To what extent is the famous Italian art movement Arte Povera a ‘poor art’ rebellion or a rich man’s game? After a major survey in Paris, we look at the history of the Faustian pact Germano Celant made with the market in service of Italian art.
Last month, the major exhibition, Arte Povera, closed at Paris’ Bourse de Commerce, the home of the Pinault collection, adding a further jewel to the Italian art movement’s crown. The definitive exhibition surveyed not only Arte Povera’s key protagonists – Giuseppe Penone, Jannis Kounellis, Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto and several others who now rank among the most prestigious of modern Italian artists – but also the legacy of the movement and its impact among a selection of international contemporary artists including William Kentridge, Anna Boghiguian, Theaster Gates, Pierre Huyghe, and more.
The stellar trajectory of Arte Povera is, however, paradoxical. Despite its humble origins as a counter-cultural, anti-capitalist, guerilla-style revolution, over the past 50 years, the “Poor Art” movement has developed an inextricable relationship with the market and establishment elite. Auction records stand in the millions: Boetti $8.8 M, Pistoletto $4.8 M, Kounellis $2 M, Merz $1.7 M. In its annus mirabilis of 2014, artworks sold under the Arte Povera umbrella collectively accrued over $100 M.
Arte Povera’s triumphs, both critical and commercial, have led many to proclaim it as Italy’s greatest artistic export (perhaps with the facetious caveat “since the Renaissance”). Much of this success can be laid at the feet of the movement’s prodigious champion, Germano Celant, who did so much to promote Arte Povera worldwide – but at what cost? Arte Povera has been mythologised as a radical ‘poor art’ movement rebelling against a capitalist system. However, in order to be truly radical, one must tear down the old to install the new. This article shall discuss how Celant in fact worked from within the art world system to insert his brand of Italian modernism into the canon, with the results divorcing the movement from its essential values.
© Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier.
Photo: Nicolas Brasseur / Pinault Collection.
The Genoese curator and writer was instrumental in not only laying the foundational definitions of Arte Povera in the 1960s, but also in constructing the narratives surrounding it. Celant was determined to write his artists into the history books, and the pen was his mightiest weapon when it came to validating his collection of artists under a single umbrella. His prolific output lambasted the growing momentum of Pop Art, and positioned Arte Povera as the antithesis to capitalist, market-led, post-war American influence.
The mythology Celant constructed around the movement traded heavily on a romanticised notion of the povera brand. Giuseppe Penone, now an Italian icon, explains as much in the Bourse de Commerce’s promotion for the show: “Arte Povera is rooted in the past, in an idea of simplicity and in the poverty of things.” It is simultaneously humble, unassuming, rustic and nostalgic. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the curator of the Bourse de Commerce exhibition and expert in this field, cites St Francis of Assisi as a comparable example. The saint’s embodiment of altissima poverta (extreme poverty) in his rejection of all earthly goods to achieve eternal riches is how he is most enduringly remembered. The idea, etymologically implicit in Arte Povera, is enticing even to non-believers, but within a society built on deeply Catholic values, the ethical framework is a powerful validator of the brand.
Nowadays, the term povera is reductively associated mostly with the artists’ use of ‘poor’ materials, such as plant matter or raw minerals, which were considered unsuitable for artistic creation. Celant instead positioned the movement as the product of a new artistic language that transcended the material world and achieved a quasi-sacral dimension. “The insignificant is coming into being,” he writes in the exhibition text of its first exhibition, Arte Povera – Im Spazio, “or rather, it is beginning to impose itself. Physical presence and behaviour have themselves become art. We are living in a period of deculturation. Iconographic conventions are collapsing, symbolic and conventional languages crumbling.”
The crumbling conventions he writes about refer to the tremendous social upheaval that Italy underwent post-WWII, a chaotic context into which Celant sowed the seeds of his new order. The demographics of Italian society had more or less inverted in the 1950s, as workers moved north to start new lives in the cities of Milan, Turin and Genoa, trading fields for factories. The country had been a major benefactor of the U.S.’s Marshall Plan to reinvigorate economic growth, and Italy received over $1.5 Billion in investment throughout the decade. It paid off, with the resulting boom termed il economico miracolo (no translation needed), but the converse side of the deal was that with U.S. dollars came U.S. culture. The group of artists Celant assembled under the Arte Povera brand was not coincidental – they were brought together precisely because of their like-minded reaction against the sudden modernisation of their country and what was seen by many as U.S. cultural imperialism. The sentiment was widespread: in 1957 the art critic Dario Micacchi compared an exhibition of Abstract Expressionist artists in Rome as equivalent to “marines landing on the banks of the Tiber.” American cultural impact reached a tipping point in 1964, when Robert Rauschenberg won the Grand Prize for Painting (what is now called the Golden Lion) at the Venice Biennale. After the reactionary press storm had settled, one thing was clear: Pop Art was here to stay. The art world now orbited around New York, not Paris.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, a core protagonist of Arte Povera, was in Venice at the time of Rauschenberg’s victory. He described it as “the crown American politics was missing.” It is telling that concurrent with Pop Art sweeping the globe, Pistoletto himself conceived his now iconic Venus of the Rags (1967). Juxtaposing a classical nude statue of Venus against an overwhelming pile of discarded clothes, Pistoletto couldn’t have been clearer as to what he felt about the tide of consumerism sweeping Italy’s classical heritage under the rug.
