Magazzino Italian Art Foundation's Germano Celant Research Center serves as a resource for scholars and students. It offers an extensive library and archive of publications on a wide array of subjects, including Italian art, postwar and contemporary art, design, architecture, and Murano Glass. The collection provides a special focus on the Arte Povera movement, with nearly 1,000 books on the subject available to researchers. Magazzino Italian Art offers researchers the unique opportunity to both read the most important scholarship on Arte Povera as well as view the artworks on-site. Currently, the Germano Celant Research Center has over 5,000 publications, with 330 of those being rare book and archival material such as photographs, invitations, and posters.
The Research Center honors the life of Germano Celant, renowned art historian, critic, and curator—one of the most influential figures in postwar and contemporary Italian art. In 1967, at the age of 27, Celant curated a group exhibition including seminal poveristi at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa entitled Arte Povera-Im Spazio. This exhibition marked the beginning of the Arte Povera movement, an artistic investigation of unconventional and commonplace materials that challenged traditional media—echoing a new reality of postwar life and politics in their country.
A priority of the Germano Celant Research Center is to continue to actively develop the collection, with new purchases and gifts added daily to its holdings. The Research Center’s database is searchable for on-site researchers, and the collection’s holdings are also exported to the web-based library network WorldCat, where they are visible through targeted searches.
The Germano Celant Research Center is also equipped with state-of-the-art scanner technology, the KIC Bookeye 4, which is sensitive enough to scan archival material at 600 dpi resolution and allows for scholars to scan and send JPG or PDF files directly to their computers.
Magazzino Italian Art Foundation launched a Scholar-in-Residence program, hosted by the Research Center and now in its fifth year.
Students, faculty, and scholars are welcome to contact info@magazzino.art with their research inquiries.