding contemporary energy, of life and industry.”37 Keeping in mind that Hans Namuth’s film of Jackson Pollock painting was filmed the following year in 1951, Soby’s focus on Marini’s working environment fits into a larger American interest in artistic process as reflecting the artist’s psyche. In addition, he explicitly situated Marini’s work in the Italian humanist tradition of “the equestrian monument of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza del Campidoglio at Rome” and “the huge wooden horse that served as the model for Donatello’s Gattamelata.”38 Marini’s “enthusiasm” for iconic Italian sculptural types was

162

Postwar Italian Art History Today

foregrounded, giving a strong footing to his place as inheritor to an Italian artistic patrimony and, in turn, purveyor of cultural cachet to a discerning American collector. At the same time, Soby’s essay positioned Marini within a larger international landscape of contemporary sculpture, in particular contrast with his more well-­ known contemporary, Henry Moore. Marini’s “philosophy is different from Moore’s [. . .] in that he shows little faith in the modern doctrine of ‘truth to material’.”39 This distinction between Marini and Moore foreshadowed the critical moves later in the century, which by the mid-1950s shifted toward international rivalries between European and American sculptural modernisms. From Rodin to Hildebrandt, these kinds of sculptural debates with regard to artistic process, between modeled versus direct carving, already held an important place in sculptural discourse at the beginning of the Cold War.40 Importantly, Soby’s focus on material aspects of Marini’s works signaled this broader historical understanding of modernist ideals for sculpture that would grow into the Clement Greenberg/Herbert Read colloquy of optic versus haptic.41 The exhibition at Curt Valentin’s Buchholz Gallery garnered Marini a number of commissions from American collectors as well as invitations to participate in group shows across the country. So large was the American demand that Italian collector Emilio Jesi even lamented that his commission would not be fulfilled in a timely manner because of these new American clients.42 One collector, Mrs. Charles Grace, was so excited by her new purchase of a bronze boxer that she sent Valentin a photograph of her riding with it in their car during a 1952 move.43 Also among Marini’s continued American clients was Nelson Rockefeller, who added two new portraits to his collection in 1951.44 Following suit, American universities requested Marini for teaching engagements and visiting artist residencies.45 It was this 1950 exhibition at Buchholz that elicited the broadest critical reception to date of Marini’s work in the United States; the response was so favorable that Gino Ghiringhelli wrote to Marini to say that the massive interest might result in a second edition of the sculptor’s monograph.46 Mimicking the rhetoric of the exhibition texts from both the Buchholz and MoMA catalogs, the reviews set out to show the sculptor’s importance as both representative of modernity and a part of the ancient lineage of humanist high culture. These critical responses not only shaped the American perception of the Italian sculptor but also changed the way in which Marini framed his own work. He was

Buying Marino Marini

163

portrayed as a rustic Tuscan sculptor, a true Etruscan artisan. By tracking the historiography of this art criticism, it has become clear to me that Marini quickly embraced these readings, even taking them a step further. At this point, both Marini’s formal training at the Accademia di belle arti di Firenze and his established critical status in Italy tellingly disappeared from the American discourse.47 In one such response, art critic Howard Devree set the tone of his critique with the subtitle “Modern with Tradition.” Devree designated the relationship between modernity and tradition as the most important aspect of Marini’s work, with his sculpture symbolizing the multifarious ancient lineages that coalesced in modern art. He wrote that, “[a]cross space and time certain artists seize upon forms which are always there. A Han dynasty Chinese, an Egyptian of the great age, an ancient Cretan, a medieval guildsman and a contemporary America may share in this.”48 Aligned with the rhetoric of the Cultural Cold War, rather than merely tracing the general trend of archaism within modernism, Devree’s description made Marini a linchpin between ancient humanist traditions and “contemporary America.”49 Along these lines, the review by New York Times art and architecture critic Aline Louchheim highlighted the perceived duality in Marini as being both old and new.50 Louchheim led her discussion focusing on Marini the person rather than Marini’s sculptural production nor, as Soby had, his process of making. She portrayed Marini as an exotic other, harkening back to another era. He was, in her estimation, the Tuscan prototype artisan and his very physiognomy reflected this connection to an older time: The moment you meet him you know he comes from Tuscany. You try to decide specifically what this agile face recalls. The gently sensual lips, the delicate retroussé nose, the steeply arched eyebrows, the high forehead—was the ancestor one of the Florentines who wind through the fairy-­tale landscapes of the Val d’Arno in Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco, or one of those whose pristine profiles was caught by Antonio Pollaiuolo? [. . .] is this a descendant of Verrocchio’s “David”?51

His body and his facial characteristics functioned as proxy for his works’ humanist qualities. Even when Louchheim returned to describe the work itself, the vague Italian qualities of Marini’s identity remained the focus. She wrote, “It is this belief that the Italian temperament is eternally grounded in the definitive and the construction—almost in an architectural concept—by which Marini explains

164

Postwar Italian Art History Today

the ‘new renaissance’ of sculpture in Italy.”52 Much like the earlier fascist ideal of Italianità, Marini was, for the critic, the epitome of a vague humanist tradition finding resurgence in the modern era.53 Not long after, a shift was felt within American cultural discourse, exemplified in the writing of American critic Clement Greenberg. In the 1952 essay “Feeling is All,” Greenberg considered Marini in an effort to set new terms for sculpture as an autonomous medium. This essay signaled the coming dramatic shift in the critical reception of the sculptor’s work. Greenberg began this essay with discussions of “honesty” in art, all the while reinforcing the hierarchy of painting over sculpture.54 Greenberg described Marini, in this initial characterization, as two-­times removed from the most advanced sculpture—first in medium and second in form. In contrast to the “strongest [aspects] in post-Cubist art,” the European sculptors like Marini reflected the “flashiness” utilized to move past the artistic “strain” of the moment.55 These assertions marked the beginning of an important shift in American criticism, plotting American sculpture, or American-­ inspired ideals for sculpture, against those of the “Old World” across the Atlantic. Greenberg more clearly outlined his conception of a postwar modern sculptural ideal in the seminal 1952 essay,“Cross-Breeding of Modern Sculpture.” Greenberg identified two “rebirths” of sculpture: one via Brancusi and Picasso, and the second via the “old Gothic-Renaissance tradition of sculpture.”56 In so doing, he described how “the new, ‘open’ sculpture,” was “pictorial” and tended “to converge toward architecture [. . .] more than anything else,” yet, both “new” sculpture and advanced “traditional” sculpture were simultaneous creations.57 In this description, Greenberg singled out among the old tradition what he termed the “Italian archaicizers” as taking up where Rodin had left off in the vein of “traditional” sculpture. He wrote that “Marini, Manzù and Fazzini—have talent, especially the latter two, but it is all they can do to produce work that transcends superficiality and fashion.”58 For Greenberg, it was unclear if these best European models were “capable of doing more.” Greenberg’s “new” sculptors, the American “constructor-­sculptors,” would soon, he mused, be recognized as superior. The American David Smith was “the most powerful yet subtle sculptor” of this new type, while the “Italian archaicizers” were merely kicking a dead horse.59 By labeling Marini as an “Italian archaicizer,” Greenberg flipped the script on the narrative championing the Italian humanist tradition. Now, Marini’s connections to the history of Italian culture would jeopardize his ability to be truly modern. In essence, Greenberg set up American production as superior to European, fitting the rapidly changing critical landscape of the mid-1950s.60

Buying Marino Marini

165

As politics shifted, so did trends. Exemplified in Greenberg’s descriptions of Marini, art criticism went hand-­in-hand with a growing Cold War nationalism. Art collectors gradually followed suit. Initially, collectors, critics and curators had all subscribed to the importance of postwar Italian art and its humanist cachet as a means to legitimize American culture. Spurred on by the Marshall Plan’s financial and ideological support, the American market for Italian art functioned politically in solidifying America’s claims to cultural supremacy over the Soviet Union, the effects of which were long lasting. American collectors, private and public, bought Marino Marini. They participated in the new market of the Cultural Cold War and purchased images of modernity and a connection to the classical humanist tradition. However, as the politics of the Cold War intensified, the nationalist rhetoric between democratic allies changed the discussion. In the mid-1950s, Italy entered its own “Economic Miracle” and began to thrive despite the waning American financial support.61 Italy, like much of Europe, was no longer reliant on the United States and regained an independent place on the international stage.62 The new trans-Atlantic environment, with ever strengthening European states, elicited growing nationalistic support for culture on both sides of the Pond. In the end, Marini fell out of favor with American collectors and curators, who looked to their homegrown masters for high cultural value.

Notes 1 James Thrall Soby, “Letter to Nelson A. Rockefeller,” June 8, 1948, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers. Owned by Museum of Modern Art, New York; microfilmed by Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. MF3154. 2 At least sixty sculptures, almost exclusively bronzes, were purchased by private collectors and dozens more would be purchased by or donated to American museums before 1960. This data was compiled by the author by crosschecking the catalogue raisonné with museum digital databases. See Marino Marini. Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculptures, ed. Marina Beretta. First ed, Fondazione Marino Marini (Milan: Skira, 1998). 3 See William N. Eisendrath Jr., Contemporary Italian Art. Painting, Drawing, Sculpture (St. Louis: City Art Museum of St. Louis, 1955) and Marino Marini. Sculpture and Drawings, Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Modern Art Society, 1953).

166

Postwar Italian Art History Today

4 One of Marini’s small Cavaliere sculptures sits on pedestal in the Larrabee’s business office, filmed at 30 Broad Street in Manhattan. See Billy Wilder, Sabrina, 113 min. Paramount Pictures, 1954. The Museo Marino Marini pointed out this reference via their social media account https://m.facebook.com/museomarinomarini/posts/ 10153465627993535:0 (accessed June 20, 2015). 5 Unless otherwise noted, basic biographical information was taken from Marino Marini, 343–6. 6 Henry Stuart Hughes, The United States and Italy. 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 32. 7 See Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “Culture and the Cold War in Europe,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 1, eds. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad. 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 398–419; Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of The Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 322–59; and Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War. The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999). 8 David Getsy, “Tactility or opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on The Art of Sculpture, 1956,” Sculpture Journal 17, no. 2 (2008): 86–7. Also, see Robert Burstow, “The Limits of Modernist Art as a ‘Weapon of the Cold War’: Reassessing the Unknown Patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner,” Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 1 (1997): 68–80. 9 “[. . .] soft power resources [are] cultural attraction, ideology, and international institutions [. . .]” Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: the changing nature of American power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 188. 10 Getsy, “Tactility or opticality,” 87. 11 For brevity, I am presenting a much-­simplified version of the situation leading to the 1948 elections and the larger European context. For a thorough overview, David Ellwood’s work on the subject further outlines how the Italian situation fit into the larger European climate. See David Ellwood, “The 1948 elections in Italy: a Cold War propaganda battle,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13, no. 1 (1993): 19–33. 12 Italy, country study, European recovery program, Economic Cooperation Administration (Washington, DC: United States Government Print Office, 1949), 5. Also see Country Data Book: All Participating Countries, Economic Cooperation Administration. Washington DC: United States, 1950. These numbers are in the original, listed 1948–9 currency rates. 13 For example, see Claudio Alhaique, Relazione sull’attività della Compagnia Nazionale Artigiana (Rome: Arti Grafiche A. Chicca), 1951; Italian Arts & Crafts (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution), 1955; Italy At Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today

Buying Marino Marini

167

(Rome: The Compagnia Nazionale Artigiana, 1950); and Relazione della X Commissione Permenente, Ministero dell’industria (Rome: Camera dei Deputati, 1949), 6. 14 Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 19. 15 Gienow-Hecht, “Culture and the Cold War in Europe,” 408. 16 Likewise, American artists inspired by Italy had their own show in the United States. See Harris K. Prior, Italy Rediscovered an Exhibition of Work by American Painters in Italy Since World War II (Utica, NY: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1955). This would not be the first time that American collectors and museums shifted their interest in art based on larger political trends. For example, “German art before the Civil War played a prominent role in the United States, but after the Civil War American patrons tended to value French academic and avant-garde art over contemporary Germany painting. American museums enlarged their collections with old masters and French Impressionists,” Marion Deshmukh, Françoise Forster-Hahn, and Barbara Gaehtgens, “Introduction,” in Max Liebermann and International Modernism: An Artist’s Career from Empire to Third Reich, eds. Marion Deshmukh, Françoise Forster-Hahn, and Barbara Gaehtgens (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 9. 17 In particular, the web of public–private support of Italian art came together in the activities of the newly established MoMA. For details of MoMA’s creation, connections to the Marshall Plan, and the broader details of MoMA’s connections to the US government, see Chapter 4 of Antje K. Gamble, “National and International Modernism in Italian Sculpture from 1935–1959,” PhD diss. (University of Michigan, 2015); and Serge Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 30–84. 18 After the war, many one-­time collaborators claimed to have been Partisans all along. This was an important rhetorical shift in the cultural reconstruction effort. See Christopher Duggan, A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 244; Filippo Focardi, “Reshaping the Past: Collective Memory and the Second World War in Italy, 1945–55,” in The Postwar Challenge. Cultural, Social, and Political Change in Western Europe, 1945–58, ed. Dominik Geppert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 41; and John Lamberton Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 19 In the now famous photograph, Lucio Fontana transversed his studio, which had been turned to rubble, as a sign of hope in reconstruction. Sharon Hecker. “‘Servant of Two Masters’: Lucio Fontana’s Sculptures in Milan’s Cinema Arlecchino (1948),” Oxford Art Journal 35, No. 3 (2012): 340. 20 Before the war, American institutions like MoMA supported fascist state-­sponsored exhibitions. See Raffaele Bedarida, “Export/Import: The Promotion of Contemporary

168

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Italian Art in the United States, 1935–1969,” PhD diss. (Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2016). 21 Edouard Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century (San Francisco, CA: Bedford Arts, 1990), 89. 22 Monroe Wheeler, “Memorandum to Alfred Barr and James Thrall Soby,” April 17, 1946, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, owned by Museum of Modern Art, New York; microfilmed by Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. MF 3153. 23 This exhibition also had precedents in the inter-­war fascist-­sponsored exhibitions in the United States. See Bedarida. “Operation Renaissance: Italian Art at MoMA, 1940–1949,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 2 (2012): 147–69. 24 Alfred H. Barr Jr. and James Thrall Soby, Twentieth-Century Italian Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1949), 131. 25 Ibid. 33. 26 In an essay originally published in 1961, Soby described identifying Marini’s privileged place among Italian postwar art when he first met him in the 1940s. See James Thrall Soby, “Genesis of a Collection,” in The Collector in America, ed. Jean Lipman (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), 177. 27 For example, see Roberta “Bobby” Fansler Alford, “Letter to Alfred Barr,” March 11, 1946, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, owned by Museum of Modern Art, New York; microfilmed by Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. MF 3153. Also see the discussion of the Fascist-­sponsored Comet Gallery in New York in Chapter 1 of Bedarida, “Export/Import.” 28 See Pauline Rose, Henry Moore in America: art, business and the special relationship (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). 29 Margrit Fischer. “Letter to Marina Marini,” June 9, 1949, in Archivio Marino Marini, ID69, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia. Emphasis original to text. 30 Kaufmann’s Cavaliere was a work of the same composition as examples now at the Guggenheim Venice and Getty, titled Angelo della Città. Art historian Teresa Meucci claims that the Guggenheim example was the first (Teresa Meucci, “Marino Marini e Curt Valentin: La fortuna dello scultore in America,” Quaderni di scultura contemporanea, no. 8 (2008): 8). However, in his unpublished memoir, James Thrall Soby claimed that Peggy Guggenheim’s Angelo della Città came second after Kaufmann’s horse (James Thrall Soby, manuscript: “My Life in The Art World” Part 2, in James Thrall Soby Papers, VIII.A.2, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 20.7.). A third and final cast was made in 1950 for Dr. C.J. Engels of Curaçao. It was bought in 1971 by Broadway and film producer Ray Stark and was later gifted to the J. Paul Getty Museum (Christopher Bedford. “No. 18 Marino Marini, Angel of the Citadel—Horse and Rider—Town’s Guardian Angel,” in The Fran and Ray Stark Collection of 20th-Century Sculpture at the J. Paul Getty Museum, ed. Antonia Boström (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), 118–21). This cast from

Buying Marino Marini

169

Kaufmann’s collection was not included in the current, first edition of the artist’s catalogue raisonné. 31 “Marino Marini’s Horseman, part of the Kaufmann outdoor sculpture collection, was lost during a flood at Bear Run in August of 1956. In the Bruno Zevi’s L’architettura (agosto 1962) the author indicates that the sculpture was placed over the Bear Run by Wright. Fallingwater houses the fragments found in the stream after the flood in its offsite storage.” Aleksandra Carapella, email correspondence to the author from Fallingwater’s Curator of Collections, July 31, 2013. 32 See Matthew A. Postal, “Rockefeller Guest House,” Research Department (New York: Landmarks Preservation Commission, 2000); and Blanchette Rockefeller, “Letter to Marina and Marino Marini,” Febuary 14, 1950, in Archivio Marino Marini, ID88, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia. 33 As historians Matthew Hilton and Martin Daunton have argued, post-World War II consumers’ choices were influenced by the “commercial and political interests seeking to define the consumer in order to legitimate their own aims and ambitions.” See Matthew Hilton and Martin Daunton, “Material Politics: An Introduction,” in The Politics of Consumption. Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, eds. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 4. 34 Calder met Marini at the Biennale the same year, 1950, and wrote to Marini about the trip in May saying he had begun to learn Italian in anticipation of Marini’s visit. See Alexander (Sandy) Calder, “Letter to Marina and Marino Marini,” April 7, 1950, in Archivio Marino Marini, ID142, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia. In his never-­published autobiography, James Thrall Soby recounted that Marini admitted that, “I’m very afraid of refinement in my sculptures [. . .] so I like to roughen up the bronzes a bit after they’ve been cast.” Later, Soby caught Marini chiseling Kaufmann’s new Cavalierei and, he recounted, “I yelled for Edgar Kaufmann, and he and I managed to lure Marini back into the house.” See James Thrall Soby, manuscript: “My Life in The Art World” Part 2, in James Thrall Soby Papers, VIII.A.2, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 20.7. 35 Meucci, “Marino Marini e Curt Valentin: La fortuna dello scultore in America,” 8–9. Translation by the author. 36 See more on Rosso’s postwar influence in Sharon Hecker’s chapter in this volume. 37 James Thrall Soby, “Marino Marini,” in Marino Marini, February 14–March 11, 1950, ed. Buchholz Gallery (New York: Curt Valentin, 1950), 1. 38 Ibid. 1–2. 39 Ibid. 3. Emphasis original to text. 40 For example, see Andrew Causey, “R.H. Wilenski and The Meaning of Modern Sculpture,” in Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930, ed. David J. Getsy (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004), 267–89; and R.H. Wilenski, “from The Meaning of Modern Sculpture,” in Modern Sculpture Reader,

170

Postwar Italian Art History Today

eds. David Hulks, Alex Potts and Jon Wood (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007 [1932]), 106–8. 41 Getsy, “Tactility or opticality,” 86–7. 42 Emilio Jesi, “Letter to Marino Marini,” August 22, 1945, in Archivio Marino Marini, ID17, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia. 43 Mrs. Charles Grace, “Note to Curt Valentine with Photo,” 1952, in Archivio Marino Marini, ID210, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia. 44 Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Letter to Marino Marini,” February 12, 1951, in Archivio Marino Marini, ID213, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia. Also see Francine Du Plessix, “Anatomy of a Collector: Nelson A. Rockefeller,” in The Collector in America, ed. Jean Lipman (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), 16. 45 It is unclear whether or not Marini ever did teach courses in the United States. However, permissions were granted from the Italian government to temporarily vacate his position at Brera. For example, see Franco Boubous, “Letter to Marino Marini,” January 31, 1950, in Archivio Marino Marini, ID91, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia; Ministro della Pubblica Istruzione. Letter to Marino Marini, March 28, 1950, in Archivio Marino Marini, ID106, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia. 46 Gino Ghiringhelli, “Letter to Marino Marini,” March 8, 1950, in Archivio Marino Marini, ID128, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia. He is referring to the artist’s first monograph: Lamberto Vitali. Marino Marini: 33 tavole, ed. Giovanni Scheiwiller, Arte Moderna Italiana N. 29 (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1937). 47 As one of the major shifts in the critical discourse coming from the United States, Marini’s image as a rustic Tuscan sculptor paralleled the critical emphasis on Henry Moore’s working-­class roots. See Rose, Henry Moore in America, 15–19. 48 Howard Devree, “Diverse Modernism: Early and Recent Paintings by Picabia— Marini’s sculpture—John von Wicht,” New York Times, February 19, 1950: X9. 49 Ibid. 50 Aline B. Louchheim, “Tradition and the Contemporary,” New York Times, February 19, 1950: X9. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Italianità is a term that was most explicitly used for a Fascist ideal of an Italian civilization. As Emilio Gentile writes, Italianità was seen as a “necessity of a radical process of moral, cultural, and political regeneration meant to give birth to a ‘new Italian.’ [. . .] Artists and intellectuals were to abandon the privileged isles of aristocratic individualism and immerse themselves in the impetuous flux of modern life in order to become the artificers, the spiritual guides of the New Italy.” Emilio Gentile, “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism,” Modernism/Modernity 1, No. 3 (1994): 59.

Buying Marino Marini

171

54 Clement Greenberg, “Feeling is All (1952),” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian. 4 vols. Vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986–93), 99–101. 55 Ibid. 56 Greenberg, “Cross-Breeding of Modern Sculpture (1952)”, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian. 4 vols. Vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986–93), 107. 57 Ibid. Emphasis original to text. 58 Greenberg, “Cross-Breeding,” 112. 59 Ibid. 60 Read more about Greenberg’s complicated relationship to democracy and communism here: Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: the New York intellectuals & their world (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 61 Hughes, The United States and Italy, 177. 62 Duggan, “Italy in the Cold War Years and the Legacy of Fascism,” in Italy in the Cold War. Politics, Culture and Society 1948–58 (Oxford & Washington DC: Berg Publishers Limited, 1995), 1–24.

9

A House No Longer Divided: Patronage, Pluralism, and Creative Freedom in Italian Pre- and Postwar Art Laura Moure Cecchini

In the study of Italian modern art, World War II is often treated as a watershed that serves to divide artists working between the 1920s and the 1960s into two distinct categories—for example, a recent publication such as Art of the Twentieth Century, edited by Valerio Terraroli and Gabriella Belli, separates the period into a volume dedicated to The Artistic Culture Between the Wars—Art 1920–1945, and another one to The Birth of Contemporary—Art 1946–1968.1 According to this division, on one side we have artists who thematicized the complexity of life under totalitarian regimes, with its inevitable compromises and rebellions; on the other, artists who expressed the promises and anguishes of the postwar reconstruction, and whose work ushered in the genres, styles, and interests of contemporary art. From a pedagogical standpoint, such separation facilitates the study of how art reflects social, political, and economic changes, and therefore how epochal events such as world conflicts shaped artistic practices and agendas. Yet what Augusto del Noce has called “the myth of 1945” has also concealed important continuities in the way the art system operated in Italy during the twentieth century.2 Furthermore, as the label “postwar art” is more commonly associated with the work of artists from the 1960s and 1970s rather than of those who worked in the period immediately after the end of World War II, it is often overlooked how much of the practices of the Italian art system before the war persisted after the end of fascism. For instance, the break between prewar and postwar art obscures the fact that many prominent Italian modernists spanned this artificial divide and worked successfully in both periods—such as Giacomo Balla, Mario Sironi, Massimo Campigli, Mario Mafai, not to mention Lucio Fontana and Renato Guttuso, among many others.

174

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Although the end of the fascist regime, moreover, provoked major changes in the relationship between artists and the economic system, in this essay I will argue that some important features of state art patronage persisted after the fall of Benito Mussolini, albeit no longer in the public but rather in the private sphere. To prove my thesis that the relation between interwar and postwar Italian art is in many important respects one of continuity rather than rupture, I will examine three collections of paintings developed during the postwar reconstruction that made use of some of the collecting protocols of the fascist state, such as commissioning works illustrating a specific subject matter, while allowing the artists to determine the style in which the artwork would be made. Two of these collections were organized by the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini: a collection of visions of Rome, which Zavattini assembled for film producer Ferruccio Caramelli, and Zavattini’s own collection of artists’ self-­portraits. The third collection was commissioned by the industrialist Giuseppe Verzocchi, but shared a similar logic to the ones gathered by Zavattini: it was thematic, focusing on representations of labor. Although these collections are familiar to scholars of Italian art, they have yet to be considered in conjunction and as symptomatic of a particular way of understanding the relation between artists and patrons. It has to be pointed out, moreover, that Zavattini, Caramelli, and Verzocchi were not major players in the larger panorama of Italian modern art—in no small part, I might argue, precisely because of the unusual way in which their collections were formed. These three collectors have little in common with more renowned art patrons of the 1930s and 1940s such as Riccardo Gualino, Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano, Alberto Della Ragione, Rino Valdemeri, or Pietro Feroldi, or in the postwar period, Emilio Jesi, Gianni Mattioli, Giuseppe Vismara, and Riccardo Jucker, whose artworks now are part of the most important Italian museums of modern art.3 These well-­known collections were formed in a similar way to other international ones of the period, and often included non-Italian artists. The collectors developed a privileged relation with an art gallery (Vismara with the Galleria del Milione, for instance, or Della Ragione with Galleria della Spiga), a connoisseur or art critic (Gualino and Lionello Venturi, for example, or Feroldi and Carlo Belli), or an artist (like the Boschi–Di Stefano couple with Sironi and Fontana, or Gualino with Felice Casorati). They acquired a variety of artworks— with different media, styles, genres, and subject matter—with the aim of providing a selective view of Italian modern art that revealed the foresight and discernment of the collector’s taste.

A House No Longer Divided

175

By contrast, Zavattini, Caramelli, and Verzocchi were extremely inclusive in their collecting practices, incorporating artworks of different styles and movements, while at the same time requiring a specific subject matter and format from the artworks that they commissioned—and, in the case of the Caramelli and the Verzocchi collections, also imposing a timeframe for the delivery of the finished piece. Throughout the postwar period, by instituting monothematic prizes and competitions, institutions such as cultural associations, banks, and art galleries also encouraged artists to produce work that responded to a specific set of instructions.4 However, the fact that this practice permeated too the collecting modalities of private citizens like Zavattini, Caramelli, and Verzocchi—rather than only those of institutions—is in and of itself worthy of attention. In this chapter, I will analyze the ways Giuseppe Verzocchi and Cesare Zavattini reiterated some aspects of the fascist patronage policies by imposing a set of restrictions on the artists’ work, but also by allowing them to express their peculiar aesthetics in the form and content of their artworks. Caramelli, Zavattini, and Verzocchi’s collections of paintings exemplify how Italian modern artists sought to reconcile the patrons’ demands with their own desire for self-­ expression, while the collectors sought to fulfill their wish for a diverse but coherent collection. Such analysis reveals that the idea that artists deserve creative freedom but must operate organically with the rest of society—with all the compromises this inevitably entails—was a constant in the relationship between patrons and artists before and after World War II. More importantly, analyzing these collections also shows the ways in which the notion of aesthetic pluralism—which is a common trait of the majority of art during the fascist period and, allegedly, of postwar liberal regimes—could operate as a means of neutralizing political dissent, and of deflecting forms of opposition under a veneer of tolerance and inclusivity. “Among the thousand things that occupied me in liberated Rome in the period around 1945,” Zavattini once recalled, “the passion to collect and to get others to collect contemporary art was a sort of obsession. ‘Collect, collect!’ I would say even to people who had no taste for art and no knowledge of painting.”5 Zavattini was instrumental in building the collections of several members of the Italian star system, such as the actors Isa Miranda and Vittorio de Sica. For the film producer Ferruccio Caramelli, Zavattini commissioned several Italian artists to paint views of Rome. The only conditions were that they must work in a small two-­dimensional format (20 cm × 26 cm (7 × 10 inches)), and that

176

Postwar Italian Art History Today

regardless of their market value they would all receive the same economic compensation.6 By 1948, the “Collezione Roma” included fifty-­four paintings by fifty-­one living Italian artists, both established and newcomers. The collection, acquired in 1983 by the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, provides a comprehensive overview of the different tendencies of Italian modern art in the late 1940s. In some cases, like Giorgio de Chirico and Filippo de Pisis, the artists chose the same subject matter, an effective way of highlighting their differences in style and sensibility. Alberto Savinio’s view of Trinità dei Monti, Renzo Vespignani’s depiction of Rome’s modern “gazometro” (a tank for storing gas), and Mario Mafai’s serene Accademia di Belle Arti also reveal the multiple souls of Rome, which had been devastated during the war and was enduring a painful process of reconstruction and modernization. In the same period, Zavattini began his own collection of artists’ self-­portraits. Although he was very successful as a novelist and screenwriter, he did not possess the economic resources to start a traditional art collection. Inspired by a very small sketch by Massimo Campigli that the critic Raffaele Carrieri had gifted him, in 1941 Zavattini asked each of his artist-­friends (who included Giacomo

Figure 9.1  Herbert List, “Rome. Cesare Zavattini, Italian writer, in front of his collection of miniatures by great Italian painters at his home,” 1951. Herbert List/ Magnum Photos.

A House No Longer Divided

177

Figure 9.2  “100 sguardi su Roma,” Collezione d’Arte di BNL Gruppo BNP, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale, July 17 to October 28, 2012. Photo of Sara Di Carlo, published in “100 Sguardi su Roma,” Roma, www.sulpalco.it, July 16, 2012, http://www.sulpalco.it/2012/07/16/100-sguardi-­su-roma/.

Balla, Felice Carena, Giacomo Manzú, Fausto Pirandello, Gino Severini, and Ottone Rosai, among many others) to paint a small self-­portrait for him.7 Many donated their paintings because of their friendship with Zavattini, or because they were honored to become part of such an unusual selection of portraits. When he did pay the artists, however, Zavattini did not hesitate to ask for a heavily discounted price “because I am a colleague, not an industrialist,” he said.8 The oil “quadrucci” (small paintings), as Zavattini called them, had to be signed and painted on a piece of canvas or wood no bigger than 8 x 10 cm (3 x 4 inches). As Zavattini’s collection continued to grow until it was sold in the 1970s, these self-­portraits summarize broad generational shifts in Italian art.9 The Verzocchi collection of images of labor also included representatives from the major Italian art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Giuseppe Verzocchi had built his fortune producing firebricks. Since the mid-1920s, he had also employed innovative graphic artists to promote his industry. In October 1949, he commissioned seventy-­two artists—as diverse as Afro, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Giorgio De Chirico, Enrico Prampolini, and Emilio Vedova—to represent labor, encouraging them “to deal with this subject in their own language.”10 The only condition was, once more, the size of the paintings (70 cm × 90 cm (27 × 35 inches)) and the discrete inclusion of a

178

Postwar Italian Art History Today

firebrick with the initials “V&D,” the name of Verzocchi’s company. All painters were compensated with the generous sum of 100,000 lire.11 As can be seen in the current location of the collection, the Pinacoteca Civica di Forlì, the artworks vary greatly in style and subject matter. As Verzocchi put it in the invitation he sent to the artists: Labor in the fields, labor in the factory, labor in the trade, labor in the studio of a painter, labor in a chemistry lab, labor in the office of an industrialist, physical labor, mental labor, labor, labor, labor in all its nobility. Paint for me any episode of labor, from the gleaner to the metalworker; do for me a painting with figures or without figures, paint a symbolist artwork, in the style of the 19th century, the 20th century, the 21st century. Do whatever you want. I only ask that each artist give me something that is a typical expression of his style.12

A lavish catalog of the collection was published in 1950, when it was exhibited in conjunction with the Venice Biennale. Verzocchi was astounded when the artists demurred from sending him a self-portrait and a brief written presentation—in addition to the submitted “representation of labor”—in a timely manner. Many refused to write a text, arguing that if the painting was successful, words were unnecessary; others balked at having to draw a self-portrait, and insisted on

Figure 9.3 Johnny Bergamini, View of Collezione Verzocchi, Palazzo Romagnoli, Forlì (Italy). © Palazzo Romagnoli, Forlì.

