Catalogue

There was once the easel painting with a solid frame and a complete perspective system in which a illusion of reality was embedded. Then the Impressionist landscapes appeared on the horizon and began to give instructions to viewers as to where they must stand, the right distance for observation and the attitude to be adopted. But this was not the end. The huge canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, fraught with vital tension, expanded still further laterally and came to break through the border. The frame, now reduced to a parenthesis, dissolved to liberate illusion and its function was transferred as though by magic to the exhibition space. The time was ripe for Marcel Duchamp to hang 1,200 coal sacks from the ceiling of Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938 and stand the visitors on their heads. For the first time the exhibition space was treated as a box, a display window to manipulate. Duchamp’s gesture “dispatches the bull of history with a single thrust”. The years go by and, as in an echo chamber, it will appear more successful all the time. The white cube begins to devour the object. The context upstages the work exhibited and becomes a “chamber of transformation” that turns whatever enters it into art. The gallery can also remain empty, be filled with rubbish, remain closed for the entire period of the show, simulate a space of real life, be wrapped with tarpaulin and rope together with the entire museum building, host tableaux vivants or shocking happenings. The same scenes would probably not attract the slightest attention outside the white cube, but inside it even our everyday life – the café, the bedroom, the service station – becomes art, an experience that goes beyond looking. As though on board a spaceship, scrutinizing the Earth as it disappears on the horizon, Brian O’Doherty reconstructs a history of the art of the 20th century from the perspective of the evolution of the exhibition space, now to be regarded as the undisputed arena of discourse.

Like a virulent virus that spreads like wildfire, art collecting can lead those infected to authentic excesses like clearing out their homes to make room for works and spending entire fortunes through a longing for possession so strong as to become irresistible. What strikes the spark? A bent for financial speculation, pure intellectual delight or the desire to become someone by building up social prestige on the foundations of art. While there are many possible reasons and approaches, from militancy to passion, putting together a collection is in any case a pathway of self-knowledge and discovery. Il piacere dell’arte offers an overview of contemporary collecting in Italy, which has become an increasingly authoritative undertaking in recent times by virtue not only of the enterprise and initiative involved but also of the ever-greater planning that characterizes many collections. Starting from the fundamental historical background and an examination of the fertile terrain out of which outstanding figures like Giorgio Franchetti, Giuseppe Panza and Marcello Levi emerged and arriving at their contemporary counterparts, the book also seeks to identify the causes of the “lack of modernity” of Italian collecting, hampered by heritage restrictions and one of Europe’s highest rates of VAT. While these bureaucratic and fiscal impediments work on the one hand to obstruct dialogue with the institutions (unlike what happens across the Atlantic, where donations to museums are incentivized by tax relief), on the other they give rise to the strong development of private initiative and foster the opening of numerous foundations to the public. This is the most peculiar feature of the Italian panorama, a complex and multifaceted reality whose potential proves all the more interesting to examine by virtue of its social aspects and organic character.

Paris, 1 July 1867, the inauguration of the Universal Exposition. With the end of the American Civil War, the landscape painters, members of the first authentic American school, returned to Europe convinced that they deserved praise, prizes and medals. Rather than acclaim, however, it was bitter humiliation that awaited them. The French critics shattered their dreams of glory with cruel, sarcastic comments on the large canvases crammed with majestic waterfalls, age-old trees and boundless horizons, pouring scorn on the best that a nation eager to assert itself in the arts as in the economic field had to offer. The American exhibition, said the French, “is unworthy of the sons of Washington … young and crude, in the midst of our old cultures it gives the impression of a giant lost in a dancehall”. The unexpected humiliation led first of all to self-examination and criticism. Why was the land of Melville and Poe unable to produce painters with the expressive power of its greatest writers? What should the painters of a young nation do to earn the respect of the Old World? Was it possible to bridge the abyss between them and European art? For the time being there was no choice. They were forced to bow to the tastes of the French, the undisputed arbiters of world painting. In actual fact, the Parisian failure of 1867 became a stimulus that prompted the “sons of Washington” to transform the defeat suffered into a challenge. American painters set off for France in their hundreds and settled in Paris, where they attend the course of masters like Gérôme and Cabanel. They then founded new “colonies” of artists, like the legendary one at Pont-Aven in Brittany. The success of the greatest amongst them, including Whistler, Sargent and Cassatt, paved the way for a host of others. Backed at home by the colossal resources of philanthropists and patrons of the arts as well as extraordinary museums such as the MoMA in New York, they succeeded in surpassing Paris in the space of two generations and making America the new home of art, the pulsating centre of world painting that was also to attract renowned French artists. The epic tale of American painters recounted by Cohen-Solal moves from Paris to New York, Giverny to Chicago and Pont-Aven to Taos. The turning point came with the 1948 Venice Biennial and the first-ever exhibition in Europe of eight canvases by a largely unknown artist, namely Jackson Pollock, soon to be acclaimed all over the world as the first absolute master of American painting.

