Robert Rauschenberg

6 February 1963: at the age of just 30 Piero Manzoni was found dead of a heart attack in his studio in via Fiori Chiari. From that moment on his reputation as a provocateur and wild child preceded him, with his most subversive work, Artist’s Shit, elevating him to cult status. But what actually came before and lay behind those 30 grams of pure artistic output? Flaminio Gualdoni sets out to explore exactly that in this biography that traces the guiding themes of Manzoni’s works, lending order to a jumble of hitherto fragmented materials and setting aside any apocryphal hypotheses. Milan’s “dolce vita” nightlife and the artist’s youthful bike expeditions; the early experiments under Fontana, in the search for a personal style, and the partnerships with young Italian contemporaries and international avant-garde movements which brought acclaim and recognition. This fast-moving career relegates Manzoni the private individual increasingly into the background, turning the spotlight purely on Manzoni the artist. What emerges powerfully, even in his continuous, incessant experimentation with all kinds of media – from painting to designs for immersive environments – is the compact kernel of an aesthetic adventure around the very essence of the work of art. And his life, in the dual sense of everyday existence and exceptional artistic undertaking, was necessarily an integral part of this tenaciously pursued adventure. In the words of the artist: “There is nothing to say; there is only to be, to live.”

Fourth volume of the serie "Quaderni del collezionismo" edited by Pinacotaca Agnelli and published in co-edition with Johan & Levi editore.

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.

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.

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.

In a career of just twelve years, the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924 – Cologne, 1976) produced more ideas than most artists do in an entire lifetime. After devoting himself to poetry for twenty years, he abandoned it in 1964 to enter into a pact with a universe of very different values, namely the visual arts. Traversing media freely – from installation and sculpture to artist’s books, prints, film and inscriptions on aluminium panels – Broodthaers embodied the “post-media artist” for whom any form could be used in the service of an idea. The conceptions that drove his work included institutional critique (of which he was a pioneer), the debunking of art and visual puzzles. Edited by the artist’s daughter Marie-Puck Broodthaers, the book includes a vast selection of previously unpublished photographs, two important art-critical studies, a complete exhibition chronology and a select bibliography. With its 350 colour photographs, this is the most important and authoritative monograph ever published on Marcel Broodthaers.

This work in praise of the “funny guy” Francis Picabia as the inventor of Pop Art was born out of the posthumous discovery of a set of twelve ink drawings on paper that he produced in 1923. Intended as covers for André Breton’s literary revue Littérature but never published, the drawings are copies of advertisements taken from magazines and department store brochures complete with the name and price of the article concerned. Picabia added his initials to this simple advertising material, perhaps as an ironic comment on his inability to sell himself and perhaps to play down the failure of his show at the Dalmau gallery in Barcelona, which Breton witnessed. They mark a stylistic and thematic turning point with respect to the artist’s previous projects. Picabia was the first to use marketing material as a strategy of artistic subversion, elevating crude advertising to the status of artwork. He thus invented Pop Art and can be seen as a forerunner of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. The author reconstructs the context and circumstances in which the drawings were produced. The period 1922–23 saw the implosion of the Dada movement and its drift into Surrealism, the publication of Littérature as a forum for the artists and writers involved to air their sometimes conflicting views, the friendship and collaboration between Picabia and Breton, and the journey by car to Barcelona for the show at the Galerie Dalmau preceded by a lecture at the Ateneu Barcelonés. This is not a text for specialists and the author, while addressing a little-known and highly specific part of Picabia’s superabundant and kaleidoscopic oeuvre, succeeds in introducing the ordinary reader to the artist’s universe and the context in which he worked. Lebel is no denigrator of American Pop Art. Picabia’s drawings had yet to be rediscovered and were never seen by Warhol and the other Pop artists. There is thus no suggestion that the Americans “stole” the idea from him. The text is accompanied by a previously unpublished material in the shape of a letter from Picabia to Breton dated 1923 and a drawing of the same year that accompanied it.    

Woman, artist, outsider, icon: from her groundbreaking debut with Breakfast in fur, which made it into the MOMA when she was just over 20, to her lengthy and difficult quest to be cast off artistic, ideological and gender-related labels, Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) is one of the few female figures in art history famous for challenging time-honoured rules and preconceptions in the name of a genuine vocation.Her life and work were shaped by a radical outlook: no easy path, both in terms of the conformist society of the day, and the inherent sexism that characterised the artistic and literary milieu of her time. Man Ray's revered muse, Breton's irreverent protégé, a party to and exponent of the most radical experiments and most exciting artistic adventures in the twentieth century, Meret Oppenheim was a free spirit with the confidence and at times tormented originality of a natural talent.From her encounter with the theories of Carl Jung to her dazzling engagement with the surrealists; from her long struggle with depression to her magnetic attraction to Max Ernst, aged just 20; from her intense, profound artistic partnership with Alberto Giacometti to her secret and, to date, little known friendship with Marcel Duchamp, Martina Corgnati traces a faithful and intriguing portrait of a woman and artist who, following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf and Lou Salome and combating the facile stereotypes of an all-female art,  had the courage to shout out to women of every era: "Freedom will not be given to us: we have to take it for ourselves".The volume was produced with the support of Pro Helvetia.