Copyright by Dorothy Jean McKetta 2012

The Thesis Committee for Dorothy Jean McKetta Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis:

The Leo Castelli Gallery in Metro Magazine: American Approaches to Post-Abstract Figuration in an Italian Context

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Supervisor: Richard Shiff

John R. Clarke

The Leo Castelli Gallery in Metro Magazine: American Approaches to Post-Abstract Figuration in an Italian Context

by

Dorothy Jean McKetta, B.A.; B.F.A.

Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin August 2012 Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to Paolo Barucchieri (1935-2012). Thank you, Paolo, for sharing your Italy with me. Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the many people who have made this thesis possible. Thank you to the members of my thesis committee who attended my colloquium: Dr. Andrea Giunta, Dr. Linda Henderson, and Dr. Nassos Papalexandrou. All of your comments have helped to bring my topic into focus over the past few months. To my reader, Dr. John R. Clarke, thank you for encouraging me to write on Italy in the twentieth century, and for sharing your personal library so generously. And, of course, many thanks to Dr. Richard Shiff, my advisor, who suggested and that Metro magazine might help me find clues to Cy Twombly’s Roman milieu. Thank you for all your attention and trust. I would also like to acknowledge a few others who have helped along the way: Laura Schwartz, William Crain, Bob Penman, Maureen Howell, Jessamine Batario, my parents Randy and Terry McKetta.

v Abstract

The Leo Castelli Gallery in Metro Magazine: American Approaches to Post-Abstract Figuration in an Italian Context

Dorothy Jean McKetta, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012

Supervisor: Richard Shiff

Between the years 1960 and 1970, New York gallerist Leo Castelli was closely involved with Milanese editor and publisher Bruno Alfieri’s Metro magazine—an international review of contemporary art. By placing his artists in Metro, Castelli insterted them into the world of Italian art criticism and theory. This recontextualization familiarized the American artists of Castelli’s gallery to a European audience and positioned them at the end of a succession of modern European artistic styles. Specifically, Castelli’s artists, each of whom engaged in a form of pictorial figuration, were seen as ending the dominance of the “pure” abstraction of the French informel style.

This thesis uses the archive of correspondence between Bruno Alfieri and Leo Castelli to examine Castelli’s contribution to Metro during the 1960s. Departing from this chronology, it also seeks to understand the unique brand of figuration that each of

Castelli’s artists brought to Metro, given cues from contemporary Italian theory and criticism—particularly that of Gillo Dorfles, who wrote on several of Castelli’s artists.

vi Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... vii

List of Tables ...... ix

List of Figures ...... x

Introduction: Leo Castelli and Metro Magazine ...... 1 Other Gallerists ...... 7 A Quick Note About Style ...... 9

Chapter One: Setting the Scene in Metro 1 ...... 15 Making a Scene: Bar and Café Culture...... 16 Edward Higgins dans le Metro ...... 19 The Biennale, Metro and Cultural Aggiornamento...... 20 Contemporary Art and the “Metro Young” in 1960 ...... 23 The Artist as Art...... 26

Chapter Two: Robert Rauschenberg in Metro 2 ...... 29 Rauschenberg as Anti-hero ...... 30 Dorfles and Eco: Rauschenberg and Open Poetry of Visual Information ....32 Rauschenberg dans le Metro ...... 40

Chapter Three: Jasper Johns in Metro 4/5 ...... 47 Gillo Dorfles on Jasper Johns ...... 50 Leo Steinberg on Jasper Johns ...... 55 Jasper Johns in Interview ...... 57 “Jasper Johns” in Metro and After ...... 59

Chapter Four: Cy Twombly and L’Esperienza Moderna in Metro 6 ...... 62 Making a Scene: Who’s Who at the Venice Biennale ...... 62 Making a Scene: The Artists of L’Esperienza Moderna ...... 64 Gillo Dorfles on “Written Images of Cy Twombly” ...... 68 The New Figuration of L’Esperienza Moderna ...... 72

vii Chapter Five: Roy Lichtenstein and Lee Bontecou in Metro 8 ...... 74 Dorfles and The New Figuration ...... 74 Dore Ashton on Lee Bontecou ...... 76 Robert Rosenblum on Roy Lichtenstein ...... 78 Lichtenstein dans le Metro...... 82

Chapter Six: Metro Magazine in 1964 ...... 85 The 1964 Venice Biennale ...... 85 Restructuring Metro ...... 88

Conclusion ...... 93

Notes ...... 95

Appendix A: Table ...... 141

Appendix B: Figures ...... 142

Bibliography ...... 181

viii List of Tables

(Table 1) Metro, Information by Issue: Languages, Length, Advertisements...... 141

ix List of Figures

(Fig. 1) Three full-page ads for galleries in Metro 13: Alfieri Libreria/Galleria, The Leo Castelli Gallery, and Galleria Lorenzelli; images from Metro 13 (February, 1968)...... 142 (Fig. 2) Cover and pages from Zodiac 8: “America.” The cover features Jasper Johns’s Three Flags (1958); the pages show an installation view of

paintings by Jasper Johns; images from Zodiac 8 (1961). At top left: Preliminary sketch of the cover by Bruno Alfieri; image from a letter to Leo Castelli, 25 January 1961, The Leo Castelli gallery records, 1:15, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute (Washington D.C.)...... 143 (Fig. 3) Photograph of Jorge Piqueras at Les Deux Magots, from “Piqueras aux Deux Magots et au Dôme,” in Metro 2; images from Metro 2 (May, 1961).

...... 144 (Fig. 4) Pages from the article “Caffé Rosati,” in Metro 1 with photographs by Virginia Dortch; images from Metro 1 (December, 1960)...... 145 (Fig. 5) Caffé Rosati in 1963, photograph by Mario Dondero; image from Gli Irripetibili Anni ’60...... 146

(Fig. 6) “Biennale 1960: Jean Fautrier,” photograph by Ugo Mulas; image from “Due Domande” in Metro 1 (December, 1960)...... 147

(Fig. 7) Images from “A Visit with Ben Nicholson,” photographs by Felicitas Vogler; and Ben Nicholson, November 1959 (Paros, 2 Circles); collection Felicitas Vogler. All images from Metro 1 (December, 1960). 148

x (Fig. 8) Images from “A Visit with Ben Nicholson,” photographs by Paolo Monti; and Ben Nicholson, 1955 Diagonal and August 1958, drawings on paper; Milan, private collection; images from Metro 1 (December, 1960)...... 149 (Fig. 9) Pages from “Georges Noël: Metro Young No. 1,” photographs by Paul Facchetti and PH Boubat. Two paintings by Georges Noël; left: from the collection of Paul Facchetti; right: from the collection of Theodor

Arensberg; images and information from Metro 1 (December, 1960).

...... 150 (Fig. 10) Images of artworks from “Edward Higgins: Metro Young No. 2,” in Metro 1; left: Sentinel I (1959); top center: Manifold I (1960); top right: Pair (1960); bottom center: Gothic (1960); bottom right: Torso (1960). All are welded steel and plaster; images from Metro 1 (December, 1960)...... 151

(Fig. 11) Images from “Edward Higgins: Metro Young No. 2,” photographs by Charles Rotmil; images from Metro 1 (December, 1960)...... 152 (Fig. 12) Pages from “The Painter Jorge Piqueras,” in Metro 2, with photographs by Hans Haacke and Luc Joubert (bottom left and right); images from

Metro 2 (May 1961)...... 153 (Fig. 13) Photographs of Gérard Schneider and his work in Metro 2, photographs by Paolo Monti and Herbert Maeder (top); images from Metro 2 (May,

1961)...... 154 (Fig. 14) Pages from “A Visit to Dubuffet” in Metro 2, photographs by Paolo Monti; images from Metro 2 (May, 1961)...... 155

xi (Fig. 15) Pages from “Robert Rauschenberg: Metro Young No. 3” in Metro 2. Works shown, bottom, left to right: Autobiography (1960); Untitled Combine (1955); Monument (1958); Bed (1955); Winter Pool (1959), Trophy II (1960), Trophy I (1959); Talisman (1958); Odalisque (1955); Canyon (1959), Coca-Cola Plan (1958). Images from Metro 2 (May, 1961) ...... 156 (Fig. 16) Portrait photograph of Jasper Johns by Ed Meneely in Metro 4/5 (May,

1962)...... 157

(Fig. 17) Michelangelo Pistoletto, Photo of Jasper Johns (Minus Object), 1966, photograph on paper, 98 ½ x 39 ½ in.; image from Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1959-1974...... 158 (Fig. 18) Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jasper Johns’s Ears (Minus Object), 1966, photograph on paper; image from Michelangelo Pistoletto...... 158 (Fig. 19) Photograph of Leo Castelli and Gillo Dorfles in the garden of the Krausz

Villa in Trieste, 1928. Leo is in back with arm raised, Dorfles is at right with dark jacket; image from Cohen-Solal, Leo and his Circle...... 159 (Fig. 20) Eight-page layout of Dore Ashton’s “Thirty four Illustrations for Dante’s

Inferno,” in Metro 2 (May, 1961)...... 160 (Fig. 21) Robert Rauschenberg, Dante’s Inferno: Dante and Virgil are Still in the Heretic’s Realm #10 (detail), 1959-60, graphite pencil, gouache,

transfer; 14 ½ x 11 ½ in.; image and information from artstor.org...... 161

xii (Fig. 22) Robert Rauschenberg, Dante’s Inferno: At the Trumpet Signal, Dante and Virgil Approach the Middle Pit #30 (detail), 1959-60, graphite pencil, gouache, transfer; 14 ½ x 11 ½ in.; image and information from artstor.org...... 161 (Fig. 23) Pages from “Jasper Johns: Metro Young No. 12,” from Metro 4/5 (May, 1962). Works shown, top, left to right: Highway (1959); Large White Flag (1955); bottom left to right: Three Flags (1958); Target

with Four Faces (1955); 0 Through 9 (1960); 0 Through 9 (1961);

Target with Plaster Casts (1955); Flag above White (1954).....162 (Fig. 24) Pages from “Jannis Kounellis: I simboli grafici diventano pittura,” in Metro 4/5 (May, 1962)...... 163 (Fig. 25) Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1959. Performance by Kounellis in his studio in Rome, 1960; image from Jannis Kounellis...... 163 (Fig. 26) Advertisement for “BA & C Visual Communications,” in Metro 4/5 (May,

