This post was originally published on artnews.com
In his 1967 article “Notes for Guerrilla Warfare,” the art critic Germano Celant (1940–2020) coined the term “Arte Povera,” describing the movement as full of revolutionary potential. Championing artists like Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, he showed how their work rejected the capitalist system of production and consumption. By embracing unconventional ephemeral forms and materials—cardboard, wood, newspaper, and cubes of earth—these artists broke free from the confines of the art market, along the way critiquing the consumerism that had taken hold of postwar Italy.
In contrast, the exhibition “Arte Povera” at the Bourse de Commerce | Pinault Collection in Paris, assembling more than 250 works, one-third of them drawn from the collection of François-Henri Pinault—France’s third-richest man—argues, in both the exhibition literature in a tour for the press, that the Italian post-minimal movement was concerned with energy flows and with the connection between humanity and nature, that it focused on material and experiential practices for their own sake. To be sure, these are key aspects of Arte Povera. Still, this exhibition omits much of the political and social context that defined the movement and postwar Italy more broadly.
Arte Povera responded directly to Italy’s postwar economic boom, aided by the US Marshall Plan. During that time, northern cities like Turin and Milan industrialized rapidly, leading to mass migration from the south. By the late 1960s, Cold War tensions were escalating, and the Italian Communist Party was gaining significant political influence, earning 12.6 million votes in the 1976 general election. During these “Years of Lead” (late 1960s–late ’80s), terrorist paramilitary groups—some covertly supported by the NATO project Gladio—battled police, bombed train stations, and even murdered the Christian Democrat President Aldo Moro.
Meanwhile, the United States’ economic and cultural postwar dominance grew. In 1964 Robert Rauschenberg won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, the world’s most prestigious art award, granted on Italy’s home turf. Arte Povera was in this context a grassroots reaction to art imported, along with Marshall Plan aid and the American way of life, and actively promoted by the CIA. None of this is mentioned in the Parisian show. Arte Povera artists sought not only to create an art of primordial energies, they were also critiquing the crude gestures of Abstract Expressionism, the slick consumerism of Pop, and the stodgy rigidity of Minimalism and Socialist Realism.
This double character of Arte Povera—artistic innovation intertwined with political critique—is visible in the artworks, even if the curators underplay it. In the vestibule, Marisa Merz’s untitled fountain from 1997 spews water from a wax violin placed at the center of a lead basin. To the Pinault Collection’s credit, Marisa occupies space equal to her male counterparts here, after long being overshadowed in the history of Arte Povera by her husband, Mario.
The neon light of Mario Merz’s Che Fare? (1968), displayed in the museum’s rotunda, asks Vladimir Lenin’s famous question: “What is to be done?” While the wall text notes this allusion, it chiefly discusses the work’s conservation, mentioning how the heat of the neon melts wax that must be replaced periodically, and bypassing deeper reflections on how Mario Merz, the most politicized of the Arte Povera artists, drew inspiration from revolutionary politics.
Other radical allusions appear in works like Kounellis’s untitled 1969 piece, which features a candle and a plaque with the words LIBERTÀ O MORTE W MARAT W ROBESPIERRE, referring to the Jacobin martyrs of the French Revolution. Mario Merz’s Igloo di Giap (1968) features a neon inscription quoting North Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp: “If the enemy concentrates, he loses ground; if he disperses, he loses strength.” On the museum’s upper level, Luciano Fabro’s L’Italia (1968), an iron cutout of the map of Italy suspended upside down by a steel cable, evokes the death of fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who was hung by his heels. Works like this underline Arte Povera’s unmistakable connection to left-wing politics, but again, the wall text dismisses them decisively, stating that though the work “might at the time have suggested a political commentary against nationalism … that was not among the artist’s intentions.” It stops short of accounting for the artist’s choice of nation-state as form, instead emphasizing material details over any political resonance.
Alongside such explicitly political works, other pieces offer more nuanced critiques of modernity. Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venere degli stracci (1967) juxtaposes a classical Venus statue with a heap of rags, symbolizing the clash between Italy’s rich artistic heritage and the wastefulness of consumer capitalism. Giovanni Anselmo’s untitled 1968 work—a rectangular granite block “eating” a head of cabbage—lampoons the self-seriousness of American Minimalism.
This selective historical context points to a larger trend within the Pinault Collection’s program, and the depoliticization reflects the broader absorption of radical art into the commercial art world. Once a critique of capitalist excess, many works of Arte Povera have now become luxury objects, displayed in a museum funded by one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
The transformation of Arte Povera into a commodity raises an uncomfortable question: can radical art movements still challenge the system when they get subsumed by it? The exhibition at the Pinault Collection, about an art movement that sought to challenge both the art market and societal norms, serves as a reminder of the limitations of revolutionary art working within a system that absorbs and commodifies dissent.