It was not only the U.S.’s soft power politics that artists were moving away from, but also their more hard-edged foreign policies, namely the war in Vietnam. Another key name of the Arte Povera movement is Mario Merz, famous for his “igloos”. The first of these now iconic structures was his Igloo di Giap (1968), a metal and clay dome around which is fixed in neon script a quote from the Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp: “If the enemy concentrates, it loses ground; if it disperses, it loses strength.” First exhibited in 1968, the year of the infamous Tet offensive and the deadliest year of the war for U.S. forces, the work is implicitly aligned with the Vietnamese struggle and a statement of anti-American sentiment.
And yet, despite the obvious anti-U.S. perspective shared by many of his artists, Celant knew what had to be done. Only 27 at the time of the first Arte Povera exhibition in 1967, his youth came with ambition. Like so many others, he knew that to cement the legacy of Italian art, he needed to ‘break America’. This would not be easy, as the U.S. was suspiciously (and hypocritically) dismissive of any cultural intrusion of their borders, so he approached the problem in a more subtle manner – rather than storm the walls, he opted for a Trojan Horse of his own.
© Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier.
Photo: Nicolas Brasseur / Pinault Collection.
His vehicle for this critical infiltration of America was his 1969 book, Arte Povera. Despite Celant’s prolific writing, Arte Povera was never furnished with a specific manifesto like Futurism or Surrealism, partly because it has always been impossible to fully define in prose. The eponymous book came the closest, but it was unlike any previous’ manifesto’, either political or artistic.
As Raffaele Bedarida writes in Post War Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’, “The American edition introduced the movement and the author himself to the United States for the first time. Unlike previous exhibitions and publications using the word “Povera” in the title, the new book included American and European artists who had already been categorised by other critics as Earthworks, Conceptual Art, Anti-form, or Process Art. Arte 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.”
Celant’s intentional grouping of Italian, American and other international artists together aligned the movement to pre-existing American counter-cultural movements. It intended to explore the relationships between their work and the Italian artists in harmonious parallels rather than competition. The Bourse de Commerce exhibition followed this template with its own inclusion of contemporary artists external to the movement, and the effect is as equally validating today as it was then. The image of povera in Italy suggested a return to a rural, pre-industrial history; in the U.S. it traded off similarly souring relations with urban, financial capitals and a growing association with the desert as a new frontier, untouched by consumerism. Celant seems well aware of this connotation when he chose differing covers of the book for specific countries; The Italian version featured one of Mario Merz’s Igloos – the U.S version Walter De Maria’s Mile Long Drawing, in California’s Mojave desert.
The ruse worked; Celant was able to send copies of the book to the leading critics and artistic luminaries of the day, opening dialogues with people including Leo Castelli and Seth Siegelaub, and further momentum was added when Harold Rosenberg reviewed the book for The New Yorker Magazine, legitimising the foreign movement for a home-grown U.S. audience.
Institutional recognition followed, with major exhibitions at MOMA and the Guggenheim both validating Arte Povera artists within an established framework. In more elite circles, private collector interest was driven by dealers like Ileana Sonnabend, who had championed the artists in her Paris gallery, and did the same when she opened a New York space in 1970.
Celant himself, ever preoccupied with writing, was invited to contribute further on the topic for U.S. exhibitions and publications and relished the process of giving voice to his reflections on Italian self-identity. Working between Italy and the States for the rest of his life, his legacy establishes him almost as the sole interlocutor between the two countries, an artistic ambassador of great renown. He was appointed Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim in New York in 1988, and in 1997 curated the Venice Biennale. He is recognised today as a legend of art history, as a quick scroll through his many obituaries in 2020 will confirm. The artist Thomas Demand memorialises him, “He wrote art history as much as he was written about.” Via his many successes, Celant secured a bright future for Arte Povera and its subsequent manifestations, but the effects of his efforts to align Arte Povera with the art market are now beginning to be seen.
The artists involved in Arte Povera from the start, and whose works stood under the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce for most of last year, set out to de-objectify their art from a global economic framework years before Celant co-opted them, and yet he has managed (I think quite consciously) to sacrifice many of those ideals in the service of their international and historical recognition. Beyond the romanticised mythology that Arte Povera sprang from a bucolic land out of Italy’s classical past, the movement’s clandestine truth is that all its validation is drawn from the very system it originated to oppose: institutional recognition, critical press reception, and a strong selling market. In writing Arte Povera into the canon of art history, Celant has brought many an outside voice into the mainstream, making its mythology easily digestible. How will its contemporary legacy rediscover its edge?
Top Photo: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus of the Rags, 1967. Courtesy of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Photo: Paolo Pellion.