1962) ...... 164 (Fig. 27) Illustration by Paul Davis from Metro 6 (June, 1962)...... 164 (Fig. 28) Illustrations by Paul Davis from Pagina 1 (November, 1962)...... 164 (Fig. 29) Metro’s Target Logo on title pages of Metro 7 and Metro 8 (December,

1962) and (April, 1963)...... 165 (Fig. 30) Eight-page layout of “Who’s Who (at the Thirty-first Venice Biennale)” from Metro 6 (December, 1962) Article by Virginia Dortch and

Faith Pleasanton...... 166 (Fig. 31) Leo Castelli in the article “Who’s Who” from Metro 6 (December, 1962)...... 167

xiii (Fig. 32) Cover of the exhibition catalog for “Novelli Perilli Twombly” exhibition at the Gallerie “Aujourd’hui” at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussells (November, 1959); image from L’Esperienza Moderna: 1957-1959...... 168 (Fig. 33) Pages from “Achille Perilli: Metro Young No. 13” in Metro 6 (June, 1962). Works shown, top left to right: Rapporto sulla paura (1962); Gli amori di Cleopatra (1961); bottom left to right: La civiltà del ragno

(1961); La polvere d’oro (1961); I dialoghi delle ombre (1961);

Georgia in Wonderland (1961); Manoscritto per Carla (1962).169 (Fig. 34) Pages from “Gastone Novelli: Metro Young No. 15” in Metro 6 (June, 1962). Il re delle Parole (1961) appears at the top of the page at bottom, right...... 170 (Fig. 35) Gastone Novelli, Il Re delle Parole, 1961, 138 x 87 in.; image from http://milano.corriere.it...... 171

(Fig.36) Images from Paul Klee’s notebooks and lecture notes. Top left: “Irregular projection on an uneven plane;” top right: “Theory of Articulation;” Bottom: “Weight structure in two dimensions.” From Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye...... 172

(Fig. 37) Paul Klee, “Dividual Structural Rhythms, ” notebook page; image from Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye...... 173 (Fig. 38) Pages from “Cy Twombly: Metro Young No. 14” in Metro 6 (June, 1962).

Olympia (1957) and Untitled 1958 (Rome) appear in the page at center, right...... 174

xiv (Fig. 39) Cy Twombly, Olympia, 1957; Oil-based house paint, lead pencil, colored pencil, and wax crayon on canvas, 78 ¾ x 104 in.; image from “Cy Twombly Gallery 1951-59,” at cytwombly.info...... 175 (Fig. 40) Cy Twombly, Untitled (Rome), 1958; Oil-based house paint, lead pencil on canvas, 52 ¾ x 62 3/8 in. (134 x 159 cm). Private Collection, Greenwich, Conn.; image from Cy Twombly: A Catalogue Raissone...... 175

(Fig. 41) Pages from “Lee Bontecou: Metro Young No. 19” in Metro 8 (April, 1963);

works shown, top right: Untitled (1962), collection of Houston Museum of Fine Arts; bottom, right: Untitled (1962)—Ashton refers to this work as “that grinning death relief.” ...... 176 (Fig. 42) Pages from “Roy Lichtenstein: Metro Young No. 21,” showing Robert Rosenblum’s “Roy Lichtenstein and the Realist Revolt,” in Metro 8 (April, 1963)...... 177

(Fig. 43) Roy Lichtenstein, Sponge, 1962, oil on canvas, 68 x 56 in.; private collection; image from Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective...... 178 (Fig. 44) Roy Lichtenstein, Cover of Metro 10 magazine, 1965; from Metro 10 (October, 1965)...... 179

(Fig. 45) Images from “Roy Lichtenstein at the Piano,” photographs by Gianni Berengo-Gardin; images from Metro 16/17 (August, 1970). ...180

xv Introduction: Leo Castelli and Metro Magazine

“Now that there is a project for a direct telephone line between Kennedy and Khrushchev, I hope that both our governments will realize that it is of utmost importance that a similar system should be installed between Metro and the Castelli Gallery.”

-Leo Castelli in a letter to Bruno Alfieri, December 19621

In his “Letter from the Editor” in Metro magazine’s first issue of December 1960, editor and publisher Bruno Alfieri declares a mission statement for his art journal:

We have tried to offer you a magazine that is pleasant not only to read, but also to look at, and we have sought to strike a balance between critical articles and services of information. But above all, our aim has been to offer you disinterested ‘counsel’ (and we do not care whether this irritates certain art dealers) so as to guide you rapidly through the maze of contemporary art, keep you well-informed, and help you to form an opinion uninfluenced by speculative maneuvers.2

Although positive on the activity of collecting, Alfieri expresses his distaste for those who would treat art as a merely economic activity, and he promotes the idea that Metro is a disinterested guide to quality in contemporary art. Metro will always feature at least one young artist, he continues, and that selection, he promises, “will not be influenced by the pressures of art dealers.”3 However, over the course of the sixties, Bruno Alfieri and New York gallerist Leo Castelli shared a rich correspondence and professional relationship. And although Castelli may not have needed to exert much “pressure” to exercise his “influence” on the magazine, the degree to which he was directly involved in deciding content for Metro may shed some doubt on Alfieri’s earliest claims to neutrality.

Metro, with its international distribution and its ties to the Venice Biennale, gave Castelli a journalistic means to promote his artists overseas. Castelli must also have seen the magazine as an opportunity to commission potentially important works of art

1 criticism on the artists of his stable, because with the help of Alfieri’s backing he funded Leo Steinberg’s famous essay “Jasper Johns,” essays by Dore Ashton on both Robert Rauschenberg and Lee Bontecou, John Cage’s famous essay “On Robert Rauschenberg,” and an essay by Robert Rosenblum on Roy Lichtenstein, among others.4 For the times that Castelli did not provide both the images and written material for his artists as they appeared in Metro (and sometimes to supplement the materials he did send), Italian critic, historian, and aesthetic theorist Gillo Dorfles would often write on Castelli’s stable, contributing essays on Rauschenberg, Johns, and Cy Twombly.

For Alfieri, Castelli provided an entrée to the American art scene. He was impeccably organized and generous in sharing images and essays; he would keep Alfieri informed on various happenings in American art by sending news stories and articles, and he would occasionally put Alfieri in touch with other New York gallerists. Better still, he was a correspondent on American soil, to whom Alfieri could, and always did, write in Italian—though he consistently responded in English.

This thesis is a look at Metro magazine from the viewpoint of Alfieri’s correspondence with Castelli. Both the magazine’s publication and the records of Alfieri’s letters in the Castelli archive span roughly a decade, from 1960 to 1970. The letters continue beyond the publication of Metro’s last issue, though, and the last is dated

November 15, 1972.5 There is no explicit mention in these letters of why and how Metro magazine ceased to exist, likely because neither Alfieri nor Castelli was aware that the 16/17 double issue of Metro, printed in August 1970, would be the last.6

In the early 1970s, Alfieri and Castelli collaborated on the book The New Avant- Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies, with text by Grégoire Müller and photographs by Gianfranco Gorgoni, put out by Praeger Publishers in October, 1972. The project ended badly, and the last letter that Alfieri sends to Castelli complains that the 2 photographer Gorgoni had acted abusively toward him and his family. In this same letter, he hints, too, at the possibility of his own friendship with Castelli (which was always also a business collaboration) coming to an end.7 At this same moment, Alfieri finds himself embroiled in a dispute concerning payments owed from Wittenborn Press, the U.S. distributor for Metro, who also distributed several of his many other publishing endeavors in the sixties, including: Zodiac: International Review of Architecture (1957- 63), Quadrum: International Review of Modern Art (1956-66), Pagina: International

Review of Contemporary Graphics (1962-65), Marmo: International Review of Art and

Architecture (1963-65), and the short lived Pacco, a review dedicated to packaging design, for which he only ever completed one issue, which appeared as an insert in Pagina 5 of 1965.8 Somewhere in the shuffle between Alfieri’s quarrel with Gorgoni and his disputes with Wittenborn Press, as well as his investing time, money and attention in his own new gallery and bookshop, Metro falls by the wayside. To make matters worse, it seems that

Gorgoni had accepted cash advances from both Virginia Dwan and the Castelli-Alfieri- Praeger team for the same New Avant-Garde project. The final letter in the Alfieri file of the Castelli Gallery archive comes from Virginia Dwan of Dwan Gallery, forwarded to Castelli by David Bell of Praeger Publishers. It reads:

We wish to advise you that Dwan Gallery made cash advances to Mr. Gianfranco Gorgoni with which he was to compile a book. We have learned that you have published this book under the title The New Avant-Garde: Issues for Art of the ‘70s. Before you make any payment to Mr. Gorgoni, Mr. Fiore, or anyone else connected with this book, we would suggest that you contact us so that we can advise you of the amounts due us.9

3 As a final insult to financial injury, Dwan botches Alfieri’s name, calling him “Mr. Fiore,” and from 1972 on, Alfieri all but disappears from the art world, publishing instead on automobile design until the early 2000s. In this thesis, I examine Metro using the archive of correspondence between Alfieri and Castelli to establish a chronological framework. This does not imply, however that I limit my discussion to those parts of Metro that Castelli was directly involved with. Rather, I allow these parts to stimulate discussion of larger issues at play throughout the decade of Metro’s publication. In these ten years, Metro’s activity separates somewhat neatly into three phases. The first phase includes the first three years, wherein Alfieri put out eight issues of the magazine. This phase is characterized by large photographic spreads on individual artists and their work in both black and white and color reproductions, with an additional interest in incorporating other art forms (i.e. literature, poetry, film, architecture, and industrial design). In an attitude of playfulness, Alfieri also experiments here with unusual layouts and dada-inspired fits of nonsense. Metro expresses, in this first phase, its desire to welcome those readers less versed in art criticism and history—a desire to inform the general public on contemporary artistic currents in hopes that they might become inspired to begin their own collections, or at least attend art events. The articles during this first phase of Metro employ a “show-and- tell” style of art criticism, where for the most part, the reader is meant to view the photographs, read the artists name, and if he or she is still interested, glance over the accompanying text. In other words, the majority of the material in Metro in these first years, does not consist of heavily footnoted academic articles for the already-initiated reader. The first year of this period in Metro’s activity, 1960, is a year of transition in Italian art, wherein Jean Fautrier has just won the international grand prize for painting at 4 the Venice Biennale, and in so doing, has heralded the end of Italy’s infatuation with l’informel, and the end too of France’s cultural dominance in Italy, as well as the tapering off of the existentialist tendencies in Italian art criticism.10 By the end of the first phase of Metro’s production, it is clear that the United States has replaced France as cultural center of the world. In 1964, Metro publishes no issues. This is a time when Alfieri restructures the magazine’s direction and funding. He takes over as the magazine’s sole director, whereas before he had shared his duties with the Società Foscama di Torino and had received funding from the Northern Italian industrial giants Olivetti and Henraux.11 Castelli steps in at this time as a larger shareholder in the magazine, sharing also some administrative duties with Alfieri. In this year when Alfieri publishes no issues of Metro magazine, Editoriale Metro publishes a book The International Directory of Contemporary Art, a juried selection of two hundred contemporary artists.12 Importantly, this year also marks the first ever large-scale victory for American art at the Venice Biennale, with Robert