Conceptual Art was one of the most important movements of the second half of the 20th century. Starting from its origins in the 1960s and the principles formulated by Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, Alberro addresses specifically its New York trajectory through the career of Seth Siegelaub, who unquestionably played a key role. An eccentric, multifaceted art dealer, Siegelaub employed wholly unconventional methods of promotion to support artists who seemed to create works out of nothing, sponsored them with shrewd and diplomatic business acumen, and paved the way for the appearance of a new type of actor on the art scene, the freelance curator. Alexander Alberro offers an unprecedented overview of materials and reviews regarding the most important works, embedding Conceptual Art in the social context of rebellion against traditional cultural institutions, commercialization and the dawn of the globalized world. A new perspective emerges, however, from his meticulous reconstruction. In actual fact, this movement had no intention whatsoever of rejecting the market but rather aimed at revolutionizing and conquering it. It was to this end, for example, that Siegelaub founded Image Art Programs for Industry Inc., a firm that used contemporary art to confer added value on companies seeking social visibility, and drew up the Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sales Agreement, a new type of contract aimed at limiting the overwhelming power of collectors, galleries and museums and increasing the rights of artists. In the end, this instrument involuntarily set the seal on the wedding of art and capitalism.

Belgrade, 1974: Marina Abramović set fire to a monumental five-pointed star, the symbol of the Tito regime, and laid down inside it until she was overcome by the fumes and fell unconscious. Naples, one year later: the artist challenged the public to use any of the objects laid out on a table on her resolutely passive body and one spectator pointed a loaded gun at her throat. New York, 2002: she lived and fasted for twelve days in a suspended structure set up in the Sean Kelly Gallery, drawing sustenance only from the fascinated gaze of spectators who watched her drink, sleep, wash and urinate. James Westcott was one of them and this was his first encounter with the self-proclaimed “grandmother of the Performance Art”. It is also the opening scene of Quano Marina Abramović morirà, an intimate biography of an artist who has been flirting with death for forty years by using her body as the focal point of legendary performances. Launching herself into performance art initially meant rebelling against a “militarized” upbringing under the tyrannical control of a mother who imposed Communist cultural dictates and never kissed her. The complete break with Belgrade and take-off of her career began after she met the German artist Ulay. Together they toured Europe in a Citroën van transformed into a mobile home and staged performances laying bare an extreme symbiosis that culminated in Nightsea Crossing, repeated ninety times in five years, which involved them sitting immobile and gazing into one another’s eyes for seven consecutive hours across a table. In their last performance as a duo, they set off walking from either end of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle three months later and say goodbye. Again a solo artist and soon to receive the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennial, Abramović finally arrived in the limelight of New York, from where still dominates the international art scene. She has often been asked whether she has ever been afraid of dying during her daring actions. She answers, “What if I do? Life is a dream and the death an awakening. We should rather think about how precious our existence is and the senseless way we waste it.”

Bacon’s reaction on being asked by Daniel Farson whether he was happy to have won a place on the Olympus of art was one of sincere indifference. He cared nothing for the tinsel of fame, still less for posterity, and often remarked that we are nothing at all once we are dead. He did not believe in God, morality or love but described himself nevertheless as an optimist. An optimist of nothingness living on the feelings of the moment. Life is so senseless that you may as well make something extraordinary of it. This Nietzschean paradox also guides an approach to painting marked by the ability to take advantage of the creative accident, as when he threw paint at random onto the canvas to see what would come out of it. Like a tightrope walker poised between abstraction and figuration, Bacon combined intentional fortuity with the calculation of a gambler. He went against the tide of artistic fashion, which embraced abstract art in that period. He sought to paint the tragic beauty of life, and if he distorted the human figure it was only in order to extract a greater and more violent truth. A similar intent seems to animate this book, vivid personal recollection rather than official biography, which unearths material collected firsthand during a friendship that began in a club in Soho in 1951 and lasted over forty years. Farson’s is a stark, unvarnished portrait of an artist of extremes, capable of great love and fierce hatred, immense magnanimity and pitiless slander. Between a bottle of champagne and a caustic comment, we follow his madcap forays between the gutter and the Ritz, which always ended up in Soho, the bohemian quarter of London, the second home – if not the first – of writers and artists who drowned their talent in alcohol. Bacon’s descent into the homosexual underworld was paralleled by his irresistible artistic ascent. The works marked by the explosion of a raging sexuality were to go down in history as masterpieces, but whenever he was asked what he did, he would say that he was just an old queer.

