For three days – from October 4 to 6, 1968 – in the small town of Amalfi, near Naples, they drank, talked about anything and everything, and played football. They contemplated the cliffs that plunge into the sea, hiked the steep paths, and swam – as the water was still warm in this early autumn. And these young people, whose average age at the time was around 30, turned art history upside down.

Major artists of the 20^th century – Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Giuseppe Penone, Emilio Prini, Mario and Marisa Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gilberto Zorio – were the representatives of arte povera, a movement to which the Bourse de Commerce-Collection Pinault in Paris is devoting a retrospective exhibition until January 20, 2025. Arte povera, or poor art, like the materials they use in their work: wood, stone, thread, bits of plastic, burlap, etc.

It was a nod to the spirit of post-war Italy, where happiness was supposed to come from the Fiat and Ferrari factories, and a challenge to pop art, which, for all its irony, celebrated American capitalism. Their works twisted the idea that a work of art had to be precious, on a pedestal, inaccessible. Their works were alive. You could smell the dead leaves that Penone put in the exhibition rooms, brush against the threads of Boetti's embroideries and see your own reflection in Pistoletto's mirrors.

'It was ebullient'

Arte povera. The formula had been discovered the previous year by an Italian critic and curator, the virulent Germano Celant. He exhibited works in a Turin gallery, La Bertesca. He also wrote an article for Flash Art magazine, in which he explained that a generation of visual artists was inventing a new way of making and changing the world. The same Celant invited them to Amalfi. Marcello Rumma, a local entrepreneur, publisher and collector, asked him to mount an exhibition in the old arsenal, a medieval building adjacent to the small port.

The works were installed under the vaulted ceiling, the exhibition baptized "RA3" and subtitled "arte povera + azioni povere" (poor art + poor actions). Rumma asked photographer Bruno Manconi to capture this moment, steeped in the history of the avant-garde and the 1968 spirit of reenchanting life. "It was ebullient," said Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of the exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection and a specialist in arte povera. "All came to present their work with a rare strength. A veritable bacchanal."

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