Where there’s everything: Pistoletto, the Gruppo d’Arte “l’Arlecchino,” and localist internationalism in Presenze

Abstract

Recent scholarship on journals produced by postwar Italian avant-gardes has focused on artists’ use of publications to engage with aesthetic constructions of international and global modernisms after Fascist isolation. This scholarship, however, has not yet accounted for the different models of internationalism articulated in these publications, especially in those based outside of Italy’s major cultural centers. This article addresses the little-known arts and culture publication Presenze (1957–1960), established in late 1950s Turin by the multidisciplinary Gruppo d’Arte “l’Arlecchino” (Harlequin Art Group). Despite the historical significance of the group’s members, including artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933–), best known for his association with the late 1960s Italian avant-garde Arte Povera, no scholarship has been written on Presenze. Formal and social art-historical analysis of works of art, texts, and editorial layout, with special attention to Pistoletto’s work, is used to examine the model of Italian avant-gardism and internationalism constructed in Presenze. Presenze is found to have constituted a formative testing site for Pistoletto’s practice in the conflicted context of postwar Italian art, and a model of vanguard, localist internationalism for other artists working in 1950s Turin that counters existing ideas of internationalism in postwar Italy as a model of sprovincializzazione (de-provincialization). It is also found that Presenze’s espoused universalist ideology reinscribed Eurocentric models of East and West, foreshadowing later models in postwar Italian art.