, 1940) is an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 art historian, critic and curator

Curator

A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...

, mostly renewed for being one of the founding members of the "Arte Povera

Arte Povera

Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...

" (poor art) movement in 1967.

Celant attended the University of Genoa, where he studied history of art with Eugenio Battisti. In 1967 his manifesto of Arte Povera, Notes for a Guerilla, was published in Flash Art. The concept of Arte Povera seemed to be that in Italy art was quite different from the America

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 due to the different circumstances at the time. Italy was going through an industrial

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...

 period but was not really making the pop art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

 that coincided with the established economy as opposed to American artists like Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

, Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...

, and other pop artists. The Italian artists were going for a neo-humanism in their art and not for the coolness and calculated machine-made imagery of the pop artists.

"Arte Povera" was essentially formed around two nucleus: one in Turin

Turin

Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...

, with artists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera...

, Mario Merz

Mario Merz

Mario Merz was an Italian artist, and husband of Marisa Merz.-Life:Born in Milan, Merz started drawing during World War II, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from...

, Marisa Merz

Marisa Merz

Marisa Merz is an Italian sculptor, widow of artist Mario Merz. She now lives in Milan.-Life:Marisa Merz was born in Turin, Italy in 1931. In the 1950s she met Mario Merz who was studying there, and they later got married...

, Giuseppe Penone

Giuseppe Penone

Giuseppe Penone is an Italian artist. Penone started working professionally in 1968 in the Garessio forest, near where he was born. He is the younger member of the Italian movement named "Arte Povera", this term has been coined by Germano Celant. Penone's work is concerned with establishing a...

, Giulio Paolini

Giulio Paolini

Giulio Paolini is an Italian artist. Often linked to the Arte Povera movement, he is best known for an artistic practice that is inscribed in a more strictly conceptual sphere.-Biography:Paolini was born in Genoa....

, Giovanni Anselmo, and Piero Gilardi; and one in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, with Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti known as Alighiero e Boetti was an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera....

, Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis

Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. He studied in art college in Athens until 1956 and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome....

 and Pino Pascali

Pino Pascali

Pino Pascali was an Italian artist, sculptor, set designer and performer.-Biography:Pino Pascali was born in Bari, Italy in 1936 and moved to Rome in 1955 to learn scene painting and set design at the Academy of Art...

. Celant went on to organize Arte Povera exhibitions at Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa (1967), Galleria De' Foscherari in Bologna

Bologna

Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...

 (1968), and a three-day performance event called "Arte Povera & Azioni Povere at Amalfi" (1968).

In 1974 Celant edited and curated the Catalogue Raisonné

Catalogue raisonné

The typical catalogue raisonné is a monograph giving a comprehensive catalogue of artworks by an artist.The essential elements of a catalogue raisonné are that it purports to be an exhaustive list of works for a defined subject matter describing the works in a way so that they may be reliably...

 of Italian artist Piero Manzoni

Piero Manzoni

Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic conceptual art. Influenced by the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera...

. He curated many exhibitions on Italian art, including "Identité italienne. L'art en Italie depuis 1959" (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1981), and "Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968" (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1994). In 1997 he was the director of the Venice Biennale

Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...

 and in 2004 he curated the exhibition "Art and Architecture" in Genoa when the city was nominated European Capital of Culture.
Celant is currently Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...

 in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 and Artistic Director of the Prada

Prada

Prada S.p.A. is an Italian fashion label specializing in luxury goods for men and women , founded by Mario Prada.-Foundations:...

 Foundation in Milan

Milan

Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

.

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