‘Poor’ art at high prices

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At Christie's Eyes Wide Open sale of Arte Povera, some of the prices were certainly eye-opening

Rosalind McKever reports on a recent sale

Arte Povera (literally ‘poor art’), a term coined by the Italian art critic Germano Celant in 1967, refers to a tendency to break down the difference between art and life through experimentation with everyday materials and performative art works. Despite the name this ‘poor’ art has been attracting record prices. In February 2014 a major collection of art focused on Arte Povera sold at Christie’s for an impressive £38.5 million. The following day Sotheby’s included works by precursors of the Arte Povera movement in its Contemporary Art Evening Sale, with Alberto Burri’s Rosso plastica (1963) selling for over £3.5million. This increased interest is partly due to recent major exhibitions. Burri and major Arte Povera artists including Alighiero Boetti,  Michelangelo Pistoletto and Pino Pascali have all been exhibited at a range of prestigious London galleries, respectively the Estorick Collection, Tate Modern and the Serpentine, and the Camden Art Centre. Celant himself has also orchestrated an international focus through the restaging of the seminal 1969 conceptual art exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form’, which included works by the protagonists of Arte Povera, at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

The breadth and quality of the ‘Eyes Wide Open’ sale is unlike anything previously seen in the UK. The star of the show is arguably Pistoletto’s Lui e Lei – Mario e Michelangelo (1968), one of his influential mirror paintings, which set a new world record price for the artist at auction, just shy of £2 million. Looking at the work, you find yourself reflected in the intimate space of Pistoletto and his wife, who gaze intently at each other, foreheads touching. Francis Outred, international director and head of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Christie’s Europe, considers this work apposite for the couple who amassed this important collection through his passion and her research.

The piece was first shown in 1968 at Galleria L’Attico, where in 1969 Jannis Kounellis  exhibited 12 live horses. Kounellis is represented in this collection by an 1988 ‘Untitled’ work featuring burlap sacks of rice, coffee, flour, corn, broad bean and green peas, each stapled to an iron wall by metal planks, squeezed yet almost overflowing. The sacks, reminiscent of those exhibited by the artist at ‘When Attitudes Become Form’, indicate the artist’s engagement with poor and agricultural materials after Italy’s economic miracle, the period of sustained economic growth Italy enjoyed after the ravaging of the Second World War. The irony that Kounellis’ 1968 untitled work made of metal, jute and wool sold for over double its £500,000 estimate is not lost. Alighiero Boetti too reached extraordinary prices with his 1974 colour embroideries Addition and Subtraction, and his Rosso Gilera 60 1232–Rosso Guzzi 60 1305 (1967–1) each selling for over £1.5 million, and his beautifully conserved biro drawing The Six Senses (1974–5), going for £1.3 million.

Arte Povera did also embrace luxury and man-made materials. Luciano Fabro’s Piede (1970–1), one of his series of claw-like feet, brings together polished bronze (his only bronze work in the series) with a column of exquisite bright blue silk, hanging from the ceiling, almost like a trouser leg. Mario Merz’s sculptures demonstrate how Arte Povera artists also juxtaposed the natural and the manmade. In Untitled (1982) a taxidermy deer head is placed in the middle of a neon Fibonacci sequence (a numerical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers; leaves are often spaced on plants in this way). The work of Merz’s wife Marisa, who received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale 2013, went to auction for the first time in the UK at this sale. With her 1974 wax-based Chivas Regal, her 1986 drawing and her 1997 Fountain, the works map her diverse career, but is yet to receive the recognition it deserves on the international stage, or high prices in the sale room, although one hopes the earliest of her works may have been sold to a museum.

Arte Povera also sought to question the rules of art making. Giulio Paolini’s Antologia is made of two canvases facing each other, the stretcher of one visible to the spectator. It is decorated with invitations to all the contemporary art shows in Turin in 1974, including Gerhard Richter,  Joseph Beuys and Cy Twombly.   Arte Povera’s subversive nature is also evident in Pino Pascali’s Torso di Negra al Bagno (Nascita di Venere) (1964–5) a freestanding two-metre-tall black canvas inflated with balloons to make the form of a female torso clad in a black bikini. The piece not only questions our expectations of a Venus but the boundary between painting and sculpture.

The collection on sale was strong not only in Arte Povera, but also the artists who inspired it. Pascali’s engagement with the boundary between painting and sculpture can trace its roots to Lucio Fontana’s slashed and punctured canvases; the sale included the first of his punctured works to be made on a red canvas. Alberto Burri   also experimented with the performative possibilities of painting and with unusual materials, such as plastic and celotex. Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani’s explorations of the possibilities of white are also represented, the latter achieving prices way above estimates.  Gianni Colombo’s Strutturazione pulsante (1959) a kinetic grid of off-white polystyrene blocks, reached the second-highest price for the artist at auction.

Lesser-known artists were also included, with mixed results at auction. Piero Gilardi’s eccentric 1999 work Bio-feedback, in which seven plastic faux rocks vibrate to the viewer’s heartbeat (via the pulse monitor) may be entertaining, but failed to sell. Francesco Lo Savio’s subtly graduated canvas, Space Light (1959) set a new record for the artist at auction, hitting £1.1 million, about four times its estimate. His work is clearly emulated in the Anish Kapoor Void (1993) from the same collection. The collectors’ interest in contemporary international art influenced by Arte Povera, including Twombly, Tony Cragg,  Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Kosuth,   emphasizes the importance of post-war Italian art.

That a collection so lovingly put together has been dissolved through the international art world seems sad. One hopes that the attention paid to the fascinating art of this period will increase awareness of these stimulating, thought-provoking and often witty artists. In future, the increasingly astronomical prices may become the headline for ‘poor art’.