A Young Artist and His City

It is not only Mario Merz who takes time to find his way, it’s somewhat the entire culture of the environment where he lives, the city of Turin, which, with the hardships of the postwar period and reconstruction, from the late ‘40s to the late ‘50s, takes a good decade or so to become a cultural capital and a modern city, in all senses. Historians say so, and cultural historians in particular, who all note, for example, how in 1948 the city, under Communist mayor Domenico Chioggiola, refuses to acquire Peggy Guggenheim's collection: clearly not a good sign.

First there was the narrow-mindedness of Fascism, politically and culturally. Felice Casorati wields particular influence in the city’s art world; a leading figure in movements that encourage a revival of tradition in painting and sculpture, legitimizing, under the regime, an attempt to impose an official esthetic, that of the Novecento, even in its most rhetorical and celebratory variations (but a veritable official art will not arise in Italy; our artists’ greatness makes them incapable of submitting to all such impositions). And obviously, even then, there were opposing tensions, for example, in the work of Carol Rama, which already was circulating in the city, in semi-clandestine fashion.

While in Turin people were looking beyond Italy, the furthest they got was France. Those in the upper classes speak French, as do Mario and Marisa Merz, who speak it extremely well. Even after the Liberation, France remains the principal, if not the only outlet for dreams of anti-provincial emancipation on the part of many Turinese artists and intellectuals. Early on, Fauvism was the reference point for the Gruppo dei Sei Pittori, the Group of Six; these painters constituted the Turinese school that, like the Corrente artists in Milan or the Scuola Romana, showed their opposition to the style and content of Novecento precepts and official art in general through an expressionist rendering of shapes and colors.

Later, artists continue to look toward France, however, without integrating developments into their work emerging within the context of their own city. During this period, culture in general is elitist, enjoyed by a “niche” public, as we say today, without relating to ongoing political, economic and union circumstances, in a city that beginning with Fiat’s power in the early ‘50s, holds a monopoly over automobile production and is known as the Italian Detroit.

Over the course of the early ‘50s, Paul Eluard, Jean Cocteau and Albert Camus come to the city to lecture at “Literary Fridays,” while in 1952 the French bookstore opens, the first in Italy, with the participation of the actor and director Jean-Louis Barrault. From 1951 to 1961 the Associazione Italia-Francia holds seven exhibition-debates with artists from the two countries, while La Nuova Bussola Gallery, which customarily exhibits Klee and Kandinsky, changes direction, beginning in 1955, lookig beyond the Alps and hosting up to eighteen shows in a single session, all presented as small retrospectives. Hans Hartung, a Frenchified German, and Mathieu arrive, and then there are the first reactions to this visceral outpouring, seen in the work of François Morellet and the Argentine Julio Le Parc, the latter also Frenchified, followed by Nouveau Réalisme. This all entails great effort (with economically burdensome conditions imposted by the artists’ original galleries, the famous and already powerful Maeght, Jeanne Boucher and Galerie de France), and with a certain hostility on the part of widely circulated daily newspapers. We should not forget the attacks by Marziano Bernardi in La Stampa or those more high-end but equally brutal critiques that Dino Buzzati will launch from Milan a few years later, in Corriere della Sera.

Things change around 1957, a date that can be considered emblematic, at least with regard to what concerns us here. Alberto Papuzzi reminds us that it is that year that Fiat introduces the Cinquecento, the automobile-symbol of the incipient boom, the economy car conceived to be within everyone’s reach, while three years earlier, in 1955 in Geneva, Fiat had introduced the Seicento, which cost the equivalent of one year’s wages for a worker. The factory manages to attain social harmony, following the difficult years under Vittorio Valletta; and television and other status symbols of a new era arrive.

In 1957 Luciano Pistoi’s Galleria Notizie opens, and the climate begins to change in this regard as well; some of the most important international artists exhibit here, working at the height of Art Informel and the art that follows.

Here, Pinot Gallizio shows his Industrial Painting for the first time. Gallizio and Moreni, two earlier artists Merz looks at, are among those who, along with other equally decisive figures such as Piero Ruggeri, Sergio Saroni and Antonio Carena are trailblazers in Turin for an internationalism that, within a few years, will characterize the city as a true cultural capital (although recognition of the latter artists does not go beyond a local dimension). Above all, they break with the Casorati-like figurative tradition, introducing the visceral turmoil of Art Informel, wreaking havoc with well-defined, settled form, including somewhat disquieting work echoing Surrealist-inspired approaches (that of Italo Cremona, for example).

During this decade, Mario Merz is watching; a developing artist, he spends entire years at home, reading everything he can, everything that interests him. He is preparing to become an exponent of the new avant-gardes but, as we have already seen, he is not completely opposed to the past and, indeed, loves and studies art history, with a curiosity and attention decidedly unusual for that period and those generations. We have indirect testimony that Francesco Arcangeli gave a few years ago to Claudio Spadoni. In the autumn of 1945, while he was studying old painting at the Ca’ D’Oro in Venice, Arcangeli had met “an undoubtedly unique man” whose name was Mario Merz, who was then twenty years old and, the war over, was setting about to make art. Arcangeli writes that it was precisely Merz who first spoke to him about Mattia Moreni, a painter whose work he did not know yet: “Merz spoke about painting that was harsh and fantastical, expressionistic in quality, along the lines, I remember, of Dosso Dossi or Grünewald, names that excited the imagination of the likes of me, a student of Roberto Longhi!”