Rauschenberg taking the international grand prize for painting. The second phase of Metro’s activity (issues 9-12, years 1965-67) begins in 1965, under a new financial and administrative structure. The magazine does away with its “Metro Young” series on up-and-coming artists, its “Metro-rama” series of images with only brief textual information to describe each one, and its “Metro Lexikon” series—a “historical outline of the art of all times and all countries” for the purpose of educating the uninitiated reader.13 Instead, the magazine now consists of essays, primarily. The articles grow slightly longer, and their content is more likely to be borrowed from Alfieri’s other publishing projects: magazines, books, and catalogs. The content becomes more focused on American and Italian artists, but there is also an increase of articles that do not discuss specific artists at all, but rather deal broadly with issues in contemporary 5 art (i.e.: the purpose of the Biennale, how Italy should structure its international exhibitions, the evolution of art as merely a reflection of developments in technology, negotiating literary and visual content in contemporary art). The number of articles in French begins to dwindle, as does the number of advertisers (table 1). By the final phase of Metro’s activity (issues 13-17, 1967-70), the so-called “New Series,” the magazine exists in three parts. There still remains a section, usually toward the end of each issue, that Alfieri continues to supply. This section contains images of artists’ work, short essays on specific artists, and reviews of recent exhibitions, in the style of the first two phases of Metro. The first pages of each issue in the “New Series,” however, appear to be supplied and curated by Alfieri’s two new co-directors: social historian and art writer Giulio Carlo Argan, chair of modern art at the Università di Roma; and art critic, historian, and aesthetic theorist Gillo Dorfles, professor of aesthetics at the University of Trieste.14 The first third of the material in Metro 13-17, contains almost no images, and instead there are full pages of text and copious footnotes. The topics of these essays usually involve institutional critique and social-historical views of contemporary art’s stylistic evolution. This phase of Metro also includes longer art- historical essays, usually dealing specifically with topics in Italian art history relevant to events and tendencies in contemporary Italian and American art. This phase of Metro is important in its focusing attention on the new Italian artists, and not just those imitating American pop tendencies, but also those involved in Italy’s arte povera movement. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, in her large book Arte Povera, lists “prominent voices of established theoreticians” of this period in Italian art history who served in promoting international recognition of arte povera: Giulio Carlo Argan, Gillo Dorfles, Maurizio Calvesi, Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, as well as the younger critics Alberto Boatto, Germano Celant, Achille Bonita Oliva, Marisa Volpi, Tommaso Trini, and Filiberto 6 Menna. 15 All of these critics contributed essays in this last phase of Metro. Some were listed as editorial staff members, and two, Argan and Dorfles, were co-directors. Castelli’s involvement in this phase is more difficult to trace. Metro had covered the Castelli Gallery’s neo-dada and pop periods, and now it gives coverage of American “primary structures,” with special focus on the artists of Castelli’s and Virginia Dwan’s galleries. However, the archive of correspondence between Castelli and Alfieri thins out in this phase.

The correspondence between Alfieri and Castelli is richest and most revealing in

Metro’s first phase (issues 1-8, 1960-63). For this and other reasons, this thesis centers its attention on that three-year period. Castelli’s contributions to Metro in this period are of a particular type. For issues 1-8, Castelli sends photographic materials and commissioned essays that are devoted to the work of one artist at a time for Metro magazine’s “Metro Young” series, wherein, according to Alfieri, Metro features artists who “give evidence of genuine artistic talent and a clear sense of history; in them one perceives possibilities for maturation, further development, and for their definitely winning a place in contemporary art.”16 Castelli’s artist Edward Higgins is the second artist to be featured in the “Metro Young” series (after French painter Georges Noël), Rauschenberg appears as Metro Young No. 3, Johns is No. 12, Cy Twombly is No. 14, Lee Bontecou is No. 19, and Roy Lichtenstein is Metro Young No. 21.17

OTHER GALLERISTS

It is likely that Alfieri enjoyed a close working relationship, similar to the one he shared with Castelli, with gallerist Bruno Lorenzelli in Milan. Galleria Lorenzelli is the only other gallery, besides the Leo Castelli Gallery, to purchase advertising space in

7 every issue of Metro. In Issue 13, in fact, the only galleries to advertise are the Castelli Gallery, Galleria Alfieri, and Galleria Lorenzelli (fig. 1). The letters between Alfieri and Castelli hint at Alfieri’s having had some influence with the Lorenzelli gallery. In one letter, from January 1961, Alfieri offers Castelli the opportunity to organize a solo show for Jack Tworkov at Galleria Lorenzelli.18 When Castelli expresses some hesitance, having been unimpressed with the exhibition catalog for Lorenzelli’s École de’ Paris show, Alfieri assures him that if he were interested in showing Tworkov at Lorenzelli, Alfieri would oversee the catalog himself, and provide his own exhibition essay.19 In its first and second phases of activity, between 1960 and 1967, Metro also tends to publish articles promoting artists whom Galleria Lorenzelli promotes at the same time. For instance, Metro features French painter Georges Noël in its first issue in December of 1960. The very next month, Galleria Lorenzelli exhibited works by Noël, and together with Alfieri published an exhibition catalog for the show.20 It is also, perhaps, no coincidence that in the same year that Metro runs a feature story on Jorge Piqueras, Alfieri puts out a book on Piqueras with Lorenzelli. When Alfieri begins collaborating with Castelli on publishing projects outside of Metro, he likely follows a model he had already established with Lorenzelli.21

At some point, Alfieri also begins working with Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, and Metro’s feature stories begin to correspond with exhibitions at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend.22 In Metro’s seventh issue from December of 1962, Nicolas Calas and Alain

Jouffroy both contribute essays on painter Jim Dine.23 Jouffroy’s text is published in French only, with no translations. Soon after Metro published these essays in 1963, Dine exhibited both in a solo exhibition and among the American pop artists in the Dessins Pop group show at Galerie Sonnabend. 24 Michael Sonnabend writes an article on artist 8 Michelangelo Pistoletto for Metro 12 in 1967.25 And in Metro 9, from 1965, Pierre Restany’s article on Sonnabend artist Claes Oldenburg is the only article printed in French for that issue, suggesting that Metro has become acutely Americanophilic at that point: even its French articles are about American artists.26

A QUICK NOTE ABOUT STYLE

Throughout much of this thesis, I refer to artworks and artists as either belonging to, or deviating from, stylistic groupings. Metro is very conscious of style as a dimension of art’s aesthetic and communicative power in its particular historical period. Even in fulfilling his claim that “Metro’s policy is not to bet on fads, but on lasting values,” Alfieri performs aesthetic judgment on the basis of stylistic analysis, since the same sort of stylistic analysis required to determine which artworks do belong to a fad is required to determine which artworks do not. But for Alfieri, presumably, “lasting values” transcend stylistic boundaries, so that truly great works will not appear to belong to any one fad

(here, “fad” is merely a way of saying “style” with a built-in negative connotation, or to specify a style that is no longer in fashion), so it becomes immediately necessary for Alfieri to emphasize the ways that a great work by a great artist does not actually belong to the stylistic grouping that, at first glance, it appears to exemplify. This is why we see articles by Alfieri with titles like “The Unreality of Rotella,” where Mimmo Rotella is otherwise known as a nouveau-realiste; “The Realism of Vasarely,” where Vasarely is an abstract painter if there ever was one; and “The Condition of the Arts: ‘Pop’ Means ‘Not popular’.”27 Giuseppe Marchiori performs the same sort of negation of simple stylistic categorization to imply “lasting values” in the pages of Metro. Take, for example, the very long title for his essay from Metro 6: “ ‘The Forests’ of Robert Helman: The

9 painting of an Independent and Isolated Artist; Armed with Fantasy and Tenacity, and Outside Any Current or Movement Whatsoever.” Fads may only be recognizable in retrospect. In Metro’s first issue, Alfieri praises Georges Noël as belonging to the French school of l’informel, but by the second issue, Alfieri declares the end of l’informel, and accuses Gérard Schneider, a painter of whom “everyone has spoken well,” of participating in a style of painting that has become defunct:

But little by little we have got the feeling that certain phenomena connected with petty modes doomed to disappear quickly, have troubled [Schneider’s] work and that of the truly better artists of the école de Paris. They were, of course, only acrobatic painters and sculptors, and not true artists.28

To categorize a work of art by style is to prioritize only certain formal, literary, conceptual, material, or pictorial content as being key to its meaning, and to ignore whatever other qualities the particular work of art may have. This provides an expedient for art criticism by making two distinct artworks or artists interchangeable in conversation: Alfieri could insert any other painter’s name associated with the informel style into his comment about Schneider, and that painter would be equally guilty of “acrobatic” painting (if that’s what the informel “boils down to” in retrospect), so all informel artists would be equally passé. Categorizing works of art into specific stylistic groups provides a shortcut (like a mnemonic device) for interpreting the work or imposing a verbal meaning onto it. Importantly for Metro and any other art journal or chronicle, assigning stylistic labels to artworks helps one to imagine that artworks that are simply different from one another constitute a changing, evolving art world, rather than constituting an entropic plurality of artistic methods and products.29 Over the course of the sixties, Castelli’s gallery shows work ranging from the abstract expressionism of Jack Tworkov, to the neo- 10 dada of Johns and Rauschenberg, to the pop of Lichtenstein and Warhol, to the minimalism of Judd and Morris. By illuminating certain formal, pictorial, conceptual, and material tendencies in each artist’s work, it is easy to see how one style might lead to the next.30 Dorfles chronicles art’s stylistic evolution since WWI in and article called “Obscure Aspects of the New Figuration in Italy”:

No sooner was post-cubist Picassoism accepted and digested (which had supplanted constructivist geometrism) than informal and action painting noisily burst out on to the scene; just as they began to celebrate the informal style and dedicate huge monographs to the new masters of chromatic and plastic dissolution, the dubious but attractive, illusion of neo-dada appeared (with all its derivatives of new-realism, assemblage, etc.). And while a few critics—for all their thinly veiled disgust—were even singing the praises of this neo-dada, back came the “New Figuration” after considerable fanfare—the nightmare of all those who had hoped for a period of peace in the reign of pure abstraction.31

Stylistic Categories are particularly important to Italian art in the period immediately after World War II. Under Mussolini, the state sanctioned a sentimental style of social realism in painting, so immediately after Italy’s liberation from both

Mussolini and the German occupation, Italian artists had an opportunity to paint in modes that had been suppressed before—namely, different types of abstraction were now available.32 This sudden change in itself creates the problem of “choosing” which pre- established type of abstraction to work in: constructivism, cubism, expressionism, neo- impressionism, and so forth. Italian artists selected the brand of image making they thought best suited their post-war age, formed social groups around it, signed manifestoes, and dedicated their visual research to that style until that method was no longer tenable.33 Then new groups would form. In this way, stylistic labels existed a priori, preceding the individual works they described. This is a pattern that began with artists’ groups during the First World War.