A House No Longer Divided

179

sending a photograph instead. As Verzocchi wrote to the painter Pietro Annigoni, “I have been working for 44 years and I have dealt with people of all kinds, but I would have never imagined that artists would drive me so crazy.”13 In their monothematic focus, and inclusion of a plurality of styles, these collections were quite different from the more renowned ones of the interwar and postwar periods. Instead of including all the tendencies of contemporary Italian art, collectors like Della Ragione, Feroldi, Gualino, Mattioli, or Cardazzo aspired to assemble a selection of artworks that included representatives only of those movements that they considered valuable and relevant. Unlike Verzocchi and Zavattini, these collectors were not interested in showing the plurality of tendencies at a given moment in time, but rather artistic visions that were exceptional because of their theme, format, technique, or style. Each collector chose works of high quality that were representative of a significant phase of the artist’s development, and of the art historical period in which he worked. Although they sometimes commissioned artists to produce artworks for their collections, these collectors were interested in works that expressed the peculiar style of each artist, the quid that made their works desirable and worthy of occupying a space in future narratives of Italian modern art—and this originality was expressed in their growing value in the art market. By contrast, Zavattini and Verzocchi directly commissioned famous and unknown artists to produce custom-­made paintings that responded to a set of restrictions they imposed. Artists became workers at the service of a financial supporter—Laura Malvano has gone so far as to suggest that the stipulations imposed on artists likened their artworks to industrial commodities.14 The patrons, by putting in place a set of provisions—and taking upon themselves the difficult task of forcing the artists to respect them through different forms of more or less polite coercion—made themselves an essential part of the creative enterprise. The artworks in the Caramelli, Zavattini, and Verzocchi collections have meaning only as part of an organic whole with others of the same theme—it is not accidental that when these artworks had to be sold they tended to be bought together rather than separately.15 Yet Verzocchi and Zavattini insisted that, so long as the artists respected a set of requirements, they were free to represent the themes of these collections according to their own mode of expression. At first sight, the emphasis put on creative freedom and pluralism by these patrons seems to align their collections with the postwar values championed by American figures like MoMA’s Director Alfred J. Barr. Barr famously claimed that the trademark of totalitarian art was the stylistic uniformity of its production;

180

Postwar Italian Art History Today

conversely, liberal democracies were supposed to give way to the unfolding of multiple artistic practices.16 Yet the fascist art system that nurtured the careers of most of the artists included in the Caramelli, Zavattini, and Verzocchi collections complicates this narrative. Scholars have by now demonstrated that despite specific cases in which artworks were removed from display because of their thematic unsuitability, it is precisely the stylistic pluralism encouraged under the fascist regime that served to distinguish the cultural production under Mussolini from that under the Nazis, and the Italian corporate structure when compared to the fads of the capitalist art market.17 As Ernst Bloch put it in 1937: How dangerously blurring it would be [. . .] if the Nazi heart had the hypocrisy even to beat for Franz Marc or, in another field, for [Béla] Bartók with the aim of a particular disguise. The confusion would be great; the fact that it is unfortunately not wholly impossible is demonstrated in some respects by the example of Mussolini, beneath whose rotten scepter progressive architecture, painting and music worth discussing remain unmolested.18

Many fascist ideologues argued that in democratic systems the art market determines which art is successful and which is not, and so artistic freedom cannot flourish. To counter this, they claimed, the state needed to operate as the main art patron to ensure that artists were protected from the vagaries of bourgeois taste and could thus enjoy true artistic independence.19 The price of such freedom took the form of the artists’ more or less formal allegiance to the state’s corporate structure. In the case of the fascist regime, for instance, artists had to join the art unions in order to participate in competitions and shows. When decorating a public building, they had to adhere to specific instructions. Yet these constraints were considered by many artists, and by art critics sympathetic to the regime, to be less burdensome than those imposed by the art market, because they did not so much affect the style in which artists worked but merely assimilated them within the institutional structure of the state.20 As the ex-Futurist, and anti-­bourgeois fascist artist Ottone Rosai insisted as late as 1942, so long as the state did not impose “official aesthetic canons,” artists under the regime could be said to enjoy “total freedom of expression.”21 According to this argument, the restrictions imposed by Mussolini’s patron state only made visible that art was subjected to the same rules of production as other forms of labor, that it was not sequestered in an autonomous realm as bourgeois societies pretend. This implied that the state actively supported artistic activity, but also that the artist had to become, in the words of Mussolini, a “worker citizen,” with

A House No Longer Divided

181

a “moral commitment that is not inferior to that of other fascists.”22 Yet public officials and critics often decried such conditions asserting that the corporative structure frequently reduced the state to the role of profligate charity giver rather than of discerning cultural promoter.23 As Minister of Education Giuseppe Bottai argued, “with a generosity that is not typical of most patrons, [the State] only requires that the artworks it patronizes be artworks,” without imposing specific genres, subject matter, or styles.24 Because of this practice, Bottai observed, while collectors could handpick high-­quality artworks, the state was forced to be less selective when supporting artists.25 This is another important convergence between Verzocchi and Zavattini’s collecting practices and the patronage policies of the fascist regime. Although Zavattini and Verzocchi constrained artists to address a certain theme in a particular format that was often not natural for them, they surrendered the role of the arbitrating critic. In the words of critic Renato Barilli, while Zavattini imposed certain “humility” on the part of the artists—who were forced to work in a small format, more often than not against their usual practice—in exchange “he relinquished the right to be a critic who like an exterminating angel separates with his sword the good from the bad.”26 To further this idea of the non-­ discerning (and therefore tolerant and inclusive) patron, in an article published in Life Magazine in 1950 Verzocchi went as far as to pretend that “he could scarcely tell a Titian from a Picasso.”27 This is not accurate, of course: Verzocchi also collected medieval and Renaissance painting, and owned a Duccio di Buoninsegna among other artworks, but he hardly mentioned this fact when talking about his collection of paintings of labor, which he presented mostly as a social enterprise, or what we would now call corporate responsibility; as if he had two entirely separate collecting personas.28 If the artworks they commissioned responded to the theme and measurements they had requested, Zavattini and Verzocchi included them in their collections, without putting into question their artistic value. In so doing, they avoided (like the fascist state, as Bottai had pointed out, and unlike more discriminating collectors of the postwar period) expressing judgments about both the aesthetic and the economic value of the artworks they commissioned—let us remember that Zavattini, Caramelli, and Verzocchi paid the same amount for every artwork they commissioned, with no consideration given to the artists’ market value. Simonetta Lux has observed that the indifference that collectors like Verzocchi manifested towards form and style—considering all to be equivalent within the context of the overarching theme of their collections—reveals a tendency

182

Postwar Italian Art History Today

towards the de-­ideologization of art.29 Verzocchi, for example, accepted in his collections works by the Communist Renato Guttuso, as well as by the fascists Ardengo Soffici and Cipriano Efisio Oppo, while Zavattini included works by Mussolini’s ally Mario Sironi and by the antifascist Aligi Sassu. Although the term de-­ideologization is quite problematic, it seems to me to convey the process by which, for example, a depiction of labor by Sironi—which evoked the artist’s previous interpretations of the same theme during the fascist period, representing the worker as integral to the regime’s rhetoric—was deactivated and neutralized in its political implications when it was exhibited side by side with an equally decontextualized representation of work by Guttuso, with its own ideological underpinnings but on the opposite side of the political spectrum. By presenting them simply as representations of labor, and equalized in their political stances, Verzocchi’s collection (like Caramelli and Zavattini’s) annulled the ideological import of Sironi and Guttuso’s artworks. Yet this so-­called de-­ideologization arguably had a precursor in the tolerance of stylistic diversity among artists that was already at work under the fascist regime— as the coexistence of the classicizing aesthetics of the Novecento group, the expressionist angst of Sironi, the neofuturism of aeropittura, and the acceptance of radical forms of abstraction and rationalism throughout the 1930s reveal. The regime’s artistic pluralism corresponded to fascism’s refusal to be restricted and confined by a single political position, and its ambition to express the multiple aspirations of Italian society, a central aspect of fascist ideology.30 The pluralism that reigned at the artistic level concealed the fact that no political pluralism was possible under fascist rule. Like the fascist patron state, Verzocchi and Zavattini operated as if form could be separated from content: while the economic sponsor should prescribe the latter, the former was so irrelevant that the artists could be given free rein. By implying that so long as artists could choose their style they were truly free, in the interwar period and in the postwar collections I have examined, art was presented as an autonomous realm, and artists were thwarted from attending to the concrete social and economic conditions in which they worked. To my knowledge, the practices of Verzocchi and Zavattini were rare among private collectors of the Italian postwar period. Yet they show that the approach to patronage of the fascist regime could permeate what is usually associated with the liberal system par excellence, private enterprise. Their, and the fascist regime’s, tolerance for a variety of styles also teach us that a plurality of styles does not necessarily imply a plurality of artistic agendas—unless, like many fascist ideologues, and Verzocchi and Zavattini themselves, we consider that both the

A House No Longer Divided

183

content of the artworks and the social and political position of the artist are not an integral part of the artwork. It is precisely to counter such indifference to style that in 1948 Palmiro Togliatti, secretary of the Italian Communist Party, exhorted left-­wing artists to move away from new forms of abstraction (accused of being solipsistic and incomprehensible to the larger audience) and to rather adopt an easy-­to-read form of realism. Responding to artistic movements such as Fronte Nuovo delle Arti that were inspired by the expressionist aesthetics of the Fauves and the Cubists, Togliatti accused young Italian painters (many of whom were Communists) of producing mere “scribblings.”31 Not only in agreement with Cominform guidelines, Togliatti’s crusade against abstraction should also be interpreted along the lines of the discussion on realism that had engaged Ernst Bloch and Georgy Lukács in 1938.32 In their interventions in the German review Das Wort, Bloch and Lukács debated on the best aesthetic form to express social reality under capitalism; like Togliatti exactly ten years later, Lukács too argued that realism (not photographic naturalism though) was the only style able to produce a truly popular art and to express politically progressive trends. Guttuso, Mafai, and Giulio Turcato, among others, responded to Togliatti’s article by pointing out that they were against an “art without content” but that true art should be more than “naturalistic illustration.”33 Yet for Togliatti—and Guttuso and others who ended up aligning with his positions—aesthetic pluralism runs the risk of neutralizing political debate. To avoid the fictitious tolerance of the fascist years, style had to be politicized: on the right side, representational art; on the wrong one, everything else. The fracture between politically acceptable and unacceptable styles (or between art professing to be committed to a specific party-­line, and art committed to aesthetic experimentation) split Italian painters throughout the first half of the 1950s.34 By 1956, the year of the Polish protests and the Hungarian Revolution, and of numerous defections of artists and intellectuals from the Italian Communist Party, the terms of the debate had been exhausted. In the following decades, Italian artists would bypass the discussion of painterly style by challenging painting itself (by transcending the picture plane, engaging with the monochrome and textural matter, and experimenting with found materials) or by avoiding the medium altogether in favor of sculptural, performative, and spatial forms of art. “Style” as an interpretative category would also be increasingly questioned in art criticism—so much so that Svetlana Alpers referred to the term as “a depressing affair indeed.”35 Yet as postwar Italian art is often interpreted as shaped by returns

184

Postwar Italian Art History Today

to “classicism,” “abstraction,” “realism,” or “Baroque,” an awareness of the political implications of style (even when it was presented as purportedly neutral) in the longue-­durée of Italian modernism is ever more urgent. To conclude, I would suggest that it was precisely because during the twenty years of the fascist regime style was deemed inconsequential and non-­political that formerly fascist-­sponsored artists continued to work generally undisturbed in the postwar period. Verzocchi and Zavattini’s collections show that the pluralism of postwar Italian art is not only linked to changed political conditions, but also to the persistence of a particular view of the relation between artistic form and content that flourished before the fall of Mussolini’s regime. To what extent postwar painting responded to, and questioned, such political neutralization of style, seems to be a question still worth exploring.

Notes 1 Valerio Terraroli, Gabriella Belli, Carlo Bertelli, Germano Celant, and Ester Coen, Art of the Twentieth Century (Milan: Skira, 2014). 2 Augusto del Noce, Giovanni Gentile. Per una interpretazione filosofica della storia contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 10. 3 The analysis of art patronage during the ventennio has mostly focused on the building of public rather than private collections. Yet it was in this period when the core of some of the most important collections of Italian modern art was formed, many of which would eventually become accessible to the public in the postwar period: for example the collections Della Regione (now Museo Novecento, Florence), Cardazzo (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Milena Milani, Savona), Rimoldi (now Museo Rimoldi, Cortina d’Ampezzo), Mattioli (now Museo Peggy Guggenheim, Venice), Jucker (Museo del Novecento, Milan), and Vismara (Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan), among many others. On private art collections in Italy during the interwar period, see Paolo Fossati, “Le stanze del collezionista: appunti sugli inizi delle raccolte d’arte contemporanea in Italia,” in Collezione privata Arte italiana del 20o secolo, eds. Maria Cristina Rodeschini Galati and Francesco Rossi (Bergamo: Mazzotta, 1991), 19–30; Pia Vivarelli, “La politica di Bottai a sostegno delle collezioni di arte contemporanea e delle gallerie private,” in Artisti, collezionisti, mostre negli anni di Primato 1940–1943 (Rome: edieuropa, 1996), 57–64; Davide Lacagnina, “Arte moderna italiana: collezionismo e storiografia fra le pagine di ‘Emporium’ (1938–1943),” in Emporium II: parole e figure tra il 1895 e il 1964, eds. Giorgio Bacci and Miriam Fileti Mazza (Pisa: Scuola normale superiore, 2014), 453–80; Annalisa Scarpa, Sguardi sul Novecento: collezionismo privato tra gusto e tendenza (Milan: Skira, 2012).

A House No Longer Divided

185

4 I am grateful to Silvia Bottinelli for pointing this out to me. For more information, see chapter 1 of Silvia Bottinelli, Un Premio Dimenticato. La collezione del Fiorino alla Galleria d’arte moderna di Palazzo Pitti (Florence: Edifir, 2007), as well as E.Z. Manara, ed., Il 1950. Premi ed esposizioni nell’Italia del dopoguerra (Gavirate: Nicolini, 2000). 5 “Tra le mille cose che m’impegnavano nella Roma liberata intorno al 1945, il cinema, la narrativa, quella di raccogliere e fare raccogliere opere d’arte contemporanea era una specie di ossessione: di dire ‘colleziona, colleziona!’ anche alle persone più lontane dal gusto e dalla conoscenza della pittura.” Cesare Zavattini cited by Marcello Venturoli in Cinquanta Pittori per Roma: La Collezione Roma 1948 della Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (Rome: Editalia, 1983), 11, translated in the original, p. 15. 6 25,000 lire or 8,000, depending on the accounts. Marcello Venturi, Cinquanta Pittori per Roma, 11; Stefano Zuffi, Cinquanta pittori per Roma = Fifty painters for Rome:“Collezione Roma” proprietà della Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (Milan: Electa, 1995), 12. 7 “Una notte stavo solo soletto nel mio studio a guardare il bozzetto della Ricamatrice di Campigli, regalatomi da Raffaele Carrieri quando avevo lasciato Milano. [. . .] quasi ad alta voce dunque pensai che sarei stato molto contento se avessi potuto mettere un quadretto d’autore per parete. E perché non due? Mi soffiò nell’orecchio il diavolo. Insomma, scrissi una trentina di lettere ai miei amici cominciando con Carrá e finii con l’andare a letto all’alba.” (“One night I was all alone in my studio contemplating the sketch of the Ricamatrice [Embroiderer] by [Massimo] Campiglio, which Raffaele Carriere had gifted me when I left Milan [. . .] I thought aloud that I would be very happy if I could put one little painting by an artist on each wall. And why not two? suggested the devil. So, I wrote around thirty letters to my friends, starting with [Carlo Carrà] and ended up going to bed at dawn.”) Letter from Zavattini to Emilio Greco, March 12, 1959, Archivio Cesare Zavattini, Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia, cited in Marina Gargiulo, “A tutti i pittori ho chiesto l’autoritratto”: Zavattini e gli artisti della collezione 8 x 10,” in A tutti i pittori ho chiesto l’autoritratto: Zavattini e i maestri del Novecento (Milan: Skira, 2013), 11–17, 11. 8 “Bisogna chiedere al pittore, trattandosi di un collega e non di un industriale, un prezzo da amico,” Cesare Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, ed. Silvana Cirillo (Milan: Bompiani, 1988). Letter to Carlo Cardazzo, Rome, March 10, 1943, p. 71. My translation. 9 The “Collezione Minima,” as Zavattini’s collection of small-­format paintings is now called, continued to increase until the late 1970s, when he was forced to sell his 1,500 “quadrucci” by economic difficulties. Although the collection was dismembered, 152 artists’ self-­portraits are now in the Pinacoteca di Brera. 10 Giuseppe Verzocchi, Il lavoro nella pittura italiana d’oggi (Milan: Raccolte Verzocchi, 1950), Intro, np. Translated in the original. 11 Giuseppe Verzocchi, Prima circolare, September 3, 1949, published in Katia Severi, La Collezione Verzocchi e il suo carteggio (Castrocaro Terme: Vespignani, 2008), 58.

186

Postwar Italian Art History Today

When the paintings were first exhibited in Venice in 1950, Verzocchi gave seven prizes of 300,000 lire to the paintings the public most liked. The prizes were won by de Chirico, Sironi, Campigli, Depero, Menzio, Bartolini, and Breddo. 12 “Lavoro nei campi, lavoro nelle officine, lavoro nei traffici, lavoro nello studio di un pittore, nel laboratorio di un chimico, nell’ufficio di un industriale, lavoro delle mani, lavoro del cervello, lavoro, lavoro, lavoro in tutta la sua nobiltà. Mi si raffiguri un episodio qualunque di lavoro dalla spigolatrice all’operaio siderurgico; si faccia un quadro con figure o senza figure, si faccia un quadro simbolico, si faccia dell’800, del ’900 o del 2000, si faccia quel che si vuole, chiedo soltanto che ogni artista mi dia qualcosa che sia l’espressione tipica della sua maniera. “Circolare, Lanciano (Chieti), 19 settembre 1949, inviata da Verzocchi a tutti gli artisti contattati per la sua raccolta,” in Arte e lavoro: la collezione Verzocchi (Rome: Palombi, 2004), 51. My translation. 13 “Sono 44 anni che lavoro ed ho avuto a che fare con gente di tutte le specie, ma non avrei mai creduto che i pittori mi facessero impazzire tanto,” Katia Severi, La Collezione Verzocchi e il suo carteggio (Castrocaro Terme: Vespignani, 2008). Verzocchi to Pietro Annigoni, January 26, 1950, cited p. 172. My translation. 14 Laura Malvano, “Il tema del lavoro negli anni del Realismo,” in Arte e lavoro: dal Verismo al Neorealismo ([Valle d’Aosta]: Regione autonoma Valle d’Aosta, 2000), 93–103, 93–4. 15 As Verzocchi put it, “I have tried to choose artists representative of the most varied and indeed opposing tendencies, so that the collection, despite its single theme, might be truly comprehensive.” Giuseppe Verzocchi, Il lavoro nella pittura italiana d’oggi (Milano: Raccolte Verzocchi, 1950), Introduction. Translation in the original. Zavattini also stated, “I own today a unique collection: all Italian contemporary painting in a single room.” (“E oggi posseggo una collezione unica al mondo: tutta la pittura italiana contemporanea in una camera.”) Letter to Cesare Civita, editorial director of Mondadori, Rome, August 26, 1946. Cesare Zavattini, Una, cento, mille lettere, ed. Silvana Cirillo (Milano: Bompiani, 1988), 104. My translation. Zavattini’s collection, however, also included foreign painters, such as Sebastian Matta, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. 16 See John Elderfield, ed., The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century (Museum of Modern Art: New York, 1994). 17 See, for instance, the reaction to some mural paintings with a clearly bourgeois subject in the Hotel Ambasciatori (via Vittorio Veneto, Rome), made by Guido Cadorin. Cfr. Francesca Coiro Cecchini, La pittura murale del Ventennio a Roma (Rome: Edilazio, 2006), 29–35. See also Fernando Tempesti, Arte dell’Italia fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976); Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988); Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State. Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), Sileno Salvagnini, Il sistema delle arti in Italia 1919–1943 (Bologna: Minerva, 2000), Monica Cioli, Il

A House No Longer Divided

187

Fascismo e la sua arte: dottrina e istituzioni tra futurismo e Novecento (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2011), among others. 18 Ernst Bloch, “Jugglers’ Fair Beneath the Gallows, (1937),” in The Heritage of Our Times (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 75–80, 79–80. 19 On the art market during the fascist period, see Bianca Saletti, “Il mercato dell’arte durante il Fascismo,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica no. 2 (1989): 258–90. 20 For the discussion on whether fascist art should be identifiable or not through specific stylistic features, see, among others, Maria Cecilia Mazzi, “Modernità e tradizione: temi della politica artistica del regime fascista,” Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte, 12 (1980): 19–32; Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism. Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Emily Braun, “Expressionism as Fascist Aesthetic,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1, 1996): 273–92; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the ‘Third Way’,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1, 1996): 293–316; Joan L. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2005). 21 “Così, dal momento che ogni artista è chiamato, se si può dire, a continuare la linea del proprio lavoro, e non ad adattarlo a speciali condizioni esteriori, tutto si risolverà [. . .] nella misura con cui saprà comprendere e assimilare certe indubitabili novità che si presentano, ma che però non esulano dai fini artistici. E ancor più che lo Stato non impone con essa canoni estetici ufficiali, ma lascia agli artisti completa libertà d’espressione.” Ottone Rosai, “La legge per gli artisti,” Primato no. 11 (June 1, 1942), 211. 22 “L’arte del decennale: Il Duce parla agli artista e ai professionisti riunti all’Augusteo in Roma,” La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia, 10 (October 1932): 48, translated in Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149. 23 For instance, see Roberto Longhi, “La Mostra romana degli Artisti Sindacati—Clima e opere degli irrealisti,” L’Italia Letteraria (April 7–14, 1929). 24 “Lo Stato [. . .] con una liberalità che non è di committenti comuni, nessuna altra qualità esige dalle opere, se non quella d’essere opera d’arte,” Giuseppe Bottai, “Socialità dell’arte,” Primato 3, no. 8 (April 15, 1942): 151–2, 151. 25 Alessandro Del Puppo, “Da Soffici a Bottai. Una introduzione alla politica fascista delle arti in Italia,” Rivista de História da Arte e Arqueologia no. 2 (nd): 191–204, 198. See also Giuseppe. Bottai, Politica fascista delle arti (Rome: Signorelli, 1940); Paolo Fossati, “Pittura e scultura tra le due guerre,” in Storia dell’arte italiana. Parte seconda: dal Medioevo al Novecento. Volume terzo: il Novecento (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1982), 175–259; Sileno Salvagnini, “L’arte in azione. Fascismo e organizzazione della cultura artistica in Italia,” Italia contemporanea no. 173 (December 1988); V. Cazzato, ed., Istituzioni politiche e culturali in Italia negli anni Trenta (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 2001); Sileno Salvagnini, “L’Ufficio per l’Arte Contemporanea e la politica

188

Postwar Italian Art History Today

artistica di Bottai nei fondi dell’ACS,” in La passione del critico: scritti scelti sulle arti e la cultura del ’900, by Paolo Fossati, eds. Gianni Contessi and Miriam Panzeri (Milan: B. Mondadori, 2009), 293–315. 26 “D’altronde, come compenso, Za[vattini] non si arrogava certo il diritto di scegliere, l’attività del critico, di un angelo sterminatore che con la spada pretenda di separare i buoni dai cattivi, era del tutto estranea alla sua mentalità, e dunque questa sua minicollezione spalancava le porte a tutti i colleghi, senza distinzione di stili, tendenze, preferenze professionali, tutti degni di entrare, purché accettassero la prova di modestia dell’andare in piccolo,” Renato Barilli, “Za obbliga i colleghi a un rito collettivo di umiltà,” in A tutti i pittori ho chiesto l’autoritratto: Zavattini e i maestri del Novecento (Milan: Skira, 2013), 18–19, 19. 27 “Speaking of Pictures . . .,” Life Magazine, October 30, 1950: 14–16, 14. Two other American articles on the collection are “What’s Your Work?” Time, August 7, 1950; “Artists on Work,” New York Times Magazine, August 27, 1950. 28 Valentino Pace, “Da Duccio alla pittura italiana di metà XX secolo: Giuseppe Verzocchi, collezionista e mecenate del XX Secolo,” in Immagine e Ideologia. Studi in Onore di Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, eds. Arturo Calzona, Roberto Campari, and Massimo Mussini (Milano: Electa, 2007), 594–8. 29 Simonetta Lux, “Un imprenditore e l’arte italiana negli anni della ricostruzione postbellica: Giuseppe Verzocchi,” in Arte e lavoro: la collezione Verzocchi (Rome: Palombi, 2004), 15–18, 16. 30 Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (1918–1925) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996). 31 Roderigo di Castiglia, “Segnalazioni,” Rinascita: Rassegna di politica e cultura italiana V, No. 11 (November 1948): 424. See Nicoletta Misler, La via italiana al realismo. La politica culturale artistica del P.C.I. dal 1944 al 1956 (Milan: G. Mazzotta, 1973); Juan José Gómez Gutiérrez, The PCI Artists: AntiFascism and Communism in Italian Art, 1944–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). 32 Bloch’s “Discussing Expressionism” and Lukács’ “Realism in the Balance” have been translated into English in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977), 16–59 33 For this debate, see Adrian R. Duran, Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy (London: Routledge, 2017), especially chapter 5. 34 For some of these debates see Marcia E. Vetrocq, “National Style and the Agenda for Abstract Painting in Postwar Italy,” Art History 12, No. 4 (December 1, 1989): 448–71. 35 Svetlana Alpers, “Style Is What You Make It: The Visual Arts Once Again,” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang, rev. and expanded ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 96.

10

Co-­research and Art: Danilo Montaldi’s Horizontal Production of Knowledge Jacopo Galimberti

After Boccioni, I am going to study hard, again, El Lissitzky and Schwitters. Then I will tackle Klee and the others with no rush. We should tend to develop a new theory of form, one that meets the needs of our time.1 Danilo Montaldi, 1972 Danilo Montaldi is often regarded as a political activist and social researcher. Yet while these labels may be accurate, they are also reductive, as Montaldi was an intellectual with a pronounced interest in literature and the visual arts. His figure is absent from the mainstream narratives of postwar Italian art. Nonetheless, Montaldi’s approach to art and artistic production suggests new avenues in both the study of 1960s art criticism and the connections between political radicalism and art. This chapter contextualizes his work, adopting the perspective of social history. What follows first introduces Montaldi and his research methodology, “co-­research,” which has had an international resurgence of interest. The subsequent analysis revolves around Montaldi’s gallery, and particularly two exhibitions that visualized his meditations on “popular culture.” A case study, Montaldi’s collaborations with the artist Giuseppe Guerreschi, provides an example of how co-­research was implemented in the realm of art. This casts a new light on the notion of co-­research, showing that its core tenets exceeded the field of social sciences. An analogy between Montaldi’s approach to knowledge and Carla Lonzi’s transcription of her recorded dialogues with artists, titled Autoritratto, will be drawn in order to explore the underlying similarities and differences between the epistemological and political ambitions of two influential activists.

190

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Montaldi’s networks Danilo Montaldi was born to a working-­class family in Cremona in 1929. In 1946, while the membership figures of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) were increasing exponentially, Montaldi quit the party because of its reformist agenda. From the late 1940s until his death in an accident in 1975, he was in contact with a variety of Italian and international far-­left organizations. Montaldi was on friendly terms with the Bordighisti, Trotskyists, Anarchists, and the operaisti of Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) and Classe Operaia (Working Class). He also befriended Piergiorgio Bellocchio and Franco Fortini, although he never wrote for Quaderni Piacentini (Notebooks of Piacenza). Montaldi published in prominent Italian intellectual magazines of the 1950s and 1960s: Discussioni (Discussions), Nuovi Argomenti (New Arguments), Ragionamenti (Reflections), Opinione (Opinion), Passato e Presente (Past and Present).2 During his many trips to Paris, he entered into dialogue with the activists of Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarity), a splinter group of activists that had broken with the French Trotskyites and went on to become the major representative of council communism in France from 1948 until the early 1960s. Through this group he read the French translation of The American Worker, an anonymous pamphlet written by a General Motors worker, which developed an ethnographic investigation into the conditions of the proletariat in postwar America. Montaldi translated this text from French into Italian, along with Journal d’un ouvrier (Diary of a Worker), which told of the grass-­root struggles and the expérience prolétarienne in the Renault plants from the perspective of Daniel Mothé, a factory worker and member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.3 In the post-1968 political landscapes, Montaldi cooperated with the communist organization Avanguardia operaia (Worker Avant-­garde), which included rank-­and-file syndicates dissatisfied with the main Italian unions. It is in this context that Montaldi began conducting research into “the new working class” that had emerged during the struggles of 1968–70. This endeavour was interrupted by his untimely death in 1975, but some materials produced for this analysis were published posthumously.4 Despite his internationalist vocation, Montaldi lived in Cremona for most of his life, with the exception of the period between 1961 and 1964, when he worked as an editor for the leftist publishing house Feltrinelli in Milan. In Cremona, he lived on a limited income, most of which came from his work as a translator. He translated several books, ranging from a volume of Picasso’s writings to LeviStrauss’s Totemism Today. From 1957 to the mid-1960s, Montaldi was part of a Cremona-­based grassroots political organization called Gruppo di Unità Proletaria

Co-research and Art

191

(Group of Proletarian Unity), which established bonds of friendship not only with operaisti and Socialisme ou Barbarie, but also with the British group Solidarity for Worker’s Power, the Japanese Zengakuren (All-Japan League of Student Self-­ government), as well as News & Letters in Chicago and Correspondence in Detroit. In 1966, Montaldi founded, in collaboration with workers and students, the Karl Marx group, which aimed to generate grassroots, autonomous political activity in Cremona and its surroundings.

Co-­research The methodology that is often associated with Montaldi and other Cremona-­ based activists (notably Romano Alquati) is conricerca (“co-­research” or “communal research”), although Montaldi never described his method as such.5 Montaldi’s co-­research was an inquiry into the proletariat, but it was also an epistemic process resulting in the transformation of the subjects involved in the research in an effort to effect political activity. A less partisan version of this approach had been developed in North America, where it was implemented by maverick sociologists such as David Riesman. Unlike the Italian trade unions and the PCI, which were wary of anything “American,” sociologists Alessandro Pizzorno and Roberto Guiducci, who were among the founders of Sociology as a scientific discipline in Italy, had welcomed qualitative methods since the 1950s. Pizzorno invited Montaldi to participate in their research projects, but Montaldi always refused to become a specialist working within academic circles or to be in the employ of companies with a progressive social agenda.6 Other independent researchers shared his reluctance, notably the ricercatori scalzi (barefoot researchers); in other words, activists including Alquati, Cesare Bermani and Sergio Bologna, who carried out sociological, economic and historical research in service of the working class. Montaldi’s co-­research had a twofold goal. Firstly, Montaldi aimed to undermine received ideas about the proletariat’s identity. In so doing, he countered the claim of the PCI’s and the trade unions’ leading bodies to represent the working class and to guide it towards the appropriate emancipatory goals. By placing the researcher on the same level as the subjects of the inquiry, and treating the latter as knowledge producers in their own right, Montaldi generated a horizontal process facilitating the development of a shared activity. In 1956, Montaldi argued, “between the ‘interviewer’ and the ‘interviewee’ there is not the

192

Postwar Italian Art History Today

barrier (or the flattery) represented by the use of a different language [. . .], the project of analysis that was initially outlined by one [the researcher] was subject to several alterations made by many.”7 Secondly, Montaldi defied the predominant attitude of folklorists, who indulged in the pastoral myth of Arcadia or that of the noble savage.8 In the mid-1950s he tried to move beyond the ethical atmosphere of “neo-­realism” in order to rethink the forms and expressions of class conflict. His books are a testament to this political and epistemological approach. Montaldi is the author of at least four major books: Milano, Corea, first published with Franco Alasia in 1960; Autobiografie della leggera and Militanti politici di base, which are based on life stories; and a book titled Saggio sulla politica comunista in Italia, which was published posthumously and constituted of a controversial history of the PCI.9 In 1959, Montaldi also made a short film, La matana del Po, which depicts underclass people living on the banks of the Po. In the 1950s, Italian architects and city planners contributed to an intense debate about suburban areas and the material culture of the working class, at a time when migration from Southern Italy was increasingly directed toward the manufacturing centers of Milan and Turin. Against this backdrop, Montaldi was among the first to shift the focus of attention from the “subaltern classes” in Southern Italy (explored by the likes of Ernesto De Martino, Danilo Dolci and Franco Cagnetta) to the urban conurbations of Lombardy. Specifically, he concentrated on the Milanese shantytowns, popularly called Coree (Koreas), referencing the putative similarities between these squalid areas and the appalling conditions of the Korean population after the civil and proxy war.10 These dreary suburbs are the setting of the life stories told in Milano, Corea. Montaldi’s second book has a rural geographic focus and is titled Autobiografie della leggera (autobiographies of the “leggera”), “leggera” being a slang word for the lives of social outcasts. The book comprises life stories narrated by misfits, petty thieves, poor prostitutes, etc., introduced by a lengthy essay in which Montaldi clarifies the tenets of his method and interprets the results of the research. Several film directors approached Montaldi, as they wanted to turn one of the stories, that of O., into a film, but none of the projects were ever realized. Montaldi’s last published co-­research, Militanti politici di base, gathers together the life stories of political activists including Montaldi’s father, an anarchist who spent two years in jail during the dictatorship. Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote an enthusiastic review of Autobiografie della leggera praising how storytellers were encouraged to invent a language to cope with a genre, autobiography, that did not belong to popular culture.11 It is possible to contrast the attitude of Montaldi and that of Pasolini in relation to the underclass.

Co-research and Art

193

The latter understood “the vanquished” as the repository of pristine forms of life and knowledge secretly connected with pagan culture. In the same year that Montaldi published Autobiografie della leggera, Pasolini released Accattone, a film in which Johann Sebastian Bach’s sacred music seemingly redeems the ruthless and miserable life of the Lumpenproletariat, infusing it with solemnity. By contrast, Montaldi did not aesthetize the subjects of his inquiries, and he never considered his pícaros to be vanquished. Rather, he tried to empower them, challenging the idea—which was widespread within the PCI and the Church— that marginalized people are humble, frugal, and potentially more virtuous. His attempt to foster empowerment did not equate to a romantic idealization of the Milanese coreani. Montaldi was not blind to the opportunism of some of them, but he did not resort to a moralistic critique. Having said this, it is nonetheless possible to formulate an objection to Montaldi’s explorations. His inquiries provided an idiosyncratic depiction of the class. At the height of Italian Taylorism and the process of “becoming working class” of the proletariat, Montaldi focused on subjects that were either relatively exterior to capitalist valorization (the leggera) or not yet entirely subsumed by it (the coreani). Sandro Mezzadra, a contemporary leading expert on migrations, is consciously indebted to the 1960s militant inquiries of operaisti, which were, in turn, steeped in Montaldi’s approach through the connection established by Alquati.12 Through the notion of the “autonomy of migration” Mezzadra emphasizes that the “neo-­ realist” rhetoric against which Montaldi struggled still pervades leftist and religious-­minded discourses about migrants, in that migrants are often cast as pure and naïve people who need protection and elicit compassion, but whose subjectivity, political strategies and creativity tend to be negated.13

Exhibiting the “popular” In 1956, when Montaldi was twenty-­seven years old, he was invited by the French poet Jean L’Anselme to write a short essay about “popular expression.” In his text, Montaldi mentioned the touchstones of contemporary literary and ethnographic debates: Metello (which he defined as the new “populist” novel of Vasco Pratolini), as well as the work of Rocco Scotellaro and Pasolini’s Canzoniere italiano.14 One of Montaldi’s theses was that popular expression in Italy was viewed as eminently collective (corale), whereas French culture had long seen the appearance of the individual figure of the worker–writer. The reasons for what appeared to him as

194

Postwar Italian Art History Today

a shortcoming lay in both the repression of the fascist regime and the policies of postwar leftist parties, which appropriated “national-­bourgeois culture rather than seeking the class features in the realm of art.”15 Montaldi’s contribution to the self-­awareness of the proletariat and his focus on the class’ “expression” will be at the core of his 1960s books and a central part of the work he conducted through his art gallery. Montaldi had a strong inclination toward visual art. Together with Ambrogio Barili, in 1965 he opened the Gruppo d’arte Renzo Botti, a gallery in Cremona. This exhibition space aimed to stimulate debate about art in the city, but it proved to be largely unsuccessful in this respect.16 Montaldi was responsible for the exhibitions and wrote most of the texts featured in the booklets accompanying them. During its ten years of activity, the gallery showed a wide variety of artists working in different media. The “Botti” often showed painters and sculptors related to realismo esistenziale (existentialist realism), a loosely associated group of artists active in the 1950s who embraced realism while rejecting the aesthetic dicta of the Italian Communist Party. Its proponents included Bepi Romagnoni, Giuseppe Guerreschi, Mino Ceretti, Floriano Bodini, and Gianfranco Ferroni. Nonetheless, the curatorial policies of the gallery were not limited to the Milanese art scene. In 1967, Montaldi presented a collective exhibition of young Russian painters who departed from the realist aesthetic prescribed by the party. One of these was the young Ilya Kabakov. In 1972, the Botti gallery organized a solo show of German engraver Peter Ackermann. Montaldi’s was probably the first gallery in Italy to exhibit the agitprop silkscreen prints produced by the Atelier Populaire (Popular Workshop), the self-­managed artistic workshop that was established in the occupied Fine Arts School of Paris between May and June 1968. This event was the product of Montaldi’s trip to Paris. Indeed, in June 1968, Montaldi had traveled to the French capital to experience the political struggles firsthand. In some of his letters to Guerreschi he reported his visit to the Atelier and described its working method, providing one of the most vivid accounts of the workshop’s activity and egalitarian ethos.17 Several exhibitions at the Botti Gallery addressed, directly or indirectly, the issue of the popular.18 A brief discussion of the exhibition about Épinal prints and the exhibitions Montaldi devoted to the local artist Renzo Botti (after whom the gallery was named) will exemplify Montaldi’s rejoinder against mainstream approaches to the “popular.” In the mid-1960s, the success of Pop Art, along with the emergence of a distinctively syncretic and cosmopolitan “low culture” mostly disseminated by mass media, rekindled the postwar controversies surrounding popular culture. Organized

Co-research and Art

195

by Giulio Carlo Argan, the 1966 Convegno internazionale, artisti, critici e studiosi d’arte was entitled “Arte popolare moderna” (Modern popular art), and among the speakers were art historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and folklorists who examined “the popular” without hypostatizing it.19 Almost ten years later, following the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the 1973 oil crisis, the diatribes about the critical valence and “modernity” of popular art had not yet dissipated. A 1975 exhibition, Avanguardia e cultura popolare (Avant-­garde and Popular Culture), raised the stakes by focusing on one of the most widespread assumptions about avant-­garde art, namely its endemic distance from the lower classes. A better knowledge of the communist art of the 1920s, from the Russian constructivists to the Spartacist wing of Dada, along with the emergence of a metropolitan, but nonetheless “popular,” counterculture born out of late Fordism, pushed the curators not to accept this gap as a destiny.20 In 1970, the Botti Gallery engaged with popular art through a show focused on Épinal prints, many of which came from Montaldi’s personal collection. Montaldi’s critical text for the exhibition developed what can be described as an anthropological approach to these works. Countering essentialist discourses, which tend to view Épinal prints as authentically “popular,” Montaldi argued for the need to understand them as “consumption objects” that had acted as a means to propagate mostly conservative values between 1750 and 1840. Instead of admiring their quaint naïveté, Montaldi underlined how these works often fulfilled the function of connection between, on the one hand, the political events of the capital and its visual world, and, on the other hand, the rural regions of France. It was in their attempt to foster moral conformism and acquiescence that the Épinal prints prefigured contemporary mass media. According to Montaldi, the work of artists such as François Georgin and Jean-Charles Pellerin, who consciously fashioned the popular immaginario through their prints, was now revived by press tycoons, “Pellerin, like Springer; like Hearst and Crespi; like Bild, Oggi and the TV.”21 Montaldi also touched upon the twentieth-­century’s artistic appropriation of these prints, mentioning Dada but also Arte Povera. His observation confirmed both his awareness of the most recent trends and the ambivalent nuances conveyed by Germano Celant’s critical category at the time.22 Montaldi’s work concerning Renzo Botti constitutes another conspicuous effort to contradict widespread misconceptions about popular culture. Botti was on friendly terms with Montaldi’s father and represented an important interlocutor for Montaldi until his death in 1953. Botti was poor and solitary, just like many of the figures in Montaldi’s books; yet, he had achieved renown in Cremona, where the local press depicted him as a picturesque and “noble” tramp.23 Shortly after

196

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Botti’s death, Montaldi set out to explore his multifaceted personality so as to defy this condescending portrayal. In 1956, Montaldi and some friends published texts by Botti, along with a group of short essays in which they provided a different picture of the painter.24 Montaldi opined that Botti was not a romantic outcast. Rather, he was a cultivated plebeian who consciously rejected the ethos of bourgeois society; “Poor devil. Nonsense. I have never been a poor devil. I feel sorry for them. Poor wretch,” wrote Botti.25 In the 1960s and 1970s, Montaldi held numerous exhibitions of Botti’s work in his gallery, and in 1975 he edited the painter’s writings. In his introduction to this short book, Montaldi claimed that Botti’s life unveiled traditions that were not “conservative, but secret and clandestine in relation to the culture of contemporary society.”26 In this way, Botti joined the tellers of life stories found in Autobiografia delle leggera. He embodied an oppositional, underground culture that, according to Montaldi, should be understood as a component of the class, of a political subject that was more resourceful, resilient, and radical than that delineated by the PCI.

