Root and branch

Eventually,’ said Michelangelo Pistoletto, ‘it became a movement. In fact, I believe that arte povera was the last true movement. Since then all artists have been individuals.’ We were sitting one baking hot day last month in his cool study in Biella, a small town in the foothills of the Alps where he has established a huge museum and foundation in a series of disused 19th-century textile mills. He was discussing the group of Italian artists of the 1960s of which Pistoletto himself was a founding member.

Arte povera is an umbrella phrase that covers a number of diverse artists, several of them marvellous, who emerged in Italy about half a century ago. What they had in common was more a mood than a style exactly. Their work ran parallel to that being produced concurrently in many different places — by Richard Long in Britain, for example, and Joseph Beuys in Germany.

It often involved using real objects —rocks, cloth, pieces of metal — not to make images of other things by, say, carving marble into a human figure; nor even by making an abstraction — such as a geometric form. But using these materials just as themselves.

Thus, a stone might become part of a work of art about stones — their weight, the way that their surface has been eroded by time. This was an international tendency, but the artists of arte povera used it with, so to speak, an Italian inflection. They were aware of their predecessors going back into classical antiquity, and beyond, as I discovered when I talked to Pistoletto and his younger contemporary and fellow member of the group, Giuseppe Penone. This is modern art with roots (and, in the case of Penone, who likes to work with trees, sometimes leaves and branches as well).