Personalities

Leo Castelli insisted that he was not an art dealer but a gallery owner. For his artists he was a lot more: a patron of the arts. From the opening of his first gallery in 1957 to his death in 1999, Castelli dominated the cultural life of New York and elevated the status of the American artist, which came to dominate the international artistic panorama during those years. The figure of the multifaceted gallery owner was born with him. A businessman and tireless explorer in constant pursuit of new discoveries, he was ready to run risks and use the most effective commercial strategies in order to make his protégés known. Together with Ileana Sonnabend, his former wife and close ally, Castelli encouraged budding talents and championed their cause with museums. Through a vast network of international relations he reinvented the rules of the art market and revolutionized the artistic culture. The discovery of Jasper Johns, his “hero”, and the triumph of Robert Rauschenberg at the 1964 Venice Biennial were just two of his early successes followed by a host of other revelations – including Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist and Cy Twombly – that confirm his role as a creator of legends. But who was Leo Castelli, the man who waited fifty years to open his first gallery? A man of multiple identities is concealed behind the charisma of an affable, media-friendly European. Born in Trieste in 1907 to Jewish parents, he spent his first thirty years in major European cities such as Vienna, Milan, Budapest, Bucharest and Paris. His professional trajectory began with a daring flight to the New World to escape the dramatic political and social context of the Nazi racial laws and the horrors that were to follow. Annie Cohen-Solal embeds the roots of her biography in the distant past of the Castelli family, tracing their ancestors in the Tuscany of the Renaissance and reconstructing a history rife with persecutions, wars, breaks and upheavals that shows surprising similarities with the family’s more recent past and Leo’s own life. By an ironic twist of fate, a man who was always reticent about his Jewish identity found in the Jewish Museum, after the MoMA, the institution that was to consecrate him as a champion of the great American movements – from Pop Art to Conceptual Art – that are the formidable legacy of Leo Castelli.

Georgia O’Keeffe (Sun Prairie, 1887 – Santa Fe, 1986) was one of most innovative American artists in the years when painting broke away from realism. The pioneer of a non-objective art that mixes clarity of vision and emotive urgency, she developed a personal approach to abstraction and a compositional method best expressed in her celebrated and intensely sensual flower paintings. The book interweaves the artist’s personal and artistic life against the background of figures of the calibre of Steichen, Strand, Demuth, Dove, Marin and Hartley in a highly representative slice of the artistic expression of the American short century. Born in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe had a childhood marked by financial crises and frequent upheavals. At the age of 20 she was in Chicago, where she continued her studies, began to work as an illustrator and took her first steps in the universe of creativity under the guidance of Arthur Wesley Dow. It was then in New York that she met the older married man who was to become her mentor, Alfred Stieglitz, an acclaimed photographer and gallery owner, who was to leave a deep imprint on her future. They started living together and it was under his wing that she matured as an artist and a muse. They addressed the same subjects, exchanged ideas and influenced one another. Familiarity with photography enabled O’Keeffe to develop a style rooted in realism – albeit of an abstract kind – based on techniques borrowed from photography. She managed to establish herself in the artistic community, something unprecedented for a woman at a time when painting was practically a male preserve. Though loath to accept social and family obligations, which were hard to reconcile with her fierce need for solitude, she agreed to marry Stieglitz in 1924 and reached the peak of her creative blossoming three years later. This is the period of the floral and urban paintings that were to set a trend in 20th-century America. She built up a solid reputation during the long years spent in New York with breaks at their summer house on Lake George. O’Keeffe’s story is also one of suffering accompanied by setbacks in her professional and private life. Success did not make her immune to wounds and she often felt misunderstood by her most faithful champions. Averse to labels, she had a tormented relationship with male critics. When they praised her bold use of colour, she responded with subdued hues. When her broad volutes were interpreted as sexually allusive, she abandoned the subjects most charged with feeling and returned to a realistic repertoire, sometimes “filched” from male colleagues. Fame led, however, to gradual detachment from Stieglitz, who remained faithful to his role of mentor by finding someone new to mould, namely the 20-year-old Dorothy Norman. O’Keeffe spent more and more time in New Mexico, entranced by the bleak desert landscapes strewn with the white skulls of animals, which became a further addition to her already rich store of subjects. She moved definitively to Abiquiu on Stieglitz’s death.

