Beyond Canvas

Paul Schimmel on Postwar Italy

interview by Francesca Pola

Paul Schimmel is an American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles and Francesca Pola is an Italian historian and critic of postwar and contemporary art. In this conversation they explore the ties between artists in postwar America and Italy and the groundbreaking artworks they produced.

Francesca: Your 2012 exhibition at MOCA, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void 1949–1962, captured a global impulse to demolish traditional artistic conventions, which was a particularly strong current in Italy. Could you explain the concept for the show?

Paul: One of the great things about largescale thematic exhibitions is that they take you to places you didn’t know you were going to go. If you follow the artists—who they were inspired by, who they exhibited with, who they fought with—you realize that the history of European and American art isn’t as nationalistic as many believe. There are things in science, art, and literature that erupt simultaneously in different parts of the world, without participants knowing they have been deeply affected by the same social and political currents.

In Italy, the collapse of traditional hierarchies and Fascism created such instability that foreign countries became hugely influential. The impact of the United States is so interesting—you see Alberto Burri using sacks that were part of the Marshall Plan to provide food for the people of Italy. These moments when the old order is crumbling are fascinating—as Kazuo Shiraga said, “when you have anarchy, you have opportunity”. That was very much true in countries that had lost a lot of their prewar identity and were, in a sense, a tabula rasa. And for artists, there is nothing better.

The idea of the tabula rasa is a recurring theme in postwar Italian artists’ work and writing. They sought to create a new form of art connected to a new reality. On a formal level, they were reinventing the surface through their materials and techniques, but in a more conceptual sense they were also making the surface a place for reflection, engaging viewers with ideas that go beyond the canvas. Going beyond canvas meant going beyond conventions or restrictions of any kind, so this sense of freedom was crucial.

As Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”. Fontana’s very deliberate pricking and breaking of canvas imbues his works with a strong sense of their own making and process. The image itself, the spatial concept, is about this deliberate act—a kind of performance, akin to action painting. The work of art was a record of time and process, and whether it’s a private performance or, as in the case of Yves Klein, a very public performance, it’s a record of its own making.

This is very much the case with the great Italian artist Alberto Burri, a field doctor in the Italian military who was captured during the war and sent to a military encampment in West Texas, where Donald Judd later built his foundation. In one of the very buildings Judd would go on to buy, Burri decided he was no longer going to be a doctor. He was deeply affected by the gruelling, heartbreaking work of sewing up wounds on the battlefield. He took this idea of stitching skin to his art, in a sense sewing up canvas to heal the wound—not to hide it, not to represent it, but to illustrate it by sewing it back together.

So, on the one hand, you have Fontana rupturing the surface with delicate and beautiful breaks in the picture plane, and, on the other, you have Burri taking sackcloth and sewing it back together, taking what he had learned as an army doctor and applying that to the health and healing of works of art themselves.

Do you think there is a utopian dimension to that generation’s impulse to forge a different kind of reality to the one they experienced during the war?

Throughout the history of art, utopian and dystopian have been two sides of the same coin. Burri began with a very dystopian view of the world—he had lived through horror and wanted to create something that would heal. I found that quality in Burri had a significant influence on American artists like Lee Bontecou and Salvatore Scarpitta who elected to leave the United States and work in Italy during the 1950s, when great change was underway, and with it, great possibility.

For Scarpitta, the purpose of his wrapping and binding of the surface was to heal and bind something, like Burri, with the utopian vision that artists could make it better. This takes us back to Fontana, who was a great dreamer, fascinated by what would happen when you punctured the picture plane and let the light or darkness come through from behind. His interest in light in experiments with neon and installations was always about using light to cut through space and let in a utopian view, maybe almost a sense that there is a God out there who could bring sanity and rationality to a world that seemed utterly destroyed.

One result of war is that people from distant and different lands share experiences they never would otherwise, cultural and political experiences, as well as grief and loss.

It’s about healing the wounds of the recent past and also connecting with other human beings. Artists were moving beyond the convention of the surface but also creating experiences. Gianni Colombo and Agostino Bonalumi designed immersive sensory environments and Pietro Consagra created his “frontal sculptures” to make physical and psychological connections with the viewer.

The transition in materials that we see in early pieces by Burri was inspirational for a whole global generation. This current in the fifties and sixties mirrored the evolution of Italy, the economic boom, or the so-called Italian miracle, which was so visible in people’s everyday lives.

The transitory and changing nature of these “poor materials” is fascinating. Fontana created some of his most extraordinary three dimensional works in clay and his experiments with neon are truly revolutionary. Fontana had started working on walk-in environments during the war, when he was back in his homeland Argentina. Arte Povera artists in Italy, and even Light and Space artists in Los Angeles, were keenly aware not only of controlling the work of art, but also of creating an environment in which these works could be experienced in their totality.