Co-­researching with Guerreschi A careful reading of Montaldi’s correspondence with the artist Giuseppe Guerreschi suggests that Montaldi, intentionally or not, implemented co-­research in his relationship with the painter. Guerreschi and Montaldi met and became friends in 1963, and they maintained correspondence until Montaldi’s death. Shortly after their meeting, they quickly discovered not only that they were born on almost the same day, but also that in the same year that Montaldi published Milano, Corea, Guerreschi, unaware of Montaldi’s book, made a painting with virtually the same title and theme. As the years progressed, their relationship developed into an intense intellectual exchange. After Botti, Guerreschi became the most important artist in Montaldi’s life. Guerreschi exhibited at the Botti Gallery several times, and Montaldi himself wrote the texts in the booklets. In the early 1970s, Montaldi also wrote a preface for Guerreschi’s book of etchings entitled Vietnam Suite.27 Around the same years, Guerreschi made a portrait of the activist in which some of his political sympathies are hinted at in clues and citations. Montaldi was preparing a lengthy essay about the relationships between Italian communists (particularly Amedeo Bordiga) and Karl Korsch, a leftist critic of Bolshevism, whose militant and theoretical work evolved out of the struggles that took place in Germany in the late 1910s and early 1920s.28 In his

Co-research and Art

197

Figure 10.1  Giuseppe and Max Guerreschi with the “Rudi Dutschke,” 1968. © Max Guerreschi.

portrait of Montaldi, Guerreschi evoked interwar leftist communism by means of a drawing from the spartacist years of George Grosz, which Montaldi had previously transformed into a print that could be purchased in his gallery. This reminder of communist insubordination—a self-­portrait of Grosz bleeding, beaten by the police—was associated with a symbol merging the hammer and

198

Postwar Italian Art History Today

sickle of communism with the coat of arms of the Russian Empire, which had been published on the cover of Trotsky’s Between Revolution and Imperialism.29 The other figure surrounding the sitter was a profile representation of Max, one of Guerreschi’s two sons, which had already appeared on the brochure issued for one of Guerreschi’s exhibitions at the Botti. The numerous frames that punctuate the image, along with the iconographic sources of the portrait, suggest a common denominator for etchings, prints, and books, thereby visualizing the overlap between Montaldi’s and Guerreschi’s work. It is through their correspondence and the texts written for the exhibition catalogues that Montaldi’s and Guerreschi’s co-­research slowly took shape. Montaldi wrote a text in the booklet that was published on the occasion of an exhibition of Guerreschi’s prints at the Botti Gallery. In a letter to the painter he explained his word choice: “I paraphrased [. . .] what you wrote [in our correspondence] [. . .], because it was well expressed, and in this regard your words have a function more than the words of anyone else.”30 Montaldi did not try to devolve art writing to artists. He deemed art critics legitimate, but only when they attempted to bridge the distance between themselves and artists. For example, he praised the observations an art critic made about Guerreschi: “I like Garroni’s article [. . .]. It interests me because he achieved an analysis of your work that develops an ongoing self-­questioning.”31 To a certain extent, Montaldi’s co-­research echoed what Hans-Georg Gadamer defined, around the same time, as the “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) subtending the hermeneutic process. Yet, Montaldi’s co-­research diverges from Gadamer’s neutral philosophical investigations, as it aimed to make the resulting dialectic subservient to the creation of shared projects to be embedded in what has been called, in relation to Montaldi, “class self-­consciousness.”32 Around the mid-1960s, Guerreschi became increasingly interested in Jewish culture. The figure of the prophet is central to several letters. Guerreschi was preparing a painting revolving around this theme, which he initially conceived of as being chiefly religious. Montaldi dissented and discussed the need for a more materialistic view of prophecy. In 1967, the advent of the worker and student protests shifted Guerreschi’s perspective. He was now more inclined to politicize his character. In July 1968, Guerreschi wrote to Montaldi “unlike my initial opinions, The Prophet [sic, the main figure in the painting] increasingly turns out to be a man whose mind and feet are rooted in history. He is the person who rebels against the idea of a vague collective responsibility in order to introduce and impose the new principle of firm and conscious individual

Co-research and Art

199

responsibility. He is the person that [. . .] transforms religio into morality.”33 This joint meditation led Guerreschi to depict the German student activist Rudi Dutschke in the guise of a prophet, in a twist that cannot but recall the title of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky’s life until 1921, The Prophet Armed, by

Figure 10.2  Giuseppe Guerreschi, Giovane profeta, 1969. Oil on canvas, 150 × 110 cm. © Max Guerreschi.

200

Postwar Italian Art History Today

then already a classic.34 Following his trip to Paris in June 1968, Montaldi replied to Guerreschi, suggesting the need for an “anonymous” prophet echoing the egalitarian spirit of the 1968 movement. Guerreschi partly agreed. A few months later, he definitively deleted the portrait of the German leader. After extensive reworking, the final painting no longer showed the activist delivering a resounding speech, but rather a twelfth–fifteenth century terracotta head made in Nigeria on a multi-­armed marble sculpture carefully represented on canvas.35 Montaldi did not enquire about the reasons why his friend culled these images, and the subject of their correspondence gradually changed. While presenting I profeti, a series of paintings related to the theme of the prophet at a Milanese exhibition in 1969, Guerreschi wrote a text in the exhibition catalog. The first paragraph paraphrased one of Montaldi’s letters to him.36 The second paragraph included, in italics, excerpts from Montaldi’s and Guerreschi’s letters. While the different authors were not mentioned, the dates denoted in parentheses suggest that these were excerpts from their correspondence. In a sort of crescendo, the final part, entitled “Young Prophet,” still included interpolations in italics but goes one step further and combined Montaldi’s and Guerreschi’s words with no clear distinction. Guerreschi dubbed this writing as a “testo a due voci” (meaning a text written for, or delivered by, two “voices”). Montaldi agreed, describing it as “the translation of an ongoing dialogue.”37 Guerreschi’s choice to merge more “voices” and to blur the different roles of the individuals participating in the conversation resonates with the open and horizontal production of knowledge inherent to Montaldi’s co-­research. What is more, it was not Montaldi who transcribed their correspondence or encouraged the artist to do so, but rather Guerreschi himself who took on the role of shaping the output of their communal investigation.

Montaldi’s and Lonzi’s epistemology Montaldi was not simply an activist; he was also an intellectual who looked at artists with interest and admiration. His exhibitions, publications, and critical texts focusing on Botti and “the popular” demonstrate the multifarious ways in which Montaldi let Botti speak, liberating him from the maudlin interpretation of his lifestyle and artworks. In the case of Guerreschi, Montaldi’s decade-­long dialogue with the artist originated in an exploration that occasionally resembles the one undertaken by Carla Lonzi around the same time. In the mid-1960s, Lonzi recorded fourteen one-­to-one conversations between her and artists. In Autoritratto

Co-research and Art

201

Figure 10.3  Giuseppe Guerreschi, Ritratto di Danilo Montaldi, 1972. Etching, 40 × 47 cm. © Max Guerreschi.

(1969) she used them to compose a book-­length text based on montage. Autoritratto fused Lonzi’s and the artists’ dialogues into a seamless flow, where the speakers are identified but no one directs or delimits the speaking. Lonzi’s project defied the figure of the male militant art critic, best embodied by Argan, exposing

202

Postwar Italian Art History Today

how his writings “on” art implied an aprioristic and authoritarian idea of what artists should make and think. Guerreschi’s text for I profeti is similar in spirit to the prose of Autoritratto, but it pushes the experiment even farther in that it was no longer the critic, but now the artist who synthesized the results of co-­research. Lonzi was probably aware of Montaldi’s books such as Autobiografia della Leggera. Her work was indebted to an intellectual milieu (including oral historians Gianni Bosio and Bermani) cognisant of Montaldi’s pioneering research. Both Montaldi and Lonzi challenged, to different degrees, the division of labor characterizing the relationship, in the 1950s and 1960s, between art critic and artist, which mirrored other dichotomies: that separating subject and object, that divorcing intellectuals from laborers, and, indirectly, the mind from the hand, the spirit from matter, men from women. The novelty of their approach went beyond the artistic domain, eroding pivotal categories of 1950s Italian, and ultimately Western culture. In a book devoted to Lonzi, Vanessa Martini provided commentary on Argan’s position at the Convegno internazionale, artisti, critici e studiosi d’arte of 1963, which elicited widespread reactions and marked the beginning of Lonzi’s intellectual turn. Martini noticed that, “within the framework of the critic/artist relationship Argan’s position seemed to reproduce the difficulty informing the individual/mass party relationship, and notably the worker/PCI one.”38 This analogy lays bare some of the stakes and subtexts of the polemic opposing Lonzi to Argan. Autoritratto was not only concerned with the reformulation of the tenets of art criticism. It also, and most importantly, put forward an alternative manner of producing communality and knowledge in a way that is ultimately redolent of Socrates’ dialogue-­based maieutics. From the perspective of this broader project, Lonzi’s endeavour remains in keeping with that of Montaldi. Montaldi’s co-­research addressed people who, for better or worse, rejected the leftist parties’ pretence of knowing and representing the “working classes,” as well as of directing their impulses. Montaldi and Lonzi harbored different political ambitions. The former’s idea of class was hardly compatible with the latter’s separatism. Lonzi set the “authenticity” of artists against the false myths of art criticism, at least until when her feminist commitment—Lonzi was among the founders of the second wave of feminism in Italy—made her question her previous stance.39 By contrast, Montaldi never posited authenticity as an aim or as a hidden potential at the core of the leggera. Nonetheless, both Montaldi and Lonzi can be ascribed to the epistemological tradition of co-­research, as both tried to empower their interlocutors, challenging their putative need for a guide, an avant-­garde or an intellectual speaking on their behalf.

Co-research and Art

203

In a letter to Montaldi, Guerreschi asked his friend if Militanti politici di base intended to draw portraits and, if so, what might have been the historical meaning of making portraits in the 1960s. Montaldi replied that, through the life stories of grassroots activists, he aimed to sketch the portrait of a historical phase.40 Autoritratto arguably represents an opposing conceptual movement: from the multitude of voices composing a historical phase to the portrait of the ego. Autoritratto is, after all, a plural “self-­portrait” of Lonzi herself, but one that makes no concessions to the subject as a transparent and self-­contained entity detached from the body and its emotions. Through their different approaches yet similar epistemology, Lonzi and Montaldi sought to reconcile personal liberation with a new collective horizon, where individual as much as class consciousness is a process and a locus of struggle.

Notes 1 “Dopo Boccioni, ho intenzione di studiarmi bene, di nuovo, El Lisitskij e Schwitters. Poi di affrontare con maggiore calma Klee e gli altri. Si dovrebbe tendere a una nuova teoria della forma adeguata ai tempi”, Montaldi’s letter to Guerreschi, January 17, 1972; Danilo Montaldi, Giuseppe Guerreschi, Lettere. 1963–1975, ed. Gianfranco Fiameni (Cremona: Edizioni Linograf, 2000), 395. 2 The majority of Montaldi’s articles for these magazines were republished in Danilo Montaldi, Bisogna sognare: scritti, 1952–1975, eds. Cesare Bermani and Gabriele Montaldi Seelhorst (Milan: Cooperativa Colibri, 1994). Insightful publications about Montaldi include: the monographic issue of Parolechiave, Vol. 38 (2007); Danilo Montaldi (1929–1975): azione politica e ricerca sociale, ed. Gianfranco Fiameni (Cremona: Biblioteca statale di Cremona, 2006); Danilo Montaldi e la cultura di sinistra del secondo dopoguerra, ed. Luigi Parente (Naples: La città del sole, 1998). For the relationship between Montaldi and art, see Gabriella Montaldi-Seelhorst, “Danilo Montaldi: l’arte come strumento di conoscenza di ciò che è per poter promuovere ciò che dovrà essere,” Parolechiave, Vol. 38 (2007): 67–79; Gianfranco Fiameni, untitled, in Ackermann, Banchieri, Benecke [. . .] Jannsen, eds. Gruppo d’arte Renzo Botti, Assessorato scuola e cultura (Cremona: np, 1977), 5–13. 3 Montaldi’s translation of the pamphlet was published in several issues of Battaglia comunista, the first of which dates from February 1954. Montaldi’s introduction to the translation was republished and translated into English by Sala Mohandesi and in issue 3 of Viewpoint, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/introduction-­toloperaio-­americano–1954/ (accessed April 24, 2016); Claude Lefort, “L’experince prolétarienne,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, No. 11 (November–December 1952): 1–19;

204

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Daniel Mothé, Diario di un operaio. 1956–1959, trans. Danilo Montaldi (Turin: Einaudi, 1960). 4 Gianfranco Fiameni, “Autobiografia di una bombolaia. Dai materiali di un’inchiesta sulla nuova classe operaia diretta da Danilo Montaldi,” Quaderni Piacentini, no. 70/71 (May 1979): 130–2; L’inchiesta sulla nuova classe operaia. Lettere di Danilo Montaldi, Quaderni Piacentini, no.72/73 (October 1979): 100. This was confirmed also by Antonio Negri’s recollections of a conversation with Montaldi in the early 1970s; interview of Antonio Negri with the author, October 16, 2014. 5 For the concept and genealogy of co-­research, see the monographic issue number 3 of Viewpoint devoted to the Workers’ inquiry, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/30/ issue–3-workers-­inquiry/ (accessed April 24, 2016); Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, Gigi Roggero, “Conricerca as Political Action,” in Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization, eds. Richard J.F. Day, Greig De Peuter, Mark Coté, trans. Enda Brophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 6 Danilo Montaldi, “Sociologia di un congresso,” Rivista storica del socialismo, no. 4 (October–December 1958): 577–603. 7 “Non esiste tra ‘intervistatore’ e ‘intervistati’ la barriera (o la lusinga) di un diverso linguaggio [. . .] lo stesso disegno d’analisi preparato in precedenza da uno [the researcher] subì varianti successive proposte da molti,” Danilo Montaldi, “Una inchiesta nel cremonese,” Opinione, No. 2 (June 1956): 29–46 (quotation on p. 29). 8 Danilo Montaldi, “La Mistica del selvaggio,” Avanti! no. 294, December 12, 1959: 3; Danilo Montaldi, “Crisi del mito contadino (con una nota su Cesare Pavese),” Presenza, No. 1 (July 1958): 3–13. 9 Danilo Montaldi, Franco Alasia, Milano, Corea. Inchiesta sugli immigrati (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960); Danilo Montaldi, Autobiografie della leggera (Turin: Einaudi, 1961); Danilo Montaldi, Militanti politici di base (Turin: Einaudi, 1971). Danilo Montaldi, Saggio sulla politica comunista in Italia (Piacenza: Quaderni piacentini, 1976) 10 John Foot, “Revisiting the Coree. Self Construction, Memory and Immigration on the Milanese Periphery, 1950–2000,” Italian Cityscapes Culture and Urban Change in Contemporary Italy, eds. Robert Lumley and John Foot (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 46–59 11 For the debate about Autobiografie della leggera, see Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Sincerità e altro,” Vie Nuove (March 15, 1962): 35; Pier Paolo Pasolini, “L’avventura di ognuno,” Vie Nuove, March 22, 1962: 35; Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Intellettuali e curiosi,” Vie Nuove (April 5, 1962): 1. 12 Romano Alquati, “Su Montaldi (Panzieri, io) e la con ricerca,” in Romano Alquati, Camminando per realizzare un sogno comune (Turin: Velleità Alternative, 1994), 119–208. 13 See for instance, Sandro Mezzadra, Bret Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

Co-research and Art

205

14 Danilo Montaldi “L’epressione popolare in Italia,” first published in Montaldi, Bisogna sognare, 59–63. 15 “Cultura nazionale-­borghese che nella ricerca di una manifestazione di classe sul terreno dell’arte,” Montaldi “L’epressione popolare in Italia,” Montaldi, Bisogna sognare, 62. 16 I wish to thank both Gianfranco Fiameni (December 12, 2012) and Ambrogio Barili (April 30, 2013) for sharing their recollections with me during two interviews. 17 Montaldi’s letter to Guerreschi, 18 July 1968, in “Lettere di Danilo Montaldi a Giuseppe Guerreschi”, Parolechiave 38 (2007): 190–1. 18 Danilo Montaldi “L’epressione popolare in Italia”, first published in Montaldi, Bisogna, 59–62. 19 Giulio Carlo Argan, “Arte moderna come arte popolare”, in Arte popolare moderna, ed. Francesca R. Fratini (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1968). 20 Giovanni M. Accame, Carlo Guenzi, eds., Avanguardia e cultura popolare (Bologna: Galleria d’Árte Moderna, 1975). 21 “Pellerin, come Springer; come Hearst e Crespi; come il Bild, Oggi e la TV,” Danilo Montaldi, “Stampe popolari francesi,” republished in Ackermann, Banchieri, 27–29 (quotation on p. 29). 22 Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-­worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Art History, Vol. 36/2 (2013): 418–41. 23 Danilo Montaldi, “Renzo Botti, la città,” republished in Ackermann, Banchieri, 24–6. 24 This cyclostyled document entitled “Conoscere Renzo Botti” was reprinted in Renzo Botti: i cento disegni raccolti da Danilo Montaldi. Donazione Seelhorst-Montaldi (np: 1989). 25 “Poverino. Ma che poverino. Io non sono mai stato un poverino. Loro mi fanno compassione, poveri disgraziati,” see Mario Balestrieri “Prefazione,” in Renzo Botti: i disegni della raccolta Montaldi, eds. Renzo Botti, Mario Balestreri, and Gianfranco Fiameni (Cremona: Biblioteca statale e libreria civica di Cremona, 1989), xi–xvi (quotation on p. xiii). 26 “Non conservatrici ma segrete e sotterranee in rapporto alla cultura dell’attuale società,” Danilo Montaldi, “Il valore di Renzo Botti,” in “Conoscere Renzo Botti,” 35–37 (quotation on p. 37). 27 Giuseppe Guerreschi, Danilo Montaldi, Vietnam Suite (Turin: Fratelli Pozzo, 1974). 28 Danilo Montaldi, Korsch e i comunisti italiani: contro un facile spirito di assimilazione (Rome: Savelli, 1975). 29 Montaldi’s letter to Guerreschi and the latter’s reply, February 26, 1973 and March 5, 1973, Lettere, 464–8. 30 “Parafrasato [. . .] quanto tu hai scritto [. . .] perché era ben espresso, e le tue parole hanno, in proposito, una funzione, più che le parole di chiunque altro,” Montaldi’s letter to Guerreschi, May 30, 1965, Lettere, 25.

206

Postwar Italian Art History Today

31 “L’articolo di Garroni mi piace [. . .]. M’interessa perché riesce a un’analisi del tuo lavoro in un continuo confronto con se stesso,” Montaldi’s letter to Guerreschi, 25 July 1966, Lettere, 61. 32 Enzo Campelli, “Note sulla sociologia di Danilo Montaldi. Alle origini di una proposta metodologica,” La Critica Sociologica, No. 49 (1979): 39. 33 “Contrariamente alle mie opinion iniziali, Il Profeta, si rivela sempre più un uomo con piedi e mente fissi nella storia. È colui che si ribella all’idea di una vaga responsabilità collettiva per introdurre ed imporre il nuovo principio di una ferma e consapevole responsabilità individuale. È colui che [. . .] trasforma la religio in morale,” Guerreschi’s letter to Montaldi, July 12, 1968, Lettere, 160–1. 34 A classic of anti-Stalinism, the book was translated into Italian in 1956, Isaac Deutscher, Il profeta armato, trans. Antonietta Drago (Milan: Longanesi, 1956). 35 The iconographic source of the head is Michel Leiris, Jacqueline Delange, eds., Africa nera. La creazione plastica, trans. Giulia Veronesi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1967), 86. I wish to thank Max Guerreschi for this information. For the marble sculpture, see Guerreschi’s letter to Montaldi, February 6, 1968, Lettere, 212. 36 Giuseppe Guerreschi, “Del profeta. Appunti, domande, risposte e considerazioni personali e no,” in Guerreschi. Dipinti (Rome: Edizione Fante di Spade, 1969), np. 37 Guerreschi’s letter to Montaldi, June 2, 1973; “Il trasferimento di un dialogo continuo,” Montaldi’s letter to Guerreschi, February 24, 1969, Lettere, 219. 38 “La posizione assunta da Argan pareva riprodurre nel rapporto critico/artista quella difficoltà che attraversava la relazione individuo/partito di massa—e più precisamente lavoratore/PCI,” Vanessa Martini, “Gli inizi della ‘straordinaria stagione’ di Carla Lonzi”, in Carla Lonzi: la duplice radicalità. Dalla critica militante al femminismo di Rivolta,” eds. Lara Conte, Vinzia Fiorino, Vanessa Martini and Carla Lonzi (Pisa: ETS Edizioni, 2011), 12. For the Convegno internazionale artisti, critici e studiosi d’arte, see Jacopo Galimberti and Paula Barreiro Lopez, “Southern Networks. The Alternative Modernism of the San Marino Biennale and the Convegno internazionale artisti, critici e studiosi d’arte,” in Postwar—Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, eds. Okwui Enwezor, Ulrich Wilmes and Atreyee Gupta (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 39 Giovanna Zapperi, Carla Lonzi. Un’arte della vita (Rome, DeriveApprodi, 2017), 88–118. 40 Guerreschi’s letter to Montaldi and the latter’s reply, June 14, 1971 and June 21, 1971, Lettere, 356–8.

11

Shaping and Reshaping: Private and Institutional Patronage Martina Tanga

Institutional reinvention: the Venice Biennale during the 1970s In a satirical cartoon from a 1974 edition of the right-­wing Italian newspaper Il Secolo d’Italia, a woman clad in Greco-Roman garb stands outside the threshold to the Biennale. She is barred from entering by a disheveled, bearded peacenik with John Lennon sunglasses and a black beret. The message from the Right was clear: liberal politics had taken art hostage and corrupted the proud tradition of Italian dominance in the world of international art exhibitions. Political tensions at the Biennale had been running high for some time, as forces of social change had muscled their way into an institution that had been operating with the same directive for the past fifty years. Progressives called for art establishments, like the Biennale, to be more transparent, more open, and more accessible. Meanwhile, the Right strove to upkeep the status quo and confine art in the ivory tower. What this cartoonist failed to grasp—or perhaps grasped all too well—was that rather than mark the end of art in the Biennale, the 1974 exhibition represented a recasting of art’s role from a rarefied commodity for Italy’s upper classes to an accessible experience for everyone. The controversies surrounding the Biennale were indicative of a widespread national issue. During the 1970s, museums and cultural organizations across the country found themselves in a state of crisis.1 They were public institutions and, as such, beholden to a government many deemed dysfunctional.2 Museums and other such organizations were not in control of their own budgets, could not easily make acquisitions, organize themselves as research centers, or guide their own direction. Artists and critics questioned their roles within the mechanisms

208

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 11.1  I Guerriglieri della Biennale, Il Secolo d’Italia, Rome, October 22, 1974. © Il Secolo d’Italia.

Private and Institutional Patronage

209

of cultural production, the art they supported, and their accessibility to a variety of viewers. The only major institution to proactively respond to this critical pressure during the 1970s, I argue, was the Venice Biennale. Undergoing a staggering transformation, it went from a hierarchical organization that reflected political expressions of power and art market trends to one that placed democratic values—accessibility, equality, and transparency—at the center of its mission. The Biennale strove to achieve this goal by espousing decentralizing ideals, diffusing operative power amongst a number of individuals, and expanding its exhibition spaces. For a brief period, there was a genuine effort for greater accountability in decision-­making processes and inclusivity both in terms of artist and audiences. While some of the tangible changes made to the Biennale can be seen still today, such as the (more-­or-less) democratic appointment of the Biennale President, the spirit and vitality that had sought to open up the Biennale like never before ended with the close of the 1970s.3

Crisis and dissent at the Biennale The state of crisis facing Italy’s art institutions in the 1960s and 1970s was directly linked to their operative structure, which had been established under the fascist regime. All Italian cultural institutions had slowly been embedded into a highly centralized system of artistic patronage, part of Mussolini’s larger plan to bring about an “anthropological revolution” to remodel the Italian people as a superior race.4 He restructured existing cultural and artistic institutions as well as set up new ones, organizing them into a highly efficient pyramidal hierarchy.5 The Duce’s project was totalizing: in celebrating the power of Italian creativity, he equated his own ideological project to that of an artist who would mold and style the national body as a sculptor would clay.6 Indeed, Mussolini thoroughly exploited the Biennale’s acclaimed status and used it as a platform to launch Italian nationalist culture abroad. He took over the Biennale—an institution founded in 1895—by underwriting a number of new laws. In 1928, Mussolini declared the Biennale an Ente Autonomo Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d’Arte (Autonomous Agency Exhibition of the International Art Biennial).7 This law decreed that Venice was to hand over the exhibition buildings and the organization of the institution to the Ente Autonomo. The creation of an “autonomous” agency was entirely fictitious, as in actual fact it was a political maneuver to remove the Biennale from the

210

Postwar Italian Art History Today

jurisdiction of Venice and to make it dependent on the Italian state. Two years later, Mussolini amended the Biennale’s legal status so that the fascist government directly appointed the organizing body. This new law gave the state the official authority to select a president of the exhibition and assign primary financial support.8 The Venice Biennale’s new identity was consolidated in 1938, whereby its organizing activities were further defined in the Statute as centralized and dependent on governmental authority.9 This transformation of the Biennale occurred in other Italian museums as well, and was completely in line with Mussolini’s cultural master plan. The tentacles of the fascist regime infiltrated all Italian cultural structures, small and large. Fascism officially ended with the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II. However, Mussolini’s reforms to the Biennale, and those to all the other cultural structures, lasted well beyond his deposition. The Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democratic Party, DC), democratically elected in 1945, made no changes to the Biennale’s fascist-­era Statute, or to any other cultural institution. In fact, the DC took advantage of the power to dictate the administration of the Biennale throughout the 1950s and 1960s and used it to implement their own cultural program: that of restoring the image of Italy’s democratic culture to the international community. Indeed, art historian Nancy Jachec remarked that it was no coincidence that Italy’s newly democratically elected government coincided with the appearance of Modernism at the Biennale.10 The Italian art movement Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, for example, premièred at the 1948 Biennale, and so did the work of Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning in the American Pavilion. Thus, in the years after fascism, the Venice Biennale continued to be a political tool for a Western pro-­capitalist democratic program. The official status of the Venice Biennale, and its still functioning fascist administration, made it a target during the 1968 protests, along with all establishments that were seen as symbols of authority, and that were in fact, still fundamentally fascist. The first art institution to be critiqued was Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna in April 1968.11 A number of artists and art-­world personalities— the critics Daniela Palazzoli, Lea Vergine, Tommaso Trini, and the photographer Ugo Mulas—occupied the premises and advocated for the self-­management of cultural institutions. The counter-­culture journal Bit: Arte Oggi in Italia (Art: What’s Happening in Italy Today) covered the events and published a statement drafted by the protesters. This document laid out various key terms that defined the critique against art institutions, relevant also to understanding the charges

Private and Institutional Patronage

211

against the Biennale.12 First, the authors demanded the self-­management of public sites of culture, such as museums and other exhibition venues. Second, they stated that the active student movement provided them with a model for shaping a shared ideological platform. Both of these positions demonstrated that the denunciation of art institutions came from an emerging consciousness that challenged how art establishments were run and whom they represented. That summer, Venice, too, was a focal point for agitation. Protesters labeled the Biennale as an arena for the wealthy and powerful who vaunted the commodification of culture. They organized into an official boycotting committee, calling themselves Il Comitato degli Studenti, Operai e Intellettuali Rivoluzionari per il Boicottaggio della Biennale (Committee of Students, Workers, and Intellectual Revolutionaries for the Boycott of the Biennale).13 The Committee issued manifestos: one published on June 7, 1968 openly attacking the Biennale as “one of the moments which concretizes the mechanism of repression and mystification of culture of the bosses.”14 The committee also sent a letter to the Italian artists participating at the Biennale, urging them to reconsider their involvement in the exhibition.15 On the evening of the inauguration on June 18, 1968, a demonstration ensued in the streets of Venice. Approximately 200 students paraded through the city, stopping in Piazza San Marco where they were joined by artists as well as factory workers.16 Police hit back at the picketers and the scene quickly became violent. As a result, a number of pavilions closed their exhibition spaces. Meanwhile, in the galleries that remained open, some artists, such as Gastone Novelli, decided to exhibit their artworks turned toward the wall, or took them down altogether, in a sign of solidarity with the broader political protest.17 This dissent carried into the following decade. The 35th Biennale of 1970 became another platform for debate about the institution’s cultural role. This time, though, criticism did not play out on Venice’s streets, but rather in the media and newspapers. While urban protesters’ slogans and posters could be easily dismantled and destroyed, written attacks by artists, professors, and critics that circulated in print could not be so quickly dismissed, and caused greater damage to the institution’s reputation. Contemporary journals and magazines became the locus for the discussion of the cultural role of public institutions at large. For example, the 1973 June/July issue of NAC (Notiziario Arte Contemporanea) conducted a series of interviews and published texts related to the structure and institutional function of museums. Of note, Franco Russoli, director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and member of the board of the

212

Postwar Italian Art History Today

International Council of Museums (ICOM), stated that museums were gravely limited in their cultural role as they were not administratively autonomous from the state apparatus.18 Specifically in regard to the Biennale, critics assailed the Fascist Statute of 1938. Curator and critic Enrico Crispolti wrote, “As I have been saying for about ten years the Biennale has not wanted to renew its Statute and it has not wanted to be critical of its cultural position, taking instead a path of an art fair based on the commodification of art and a tourist attraction.”19 Other prominent cultural figures also voiced their arguments for why the institution could no longer function under its current conditions and leadership.20 They unanimously voiced their objection to the un-­democratic nomination of art historian Umbro Apollonio as president and they resented the fact that a restricted number of young artists represented the Italian Pavilion.21 But the 1970 Biennale went ahead anyway and the Consiglio di Stato (Biennale Council) refused the proposal to suspend the Italian Pavilion. Italy’s museums indeed needed updating. In addition to the Biennale, the history of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM) in Rome, founded in 1883, is particularly illustrative of the crisis Italian institutions faced because of their governmental entanglements and anachronistic administration policies.22 By the 1970s, GNAM had made substantial strides in its quest to spearhead Italy’s cultural discourse.23 However, its institutional position remained precarious, caught between attempting to implement independent programs and remaining subject to the bureaucratic administrations of a state museum. This difficult relationship can be clearly observed in the polemics surrounding the Piero Manzoni retrospective curated by Palma Bucarelli, the director of GNAM, in 1971.24 While Manzoni became well-known for his provocative art in the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1970s he was already an institutionalized figure and thus a relatively safe choice for an established museum like GNAM. Nevertheless, because of the museum’s profile and state sponsorship, the exhibition of Manzoni’s scatological works caused a public scandal and the museum was denounced and taken to court by the Christian Democrat Guido Bernardi.25 At the time, the GNAM reported to the Ministero della Publica Istruzione (Ministry of Public Education) and was dependent on its authority for all of its programming and funding. The debate surrounding the Manzoni exhibition revealed that the GNAM, like many other Italian cultural institutions, was ultimately subject to government oversight. Unlike the GNAM, the Biennale made tangible reforms, most notably in the creation of its new Statute. The charter disentangled the Biennale from

Private and Institutional Patronage

213

governmental embroilment and introduced greater transparency to its operation. The document, signed on July 26, 1973, outlined the Biennale’s fundamental principles in meticulous detail, including its management, funding, organizing body, and implementation strategies. But the most fundamental change regarded the election of the Biennale’s president. Prior to 1973, the Ministry of Public Education directly appointed the president. The new Statute decreed that this figure would be democratically elected through a vote by the newly formed Consiglio Direttivo (Steering Committee).26 Furthermore, the Statute stipulated that the members of the Steering Committee each serve a four-­year term, ensuring temporal limits to their influence. For each Biennale, the Steering Committee appointed a visual arts committee—composed of important Italian art historians, critics, and connoisseurs in the field—that then carried out the programming for that year’s exhibition.27 To highlight the openness of the Biennale’s decision-­making policies, the Statute also outlined that every year, during the preparatory phase of the program of events, the Steering Committee would promote a public advisory meeting with cultural, social, and political organizations who had a vested interest in the Biennale.28 These changes allowed the Biennale to avoid the same type of corruption allegations plaguing other institutions across the country.29 Since the 1970s, they have been followed less vigorously, although the core principles still remain in place today.