Now Spadoni notes, and we too wonder: how could a young man of that age risk challenging juxtapositions, not only revealing an understanding of art history, but also articulating the debate arising at that time, regarding specific art-historical themes? A knowledge of Grünewald is understandable, but Dosso Dossi and the entire rediscovery of European Mannerism was yet to come, and so it seems that Merz was up-to-date with the most specialized research being undertaken, specifically in that period between the postwar period and the ‘50s, by historians of the caliber of Giuliano Briganti and Federico Zeri (nor should we neglect a fundamental contribution dating back to 1962, L’antirinascimento by Eugenio Battisti, about whom more shall follow).

Indeed, it is thanks to them that in Italian universities today, the Mannerists are studied and considered equals of their early Renaissance forebears, and no longer producers of convoluted repetitions of out-of-date formulas. Mario Merz, just starting out as an artist, with extremely difficult beginnings and little luck, is already cultured, that is, a young man who is growing culturally along with his city.

With the accomplishments of Art Informel, Turin becomes a driving force for the most radical avant-garde of the time, and this occurs thanks to collaboration between the private and public sectors (in the sense of museum institutions, with a timely synergy that will be repeated only rarely in our country) and between gallery owners, art critics and collectors.

In 1956 Michel Tapié arrives in France; an aristocrat and relative of Toulouse-Lautrec, he had presented an exhibition of Pollock’s work in Paris in 1954, writing in the catalogue: “I am happy to toss a bomb into a sleepy city!” In Turin, which clearly was sleeping even more heavily, he will want to do likewise; along with Luigi Moretti and Ada Minola he establishes the International Center of Esthetic Research, to support art that he defines as “autre,” or art of another kind, because it is based on a gestural language of uncommon immediacy, which at the same time dissolves the very terms of the dialectic between figuration and abstraction. In Turin, he soon meets Pistoi, and the two men organize the exhibition “Arte Nuova” at the Palazzo Granieri, in collaboration with the Circolo degli Artisti and the Associazione Arti Figurative. Art by Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Sam Francis are seen for the first time in the city, and in some cases in Italy, along with works by Georges Mathieu and Antoni Tapiès from Europe.

Pistoi, by now an experienced militant critic, founds an art bulletin that he calls Notizie, like his future gallery, working with critics such as Enrico Crispolti. This is probably where he gets the idea to become an art dealer, something he will do in 1957, thanks to a sequence of events that are as accidental as they are fortunate. In Milan he gets to know the brother of Wols, then one of the directors of Agfa Color, a famous producer of color film products for photography. He consequently is able to exhibit drawings by this important German artist, another example of Frenchification and someone who had endured great hardships. Not having an actual space, he accepts a proposal from the painter Tommaso Garelli, to hold the exhibition in the latter’s studio, which is completely repainted for the occasion. The show is seen by an important collector, Carlo Frua, whose purchase of some works allows Pistoi to open his gallery and to faithfully repropose the same selection of works; Riccardo Jucker, another eminent and extremely astute and cooperative Italian collector, also visits this first exhibition at Galleria Notizie.

There is also Mario Tazzoli’s Galatea Gallery, which works to expand the outlook of the city’s art panorama, without giving up on promoting the most promising young Italians. In 1958 Tazzoli, more interested in figuration than abstraction, presents a solo show of the work of Francis Bacon, which will cause a stir. This reaction is not only a result of the English artist’s youth, but also, as Pistoi notes, because he is already a legend, as his presence in the city and the interest he arouses is followed by a timely, large retrospective at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna. Furthermore this exhibition, with the support of collectors, engenders two different and equally interesting reactions that, among other things, will profoundly influence the evolution of artistic languages, in Italy and beyond.

Bacon imposes a definitive comparison, allowing Michelangelo Pistoletto to open up to new developments, and encouraging Mario Merz to make radical progress in his art. Pistoletto and Merz are both figurative painters because they know how to belong to a tradition that is expressed through the image, and they feel they are the most recent representatives of a long cultural genealogy. But a tradition is refreshed more through transgressions that codifications, more by breaking away in a forward direction or through sideways swerves than through a unidirectional evolution.

Bacon’s imposing figuration conveys the tragic sense of life and, indeed, reactualizes the very category of the tragic in painting, being a profound meditation on the precariousness of existence. His portraits, which attain the status of emblems of human suffering, stimulate Pistoletto, who begins his significant period of mirror paintings, moving beyond the tragic sense, toward a cooling down of emotional pathos, in favor of a psycho-physical sharing on the part of the viewer and an opening up to the collective dimension of existence.

Mario is perhaps more prosaic; Bacon’s presence, which had attracted the attention of critics and collectors in Turin, that is, in Italy, becomes a burden for artists who are younger or not yet encouraged by success, if possible beyond local confines. He doesn’t mince words in this regard: “International success was Paris and to show your work you had to see certain figures with direct ties to Paris: Bussola didn’t have this, also because Bacon had closed everything off. The Agnellis, through Carluccio and Bussola, acquired Bacon’s work in Turin, and so we didn’t have anyone.”

But this is not all; there is also the fact that Bacon’s painting, like that of Picasso, forces leaps in quality, radical choices that call into question the very primacy of painting, and a comparison with similar precedents becomes exceedingly difficult. And, in fact, Pistoletto and Merz, who will become good friends, contend with figurative painting, in other words with tradition, but going further, working beyond painting itself.