Arte Povera, an art movement whose name translates from Italian as [ˈarte ˈpɔːvera] or "poor art," emerged in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Turin was a primary hub, the movement also gained significant traction in Milan, Rome, Genoa, Venice, Naples, and Bologna. The designation was introduced in 1967 by Italian art critic Germano Celant amidst a period of considerable societal unrest, prompting artists to adopt a radical posture and challenge the established norms of governmental, industrial, and cultural institutions.
Arte Povera (Italian: [ˈarteˈpɔːvera]; literally "poor art") was an art movement that took place from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s in major cities throughout Italy and above all in Turin. Other cities where the movement was also important are Milan, Rome, Genoa, Venice, Naples and Bologna. The term was coined by Italian art critic Germano Celant in 1967, and introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture.
Early exhibitions featuring artists aligned with Arte Povera were hosted at the Christian Stein Gallery in Turin, under the direction of Margherita Stein. The seminal exhibition "IM Spazio" (The Space of Thoughts), organized by Celant at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa from September to October 1967, is frequently recognized as the official genesis of the movement. Celant, who subsequently became a leading advocate for Arte Povera, curated two exhibitions in 1967 and 1968. He further solidified the movement's theoretical framework with the publication of the influential book Arte Povera Storie e protagonisti/Arte Povera. Histories and Protagonists by Electa in 1985, which championed a revolutionary artistic practice liberated from conventional constraints, structural power dynamics, and commercial pressures.
Despite Celant's ambition to position Arte Povera within a broader international radical art context, the term predominantly characterized a cohort of Italian artists. These artists challenged corporate ideologies through works employing unconventional materials and styles, frequently incorporating found objects. Prominent figures intrinsically linked to the movement include Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Enrico Castellani, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, and Gilberto Zorio. Earlier innovators in the visual arts, considered proto-Arte Povera artists, encompass Antoni Tàpies and the Dau al Set movement, Alberto Burri, Piero Manzoni, and Lucio Fontana with Spatialism. The art dealer Ileana Sonnabend was a notable advocate for the movement.
Principal Thematic Directions and Conceptual Foundations
- Emphasis on elemental objects and straightforward communication.
- The integration of the human body and performative actions as artistic mediums.
- Elevation of quotidian experiences to significant artistic content.
- Incorporation of natural and industrial remnants.
- Manifestation of dynamism and energetic qualities within artistic creations.
- Documentation of nature's physical and chemical transformative processes.
- Investigation into the concepts of spatiality and linguistic expression.
- De-emphasis on intricate and symbolic semiotics.
- A radical rejection of established cultural and artistic systems, positing art as synonymous with life itself.
Artistic Mediums and Methodologies
Practitioners of Arte Povera extensively utilized a diverse array of materials, encompassing quotidian and "poor" substances, industrial components, and organic or ephemeral matter. Integral to their artistic methodology were natural processes such as gravity, chemical interactions, thermal variations, and environmental exposure, which enabled artworks to undergo in-situ evolution, degradation, or regeneration.
Ephemeral and Biodegradable Mediums
Numerous artworks incorporated living or degradable substances to emphasize concepts of temporality and unpredictability. For instance, Giovanni Anselmo's 1968 piece, Untitled (Sculpture That Eats), features a head of lettuce compressed between granite blocks by copper wire; the wilting of the lettuce alters the equilibrium, necessitating its periodic replenishment. Jannis Kounellis famously integrated live animals and raw elements into gallery spaces, most notably exhibiting twelve live horses at Galleria L'Attico in Rome in 1969. Giuseppe Penone's artistic endeavors frequently explore themes of arboreal life, organic growth, respiration, and corporeal impressions, thereby transforming vegetal temporalities into sculptural expressions.
Manufactured and Commonplace Substances
Artists additionally repurposed industrial materials and everyday items, frequently employing them in intentionally unrefined manners. Michelangelo Pistoletto's Mirror Paintings, for example, incorporate polished steel surfaces that reflect both observers and their environment, thereby merging the artwork's image with its surroundings. Mario Merz conceived igloo structures that combine metallic frameworks, glass, earth, or sacks of clay soil with neon numerals or textual elements. Pier Paolo Calzolari utilized refrigeration units, lead, salt, neon, and frost to articulate various states of matter and explore subtle temperature transitions.
Artistic Process and Temporal Dimensions
Many Arte Povera works were conceived as dynamic processes rather than static forms, aligning with a broader shift towards process-based and post-minimal practices by the late 1960s. Exhibitions such as Harald Szeemann's Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969) highlighted installations built, altered, or staged on site, prioritizing conceptual frameworks, actions, and changeability over permanence.
Oxidation and Patination
Within the Arte Povera movement, oxidation, encompassing rust, verdigris, and analogous patinas, served as both a temporal indicator and an integral material process within artistic creations. Germano Celant noted how artists like Jannis Kounellis and Giovanni Anselmo emphasized material transformation and 'impoverished' substances to critique industrial refinement and durability. Art historian Florence de Meredieu has interpreted rust as both a repository of memory and a catalytic force, bestowing distinctiveness and historical depth upon materials. More generally, critics linked oxidation and other natural phenomena to the post-minimalist shift, which permitted materials to evolve and change organically over time.