The 1974 Biennale The first Biennale president to be elected under the new legal profile was Carlo Ripa di Meana.30 A socialist then in his mid-­forties, Ripa di Meana was just beginning his political career.31 This was to be his first role in such a prominent appointment and he steered the newly reformed Biennale into its most progressive years: the 1974, 1976, and arguably 1978 editions.32 His first challenge was to organize the cultural activities for the scheduled 1974 exhibition. But because of the institution’s inchoate restructuring, no new organizing body had yet been elected to coordinate the events. The exhibition did not include national representation in the pavilions, as was customary, nor was it assigned a conventional numeration. Yet, taking advantage of this incipience, the organizers did not hesitate to mount the most challenging Biennale to date. The theme was a political stand against the Chilean dictator General Pinochet, an apt subject for an institution that now aimed to position itself as a reformed

214

Postwar Italian Art History Today

democratic establishment.33 Moreover, condemning the military takeover in Chile further distanced the Biennale from its own fascist past. Chaperoning the Biennale into its new era, Ripa di Meana embraced progressive leftist forces— advocating for the redistribution of power from a hierarchical to a lateral organization—directly into the organization of the display of art.34 Thus, rather than confine the events to the national pavilions, he exhibited visual material throughout the city of Venice and the surrounding areas. The exhibition titled Immagini e parole dal Cile (Images and Words from Chile), for example, which showcased documentary photographs of life in Chile during the Allende regime, took place in the Giardini, as well as in Venice’s Campo San Polo, the neighboring town of Chioggia, and in Mestre across the lagoon. The photographs appeared on mobile metal structures that crisscrossed the different urban spaces, intersecting the ordinary pedestrian flow. Another way Ripa di Meana spread the Biennale out into the city, explicitly tied to the theme of Chile, was by inviting Chilean artists to create wall paintings, or murales, all over Venice and its working-­class neighborhoods. The Brigada Ramona Parra, who had painted pro-­democratic imagery in the streets of their

Figure 11.2  Immagini e parole dal Cile, 1974, Venice, installation photograph. © La Biennale di Venezia, ASAC, Fototeca, serie “Attualità e Allestimenti”—Libertà al Cile, 1974. Photo: Lorenzo Cappellini.

Private and Institutional Patronage

215

home country during the early 1970s, covered Venetian urban walls with bold, powerful depictions of resistance. They worked with local artists to paint tight fists, screaming mouths, emblematic stars, and piercing eyes set against a pure white background. In Chile, the Brigada used these murals as a means to speak to the public in a country where communication was largely in the hands of the military. Remarking on their presence in Venice, the leftist Italian art historian Mario de Micheli described them as “intervention painting, agitation painting, emergency painting.”35 In Italy, the student movement had been developing their own form of murals as a subversive means of raising awareness among young people. By locating the Brigada’s murals in Venice, the Biennale integrated both the Chilean and Italian contexts of dissident urban aesthetic interventions. The hasty organization of the activities led to the decision to forgo the customary catalogue and instead to print a weekly newspaper entitled Libertà al Cile. The newspaper format, both topical and fleeting in its nature, was appropriate for that year’s extemporaneous and overtly political theme. The publication appeared in five editions, each printed in a run of 100,000 copies. Each issue also included a poster, created especially for the newspaper. The leftist Venetian artist, Emilio Vedova, produced one for the October 19 edition and his design incorporated black-­and-white abstract brush-­strokes with the words “Neruda Allende” written in the lower-­left section, showing his admiration for the Chilean writer Pablo Neruda and support for the ousted Allende government. Artists Diego Birelli, Andrea Cascella, Giò Pomodoro, and Roberto Sebastian Matta created the others. This endeavour, with its wide distribution, was one of the Biennale’s most effective ways of decentralizing information and making art accessible to a broader public.

The 1976 Biennale While the themes of decentralization and public access continued throughout the decade under Ripa di Meana’s leadership, the 1976 edition marked a return to a traditional, structured, and organized Biennale. The title was Ambiente, Partecipazione, Strutture Culturali (Environment, Participation, Cultural Structures). The focus on ambiente, or environment, at the national level pointed to Arte Ambientale, an emerging tendency to expand art practices into the urban environment. Active and often participatory, it delineated an art form that was intimately tied to its urban site as it engaged with cultural patrimony, social

216

Postwar Italian Art History Today

actuality, and political contingency. Yet, environment was also a savvy choice for the organizers as it could be linked to international trends in installation and land art. As a result, Reiner Ruthenbeck installed work in the German Pavilion and land artist Richard Long represented the British Pavilion. With its flexible yet encompassing qualities, the theme of environment thus functioned as a unifier for the heterogeneous Biennale, with all the different and unique national pavilions. This was in direct contrast to the laissez-­faire exhibitions of the pre-­reform years.36 The themes of participation pervaded various forms of programming, including an unconventional series of debates and colloquia on decentralization held off-­site.37 These were part of the organization’s larger, intentional move towards becoming a platform for the discussion of both sociocultural issues and aesthetic production. Ripa di Meana appointed a special committee to chair these talks, which culminated in a conference entitled “Il decentramento culturale in Italia.”38 The meeting included sociologists, artists, trade union members, representatives of grassroots associations, and local organizations. The common objective was to debate how to include, in the circuits of cultural production, those individuals who had traditionally been excluded, and to question the role of cultural institutions in this process.39 Building on 1974, Ripa di Meana continued to push the Biennale toward greater transparency, openness, and democratic process in its engagement with its audience. Meanwhile, the Italian pavilion’s exhibition entitled Ambiente come sociale, curated by Enrico Crispolti, surveyed radical national aesthetic developments and presented artworks that directly confronted Italy’s social and political realities. But Crispolti made the unconventional choice not to house any original artworks— which were site-­specific and located in Milan, Rome, Naples, and other cities across the peninsula—within the confines of the gallery. Instead, documentary photographs and video, texts, pamphlets, and audio recordings of the original works lay sprawled on tables in the gallery space like the products of field research. Crispolti thus added another spin to the Biennale’s themes of decentralization and environment, and in effect turned them inside out. While the exhibition took place in the Italian Pavilion, the actual artworks were not there, replaced by multimedia evidence of their original instantiation in the urban context. Crispolti’s show included the work of approximately thirty artists and artist groups. Among them was sculptor Mauro Staccioli, whose hard-­edged pieces clashed both physically and metaphorically with the surrounding landscape. He situated his works in piazzas and streets, and, even though they were built out of heavy-­duty construction materials such as iron and cement, their display was

Private and Institutional Patronage

217

Figure 11.3  Mauro Staccioli, Scultura-Intervento, Piazza Galleria Manzoni, Milan, December 1974 to January 1975, installation photograph. Image courtesy of the artist.

time-­limited. At the Biennale, Crispolti exhibited documentary photographs of Staccioli’s Scultura-Intervento (Intervention Sculpture), originally installed in Piazza Galleria Manzoni, in Milan, in 1974. A giant cement cube with sixteen sharp spikes—four emerging out of each vertical face—sat in the piazza like some medieval torture instrument reinterpreted with a classical sense of balance and proportion. Audience participation in the urban context was integral to all of the projects Crispolti exhibited. He chose artists who worked in the public arena and created spontaneous, interactive aesthetic experiences. In addition to pieces by Staccioli, Crispolti showcased the work of Franco Summa, based in Pescara, who interwove his projects with the urban environment and often collaborated with the local community. Among the work shown in the exhibition was a piece carried out with Pescara’s local art students, entitled Una bianca striscia di carta (A White Strip of Paper) from 1973. The students held up the large white sheets in Pescara’s main square, forcing inhabitants to walk around them, and with the aim of making them more aware of the city’s spaces in the context of social life.40 While the galleries were filled only with documentary traces of art, Crispolti envisioned the space as alive with debate. Even before the more general conference

218

Postwar Italian Art History Today

on decentralization in Italy taking place at the behest of Ripa di Meana, Crispolti had organized a conversation addressing the theme of decentralization specifically in the visual arts. Entitled Nuova domanda e nuovi modi di produzione culturale, this discussion again directly linked Crispolti’s exhibition with the Biennale’s aim of decentralizing administrative power and diffusing the exhibition of art across multiple locales.41 This brought Crispolti’s curatorial choices of experimental art practices and the Biennale’s new institutional goals into alignment, and it became an opportunity to present this confluence to an international audience.

The 1978 Biennale The year 1976 was supposed to be the final Biennale under the leadership of Ripa di Meana, as his tenure was meant to expire in 1977, but the negotiations for the selection of a new steering committee and president were protracted.42 Taking action in this indecisive situation, Ripa di Meana extended his post, providing some measure of continuity to the 1978 Biennale edition. But Italy had felt a decisive change of mood, and the issues that had clearly defined the 1970s began to seem distant. Violence and terrorism reached a new level of ruthlessness with the abduction of DC Prime Minister Aldo Moro on March 16, 1978, and his murder on May 9 of the same year. This was certainly a dark hour for Italy, and the level of brutality shocked the entire nation. A return to order ensued, and the nation turned its back on radical politics. This change of tide in Italy is often referred to as the riflusso (the reflux), indicating the collapse of the social movements, the dissolution of the New Left, and a general retreat from both the political sphere and ideology.43 These themes were certainly reflected in the 1978 exhibitions. Titled Dalla natura all’arte, dall’arte alla natura (From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature), the Biennale explored art’s relationship to nature throughout the twentieth century, a decidedly a-­political subject. None of the initiatives covered the overarching theme of decentralization that had been so strongly present in the editions before. Even on a spatial level, all of the programming was more contained, taking place in the Giardini—the Biennale’s official location—and the Magazzini del Sale on the Zattere—the new spaces opened since 1974. The exhibitions did not expand into the urban sphere, as had occurred in the previous two Biennales, nor were there satellite exhibitions or discussions.

Private and Institutional Patronage

219

The Italian Pavilion, co-­curated by Crispolti again, along with Luigi Carluccio and Lara-Vinca Masini, resulted in a rather incoherent exhibition.44 Given their strong and conflicting personalities, the three curators could not settle on a consistent interpretation of the general theme of Art and Nature.45 The exhibition, therefore, comprised three different sections; each one separately coordinated by its curator.46 While Carluccio presented artworks that were subjective and formal, Masini showed artworks that were conceptual and theoretical. Crispolti’s section, which directly engaged with socio-­cultural issues and continued the thematic of the years before, was sandwiched between these two very different presentations. He identified “nature” in terms of social relationships with precise political and social implications. Titled Natura practicata (Practiced Nature), the art he presented emphasized the dialectical relationship between nature and culture, because, he explained, “one is either in nature or in the urban environment.”47 Unlike his co-­curators, Crispolti also used the spaces in the Giardini which brought the work in closer proximity to the public and created a more fluid context for the experience of the work. For instance, the Florentine artist Maurizio Nannucci explored the relationship between words and images with both modes of mass communication and natural materials. During the days of the vernissage, an airplane carried the message “Image du Ciel”—in blue writing on a blue sky—above the Giardini. Nannucci identified the sky by labeling it, but language here fell short, as it could not encapsulate the vastness of the firmament. The piece also included an installation, situated inside the Italian Pavilion, comprising various objects: a photo/souvenir of the flight, a palm-­tree, a chair, and a large fan. Nannucci’s subtle homage to Marcel Broodthaers and the practice of Institutional Critique— referenced via the palm—seemed a particularly fitting reflection of the Venice Biennale as an institution. Moreover, by incorporating a photograph of the lettering “Image du Ciel,” Nannucci established a relationship between these two spaces—inside the Biennale’s gallery and the sky outside—bringing them together through different modes of communication, different institutional and non-­institutional spaces, as well as natural and artificial elements. Overall, Crispolti’s exhibition, which continued the themes reflected in the Biennale’s institutional reinvention of the 1970s, found itself at odds with the other ideas explored within the Italian Pavilion. Vestiges of politically conscious art were still present but drowned out by the cacophony of inward-­looking aesthetic narratives. The Steering Committee nominated conservative Neapolitan historian Giuseppe Galasso as President of the Biennale in 1979 and he made his

220

Postwar Italian Art History Today

mark on the 1980 edition by implementing a policy of “restoration,” closing the chapter on the turbulent yet highly creative decade of the 1970s.48 Even though the Statute was not changed, the 1976 Biennale was the last of the decade to respond overtly to the politics of reform of Italy’s institutional patronage. Due to a shift in internal organization and the rise of neo-­conservatism, the drive to democratize would not endure, and the Biennale disavowed its progressive position. In the following years, the Biennale administrators shifted their focus towards international guest curators. Just in 1980, for example, rising star curators Harald Szeemann and Michael Compton spearheaded the visual arts committee.49 Italian institutions would have to wait until the late 1980s for a renewed interest in the structures that support contemporary art in Italy, and institutions like the Castello di Rivoli in Turin or the Museo d’Arte Moderna Bologna (MAMbo) would once more model an example of curatorially ambitious, democratically organized, audience centered museums.50

Notes 1 Antonio Thierry, “Per un uso sociale del museo,” Musei e gallerie d’Italia, anno XVI, no. 45 (settembre–dicembre 1971): 3–10. 2 Giulio Carlo Argan, “Arte, artisti, istituzioni,” in Profili dell’Italia repubblicana, eds. Giulio Carlo Argan, Ottavio Cecchi, and Enrico Ghidetti (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1985), 2–32. 3 The politician Paolo Baratta was nominated to be the president of the Venice Biennale in 2008, and at the time of writing this essay, was still in office. His appointment as president was re-­confirmed in 2011 directly from the Minister of Culture Lorenzo Ornaghi, without democratic election to office. 4 Emilio Gentile, “The Fascist Anthropological Revolution,” in Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy, eds. Guido Bonsaver and Robert S.C. Gordon (London: Legenda, 2005), 25. 5 New cultural structures aimed at bringing artists and intellectuals into the fold of the fascist state included the Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura (Fascist National Institute of Culture), and, most important, the inclusion of artists and intellectuals in the fascist professional unions through the umbrella organization, the Confederazione dei Professionisti e degli Artisti (Confederation of Professionals and Artists). It was through these unions that fascism exercised the greatest degree of coercion, as they required membership to practice the profession. See Philip V. Cannistraro, “Mussolini and the Italian Intellectuals,” in Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-­century Italy, 37.

Private and Institutional Patronage

221

6 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 4. 7 Law no. 3229 passed on December 24, 1928. See Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale, 1895–1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society 1968), 15. 8 Lambro Trezzini, Una storia della Biennale teatro: 1934–1995 (Rome: Bulzoni, 2004), 17. 9 Mussolini finalized the Statute for the Venice Biennale on July 21, 1938 under the law no. 1517 10 Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948–64: Italy and the idea of Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 6. 11 The Galleria d’Arte Moderna was inaugurated in 1921, and as a cultural structure, it fell under the jurisdiction of fascism. 12 Document reproduced in Bit: Arte Oggi in Italia (Art: What’s Happening in Italy Today), no. 2 (April 1968): 20–1. Original Italian: “Gli occupanti costituiscono a tutti gli effetti una ASSEMBLEA COSTITUENTE per una associazione di artisti con finalità di controllo e di autogestione dei luoghi di cultura pubblici o aperti al pubblico. Gli occupanti riconoscono nel movimento studentesco UN IDEALE COMPAGNO PER UNA PIATTAFORMA IDEOLOGICA COMUNE DI AGITAZIONE,” Bit was directed by Daniela Palazzoli with the collaboration of Tommaso Trini and Germano Celant. The publication was conceived of as an information bulletin and it covered the socio-­political and cultural climate of dissatisfaction of 1968. See Giuliano Sergio, “Forma Rivista: critica e rappresentazione della neo-­avanguardia in Italia,” Palinesti, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2011): 83–96. 13 Cesco Chinello, “Il sessantotto operaio e studentesco a Porto Marghera,” CSEL no. 2 (1988): 202. 14 “Operai, Compagni” single sheet pamphlet, Venice, 1968. Original Italian: “Uno dei momenti in cui si concretizza il meccanismo di repressione e mistificazione della cultura dei padroni” nei “giorni del mercato culturale.” Signed by “Il Comitato degli Studenti, Operai e Intellettuali rivoluzionari per il boicottaggio della Biennale,” reprinted in Cesco Chinello, “Il Sessantotto operaio e studentesco a Porto Marghera,” CSEL No. 2 (1988): 202. See also Luigi Nono, “Cronaca politica della Biennale boicottata,” in “Rinascita,” Nos. 29, 26 (July 1968): 15–16. 15 This letter was sent to all of the organizers of the Biennale as well as some artists, such as Michelangelo Pistoletto, Livio Marzot, Carlo Mattioli, Rodolfo Aricò, Gino Morandis, Gianni Colombo, and Gianni Bertini. 16 Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-­worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Art History, no. 36 (2013): 429. 17 Paola Nicolin, “T68/B68” in The Italian Avant-Garde, 1968–1976, ed. Alex Coles (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 86. Gaston Novelli was one of the artists who turned

222

Postwar Italian Art History Today

his paintings against the wall and painted on the back, “La Biennale è Fascista,” see Luca Massimo Barbero, Gastone Novelli e Venezia = Gastone Novelli and Venice (Rome: De Luca, 2011), 26. 18 Franco Russoli, “Nuove strutture per i musei,” NAC no. 6/7 (1973): 2–3. 19 Enrico Crispolti, “Untitled” in Avanti, March 3, 1970. Original Italian: Come io stesso da più di una decina d’anni ho sottolineato, la Biennale, come ha rifiutato di rinnovare lo statuto, così ha sempre rifiutato di puntare su una riqualificazione culturale, preferendo la caduta a livello fieristico e mercantilistico, e di mera attrazione turistica. 20 Individuals such as Enzo Brunori, who had exhibited at the 28th Biennale and was now director of the Istituto State d’Arte di Civitavecchia and Secretary General to the Federazione Nazionale Artisti aderenti alla CGIL; Luigi Montanarini, a painter and director of the Academia di Belle Arti di Roma; artist Enrico Paolucci, who had exhibited at the Biennale in 1938, 1942, 1954, 1956, 1966, and was the director of the Academia Albertina di Torino; and Alfredo Castelli, professor at the Academia di Belle Arti. 21 Luigi Mattei, Venezia: la Biennale di mezzo (Rome: Privitera editore, 1972), 36. 22 The GNAM, too, became an instrument of cultural propaganda for the Fascist regime. See Francesca Romana Morelli, “Cipriano Efisio Oppo, la Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e la politica artistica del Regime,” La Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna: cronache e storia, 1911–2011, eds. Stefania Frezzotti and Patrizia Rosazza Ferraris (Rome: Palombi, 2011), 113–27. 23 This is largely the result of Palma Bucarelli’s forceful leadership. She took over the directorship of the GNAM in 1944 and was responsible for the reinstallation of the art after it had been moved into storage for safekeeping during the war. See Mariastella Margozzi, “Tra poetrica figurativa e ricerche astratto-­informali: la scelta di Palma Bucarelli per la Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna,” ibid, 169–181. See also Marisa Dalai Emiliani, “Cent’anni di museo d’arte contemporanea in Italia (1880– 1980),” Per una critica della museografia del Novecento in Italia: il “saper mostrare” di Carlo Scarpa (Venice: Regione del Veneto, 2008), 74. 24 The exhibition dates were: February 5 to March 7, 1971. 25 The controversy was discussed in parliament when Christian Democrat and member of parliament Guido Bernardi addressed the Minister of Education in reference to Bucarelli’s choice to exhibit Manzoni’s cans labeled “Artist’s Shit.” See Mariastella Margozzi, Palma Bucarelli: il museo come avanguardia (Milan: Electa, 2009), 260. 26 According to Article no. 8 of the July 1973 Law no. 438, the Steering Committe was to be composed of the mayor of Venice, members of Venice’s municipal council, representatives from the Veneto regional administration, and delegates from the national Consiglio dei Ministri (Council of Ministers).

Private and Institutional Patronage

223

27 With the Biennale Presidential tenure of Giuseppe Galasso in 1980, the Steering Committee began appointing international figures to the Visual Arts Committee. For example, Harald Szeemann was invited in 1980, Evelyn Weiss in 1984, and David Sylvester in 1988. 28 Article no. 13 of the July 1973 Law no. 438 stipulates: “Oggi anno, nella fase preparatoria del programma delle manifestazioni, il consiglio direttivo promuove un incontro pubblico a carattere consultivo con le organizzazioni culturali, sociali, e politiche interessate ai settori di attività della Biennale.” 29 Despite the fact that funding for the Institution was still to come from state sources—the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Culture—as well as municipal and regional sources. 30 Carlo Ripa di Meana was elected president by the Steering Committee of La Biennale di Venezia composed of the Mayor of Venice Professor Matteo Ajassa; Giuseppe Mazzariol and Mario Baratto, designated by the Venice City Council; Professor Giuseppe Rossini, Domenico Purificato and Adriano Seroni, designated by the Venice Province Council; Dr. Roberto Mario Cimnaghi, Ermanno Olmi, Professor Piero Zampetti, Mario Monicelli and Francesco Maselli, designated by the Veneto Regional Council; Professor Guido Perocco, Neri Pozza, and Dr. Carlo Ripa di Meana, designated by the Council of Ministers; Dr. Manlio Spandonaro, designated by the Italian Federation of Workers’ Trade-Union (CISL); Ennio Calabria, designated by the General Federation of Work (CGIL); Roberto Mazzucco, designated by the Italian Work Union (UIL); Osvaldo De Nunzio, designated by the permanent staff of the Venice Biennale. Published by the Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana dated February 21, 1974 and signed by Prime Minister Mariano Rumor. 31 Carlo Ripa di Meana began his political career in the 1960s. He was a member of the Club Turati based in Milan, which was a socialist club that followed the ideals promoted by the socialist Filippo Turati (1857–1932). 32 Critical reception of these Biennale editions can be found in the following compendiums, published by the Venice Biennale under the direction of MarieGeorge Gervasoni Salvetti: Biennale di Venezia: Annuario 1975: Eventi del 1974 (Venice: Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee, 1974); La Biennale di Venezia: Annuario 1978: Eventi del 1976–77 (Venice: Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee, 1979); La Biennale Di Venezia: Annuario 1979s: Eventi Del 1978 (Venezia: Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee, 1982). 33 Carlo Ripa di Meana, Libertà al Cile, October 5, 1974, un-­paginated. Original Italian: “Intendiamo non solo operare un atto di solidarietà globale della cultural Italiana verso la cultura di un paese sottoposto a una intollerabile dittatura fascista, e verso tutto il poplo di quel paese, ma altersì saggiare un nuovo modo di affrontare il problema dell’organizzazione a livello interdisciplinare e della realizzazione a livello

224

Postwar Italian Art History Today

popolare della attivita della Biennale nel suo terreno istituzionale.” (“We intend not only to carry out an act of global solidarity of the Italian cultural towards the culture of a country subjected to an intolerable fascist dictatorship, and to the entire population of that country, but to try out a new way of tackling the problem of organization at an interdisciplinary level, and the realization at a populist level of the activity of the Biennale in its institutional terrain.” 34 Discourse of decentralization had gained ground since the end of World War II in an attempt to extricate institutions from their previous Fascist configuration. See Douglas Yates, Neighborhood Democracy: The Politics and Impacts of Decentralization (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1973); Giuliano Della Pergola and Giorgio Ferraresi, Il decentramento nella città in Italia (Rome: I.G.M.), 1969; and Doriana Giudici, Sindacato e decentramento produttivo (Rome: Editrice sindacale italiana), 1978. 35 Mario de Michelli, “La Democrazia dipinta sui muri,” Libertà al Cile, October 5, 1974, un-­paginated. Original Italian: “Pittura d’intervento, pittura d’agitazione, pittura d’emergenza.” 36 Sara Catenacci, “L’ambinete come sociale alla Biennale di Venezia 1976: note da un libro mai realizzato,” in In Corso d’Opera: Richerche dei dottorandi in Storia dell’Arte della Sapienza, eds. Michele Nicolaci, Matteo Piccioni and Lorenzo Riccardi (Rome: Campisano editore, 2015), 318. 37 In addition to Germano Celant’s exhibition Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alla Body Art (Environment/Art: From Futurism to Body Art) held in the Central Pavilion, the Biennale also included eight other exhibitions in and around Venice that covered topics including German Werkbund design from the 1920s, rational Italian architecture form the 1930s, contemporary American urban planning, as well as an exhibition of glass design and a retrospective of Man Ray’s photography. The Biennale now aimed to be a serious contender in the international world of avant-­garde cultural institutions. 38 The conference took place on October 1–3, 1976. 39 “Attività del Gruppo permanente di lavoro per i convegni,” reprinted in Annuario 1977: Eventi del 1976: La Biennale di Venezia (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 1977), 426. 40 Franco Summa, email exchange with the author, September 26, 2013. 41 The conference “Nuova domanda e nuovi modi di produzione culturale” was held on July 18 and 19, 1976. 42 Enzo Di Martino, The History of the Venice Biennale: 1895–2005: Visual Arts, Architecture, Cinema, Dance, Music, Theatre (Venice: Papiro Arte, 2005), 68. 43 Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990), 329. 44 Enrico Crispolti, along with Luigi Carluccio, and Lara-Vinca Masini, was invited to curate the Italian Pavilion by the architect Luigi Scarpa, appointed the interim

Private and Institutional Patronage

225

Director of the Visual Arts Section. Under the 1973 Statute the Director of the Visual Arts is appointed for a term no longer than four years. See Article no. 18 of the July 1973 Law no. 438. 45 La Biennale di Venezia: Annuario 1979: eventi del 1978 (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 1982), 199. 46 Carluccio titled his Natura come immagine (Nature as Image), Crispolti named his section Natura praticata (Nature Applied), and Masini called her section Topologia morfogenesi (Topology and Morphogenesis). 47 Enrico Crispolti, interview with the author, Rome, June 14, 2012. 48 Di Martino, The History of the Venice Biennale, 69. 49 Harald Szeemann, along with Achille Bonito Oliva, created the “Aperto” section in the 1980 Biennale for young artists. 50 The Castello di Rivoli opened its doors as a Museum of Contemporary Art in 1984 and the MAMbo becomes an official institutional entity in 1995 and renamed in 2007.

Section IV

Reassessing Arte Povera

12

Isolated Fragments? Disentangling the Relationship Between Arte Povera and Medardo Rosso Sharon Hecker

This essay deals with Arte Povera’s engagement with Medardo Rosso (1858– 1928). There are two prevailing narratives of Arte Povera. The first sees it as a loosely connected movement with an approach of open experimentation that was current in its earliest period of gestation in the mid-1960s. The second narrative, which emerged in the 1980s, is of a unified, nationally based movement rooted in Italian identity and cultural continuity. As my case study will show, this second account needs to be re-­evaluated.1 I propose that Arte Povera artists entertain a multifaceted dialogue with ideas expressed a hundred years earlier in Rosso’s highly unusual, experimental sculptures and photographs. In focusing on the variety of ways in which Arte Povera draws on a single artist from the past, I shall highlight this movement’s ongoing resistance to closure or to a single-­mindedness of approach. I believe that Arte Povera artists take up and reject strands of Rosso’s art and ideas individually and as they see fit, without feeling the obligation to inherit his project as a whole. These artists’ engagement with various components of Rosso’s project is consistent with Arte Povera’s original approach of open experimentation. Their process of flexibly mining an artist from the past keeps their work vital and relevant today. By their diverging approaches, these artists do not transform Rosso into a central or heroic voice of authority from the past. They thus disrupt uniform “genealogical” or reified descriptions of Italian cultural continuity and national identity evident in the later narrative. I will first go back in time and point to the diverse ways in which earlier twentieth-­century artists in Italy related to Rosso’s art, from Umberto Boccioni to Arturo Martini to Lucio Fontana. Whereas Boccioni attempted to define

230

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Rosso as the forefather of Futurism and modern Italian art, Martini and Fontana refused to acknowledge any direct relationship to his work. I will then present five examples of Arte Povera artists from the postwar period: Luciano Fabro, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Giovanni Anselmo, and Remo Salvadori. I believe that Arte Povera, in different ways, continues to mine questions that Rosso posed at the end of the nineteenth century regarding boundaries and dialogues that can be established between materiality and immateriality. I intend to examine these artists as a loosely associated group, with each artist preserving his or her own unique approach.2 The enduring interest in Rosso on the part of artists associated with Arte Povera clearly indicates the continuing relevance of his ideas for their work. For example, when Giovanni Anselmo saw an exhibition of Rosso’s work in 1996, he said that the sculptures seemed to move as he walked among them, their very matter vibrating “as if [they] had a beating heart.”3 He retained, he said, the image of “a burning flame: [t]he impression I had was like a form in transformation, of matter being dematerialized, a sculpture that denies and cancels itself. I believe that this sculptor, by surpassing sculpture, arrived at an open position that art has since developed.”4 Evoking the semiotic opera aperta (open work), Anselmo points to the openness of contemporary art to multiple influences, a characteristic feature of Rosso’s own artistic project.5 Rosso, in fact, defined his art as one that attempted to go beyond the convential limits of his time by making sculpture, the most bounded and isolated of the arts, receptive to light, atmosphere, temporality, and changing moods.6 It is important to specify that Arte Povera’s postwar idea of “openness” was viewed not as all-­permissible but rather as an acceptance of dialogue and encounter, which is not dissimilar to what Rosso believed about his own work in his time. Anselmo’s statement of Rosso’s project as an opera aperta represents a shift from the viewpoint expressed at the beginning of the twentieth century by painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni. In his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture of 1912, Boccioni hailed Rosso as brilliant, poetic, and revolutionary, the first modern Italian sculptor.7 Yet Boccioni opined that Rosso’s art was “too isolated and fragmentary, lacking a synthetic thought that affirmed a law.”8 Rosso’s ideas, he felt, were too scattered and thus not easily transmittable. Boccioni’s words were a response to Rosso’s intuitive approach to sculpture. At the same time, they were an expression of Boccioni’s nationalistic longing to bring forth a robust, original Italian modern art movement through a singlemindedness of purpose and ideas. Boccioni aimed to place Rosso’s work as

Isolated Fragments?

231

a solid point of “origin,” the starting point of Italian modern art from which his own work would naturally flow. This is a historicizing wish that still needs to be examined fully. In fact, Arte Povera artists rejected this idea of a unified art in the service of nationalistic politics. One artist said: “like Fascism, [. . .] Futurism forgot difference, encounter, and the connection between opposite poles.”9 The idea of Italian origins still courses through numerous readings of preand postwar Italian art history. It underlines an enduring wish to have a unified, “made-­in-Italy,” Arte Povera movement with common national ideals and origins, which is something that remains debatable and has been questioned in recent studies of the loosely grouped movement.10 This historicization still affects our understanding of Rosso’s work in relation to Arte Povera. Even today, critics like Giovanni Lista regard Rosso as “a very significant artist from whom Italian modern art historically originates.”11 Yet Rosso’s work eludes this exclusive mold of Italian character and origination. Anselmo’s and Boccioni’s readings provide useful parameters for examining Rosso’s postwar legacy in Italy. On the one hand, Rosso’s contribution can be considered “open” and fluid, as Anselmo stated; on the other, there is a need to better understand Boccioni’s comment about the strangely fragmented nature of Rosso’s work. Both aspects, I believe, become evident when we trace Rosso’s multifaceted presence in twentieth-­century Italian art, through writing and interviews with artists, critics, and art historians. Given the elusiveness of his oeuvre, Rosso’s appropriation by later Italian artists has been sporadic and unpredictable—subtle, nuanced, even ineffable, with some artists drawing elements from it and others ignoring it altogether. Boccioni yearned for a Medardo Rosso whose legacy could be passed down as a straightforward and coherent entity, free of the messy contradictions that characterized the artist’s life, career, art, and reputation, and cleansed of the deep uncertainties that defined his time. But Rosso was not a canonical Italian artist. It is important to realize that most of his creative work was done outside of Italy and was inspired by ideas and discussions being conducted outside of the country.12 In 1889, Rosso moved to Paris, where he interacted with, and was inspired by, important French avant-­garde artists, writers, and collectors of his time. Later, he found exhibition opportunites and numerous collectors in Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. In 1902, he became a French citizen. He returned to Italy during World War I and then later resettled there permanently. Throughout his life, Rosso never concealed his Italian origins, but he saw his identity as cosmopolitan, and he considered his

232

Postwar Italian Art History Today

œuvre as being of international importance. He called himself a citizen of the world and a maker of art “without limits.”13 Rosso wanted to be recognized in Italy for his achievements but he did not wish to be reabsorbed by his country. His repatriation after World War I shut down his lifelong aspirations for a transnational reputation. Indeed, whereas Boccioni hailed Rosso as the Italian forefather of Futurism, Rosso himself denied this attempt to claim him, thereby refusing his own heroic place as the precursor of Italian modern art. He felt little connection to the Futurist cause and its political aims. He was thus unable to fill the national role that Boccioni wanted to create for him. Nor did he fully respond to the nationalistic campaigns, such as those carried out by painter, critic, and political activist Ardengo Soffici to reclaim Rosso for Italy.14 Rosso’s art was far from coherent and in many ways avoided coherence. It cannot be seen as representing a single unified vision, for his interests varied and shifted between dualities of light and shadow, materiality and illusion, emergence and disappearance, revelation and concealment, surface and interior, and what he termed the “dematerialization” of sculpture. His sculptures, photographs, and drawings, concerned with the temporal and contingent, with ever-­changing moods, flaws, chance, flux, and discontinuity, were in every way an art of becoming rather than one of stability. In fact, Rosso’s artistic visions, through which he expressed incompleteness, point to his early intuitions about a new language for modern sculpture that did not develop further in the bellicose national art of the Futurists. While Boccioni’s sculptures certainly benefitted from Rosso’s ideas, the traditional, ongoing, and unified narrative of the relationship between their works needs to be further examined and differentiated.15 As a matter of historical fact, in spite of Boccioni’s claims, Rosso was by no means accepted nationally in Italy. By the second decade of the twentieth century, when Boccioni published his Manifesto, Rosso’s artistic legacy had hardly been guaranteed by the Italian establishment. At the time of his death (in 1928), only a few of his works had been installed in Italian public collections. The presence of these few pieces did not constitute a national embrace of the artist by Italians; rather, their presence in museums was due mostly to his Dutch patroness, Etha Fles, who made various deals with Italian museums, between 1913 and 1920, to get them to accept a small number of Rosso’s sculptures. In exchange for the purchase of one work by Rosso, Fles gave these institutions several others by him as gifts. The one-­sidedness of this arrangement and internal museum correspondence attest to the reluctance of Italian institutions to give a national

Isolated Fragments?

