Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2007)
ANNUAL REPORT - A 2007. ÉV - MÓNIKA KUMIN: A Journey through Italian Art 1950-1980. One Hundred Works from the Farnesina Contemporary Italian Art Collection
nucleare) of Enrico Baj made with a collage technique from the remains of popular culture, and Piero Manzoni's cynical series (Achromes), the purpose of which was to désacralise material and form, can be equally interpreted as a moral-provocative cultural criticism. The simplest, "poor" materials and objects served as demonstrative tools to present conceptual models in the works of the Arte povera movement, which originated from Italy at the end of the sixties and spread all over the world. The expression was first used in the book entitled Arte Povera, published in 1969 by Germano Gelant. Arte povera, which shared some characteristics with conceptual art, used materials of little value (cement, soil, felt, rubber) and fragments of objects, all of which had been utterly alien to high art. The installations and assemblages by Alario Merz blend architectural elements, folk motifs and natural materials. His igloo motif acts like a transition between the natural and the artificial world in being a symbolic form made by man and the symbol of a natural lifestyle but at the same time it is a fragment of technicist culture. The collective-traditional motifs of European culture are brought to life through the personalities of the artists in the poetic compositions by Janis Kounellis that integrate the artefacts of European cultural tradition, in Giuseppe Penone's works in which the cultural gesture of leaving a mark is embedded in natural processes, and in the "mirror-works" by Michelangelo Pistoletto which explore the interrelation between reflecting surfaces and space. At the turn of the 1980s the Transavantgarde —a term coined by Achille Bonito Oliva—represented a radical return to painting in reaction to the Avant-garde, which by that time had been running out of steam. With this term Oliva intended to sum up the art of Sandro Chia, Francesco Clémente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola de Maria and Mimmo Paladino but the conceptual scope of Transavantgarde soon became broader. Wishing to emphasise the national character of the movement, Oliva initially only talked about the Italian Transavantgarde but his book entitled International Transavantgarde, published in 1982, discussed similar aspirations in Western Europe and the United States. Since then the concept has been used as an umbrella term for an especially wide scale of artistic aspirations. The representatives of the Transavantgarde were primarily interested in a passionate, sensuous painterliness in creating signs as well as in historical retrospection. They placed the motifs of old periods (Mannerism, Classicism, Romanticism, Expressionism) in new contexts and used elements from various traditions and styles, which resulted in works that advocated the cult of individuality, the subjective aspect of cultural history and its liberation through the imagination. The Transavantgarde is represented at the exhibition by the works of Paladino, Chia, Gucci, demente, Piero Guccione and Ruggero Savinio. Mónika Kinn in
