Christian Stein Collection A History of Italian Art
JANNIS KOUNELLIS Sin título, 1969. Margherita Stein Collection. Courtesy: IVAM
Behind a collection there exist personal points of view, attractions and phobias, temporary events and explanations which have to do with the circumstances of the art market. But beyond these aspects, the avidity that every collector feels hides a way of reconstructing the world, a selection where curiositas is the beginning of the obsession or the pleasure in the discovered object.
In this “tracking down” it might be remembered how, in the 19th century, history was assisted by philology, and archaeology, because the spaces of a period had to be named. This is what happened with Margherita Stein’s collection (which had the name and surname of her husband), which –as Jean Louis Maubant1 said– created a “centripetal” gallery, which assembled around exhibitions, performances and the evening debates of many intellectuals and artists, especially those we identify with Arte Povera.
So appears the exhibition record of a heterogeneous group, begun by a meaningful dialogue between Fontana and Melotti, and going on to great central characters like Fabro and Merz, experiencing happy surprises, like the reconstruction of the Boetti exhibition in Turin in 1967. This leads the spectator to be submerged in different states of a common concern, where less well known artists like Uncini, Lo Savio or Colla mix without complexes with Pistoletto, Kounellis, Manzoni... even giving cause for eloquent conversations, like those which have taken place over the years between Mario and Marisa Merz. In this way, a historic reconstruction is formed which achieves a harmonious succession of works which, however, loudly shouted out in their time. So, one detects –as Francisco Jarauta points out– a first reading which “allows us to enter the extensive debate of ideas which, in a plural way, went through the different artistic disciplines from the end of the 1950s and which addresses the concepts and strategies
that began to be delineated for the construction of a post-industrial civilization, the basis of that of today”. Art systems, social analysis and critical policy must be
understood then as being indissolubly united to well-known formal developments of different spatialism arguments, the simplification of processes within the relation between the object and its configuration and that “impoverishment of signs, reducing them to archetypes”, that Germano Celant was to popularize about Arte Povera, to end by talking about the symbolization of the merchandise; an explosion that, however, had already been assumed and institutionalized within the art market.
However, in these other sons of 1968 that conceptual radicalism is still detected within the European version of the end of the avant-garde groups, as was posed by Celant. This is a journey which, although it is centred in the 1960s and 1970s, also takes in the constant evolution of the language of its protagonists, coming closer to our time. They are the principal drifts of one of the great movements of the end of the 20th century in Italy, a difficult period to review, as was demonstrated in Italics, the controversial exhibition curated by Bonami, where some self-exclusions occurred, such as that of Kounellis, or the Celant exhibition in the Guggenheim of New York. But this exhibition is the product of the tastes of Margherita Stein, and for that reason there are absences like that of Burri, regarded in Italy as an artist who is closer to informalism and lyrical abstraction, but with whom an interesting dialogue could undoubtedly be established. In short, this is a personal and privileged gaze at one of the most extreme movements, outside the conventionalisms of recent decades, that is now being shown as a posthumous tribute to Jean Louis Maubant.
1.- Jean Louis Maubant, curator of this exhibition along with Francisco Jarauta, died on the 15th of September, 2010, just a month before the inauguration.
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