I think destroying the picture in this period of postwar art was an opportunity for artists to get away from the traditional patronage of the collector and take control of their own destiny by imagining not just what they made but how it would be seen and experienced by the viewer.

Many artists inherited Fontana’s concepts of space and environment. I think this kind of experience is key to Arte Povera, which was not just about poor materials but was really about reinventing the language of art from the tabula rasa you described. Would you say this impulse had an international dimension?

In some ways, the Arte Povera artists were directly reacting to the consumerism of Pop Art in the United States in a very critical way, saying, “For these Americans it’s all about transactions and consumerism”, contrasting Pop Art with poor art, or the people’s art, Arte Povera.

Initially, Americans, both collectors and critics, were absolutely enthralled by the consumerist qualities of Warhol, his interest in stardom and celebrities and Campbell soup cans and Brillo boxes, whereas European collectors were mostly interested in his work dealing with destruction—car crashes, electric chairs, and race riots.

The Italian Arte Povera artists saw the hedonism of American Pop Art, but—and this goes back to the utopian/dystopian dichotomy we mentioned before—the same artists we associate with consumerism in America were also deeply and profoundly interested in mankind’s own ability to destroy itself.

One of the key factors in Arte Povera was their political awareness, which was not an ideology but more a kind of responsibility to connect their vision to a global world. The international connections between these artists in the postwar period, and the impact of their travels, are fascinating. Is there a particular artist who encapsulates this for you?

It was only when working on Destroy the Picture that I realized how extraordinary Lee Bontecou’s accomplishments were in the fifties, when she was working in Italy. She was in touch with Burri, who encouraged the young Italian-American dealer Leo Castelli to exhibit her work, with great success. Pieces from this period by Bontecou really evoke Burri’s use of the void and positive and negative space.

She began as a fully three-dimensional sculptor and was influenced by a number of more traditional bronze-casting sculptors when she first went to Italy, before becoming inspired by Fontana. She then started to push her sculpture into the picture plane; in a way, this was the opposite of what Fontana was doing, but it was still dealing with the transient space between three and two dimensions. She was very successful with these works early on in her career, showing at the same gallery as the most famous artists of the Pop generation: Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Johns.

She had a fantastic early career and was later relegated to the sidelines. When the late sixties rolled around, Bontecou essentially gave up on making art in the commercial realm and went off to make her work in seclusion. She left New York for rural Pennsylvania. And Burri left Italy, moving to his own utopian paradise in California in the late 1960s. That was where he started making his very important experimental pieces using fire and plastic, ultimately making them, as Fontana did, as immersive environments.

The relationship between sculpture and painting was evolving in this postwar moment and the line separating them became very blurred. Can you point to any other American artists who were exploring this boundary?

In a way, the inverse of Lee Bontecou is the Italian-American artist, Salvatore Scarpitta, who was sent by his Los Angeles family to relatives in Italy before the war. When you look at his work made in Italy from 1958 on, you cannot help but think of people like Burri and Manzoni. He began with more directly Italian-inspired pieces and within two years he was moving more and more into a sculptural realm.

Like Burri, he bound his canvases like open wounds, using strapping and belting, more industrial materials. He, too, on Burri’s recommendation, joined the Castelli gallery in its first year. We think of the Castelli gallery as a bastion for American Pop artists, but in fact a lot of work by American artists working in Italy was seen there. One cannot discount how important that was for both Rauschenberg and Twombly, who were lovers, friends, and collaborators in the first half of the fifties.

They travelled to Italy together. Rauschenberg discovered Burri and Twombly discovered everything from the graffiti on the streets of Pompeii to the great myths of Roman and Greek history. But, despite all they discovered in Europe, Twombly and artists like Joan Mitchell were never welcomed home again in America in the same way. That was the case right up until the very end of Twombly’s life and for much of Mitchell’s life after she moved to France. Americans don’t seem to forgive artists who go overseas and become, in a sense, “one of them”.

The reverse of that, however, is that European and Italian artists felt a great competitiveness, even a certain animosity towards America, but the Italian artists who engaged with American culture, like Burri and Fontana, were very well received and supported by Italy.

It’s true that the reception of certain artists back in America was muted for a long time, but I hope that now we are beginning to realize how valuable this interchange was. The influence of America on Italian artists is better known, but the pull of Europe, and Italy in particular, for artists like Bontecou, Scarpitta, and Twombly had a profound impact on their work, which deserves greater attention.

Featured in vol. 3 of IL LIBRO.