233

stamp of approval to Rosso’s work and reputation.16 This was true despite the admiration of such Futurists as Carlo Carrà and the support of powerful political and cultural figures like Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s lover and a founder of the Novecento Italiano movement. Indeed, there were few exhibitions of Rosso’s art in Italy between his death and the first years after World War II. During this period, the only opportunities that subsequent generations of artists would have had to see Rosso’s works, aside from the casts displayed in regional museums, were the retrospectives at I Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in Rome in 1931 and at the Venice Biennale in 1950, both organized by Rosso’s son, Francesco. Ongoing disagreement ensued during the interwar period between Italian artists and critics who wanted to crown Rosso as their modern forebearer and those who had misgivings about his ideas and his fragmented, unstable legacy. An example is Lucio Fontana (himself born in Argentina to a family of Italian origin and quickly re-­adopted by Italy) who, in 1938, had his first one-­man show of roughly modeled, brightly glazed ceramic sculptures at the Galleria del Milione in Milan. Critic Guido Piovene immediately likened them to the sculptures of Medardo Rosso.17 But even as late as 1949, Fontana emphatically denied this connection, declaring “no [niente] M[edardo] Rosso.”18 Paradoxically, Fontana’s attitude corresponded to Rosso’s own oft-­declared antipathy for movements, founding fathers, and the authority of the past. Sculptor Arturo Martini, who had been supported by the fascist regime, is another example of this resistance to being labeled as a direct descendent of Rosso. Martini’s ideas about Rosso reflected some of the conflicting responses to Rosso’s legacy that persisted in Italy at the end of World War II. In 1944, Martini titled his first lecture for the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice: “Perché è fallita la scultura di Medardo Rosso.”19 (Why Medardo Rosso’s sculpture failed). Martini had been intrigued by Rosso in 1908 but soon rejected his ideas, stating that he was unable to decide whether Rosso was a “European value or a Milanese waste product.”20 In 1946, in the European climate of loss and amid the collapse of his own fascist ideals, Martini revived his devaluation of Rosso: “Medardo Rosso, who sensed before I did this impossibility of statuary, attempted to give a surrounding atmosphere to his work by dissolving its contours, but even he did not go beyond the fallacious suggestion that all incomplete artworks possess.”21 In reality, Martini was expressing his own great despair about the condition of modern sculpture. His statement reflects a broader art-­historical discussion. As Alex

234

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Potts has written, sculpture must always negotiate between the instability of the viewer’s encounter with sculpture and sculpture’s own “mythic status as an art of stable embodiment [. . .] because of the gap between its public and monumentalizing functions and its role as the paradigmatic autonomous object of aesthetic contemplation.”22 As Italy’s economic conditions improved and its artistic reputation began to stabilize in the 1950s, interest in Rosso’s work re-­emerged. In 1951, for example, the young painter Piero Dorazio came into contact with Rosso’s work when he was hired to re-­install the Medardo Rosso rooms at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. This was another period during which there was a renewed desire to describe, define, and codify the tenets of postwar Italian art, but this time without the political overtones of fascism. This moment of renewed self-­ definition was part of a broader sense in Italy of a need to be reborn from the ashes of war and to be seen by the world as a strong nation rather than as a defeated one, especially on a cultural level.23 In 1955, as the memory of the war prompted a search for a more hopeful, universal modern artistic language, Dorazio published La fantasia dell’arte nella vita moderna (The Fantasy of Art in Modern Life), the first postwar account of Italian modern art. Rosso was now, once again, given the status of national originator. In La fantasia dell’arte nella vita moderna, Dorazio hailed Rosso as “the first authentic modern Italian artist.” Dorazio cited artistic reasons for Rosso’s importance: Rosso’s “sensitivity for matter’s intimate relationship to light [. . .] ‘snapshots’ of figures surprised in the process of motion.” Dorazio emphasized, for the first time, Rosso’s importance for all contemporary artists.24 The negative attitudes towards Rosso’s work expressed before and during the war continued to shift after the publication of Dorazio’s book, thanks to new support from scholarship and an exhibition. Dorazio’s book led Luciano Caramel, then a young art history student at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, to consider Rosso as a subject for his thesis. In a recent interview, Caramel recounted that, during the 1950s, he had asked Fontana about his opinion of Rosso, and Fontana reiterated his disinterest in Rosso, responding that Rosso was not a worthwhile topic.25 Undaunted, Caramel next polled Luciano Fabro, a young sculptor recently arrived in Milan, later a major figure in postwar Italian art and loosely associated with the Arte Povera movement. Unlike Fontana, Fabro considered Rosso a great artist, anticipating his importance for the next generation. Caramel went on, in 1979, to organize the first major Italian exhibition of Rosso since 1950, held at Milan’s Palazzo della

Isolated Fragments?

235

Permanente. Caramel’s exhibition produced the first Italian scholarly study of Rosso in Italy.26 The question of Rosso’s place in the legacy of the postwar period is intimately linked to the ongoing difficulty with defining “modernism” in terms of Italian art. Ideas about lineage and genealogy have been crucial to this discourse, at times being upheld and at others questioned. Continuity and change with respect to the “past” (whether ancient or more recent) have remained the pillars of this debate. It is therefore noteworthy that, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, new interest in Rosso’s work was generated by young artists of the Arte Povera generation, who began to look at Rosso with fresh eyes. However, in a significant break from Boccioni’s earlier attempt to create an unbroken genetic lineage for Italian modern art, Arte Povera artists felt no such need. The earliest example of this transformation in attitude is Fabro, who, together with critic Jole De Sanna, drew a direct conceptual link between himself and Rosso. In 1976, in a small but influential exhibition titled Aptico: il senso della scultura (Haptic: The Sense [or Meaning] of Sculpture), Fabro and De Sanna examined the significance and sources of modern sculpture for contemporary art.27 The show defined Fabro’s sense of his responsibility to recover Rosso as a forgotten historical figure. Unhampered by nationalistic concerns, Fabro and De Sanna traced Fabro’s artistic project directly to Rosso, by opening the book that accompanied the show with a reassessment of Charles Baudelaire’s words from his essay “Why Sculpture is Boring,” the very essay that Rosso had claimed as his point of departure.28 Although critic Lea Vergine defined Aptico as a “ricerca di progenitori”29 (search for ancestors) and a “rassicurante catena genetica”30 (reassuring genetic chain), Fabro and De Sanna actually saw the origins of contemporary Italian sculpture not only in the works of Italians, such as Rosso, Boccioni, Fontana, Piero Manzoni, and Fausto Melotti but also in the art of non-Italian sculptors like Constantin Brancusi and Jacques Lipchitz. Whereas prior artists noted Rosso’s attention to light, space, and movement and Rosso himself wrote about “forgetting” the material of sculpture, Fabro and De Sanna were the first to point out the material aspects of Rosso’s artistic project. They dedicated a paragraph of Aptico to Rosso, ironically titled “Ha una buona cera” (He has a good appearance, a play on the word “wax,” Rosso’s signature medium), in which materiality is the focus of their interest: “[Rosso] makes the material sculpt itself [. . .] material added to material, not material just sketched out but rather [. . .] [sculpture] drowning in it, covered by it.”31 It is

236

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Rosso’s experimental approach to materiality and process that, to this day, attracts countless artists around the world to his work.32 Fabro did not stop there. His and De Sanna’s engagement with Rosso extended in a new direction when students from the Casa degli artisti (Artists’ House—a think-­tank for artists that they opened with Hidetoshi Nagasawa in Milan in 1978) organized Rosso’s documents that were held by his heirs. This archival project formed the intellectual basis for De Sanna’s further critical meditations on Rosso in her monograph Medardo Rosso o la creazione dello spazio moderno (Medardo Rosso or the Creation of Modern Space, 1985). Whereas, in the previous works with Fabro, De Sanna had emphasized Rosso’s sense of materiality, in this book De Sanna reconceptualized and situated Rosso’s ideas of space as related to the viewer’s perception, both historically and within a broader international history of modern and contemporary art.33 Twenty years later, Fabro and De Sanna were drawn to another unexamined fragment of Rosso’s oœuvre, this time his innovative use of photography. In a 1996 interview, published for the exhibition of Rosso’s work at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago de Compostela, they discussed Rosso’s use of the camera to create a momentary “immobility”34 in the spectator, a topic that Fabro would explore extensively in his own art.35 This was an idea with which Rosso experimented but which he never articulated formally. Fabro noted that while a painter must imagine a moving object as immobile while he paints it, the viewer’s movements negate stillness in sculpture. Medardo Rosso has to stop the entire whole, stop time like a camera, as a hypothetical moment of vision, because each photograph is a hypothesis of the whole, even if we know it is only a specific point of view. Yet he has to pretend that ‘this whole’ is an entire whole as if it were the addition that includes all points of view [. . .] the moment lived, why does it belong to you like an entire whole? What does this belonging to an entire whole mean?36

Fabro’s intuition about Rosso’s use of the camera as a “whole fragment,” momentarily stopped and captured, gives us a new way to understand the role of photography for sculpture in a manner that, in my opinion, has not yet been fully explored. Other Arte Povera artists have engaged directly with Rosso’s sculptures through their own work. One example is Marisa Merz. Critics have drawn obvious connections to Rosso on the basis of Merz’s small heads, sometimes made of wax.37 It should be noted, however, that slight differences are evident within similarities: while Rosso cast many of his small wax heads in plaster, wax,

Isolated Fragments?

237

and bronze, Merz models and embellishes hers with color, pastel, gold foil, and small objects. The heads by both artists lack fully articulated eyes and thus avoid direct visual contact with the viewer. Whereas Rosso’s heads mostly look down and away from the viewer, as though protecting interior private selves, Merz’s heads look upwards to the sky, necks extended, and therefore at times evoke more spiritual readings. It is noteworthy that Merz herself refuses any easy correspondences to Rosso. As in all of her pronouncements, she leaves the nature of her relationship to Rosso unarticulated and observable only via interpretation. She refused the opportunity to place one of her heads near Rosso’s at her own solo show at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice in 2011 titled Non corrisponde eppure fiorisce (It does not correspond yet it blossoms). In the same show, however, she exhibited her enormous, colorful painting behind a wax cast of Rosso’s Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy) of 1892–94. There was thus a fertile tension between her work and that of Rosso that denied any facile connection. It would seem that, for Merz, any link she makes to Rosso must be read as at once important and negligent. Rosso presents a source of inspiration that must also be simultaneously and playfully denied. The reason seems to be a risk of creating a bond that seems too close a fit, too stable, thereby denying a productive sense of difference and creative diversity. Even more subtle and complex relationships between Merz and Rosso can be found in Merz’s other works. Her gossamer knitted copper threads, shaped into curving squares, first made in 1974 and continually reworked, play eloquently on the idea of sculpture as a form of appearance and disappearance. This theme had been essential for Rosso in his experiments with the dematerialization of sculpture. Merz further echoes, and at the same time creatively varies, this theme in an untitled three-­part wooden screen with vertical, loosely attached copper threads. As the viewer passes from one “frame” to the next, the copper wires suddenly shimmer, transform back into dull wires, and shimmer again. With great economy of means, Merz expresses the unstable relationships between sculpture and time, on the one hand, and space, light, and the viewer’s mobility on the other. Her works elaborate on the vocabulary of the sculptures of Rosso by experimenting with the effects of appearance and disappearance in new poetic ways. Giuseppe Penone is another Arte Povera artist who has engaged with Rosso through his work but, unlike Merz, Penone is interested in a different trace left by Rosso: the visceral quality of his rough, abraded sculptural surfaces. Penone relates them to his own interest in the “skin” of sculptural works inspired by

238

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 12.1  Marisa Merz, Untitled, 2010. Mixed media on paper, 300 x 250 cm. Collection of the artist, with Medardo Rosso, Jewish Boy, 1892–4, wax cast with plaster interior, dimensions not given, collection of Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice. Installation for exhibition, Marisa Merz, Non corrisponde eppur fiorisce (Marisa Merz, It Does Not Correspond and Yet it Blossoms) at Fondazione Querini Stampalia onlus, Venice, 2011. Photo by Agostino Osio.

Isolated Fragments?

239

the surface of his own body, like Svolgere la propria pelle (To Unroll One’s Skin, 1970–1), Suture (Sutures, 1987–90), and Impronta (Fingerprint, 1995). As Georges Didi-Huberman has written, these works excavate the epidermis of marble or even of trees in a kind of “tactile blindness.”38 Interestingly, Penone’s ideas derive from a creative misunderstanding of Rosso’s process that renders his works fertile. Penone seems to have been taken in by Rosso’s trompe-­l’oeil, for he believes that Rosso’s waxes were hand-­modeled, rather than cast in gelatin molds taken from plasters. That the actual process involved was mechanical and not the work of Rosso’s hand modeling of wax was shown in my Harvard University study and exhibition in 2003. The mistake was nonetheless a happy one. In a 1999 interview, Penone said that he saw the wax as a spatial “involucro”39 (shell or casing) that translates the vibrations of atmosphere: “it is a direct modeling in which we can still see the fingerprints of the hand of the sculptor. It is the work of someone who really makes sculpture, who almost makes poetry out of sculpture, with respect to others who stop at rhetoric. This is the great difference, and it is for this reason that Medardo Rosso is very interesting.”40 The variety of reactions to Rosso by Arte Povera artists continues to be remarkably nuanced. Penone’s attraction to Rosso’s surfaces contrasts with the interest of other Arte Povera artists in the interiority of Rosso’s subjects. I began this chapter by talking about Anselmo’s sense of Rosso’s works as living and breathing, vibrating on the surface and within, as though with a beating heart. Anselmo connected Rosso’s art to his own in works like Respiro (Breath/I Breathe, 1969). Anselmo saw, in Rosso, a precursor of the opera aperta, and he saw his own art as a philosophical, semiotically open text, that allowed multiple or mediated interpretations by readers. Thus, Anselmo’s inspiration is different from what attracted Fabro and Merz. It would seem, then, that the further one gets from attempting to construct a single or national genealogy for Rosso, the more one is able to see the importance of the questions to which his work gave rise and the new answers that these works can produce. When I asked Remo Salvadori, of the younger generation of Arte Povera artists, what he thought of Rosso, his reply came in the form of a letter that he considered to be a textual work of art. He wrote: Dear Sharon, Your question about Medardo Rosso that reaches me today makes me reflect on a large theme that I frequently ask myself about, what is it that one interiorizes? For me it is a process that in the practice of seeing oneself/seeing emerges frequently, not so much in the formal aspects but rather in the approach to the

240

Postwar Italian Art History Today

nature of substances, materials and space, a mode that evokes geopathies, places and their energy. One can say that that which one interiorizes lives! A hug, Remo.41

It seems that the importance of Rosso for contemporary art no longer exists for Salvadori in the realm of genealogies, objects, or specific ideas, but rather resides in the very process by which an artist chooses to interiorize, as well as in the greater life and afterlife of art. At the same time, Rosso’s work leaves open the choice not to be absorbed. This is best expressed in a final comment given to me from Arte Povera artist Giulio Paolini through his biographer, Maddalena Disch: “although he has great respect for Medardo Rosso, [Paolini] does not feel him to be a ‘relative’ to any degree—he has always looked at him from a certain distance, without feeling tied or attracted to him in any particular way.”42 Ultimately, Boccioni’s complaint that Rosso’s “isolated and fragmentary” ideas lacked “a synthetic thought that affirmed a law” was its greatest value. These qualities enabled Rosso’s ideas to flow into Arte Povera openly and flexibly, constituting a significant point of reference while relieving native artists of the burden of a single-­minded approach or a national history.

Notes 1 For critical readings of Arte Povera’s nationalist politics since the 1980s, see Nicholas Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-­nam: The Politics of Arte Povera,” October 124 (Summer 2008): 9–30, especially p. 11; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “Thrust into the Whirlwind: Italian Art before Arte Povera,” in Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972, eds. Richard Flood and Frances Morris (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 21–40; Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-­worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Art History Vol. 36, Issue 2 (April 2013): 418–41. For a historical reconstruction of the critical strategies adopted by Germano Celant in the 1980s, see Flood and Morris, “Introduction: Zero to Infinity,” in Zero to Infinity, 9–20; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 2004 [1999]). See also Claire Gilman, “Introduction,” October 124: 3–7. 2 As Claire Gillman has noted, “what unites [Arte Povera] artists [. . .] is not specific materials and processes, but rather the radically unstable terrain that each occupies, a terrain that exists somewhere between materiality and immateriality, or within the perpetual exchange between opposing forces or conditions,” Gilman, “Introduction,” 7. 3 Giovanni Anselmo, “Medardo Rosso,” in Medardo Rosso, ed. Gloria Moure (Santiago de Compostela: Centro Galega de Arte Contemporánea, 1996), 228. 4 Ibid.

Isolated Fragments?

241

5 Umberto Eco, Opera aperta: Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milan: Bompiani, 1962). For an English translation, see Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Eco’s work is ubiquitously cited as key to Arte Povera. 6 See Medardo Rosso, “Concepimento-Limite-Infinito,” L’Ambrosiano, January 12, 1926 and Medardo Rosso, “Chi largamente vede, largamente pensa: Ha il gesto,” L’Ambrosiano, January 15, 1926. 7 “Alludo al genio di Medardo Rosso, a un italiano, al solo grande scultore moderno che abbia tentato di aprire alla scultura un campo più vasto, di rendere con la plastica le influenze d’un ambiente e i legami atmosferici che lo avvincono al soggetto,” Umberto Boccioni, Manifesto tecnico della Scultura Futurista (Milan: Direzione del movimento futurista, 1912), np. For a recent English translation, see Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), trans. Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 166–8 and 178–84. Already in the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, written on February 11, 1910 in Milan, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini condemned the Italian establishment for ignoring Segantini and Rosso: “domandate a questi sacerdoti del vero culto, a questi depositari delle leggi estetiche, dove siano oggi le opere di Giovanni Segantini [. . .] domandate loro dove sia apprezzata la scultura di Medardo Rosso!” (ask these priests of the true cult, these guardians of esthetic laws, where are the works of Giovanni Segantini today [. . .] ask them where the sculptures of Medardo Rosso are appreciated!). Umberto Boccioni et al., Manifesto dei Pittori Futuristi (Milan: Direzione del movimento futurista, 1910), np. 8 Boccioni, Manifesto tecnico della Scultura Futurista, np. The full quote is: “[. . .] più geniale, disinteressato e poetico, ma troppo isolato e frammentario, mancava di un pensiero sintetico che affermasse una legge. Poiché nell’opera di rinnovamento non basta credere con fervore, ma occorre propugnare e determinare qualche norma che segni una strada.” 9 Michelangelo Pistoletto, cited in Gilman, “Introduction,” 7. 10 See note 1 above. 11 “un artista molto significativo da cui storicamente parte l’arte moderna italiana,” Giuseppe Penone, “La natura non è separata dall’uomo,” interview by Giovanni Lista, Ligeia: Dossiers sur l’art, No. 25–28 (October 1998–June 1999): http://artsituation. com/new/interview-­penone-par-­lista (site discontinued; accessed January 2016). 12 See Sharon Hecker, A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017). 13 Rosso criticizes what he calls the concept of a “patria limitata” (limited homeland) in “Concepimento-Limite-Infinito,” L’Ambrosiano, January 12, 1926. He conceives a kind of art that crosses national borders in “Chi largamente vede, largamente pensa: Ha il gesto,” L’Ambrosiano, January 15, 1926.

242

Postwar Italian Art History Today

14 As early as 1904, Soffici wrote that Rosso had “toute la vivacité fraîche et attachante de sa belle race” (all the fresh vivacity and the endearingness of his beautiful race), and that Rosso was “le plus grand sculpteur de l’Italie moderne et un des plus grands du monde contemporain” (the greatest modern Italian sculptor and one of the greatest of the contemporary world). Stéphane Cloud [Ardengo Soffici], “Le Salon d’Automne: Considérations,” Europe Artiste (October–November 1904): 339. 15 The idea that Boccioni’s sculpture evolved naturally from Rosso’s is a commonplace in today’s art historical narratives. 16 See Margaret Scolari Barr, “Medardo Rosso and his Dutch Patroness,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 13 (1962): 245–8. 17 Guido Piovene, untitled review in Corriere della Sera, Milan, December 22, 1938, cited in Terra Incognita: Italy’s Ceramic Revival, eds. Roberta Cremoncini and Lisa Hockemeyer, exh. cat. (London: Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 2009), 14. 18 Lucio Fontana to Giampiero Giani, November 2, 1949, in Lucio Fontana: Lettere, 1919–1968, ed. Paolo Campiglio (Milan: Skira, 1999), 243. 19 Arturo Martini, Colloqui sulla scultura, 1944–1945, ed. Nico Stringa (Treviso: Canova, 1997), 302. 20 “valore europeo o cascame milanese?” Ibid., 9. 21 “Medardo Rosso, avvertita prima di me questa impossibilità della statuaria, tentò di dare una circostante atmosfera all’opera sfaldandone i contorni, ma anche lui non andò oltre la fallace suggestione che hanno tutte le opere incompiute.” Arturo Martini, La scultura lingua morta, ed. Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Abscondita Editore, Milano, 2001), 66. 22 Alexander Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 23. 23 For a case study on the immediate postwar scenario in Italy, see Sharon Hecker, “Servant of Two Masters: Lucio Fontana’s 1948 Sculptures in Milan’s Cinema Arlecchino,” Oxford Art Journal Vol. 35:3 (December 2012): 337–61. 24 “il primo autentico artista moderno italiano,” citing his sensitivity for matter’s “intimate relationship to light, ‘istantanee’ di figure o di espressioni sorprese in movimento,” Piero Dorazio, La fantasia dell’arte nella vita moderna (Rome: Polveroni & Quinti, 1955), 48. 25 Luciano Caramel, interview by Sharon Hecker, January 2015. 26 Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), ed. Luciano Caramel, exh. cat. (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979). 27 Aptico: Il senso della scultura, ed. Jole de Sanna, exh. cat. (Crusinallo: Alessi d’après, 1976). The exhibition was curated by de Sanna together with Fabro and the artists Hidetoshi Nagasawa and Antonio Trotta. 28 Charles Baudelaire, “Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse,” Salon de 1846 (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1846; repr. in Curiosités esthétiques, Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 185.

Isolated Fragments?

243

29 Lea Vergine, “Il senso della scultura,” Paese Sera, September 11, 1976. 30 Ibid. 31 De Sanna, Aptico, 108. 32 Sharon Hecker, “Walking Through Walls: Medardo Rosso and Diana Al-Hadid,” in Diana Al-Hadid: Regarding Medardo Rosso, exh. cat. (New York: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 2016); and “Exposition Tony Cragg à Saint-Étienne: Extraits du dossier de presse du Musée d’Art Moderne de Sainte-Étienne,” La lettre du Collège de France 37 (2013): http://lettre-­cdf.revues.org/1477 (accessed December 5, 2015). 33 Jole de Sanna, Medardo Rosso o la creazione dello spazio moderno (Milan: Mursia, 1985). 34 Luciano Fabro and Jole de Sanna, “Photograph of Medardo Rosso. Interview with Jole de Sanna,” in Medardo Rosso, ed. Gloria Moure, exh. cat. (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1996), 244. 35 See, for example, Sharon Hecker, “ ‘Sealed Between Us’: Wax and the Role of the Viewer in Luciano Fabro’s Tu,” Oxford Art Journal 36, No. 1 (2013): 13–38. 36 Fabro and De Sanna, “Photograph of Medardo Rosso,” 245. 37 See, for example, Dieter Schwartz, “The Irony of Marisa Merz,” October, No. 124 (2008): 157–68. 38 Georges Didi-Huberman, Su Penone (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2008), 22. Originally published as Être crâne. Lieu, contact, pensée, sculpture (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2000). 39 Penone, “La natura non è separata dall’uomo,” interview by Lista, 1999. 40 “si tratta di una modellatura diretta nella quale possiamo ancora scorgere le impronte della mano dello scultore. E’ il lavoro di qualcuno che fa veramente della scultura, che fa quasi della poesia con la scultura, rispetto ad altri che si fermano alla retorica. Qui sta la grande differenza, ed è per questo motivo che Medardo Rosso è molto interessante.” Ibid. 41 “Cara Sharon, La tua domanda che mi giunge oggi su Medardo Rosso mi fa riflettere su un tema grande che spesso mi interroga, cos’e’ che si interiorizza? Per me è un processo che nella pratica di vedersi/vedere spesso emerge, non tanto negli aspetti formali ma piuttosto nell’approccio con la natura della sostanza, le materie e lo spazio, una modalità che evoca le geopatie, i luoghi e la loro energia. Si può dire che ciò che si interiorizza vive! Abbraccio, Remo.” Letter in the form of an artwork from Remo Salvadori to Sharon Hecker, 2015, author’s collection. 42 “Cara Sharon, pur avendo grande stima di Medardo Rosso, [Paolini] non lo sente come ‘parente’ di alcun grado—lo ha sempre guardato da una certa distanza, senza sentirsi legato o attirato in particolar modo,” Maddalena Ditsch to Sharon Hecker, 2015, author’s collection.

13

Gilberto Zorio’s Radical Fluidity Elizabeth Mangini

Gilberto Zorio’s breakout solo exhibition in November of 1967 included a seemingly disparate array of sculptural objects, including: a rudimentary tent bearing the crystalline residue of a seawater puddle that had evaporated from its surface, a massive concrete column resting precariously on inflated rubber tubes, and a concrete semi-­cylinder filled with plaster, the color of which alternated according to atmospheric conditions during the run of the exhibition.1 Domus critic Tommaso Trini quickly identified a unity among these discrete works precisely in their unpredictability, referring to them as “a spectacle of potential energy.”2 The critic was responding to the novel ways in which Zorio’s objects, on view at Gian Enzo Sperone’s Turin gallery, departed from the deadpan problems of form and structure that had dominated much 1960s sculpture. In particular, Trini was drawn to the way Zorio’s forms visibly conserved the energy of their making, and to the means by which they succinctly marked the material transformation inherent in any sculptural activity. Two years later, Italian critic and curator Germano Celant proposed a similar reading, but with a decidedly poetic inflection. He described Zorio’s art—and that of a diverse cast of international artists then proposed under the term arte povera—as the work of the “artist-­alchemist [who] organizes living and vegetable matter into magic things [. . .].”3 Published in the first book exploring the emerging concept of arte povera, Celant’s lyrical elision of artistic experimentation and the proto-­scientific pursuit of alchemy betrayed a specific attitude toward the artwork as a vehicle though which one might access and evaluate the phenomenal world. Using this alchemical analogy, Celant described some important qualities of this art—its experimental character, its attention to energy and exchange, its refusal to fully dematerialize—but this characterization also set the terms of an array of mis-­readings of Zorio and the dozen Italian artists who would later be historicized and marketed as “Arte Povera.” 4

246

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 13.1  Installation view of the exhibition: Gilberto Zorio at Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery, 13 Via Cesare Battisti, Torino, November 1967. Image provided by the artist. Photo: Paolo Bressano.

Gilberto Zorio’s Radical Fluidity

247

Many subsequent accounts of Italian art of this era have picked up Celant’s use of the words “alchemy” or “alchemist.” However, rather than pointing to its experimental material qualities or its entreaties to the viewer, some of these later accounts use alchemy to connote a sense of supernatural mystery in regard to artistic process. In the context of “untying the knot”—and reconsidering the interpretive frames of postwar Italian art—I here disentangle “alchemy” from the writings that have attended Arte Povera in general, and Gilberto Zorio in particular. Once removed from the dense web of alchemical connotations, Zorio’s project will instead be read as invested in revealing the relative instability of the material world and probing the conditionality of aesthetic experience. Numerous scholars have successfully considered American art of the 1960s– 1970s through the lenses of phenomenology and pragmatism, but less equivalent work has been done on the unique manifestations of such impulses in European art.5 This belies the fact that Celant’s early writings on arte povera specifically refer to the American pragmatist John Dewey.6 Focusing on the connections between such philosophical models and Italian art of this era allows us to see with clear eyes that Celant’s use of an alchemical metaphor closely echoes and builds upon Dewey’s argument, in Art as Experience (1934), that artists and scientists provide distinct, yet interrelated models for working with the tensions and harmonies of nature. Here Dewey argues that artists cultivate resistances and tensions for their “potentialities,” and scientists study these moments of tension as a springboard for further research.7 Similarly, Celant’s early invocations of alchemy, in regard to the projects of Zorio and other artists, seek to link art and science as symbiotically furthering knowledge about human experience. In contrast to Celant’s nuanced, philosophically-­grounded approach, the subsequent existing literature on Zorio’s art, which consists largely of exhibition catalog essays and critical reviews, use the term alchemy in opaque and superficial ways.8 Alchemy is deployed in arguments that fall into three primary approaches to the artwork: iconographic, romantic, and economic. Each of these departs from Celant’s original construct and obscures the artist’s work in specific ways, and must be considered independently. The first and most prevalent tactic seeks to identify a lexicon of alchemical symbols, such as in Antje von Graevenitz’s 2010 essay “Alchemical Promises in Arte povera.” Among the German art historian’s claims, she maintains that Zorio uses lead as a sculptural material precisely to guarantee an alchemical interpretation, and works like Leads II (1968) should therefore be read as evoking the “melancholic-­pondering spirit of Saturn.”9

248

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 13.2  Gilberto Zorio, Piombi II (Leads II), 1968. Sheets of lead, copper sulfate, hydrochloric acid, braided copper wire, rope, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. © Gilberto Zorio, courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Philippe Degobert, Courtesy Galerie Albert Baronian.

This argument effectively turns the interpretation of the artist’s project into an alchemical scavenger hunt—an alembic here, a pentagram there.10 While it might be fun for a writer to try to decode objects in this way, this approach fails to engage with the context of materiality in Italy at the time. Indeed, such

Gilberto Zorio’s Radical Fluidity

249

iconographic readings are out of step with artistic tactics of the 1960s and 1970s. In a 1972 interview with critic Mirella Bandini, Zorio discussed the use of industrial and other non-­traditional substances in his work, saying: Today one writes (and I won’t cite the authors) about Arte povera as using ugly materials, rough materials, and it is totally wrong. Such a use of materials is in fact a new kind of materialism. The materials are what they are and are used for their own properties. For example, I use asbestos cement, (eternit), because it is a material that stands up to heat, a dense material par excellence, and I put it in juxtaposition with cobalt chloride, a hypersensitive material par excellence.11

Here the artist asserts that materials are employed for the physical and conceptual friction produced by combining opposing properties. He expressly states that it is radically different from the early avant-­garde’s celebration of materials and their iconographic resonances. What is critical to Zorio and his peers is not what the sculpture or material represents, rather the meaning derives from how the work is experienced by the viewer as a demonstration of harmonies and tensions in the moment of encounter. Identifying material symbolism in these works, in spite of the artist’s disapproval of this approach, often leads directly into the second frame: to interpreting the materials as evidence of the return of the artist as a Romantic, mysterious “Saturnine” figure. In a major 2005 monographic exhibition, curator Klaus Wolbert argues for seeing Zorio as “an adept of those mediaeval alchemists, makers of gold and magicians who sought the philosopher’s stone.”12 This casual conflation of magic and alchemy is typical of many texts on Zorio, and it serves the market of popular ideas as opposed to critical ones. It returns art to the comfortable territory of expression and intuition, muddling Zorio’s project together with that of the subsequent generation of Italian Neo-Expressionist painters known as Transavanguardia. Indeed, when curator Achille Bonito Oliva set forth the terms of Transavanguardia in 1979, he argued that this later art full of personal imagery was directly opposed to the earlier open works of Arte Povera artists. Specifically, he noted that where the earlier art had required the spectator’s engagement, artists like Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, and Mimmo Paladino return art to “a place of satisfying contemplation” and “mythic distance.”13 Since the artist’s subjectivity and closed personal iconography became central components of emerging Italian art of the 1980s, reading alchemy in the works of earlier artists like Zorio allowed the market to soften the stark contrasts between Arte Povera and Transavanguardia to the point of near elision.

250

Postwar Italian Art History Today

We see evidence of this hollow marketing strategy not only in the popular critical reception of his work, but also in Zorio’s inclusion in a number of art-­andalchemy-­themed exhibitions from up to the present day, including the 2014 exhibition Art and Alchemy: The Mystery of Transformation.14 The prevalence of casting Zorio as an alchemist in such terms hinders reading his work in its proper socio-­political and aesthetic contexts. Zorio himself tried to keep alchemy somewhat distant from his work during the period of Transavanguardia’s market ascendancy. In fact, the artist declined an invitation to participate in the “Alchemy” section of Maurizio Calvesi’s 1986 Venice Biennale, citing the way it confused the meaning of his work. Already in 1986, the term “alchemy,” and Calvesi’s use of it, in particular, did not fit well with what Zorio understood his work to be doing.15 Calvesi’s portrayal of the artist as alchemist originally emerged alongside Zorio’s mature work in the late 1960s. It was a retrospective and alternative way of understanding Modernism, founded upon the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious.16 Reaching as far back as Albrecht Dürer and Antonio Piranesi, Calvesi argued that alchemy’s unitary principle—its suggestion that man and world are essentially connected—is at the foundation of modern western culture. This Modernist concept, and its foundation in Jungian thought, could not be further from Zorio’s aims in the late 1960s, when he and his peers were eschewing idealist notions of the transcendent artwork by rejecting visual representation in pursuit of more direct, less hierarchical communication via objects and sensory experiences. A third and much more promising approach appears in Karen Pinkus’s recent book Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence, where she traces the historical appeal of alchemy itself as an interpretive device to understand the human desire to control matter, arguing that this trend is coexistent with the rise of capitalism.17 Herein is the economic argument: that the tendency toward dematerialization in postwar art marked a keen awareness on the part of artists of the excess value ascribed to the raw materials of their works and a resistance to the spectacularization of their production. This concept deftly counters the romantic and iconographic readings of the artist as alchemist, but it doesn’t go far enough into reading the works themselves as models of this resistance. Though Pinkus aims to argue that Zorio therefore does “more than merely represent alchemy,” the presence of one of Zorio’s drawings on the cover belies the fact that a scant four pages are devoted to dematerialized art of the 1960s in general, and only two paragraphs reference the work of Zorio himself.18 A tactical approach unites each of these modes: alchemy is used as a spectacular headline

Gilberto Zorio’s Radical Fluidity

251

or hook to serve the writer’s, the curator’s, or the market’s aims, failing, on the whole, to investigate what the term might mean for the artist’s project. Why, then has the alchemical frame persisted for half a century in relation to Zorio’s work—from the founding theorist of Arte Povera, to historic and recent curatorial apologists, to serious scholars, to the popular press? Although it is applied too casually, the prevalence of an “alchemy discourse” around Zorio’s art does indicate something central in his work. Indeed, it probably wouldn’t have stuck if it didn’t. It points to the mutability of his materials and to the ways in which his works can seem to be in a state of change. However, the most important implications of this mutability are buried under alchemy’s historical and literary baggage. Once unlocked from such Faustian rhetoric, different aesthetic, philosophical, and political aspects of Zorio’s project come into focus. To cast this artist’s project in another light, the present essay will consider his works’ “fluidity.” Used by the artist himself in writings as well as in the title of a series of objects and actions, fluidity encompasses physical and metaphoric properties that can capture and extend most of what has been previously seen as “alchemical” in Zorio’s art. When, in 1969, the artist wrote: “I like to talk of fluid and elastic things, things without lateral and formal perimeters,” he forecast the way his project would exceed the iconography and materials of individual works. In this regard, it must be stated that it is not the aim of this essay merely to substitute one term for another. Instead, the present argument will employ a new interpretive lens entirely: one no longer rooted in mythical and iconographic interpretation of his work, but rather focused on material reception and phenomenological readings. Fluidity embraces material contingency, rather than intentionality, and it introduces the concepts of extended temporality, artistic vulnerability, and viewer conditionality. Looking at a handful of representational early works, attentiveness to fluidity opens the aesthetic and political potential of his art through multiple readings and extended encounters. At its core, Zorio’s investigation of fluidity is a critical condition of an art that ultimately seeks to interrogate the ontology of being. A column shown in that first solo exhibition, Senza titolo (Untitled, 1967), is a fitting example of the ways the artist uses the physical properties of materials to demonstrate the fluid exchange inherent to any experience, even that of the most ideal, inviolate art object. This “column” is a tall cylinder of cement that seems to have sloughed off an outer skin, with thick folds of pink plaster gathering near its base. This is how it appears if the room is particularly crowded or humid, as at an opening or well-­attended gallery exhibition. However, in a dry museum

252

Postwar Italian Art History Today

environment, or when encountered alone, the piece has a different appearance: the plaster is a bright bluish-­green, having changed hue in response to different atmospheric conditions. Here Zorio mixed his plaster with cobalt-­chloride, a hygroscopic compound the relative instability of which is underscored by its contrast with the inert, fireproof asbestos cement pipe it envelops. These material choices explicitly stage a deferral of the work’s potential. This work has to be lived with, viewed multiple times, in various conditions to be experienced in its plural forms. Such temporal delay can be read not only as a result of Zorio’s material choices, but also as his pointed rejoinder to the modernist prescription that sculpture be autonomous. Instead, this work’s final form is entirely contingent, indexing the conditions of its viewing. Considering this untitled column in the context of its making, the sociability of Zorio’s revelation of the dynamism of apparent solids becomes more complex. In November of 1967, while Zorio’s sculptures were on view in Sperone’s gallery, students at the University of Turin—who have been said to set the pace for the Italian student movement at large—staged a month-­long occupation of the humanities department in the Palazzo Campana.19 In this form of nonviolent protest, individuals coalesce fluidly, collectively taking the shape of the space occupied. Indeed, one of the properties that distinguish fluids (gases and liquids) from solids is relative deformability: the fact that fluids change a lot with only a small change in the forces acting upon them.20 Water, for example, adapts itself to the shape of whatever container in which we place it. In Senza titolo (Untitled, 1967) and the related work Rosa-­blu-rosa (Pink-Blue-Pink, 1967) the sculptures are vulnerable to such perceptual “deformation.” These seemingly rigid objects’ easy mutability betrays their latent fluidity as much as their orientation to the social—toward lived temporal experience. In Zorio’s own words, sculptures that implicate the viewer in vital situations “attempt to render the physical solids surrounding us dynamic.”21 Celant, too, noted such connections between the objects in Zorio’s Sperone show and the social context in his manifesto for Arte Povera, also from November 1967. He argued that Zorio’s precarious structures remind us that everything has a breaking point, asking the pointed question: “Why not try it with the world?”22 While Turin-­ based Celant may have had the immediate context of the Piazza Campana or similar demonstrations in mind, Zorio’s work is not directed at a specific political topic. Nevertheless, the malleability of such apparent solids in response to viewers has the effect of visualizing the form and potential power of human presence and assembly.