Death has always deeply fascinated mankind, a source of angst that has dominated artworks and the human imagination since time immemorial. Every era abounds with symbols for the transient nature of our earthly existence, but one stands out above all: the skull, that often “meditative” simulacrum that warns us of the futility of all worldly things and forces us to ponder the meaning of life. The definitive emblem of Vanitas, the skull crops up in Medieval imagery, topping off putrefying bodies that lie in wait for careless wayfarers. Stripped of its flesh, down to the bare bone, in the Renaissance the skeleton began the rise towards its seventeenth century pinnacle. Yet subsequently this image encountered varying fortunes. In the eighteenth century it lost most of its macabre connotations with the resurgence of subgenres connected to the memento mori, yet without dissipating its power. And while in the nineteenth century it made a half-hearted return, it was in the twentieth century that it regained much of its previous popularity. The turn of the millennium saw it on the crest of the wave, with skulls and skeletons once more dominating the visual arts. However this exponential increase in popularity, in quantity rather than quality, did not automatically correspond to a renewed power: art appears to be inured to the point of insensitivity to the image of the skull. Inert, incapable of inspiring fear or imposing a moral agenda, the death’s head appears to have lost all its previous emphasis. This is the diagnosis reached by the author of Frenologia della vanitas after a long and complex exploration that seeks out unusual combinations and forges connections between past and present, styles and periods. The decision not to adopt a chronological structure or other forms of classification enables the arguments to develop rhizomatically, played out against the author’s underlying apprehension for the future of the skull.

The book presents 78 photographs that Pier Paolo Pasolini commissioned Dino Pedriali to take over two sessions of two days each at his two houses in Chia and Sabaudia in the second week of October 1975. According to the photographer, Pasolini intended to use them in his last novel, Petrolio, which was published posthumously. Pedriali was to met Pasolini to show him the photos on 2 November 1975, the very same day when the poet’s body was found on the beach at Ostia. As in a film, the images take us with agonizing intensity into the life of the eclectic intellectual, his moments of work and recreation, writing, correcting and drawing, in his medieval hideaway or wandering through the streets. Some are taken from outside the house, penetrating the intimacy of Pasolini’s room to show him naked in a game of studied surprise and unawareness devised by the photographer and his subject so as to give the impression of “stolen” shots. Conjuring up the imagery and poetics of Pasolini’s films, these previously unpublished photographs bearing witness to his legacy and the artistic talent of Dino Pedriali thus become part of our shared heritage.

Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960-70, the first show organized by the Rome-based association Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, founded by Graziella Lonardi Buontempo, initiated a major effort to promote contemporary art, both Italian and foreign. The 33 artists featured are now emblematic of Italian art in the 1960s and ’70s: Vincenzo Agnetti, Carlo Alfano, Getulio Alviani, Franco Angeli, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Agostino Bonalumi, Davide Boriani, Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele De Vecchi, Luciano Fabro, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Jannis Kounellis, Francesco Lo Savio, Renato Mambor, Piero Manzoni, Gino Marotta, Manfredo Massironi, Fabio Mauri, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Vettor Pisani, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mimmo Rotella, Piero Sartogo, Paolo Scheggi, Mario Schifano, Cesare Tacchi, Giuseppe Uncini and Gilberto Zorio. Ugo Mulas, the photographer most closely involved with the international art scene at the time, was commissioned to cover the event, which he did in his unmistakable style. The 130 photographs taken, which remained largely unpublished on their author’s death at an early age, now appear in this volume some forty years later. They capture the artists, the installations and the visitors in an extraordinarily lucid photographic reading a crucial exhibition for Italian contemporary art. The book also provides useful insight into the history of photography, shedding light on the photographer’s work and his dialogue with artists. It was during the show’s inauguration that Mulas took one of the first shots of the “Verifications” series, regarded as among the most important photographic works of the period in terms of formal rigour and analysis of the medium.

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.

Pino Pascali blazed like a shooting star in the history of Italian art. Born in Bari in 1935 and killed just thirty-three years later in a car crash, he is regarded as one of Italy’s most innovative avant-garde artists of the post-war period together with Boetti and Manzoni. Despite his very short career, he won almost unanimous acclaim in his lifetime through the staggering originality of his talent. In 1968, a few months after his death, the Venice Biennial devoted a room to his work and posthumous recognition soon followed with a series of international prizes and shows in the most illustrious museums of contemporary art. His work now sells for millions. This book focuses solely on Pascali’s plastic art of the period 1964–68 with brief mentions of his activities in the spheres of advertising, stage design, drawing and performance. In defining the formal processes of his sculpture, Tonelli deliberately eschews exegetic stratifications designed to mythicize the artist and impede effective understanding of his work. Setting aside all curiosity about Pascali as a man and his legend, the author examines his work in thematic and chronological terms, addresses the numerous interpretations put forward by critics and uses Pascali’s own statements to redefine the field of action and meaning of his visual language and trace its origins and precedents. While Magritte, Savinio and De Chirico constitute inescapable points of reference, Pascali is embedded in a wholly contemporary context, playful, iconoclastic and adaptable, looking forward to some avant-garde movements of the period and possessing an intuitive grasp of the relations between exhibition space, the theatrical nature of exhibition and the limits of sculpture. The book thus attempts the necessary operation of freeing Pino Pascali from his own myth and correcting a partial and misleading image. The reader will discover that the artist’s work is far less ingenuous, child-like, primordial and wild than previously believed.

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.