Germano Celant, the Towing Italian Art Critic Who Gave the World Arte Povera, Has Died at Age 80 From Coronavirus Complications

The widely influential Italian
art historian, critic, and curator Germano Celant, who coined the
term Arte Povera to describe the radically economical art
of Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz, and Giuseppe
Penone, among others, has died at age 80 in Milan due to
complications from the coronavirus.

His death, which was reported by various Italian news outlets,
followed his hospitalization at San Raffaele hospital several
weeks ago.

He began exhibiting symptoms after returning home from New York,
where he had visited the Armory Show, according to the Italian
publication Artibune.

The eminent
curator launched his career in 1967 when he published his Arte
Povera manifesto, “Notes for a Guerilla War,” in Flash
Art magazine, where he championed the work of artists who made
“poor art, committed to contingency, to events, to the
non-historical, to the present.”

Arte Povera—largely a response
to Italy’s post-war industrial culture and economy—contrasted with
the bright colors and commercial sensibility of the American
Pop Art movement. Celant cast his favored artists, who
used unconventional materials such as plywood and rags in their
work, in political
terms. In the background, as Celant was writing his
polemics, a recession
in Italy hampered what was previously a period of sustained
economic growth, and students influenced by Marx were protesting at
universities.

As he helped to establish the careers of anti-establishment
artists in the 1960s and ’70s, Celant climbed the ranks of the art
world in an increasingly distinguished career.

In 1997, he curated the Venice
Biennale, and also held roles as a curator at the Guggenheim, a
contributing editor of Artforum and Interview
magazines, and was the artistic director of the Prada Foundation in
Milan at the time of his death.

“I don’t feel like a man of power,” he once said. “I’ve always
been interested in the power of art. Artists know that: that’s why
they trust me.”

Celant was born in Genoa in
1940. He studied art history at the University of Genoa with the
critic Eugenio Battisti, with whom he later worked at the art and
design magazine Marcatrè, which was founded by a group of
critics including Umberto Eco.

Celant’s exhibition “Im Spazio,”
which was mounted at Genoa’s Galleria La Bertesca in 1967, is often
seen as the beginning of the Arte Povera movement. Among his many
other significant exhibitions was a 1993 show at the Prada
Foundation in which he reimagined “When Attitudes Become Form,”
Harald Szeemann‘s
influential 1969 show. Other significant exhibitions by Celant
included “Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968,” which was staged at
the Guggenheim in New York. 

“The loss of Germano Celant is a
catastrophe,” Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of the Castello
di Rivoli museum in Turin, wrote in a
Tweet. “One of the most
serious people in the art world, of the most intelligent,
profound.”

The post Germano Celant, the Towing Italian Art Critic Who
Gave the World Arte Povera, Has Died at Age 80 From Coronavirus
Complications appeared first on artnet News.