Gilberto Zorio’s Radical Fluidity

253

The ease with which a material can change form or visible state points to the inherent fluidity of the physical and social worlds, but it also indicates the potential of conceptual transformation. On a basic level, sense impressions might be said to be fluid, since they are formless until they are processed, categorized, and crystallized into language. Consider an infant, whose brain works tirelessly to recognize patterns in the river of sounds in which it is immersed so that it can learn to communicate with others. In 1968–9, Zorio made a number of works addressing the linguistic transmutation of experience by reversing the flow from language back into formless sensory perceptions. In Per purificare le parole (To Purify Words, 1968–9), a long, soft hemp tube filled with alcohol lies on the floor in a circle, its ends lifted off of the ground by a steel stand. One end of the tube is fitted with a mouthpiece, the other left open for listening. Words spoken into the mouthpiece emerge from the other end as garbled sounds, the sonic waves having deformed as they traversed the alcohol. Words are literally and metaphorically purified here; literally, in the sense that one might clean a wound with alcohol, and metaphorically, since passing through the liquid reverts them from an organized system of linguistic signs into soggy, incomprehensible sounds.23 What is returned to the viewer/participant via the ears bears little resemblance to the structure of the thought that it emitted only seconds before. This is precisely what Dewey argued distinguished sense from other forms of meaning: it is so deeply embodied in the experience that signification expresses the function of sense organs.24 Zorio’s related installation Microfoni (Microphones, 1969) further underscores the foundational role of the body in the apperception of stimuli by simultaneously amplifying sounds picked up by more than a dozen microphones hanging from the gallery’s ceiling. Zorio’s Microphones do not derive meaning from the materials themselves; rather, the technological apparatus is employed to create a tense situation in which the viewer becomes acutely aware of the act of hearing. Engagement with this work pulls the viewer into an experience of sound and speech that liquefies the order that an acculturated mind and acquired language impose on sense perceptions. Without recourse to the learned symbolic order of language, the sounds shattered by multiple and simultaneous amplification—or, in the earlier work, scrambled by the alcohol—can only derive meaning from the senses themselves. For the viewer, these encounters with purification or technological augmentation reconfigure the barrier between mind and body as fluid and dynamic. In two early works Zorio himself termed “fluid,” this concept telescopes from the demonstrable and material to the metaphoric and philosophical. In

254

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Fluidità radicale (Radical Fluidity, 1969–70), the artist focuses on the potential mutability of the viewer, in contrast to the object.25 In one version, he fashioned a tin-­zinc rod with a circular handle on one end.26 Incised into the side of this rod is the word “FLUIDITÀ.” On the outside edge of the loop, the word “RADICALE” is welded in raised letters. Using this object in a series of photographically-­documented actions—jabbing, jousting as with a foil or javelin—the artist was left with the word “RADICALE” impressed on his hand. The temporary imprint of the words on Zorio’s skin is a product of an exchange of energy between the artist’s hand and a material, but the deformation is fleeting. The warmth provided by the hand to the metal quickly dissipates, as do the words impressed on his skin.27 In a second version performed with a lit cigarette, the phrase is reserved only for those who later see the long-­exposure photograph. It would have been invisible for anyone actually there at the present time of the action. This work bears questions about the very nature of our experience in time as well as the potential role of art in ordering sense impressions: How do our sensory experiences of the physical world become intelligible? Where do they become visible? Where do the semiotics of an image diverge from that of written language? The late writings of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty provide a means by which to consider these elements of Zorio’s practice as much more than a magic show performed by an alchemist. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty considers the role of the artist in society, arguing that the artist transforms the temporal, phenomenal world into an image that is yet neither fixed nor immanent. He describes a confluence between the way artists synthesize multi-­sensory experience into the visible and the way the brain creates an image of the world through which the body is able to move. For Merleau-Ponty, art’s eternal appeal is that it communicates some sense of the perceptual contradictions inherent in human experience of the physical world.28 In Gilberto Zorio’s work, time is the invisible factor determining such oppositions and contrasts—invisible/visible, heavy/light, reactive/inert, or solid/gaseous. Though humans devise ways to mark it, the experience of time is continuous and fluid. The fluidity of time is further manifest in Zorio’s project though his use of five-­pointed stars, which bridge from the phenomenological and demonstrable event to a cosmic sense of time.29 From the first of his works to use stars, Autoritratto (Self-­portrait, 1972), to the star-­shaped towers he continues to make today, many scholars have interpreted these stars as alchemical symbols.

Gilberto Zorio’s Radical Fluidity

255

In a conspicuous example, the aforementioned curator Wolbert directly quotes a number of pentagram-­related passages from Goethe’s Faust in an argument for the way he believes Zorio uses stars as a means to “equip [his art] with secretive imputations.”30 On the contrary, I argue that Zorio’s recurrent use of the star is precisely because it is so ubiquitous that it exceeds narrow iconographic definition. The star is a fluid symbol par excellence, easily recognizable, its various forms appearing in a diverse range of cultures, and applied to a diverse set of meanings: from the US flag to the Communist Party insignia, from Islamic architecture to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and from the peaceful star of Bethlehem to the terrifying emblem of the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). Zorio’s five-­pointed star, with all of its layers of meaning, was foremost a vehicle through which he could explore his interest in the visualization of transfers of energy. By refusing to consider Zorio’s stars as occult pentagrams, one can read them as notations of energy and markers of time simultaneously congruent with and beyond human experience. Zorio’s second work using the symbol was the Stella

Figure 13.3  Gilberto Zorio, Stella bruciata (Burned Star), 1977. Star cut by the artist into a brick wall with an oxy-­hydrogen flame. Dimensions variable. © Gilberto Zorio, courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Philippe Degobert, Courtesy Galerie Albert Baronian.

256

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Incandescente (Incandescent Star, 1972): an electrified wire construction that glows red in a darkened gallery. Made of little else but conductive wire, this confirms an orientation toward fluidity and energy. In works like Stella Bruciata (Burned Star, 1977), Zorio further reduced the material aspect of the star, using ignited gases to burn a star in a brick wall. As oxygen and hydrogen form water vapor they release energy, and the parts of the wall touched by this reaction transform instantly from a solid mass into a vaporous absence. This is radical fluidity, indeed. Each of Zorio’s five pointed stars is also a diagram. The gesture involved in scribing that sign redoubles the energy of its vectors. More importantly, the drawn traces of the action solidify a concept that, like the invisible gases of Zorio’s welding torch, partially eludes perception. It is a graphic notation of the presence of energy in the universe; energy that humans experience in the form of light anywhere from a few minutes to thousands of years after it left its source. In this sense, Zorio’s glowing, burning, incandescent stars present the viewer with a palpable demonstration of that extreme attenuation of visual experience. Reading the stars this way further underscores Zorio’s commitment to making works that prompt viewers to interrogate the nature of being. Through the above examples it becomes clear that what one misses when overlaying works such as these with an alchemical analogy is the ability to read Zorio’s demonstrations of fluidity as a governing principle of lived experience, of the artwork as a philosophical and material exploration of the all-­too-often invisible workings of the phenomenal world, and of the dynamic structures of the natural world as a model for the radical malleability of the socio-­political landscape. Freed from the lashings of iconographic interpretation, Zorio’s formal and material choices come into focus as a means to achieve specific visible reactions. Far from reinstating the authority of their creator, his works indicate vulnerability when faced with the continuous flow of energy from one object or one state to another. Instead, the artist shows us the phenomenal world as it impresses itself on him by devising ways for us to participate in the work and to thereby more consciously reflect upon the ways our own senses are pressed upon by the world. His works do resist crystallization into objects for the market, and they cannot be easily reduced to a book cover or slogan without becoming fundamentally different. They are designed to be open, unfinished, and fluid. These works await a participant who will enter into their stream, activating the ever-­present potential for energy exchange.

Gilberto Zorio’s Radical Fluidity

257

Notes 1 The works mentioned here are Tenda (Tent) (1967), Senza titolo (Untitled) (1967), and Rosa-­blue-rosa (Pink-Blue-Pink) (1967). 2 Here Trini uses the term “spectacle” to refer to the way the work makes energy visible, the way it performs the energy exchange. Certainly, the concept of “spectacle” may have been in the air given Guy Debord’s coincident publication of Society of the Spectacle, a Marxist text in which Debord theorizes “the spectacle” as the replacement of direct experience with images produced by the culture industry. However, as Zorio’s work specifically aims to unveil that which is invisible, to make such forces palpable through a visual sign, Trini’s use of “spectacle” should be considered here more literally, as something made manifest and visible, or even as a “performance” in the sense that it is often used in Italian. The full quote is as follows: “Zorio sembra in termini di massa come energia continua. [. . .] L’azione con cui Zorio s’impossessa delle cose del mondo è anche quella che trasforma il loro stato fisico in un altro. La sua energia resta visibilmente conservata nel lavoro—uno spettacolo di energia potenziale.” (Translation mine.) Tommaso Trini, Zorio (exhibition brochure) (Turin: Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, 1967) (unpaginated), 7. NB. There is a partial translation by Gilda Williams of this text in Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 1999), 276. 3 Germano Celant, Art Povera (New York: Praeger, 1969), 225. 4 For a thorough discussion of the labeling, marketing, and historicization of “Arte Povera,” as separate from the ideas of “arte povera” initiated by Celant in the 1960s, see Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-Worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Art History, Vol. 36, No. 2 (April 2013): 418–41. 5 The most notable examples of this include Rosalind Krauss’s argument that Wittgenstein’s foregrounding of meaning through experience was foundational for early minimalist artists of the 1960s in “Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post-60s Sculpture,” Artforum (November 1973). 6 Paraphrasing a passage from Art as Experience, where Dewey parses out the verbal variables of sense perception, Celant writes: “Among living things [the artist] discovers himself, his body, his memory, his gestures—all that which directly lives and thus begins again to carry out the sense of life and of nature, a sense that implies, according to Dewey, numerous subjects: the sensory, sensational, sensitive, impressionable and sensuous,” Germano Celant, Art Povera (New York: Praeger, 1969), 225. 7 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1980 [1934]), 15. 8 While the major approaches and examples of “alchemy” in the literature on Zorio are covered in the following paragraphs, it bears mention that the term is also commonly used in the popular press. See note 13.

258

Postwar Italian Art History Today

9 Antje von Graevenitz, “Alchemical Promises in Arte povera,” in Che Fare? Arte povera—The Historic Years, eds. Friedeman Malsch, Christiane Meyer-Stoll, and Valentina Pero, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2010), 32. 10 In another example, in a 2005 exhibition catalogue for Zorio, Ada Masoero argues that of all of the Arte povera artists, “[. . .] there is no doubt that [Zorio] was the most successful interpreter of the alchemical side [. . .].” Her account draws connections between lead as an alchemical material as well as his employment of terracotta and alchemical vessels. Masoero describes the alchemical in its dualism, and further suggests that Zorio’s use of metals connects the artist to foundational mythologies where the blacksmith figure is the source of life. Ada Masoero, “Zorio: Roots,” in Gilberto Zorio (exh. cat.), ed. Klaus Wolbert, trans. Kercher, et al. (Darmstadt: Institut Mathildenhöhe and Turin: Hopefulmonster, 2005), 170–3. This approach is also latent in discussions of Zorio’s work that highlight specific terminology that can be read to refer to alchemy. See, for example: Robert Lumley, “Spaces of Arte povera,” in Zero to Infinity: Arte povera 1962–1972, ed. Richard Flood and Frances Morris (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center and London: Tate Modern, 2001), 54. 11 “Oggi si scrive (e non cito gli autori) sull’Arte povera in quanto uso di materiali bruti, rozzi, e si sbagliato tutto. Di quest’uso dei materiali si è fatto un nuovo materialismo. I materiali sono quelli che sono e sono stati usati nella giusta dimensione. Per esempio, io uso l’eternit perché è un materiale che regge al calore, ottuso per eccellenza, e lo metto in contrapposizione al cloruro di cobalto, materiale ipersensibile per eccellenza.” Gilberto Zorio, interview by Mirella Bandini, [1972] in 1972: Arte povera a Torino, ed. Mirella Bandini (Turin: Allemandi, 2002), 101. (Translation mine.) 12 Klaus Wolbert, “At the Sign of the Pentagram,” in Gilberto Zorio, 165. 13 See Achille Bonito Oliva, “La Trans-Avantguardia Italiana.” Flash Art International, No. 92–93 (October–November 1979): 17–20. Printed in English as “The Italian Trans-Avantgarde,” trans. Michael Moore, Flash Art International, No. 92–93 (October–November 1979). 14 For a few examples from popular criticism, see the following: Roberta Smith, “Review/Art; Arte Povera Installations: Engineering and Alchemy, The New York Times (May 20, 1988); Victoria Donahoe, “Gilberto Zorio, The Alchemist of Energy,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (October 29, 1988); Michael Kimmelman, “The Alchemy of Gilberto Zorio,” The New York Times (June 7,1991); and Rachel Spence, “Unpredictable Alchemy,” The Financial Times (August 2, 2013). 15 Zorio was included in the Venice Biennale that year in the “Wunderkammer” section of the central exhibition, and mounted works in a solo room. He stated that he declined an invitation to participate in the alchemy section because it was too confusing. Zorio, interview with the author, via email, August 12, 2014.

Gilberto Zorio’s Radical Fluidity

259

16 Calvesi himself may be building upon the midcentury writings of the Milanese dealer Arturo Schwartz, who investigated the alchemical in the work of Marcel Duchamp. 17 One of the promising aspects of this approach to Arte povera in general is its potential connection to Dewey, who argues in the 1930s that the separation between art and life was rooted in the rise of capitalism (and nationalism). See Dewey, Art as Experience, 8–9. Reading artistic dematerialization as anti-­capitalist is certainly not a new approach, but thinking about alchemy in art as a potential reversal of the separation between art and life offers a nuanced reading of the tactic that Celant identifies in his early Arte povera texts as “alchemical.” 18 Pinkus cautions against reading glass vessels in Zorio’s work as alembics, but refrains from providing a convincing analysis otherwise. She argues that, in general, the dematerialized art of the 1960s is a means to resist the market. Karen Pinkus, Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 163. 19 Robert Lumley, States of Emergency (New York: Verso, 1990), 6. For more on the student movement in Turin, see also Carole Fink, Phillip Gasset, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 20 G.K. Batchelor, An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1967]), 1. 21 Zorio, interview with author, Matrix/Berkeley, 313. 22 Germano Celant, “Arte povera: Notes for a guerrilla war,” trans. Paul Blanchard, in Celant, ed., Arte povera = art povera (Milan: Electa, 1985 [1967]), 37. Originally published as “Arte povera: appunti per una guerriglia,” Flash Art no. 5 (novembre– dicembre 1967). 23 Certainly, the alcohol used in this work and the various vessels Zorio employs in later versions could be considered alchemical ingredients if one engages in an iconographic scavenger hunt, but this materialist interpretation is exactly that which I seek to counter here, and which Zorio himself argues against in the previously cited interview with Mirella Bandini. See note 11. 24 Dewey, Art as Experience, 22. 25 Zorio’s use of the term “radical fluidity” may be related to the early twentieth century philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose concepts of duration, fluidity, and dynamism, or “universal flux,” were important to the Italian Futurists and later to the Fluxus artists. Notably, his early phenomenological philosophy was considered an anti-­intellectual stance because it centered on intuition and experience. See Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 21–2, 29. Bergson’s philosophy was, in part, based on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ term “radical fluidity.” See Ivy G. Campbell, [review of] “Edouard Le Roy,

260

Postwar Italian Art History Today

The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson,” The American Journal of Psychology 24, No. 3 (July 1913): 445–55. 26 Curator Constance Lewallen writes that the origin of this object was related to a trip Zorio took to Japan in 1969, where “he was inspired by Japanese archers who, through intense interior training, can hit a target from hundreds of yards away.” As such, this form is related to the javelins that Zorio also began to use after this trip to Japan. See Constance Lewallen, Gilberto Zorio, Matrix/Berkeley 152 (exhibition brochure) (Berkeley, CA: University Museum/Pacific Film Archive, 1992). 27 This work was originally conceived as a contribution to a performance at Sperone by Pistoletto’s Zoo, titled Lo Zoo scopre l’uomo nero, in which the elder artist invited others to take part and submit works to “his” show. The show followed the egalitarian nature of the Zoo and of earlier exhibition models like Amalfi, where artists expanded their practices to include actions. See Anna Minola et al., Gian Enzo Sperone: Torino, Roma, New York, Vol. I (Turin: Hopefulmonster, 2000), 36. The series of photographs now lives in the collection of Michelangelo Pistoletto. 28 Merleau-Ponty writes: “the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery (Evanston: Northwestern, 1964), 187. 29 In an interview with the author, the artist noted that his first experiments with the star were in 1970–1, but came into finished works in 1972 with the mask and incandescent star. Zorio, interview via email exchange with the author, October 31–November 17, 2008. 30 Wolbert himself complicates this reading by connecting the star to the Cold War context—it symbolizes both Soviet and US armed forces—however, the overwhelming emphasis on the secretive and occult overshadows these more apt socio-­political connotations. Wolbert, “Sign of the Pentagram,” 166.

14

Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII: Luciano Fabro’s Early Works Giorgio Zanchetti

Being requested by the editors to provide, at the very beginning of this essay, a concise statement of intents, as plain as possible, I should say that the following text doesn’t focus on the position of Luciano Fabro with respect to Arte Povera, but on its full independence, as an author, from the blurred, grey context of any overambitious categorical distinction applied to the artists of his generation. Since Arte Povera was a short-­term situation, much more than an artistic tendency or an active group, it seems to be an almost unserviceable category to fully understand the complexity of his works. Luciano Fabro’s cultural references and choices, in the early 1960s, were addressed to build up a personal genealogy in a permanent dialectic confrontation with the philosophical (from Francis Bacon to Galileo Galilei and René Descartes) and artistic tradition of the past (in which new Italian sculpture of the twentieth century, from Medardo Rosso to Umberto Boccioni, Arturo Martini, Fausto Melotti, and Lucio Fontana, had a great part). As I will suggest in the following pages, Fabro’s historical reference to the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon have been complemented by the young artist’s interests in twentieth century phenomenological theory, through the writings of Italian philosopher Antonio Banfi, who was professor in Milan University until the late 1950s. Reconsidering the role of Luciano Fabro in and beyond the wide and almost undefined context of Arte Povera, it seems essential to understand how much his works maintain a peculiar position between the historical art tradition (from Renaissance to Avant-­garde) and the radical innovation of means and methods typical of the experiences in environment and relational art from the 1960s.1 In September 1967, a few months before the opening of his personal exhibition entitled Tautologie at Galleria Notizie in Turin, Fabro wrote:

262

Postwar Italian Art History Today

I notice that every process finally ends in the same idleness, related to the habit of thematic exhibitions. The Arte Povera/Im Spazio show at Galleria Bertesca confirms this trend. You already feel that the pace of the race is slowing down; there is something too obvious, popularizing, a sense of boredom, also, in my opinion, a great staleness and coarseness.

Even before its establishment in Italy and abroad and its thorough theoretical and critical assessment, the Arte Povera brand started to show troublesome issues, at least for an artist fully conscious of his artistic and cultural genealogy and of his own means. The strong need for “a kind of immunization cure” from vagueness and dissatisfaction with group thematic shows is one of the main reasons why Fabro started his Tautologie series. In it the artist has given tautological significance to very ambiguous operations that solicit an infinity of inferences. But at the same time, these inferences don’t determine a perceptual development, quite the contrary, they always end up by manifesting a state of perception.2

The new attitude shown in these works—Pavimento (Floor), Avanti, dietro, destra, sinistra, (Cielo) (Front, Back, Right, Left, [Sky]), Mappamondo geodetico (Geodetic Globe), Oggetto con dispositivo per ridurne il peso (Object with a Device to Reduce its Weight), Foro ø mm 6 (6 mm ø Perforation), and Contatto (Contact), all from 1967 and exhibited together for the first time at Galleria Notizie in February and March 1968—could be seen as a clever, unexpected move “outside of the range of any adjectivized noun.” As Fabro himself explained: There is something that permits us to move with comfort outside of a voluntary, psychic, nominalistic, formal, associative, deductive, inventional, suppositional, reconstructive, sentimental, pragmatic, combinatory, particularistic, historicistic, or correlational dialectic.3

Far from aligning himself with the strict ephemeral aesthetics of process art, Fabro tries again to put his works at the very center of the relational dynamic with the observer: And all of this in order to be able to work with what is full and well-­resolved in its attributes—with precisely the virtuoso hope of leaving attributes behind, assuming for myself an attitude of attentive waiting, giving perimeters to one’s own experiences, looking out into the void, concentrating all of my humanity in the hope that the void may contain an inhabitable point. The elimination of experimentation with a definitive certainty that is neither faith nor illumination,

Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII

263

that resolves the nodes of intellect and consciousness, that is consciousness and not attitude, that is a mode, a reference point, a psychic tranquillizer. Something that goes beyond exhaustion but that maintains its consciousness, that goes beyond the limits of intuition, but that retains its freedom, that goes beyond method but that conserves its obsession.4

As we can see, an early and utterly conscious exigency of “reassessing” boundaries and going beyond indwelling limits of the Arte Povera context was fully developed in Fabro’s thought as far back as late 1967. To better understand this crucial passage, it seems important to reappraise continuity and internal coherence in Fabro’s work starting from the early 1960s. Indeed, if it is true that in 1966 and 1967 works like In cubo (In cube, which in Italian also stands for Incubus, nightmare) and the Tautologie series mark a distinct moment of evolution towards relational environment, at first, and towards proto-­conceptual practices, at second instance, it is also evident that these evolutions may not be fully understood without considering his glass and mirror works and steel rod sculptures from 1963 to 1965. That is why I intend to investigate some formal and theoretical cues of Fabro’s later position in his early works and writings, from 1963 to 1965, regarded as prodromes of his well known Arte Povera masterpieces. This essay will focus, as a study case, on the text La mia certezza: il mio senso per la mia azione. . . (My certainty: my sense for my action . . ., 1963)5 and on the extreme radicalness, in terms of visual perception of the surrounding space, of Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965): a landmark for further developments in Fabro’s researches, until In cubo’s (1966) and Tautologie’s (1967–8) environmental outcomes. In 1978, Luciano Fabro republished in his book Attaccapanni (Clothes Hanger), his first “manifesto” My certainty: my sense for my action . . . commonly known as Pseudo-Bacon, with reference to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum.6 In the 1978 book, the artist put a short note at the beginning of that theoretical statement, in order to trace its almost “mythical” origin through an exemplary anecdote. The first words of this introductory note: “Summer Solstice A.D. 1963. I worked the shift from one to nine p.m., at the circulating library of Villa Litta in Affori”7 serve as the title to the first chapter of the first book8 of Attaccapanni, which contains, beside Pseudo-Bacon, the text Atti del Comune di Milano (From the Records of Milan Municipality, March 1964) and photographs of Fabro’s early works with explanatory captions written by the artist himself. The works reproduced are Buco (Hole, 1963); Impronta (Imprint, 1964); Tondo e rettangolo (Circle and Rectangle, 1964); Tubo da mettere tra i fiori (Tube to Place Among the

264

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 14.1  Luciano Fabro, Attaccapanni (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 18–19. Courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan.

Flowers, 1963); Ruota (Wheel, 1964); Struttura ortogonale tirata ai quattro vertici (Orthogonal Structure Being Pulled at Its Four Vertices, 1964); Mezzo specchiato mezzo trasparente (Half Mirror–Half Transparent, 1965); and All Transparent. This brief introduction synthetically offers the astronomical, historical and biographical coordinates of these “origins” in Fabro’s works: Summer Solstice A.D. MCMLXIII. I worked the shift from one to nine p.m., at the circulating library of Villa Litta in Affori. That day, it was clear that anything I did, my aim was somewhere else. It started from the morning: I had just prepared a canvas, when I stumbled on it, breaking the canvas and the stretcher.9

This canvas should have been the last traditional painting from the first period of Fabro’s work; no painting from this period has been preserved or exhibited in later years, and the accident may be seen as an unintentional starting point for a change of paradigm, as the narration of the subsequent revelation of the book by Bacon will show:

Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII

265

Nobody came to the library that afternoon; it was a terribly sultry day and the sky was yellowish. The other librarians, Mila and Sandro, were at my sides; Giacinto, the clerk, was sitting near to the door at the end of the room. Suddenly, the three of them stared at me, making me feel uneasy; till they finally looked away, all together, as if they received a message through an invisible wire, gazing at the shelves behind me. I turned my back and I saw a book displaced in a very strange position; it seemed impossible not to have noticed it before: it was between the other books, but it was lifted at mid-­height and also leaning out from the row. I automatically went to put it back in place, but doing so—in the same way you are able to understand the trajectory of a moving object simply looking at a snapshot—I understood that the book was not there to be put back in place, but to be taken. I opened it: My certainty: my sense for my action . . . [etc.] It was Francis Bacon.10

The summer solstice of 1963 fell on Saturday 22 June, at 4.06 am. The day before there was a new moon and Giovanni Battista Montini became Pope Paul VI. Fabro’s account of the solstice day at the Affori Public Library is, no doubt, an exemplary anecdote, reconstructed or conceived ex post in its final structure. Nevertheless, there is no reason for considering its circumstances completely fictitious, since, in the early 1960s the artist was bringing home the bacon—if you’ll forgive the pun—working as a librarian (and later as clerk in the Registry Office) for the Municipality of Milan. The second theoretical statement I mentioned before—From the Records of Milan Municipality—shows, at its very beginning, the protocol numbers of the dossier on which Fabro was working, as a public clerk, on March 1964, when this second “manifesto” was written. Silvia Fabro has recently published and exhibited two little works on paper from 1962 which, together with an acrylic on paper pasted on canvas from the previous year, are a sort of incunabula in Fabro’s production.11 It is not easy to see these earliest works, due to the particularly strict selection Fabro did of his own work of the very first period, before the production of the mirror and steel sculptures. The two works from 1962 were composed in collage and typewriting on the bibliographic cards of the Milan’s Public Libraries; on the first one of them you can clearly see the heading “Biblioteche Pubbliche Rionali” with Milan’s Municipality Cross and the dotted lines to complete the form. The 1963 “manifesto,” My certainty: my sense for my action. . . was not published or circulated until 1969, when it appeared for the first time in

266

Postwar Italian Art History Today

the renowned collective book (not actually an exhibition catalog) Arte Povera edited by Germano Celant, under the title Parole e pensieri di Francesco Bacone (Word[s] and thought[s] by Francis Bacon)12 and side by side with a photograph of the upside-­down Italia exhibited in October 1968 at the show Arte povera + Azioni povere in Amalfi.13 Six years had passed from the composition of the text, but also on this occasion its reference to Bacon appears to be unconventional within the cultural frameworks of artistic new vanguard in Italy. The cultural refinement exhibited by Fabro quoting the Elizabethan philosopher in Arte Povera (which is much more a chronicler account than a new critical or theoretical proposal) may seem nearly supercilious, and surely is “not-­aligned” and not obvious; it is only paralleled by the one demonstrated by Giulio Paolini, who made reference to Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Joseph Archer Crowe.14 Definitely, Fabro never disclaimed his wide and deep literary and philosophic interests. As he repeatedly remarked, he was not trained as an artist in the Academy, but had a high school education in classical humanities, from where his frequent references to Bacon, Galileo Galilei, and René Descartes may have originated.15 These three stand as basic pillars of his cultural heritage in the building of his own personal thought, always up-­to-date and always open to new instances of contemporary philosophy. That is why I tried to understand which translation of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum Fabro could have read before June 1963 and—not to implement the chronicle (or the myth), but to understand which could have been in circulation of Bacon’s writings in Italy in the early 1960s—which editions of that text he could have found in the compound and heterogeneous collections of a suburban public library in Milan. The task was not easy to carry out, because of the great transiency of this kind of collection. Of the few editions of Bacon’s writings that Fabro might have known,16 it seems particularly interesting to me that he could have used Milanese philosopher Antonio Banfi’s translation of Novum Organum, published in 1943.17 The only copy of this book I have been able to find in the collection of Milan’s local libraries entered it only after 1963; nevertheless the great renown of the curator and his wide influence even on the aesthetic and artistic milieu of the 1950s and 1960s in Milan suggest that it could have been the edition of Bacon that Fabro actually “found” and read. Limiting myself to a single example, it could be useful to read few lines from Banfi’s introduction to the book:

Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII

267

Bacon’s idea of knowledge [. . .] is strictly bound to the consciousness of its own historicity. [. . .] A new knowledge may only spring from an entirely different conception of reality and life. The being is not an essential order, but a concrete existential reality in a state of perpetual becoming, by which human life is overwhelmed [. . .]. So, the theoretical essence of knowledge is for Bacon its adherence to the real, its concrete testability, its capability to reproduce in the mind the actual image of the universe.18

And to see in comparison, both for lexicon and for the ideas reflected, what Fabro says in his Pseudo-Bacone text: To discover the order of things, to determine, instead of the essences, the useful secondary properties, the modes of action, with the aim of an inert contemplation, to induce the cause from the effects that make themselves felt. To sharpen and systematize with this aim the observation and reflexion. To acquire the instruments of the spirit and to extend by their means the power of the hand into new instruments.19

And what the Elizabethan philosopher himself wrote in the original foreword to his Instauratio Magna (the full work of which Novum Organum should have been the second part): And in this manner we believe that we have established for ever a true and legitimate marriage between the empiric and rational faculties, whose sullen and inauspicious divorce and separation has thrown all things into confusion in the family of mankind.20

What the artist wants to demonstrate making use of this unexpected reference to Bacon’s Novum Organum is exactly that his new idea of art maintains strict connection with “the consciousness of its own historicity”—as Banfi wrote introducing “Bacon’s idea of knowledge”—but, at the same time, “may only spring from an entirely different conception of reality and life,” conceived as “a state of perpetual becoming, by which human life is overwhelmed.”21 These links between the historical consciousness of his own work and the inclination to experiment with new forms of perception in the field of visual arts, between conceptual attitude and aesthetic awareness devoid of any predetermined program, identify Fabro’s most peculiar version of the “legitimate marriage between the empiric and rational faculties, whose sullen and inauspicious divorce and separation has thrown all things into confusion in the family of mankind” preconized by Bacon.22 Now, the new aim of the twentieth century

268

Postwar Italian Art History Today

artist—distancing himself from the philosophical building of the Elizabethan scholar—is actually that “of an inert contemplation” in order “to sharpen and systematize [. . .] the observation and reflexion” and, mostly, to extend by the means of “the instruments of the spirit [. . .] the power of the hand into new instruments.”23 Which is the exact literary meaning of Novum Organum. The way in which Fabro constructed his 1978 book, Clothes Hanger, through allusions and dissemination of hints and remarks, is as complex and unobvious as his reference to Bacon in his first 1963 “manifesto.” Starting from some small clues that Luciano Fabro himself gave me in his last years, talking as he loved to do about his own work in terms of art history or “tradition,” I envisaged the possibility of a more punctual reviewing of the chronological sorting proposed by Fabro in Clothes Hanger for his works from 1962/63 to the end of 1965 (approximately from the Hole or from Pipe to Put Among Flowers until the first conception of In cubo). The chronology he provided in his book of 1978 should not be taken for granted and established. Why has he gathered in this first chapter (of the first book) precisely these eight works: Buco (Hole, 1963); Impronta (Imprint, 1964); Tondo e rettangolo (Circle and Rectangle, 1964); Tubo da mettere tra i fiori (Tube to Place Among the Flowers, 1963); Ruota (Wheel, 1964); Struttura ortogonale tirata ai quattro vertici (Orthogonal Structure Being Pulled at Its Four Vertices, 1964); Mezzo specchiato mezzo trasparente (Half Mirror–Half Transparent, 1965) and Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965)? While, with an evident overlapping of dates, he set apart in the subsequent chapter, titled 1965. Lo spazio si diverte tra la retta e la curva (Space Having Fun Between the Straight and the Curve Line), his Asta (Pole, 1964–5), Squadra (Square, 1964–5),24 and Croce (Cross, 1965)? The set of works included in the first chapter of Clothes Hanger quite nearly matched those displayed in Fabro’s first one man exhibition (held from 12 to 26 May 1965 at Galleria Vismara, Milan): only, in the choice for the book Raccordo anulare (Ring Connection, 1963–4) was missing and Pipe to Put Among Flowers and the two last glass works (Half Mirror–Half Transparent and All Transparent) had been grouped with these earlier works, probably to keep them apart from the steel sculptures executed in the same year, 1965. Giovanni Antonio Nogaro, from Turin, documented the works exhibited at Vismara’s in a short movie filmed inside the gallery and in a photo shoot taken in Fabro’s studio a few days before the opening. One of his photos appeared in the leaflet printed for the exhibition; another one appeared at the beginning of Clothes Hanger.25 The Vismara exhibition—together with Fabro’s other solo

Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII

269

shows from the 1960s—has recently been studied by Oscar Cattaneo; that is why I thought better to investigate further Fabro’s participation in a less-­known collective exhibition from 1966. Even before the two last glass works from 1965 (Half Mirror–Half Transparent and All Transparent) both featured prominently in the group exhibition Arte Povera + Azioni povere at the Arsenali dell’Antica Repubblica in Amalfi (October 1968)26 and—only the first one—in Fabro’s solo shows at Galleria Notizie in Turin (Avanti, dietro, destra, sinistra, tautologie (Front, Back, Right, Left, Tautologies), from February 29 to March 20, 1968) and at Galleria La Salita in Rome (Quid nihil nisi minus, lenzuola/Quid . . ., Sheets, March 1969), they were both shown for the very first time in the group show Nuove ricerche visive in Italia (New Visual Researches in Italy), held in June 1966 at Galleria Milano in Milan.27 Fabro’s participation in this exhibition was actively supported by Lucio Fontana who, even though it is rarely reported in his biographies, was the promoter of the show, together with the young artist and architect Nanda Vigo, and supported it providing an etching included in the catalog.28 The show, which opened on June 6 in via della Spiga, the former site of Galleria Milano, was quite extensive (probably on the model of the international exhibition of Op and Kinetic Art), including forty-­eight artists with a total of more than eighty works. Fabro’s Tondo e rettangolo (Circle and Rectangle, 1964), the work that Fontana purchased in 1965 at the Galleria Vismara exhibition, is the first illustration in the catalog, which also includes a rather undetailed text by Giorgio Kaisserlian; while the list of participants published at the end of the booklet simply mentions Fabro, without giving any further information about his works on the show. No photograph of the setting of the show has been found, but looking for some more hints in the Galleria Milano’s archive I’ve found two typewritten lists of the artists invited by Nanda Vigo to the show. Since the name of Fabro is not listed, it was most likely added at the last minute following a personal suggestion by Fontana29: this could be the reason for publishing the Circle and Rectangle photo on the catalogue, even if Fabro was actually going to show Half Mirror– Half Transparent and All Transparent. This last work, All Transparent, really is the most radical outcome of Fabro’s questioning the representational plane (the glass pane) and contemplating the actual presence of the public (reflected in the mirror or visible in the background through the transparent glass), before the artist moves forward devising In cubo and the Tautologies.

