A Monumental Arte Povera Survey in a Parisian Palace of Wealth Sidesteps Anti-Capitalist Critiques
Mario Merz: Che fare?, 1968.Photo Nicolas Brasseur. Courtesy Pinault Collection
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.