11 In this way, artistic styles exist as concepts before their constituent artworks exist as physical objects. It would seem that this method of working would yield an artwork that is not meaningful in itself, but is meaningful only insomuch as it illustrates the concepts associated with its style. These concepts are held in place by the manifesto, a textual object, rather than necessarily manifesting themselves visually or materially in the artwork.34 Among the artists that Metro chooses to feature, we see an eagerness to adapt to stylistic change in international art. Achille Perilli, for example, had been painting in the

1950s in an abstract style consisting of scrawled, graphic marks in black or grey on the support of a white painted surface. This group of paintings resembled the rough, calligraphic works of Wols, for example. But by 1963 in Metro’s third issue, an article entitled “Perilli’s ‘Cartoon Paintings,’” features images of a new group of paintings, wherein Perilli continues to make his signature graphic marks, but now places them in a rectangular framework that resembles the framing conventions for narrative segments in newspaper comics. In these works, Perilli has added primary colors to his palette in order to further allude to the visual conventions of comic books.35 This is Perilli’s version of pop. By Metro’s fifteenth issue in 1969, Perilli has abandoned the comic book as source material, and has traded it in for a cooler geometric structure. His graphic marks remain, but now they are surrounded by neutral tones, in gravity-free interior spaces. Perilli moves in a stylistically “cooler” direction. In the early 1960s, Dorfles writes that images lose their power to communicate after a period of “consumo” or exhaustion of their message, prompting the development of new artistic methods of communication. Both Dorfles and Argan take for granted the Hegelian notion that art evolves from one stylistic phase to the next, each phase of art reflecting the historical era in which it occurs, moving toward the eventual “death of art.” 12 Dorfles and Argan begin to contribute essays on this theme when they become co- directors with Alfieri in Metro’s “New Series” in 1968. As the title of this thesis suggests, I have chosen to accept the term “post-abstract” as a satisfactory descriptor of the kind of “figurative” art that Leo Castelli promotes in the pages of Metro, at least in the first half of the 1960s. I will acknowledge here that in art, and elsewhere, “abstraction” is a type of figuration, and “figuration” is a type of abstraction; however, in Metro, the terms “abstraction” and “figuration” are antonyms, and they will function throughout the rest of this paper according to that convention.36

Alfieri, Dorfles, and other critics of Metro tend to characterize the neo-dada and pop styles of the so-called “New Yorchese” school as novel in their approaches to figuration. For those critics, these American approaches to figuration signal the end of European “pure abstraction” without rehashing those modes of pre-abstract visual representation (i.e.: impressionism, figurative expressionism, social realism, realism, mimetic naturalism). In the Italian context of Metro magazine, the Castelli artists that appear in this essay—Higgins, Rauschenberg, Johns, Twombly, Bontecou, and Lichtenstein— whatever their stylistic categorizations may be, all perform unique and diverse forms of post-informel “return to the figure.”37 This thesis focuses on the first phase of Metro’s activity in the early 1960s, that period of cultural readjustment when American art increases in popularity in Italy and internationally. Metro credits American art of this period with defeating French “pure” abstraction by returning to—and reinventing—figuration. My goal in this thesis is to explore ways that Metro magazine recontextualizes the most famous American art of this period, the art of The Leo Castelli Gallery, for an Italian audience. In addition to examining Bruno Alfieri’s correspondence with Leo Castelli, I discuss contemporary Italian criticism and theory, in Metro and elsewhere. The work of critic and theorist Gillo 13 Dorfles, who wrote for Metro on these American artists, will provide important keys for understanding Italy’s reception of American post-abstract figuration.

14 Chapter One: Setting the Scene in Metro 1

Records of Bruno Alfieri’s correspondence with Leo Castelli begin on February 21, 1960 with Alfieri’s soliciting material for a special American-themed issue of his architectural review Zodiac, scheduled to be published in December of that year.38 In his first letter, Alfieri requests that Castelli, in addition to sending images of the latest artworks of the young artists of Castelli’s stable, should send an image of one of Jasper Johns’s American flags for the magazine’s cover. It is likely that Castelli and

Alfieri had met at a Venice Biennale or two previous to their first written correspondence, but in these early letters Alfieri addresses Castelli in formal terms— calling him “Egregio Signore Castelli” and using the polite “lei” instead of the familiar “tu” second-person pronoun.39 In March, Castelli responds to Alfieri’s request by sending not only photographs, but two books on Rauschenberg and Johns, and the exhibition catalog for the “Sixteen Americans” show at MoMA.40 He also directs Alfieri’s attention to recent articles that appeared in the French and Swiss journals Cimaise and Art

International for yet more information on new American artists. The matter of the flag image that Alfieri sought for Zodiac is resolved January 28, 1961, when Castelli sends him a transparency of Johns’s Three Flags, (1958) with a reminder to credit the art collection of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine for the image.41 Three Flags finally appeared on the cover of Zodiac 8, and this issue of Zodiac additionally featured a brief essay on American art, as represented by recent shows at Castelli (fig. 2). Alfieri’s first mention of Metro magazine appears in a letter from July 1, 1960.42

At this point, he has met with Castelli in person in Milan, and is somewhat familiar with Castelli’s artists and with American art in general. He requests that sculptor Edward Higgins appear in the inaugural issue of Metro. Alfieri specifies that he wants two or

15 three images of Higgins’s piece Torso della Donna and a Higgins interview with a “half- dozen” questions that “you, yourself (Castelli), must prepare.” In addition to the text and the images of artworks, Alfieri requests six “great photos of the artist’s studio,” suggesting that “these could also show Higgins out of the studio, on the street, or what have you.”43 He had originally suggested that Castelli commission the Higgins interview from Robert Rosenblum or Leo Steinberg, but he is thrilled with the piece that Castelli eventually sends from Georgine Oeri, whom Castelli introduces to him as the former assistant to J.J. Sweeney at the Guggenheim, and Professor of Art History at Pratt

Institute of Design. For a separate project to appear in Metro’s first issue, Alfieri requests an article on the “Sider Bar” by which he intends “Cedar Bar” (he adds “si scritto così? Non credo”) illustrated in black and white photo-reportage, that again Castelli himself would organize.44 Metro offers to pay for both projects, or to reimburse Castelli for his expenses up to a certain amount. After requesting this material, Alfieri shares his plans to proceed with Wittenborn Press for the distribution of the journal, barring any recommendation of better distributors that Castelli may be able to offer, and jokes that in any case, the magazine can be sustained simply by taking advantage of “three million addresses” in Castelli’s possession.45

MAKING A SCENE: BAR AND CAFÉ CULTURE

The Cedar Bar article that Alfieri mentions in his letter would never materialize in the pages of Metro, but it is clear from Metro’s coverage in “black and white photo- reportage” of both Caffé Rosati in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo and Les Deux Magots in Paris, that Metro had the intention of setting up a view of parallel art “scenes” among Paris, Rome, and New York (fig. 3-4).46 Of course, one wonders if Castelli may have let

16 the Cedar Bar story slip through his fingers on purpose. The well-known frequenters of the Cedar Bar are not the neo-dadaists and pop artists of Castelli’s stable in the 1960’s, but those abstract expressionists of the previous decade: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, to name a few. At this point in 1960, it is four years since Pollock’s death, and although some artists do continue to gather at the Cedar Bar, a photojournalistic feature on the tavern in 1960 would not constitute a “scoop.” Images of Les Deux Magots in Paris appear in the second issue of Metro in a feature on artist Jorge Piqueras called “Piqueras at the Deux Magots and at Dôme,” with photos by Hans Haacke and Luc Joubert.47 This article is an extension of “A Day with Jorge Piqueras / In the Studio,” a photo-essay that shows the Peruvian-Parisian abstract painter with his wife and children, playing the guitar, strolling along the sidewalk, and walking up the steps to his studio (with captions that romanticize the mold and corroding wood of his studio staircase). At the Deux Magots Piqueras poses for the photos, sitting alone at an outdoor table reading, or just passing the time (fig. 3). The accompanying text of the article itself admits to the “decline” of this famous hangout for intellectuals and artists, whose heyday came rather at the end of World War II and the beginning of the fifties. The text concludes, “But the Deux Magots is still a nice café.”48 The photos of the bar do not manage to create an aura of glamour around a geographic hotbed for avant- garde activity, as they most likely intended to do, but rather convey a sense of the Deux Magots, and perhaps by extension Paris and l’informel, having become outmoded, or at best, an object of nostalgia.

