Wearing a beautiful face despite the years, white mane behind, often dressed in black between the architect and the dandy visiting the lagoon, the Genoese Germano Celant was a figure of all the Venice Biennials that he crossed with a firm step and that he was looking at it with a direct look. Authority was his second nature. He applied it to create exhibitions judged without question. His superb retrospective " Jannis KounellisWith cupboards hanging like clouds, sent all the festival goers to the Prada Foundation, in his palace on Calle de Ca 'Corner, in Santa Croce, during the last Venice Biennale in 2019. The news of his illness had worried since several weeks the wide circle of his friends and admirers. Despite his presence and his eternal strength, he died of the Covid-19 on April 29. He was 80 years old.
Christo, the artist of modest or monumental packaging whose Center Pompidou houses a retrospective still invisible, had entrusted him with the curating of his last great adventure (before the Arc de triomphe in Paris this fall): his Floating Piers on the Lac d 'Iseo in 2016. The work, spectacular and solar by its orange-yellow on the deep blue of the lake, consisted of floating platforms covered with fabric with an area of 100,000 m².
“ When Jeanne-Claude and I first met Germano in the late 1960s, we were all very young. Our friendship is a long-term friendship that has flourished over the years. We have aged together , says his elder Christo, 85 years old on June 13, sheltered from his Manhattan studio. “ He was the curator of our Valley Curtain Valley Curtain exhibition at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan in 1973, before directing the Floating Piers project in 2016. He has always been enthusiastic about our work. Germano has written significant pages in the history of contemporary art. The art world will miss it. I already miss it . ”
A strategy thought out on the guerrilla model
This condottiere-style art historian acquired his acclaim very early on in inventing Arte Povera in September 1967. This explicit and formidably simple term of " poor art " designates the protest movement which then intended to challenge the cultural industry and the consumer society, according to a strategy thought out on the guerrilla model. Arte Povera was particularly against abstract painting which dominated the European artistic scene of the 1950s. A new group of Italian artists, it brought together under this stripping banner strong personalities who marked their times and influenced the following generations: Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Gilberto Zorio, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giuseppe Penone, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Pino Pascali.
“Germano Celant is one of those giants who marked the art scene in the second half of the 20th century. His exhibitions, like that of Harald Szeemann or Kaspar Koenig will have made events and marked milestones in cultural life, analyzes Jean-Jacques Aillagon, former Minister of Culture, former president of the Palace of Versailles in Versailles and Director General of the Collection Pinault.
“But it is above all as a witness, actor and theorist of Arte Povera, that he will have contributed to the tremendous development of critical thinking on the art of which this era was the setting. As such, it embodies a time when art was still being theorized and organized in schools or movements, where Pierre Restany invented New Realism and then Achille Bonito Oliva trans-gardes it ”, underlines the former president of the Center Pompidou . "The contemporary scene, that of today, with its profusion, its eclecticism and its absence of dogmatism, its domination, it must be said, of the market, is far removed from this time when it was still the ideas that made debate. I remember with more particular emotion his collaborations with Pontus Hulten in Paris, at the Pompidou Center, then in Venice with Palazzo Grassi with the Futurismo e futurismi exhibition ”.
A black and white silhouette well known to all art biennials, that of Venice in the first place. Vittorio Zunino Celotto / Getty Images for Fondazione Prada
" An ethnologist of creation and artists
“ The art world has just lost a precious stone. Germano Celant was one of the last great myths of contemporary art , explains to Figaro Jérôme Sans, a tireless defender of contemporary art, of the founding years of the Palais de Tokyo at the Fondation Clément in Martinique or at the last Biennale in Taipei . “ A true legend, Germano Celant, was not only the inventor, the theorist of Arte Povera, one of the founding movements of art in the late 60s. But he was a visionary, an exceptional eye , from Guggenheim where he was senior curator, at the 47th Venice Biennale of which he was the general commissioner in 1997, and at the incredible Prada foundation in Milan, Venice and Shanghai where he assumed artistic direction. Always close to contemporary art and new generations, he was an ethnologist of creation and artists ”.
“ Germano Celant was a friend, a friend of artists, galleries, museums, a friend of depth, a monument of culture, a column of 20th and 21st century art, for the“ Arte Povera ”movement and many other cultural adventures that his energy has managed to write in the history of art ”, underlines Lorenzo Fiaschi, one of the three musketeers founders of the Galleria Continua, 30 years ago this year (San Gimignano in Tuscany , Les Moulins near Provins, Beijing and Havana). “ His sensitivity, his culture and his intelligence have given so much to Italy and to the world! He was always on the front line. I was also very surprised to see him in Cuba during the inauguration of the new headquarters of the Galleria Continua in Havana. He was a pioneer, an artist, an intellectual, a young curator, even at 80! "
In Italy, the shock is great. “ Germano was the commissioner of the Venice Biennale in 1997, a difficult and transitional year in the ongoing reform of the institution, my first year as president of the Biennale, a year marked by his great professionalism to give a international in scope at the Biennale and which, despite the constraints of the time, gave a high-quality vintage ” , wanted to emphasize this April 29, President Paolo Baratta. Guest curator, Germano Celant had already organized the Arte & Ambiente exhibition in the Italian Pavilion of the 37th Venice Biennale in 1976. An exhibition which " by its occupation of space and its atmosphere, integral parts of the work " has marked the Annals in Venice. "New figure " which " gave to the curators a determining place, that of true contemporary protagonists ", he knew how to "combine a historical culture and a particular sensitivity ". And Paolo Baratta concludes: " It is a great loss for Italian culture" .
The Venetian producer Roberto Cicutto who will replace Paolo Baratta for the Art and Architecture Biennials in Venice for the next four years, hailed the memory of an “ exhibition curator who, after having invented the 'Arte povera, has become one of the most influential figures in the art world '.
Finally, the Prada Foundation, which named him "Scientific Superintendent" in 2015, recalls that Germano Celant has designed and directed since 1995 more than 40 projects, from the solo show of the American artist Michael Heizer in 1996 to the Kounellis retrospective in 2019. "We are deeply saddened by the loss of a friend and a traveling companion ," said the presidents of the Prada Foundation, Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli together. “ Germano Celant was a central figure in the learning and research process that art has represented for us since our beginnings. The many experiences, the many exchanges that we have shared over the years have helped us to rethink the meaning of culture in the present time. Intellectual curiosity, respect for the artists' work, seriousness of his curatorial practice, all these are lessons that we hold essential for the younger generations ” .