Solitary figures caught up in silent dramas. Pared down to the bare essentials, the space is real and metaphysical at the same time, bathed in relentless, limpid light. The scene is nearly always deserted and the atmosphere rife with expectancy. Edward Hopper’s human landscapes are as laconic and haunting as his urban or rural landscapes devoid of human presence and sounds. What man is concealed behind such a piercing vision? In what circumstances were his pictorial dramas generated? A taciturn and introverted artist, Hopper said little about his life. It is largely the diaries and the letters written by his wife Jo during a conjugal symbiosis of over forty years that provide the basis for this monumental biography of one of the great interpreters of the modern American scene, a painter who has left an indelible imprint on posterity both in the visual arts and in cinema. Gail Levin has drawn upon largely unpublished materials to offer a gripping narrative in which the birth of masterpieces alternates with accounts of intimate everyday life lived with Jo in a domestic theatre fraught with attraction and violent conflict, admiration and support, hostility and reconciliation. As the model of his works, intellectual stimulus, an overshadowed artist and his primary champion, Jo Nivison Hopper played a key part in her husband’s success and receives equal prominence in the pages of this book.

Described by André Breton as the most intelligent man of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp has never ceased to wield great influence over contemporary art since his death in 1968. From Dada and Surrealism to Futurism and Cubism, his art is interwoven with the great artistic movements of the 20th century without ever being reducible to any one of them. If Picasso insistently presents the figure of the artist as demiurge, Duchamp personifies the contemporary artist through his invention of the ready-made and has been recognized since the 1960s as an undisputable source of inspiration by younger generations of artists. A great deal has been written about his work but far less about his life, which he led outside the current categories, not as an artist or anarchist but as an “anartist”, to use his own neologism. Detachment, elegance, the freedom of indifference and interpenetration of opposites as well as a constant assertion of laziness and physiological disdain for money were for him the original tools of an unprecedented stance with respect to the world and things: “I prefer living and breathing to working.” Duchamp’s frequent, caustic remarks on his life serve as a whole to delineate a personal economics (reduce needs in order to be truly free) and an authentic art of living. According to Henri-Pierre Roché, Duchamp’s finest work was his use of his time. Bernard Marcadé takes this view as his starting point in the deep conviction that detailed examination of the artist’s life will provide the best understanding of his art. By describing the ready-made as a sort of appointment, Duchamp himself suggests the importance of the events of everyday life in the conception of his works. The biographical elements in play – meetings, friendships, secrets, correspondence and love affairs – are not only anecdotal and marginal trimmings of the work but “biographemes” constituting its fundamental components.

One of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation, Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, 1925 – Captiva Island, 2008), is a key figure in the radical upheavals that American visual art went through as from the late 1950s during the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Born in Texas and part Cherokee on his mother’s side, Rauschenberg daringly challenged all assumptions on taking his first steps in the art world. From his first stay in Paris, the formative experience at Black Mountain College under the guidance of Joseph Albers and his trip to Rome with Cy Twombly to his friendship with John Cage and Merce Cunningham and recognition at the international level with the award of the Golden Lion at the 1964 Venice Biennial, his art developed off the beaten track in the field of experimentation that breaks all the rules, transforming the two-dimensional space of the painting into a receptacle for heterogeneous materials. Newspaper cuttings, pieces of fabric, photographs and found objects, nothing was excluded from his Combine paintings, hybrid creations halfway between painting and sculpture, which combine a love for discarded objects inherited from Dadaist collage with abstract-Art Informel brushwork. Calvin Tomkins offers us extraordinary insight into the revolution whereby art emerged from the museums and galleries to occupy the centre of the social stage. He presents its leading figures: the old guard of Pollock and de Kooning and the new generation of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol alongside art dealers and gallery owners like Betty Parsons, Leo Castelli and the collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim. He documents the rise to the pinnacle of success of the artist who aimed more than any other in this context at a cumulative art, the irrepressible innovator who stated his desire to create a situation in which there was as much space for the viewer as the artist.