The Deux Magots article is a model for how the Cedar Bar story could have gone. Of course, the other option would have been to invite artists to stage a scene artificially, as Metro does in its feature on Caffé Rosati at the Piazza del Popolo in Rome. The Caffé Rosati actually was part of a vibrant scene in the 1960s. The group of young Roman 17 artists whom Alfieri refers to as the “Nuova Scuola Romana” in Metro, are more commonly referred to elsewhere as the “Scuola Piazza del Popolo,” sharing their name with the square on which Caffé Rosati sits.49 Among the artists belonging to this group are Piero Dorazio, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly, Gastone Novelli, and Mimmo Rotella, all of whom showed at Plinio de Martiis’s Galleria La Tartaruga—just a few blocks down the Via del Babuino from the Piazza del Popolo—over the course of the sixties. It is impressive how many well-known American and Roman artists photographer

Virginia Dortch is able to capture in these photos (fig. 4). Among them are Philip Guston,

Mimmo Rotella, Franz Kline, Afro Basaldella, Achille Perilli, Frederic Kiesler, Giulio Turcato, Gastone Novelli, and Piero Dorazio (Dortch’s husband). Just as striking, perhaps, is the relative lack of other bar patrons. Writing for the catalog for the 2011 exhibition L’Irripetibili Anni ’60 a Roma, Luca Massimo Barbero fondly praises that exhibition and its catalog for exposing the plurality, the complexity, and optimistic avant-garde energy that for him characterized the 1960s in Rome.50 He muses that the exhibition created an atmosphere to make us, the viewers, feel “as if we were seated at the Caffè Rosati on the Piazza del Popolo and we could hear, ideally, the voices of the protagonists of artistic and critical debate.”51 In a different essay from the same exhibition catalog, Giovanni Russo remembers Caffè

Rosati as a popular spot for artists and intellectuals to gather in the afternoons and evenings, and he includes a nighttime photograph of a crowded and bustling Rosati in 1963 (fig. 5).52 For the sake of recognizing artists’ faces by daylight, Dortch’s early morning photos of the Rosati scene sacrifice candor, but they do represent, however artificially, a real center of artistic community. One of Dortch’s photographs captures seven Roman artists (Mimmo Rotella, Achille Perilli, Fabio Mauri, Gino Marotta, Piero Dorazio, Giulio Turcato, and Gastone Novelli) seated in daylight, all in a row in front of 18 Caffé Rosati. The accompanying text for the photo-reportage admits that this group photograph is “not arbitrary” but “is meant to celebrate the publication of a small book, Crack, put out by Krakmalnicoff, a Roman publisher, who presents it here.”53

EDWARD HIGGINS DANS LE METRO

It is interesting that Alfieri should request to show the work of sculptor Edward

Higgins in Metro’s first issue, rather than Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns, both of whom Castelli most certainly preferred.54 In terms of Italian reception and patronage, wealthy Milanese industrialist, real estate mogul, and art collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo had purchased his first Rauschenberg combine, Kick Back, from Larry Rubin after seeing it in the 1959 Dokumenta in Kassel, and he continued to collect Rauschenberg’s work from Castelli in the 1960s.55 Rauschenberg’s first exposure in Italy, however, was the Galleria Del’Obelisco’s 1953 exhibition of his Boxes and Personal Fetishes.56 In 1958, Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome gave solo shows to both Rauschenberg and Cy

Twombly.57 Jasper Johns had already shown in the 29th Venice Biennale in 1958 in its special exhibition of “Giovani Artisti” from Britain, France, Italy, West Germany and the United States.58 As for the Higgins sculptures featured in the “Metro Young” series of Metro’s first issue, they were works that had not yet been shown publicly in Europe, and they belonged entirely to French and American collections.59 It could have been the case that Castelli meant to use Metro to discover an Italian market for Higgins’s work. Another likely explanation for Alfieri’s choosing Higgins for his first issue has to do with his identifying ways that Higgins’s work would have appeared well-suited to the visual and critical interests at play not only in the earliest issues of Metro, but in the larger Italian art world at the end of the 1950s.

19

THE BIENNALE, METRO AND CULTURAL AGGIORNAMENTO

Nineteen fifty-eight is a year of “cultural triumph” for American art in Western Europe. In that year the exhibitions Jackson Pollock 1912-1956 and Dorothy Miller’s The New American Painting, toured the continent: the Pollock exhibition showing at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome under the direction of Palma Bucarelli, and The New

American Painting exhibition showing at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Milan.60 Although some historians of art in the post-World War II period would like to see American abstract expressionism as having “signed the death certificate of European dominance after so many decades,” (and here “European” should be read “French”).61 In Italy and in Metro, this regime change came about more slowly. Take, for instance, the Venice Biennale as an indication of the values at play in the larger Italian art world. Historian Nancy Jachec argues that the administrators of the Venice Biennale spent the 1950s engaged in aggiornamento, an attempt to catch up, with the cultural progress that they had perceived as having taken place in other Western European countries while Italy remained culturally stunted under the fascist government of Mussolini.62 Italian art during the 1930s and early ‘40s had been characterized by sentimentality and social realism. In the period of cultural aggiornamento, it became imperative to renounce the figural narrative style of Italian painter Renato Guttoso, for example, in favor of a more pure and universal non-figurative abstraction.63 The idea was to “reconnect” with Western Europe by promoting a type of painting whose themes and methods could express “a shared,

European history… directly informed by the French experience of occupation and resistance, which they had shared,” yet that were universal enough to be meaningful across national boundaries.64 In the Venice Biennale exhibition catalog, leftist art critic

20 and social historian Giulio Carlo Argan promotes abstract painter Antonio Corpora “as a painter of ‘pure feeling,’ who used his direct style of painting ‘not to prop up ideological programmes,’ but in order to ‘express the human condition.’”65 Artworks of l’informel and gestural or lyric abstraction, were susceptible to such existential readings that emphasized the “human condition.” The idea is that the canvas reflects the artist’s subjective experiences and feelings directly, unmediated by recognizable, or nameable, forms; so the work’s viewer must interpret the work by recognizing the same subjective states in himself that he attributes to the painter. This does not reflect an appreciation of the “poetics of pure action” to be found in American abstract expressionism, as “poetics” would imply an interest in the functioning of communicative structures (as opposed to communication that transcends structures), and “action” would imply an appeal to the shared physicality, rather than the shared mental subjectivity, of the artist and viewer.66 L’informel, as a cultural program of European unification, reaches its culmination in 1960 when Jean Fautrier, Parisian informel painter, wins the Venice Biennale’s grand prize for painting, beating out American abstract expressionist Franz Kline.67 In the first issue of Metro, in 1960, a nearly full-page candid photograph of Jean Fautrier in Venice appears (fig. 6). It accompanies the article “Due Domande,” in which former Biennale administrators Roberto Longhi and Lionello Venturi, among others, discuss issues and problems in the Venice Biennale.68 Longhi, who had recently resigned from the Biennale board, accuses the Biennale XXX, and the Italian pavilion in particular, of being biased toward abstract art, whereas Venturi praises the Italian pavilion for doing its best to choose work that “shows well among the foreign artists.”69 In 1962, the prize for painting would go to abstract painter Alfred Manessier, and the prize for sculpture would go to Alberto Giacometti. Here in the jury’s selection of Giacommetti, Jachec sees a “subtle return to figuration,” although “the distribution of prizes indicates that gesture 21 painting still enjoyed official support in 1962.”70 Lawrence Alloway names 1964 as “the year in which the emphasis of the Biennale shifted to include a substantial number of artists working in post-informel or post-abstract expressionist styles. The prestige of abstract art, once so hard to establish, now prompted resistance to a new form of figurative art.”71 Metro has several ties to the Venice Biennale. Radolfo Pallucchini, whose name appears among those listed as editorial staff in the first five issues of Metro, and

Giuseppe Marchiori, who served as editorial staff for the entire duration of the magazine, were both active participants in the administrative apparatus of the Venice Biennale. Radolfo Pallucchini served as General Secretary, organizing the first five Biennali after World War II, and afterward continued to advise the exhibition’s organizers.72 Giuseppe Marchiori organized the exhibition Il Fronte Nuovo Delle Arti at the 28th Biennale di Venezia in 1956, wherein he showed the paintings of Piero Dorazio and other members of the Italian avant-garde Gruppo degli Otto (including gestural abstractionists Giuseppe

Santomaso, Emilio Vedova, and Afro Basaldella).73 Argan, who joined Alfieri as co- director in 1967 for Metro’s “new series,” presented the Peggy Guggenheim collection in the 1948 Venice Biennale and also served on the jury for the 1958, 1960, and 1964 biennales.74 All of these critics and historians regularly contributed essays to the official

Venice Biennale exhibition catalogues, which between the years 1950-1956 were published by “Alfieri Editori.”75 Like the Biennale, Metro magazine in its first years chooses to focus on French cultural production as much as, if not more than, it focuses on an American contribution to international art. We see, between the first and last issues of Metro, a steep decline in the number of articles that are either written in, or translated into, French as early as issue number two: going from fourteen articles available in French to only seven, whereas the 22 number of English articles between the first two issues rises from twelve to twenty (table 1). However, there is also a later drop in the number of articles that appear in English, indicating that by the late 1960s the magazine sought to reach a predominantly Italian readership; however, this decline is more gradual.

CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE “METRO YOUNG” IN 1960

Metro’s first issue is divided among three featured contemporary artists: Ben Nicholson, Georges Noël, and Edward Higgins.76 All three artists receive the kind of coverage that Alfieri requests from Castelli in his letter: images of the artist’s work, an interview, and photos of the artist’s studio that show the artist at work, at play, or performing quotidian tasks. Noël and Nicholson are both painters, so by selecting Higgins from among Castelli’s stable, Alfieri has selected a representative of international contemporary sculpture for the issue, but there are more formal and iconographic ways in which Higgins’s sculpture appears to be a “fit” for Alfieri’s first issue. All three contemporary artists that Alfieri chooses to feature in Metro’s first issue produce works that could be seen as purely abstract, but are, each in their own ways, subtly suggestive, of figuration or some recognizable iconographic content. If the reader may have been tempted to view Nicholson’s geometric contour drawings and collaged planes of color fields as instances of “pure” geometry, or as entirely formal experiments in paint and collaged materials, the magazine casts doubt on this reductive appraisal by prepping the viewer’s experience of the paintings with images of still-lives set up in Nicholson’s studio, sketches by Nicholson of landscape and cityscape scenes, and vacation photos (taken by the artist’s wife, Felicitas Vogler) where Greek white walls become rectangular sections for framing the bright blue sky, and

23 patterned marble-work on cathedral walls resemble the formal decisions at play in the artist’s collaged paintings (fig. 7-8). A horizontal line, seen in this way, becomes a horizon line. It appears that these arrangements of shapes and colors, materials, and textures, are just as much the artist’s response to visual stimulus (and tendencies within the materials themselves) as they would be responses to emotional stimulus. The text of the article reinforces this idea that Nicholson’s work, unlike works of l’informel or tachisme, is a subjective gesture tempered by formal decisions informed by encounters with the visible world. Marco Valsecchi claims that Nicholson’s geometry is in service of a “much more intimate quality of the creations: that of its lyrical intuition of a simple and absolute image drawn from the reality of the natural world.” So here we have a union of both “lyrical intuition” and “reality of the natural world.” 77 Noël’s painting is much more spontaneous and expressionistic than either Nicholson’s or Higgins’s; it consists of quickly executed scribbles and scrawls in paint and graphite on canvas (fig. 9). The accompanying text of the article refers to Noël’s painting as specifically informel, and also makes comparisons to Klee and Dubuffet.78 Noël’s work relates also to American artist Mark Tobey’s all-over paintings of tangled and layered networks of lines, which Porter McCray, director of MoMA’s International Program described at the 1958 Biennale as “most personal means of expression” with the aim of developing “eternal and universal symbols as the language of our epoch.”79 Mark Tobey was well received in Italy, and receives several positive mentions in Metro.80 With lines that are more drawn and scratched than painted and brushed, however,