270

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 14.2  Luciano Fabro, Tondo e rettangolo (Circle and Rectangle, 1964). Nuove ricerche visive in Italia (Milan: Galleria Milano, 1966). Courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan.

Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII

271

In the solo show Fabro held in January 1967 at Galleria Notizie in Turin, among new works such as In cubo, Indumenti (Clothes, and Square) (exhibited for the first time), the artist’s earlier period is represented only by the Wheel and All Transparent. In her presentation for the show—the first and fundamental text for understanding the development of Fabro’s Spatialist work from mirror panes to metal rod structures and to environmental space and installation, like In cubo—Carla Lonzi wrote: In 1963–64 Fabro develops his first works with mirrors and glass panes. We immediately realize these are not paintings any more, but mere opportunities to experience: there is no assortment of figures, nor any organization of forms: they simply reflect things or let them pass through.30

The director of the Galleria Notizie, Luciano Pistoi, in recalling his first visit to Fabro’s studio, accompanied by Carla Lonzi, witnessed the role of Fontana as mediator and a supporter in the spread of Fabro’s early work and remarked the most striking character of a work of art like All Transparent: when, together with Carla Lonzi, I went to Milan to see the first works by Fabro, I’d already heard about him from Fontana, who had bought one of those works from Galleria Vismara. Fabro was tremendously caustic in his polemics [. . .] You were wondering where he came from! You saw this crystal pane 2.60 meters wide and, beyond it, his miserable working place and his little daughter sitting on her chamber pot [. . .] He was mainly interested in how people behaved in front of this crystal work: the eyes immediately ran to the edges of the pane, looking for an image. From where and whom did Fabro come? From nowhere and nobody.31

But Fabro himself, in the Vademecum to his works published for his solo show at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (from November 21, 1981 to January 4, 1982), gives us the most exact perspective to appreciate the fundamental role of All Transparent in his progression to the relational environment (ambient), which will be the center of his later work. In his explanation, the artist starts from a plain report of the process he performed: The History: I had chosen a glass pane to build on it something that, in terms of space, could match both linear and prismatic perspective. [. . .] This glass was the stage for many tries and retries. I even built a device to study some phenomena with more ease. For two years I studied everything my obduracy could compel me to try and study and finally I realized that I always stopped in the same place to look at glass: my eyes focused on the surface of the glass, blurring and effacing

272

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 14.3  Luciano Fabro, Tutto trasparente (All Transparent, 1965). Courtesy Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan.

the objects and the space which were visible behind it, thanks to its transparency; then my eyes started running along the edges of the pane, like along a racetrack. [. . .] When I tried to change the form and measures of the glass, it didn’t happen any more.32

After this basic process of observation, Fabro is able to infer not only “that the pane’s proportions matched approximately the visual field of an average man” but also “that visual field was determined as well as by its linear measures (i.e. its dimension and its distance) by its material consistency.” Materials—even if they are similar in some respects, like glass and Plexiglas—are not interchangeable in art operations, since their inner “quality” remains different: The same pane, made of Plexiglas, had no effect. This consistency made me foresee what has been alternatively called the “quality” of the material: the power

Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII

273

that a material has, in particular conditions, to wipe out all other circumstances, drawing inside, as someone says, our sight. Now, this is the kind of sight which I once called myopic.33

It seems self-­evident that in 1965, with All Transparent, Fabro is already trying to place himself in a new and anomalous position with respect to the neo-­concretist and optical tendencies of those years. He is working on a completely autonomous conceptual research—as distant from the geometrical abstraction of the 1950s as it is from the vogue for raw materials and situations in the late 1960s—in which references to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum and echoes from Banfi’s phenomenological theory may have the same significance of any formal choice. Leaving out of focus the uninfluential elements in the background of All Transparent, Fabro’s “myopic” sight—which “is rather peculiar of artworks, completely different from the one appropriate to a landscape or a shoe”—is free to concentrate upon the real presence of the work. Where the empty transparent surface of the glass pane, directly placing the observer and his reactions in the center of the surrounding space, makes clear the essential conceptual character of any self-­conscious art proposal: It is like if we are looking to the act of thinking itself. And one more thing: people are attracted and even placed as an instinct in this type of field both physical and perceptive, and all of this really bodes well for all the artworks already made as well as for the equitable possibility to make more of them, in the future.34

Notes 1 Starting from the early experiments represented by the Ambienti spaziali by Lucio Fontana, through actions and performances by artists like Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein, Happenings, Fluxus events, and early proto-­conceptual statements and installation works. 2 Luciano Fabro, Settembre 1967–September 1967, in Luciano Fabro, “[selection of short texts].” Data 1, No. 1 (September 1971): 54–9. Reprinted in Luciano Fabro, Attaccapanni (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 45–6. These two sentences, at the beginning of the text, were omitted in the first edition published in Data magazine, September 1971; they appear in the 1978 edition. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Luciano Fabro, La mia certezza: il mio senso per la mia azione. . . (1963). 1st ed., under the title Parole e pensieri di Francesco Bacone (Word[s] and thought[s] by

274

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Francis Bacon), in Germano Celant, Arte Povera (Milan: Mazzotta 1969. English ed.: Germano Celant, Art Povera. New York: Praeger, 1969), 84. 2nd ed. in Fabro, Attaccapanni, 8–9. 6 Francis Bacon, Instauratio magna, Part II (London: Joannem Billium typographum regium, 1620). 7 Affori is a neighbourhood in northern Milan; once an independent community, it has been part of the town since 1923. 8 See Fabro, Attaccapanni, 5–56. 9 Ibid., 8–9. 10 Ibid. 11 See Luciano Fabro: Disegno In-Opera, eds. Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Silvia Fabro (Milan: Silvana, 2013), 99, 216. 12 Luciano Fabro, La mia certezza. Here is the text in the English translation from 1969: “My certainty: my sense for my action. A new logic that should be particular and supply the means for the development of the human spirit in the world. To discover the order of things, to determine, instead of the essences, the useful secondary properties, the modes of action, with the aim of an inert contemplation, to induce the cause from the effects that make themselves felt. To sharpen and systematize with this aim the observation and reflexion. To acquire the instruments of the spirit and to extend by their means the power of the hand into new instruments, to extend one’s own body in all things of the world; the things as obedient members; imitating nature but aiming to transform her according to human ideas. To analyze her instead of abstracting. To substitute the inventory of chance by the adequate method of profitable reformative invention. To assume this infinite undertaking. To ‘make’ this infinity, in which man will neither lose himself nor vainly agitate. To choose this herculean path of virtuous weariness, to let go the easy, seducing, flowery path without the fruits of work, of edifying contemplation, of the outlets that at their most, are just good enough for those that love to hurl themselves into nothing” (Celant, Art Povera, 84). 13 Arte povera + Azioni povere. RA3 (3a Rassegna di Amalfi), Amalfi, Arsenali dell’Antica Repubblica, from 4 to 6 October 1968. 14 Celant, Art Povera, 145. 15 Somewhat less expected is Fabro’s constant interest in the Didactica Magna of Czech pedagogist and philosopher Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670). 16 Cf. Francis Bacon, Per il progresso della scienza. “Cogitata et visa” ed estratti dal “De augmentis scientiarum,” ed. Mario M. Rossi (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1934); Francis Bacon, La nuova logica (Novum Organum). Libro 1, ed. Fabrizio Canfora (Bari: Laterza, 1948; 2nd edn. 1957). A copy of the 2nd edn. of the last (from 1957) is still available in the central repository of the Biblioteche Rionali of Milan. 17 Francis Bacon, Novum organum, ed. Antonio Banfi (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1943). Banfi, a renowned scholar and one of the most original and influential

Summer Solstice AD MCMLXIII

275

theorists in the field of cultural phenomenology, taught Philosophy and Aesthetics in the University of Milan between 1932 and 1957. 18 Ibid., 18–21. 19 Fabro, La mia certezza. See note 12. 20 Francis Bacon, Instauratio magna. English translation: The Great Instauration. Prœmium, in The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. 4; Translations of the Philosophical Works 1, eds. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1858]), 19. 21 Banfi, introduction to Bacon, Novum Organum, 18–21. 22 Bacon, Instauratio magna, 19. 23 Fabro, La mia certezza. See note 12. Italic is mine. 24 Pole and Square were always published under the date 1965, since then. 25 Fabro, Attaccapanni, 6. 26 See above, note 14. 27 Hand note on photocopy in Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan; see also Jole De Sanna, Luciano Fabro. Biografia, 32 (Udine: Campanotto, 1996). 28 Nuove ricerche visive in Italia, with an introduction by Giorgio Kaisserlian (Milan: Galleria Milano, 1966). I’d particularly like to thank Carla Pellegrini, director and owner of the Milano Gallery, for her kindness in providing much useful information and granting access to materials from her gallery’s archive. 29 Fabro often remembered his strict human and artistic bond with Fontana; see e.g. Luciano Fabro, “A proposito degli ambienti di Lucio Fontana,” L’Uomo Nero. Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità 1, No. 1 (June 2003): 83–8. And Fontana himself, in a dialogue with Carla Lonzi registered on October 10, 1967 and later reshuffled in Lonzi’s seminal conversation book Autoritratto, mentioned his interest in Fabro. See Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto. Accardi, Alviani, Castellani, Consagra, Fabro, Fontana, Kounellis, Nigro, Paolini, Pascali, Rotella, Scarpitta, Turcato, Twombly (Bari: De Donato, 1969), 292. 30 Carla Lonzi, [presentation], in Opere di Luciano Fabro, exh. cat. (Turin: Galleria Notizie, January 20, 1967). Turin: Galleria Notizie, 1967. Reprint Carla Lonzi, Scritti sull’arte, ed. Lara Conte, Laura Iamurri and Vanessa Martini (Milano: Et al., 2012), 504–5. 31 Mirella Bandini, “Intervista a Luciano Pistoi,” in Mirella Bandini, Maria Cristina Mundici and Maria Teresa Roberto, Luciano Pistoi. “Inseguo il mio sogno,” (Turin: Hopefulmonster, 2008), 401. 32 Luciano Fabro, Vademecum. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans–van Beuningen, 1981. Reprint in Luciano Fabro. Didactica Magna Minima Moralia, ed. Silvia Fabro and Rudi Fuchs, 154 (Exhibition catalogue, Naples: Madre, October 20, 2007 to January 6, 2008. Milan: Electa, 2007). 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid.

15

Transatlantic Arte Povera Raffaele Bedarida

In November 1969, as protests against American military intervention in Vietnam rallied in America and across Europe, the Italian art critic, Germano Celant, launched Arte Povera on both sides of the Atlantic. He did so through a manifesto-­style book, which he released simultaneously in three languages and in four countries: Italy, West Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.1 Published by Praeger with the title Art Povera, the American edition introduced the movement and the author himself to the United States for the first time.2 Unlike previous exhibitions and publications using the word “Povera” in the title, the new book included American and European artists who had already been categorized by other critics as Earthworks, Conceptual Art, Anti-­ form, or Process Art. Art Povera, however, was the first survey in America to assess these various groups simultaneously, to include artists working on both sides of the Atlantic, and to present them all as one and the same phenomenon. The book, in fact, ended up functioning as a Trojan horse, a kind of an infiltration strategy of conquest mostly aimed at promoting contemporary Italian art in America. As Celant’s first enterprise outside of Italy, Art Povera initiated his long-­term, almost obsessive, reflection on Italian identity in an international context.3 Intentions of conquest and obsessions aside, Art Povera executed the most successful campaign, to date, of exporting Italian art to the United States.4 As such, it was the paradoxical culmination of a promotional effort started by the fascist regime in the 1930s. The first paradox was that while Celant claimed for Art Povera a “stateless” character and announced the obsolescence of national boundaries in art, he actually launched a “Made in Italy” brand through it. Secondly, of all the Italian art tendencies presented in America since the 1930s, the most successful one—Arte Povera—was also the most openly and vehemently anti-American, despite its desire to sell in that country.

278

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Before the publication of the book, the Italian and the European art world had already encountered the term “Arte Povera” and most of the artists and ideas associated with it. In Italy, Celant had invented, branded, and refashioned the Arte Povera label in a number of exhibitions and publications, starting in 1967.5 In Europe too, Arte Povera and Celant were already known before the publication of Art Povera. Between 1968 and 1969, major European events presented the Italian movement as an integral part of an international phenomenon, most importantly, When Attitudes Become Form curated by Harald Szeemann and Op Losse Schroeven curated by Wim Beeren.6 Celant did not organize these two events. Both catalogs featured other Italian authors, Tommaso Trini and Piero Gilardi respectively, but they discussed Celant’s Arte Povera and framed it as the Italian branch of the various Post-­minimalist tendencies developed simultaneously in Europe and the United States. Whereas Trini attributed an important role to Celant, Gilardi polemicized against him.7 In both cases, however, they cited Celant and used his label and ideas as the inevitable point of reference. Embraced or contested, when he published Art Povera in 1969, Celant was part of the European debate and Arte Povera was considered an important aspect of new vanguard tendencies.8 Things were different in America. Some individual artists included in Celant’s group had exhibited in the United States before the publication of Art Povera. Michelangelo Pistoletto had important shows between 1966 and 1969.9 And three group exhibitions, which featured some of the Arte Povera artists, predated Celant’s book: Young Italians, curated by Alan Solomon at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Jewish Museum, New York (1968);10 Nine at Castelli, curated by Robert Morris at Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York (1968);11 and Nine Young Artists: Theodoron Awards, curated by Edward Fry and Diane Waldman at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1969).12 None of these examples, however, referred to Celant’s ideas, the term Arte Povera, or even mentioned the critic’s name. More importantly the artists who in Europe were called “Arte Povera” and discussed as an internationally significant movement, were presented in the United States as peripheral examples of tendencies that were centered in America.13 The fact that many Americans were uninterested in European and, even less, Italian art was a commonplace by the second half of the 1960s. Alan Solomon, the American curator of Young Italians, addressed the problem of Americans’ biased attitude toward non-American art in his catalogue text: During the past five or ten years, in a gradual and unconscious process, we in America have become accustomed to judging world art against American

Transatlantic Arte Povera

279

standards and American conditions. [. . .] We came more and more to turn in on ourselves, becoming less and less interested in the contemporary art of other countries.14

The Italians, too, knew they were doomed to be seen as irrelevant or, at best, as derivative ramifications of more important phenomena that were centered in America.15 The late Lucio Fontana expressed a widely shared resentment when he told Carla Lonzi: [The Americans] are so chauvinistic now that they have become even worse than the French [. . .] Someone like Pascali has been seen as a Pop artist, but it is not true at all. At all! But they mistake everything for Pop Art. [. . .] I would like to organize an international symposium on painting of the last thirty or forty years in order to show to these Americans that they have anticipated nothing, as of today, of European art, against their claim that Europe is finished.16

Celant distinguished himself by avoiding both direct confrontations and querulous protests against American chauvinism. His tactic did not focus on either national (Italian) or international identity. Rather, he emphasized the rootlessness of Art Povera through his slogan of “arte apolide” (“stateless art”) and used words like “nomadic” to distance himself and the art he promoted from the term “international.”17 Over-­used in the Economic Boom period (1957–62), the latter implied interaction between nation-­states and ultimately American imperialism.18 By the late 1960s, Celant’s generation perceived the Atlanticist foreign policy that had dominated the Economic Boom period in Italy as a form of humiliating subservience to the American hegemony.19 Art Povera instead claimed to identify a phenomenon that went beyond the framework of nations or regions, even as he conceived it as a way to export Italian art into the seemingly impenetrable borders of the United States. The fact that Art Povera was presented simultaneously in various countries and multiple languages gave the publication a transnational character. A remarkable achievement for a twenty-­nine-year-­old who had never published outside of Italy, Celant’s was a deliberate and well-­orchestrated effort to go beyond the unequal Italy–United States power relationship. It was not presented as an Italian book translated into English but as a cultural product that claimed no nationality of origins. The title, however, revealed the true nature of Celant’s maneuver. All of the editions kept in their titles the Italian word “povera,” which was underscored in the cover and first page of the American edition. Although “povera” arguably had Italian and subaltern connotations (especially in America),

280

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Celant turned this negative cliché on its head: key to the counter-­cultural movement on both sides of the Atlantic, poverty had acquired positively ethical connotations in Europe as well as in the United States. Harold Rosenberg took the bait in his review for the New Yorker. He wrote, “Art povera does not associate itself with the needy, but, like earthworks in America, it asserts its alienation from the art market and its opposition to ‘the present order in art.’ In addition, poverty represents for it a kind of voluntary creative detachment from society.”20 Openly inspired by the Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Celant decided to overcome the inefficiency and “passatismo” of Italian art institutions by launching his group of artists abroad.21 Marinetti also provided Celant with a role model by infiltrating the hostile Parisian art world and calling “Futurist” a vast array of modernist artists, regardless of their nationality and their actual affiliation to the movement.22 Indeed, in this period, Celant even reflected on the possibility of changing the name of his group from Arte Povera into “Neo futurismo italiano.”23 Celant’s ultimate goal was not to expand the Arte Povera constituency to international artists. His real objective, like Marinetti, was to give international relevance to his group of Italian artists. And the best way to do that was to make them relevant in the United States. Of the thirty-­six artists included in the book, the United States had the highest number with sixteen, followed by Italy (fourteen), the Netherlands (three), Germany (two), and Britain (two). They were not separated by country, but mixed together as in the catalogs for When Attitudes Become Form and Op Losse Schroeven. To the American public, Art Povera strategically suggested that what was done in Europe (and especially in Italy) was not only important per se, but was also intertwined with and even necessary to understanding what was happening at home. Furthering his thesis of “statelessness,” Celant listed artists only by their name and current city of residence, with no indication of their nationality (or origins) besides the spelling of their names and, in some cases, the language of their captions.24 The variety of languages mixed up in the works’ titles, in the captions, in some of the artists’ statements, and even in the title of the book could not be read by most of the readers and further contributed to the nomadic character of Art Povera. Acknowledging and embracing obstacles of communication was the very opposite of the postwar idea of abstract painting as an international lingua franca. This Babel-­like aspect was made particularly evident by the art reproduced in Art Povera, which often incorporated the written word or was documented through the combined use of text and photography. And so

Transatlantic Arte Povera

281

Pistoletto’s handwritten texts in Italian stayed in Italian. Franz Walther’s texts were kept in German and the relative English translation could be found on a separate page at the beginning of the volume. Emilio Prini’s words, in Italian, remained “untranslated in accordance with the wishes of the artist.”25 Almost all of the works’ titles were kept in their original languages. For the same reason, Celant carefully avoided grouping artists by nationality. But although Celant claimed that Art Povera presented artists in random order, the book’s chaotic appearance was, arguably, another deliberate strategy used by the author to conceal his goal to promote Italian art. He declared, “the book [had] no designated order, it grew organically as I received the materials or the artists’ contacts,” but the fact the book never juxtaposed more than two artists from the same country seems a carefully crafted reaction to the traditional nation-­based format. Special attention in this sense was devoted to the Italians. Art Povera never put two Italian artists in a row—a statistically improbable fact, considering that they were almost half of the artists in the book. Celant’s emphasis on the nomadic quality of the movement dovetailed with his shrewdness in avoiding a perceivable redundancy of Italians, and prevented accusations of chauvinism. He also changed the cover illustration. The Italian edition reproduced an igloo of the Italian Mario Merz; the foreign editions illustrated American artist Walter De Maria’s Mile Long Drawing. The trick only partially succeeded. Some American reviewers wondered why an artistic sea change that had been already defined in various ways in English now needed one more name in Italian.26 Nobody, however, accused Celant of nationalism as they had done with other Italians in the 1950s.27 Rosenberg, for one, had no problem with the title: “the term ‘art povera,’ which means impoverished art, seems a convenient designation.” Nor did he see this as a form of Italian chauvinism: “The international character of the de-­aestheticizing movement is conveyed.”28 In his Art Povera strategy Celant also formulated his theoretical framework inspired by American sources.29 The only names cited by Celant in the book were those of two well-­established Americans: the philosopher John Dewey and the composer John Cage. Celant chose to name Dewey as the source for his phenomenological approach, rather than European philosophers such as Edmund Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty who were household names among Italian critics. And he favored Cage over Futurist or Dada sources as the acknowledged inspiration for Celant’s call to merge art and life.30 Elsewhere, Celant indicated contemporary American authors Seth Siegelaub and Susan

282

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Figure 15.1  Germano Celant, Arte Povera (Milan: Mazzotta, 1969): cover.

Sontag as the main sources for his idea of a “critica acritica,” which informed the format and approach of the book.31 The format of Art Povera was directly inspired by Siegelaub’s publications. A New York critic, art dealer, and curator, he introduced innovative ways to promote contemporary artists. Celant especially acknowledged Siegelaub’s Xerox Book for having eliminated the interpretive role of the critic. “He invited [artists] to produce something for [the printed page] and made a book out of it,” Celant marveled. “A book directly made by the artists, with no mediation whatsoever, either critical or typographic.”32 Celant pursued the same goal in Art Povera,

Transatlantic Arte Povera

283

Figure 15.2  Germano Celant, Art Povera (New York: Praeger, 1969): cover.

explaining: “the book consists of documents and works of art made specifically for the printed page. The author [Celant] therefore asks each artist to produce directly the six pages that belong to him [the artist], as a work or as a document.”33 As an exercise in purported transparency, Art Povera proposed to document

284

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Celant’s own work of gathering artists’ materials as much as the artists’ work. Documentation was the declared goal and participation the method: “By gathering the book, I’ve simply lived together [with the artists] the moments that I document, through letters, direct contacts, exchanges of ideas, discussions, critiques.”34 Another major theoretical influence was that of Sontag. Celant’s manifesto on the role and method of the contemporary critic, “Per una critica acritica,” opened with a long citation from Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” which had been translated into Italian in 1967.35 “Per una critica acritica” was the most important of a series of texts which the Italian critic elaborated alongside his Art Povera publication, and wherein he rejected his earlier approach to art criticism.36 Inspired by Sontag, he declared in contradictory fashion: “art criticism [. . .] should renounce its function as ‘judgmental’ action, it must produce values, elements of discussion, it has to become a work of strategy.”37 Not only did Sontag provide him with a straightforward condemnation of the type of criticism that he wanted to distance himself from, she also helped him to define his alternative method of “acritical criticism.” If transparency was a goal and participation a method, they could be achieved by giving sensual experience preeminence over analytic and expositionary commentary. As Sontag expressed in classic counter-­cultural terms in the conclusion of her essay: 9. Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today [. . .] The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. 10. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.38

The first instance where Celant applied the “critica acritica” method, Art Povera featured key aspects of Sontag’s decalogue, or so he claimed.39 No interpretive criterion—chronological, alphabetical, national—regulates the artists’ order. Rather than judging their work from a position of authority, Celant considered himself equal to the artists. He placed his own text in the penultimate section of the book rejecting the traditional introduction. His essay fits the same six-­page space accorded to each of the participants so that he appears as an equal among others. Documentation or transparency—meaning the non-­interjection of the authorial voice—was the main goal of the book, in line with Sontag’s idea of showing “how it is what it is.” Hence, the volume mostly consists of full-­page reproductions of black and white photographs and short texts, all provided by the artists and unmediated by the critic.40

Transatlantic Arte Povera

285

Through the criteria of “arte apolide” and of “critica acritica,” Celant distanced Art Povera from his previous work and made it palatable to American counter-­ culture. His only two books published before Art Povera—the catalog of the Museo Sperimentale of Turin (1967) and a monograph on the designer Marcello Nizzoli (1968)—followed very different, traditional formats.41 Organized chronologically and framed art historically, both publications focused exclusively on Italian artists, who were discussed in terms of Italian specificity. Why did Celant suddenly focus so much on America? The reason behind this shift can be explained as part of a collective phenomenon as well as in relation to Celant’s own career ambitions. Celant’s engagement with the United States would seem to contradict both his renowned anti-Americanism and that of the movement Arte Povera itself. Political critiques marked defining moments in Arte Povera’s history. One of the most iconic Arte Povera manifestations was Mario Merz’s “Igloo di Giap” (1968). This consisted of a metallic structure holding a neon text which quoted an anti-American strategy of the Vietnam People’s Army’s General, Vo Nguyen Giap. Celant used this work to illustrate the cover of the Italian edition of the book Arte Povera. Most famously, the first theoretical manifesto of Arte Povera was Celant’s oft-­quoted piece “Appunti per una guerriglia” (1967), which compared Arte Povera to Vietnamese guerrilla warfare. Here, Celant framed Arte Povera as a reaction against consumerism and technocracy, seen as forms of American imperialism, and to Op Art, Pop Art, and Minimalism, seen as a parallel form of cultural imperialism.42 Art historians have contextualized the emergence of Arte Povera within what Robert Lumley called a “new wave of anti-Americanism” in Italy during the 1960s.43 As Nicholas Cullinan has explained: The language of turf warfare and contested ground referred to by General Giap, quoted by Merz, appropriated by Celant, and claimed by the students of ’68 marked an alignment where guerrilla war served as an analog for cultural rivalry, peasant resistance as a model for Arte Povera renunciation of consumerism, and Vietnam as a metaphor for University protests.44

Art Povera also included typical anti-American tropes in the form of anti-Pop Art and anti-­consumerism statements, but unlike his 1967 article, Celant did not propose to counter the process of Americanization head on through a nation-­ based form of guerrilla warfare, which saw the colonized Italians fighting against the American colonizers. Now he adopted “the assimilation of the system” as his strategy. He presented an Americanized, consumeristic society as a shared

286

Postwar Italian Art History Today

condition of Western Europe and the United States. If the fusion of Europe and America was an incontrovertible fact—or so Celant declared in his 1968 essay, “Il senso della vita (Europa + America)”45—the only viable response was a common European and transatlantic counter-­culture, as the book Art Povera expressed by mixing the artists’ languages and nationalities into an inextricable blend. Originally conceived by Celant within the logic of the Italian post-Informale moment and theorized as a specifically Italian reaction to American imperialism in Italy, the Arte Povera narrative was now adjusted in the book-­manifesto Art Povera to make it internationally relevant.46 Celant strategically promoted the specifically Italian reaction to Americanization as a viable model for an international movement of counter-­culture. Hence Celant invested the most effort to succeed in America. The preparation of Art Povera to launch in the United States coincided with a new form of Americanism in Italy at the end of the 1960s. Or, more precisely, it coincided with a reconfiguration of the Americanism/anti-Americanism divide. Unlike in previous years, America was not embraced or contested as a monolithic whole. The left-­wing intellectuals of Celant’s generation criticized the United States’ foreign politics and despised American capitalism, but admired American counter-­culture and political activism. The distinction between these two Americas became more and more clear during the second half of the 1960s, as non-­parliamentary leftists in Italy increasingly emphasized a condition of communality shared with American counter-­cultural movements. This new cultural attitude corresponded to broader political transformations. After the idyll of the “Miracolo Economico,” the transatlantic relationship between Western Europe and the United States descended into crisis. As inflation rose and economic growth stalled across the Atlantic, American political and military hegemony faced a serious challenge with a consequent wave of antiAmericanism. Anti-American sentiments were hardly new in Europe. What was new, however, was that now the American model was questioned in similar ways in the United States as well as in the NATO aligned countries. Similar forms of cultural and political radicalism in Western Europe and in the United States were, in part, the independent result of parallel development of wealth, consumerist lifestyle, mass education, and youth culture. But by the end of the 1960s they were commonly seen as part of the same international phenomenon.47 If the war in Vietnam and the news of the bombings of Vietnamese villages with napalm put an end to the good will and fortune of Atlanticism which had culminated in Italy during the economic boom, the Italian youth movements now identified the “true” and good America with student protest, counterculture, and Black Power.48

Transatlantic Arte Povera

287

Until the mid-1960s, every cultural manifestation coming from the United States tended to be perceived in Italy as the official representation of America or even as an extension of the American government. (And, vice-­versa, every form of promotion of Italian art in the United States was seen as a form of cultural diplomacy). This was the case in 1957, when the Rome-New York Foundation in Rome opened with a show including American Abstract Expressionist painters: an Italian critic described it as “the landing of marines on the banks of the Tiber.”49 This attitude culminated with the Venice Biennale of 1964, when part of the Italian press discussed the victory of Robert Rauschenberg as an act of American imperialism, often using military terms to describe it. Even a critic like Maurizio Calvesi, who supported Pop Art, saw that victory as a form of nationalistic aggression.50 Between 1967 and 1969 things changed. The categories were no longer United States versus Europe (or Italy) or Western versus Eastern bloc. They were, rather, young versus old and mainstream versus counter-­culture, namely categories that went beyond national and geographical boundaries. The metropolis and its skyscrapers represented by generations of Italian artists—from Fortunato Depero in 1930 to Fontana in 1962—as the quintessential symbol of America now gave way to the desert, a regenerative myth absorbed in Italy through American beat writers and now associated with the counter-­culture.51 As American protests and counter-­culture grew in the Italians’ perception of the United States, American art too was now read in Italy as a form of cultural critique from within. The Italian art magazine Metro expressed this new set of expectations when it dedicated a special issue to an inquiry, “La sfida al sistema,” where American artists were asked: “Can the present language of artistic research in the United States be said to contest the system?”52 Celant indicated that America as his interlocutor already in the cover of Art Povera, by reproducing De Maria’s Mile Long Drawing, shot in the Mojave Desert. Traveling to the United States and, more importantly, publishing books or articles reporting on the cultural scene there became a standard rite of passage in the career of an Italian art critic of Celant’s generation.53 Unlike older Italian artists and critics, who visited New York to be in the capital of the international avant-­garde, this new generation saw at first-­hand exposure to the American art scene as a way to understand American art beyond what they perceived as an official façade (for example, the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale). Celant was no exception. But in contrast to the cultural reportings of his colleagues, he used his knowledge of the American artistic debate to a different

288

Postwar Italian Art History Today

purpose: by studying and mimicking the style of American critics Celant performed his strategy of cultural infiltration. Art Povera functioned as his Trojan horse. In December 1968, he sent out letters to some of the most influential figures in the American contemporary art world, announcing his upcoming “book on the most up to date artistical [sic] researches.”54 The letter was formed as a request for “the photographic material [. . .] catalogues, statements of the same artists and other useful documents,” but it was also a strategic way to make connections in America. And it worked. For example, in December 1968, Leo Castelli forwarded to Seth Siegelaub the aforementioned letter by Celant, adding just a brief note: “If this guy didn’t write to you directly you should take care of this.”55 Siegelaub sent the requested materials to Celant, initiating a prolific exchange between the two.56 In December 1969, Siegelaub invited Celant to be part of the special issue that he was editing for the magazine Art International: “I am asking 8 critics from different parts of the world, each to edit an 8-page section of the magazine.”57 Siegelaub’s original plan was to invite Trini for the section on Italy.58 Trini at the time was one of the most influential Italian art critics and had just contributed to the exhibition catalog, When Attitudes Become Form. The new collaborations with Celant and the publication of Art Povera in November, however, appear to have influenced Siegelaub to drop Trini and invite Celant instead. Through Art Povera Celant achieved two main things. Firstly, the American art world took seriously “his” Italian artists as an integral part of international Post-Minimalism. In January 1970, Ileana Sonnabend, who had been representing Arte Povera artists in Paris, opened her first New York gallery. In July, MoMA gave Arte Povera its first institutional recognition in America through the influential exhibition Information, curated by Kynaston McShine. Celant’s Art Povera was the only book written by an Italian to be included among the “recommended readings” from all over the world.59 Two other prominent publications discussed Arte Povera as part of a global phenomenon, emphasizing the impact of Celant’s book in America: Rosenberg’s The De-Definition of Art, and Lucy Lippard’s The Dematerialization of the Art Object.60 On the other hand, the book established Celant as a point of reference in America for everything Italian. In 1972 alone, he contributed an essay on Italian design for the MoMA catalogue, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape and published two monographs on Italian artists for the Sonnabend Gallery in New York: one on Giulio Paolini and one on Piero Manzoni.61 They signaled the beginning of countless monographs and exhibition catalogues published by

Transatlantic Arte Povera

289

Figure 15.3  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Il Futurismo Mondiale (International Futurism),” 1924 as published in Fortunato Depero, Depero Futurista (Milan: Dinamo Azari, 1927), np.

Celant in America, focusing on Italy. The book on Paolini also signaled, according to Celant himself, the beginning of the process of historicization of Arte Povera. The success in America corresponded to Celant’s infamous proclamation of the movement’s end, as if its ultimate goal was now achieved.62 After having defended the Arte Povera label for years, even against some artists’ attempts to seceed, Celant now proclaimed that it was time for artists to pursue individual activities. As for Celant himself, his work too changed perspective and attitude. He went, in his own words, from being a “militant” to a “historian.”63 By 1972, the time of “guerrilla” was long gone. But now Celant also retired the ideas of “acriticism” and “statelessness.” He had embraced, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would have it, the culture industry of the late capitalist moment.64

290

Postwar Italian Art History Today

What remained was an internationally marketable Italianità on which he, subsequently, built a prosperous career both in Italy and the United States. Celant ultimately achieved the nationalistic venture, metaphorically expressed by Futurist artist Fortunato Depero forty years earlier, to “smash the Alps of the Atlantic.”65 But whereas Depero tried (unsuccessfully) to overcome the Italian national complex of backwardness by exporting his utopian project of modernization, Celant embraced that very complex and turned it into a marketing tool. Through Arte Povera, he exalted those characteristics that were traditionally considered as obstacles to the modernization of Italian society (rural, poor, Mediterranean, irrational, archaic) and used them as an exportable antidote to the negative effects of American modernity, consumerism, and technocracy. Adopting the language of American critics proved a successful strategy to “infiltrate the enemy.” But it also worked the other way: it functioned as a way to interiorize an American perspective. In other words, Celant was able to market and export successfully his product to the United States, and he made Arte Povera perceived as internationally relevant from an American-­dominated perspective. In the process, he imported American models and parameters of cultural relevance into the Italian artistic debate. In the Young Italians catalog, Alan Solomon had lamented that “we in America have become accustomed to judging world art against American standards and American conditions.” Through the book Art Povera Celant did not counter these standards and conditions, as he had declared in his “guerrilla” manifesto of 1967. Rather, he made them his own.

