Poor Art, Rich Rewards

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Arte Povera, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 9 October–20 January 2025.

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From 9 October to 20 January, the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris is hosting a major survey of arte povera, a term coined by critic Germano Celant to describe a group of Italian artists working in the late 1960s, predominantly in Turin, Milan, Genoa and Rome. Often translated as ‘poor art’, the spirit of arte povera has tended to be surmised via its proponents’ predilection for creating works from inexpensive raw materials – both natural (soil, jute, wood, wool) and industrial (aluminium, copper mesh, neon tubing).

‘Plain art’ might be a better translation: the artists gathered under the arte povera banner were working to strip away the conventional trappings of traditional art forms, and, in the process, to challenge the institutional structures in which those art forms exist. In place of the frame and other material supports that clearly delineate an artwork from its surroundings, they favoured the installation and with that, a different experience of the space of an artwork for the viewer. The other major impetus of arte povera was a counter-cultural critique of the rise of rampant consumerism, the destructive forces of industrialisation and the increasingly difficult cohabitation of human industry and the natural world.

I visited the exhibition on a Monday afternoon, when the rest of the world was at work, when men in smart shoes and women with improbably taught skin wove their way past sculptures made of hay bales, leaving in their wake the smell of perfume by brands that don’t spend money on mass market advertising. Maybe this didn’t help ease the disconnect between the original political thrust of the artworks and their new-found setting at the Bourse de Commerce. While the exhibition does not linger on this point, the city’s former commodities exchange makes for an interesting backdrop to arte povera. The Bourse was a place where raw materials – grain, sugar, coffee – were traded and later transformed into complex financial products, making it something of a figurehead of the same forces of industry that the artists set out to critique.

Some works, particularly those that may once have served up a punchy, readily accessible visual metaphor, feel dated.

Paris City Hall bought the Bourse de Commerce and in 2016 agreed to rent it out on a 50-year lease to French billionaire François Pinault, a man who knows all about complex financial products. Since 2021, the building has housed his extensive art collection, where members of the public can peruse it for a fee. A significant share of the works on display in the current exhibition (a fifth, by my calculation) are from Pinault’s own personal collection. Or, if we want to be specific about it, Pinault Collection SAS, owned by the holding company Financière Pinault SCA, which also controls luxury group Kering, Christie’s auction house, and numerous other assets.

Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the exhibition is neatly and intuitively devised. In the building’s main rotunda, visitors are immersed from the off in a collection of works by 13 of the movement’s key figures which are – to use that dreaded term – ‘in dialogue’. A wall panel informs visitors that this arrangement seeks to capture the spirit of early arte povera exhibitions in Turin, where artists were free to install their work sprawled across the floor, without formal constraints and accentuating the ‘importance of horizontality’.

Under the rotunda’s sweeping ceilings, it is hard to shake off the initial impression of a hodge podge of randomly assorted scrap scattered about at whim – which of course it isn’t – but when you place art that aspires to be horizontal into a context that is at once architecturally and institutionally vertical, that’s the risk. Proponents of arte povera, the panel continues, conceived of the artwork not as ‘a painting nor a sculpture, but a field of energy and a place to be transversed’. A small metal barrier ringfencing the central display ensures that no transversing will be taking place at the Bourse de Commerce. Elsewhere, stickers on the floor demarcate the space that visitors cannot cross – an institutional inevitability at a gallery that received upwards of half a million visitors in its first year and has major works on loan from other museums, with their attendant insurance contracts.

Around the edges of the rotunda, a series of wooden display cases trace arte povera’s precursors and inspirations, from Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, to the Situationist International and the experimental theatre of Antonin Artaud. Spaces in the basement and higher levels showcase the movement’s key figures (Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Giuseppe Penone, to name just three), leading up to the top floor, where we see the artists influenced in turn by the moment.

Arte povera and its afterlife strike me as exemplary of the fate of counter-current movements.

There are works that have stood the test of time. Penone’s carved tree trunks manage to distil through sculpture the perennial majesty of the firs and cedars that they both subtract from and add to. A rather beautiful 1979 wall piece by Marisa Mertz, the one woman in the group, sees squares of copper wire suspended on nails. It is a subtler work than Crocodilus Fibonacci (1972) by her husband, Mario Mertz, exhibited in the same room, whose fusion of nature (stuffed crocodile) and culture/civilisation (neon Fibonacci sequence) leaves less room for interpretation.

One of the rare times that the show does encourage viewer participation is with Gilberto Zorio’s Microfoni (1968), where numerous microphones hang suspended from the ceiling and breeze blocks on the floor serve as makeshift platforms. On my Monday visit, an Italian man in an anorak started singing with his eyes closed. His partner, looking very much like this was not her first rodeo, took out her phone and began filming. Smart shoes swivelled quickly towards exits, and for a brief moment, it was the emptiest room in the gallery. That moment also captured the real thrust of arte povera, which was perhaps less about coal and jute sacks (a useful shorthand) and more about what Celant described as a commitment ‘to contingency, to events, to the non-historical, to the present.’

Others works, particularly those that may once have served up a punchy, readily accessible visual metaphor, feel dated. Beyond the fact that, as a Brit, it is hard to see a lettuce in a public space without having to suppress intrusive thoughts of Liz Truss, Giovanni Anselmo’s Struttura che mangia – a wilting salad wedged between two slabs of granite that serves as a comment on precarity, matter’s contingency on other matter, etc. – feels, well, a bit limp. So too, the various piles strewn at intervals on the gallery’s floor – leaves, charcoal, potatoes, discarded textiles – now too cliché to make their way into a GCSE art project. What this reveals above all is the tight temporal confines that such art lives in: no sooner has an idea taken form, than it is already making way to a new generation of creative impulse. That is the problem, or perhaps the point, of a movement that has contingency in its very DNA.

Arte povera and its afterlife strike me as exemplary of the fate of counter-current movements, that so quickly lose their revolutionary value and are subsumed into the institutions they originally set out to critique. In recent decades, the movement’s main protagonists have become commercial products of astronomical market value, even more so when, like Penone and his trees or Michelangelo Pistoletto and his mirrors, they have a distinctive brand. Darlings of the global art fair circuit, the better-known proponents of ‘poor art’ now fetch seven-figure sums at auction houses like Pinault’s very own Christie’s.

What the more overtly political themes of arte povera reveal is that the same preoccupations of 1960s Italy – over-consumption, industrial waste, the hegemony of cultural institutions – far from being tempered over the years, have only grown. In the meantime, the art that responds to those preoccupations mutates and moves on. There is an art historical value, especially in a well-curated show like this one, to reflect on and celebrate this particular moment in time, this particular set of actors. But for anyone looking for the subversive creative practice that once gave arte povera its vitality, it is unlikely to be found in the rotunda of Paris’s former commodities exchange.