Noël’s canvases also roughly resemble Cy Twombly’s painterly-graphic allusions to the act of writing, which are featured in Metro 6; however, like Mark Tobey’s paintings, Noël’s so-called “Palimpsests” are shallower in terms of layered, material depth, and therefore they do not give the impression of having accumulated over time (as would 24 warrant the appellation “palimpsest”). The objects do not seem to have a history of their own. They look quick. (Chapter Four of this thesis deals with other European artists who employ the graphic gestural mark as an act of proto-figuration). Edward Higgins engages in a brand of sculptural figuration that uses found objects to suggest the shape of the human figure. Many of Higgins’s sculptures refer to the human body by resemblance, either in their verticality or in the soft, rounded contours of their plaster elements. Gothic (1960), for instance, vaguely resembles a human back or chest and stands upright on a pole base (fig. 10). Several of Higgins’s titles refer explicitly to the human figure, for example the sculpture that Alfieri referred to in his letter as “Torso della Donna,” is Torso from 1960 (fig. 10). But then again, the title for Higgins’s sculpture Manifold I (1960) hints instead at the second-hand machine parts that Higgins adopts to construct his forms, and not to representations of the figure at all. In the following issue of Metro, Alfieri mentions that several “middle-class readers” were shocked by the work of young American sculptor Edward Higgins, “… and not—as might seem logical—because it is apparently Dadaist, but quite the contrary, because of its superficial appearance of being an ‘object’….”81 Alfieri goes on to call the “middle-class” the “least qualified” in their assessment of artworks, as they are only interested in fads—the fad in this case being the popular preference for art that records action and intuition, art that deemphasizes its own object-hood in order to emphasize the processes of its making and the subjectivity of its maker.82 In the same breath, Alfieri announces that “by burning itself out, the informel has been able to give us back the pleasure of analyzing pictorial matter….”83 As for the dadaist qualities that Alfieri reads into Higgins’s work, he may simply be referring to Higgins’s use of found objects—the second-hand metal parts that Higgins finds in junkyards. If Alfieri did, in fact, anticipate his public’s rejecting Higgins for being “dadaist,” it is no wonder that he would shy away 25 from featuring Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns in Metro’s inaugural issue. Rauschenberg and Johns had been called “neo-dadaist” since 1958, when the term first appeared in Art News magazine.84 Although Higgins, in responding to Georgine Oeri’s interview questions, participates at first in the ruling existential and metaphysical tendencies in art-speak of the moment, he then eases into describing his artistic process in ways that are more grounded in material experimentation and formalism. He begins:

I cannot separate one thing from another. The whole of life—is a whole. Everything is connected, what we know and what we don’t know. You are in it, part of its continuous flow in which forces converge. I want to haul it in, pulling a hood over it, fastening and containing forces. The achieved confinement gets me started anew right away, as I am with the flow, shaping it as I get a hold of it.85

But Higgins continues by elaborating on the material aspects of his aristic process. He recounts his first experiences with the welding torch, developing his craft while working on an assembly line in a Chevrolet factory, gathering found materials from junkyards, working the surface of the found metal to a delicate smoothness, experimenting with the addition of clay “stuffing” in the hollow metal forms until he has “got it,” then pouring a plaster cast over the clay area.86 He concludes the interview with a statement about his work’s figurative qualities: “Most of my work is based on the figure, on figure groups; not the figure as a physical display, but as a basis for structural and spiritual relationships.”87

THE ARTIST AS ART

The texts on Ben Nicholson and Edward Higgins consist of one interview each; however, for Georges Noël Metro prints one conversation with André Malraux, two essays, one poetic tribute, and one short story by Charles Estienne about a (real? 26 hypothetical?) chat with the artist on the topics of art and literature: “What do you think of Lolita, Monsieur Noël?”88 Noël is treated with romantic biography: Jean Cathelin shares the Vasari-styled, Picassoesque anecdote that Noël could draw like a classical master at the age of six, and goes on to spin the charming tale of how Noël abandoned a career of industrial design, selling everything he owned to move to Paris and become a painter.89 “It is no use smiling at the anecdotal vulgarity of this preamble,” he warns,

The technician Noël had to paint, had to express his thought, to live metaphysically through his art, to feel no longer ‘hemmed in’ by applied mechanics and the precision of industrial design. Another idiom rose in him and he had to express it, he had to let his pen or pencil operate in a free and unsupervised world, to affirm his will to transgress the fragile prestige of common algebra and geometry to the profit of ineffable algebra and geometry.90

The critic’s performance of the “cult of the artist,” lauding attention and veneration on the artist himself, is compatible with the ideology of the informel. If Noël’s painting is supposed to be a revelation of Noël’s own interior subjectivity, if his art functions as the index of that subjectivity in confrontation with artistic mediums, then the creator himself becomes a key to interpreting the work. All three featured contemporary artists in this issue of Metro receive the same kind of scrutiny. We learn from Marco Valsecchi that Nicholson has “clear eyes,” a high voice, and “irony on his thin lips.”91 Georgine Oeri tells us that Higgins…

…about 30 years of age, is quiet, his expression stern, the forehead obstinate. The face, the whole body seem to be filled with his purpose. His motions are sure and graceful like an animal’s, although he is, at this moment, convinced of his clumsiness.92

Oeri’s first introduction to Higgins treats the artist as the object of aesthetic scrutiny, as if the qualities that she perceives in him will illuminate parallel qualities in his work. This form of artist-directed criticism persists throughout Metro’s first eight issues, and is best exemplified by Jacques Kermoal’s essays “The Psychoanalysis of 27 Lucio Fontana” and “The Psychoanalysis of Enrico Baj,” in issues 7 and 8; wherein Kermoal attempts to analyze the artists by performing exercises in free association.93 Interestingly, in one of Bruno Alfieri’s earliest published works of art criticism, he writes on the Jackson Pollock exhibition presented by Peggy Guggenheim in 1950 during the 25th Venice Biennale, and he discusses this urge to redirect his attention from the artwork to the artist.94 Time magazine reproduced excerpts of Alfieri’s essay:

Each one of [Pollock’s] pictures is part of himself. But what kind of man is he? What is his inner world worth? Is it worth knowing, or is it totally undistinguished? Damn it, if I must judge a painting by the artist, it is no longer the painting that I am interested in…95

By 1960, Alfieri feels less hesitation in accepting biography as an art historical method. In a letter from October of 1960, Alfieri expresses his approval of Oeri’s interview and adds that he would like to collaborate with her in the future. In September of 1961, he even suggests to Castelli, in two different letters, that Oeri could conduct the interview with Jasper Johns for issue 4/5 (which suggests that Alfieri would have found this style of interview appropriate even for an artist whose work is not entirely self- expressive).96 Later, Rauschenberg and Johns both reject this “cult of the artist” approach, despite Alfieri’s continued attempts to interview, psychoanalyze, and candidly photograph the artists whose lives and careers he features in Metro. Alfieri concludes his letters to Castelli about the Higgins article with very positive feedback. He is eager to work with Oeri again, and he asks if Castelli would be interested in selling any of Higgins’s sculptures, requesting pictures and prices of available pieces.

Alfieri and Castelli agree to stay in contact about Johns and Rauschenberg for future issues, and Alfieri encourages Castelli to stay in touch, reminding him to “keep some great journalistic ideas in mind for future issues of Metro.”97

28

Chapter Two: Robert Rauschenberg in Metro 2

On January 7, 1961, Bruno Alfieri writes to Leo Castelli that collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo has sent photographs of the Rauschenberg works from his collection with permission to reproduce them in Metro 2.98 Along with the Rauschenberg material, this second issue of Metro will feature the works of informel artist Gérard Schneider, and the post-informel painting of Jorge Piqueras, and the sculpture, collage, and painting of Jean Dubuffet, all of whom (with the exception of Rauschenberg) live and work in and around Paris. On January 13, Castelli reports to Alfieri:

Dore Ashton is writing a long article on the Dante drawings. She, Rauschenberg and I feel that it would be nice if all the 34 cantos were reproduced in small format, 9 per page. I’m working to get the main text that is to accompany the selection of reproduction of his paintings, and hope to have it ready soon. As far as what you call ‘the photo-reportage’ is concerned, Rauschenberg is dead against that, and would like to replace it with an autobiographical combine-drawing done for this particular purpose. Of course there will be also a good photograph of Rauschenberg, but only one.99

Two weeks later, Castelli writes to Alfieri:

As for the Rauschenberg main article, I have sensational news for you: it will be written by none other than John Cage, who has known Rauschenberg since the beginning and is perhaps one of the persons who understands his work best. I hope you are as pleased with his idea as we are.100

Rauschenberg, like Higgins, uses found objects as sculptural materials, but unlike Higgins, he also employs painterly brushwork, found photographs, and photographic transfers in his sculptural assemblages, or “combines.” Whereas Higgins presents a sculptural object that approximates the “human figure” in its general manner of occupying space, Rauschenberg’s work presents a plurality of figures, multiple pieces of

29 figural information, as well as traces of the artist’s own physical act of figuring. Accordingly, the language that Metro uses to describe Rauschenberg is quite different from the biography that appears in the Higgins article.