The book offers a comprehensive view of Nanda Vigo’s artistic production, from the sixties up to her last artworks in 2005. An exhaustive critical essay, edited by Dominique Stella, presents Nanda Vigo’s career, emphasizing her interdisciplinary approach rather than the traditional and restrictive classification of the artist as architect and designer. The book is divided into three sections: art, architecture and design, each introduced by unpublished texts by Tommaso Trini, I.J. Schoonhoven, Ettore Sottsass and Lucio Fontana, which highlight her talent in combining such different artistic expressions. Nanda Vigo was born in Milan and has studied Architecture in Losanna. After some professional experience in the United States she came back to Milan to work with Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Giò Ponti. She joined actively major European movements of artistic experimentation such as Gruppo Zero, Aktuel and Licht und Bewegung, cultivating an interdisciplinary link between architecture, art, design and the environment. She now lives and works in Italy and Africa.

Born in Rotterdam in 1904, Willem de Kooning moved to the United States in 1926. Together with Gorky, Pollock, Rothko and Kline, he was one of the leading pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, which marked New York’s replacement of Paris as the world’s capital of art. De Kooning lived the longest of that group of painters and produced the most, continuing to create surprisingly daring images into the 1980s. Active in a variety of genres including figure painting, the female nude and landscapes verging on complete abstraction, he developed many different styles, each deeply personal and at the same reflecting movements of great importance in 20th-century American culture. De Kooning’s life, from embarking as a stowaway to the attainment of celebrity, repeats the classic American myth of the emigrant who crosses the ocean in search of a better life and experiences poverty, failure and success first-hand. On the basis of a decade of research including hundreds of interviews and a series of previously unpublished letters and documents, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann offer the first major biography of this complex and romantic figure. De Kooning. L’uomo, l’artista is a living and richly detailed portrait and reconstruction of the painter’s life from the difficult years of poverty, instability and often violent family life in Rotterdam, the scene of his academic training and initial employment in decorative art, to his arrival in the United States, where he fought doggedly to establish himself as an American artist during the Depression. His early years in the United States are marked by the influence of Gorky, another immigrant, who was not only his mentor but also the role model who inspired his willingness to sacrifice everything to art. It was not until 1948 that his first solo show at the Egan Gallery revealed his talent to critics like Rosenberg and Hess, who vied with one another to champion his work and recognized him as a charismatic leader of the New York School, which was just beginning to make an international impact. His stormy marriage to Elaine Fried, another renowned figure in the world of art, reached its crisis in the late 1940s and early ’50s. At the peak of his fame, de Kooning was caught up in a self-destructive spiral to the point of personifying the new American myth of the man destroyed by his own success. He spent his days painting powerful abstract works and provocative female figures, and his nights haunting the Cedar Tavern, talking to friends like Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara, womanizing, drinking and roaming the streets. In the 1960s, worn out by the feverish world of art and nearly destroyed by success, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals followed by a vast body of haunting, ethereal late work. Until the end, afflicted by senile dementia, de Kooning remained the painter he had always been, spending the day in front of the canvas and never hesitating to destroy his creations in order to renew a constantly shifting style in accordance with his conviction that you have to change in order to stay the same.

"Each became absorbed in their own artistic universe, in ways that gradually acquired consistency and weight over the years. Art animated their lives, an inexorable imperative. Painting was the sole, intimate necessity for both, perhaps the only real secret of their indissoluble bond."