Documentation and Ephemerality
Given the mutable or perishable nature of numerous Arte Povera creations, exhibitions and scholarly publications frequently depend on photographic records, reconstructions, and artists' directives. Significant surveys and catalogs, including Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972, situated these methodological approaches within the broader historical trajectory and curatorial engagement with the movement.
Selected Examples: Materials and Processes
- Giovanni Anselmo, Untitled (Sculpture That Eats), 1968 – granite, copper wire, lettuce (utilizing biological decay as a structural element).
- Jannis Kounellis, Untitled (12 Horses), 1969 – twelve live horses presented within a gallery space (integrating living processes into the exhibition context).
- Mario Merz, Igloos, 1968– – metal armatures, glass, earth, neon (exploring themes of shelter and energy).
- Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mirror Paintings, 1962– – polished steel supports that reflect viewers and their environment (interrogating the relationship between image and surroundings).
- Pier Paolo Calzolari, works incorporating frost, lead, salt, refrigeration, and neon (investigating states of matter and transitional thresholds).
- Giuseppe Penone, tree works and breath pieces – exploring vegetal growth, corporeal imprints, and environmental temporality.
Artists
Michelangelo Pistoletto initiated his mirror paintings in 1962, thereby linking the artistic medium with the dynamic, evolving realities surrounding the artwork. During the late 1960s, he commenced juxtaposing rags with casts of ubiquitous classical Italian statuary, aiming to dismantle the hierarchical distinctions between 'art' and quotidian objects. The utilization of impoverished materials constitutes a fundamental aspect of the Arte Povera definition. In his 1967 work, Muretto di Stracci (Rag Wall), Pistoletto fashioned an unexpectedly rich and elaborate tapestry by encasing ordinary bricks in discarded fabric remnants.
Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz endeavored to heighten the immediacy of the art experience while simultaneously fostering a deeper connection between the individual and nature. In his piece (Untitled /Twelve Horses), Kounellis introduced actual, living horses into the gallery environment, presenting twelve animals tethered to the walls. Evoking parallels with the Dada movement and Marcel Duchamp, Kounellis sought to question the boundaries of artistic definition. However, distinct from Duchamp, he preserved the objects as real and animate, thereby re-evaluating the concepts of life and art while maintaining the autonomy of both domains.
The 'reality effect' is not secondary but constitutive. (...) Kounellis shifts the frontier of what can be defined as art, but there is never the idea that art should be dissolved into life. On the contrary, art is given a new message as a rite of initiation through which to re-experience life.
Piero Gilardi, mirroring the core objectives of Arte Povera, focused on reconciling the natural and the artificial. His 1965 work, (Nature Carpets), which garnered him recognition and integration into the Arte Povera movement, involved constructing three-dimensional carpets from polyurethane. These pieces incorporated 'natural' elements such as leaves, rocks, and soil as decorative motifs, thereby merging design and art to challenge prevailing societal perceptions of authenticity and nature, and to critique the increasing embedment of artificiality within the contemporary commercialized sphere.
List of Artists
Jerzy Grotowski
- Jerzy Grotowski
- Nnenna Okore
Notes
References
- Celant, Germano. Arte Povera: Histories and Protagonists. Milan: Electa, 1985. ISBN 88-435-1043-6. Subsequently republished as Arte Povera: History and Stories in 2011, with ISBN 978-88-370-7542-2.
- Celant, Germano, Tommaso Trini, Jean-Christophe Ammann, Harald Szeemann, and Ida Gianelli. Arte povera. Milan: Charta, 2001. ISBN 978-88-8158-316-4.
- Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn (Ed.). Arte Povera. London: Phaidon, 1999. ISBN 0-7148-3413-0.
- Flood, Richard, and Frances Morris. Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972. London: Tate Publishing, 2001. ISBN 978-0-935640-69-4.
- Lista, Giovanni. L'Arte Povera. Milan-Paris: Cinq Continents Éditions, 2006. ISBN 978-88-7439-205-6.
- Lumley, Robert. Arte Povera. London: Tate Publishing; New York: Distributed in North America by Harry N. Abrams, 2004. ISBN 1-85437-588-1; ISBN 978-1-85437-588-9.
- Galimberti, Jacopo. "A Third-worldist Art? Germano Celant's Invention of Arte Povera." *Art History* 36, no. 2 (2013): 418–441. ISSN 1467-8365.
- Manacorda, Francesco, and Robert Lumley. Marcello Levi: Portrait of a Collector. Turin: Hopefulmonster, 2005. Published in conjunction with the Estorick Collection, London. ISBN 88-7757-195-0.
- Arte Povera at Artcyclopedia
- "Arte Povera" in Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd edition, via art design café at the Wayback Machine (archived 11 December 2010)
- Studio International magazine review of Arte Povera exhibit at the Wayback Machine (archived 19 June 2009)