RAUSCHENBERG AS ANTI-HERO

In this second issue of Metro, Rauschenberg receives the multi-pronged coverage that Metro gave to Noël in its first issue. Castelli sends color images in addition to those sent by Panza, and sends Dore Ashton’s essay “Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno” and John Cage’s poetic essay “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist and His Work.”101 Alfieri commissions a third essay, “Rauschenberg, or the End of Obsolescence” from Gillo Dorfles, and prints an excerpt from Frank O’Hara’s “The Beat Scene” to run alongside the Rauschenberg material.102 It is interesting to learn from Castelli’s letter that Rauschenberg is “dead against” Alfieri’s call for photo-reportage, since Higgins had consented to photographer Charles

Rotmil’s shooting him semi-candidly both at work in the studio and at home with his wife (fig. 11). Perhaps Rauschenberg disliked the idea of being portrayed in the role of romantic genius artist; or perhaps Rauschenberg’s brand of neo-dada does not invite an examination of the artist in the same way that French informel did for artists previously. Germano Celant calls the artwork that immediately follows informel specifically “anti- heroic,” noting that “the artists rallied around their rejection of the existential and gestural protagonism of art informel….”103 The other artists featured in this issue of Metro—

Piqueras, Schneider, and Dubuffet— all apparently acquiesced to Alfieri’s demands for documentary photo-reportage. We see photos of Piqueras strolling along the street, sitting at a café, and playing guitar to his wife and children; we see Schneider’s face in close-up

30 portraits, and photos of the artist listening to music with playwright Eugene Ionesco; and Giuseppe Marchiori’s article “Le Personnage Dubuffet” shows Dubuffet both standing in his garden and working in his studio (figs.12-14).104 Three photographs of Robert Rauschenberg do appear in Metro 2. All three show him posing alone, surrounded by his artwork either in a studio or gallery setting (fig. 15). He does not, however, appear caught in the act of painting, as Alfieri would have preferred, nor is he shown performing the tasks of his daily life, sitting at a bar, or strolling casually down the street. Johns may have expressed a similar distaste for

Alfieri’s brand of photo-reportage regarding his own feature in Metro 4/5. One full-page photographic portrait of him, taken by Ed Meneely, appears in that issue (fig. 16). It seemed to have caused some annoyance for him or for Castelli, because in a letter dated April 11, 1962, Alfieri’s secretary Faith Pleasanton apologizes to Castelli that at that point it would be “too late to change the portrait-cliché”.105 This image of Johns that appears in Metro 4/5 would later become well-known in Italian contemporary art in the second half of the sixties, when Michelangelo Pistoletto used the photograph as the source image for two of his own pieces entitled Jasper Johns’ Portrait and The Ears of Jasper Johns, from his “Minus Objects” series of 1966 (fig. 17-18). For whatever reason, these two American artists, Johns and Rauschenberg, seemed to want to turn the photographic lens away from themselves, at least here in the pages of Metro. Instead of reading the artwork as a manifestation of the artist’s own subjectivity, we are encouraged instead to see Rauschenberg’s painterly-sculptural combines as a kind of poetry of visual information, and to see Johns’s targets and flags as self-contained picture-objects.

31 DORFLES AND ECO: RAUSCHENBERG AND OPEN POETRY OF VISUAL INFORMATION

In March of 1961, Alfieri writes back to Castelli to express how pleased he is with how the Ashton and Cage texts have turned out.106 Only after he has received these two pieces does Alfieri write to Castelli that Dorfles will also contribute a “molto bello” article on Rauschenberg entitled “Rauschenberg, or the End of Obsolescence.”107 While Dorfles may have used both the Ashton and Cage texts to model his own thoughts on Rauschenberg’s combines, those essays by Ashton and Cage already echo themes in contemporary Italian aesthetic theory. Italian aesthetic theory in this period tends to link visual art to poetry, and to treat the art object as a unit, or as a collection, of information. Dorfles is one of the best-known theorists working on problems of the “poetics of information” at this time. Umberto Eco is the other.108 “Rauschenberg, or Obsolescence Defeated” was the first of a total of thirteen articles that Dorfles would contribute to Metro. In addition to providing art criticism for the journal, Dorfles would also serve on the jury whose job it would be to select the world’s two hundred best contemporary artists for Metro’s book project The International Directory of Contemporary Art in 1964. Beginning with issue 13 in 1967, he would become a co-director of the magazine in Metro’s “New Series.”109 Dorfles taught Aesthetics at the University of Trieste, and wrote several books during the 1960s that became popular among Italian art critics and theorists, including: Il devinire delle arti (1959); Ultime Tendenze Nell’Arte d’Oggi (1961); Simbolo, Communicazione, Consumo (1962); Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti (1965) Le Oscillazione del Gusto (1966); and

Artificio e Natura (1968). And in 1969, Bell Publishing Company in New York put out Dorfles’s book Kitsch and the World of Bad Taste, which included Clement Greenberg’s essay “The Avant-garde and Kitsch”.110 An interesting biographical side note: Dorfles

32 and Castelli both grew up in Trieste at the same time and were childhood acquaintances (fig. 19).111 It is Dorfles’s book Simbolo, Communicazione, Consumo that receives the most attention during the first eight issues of Metro. In “Rauschenberg, or Obsolescence Defeated,” Dorfles uses Rauschenberg’s artwork to allude to the ideas of “information” and “consumo” that are so central to his Simbolo, Communicazione, Consumo.112 For Dorfles, a work of art contains two kinds information: semantic information and aesthetic information.113 To discover the semantic meaning contained by a given artwork is the goal of iconographic analysis: symbolic forms represent their referents as words do, by convention, and the iconographer’s role is to establish a one-to-one correspondence between pictorial symbols and their verbal equivalents. However, as time passes, those conventions of signification that engendered the creation of the artwork wear out, and the art object experiences what Dorfles calls consumo, or “death of the metaphor,” where the image ceases to channel immediately to its intended semantic meaning. But even after the “initial creative thrust has dried up,” Dorfles claims, “the artistic form will instead communicate itself by means of its own structure and by virtue of the creativity of its own process.”114The public may lose touch with the intended semantic meaning of an artwork over time, but the artwork remains a unit or collection of aesthetic information merely by existing as an image or object susceptible to the viewer’s gaze. Dorfles’s favorite example of this “death of the metaphor” is the fish carved on the pre-Christian sarcophagus, which after its use by the Romans, continued to “speak” an artistic language. For the Christians, the fish symbol signifies “Christ,” but were it to suffer the “death of its metaphor” again, the symbol, as a picture, would still be emblematic of “fish,” and as a carving would still have some material or craft value.115

33 Dorfles argues against iconographic analysis of Robert Rauschenberg’s combine drawings and paintings, arguing that:

… even when the immediate associative value inherent in so many elements taken from our daily life (Coca-Cola, portrait of Eisenhower, tin of jam, man skating), have been entirely forgotten or have become unknown references to bygone days, they will still continue to ‘work’ as stimulants to images, owing to certain formal and formative qualities which—while they have lost the semantic halo now surrounding them, they will have taken on another and perhaps still more mysterious and persuasive one.116

For Dorfles, Rauschenberg removes the ordinary, ephemeral object from its intended use, as an object of utilitarian consumption, and salvages it by recasting it as an object of symbolic consumption instead. To illustrate the futility of reading Rauschenberg’s work for its semantic meaning, Dorfles performs an iconographic, poetic apostrophe:

What is creating an atmosphere of agitated fury and a suppressed and scorching drama in his “Summer Storm”? Perhaps the necktie hung up and waving with respect to the vertical band of the centre? Or why does his “Magician” exhale the cold breath of a suburban town and the ruin of faded emblems as in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”? Or why does the empty and open central space of the “Winter Pool”, consisting of segments of the ladder incorporated in the painting, create a cold pause, opened above a frosty winter horizon; just as in “Curfew” the four bottles of Coca-Cola, the strips of canvas and the black blots of colour are enough to give a feeling of danger, of precipitous flight, and the imminence of blind catastrophe?117

Possible answers to Dorfles’s questions can be found, either in the work itself (“Perhaps, the necktie…”) or not at all. In this line of questioning, Dorfles plays at searching for some meaning outside of the artwork, which could be responsible for the artwork’s appearing the way it does. Instead, he’s happy to admit that the artwork simply appears the way it does, and he freely composes his own interpretive scenarios to explain how the given images interact. Dorfles, Ashton, and Cage arrive at a similar conclusion:

34 that Rauschenberg performs a kind of poetry, and the critic can only speak of Rauschenberg’s iconography in similarly poetic terms. Dorfles shows Rauschenberg’s imagery as being suggestive, rather than didactic, giving information to hint at meaning that is at once semantic (verbally translatable) and aesthetic (more connected to the plastic, material, musical qualities of the artwork). Rauschenberg’s imagery—which includes collaged found materials, photographic transfers from newspapers and magazines, painted areas, and drawn lines—invites the viewer to play at constructing meanings with the visual information that Rauschenberg offers. That no meaning is pre-determined for the work, but occurs, rather, in the process of viewing, limited by the suggestiveness of the imagery that Rauschenberg has selected, makes Rauschenberg’s combines and combine-drawings examples of art historian and semiotician Umberto Eco’s concept of the “open work.” This is a concept to which Eco devoted several essays he eventually adapted into a book, The Open Work, from 1962.118 Both Dorfles and Eco write on the topic of information theory—a theory borrowed from cybernetics, proposing that the amount of information contained in a “message,” verbal or visual, is inversely related to the probability that the receiver of the message could have predicted the contents of that message before having received it.119 The basic idea (and this is an extreme reduction) is that the less predictable (less conventional, less redundant, more ambiguous, more novel) the message of an artwork, the more “information” it contains.120 “Information,” simply put, tells us what we do not already know. For Eco, the “open work,” as it allows the viewer to organize the form and/or content of the work in his or her act of viewing, contains a great deal of “information.” Eco argues that an “open work,” therefore, has a greater longevity—in Dorflean terms of “consumo”—than a work that is “closed” (i.e.: a work whose entire meaning/structure is pre-determined or dictated by its author). An “open work,” then, is 35 one that does not quickly exhaust itself in semantic meaning. Importantly, Eco tends to use examples of open works in poetry, literature, and music, and suggests that visual art can work in the same way. The first chapter of his book is titled “The Poetics of the Open work,” and uses the examples of Mallarmé, Schoenberg, and Joyce, as well as Dante’s Divine Comedy.121 Cage’s text, too, emphasizes this poetic quality of openness in Rauschenberg’s work: “… there is at least the possibility of looking anywhere, not just where someone arranged you should. You are free to deal with your freedom just as the artist dealt with his, not in the same way, but nevertheless, originally.”122 Cage makes the point that one way for the painter to establish a “correct” (and therefore closed, in the parlance of Eco) way of viewing, interpreting, reading the information of the painting’s imagery is by composing its constituent parts according to some meaningful organizational hierarchy. In a non-hierarchical, scatter-plot type composition, however, the viewer is left to string the images together according to his or her own sensibility or whim. Cage points out,

“There is no more subject in a combine than there is in a page from a newspaper. Each thing that is there is a subject. It is a situation involving multiplicity.”123 Cage, like Dorfles, begins to wonder at the iconographic content of the combines, in a line of questioning that becomes poetic in itself: “Out of seeing do I move into poetry?” he asks,