Notes 1 Germano Celant, Arte Povera (Milan: Mazzotta, 1969); Art Povera (New York: Praeger, 1969); Art Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art? (London: Studio Vista, 1969); Ars Povera (Koln: Studio Wasmuth, 1969). 2 The italicized English title, Art Povera, indicates the 1969 book and Arte Povera, the Italian artists promoted by Celant during the preceding two years. 3 Beside many monographs dedicated to Italian artists, three major publications focused on these themes: The Knot (New York/Turin: PS1/Allemandi, 1985); Roma—New York (Milan: Charta, 1993); and The Italian Metamorphosis (New York: Guggenheim, 1994). America was not the only interlocutor for Celant: Identité Italienne (Paris: Pompidou, 1981) was a key moment in his definition and promotion of italianità abroad.

Transatlantic Arte Povera

291

4 Although some Italian artists had successful careers in the US in the postwar period through initiatives such as the 1949 MoMA show, Twentieth Century Italian Art and the activity of art dealers such as Catherine Viviano and Irene Brin, their success was always confined within the framework of Italian art and proved short-­lived, as the Americans’ interest in Italian art was discontinuous. Instead, Arte Povera established itself as the first Italian art movement since Futurism and Metafisica (in the singular form of Giorgio de Chirico) to enter the American art historical canon. See my dissertation, Export/Import: The Promotion of Contemporary Italian Art in the United States (New York: CUNY, 2016). 5 Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-­worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Art History, 36, 2 (April 2013): 418–41. 6 When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle, Bern (March 22–April 27, 1969); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (August 28–September 27, 1969); Op Losse Schroeven Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (March 15–April 27, 1969). See Christian Rattemeyer, ed., Exhibiting the New Art (London: Afterall, 2010). Prospect 1968 (September 20 to 29, 1968), and Prospect 1969 (September 30 to October 12, 1969) at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf also contributed to the international circulation of the Arte Povera. As art fairs, however, they did not provide a critical framework. See Lara Conte, Materia, corpo, azione (Milan: Electa, 2010). 7 Gilardi accused Celant of a domestication and marketing of Arte Povera. See Conte, Materia, corpo, azione, 187–9. 8 Szeemann and Beeren cited Arte Povera in their catalog introductions. Szeemann invited Celant to deliver a speech at the opening ceremony in Bern. Celant, Precronistoria, cit., 113. 9 Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (April 4 to May 8,1966) and Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (May 13 to June 15, 1969). See Romy Golan, “Flashbacks and Eclipses in Italian Art in the 1960s,” Grey Room, 49 (Fall 2012): 102–7. 10 Young Italians, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (January 23 to March 23, 1968) and the Jewish Museum, New York (May 20 to September 2, 1968). It included Alberto LoSavio, Getulio Alviani, Sergio Lombardo, Mario Ceroli, Renato Mambor, Laura Grisi, Jannis Kounellis, Valerio Adami, and Pistoletto. 11 Nine at Castelli, Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York (December 4 to 28, 1968). Included artists Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Bollinger, Eva Hesse, Stephen Kaltenbach, Bruce Nauman, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Gilberto Zorio. 12 Nine Young Artists: Theodoron Awards, Guggenheim Museum, New York (May 24 to June 29, 1969). Included artists: Barry Flanagan, Gerhard Richter, John Walker, Dan Christensen, Nauman, James Seawright, Serra, Peter Young, and Zorio. 13 On these precedents, see my dissertation, Export/Import, 200–6. 14 Alan Solomon, Young Italians (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1968), np.

292

Postwar Italian Art History Today

15 Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 275. 16 Published in 1969, the interview was recorded in 1967. Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto (Milan: Electa, 2010), 104–5. 17 Celant coined the term “arte apolide” in his essay, “Per una biennale apolide,” Casabella, n. 328 (September 1968): 52. 18 As recently as 1967, Celant promoted Italian artists who resisted what he called “a stylistic International without values.” Celant, “Situazione 67,” in Art Povera, 17. He avoided the term internationalism in favor of “stateless” and “nomadic.” 19 See my essay, “New Decade, New Italy,” in Afro Basaldella, ed. Gabriella Belli (Milan: Mondadori/Electa, 2012), 42–53. 20 Harold Rosenberg, “De-Aestheticization,” The New Yorker, January 24, 1970: 65. 21 In 1968, Celant was working on a book on Futurist manifestos (see below). In his “biennale grigioverde” article he quoted Marinetti by calling the institution “passatista.” 22 Emily Braun, “Vulgarians at the Gate,” in Boccioni’s Materia (New York: Guggenheim 2004), 1–21. 23 Celant, “La critica come opera di strategia e di metodologia,” in Giuseppe Bartolucci, ed., La scrittura Scenica (Milan: Lerici, 1968), 287. 24 “Walter De Maria (New York), Michelangelo Pistoletto (Turin), Stephan Kaltenbach (New York), Richard Long (Bristol), Mario Merz (Turin), Douglas Huebler (Boston), Joseph Beuys (Düsseldorf), Eva Hesse (New York), Michael Heizer (New York), Gerd Van Elk (Netherlands), Jannis Kounellis (Rome), Lawrence Weiner (New York), Luciano Fabro (Milan), Bruce Nauman (Southampton [sic]), (New York), Jan Dibbets (Amsterdam), Giovanni Anselmo (Turin), Robert Barry (New York), Pier Paolo Calzolari (Urbino), Dennis Oppenheim (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Barry Flanagan (London), Robert Smithson (New York), Giulio Paolini (Turin), Reiner Ruthenbeck (Düsseldorf), Alighiero Boetti (Turin), Keith Sonnier (New York), Giuseppe Penone (Garessio), Franz Erhard Walther (New York), Hans Haacke (New York), Gilberto Zorio (Turin), Robert Morris (New York), Marinus Boezem (Gorinchem, Netherlands), Karl Andre (New York), Emilio Prini (Genova), Richard Serra (New York), Germano Celant (Genova), Zoo.” 25 Celant, Art Povera, cit., 211. 26 William Wilson, “New Volumes Mirror a Feeling of Uneasiness,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1969, C74; John Moffitt, “Germano Celant: Art Povera,” Art Journal, 30, 1 (Autumn, 1970): 124. 27 See my article, “New Decade,” op. cit. 28 Harold Rosenberg, “De-Aestheticization,” The New Yorker, January 24, 1970: 64–5. 29 Michele Dantini has discussed this phase of Celant’s activity as “unilaterally attentive to the United States.” Michele Dantini, “Ytalya subjecta,” in Gabriele Guercio and Anna Mattirolo, eds., Il Confine Evanescente (Milan: Electa, 2010): 286–7.

Transatlantic Arte Povera

293

30 Celant, Art Povera, 225, 227. The choice proved right if an American reviewer who declared the book difficult to make sense of, found the reference to Cage helpful. Moffitt, “Germano Celant: Art Povera:” 124, 126. 31 “Per una critica acritica” appeared in three Italian magazines, with small variations: Casabella, n. 343, December 1969: 42–4; Sipario, No. 287, March 1970: 19–20; Nac, No. 1, September 1970: 29–30. The other authors listed were also Americans: Harold Rosenberg, Lucy Lippard, and Gregory Battcock. Two more names were the British Lawrence Alloway, who had lived in New York since 1961, and the Italian Carla Lonzi. She had written Autoritratto (the book named by Celant) in the US during a residency in Minneapolis from August 1967 to May 1968. See Fabio Belloni, Militanza artistica in Italia (Rome: Erma di Bertschneider, 2015). 32 Celant, “Per una critica acritica,” cit., 44. 33 Celant, Precronistoria, 152. 34 Idem. 35 Susan Sontag, Contro l’interpretazione (Milan: Mondadori, 1967). 36 Celant, “Ad Amalfi ho intuito che,” Arte Povera + Azioni Povere, 53. 37 Celant, “La critica come opera di strategia,” 287. 38 Sontag, Against Interpretation [Contro l’interpretazione], 14. 39 Although Art Povera doesn’t quote Sontag directly, Celant’s manifesto-­like statement “Stating that” used key ideas, attributed to Sontag in Celant’s “Per una critica acritica.” 40 Talking about the book, Celant wrote to Battisti: “I am not interested in the critic’s word, but the documents.” October 1970, cor70L352 Archivio Battisti, Rome. 41 Battisti, ed., Museo Sperimentale, op. cit. Although the official editor of the book was Battisti, who had conceived the Museo Sperimentale, Celant actually put it together, as documented by the correspondence between Battisti, Celant, and Aldo Passoni, Archivio Battisti, Rome. Celant, Marcello Nizzoli (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1968). Celant called these two publications “my only two books.” Celant to Battisti, March 1967, cor67L259, Archivio Battisti, Rome. 42 Celant, “Arte Povera. Appunti per una guerriglia,” Flash Art, 5 (November–December 1967): 3. 43 Robert Lumley, Arte Povera, 2004, 11. 44 Nicholas Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-Nam,” October 124 (Spring 2008): 10. 45 Celant, “Il senso della vita (Europa + America),” La Biennale di Venezia, 64–5 (January–June 1968): 92–3. This was a preview of what, a few months later, would be his text for the Art Povera. In the latter, he published the essay without a title. 46 Dan Cameron has argued that Celant’s operation had two phases: the first one, framed Arte Povera as an Italian phenomenon, the second one, as an international one, in close dialogue with the US: “Anxiety of Influence,” Flash Art (International), 164 (May–June 1992): 75–81. Gilman has proposed that Celant’s goal was to present Arte Povera as an international movement from the beginning. Gilman, op. cit., 7.

294

Postwar Italian Art History Today

Like Gilman, I believe that Celant’s initial idea of Arte Povera reacted to American art, but, as I argue here, he originally reacted to the American influence in Italy and only after 1968 did he formulate an internationally exportable model. 47 Nolan, The Transatlantic Century, 267–73. 48 Valerio Bosco, L’amministrazione Nixon e l’Italia (Rome: Eurolink, 2009), 31–43. 49 Dario Micacchi, “Le mostre, Roma,” Il Contemporaneo, July 27, 1957. 50 Daniela Lancioni, “Tutti i nodi vengono al pettine,” in Pop Art, 1956–1968 (Milan: Silvana, 2007), 67. 51 From Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West of 1968 to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point of 1970 the American desert became a topos of Italian cinema. 52 Annina Nosei Weber and Otto Hahn, eds., “La sfida del sistema,” Metro, 14 (June 1968). 53 See Belloni, Militanza artistica in Italia, 86. 54 Celant to Leo Castelli, Genova, December 1, 1968, MoMA Archives, Siegelaub Papers, I. D. 3. 55 Idem. 56 In January 1969, Siegelaub sent materials on Huebler, Barry, Weiner, and Kosuth. Then Celant invited Siegelaub “for organizing a show at Sperone’s Gallery of Weiner, Kossuth [sic], Barry and Huebler.” Siegelaub accepted in July. Siegelaub Papers, I. D. 3. 57 Siegelaub to Celant, New York, December 3, 1969, Siegelaub Papers, I. A. 82. 58 In an undated document (but between August and October 1969) Siegelaub annotated an early plan for the Art International issue, including a list of people to invite: Gerry Schum, Szeeman, Trini, Lucy Lippard, and Charles Harrison (three bullet-­points were left blank). Some of these were actually invited (Lippard and Harrison accepted, Szeemann declined), Trini and Schum were dropped from the project. Siegelaub Papers, I. A. 82. 59 Kynaston L. McShine, Information (New York: MoMA, 1970), 200. 60 Harold Rosenberg’s The De-Definition of Art (New York: Horizon, 1972). Lucy Lippard’s The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973). 61 Celant, “Radical Architecture,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape (New York: MoMA, 1972), 380–7. Celant, Giulio Paolini (New York: Sonnabend, 1972); Celant, Piero Manzoni (New York: Sonnabend, 1972). 62 Celant proclaimed the dissolution in his catalog essay for Arte Povera–13 Italienische Kunstler (Munich: Kunstverein, 1971). 63 Celant, “Foreword,” in Art Povera: History and Stories, 7. 64 Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer was published in Italy for the first time by Einaudi in 1966 as Dialettica dell’Illuminismo and was part of the Italian debate from which Celant’s original definition of Art Povera as a guerrilla war emerged. See Celant, The Knot, op. cit., 27. 65 See my article, “Bombs Against the Skyscrapers,” in International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Gunter Berghaus, ed., Vol. 6 (2016), 43–70.

Index Abstraction 95–7, 103 Abstract Expressionism 96, 98, 106, 107–8 Accademia di Belle Arte di Firenze 155, 163 Accademia di Brera 155 Accardi, Carla 127, 275 Ackermann, Peter 194, 203, 205 Age d’Or Gallery 100 Alasia, Franco: 67, 192, 204 Albers, Josef 100 Al-Hadid, Diana 243 Alquati Romano 191, 193, 204 Alviani, Getulio 275 American Academy in Rome 158 Anacronismo 37, 48, 50 Anceschi, Luciano, 136–7 Angeli, Franco 10, 114, 119, 124–5 Anselmo, Giovanni, 4, 230, 231, 239, 240 Anti-Americanism 285, 286 Antonelli, Paula 30, 34 Aptico: il senso della scultura, 235, 243 Arcangeli, Francesco, 144 Argan, Giulio Carlo 45, 51, 116, 128, 195, 199, 202, 205 Aristotle 85 Arra, Guido, 148 Art of the Twentieth Century 173 Artaud, Antonin 141 Arte Povera 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 14–17, 21, 24, 30, 32–3, 37, 39, 49–50, 95–9, 106, 115–16, 120–1, 123, 127, 135, 137, 229–30, 235, 261–3, 266, 277 Arte Povera 266, 273–5, 277 Arte Povera/Im Spazio 262 Arte povera + Azioni povere 266, 269, 274 Artforum 30 Arti Visive 99–100, 103, 110 Arts Club Rome 100 Autunno caldo (Hot Autumn) 6 Avant-­garde 95–6, 98–9, 106, 108 AZ. Arte doggi 99

Bach, Johann Sebastian 193 Bacon, Francis 261, 263–8, 273–5 Balla, Giacomo 95, 98, 103, 105, 107, 108, 173, 241 Bandini, Mirella 249, 257, 275 Banfi, Antonio 261, 266–7, 273, 274–5 Barbour, Julian 89, 91 Baroque 23–5, 32, 33, 184 Barr, Alfred H., Jr. 158 Barr, Alfred J., 179–80 Barr, Margaret Scolari 242 Barilli, Renato, 120, 136–7, 144, 181 Barreiro Lopez, Paula 206 Basaldella, Afro 98, 177 Baudelaire, Charles 235, 242 Bedarida, Raffaele 16 Beecroft, Vanessa 8, 22, 24–6, 28, 30, 32–3 Beeren, Wim 278 Belbo, Jacopo 80 Bellocchio, Piergiorgio, 190 Bene, Carmelo 77, 90 Benjamin, Walter 41 Bennett, Christopher 10 Bermani, Cesare 191, 202–3 Bernasconi, Umberto 103 Bernini 25–6 Beuys, Joseph 26 Biblioteche Pubbliche Rionali, Milan 263–6, 274 Bignardi, Umberto 116, 123 Bill, Max 100 Bloch, Ernst 180, 183 Boatto, Alberto 128 Boccioni, Umberto 103, 105, 189, 203, 229–31, 232, 235, 240–2, 261 Bodini, Floriano 194 Bogart, Humphrey 155 Bologna, Sergio 191, 205 Bolotowsky, Ilya 100 Bonami, Francesco 8, 21, 31–2, 34 Bonito Oliva, Achille 44, 51 Bordiga, Amedeo 196

296 Borges, Jorge Luis 85 Borio, Guido 204 Bosio, Gianni 202 Bottai, Giuseppe 181 Bottinelli, Silvia 9 Botti, Renzo 194–6, 198, 201, 203, 205 Brancusi, Constantin 235 Braun, Emily 4 Bredekamp, Horst 41, 51 Brigada Ramona Parra 214, 215 Briganti, Giuliano 24, 33 Brillinger, Florence 100 Brown, Marshall 24, 33 Buchholz Gallery 160–2 Buchloh, Benjamin 129 Buonarroti, Michelangelo 39, 40, 50–1 Burnham, Jack 30 Burri, Alberto 105 Café Rosati 114–15 Cage, John 281 Cagli, Corradi 99 Cagnetta, Franco 192 Calder, Alexander 160 Calvesi, Maurizio 44–5, 50–1, 97, 114, 117, 287 Campelli, Enzo 206 Campiglio, Paolo 242 Canevari, Angelo 103 Canfora, Fabrizio 274 Caramel, Luciano 54, 69, 234, 235, 242 Caramelli, Ferruccio 12, 174–5 Caratozzolo, Vittoria Caterina 31, 35 Caravaggio (Merisi, Michelangelo) 25, 44 Carrà, Carlo 161, 233, 241 Carrère, Emmanuel 90 Cartographies 105, 112 Casa degli artisti 236 Castellani, Enrico 116, 121, 275 Castelli, Leo 117, 124, 278, 288 Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea 25 Cattaneo, Oscar 269 Cattelan, Maurizio 8, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32–5 Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista 266 Cavel, Rolf 100 Cecchini, Laura Moure 12

Index Celant, Germano 1–2, 3, 4, 7, 13, 16, 21–3, 30, 32, 37, 49–50, 77, 90, 116, 132, 135, 137, 195, 205, 240, 245, 252, 257, 259, 266, 273–5, 277 Center for Italian Modern Art (New York) 3 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 159 Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago de Compostela 236 Centro Italiano per la documentazione sull’arte astratta 100 de Certeau, Michel 9, 67, 71 Ceretti, Mino 194 Ceroli, Mario 50 Chia, Sandro 8, 48–9, 52 Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana or DC) 5, 157, 210 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn 240 Čiurlionis, Konstantinas 103 Civiltà delle Macchine 99 Cloud, Stéphane [pseud. Ardengo Soffici] 242 Cold War 156–8, 160, 162, 165 Colla, Ettore 100, 103 Colombo, Davide, 10 Comenius, Jan Amos 274 Compenetrazioni iridescenti 103 Consagra, Pietro 275 Conte, Lara 206, 275 Cooper, David 90 Coté, Mark 204 Cragg, Tony 243 Cremoncini, Roberta 242 Cresci, Mario, 150 Crispolti, Enrico 14, 216, 217, 218, 219 Croce, Benedetto 50 n. 6 Crowe, Joseph Archer 266 Cullinan, Nicholas 240, 285 Dante 89 Data magazine 262, 273 Day, Richard J.F. 204 De Chirico, Giorgio 176–7 De Dominicis, Gino 9–10, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 De-­ideologization 182 De Kooning, Willem 106, 107 De Maria, Walter 281, 287 De Martiis, Plinio 114, 124

Index De Martino, Ernesto 192 De Peuter, Greig 204 De Sanna, Jole 235–6, 242–3, 275 De Stijl 100 Degand Léon 100 Deleuze, Gilles 81 Depero, Fortunato 177, 287, 290 Der Blaue Reiter 100 Descartes, René 261, 266 Deutscher, Isaac 200, 206 Devree, Howard 163 Dewey, John 136, 247, 253, 259, 281 Di Pietrantonio, Giacinto 274 Dick, Philip K. 9–10 Didi-Huberman, Georges 239, 243 Disch, Maddalena 240, 243 Divisionists 102, 107 Didymus, Thomas Judas 91? Dolci, Danilo 192 Donati, Enrico 105 Dorazio, Piero 95, 98–107, 109, 234, 242 Dorfles, Gillo 114, 117 Döry Louis 103 Duchamp, Marcel 44, 51, 77, 83 Duchamp, Suzanne 44 Duran Adrian 7 Eco, Umberto 80, 91, 136 Ellis, Robert Leslie 275 L’Espresso 80, 91 Estienne, Charles 100 Evola, Julius 80 The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick 90 Fabro, Luciano 14–16, 230, 234–6, 239, 242–3, 261–75 Fabro, Silvia 265, 274–5 Fallan, Kjetil 27–8, 31, 34–5 La fantasia dell’arte nella vita moderna, 234 Fascism (Italian) 5, 157–8, 180, 182, 209–10, 277 Fazzini, Pericle 164 Fernández, María 29, 34 Ferroni, Gianfranco 194. Festa, Tano 8, 39–40 Fiat 6 Fiedler, Konrad 50 Fiameni, Gianfranco 203–5

297

Fioroni, Giosetta, 10, 114, 120, 125 Fischer, Margit 159 Fleming, William 24, 33 Fles, Etha 232 Flood, Richard 240 Florence 155 Fluxus 273 Fondazione Origine 100, 103 Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 236 Fontana, Lucio, 4, 158, 173, 229–30, 233–5, 242, 261, 269, 271, 273, 275, 279, 284, 287 Foot, John 204 Forma 2 100 Fortini, Franco 190 Franchetti, Giorgio 124 Fried, Rose 104 Gallery 104, 105, 107 Fronte Nuovo delle Arti 210 Fuchs, Rudi 275 Fuoco, Immagine, Acqua, Terra 121 Futurism 103, 104, 107, 158, 232, 280, 281 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 198 Gamble, Antje 11 Galilei, Galileo 24, 261, 266 Galimberti, Jacopo 12, 189, 205–6, 240 Galla Placidia 127 Gallarate 28, 33 Galleria del Milione 233 Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa 262 Galleria La Salita 114 Galleria La Tartaruga 114, 122–4 Galleria Milano 269–70, 275 Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM) 102, 212, 234 Galleria Notizie 261–2, 269, 271, 275 Galleria Origine 100, 102 Galleria Vismara 268–9, 271 Gendel, Milton 103 Georgin, François 195 German Neo-Expressionism 37 Ghiringhelli, Gino 162 Ghirri, Luigi 150 Giani, Giampiero 242 Gilardi, Piero 278 Gilgamesh 76, 90 Gilman, Claire 240

298

Index

Ginsborg, Paul 5, 29 Glarner, Fritz 104, 107 Global Tools 11 Golan, Romy 7 Goodyear, A. Conger 159 Gramsci, Antonio 9, 57, 67, 70 Greenberg, Clement 11, 106–7, 162, 164–5 Grosz, George 197 Gruppo 63 136 Gruppo 70 136, 138–9 Gruppo degli Otto 51 Gruppo N 6 Guattari, Felix 81 Gucci 26 Guénon, René 80 Guenzani, Edoardo 28 Guercio, Gabriele 7, 9–10 Guerreschi, Giuseppe 13, 189, 194, 196–203, 205–6 Guerrini, Mino 100, 103 Guttuso, Renato 173, 182 Happenings 273 Harvard University 101 Heath, Douglas Denon 275 Hecker, Sharon 1, 14, 229–43 Hepburn, Audrey 155–6 Hillmann, Kay 105 A History of Italian Art in the 20th Century 4 Hockemeyer, Lisa 242 Hoffman, Otto 100 Hyperrealism 48 Iamurri, Laura 275 Illich, Ivan, 147 Informale (Informel), 6, 10, 96, 97, 138, 139–40 Information 288 Ingres Jean-Auguste-Dominique 40 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 278 Institutional Critique 47 Intermediality 48 Italian Art in the 20th Century 4 Italian Art Society 3 Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano or PCI) 5, 179, 183

Italian design 6 The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968 4 Italianità 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 32, 164 Italy: The New Domestic Landscape 288 Italy at Work 109 Jesi, Emilio 162 Jesi, Furio 79, 91 Jewish Museum, New York 278 Johns, Jasper 113–14, 117 Johnson, Philip C. 160 Jovovich, Milla 25 Kabakov, Ilya 194 Kaisserlian, Giorgio 269, 275 Kaufmann, Angelica 52 Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr. 160 Kepler, Johannes 24, 26, 33 Kinetic Art 269 Klee, Paul 189, 203 Klein, Yves 273 The Knot: Arte Povera at PS1 1–2, 3, 21–5, 27–8, 30, 32 Korsch, Karl 196, 205 Kounellis, Jannis 4, 114–15, 122–4, 275 Kris, Ernst 47, 52 Lady of Warka 73, 75–86, 89 L’Anselme, Jean 193 La Pietra, Ugo 9, 11, 53–9, 61–71, 146 Lees-Maffei, Grace 27–9, 31, 34–5 Lefebvre, Henri 9, 58–61, 68–71 Lefort, Claude 203 Leiris, Michel 206 Leonardi, Nicoletta 10 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 190 Library of Villa Litta, Affori 263–6 Lichtenstein, Roy 114, 117–18, 125 Lipchitz, Jacques 235 Lippard, Lucy 288 Lissitzky, El 189 Lista, Giovanni 231, 241, 243 Lloyd, Eleanor Bidde Barnes 155, 159 Lloyd, Henry Gates 159 Lombardo, Sergio 115, 124, 127–8 Longhi, Roberto 51 Lonzi, Carla 13, 132, 189, 199, 201–3, 206, 271, 275, 279

Index Lora Totino, Arrigo, 138–9 Louchheim, Aline 163 Love, Courtney 25 Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive 264, 270, 272, 275 Lumley, Robert 204, 285 Macherey, Pierre 129 McLuhan, Marshall, 136 McShine, Kynaston 288 Made in Italy 23, 27–8, 30–5, 277 Mafai, Mario 176 Magnelli, Alberto 95, 105 Mambor, Renato 10, 113–22, 124, 129 Manacorda, Francesco 26, 32, 34–5 Mangini, Elizabeth 15 Manifesto dei Pittori Futuristi 241 Manifesto Tecnico della Scultura Futurista 230–1, 232 Mannerism 44 Mannucci, Edgardo 104 Mansoor, Jaleh 7 Manzoni, Piero 212, 235, 273, 288 Manzù, Giacomo 158, 164 Maoists 6 Marcuse, Herbert 58, 70 Mariani, Carlo Maria 8, 37, 48, 52 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 280 Marini, Marino 11, 155–65 Marini, Mercedes 159–60 Marker, Chris 78 Marshall Plan 5, 165 Martin, John Rupert 24, 33 Martinelli, Elsa 125 Martini, Arturo 158, 229, 233, 242, 261 Martini, Vanessa 202, 206, 275 Mattioli, Gianni 173–4 Mauri, Fabio 114, 125–6 di Meana, Carlo Ripa: 213, 214 Medardo Rosso o la creazione dello spazio moderno 236, 243 Melotti, Fausto 235, 261 Mengs, Raphael 40 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 122, 137, 254, 257, 281 Merz, Mario 4, 281, 285 Merz, Marisa 14, 230, 236–7, 238, 239, 243 Meyer, Richard 125

299

Mezzadra, Sandro 193, 204 Miccini, Eugenio, 138 miracolo italiano (the Italian Economic Miracle) 5, 7, 29, 165 Mirren, Helen 25 Missoni 23, 27–32, 34–5 Missoni Art Colour 22, 23, 27–8, 31, 34 Missoni, Ottavio 29–31, 34 Mohandesi, Sala 203, Moholy-Nagy, László 100 Mondrian, Piet 100 Montaldi, Danilo 12–13, 67, 189–206 Montaldi Seelhorst, Gabriele 203, 205 Moore, Henry 159, 162 Moretti, Luigi 103 Morey, Charles Rufus 158 Moro, Aldo 79 Morris, Frances 240 Morris, Robert 278 Mothé, Daniel 190, 203 Motherwell, Robert 106, 107 Moure, Gloria 240 Mulas, Ugo 54, 56, 69 Müller-Kraus, Erich 100 Munari, Bruno 54, 69 Mundici, Maria Cristina 275 Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam 271, 275 Museum of Modern Art, New York 10, 97, 99, 104, 155, 158–62, 288 Museum of Non-­objective Painting 95, 101, 108 Mussolini, Benito, 5, 174, 180, 182, 184, 209–10, 233 Nagasawa, Hidetoshi 236, 242 Namuth, Hans 161 Nannucci, Maurizio 219 Needham, Alex 26, 27 34 Negri, Antonio 54, 68, 69, 79, 91, 204 Neilson, Bret 204 Neorealism 139 Newman, Barnett 106 Newy, Lyoyd R. 100 New York Times 163 Nicholson, Ben 105 Nigro, Mario 275 Nine at Castelli, exhibition: 278

300 del Noce, Augusto 173 Nogaro, Giovanni Antonio 268 Noland, Kenneth 106 Non-Objective Art 101–3, 108 Novecento italiano 158, 233 October 4 Ontani, Luigi 37, 43, 45, 51 Op Art or Optical Art 23, 27–30, 32, 269 Opera aperta 230, 239, 241 Operaismo 13 Op Losse Schroeven 278, 280 Paci, Enzo 136–7 Palazzo della Permanente, Milan 234–5 Pallucchini, Rodolfo 99 Panosfky, Erwin 51 Paolini, Giulio 8, 14, 37, 40–3, 51, 243, 266, 275, 288, 289 Paragone 41, 51 Parente, Luigi 203 Parmeggiani, Tancredi 98 Parrot, André 76, 90 Pascali, Pino 4, 115, 122–3, 132, 275, 279 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 192–3, 204 Patecky, Albert 100 Pavese, Cesare 204 Pellegrini, Carl 275 Pellerin, Jean-Charles 195, 205 Pellizza da Volpedo, Giuseppe 102 Penone, Giuseppe 4, 14, 230, 237, 239, 241, 243 Perilli, Achille 100, 103 Petican, Laura 7–8, 16 Pettena, Gianni 9, 11, 53–65, 67–71, 146, 148 Philip K. Dick 73, 84, 90, 91 Piazza del Popolo 114, 122–3 Piazza Fontana 6 Picasso, Pablo 164, 190 Pignotti, Lamberto 138 Pike, Andy 31, 34 Pinto, Sandra 4 Piovene, Guido 233, 242 Pisani, Vettor 8, 37, 44–5 Pisitz, Silvia 105 Pistoi, Luciano 271, 275 Pistoletto, Michelangelo 4, 241, 278, 281

Index Pitagora, Paola 117–19 Pizzorno, Alessandro 191 Polke, Sigmar 129 Pollock, Jackson 106, 161 Ponti, Gio 99 Pop Art 6, 27–8, 37–9 Postmodernism 8, 37, 38 Potts, Alex 233–4, 242 Pozzi, Francesca 204 Prada 26, 27, 31, 34 Prada, Miuccia 30–1, 34 Prampolini, Enrico 100 Pratolini, Vasco 193 Previati, Gaetano 102 Prini, Emilio 281 Quadriennale di Roma 155 Radical architecture 53–4, 58, 62, 68–9, 135, 146–9 Rauschenberg, Robert 106, 113–14, 116, 128, 287 Raynor, Vivien 2 Read, Herbert 162 Reinhardt, Ad 106 Reni, Guido 44 Restany, Pierre 114 Ricci, Stefania 27, 31, 34 Richter, Hans 104 Riesman, David 191 Roberto, Maria Teresa 275 Rockefeller, Blanchette 160 Rockefeller, John D. 160 Rockefeller, Nelson 11, 155, 160, 162 Roggero, Gigi 204 Romagnoni, Bepi 194 Rome-New York Foundation 287 Rosai, Ottone 49, 180 Rosch, Eleanor 90 Rosenberg, Alexandre 159 Rosenberg, Harold 280–1, 288 Rosenblum, Robert 48 Rosenquist, James 122 Rossi, Mario M. 274 Rosso, Francesco 233 Rosso, Medardo 14, 103, 161, 229–43, 261 Rotella, Mimmo, 275

Index Rothko, Mark 106–8, 121 Rudofsky, Bernard 105 Russolo, Luigi 241 La Salita Gallery 44 Salvadori, Remo 230, 239–40, 243 Salvo (Salvatore Mangione) 37, 43, 46–7 Salzman, Ann 109 Santa Maria della Vittoria 25 Santomaso, Giuseppe 98 Saragat, Giuseppe 118 Sarduy, Severo 24–5, 33 Sarfatti, Margherita 233 Sartre, Jean-Paul 137 Savelli, Angelo 105 Savinio, Alberto 176 Scarpitta, Salvatore 275 Schifano, Mario 10, 50, 114, 119, 121–2, 124–5, 127–8 Schopenhauer, Arthur 85 Schwarz, Arturo 44, 51 Schwarz, Dieter 243 Schwitters, Kurt 189, 203 Scialoja, Toti 98 Scotellaro, Rocco 193 Scuola di piazza del Popolo 8, 10, 37, 39, 50, 114–16, 121, 123, 129 Scuola Metafisica 158 Segantini, Giovanni 102, 241 Segni, Antonio 117–18 Segre Reinach, Simona 28, 34 Sessantotto 6 Seuphor, Michel 103 Severini, Gino 103, 105, 241 Shane, Richard Agin 241 Sidney Janis Gallery 104 Siegelaub, Seth 281–2, 288 Sironi, Mario 103 Sistine Chapel 125–7 Smith, David 164 Soby, James Thrall 155, 160–3 Soffici, Ardengo 103, 232, 242 Soldati, Atanasio 95, 98, 103 Solomon, Alan 278, 290 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation 100 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 4, 105, 278

301

Sonnabend Gallery, New York 288 Sonnabend, Ileana 117 Sontag, Susan 281–2, 284 Sottsass, Ettore Jr. 61, 68, 70–1, 100 Spatialism 6 Spatola, Adriano, 138–9 Spedding, James 275 Springer, Axel 195, 205 Sprovieri Gallery 77, 86 Staccioli, Mauro 216–17 Steele, Valerie 30, 34 Stern, Lucia 100 Strand, Paul 137 Stravinsky, Igor 161 Stringa, Nico 242 Sullivan, Marin R. 1 Summa, Franco 217 Sweeney, James Johnson 105 Szeemann, Harald: 278 Tanga, Martina 13 Tate Modern 3 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912), 230–1, 232 Titian 31 Thompson, Evan 90 Toniato, Toni 96 Transavanguardia 5, 33, 37, 48–50, 52 Trini, Tommaso 245, 257, 278–88 Trotsky, Leon 190, 198–200 Trotta, Antonio 242 Tugnoli, Andrea 115, 119–21 Tupamaros 6 Turcato, Giulio 275 Twentieth Century Italian Art 10–11, 97, 99, 104, 109 Twombly, Cy 106, 114, 275 United States 155–65 Università degli Studi di Milano 261, 274–5 USSR 157–8, 165 Vaccari, Franco 11, 135, 139–41, 143–6 Valentin, Curt 155, 160–2 Van Eyck, Jan 40 Vantongerloo, Georges 100, 104–5 Vedova, Emilio 215

302

Index

Venice Biennale 10, 13–14, 37, 40, 50, 99, 113–17, 127, 144–6, 233, 287 Venturi, Lionello 45, 51 Venus de Milo 44 Vergine, Lea 210, 235, 243 Veronese 31 Versari, Maria Elena 241 Verzocchi, Giuseppe 12, 174–5, 177–82, 184 Vezzoli, Francesco 8, 22, 24–6, 28, 30, 32, 33 Vidal, Gore 25 Vietnam war 277, 285–6 Vitali, Lamberto 161 Viva, Denis 8 Von Rebay, Hilla 95, 100, 101, 102 Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) 3 Warhol, Andy 114, 124–5 Watts, Alan, 138 Wheeler, Monroe 158

When Attitudes Become Form, exhibition 278, 280, 288 White, Nicola 29, 34 Wilder, Billy 155–6 Wölfflin, Heinrich 24, 33 World War II 155, 157 Wright, Frank Lloyd 160 Years of Lead (gli anni di piombo) 6 Younger European Painters 105 Young Italians 278, 290 Zanchetti, Giorgio 15 Zapperi, Giovanna 206 Zavattini, Cesare 12, 174–7, 181–2, 184 Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972 3, 4, 240 Zero/Nul 6 Zervos, Christian 103 Zorio, Gilberto 15, 245–60