Andy Warhol superstar traces the artist’s activities “on screen”, from his films and adverts to television appearances.This side of his career was what definitively confirmed his superstar status and led to him being both revered and hated to the point of assassination attempts. The book explores his experiences in this sphere and the figures who accompanied him and came to represent an integral part of the Warhol milieu, first and foremost his muse Edie Sedgwick. Theatre expert Luca Scarlini investigates Warhol’s multiple identities: his phobias, contradictions and aspirations regarding his image and the production of works for the small screen and the big screen, against a backdrop of pop culture and camp, the kitsch-dominated scenario of the 60s and 70s.

Begun in 2006 and closed down by the authorities three years later, the blog of the artist and architect Ai Weiwei came to attention at the international level as one of the most courageous cultural and political acts in contemporary China. An implacable critic of the ruling class in the tradition of the “public intellectuals” of the 20th century, Ai took up in his writings the demands for pluralism stifled in bloodshed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, using the Internet to protest against the material and moral consequences – concealed by the regime’s propaganda – of the Chinese model of development: the lack of political rights, the savage exploitation of labour, the destruction of the environment and historical memory, the violent repression of minorities, the arrogance and impunity of the rich and powerful, and the rigid control over public opinion. Defying censorship, Ai Weiwei created an unprecedented form of civil and cultural resistance. His posts alternate criticism and protest, discuss the latest artistic developments, mercilessly expose official hypocrisy and use humour and polemical verve to lay bare the lies, cynicism and resignation inculcated by an establishment that combines paternalism and harsh repression to keep its citizens in a state of eternal infancy in which the rituals of consumerism have replaced the permanent mobilization of Mao’s era. Now translated into Italian, Ai Weiwei’s blog also constitutes proof of the power of art as a tool of resistance and regeneration. Renewing the impulse of the modern avant-garde, his digital diary becomes a means of collective mobilization, a “social sculpture” that transcends the boundaries of traditional creativity to raise urgent questions about the role and responsibility of the artist, the spectator and indeed all of us. A living sculpture, an agent of transformation of the world thanks to which the dimension of the multitude that characterizes our social field can acquire self-awareness and discover its strength, finding the essential value of truth once again and with it the possibility of a different time and space in keeping with the needs of more complete and freer human beings.

The 'analytical line' that emerged in artistic debate in the sixties led to a significant change in the role of photography, the consequences of which are still felt today. In those pivotal years, photography was emancipated from technical virtuosity for its own sake, and opened up to new conceptual practices. Finally legitimsed as art, it became the object of intense theoretical and linguistic analysis. Marinella Paderni starts out from this historical premise to document the work of artists who, from the mid nineties to the present, have metaphorically taken up the legacies of that conceptual season, forging continuity between the avant-garde movements of that period and today's currents in photography. Her analysis examines theoretical debates on the 'reinvention of the medium' and outlines the last two generations of contemporary Italian photography: a scenario that bears witness to the emergence of original visual practices and a multifaceted reflection on photographic language in the era of the dematerialisation of reality.

In an age where ideologies and schools of thought have lost the capacity to forge strong cultural models, where national identities are gradually dissolving into a global context, and the distinctive characteristics of individual aesthetic languages faded out some time ago in favour of contamination, it is legitimate to ask whether we can still consider the contemporary period in terms of one single medium - in this case sculpture - within the boundaries of a specific national context. With these questions in mind, Alessandra Galasso explores the roots of contemporary sculpture in its many facets and declinations, traces its origines and presents the most recent work of the Italian artists engaged in this expressive genre. Her analysis commences from a historical perspective, embracing the entire sculpture tradition of the 20th century, and the radical changes that characterised it, then looks to the italian art panorama of the last decade, identifying original visual strategies and new interpretations of our complex reality. The thirty artists presented in Laboratorio italia - young italian sculptors, all share the awareness of combining old identities with new multicultural contexts, the practice of recovering traditional aesthetic canons with the desire to reinvent them from a new angle, and new materials. All the artists blend experimentation and tradition in their own ways, and combine their own personal stories with the Zeitgeist.