Cover for 17 variazioni su temi proposti per una pura ideologia fonetica, Alberto Burri, 1955, MoMA: Drawings and Prints

General Print Fund in honor of Deborah Wye Size: page (each approx.): 10 1/16 x 6 11/16" (25.5 x 17 cm); overall (closed): 10 1/8 x 6 3/4 x 1/2" (25.7 x 17.2 x 1.3 cm) Medium: Cover (ink and gold leaf on canvas) from an illustrated book with cover, scorched fabric, and ink and gold leaf on paper

Italian phrase for “Poor art” or “Impoverished”. It is one of the most significant influential avant-garde movements to emerge in Southern Europe in the 1960s.

Artists used literally poor and cheap materials that they repurposed for their practice. They used common place materials that evoked a pre-industrial age. Such as earth, rocks, clothing, paper and rope.

Artists subtly critiqued the industrialisation and mechanisation of Italy at the time. They challenged to establish notions of value and property. Artists believed that modernity threatened to erase collective memory and tradition and they opposed the technological pro occupation of American Minimalism.

Artists presented absurd, jaring and comical juxtapositions of the old and the new and of the highly processed and pre industrial. Artists evoked some of the effects of modernism and its tendency to destroy experiences of locality and memory as it pushed ever forwards into the future.

Arte povera is most related to ‘Assemblage’, which is an international trend using similar materials. They both marked a reaction against the abstract painting that was perceived as dominating art in this period.

Arte Povera proposed an artistic practice that was much more interested in materiality and physicality and borrowed forms and materials from everyday life.

Artists who contributed to Arte Povera:

Alberto Burri

Antoni Tapies 

Plate from 17 variazioni su temi proposti per una pura ideologia fonetica, Alberto Burri, 1955, MoMA: Drawings and Prints

General Print Fund in honor of Deborah Wye Size: page (each approx.): 10 1/16 x 6 11/16" (25.5 x 17 cm); overall (closed): 10 1/8 x 6 3/4 x 1/2" (25.7 x 17.2 x 1.3 cm) Medium: Ink and gold leaf on paper from illustrated book with cover, scorched fabric, and ink and gold leaf on paper

17 variazioni su temi proposti per una pura ideologia fonetica, Alberto Burri, 1955, MoMA: Drawings and Prints

General Print Fund in honor of Deborah Wye Size: page (each approx.): 10 1/16 x 6 11/16" (25.5 x 17 cm); overall (closed): 10 1/8 x 6 3/4 x 1/2" (25.7 x 17.2 x 1.3 cm) Medium: Illustrated book with cover (ink and gold leaf on canvas), scorched fabric, and ink and gold leaf on paper