Germano Celant Biography
Germano Celant (1940 - 2020) was the towering Italian critic, curator, and art historian whose writings, exhibitions, and scholarship altered the trajectory of contemporary art and made him a leading voice in the field. Author of hundreds of books, essays and articles that have coincided with just as many major exhibitions, Celant is closely linked to Arte Povera, a term he coined in 1967 for the association of avant-garde artists who gave meaning to banal and they challenged the symbolic function, formal conventions and commodity status of art in post-war Italian culture. Celant was born in Genoa in 1940. The early clashes between communist and neo-fascist workers would have a profound impact on Celant, whose practice was shaped by left-wing and working-class perspectives widely shared by artists in the turbulent Italy of the 1960s. At the University of Genoa, he studied with Eugenio Battisti, a historian of 16th-century Italian art who inspired the curator's notion of the "baroque vision," a concept he would later use in his ambitious multiple exhibitions. In 1963 Celant accepted a job at the cultural magazine Marcatrè, where he obtained his first bylines and eventually became editor. Four years later, Flash Art published his Notes for a Guerrilla, the manifesto that broadly articulates and founds Arte Povera, defined as "a poor art committed to contingency, to events, to the non-historical, to the present". In the same year Celant organized the watershed exhibition “Arte Povera – Im Spazio” at the La Bertesca Gallery in Genoa. The Poverists, working in Rome and Turin during a period of worker militancy, economic instability and student radicalism in the fallout of the "Italian economic miracle" pumped up by the Marshall Plan, used recycled materials and everyday objects in response to the slippery surfaces of American Pop and minimalism. Among these Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio. In 1971, Celant moved from criticism to art history and turned his attention away from Italian art toward broader practices throughout Europe and the United States. His first large-scale exhibition, “Environment/Art from Futurism to Body Art,” at the 1976 Venice Biennale, featured installations by Dan Graham, Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, and others in conversation with engaging works from the historical avant-garde, including Giacomo Balla, El Lissitzky, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. From 1988 to 2009, Celant was senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1994, Celant curated the interdisciplinary exhibition "Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968", unique at the time for its focus on fashion as a mode of cultural expression. In 1993 he became artistic director of the Prada Foundation, where, in addition to organizing exhibitions dedicated to first-rate artists, he organized experimental exhibitions such as “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943” and his 2013 revisiting of Harald Szeemann’s seminal 1969 exhibition on minimalist and process art, “When Attitudes Become Form.” Celant was also artistic director and curator of the Aldo Rossi Foundation in Milan; curator of the Vedova Foundation of Venice; curator of art and architecture at La Triennale di Milano; and, since 1981, contributing editor of Artforum.