“And is this a poetry in which Eisenhower could have disappeared and the Mona Lisa taken his place? I think so, but I do not see.” The poetry of Rauschenberg is a non- hierarchical, but suggestive, poetry—the poetics of the “open work.” Cage continues:

Were he saying something in particular, he would have to focus on the painting; as it is he simply focuses on himself, and everything, a pair of socks, is appropriate to poetry, a poetry of infinite possibilities. It did not occur to me to ask him why he chose Dante as a project for illustration. Perhaps it is because we’ve had it around so long so close to us without bothering to put it to use…124

36 Dante is as useful as “a chicken or an old shirt” in Rauschenberg’s art, as ready- made and exhausted in its utilitarian object-hood as an old sock.125 It is possible for Cage to make these claims because he, like Dorfles, opposes an iconographic analysis of semantic meanings in Rauschenberg’s imagery. He states that Rauschenberg’s work contains objects and that “object is fact, not symbol…. Not ideas but facts.”126 So, Cage’s “fact” is like Eco’s and Dorfles’s “information”, a kind of information that is not necessarily meaning.127

It is important to Eco, however, that the creator of the “open work” construct a communication whose effect is “at once undefined and yet limited to a particular ‘field of suggestivity…. To avoid unnecessary semantic dispersion, the more allusive speaker will have to give his audience a particular direction.”128 Dorfles too makes the point that Rauschenberg’s combines do not dissolve into total chaos and disorganization, but that Rauschenberg consciously engages in the act of suggestive composition.129 In his combines, he arranges paint color and texture, found objects, sculptural materials, drawing mediums, found images, and fabric into complex structures and novel forms in order to “give his audience a particular direction.” In his Dante cycle, however, Rauschenberg has fewer visual elements with which to create suggestive compositions. With only white paper, graphite, gouache, and photographic transfers, the combine- drawings rely more for their quality of suggestiveness on Rauschenberg’s selection of found images (fig. 20-22). The pictorial element, and its arrangement on the page, is the primary variable among the cantos, whose size, shape, physical texture, and color palette remain almost constant. Ashton comments, “He has kept them very nearly in grisaille to preserve the character of a book page.”130 On the flat surface of the paper, the images occur in a single plane of communication, occasionally overlapping, crashing into one another, or sometimes allotted a section of the page to inhabit in isolation, but for the 37 most part discrete, legible, or at least suggestive in their partial legibility.131 In this way, the combine-drawings contain information, as Cage observed, the way a newspaper page contains information. Multiple subjects are legible, but there is no one determined sequence in which the viewer must “read” them. Rauschenberg transfers the photograph to the paper by penciling the back of a reproduction; the photographic image is conveyed by the traces of his stylus’s pushing and pulling. The page may bear the record of a horizontal processes, pictures landing on the surface of the paper, but the indexical marks of Rauschenberg’s stylus talk of motion—not only onto, but in and around, the page.

Of course, in this cycle of combine-drawings, Rauschenberg’s found images are not only suggestive in themselves or as constituent pictorial elements in larger compositions, but they further claim to illustrate Dante’s text. Rauschenberg’s canto drawings illustrate Dante’s Inferno by allegory. Ashton, like Cage, discusses the poetic qualities of Rauschenberg’s combines—specifically the combine-drawings of his illustrations of the thirty-four cantos of Dante’s Inferno. However, Ashton sees

Rauschenberg’s selection of Dante’s Divine Comedy, as more meaningful, less casual, than Cage does. Ashton relates Dante’s allegorical text to Rauschenberg’s allegorical drawings, calling allegory a “veiled presentation of a meaning implied but not expressly stated.”132 To illustrate the parallels in semantic and aesthetic meaning between Dante’s poetic practice and Rauschenberg’s poetic visual practice, she makes two parallel statements of her own:

How to Read Dante According to T.S. Eliot: Forget about obscurities of allegory. It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the Scholarship. Genuine Poetry can communicate before it is understood.133

How to Read R According to Me: Forget about the obscurities of allegory. It is better to appreciate his eloquent plastic means—the delicate films of paint, rubbing and blurring, washes and fine pencil lines, semi-obscured newspaper 38 transfers—first, and the iconography later. Genuine painting can communicate before it is understood.134

Clearly, Ashton’s words here agree with Dorfles’s anti-iconographic approach to Rauschenberg’s work—even when the artwork under discussion is a so-called “orthodox book-illustration” where the “artist followed the text and sequence of the narrative detail closely…”.135 Although Dante and Rauschenberg use a completely different lexicon of images, they use them in a similar way—allusively, suggestively—leaving the work “open” to the reader’s/viewer’s interpretation and play. For Ashton, this kind of iconographic openness is a feature of allegory. “Allegory,” she says, “means clear visual images, and clear visual images are given more intensity by having a meaning—we do not need to know what the meaning is….”136 Ashton draws another parallel between Dante’s language and Rauschenberg’s image-language, pointing out that both artists work in the vernacular—using the terms of their contemporary situations to speak to themes either historical or otherworldly.

Dante wrote “DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA,” in praise of the vernacular. He believed that the poet should make his style match the material. In the Inferno, he used vulgar language—vulgar in the sense that it was the language of the Florentine populace…. Sometimes he used vulgar language in its other sense: he relished four-letter words. R is also a devotee of the vernacular.137

Rauschenberg is a “devotee of the vernacular” in his use of ordinary, contemporary, low, non-art materials, such as newspaper pictures, to achieve his aesthetic effects. In 1962, Eco and Dorfles both write with l’informel as their reference point for contemporary art. In summer 1961, the magazine Il Verri from Milan published an issue devoted to informel and included an essay of Umberto Eco’s “L’Informale come opera aperta.”138 Eco’s book L’Opera Aperta includes a chapter on informel called “The Open Work in the Visual Arts.”139 Unlike the art of l’informel, Rauschenberg’s is an art that

39 involves pictures and figures, recognizable or nameable imagery. Yet, despite Rauschenberg’s introduction of images and literary references, Cage, Dorfles, and Ashton demonstrate that Rauschenberg’s combines and combine-drawings remain open, suggestive. Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who had already been a devotee of l’informel and abstract expressionism, and had collected works by Fautrier, Kline, Tàpies, and Rothko in the fifties, would eventually purchase eleven of Rauschenberg’s combines and combine-drawings.140 So apparently, Rauschenberg had the ability to appeal to l’informel’s fan base.

Interestingly, Panza first learned of Rauschenberg’s work from John Cage, who had come to Milan in 1958 to work at National Italian Radio’s electronic music studio. Panza and Cage met for lunch, and Cage spoke of his painter friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Again, in Metro it is Cage introducing Rauschenberg to his Italian audience.141

RAUSCHENBERG DANS LE METRO

Castelli’s choosing Ashton and Cage to provide the accompanying texts for Rauschenberg’s work in the second issue of Metro reflects Castelli’s intention to create popular support for Rauschenberg in a European context. To begin with, both the Ashton and Cage texts demonstrate how easily Rauschenberg’s combines and combine-drawings lend themselves to analysis by the popular concepts of information theory and the “poetics of the open work” that aesthetic theorists were already attempting to apply to l’informel—even if Ashton and Cage do not explicitly mention (or are unaware of) Umberto Eco and Gillo Dorfles’s research in those areas. In the context of Metro, both Ashton and Cage contribute texts that balance poetry and prose, and that Alfieri praises as exemplary of the kind of “integration of the arts” that Metro has “always fought for,” 40 adding in a post-script to Cage’s article that he is “happy that a musician should have tackled the adventure of the white sheet of paper by substituting time with space.”142 Importantly, it is Castelli, not Alfieri, who suggests that Metro feature Rauschenberg’s series of combine-drawing illustrations for Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, which might imply that Castelli and Rauschenberg were attempting to curry favor with an Italian audience, for whom Dante Alighieri is a national icon. As an indication of Dante’s importance in Italy: the Italian language is based on Tuscan dialect, simply because the

Tuscan vernacular was the language in which Dante penned the Divine Comedy. Today, school children in Italy spend three years of high school literature classes studying Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.143 Anne Cohen-Solal, author of the recent biography of Leo Castelli recalls that the gallerist, a native Triestino, often recited pieces of the Divine Comedy by heart; and in Metro 13, Sandra Pinto describes a certain fondness for bourgeois ornamentation that is “as typically Italian as ‘knowing the Divine Comedy by memory.’”144 Dante is almost as boldfaced an icon of Italian cultural heritage as Johns’s American flags are icons of American-ness. Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery dealt with the problem of opening an American art gallery in an unwelcoming Parisian atmosphere by fearlessly exposing Jasper Johns’s American flag series in the gallery’s inaugural exhibition of 1962.145 And in a similar declaration of non-contrition, in 1964, the year that Rauschenberg infamously took the Venice Biennale’s international grand prize in painting, Galerie Ileana Sonnabend exhibited this group of Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Cantos.146 So there is evidence that both Castelli and Sonnabend used

Rauschenberg’s Dante cycle in this way—to signal an American artist’s presence in a European (Italian) intellectual context.147 One thing that sets this work of Rauschenberg’s far apart from other artists both in Metro and in Castelli’s stable at this time, is his engagement with a theme that is 41 explicitly literary—taken from poetry. Italian aesthetic theory of the early 1960s already made little distinction between works of poetry and works of visual art, but here, in work that goes far beyond the “subtle return to figuration” that takes place in greater Europe post-1960; the artist unabashedly illustrates a famous work of poetry. To avoid the negative connotations of non-art that the word “illustration” can carry, one oculd describe Rauschenberg’s Dante cycle as what Umberto Eco, in his book Dire Quasi La Stessa Cosa, would call a “intersemiotic translation” where a work from one medium is made to conform to the limitations and nuances of another form of expression altogether.148

Interestingly, Cy Twombly is the other artist among Castelli’s stable who takes on explicitly literary themes in his painting, beginning his “Poems to the Sea” series in 1959, citing specific ancient and mythological references in his work in the early sixties (ex: Leda and the Swan (1962), Ides of March (1962), which may refer to the literature of art history just as easily as they refer to textual sources).149 Cy Twombly’s and Robert Rauschenberg’s trip to Italy and North Africa is now an often-cited anecdote in art history. Its frequent appearance in the literature on these two artists, suggests a desire on the part of art historians to find evidence of Mediterranean influence in the works of both painters (Twombly, of course, settled in Rome in 1957). What the two artists seem to share is a scatter-plot approach to composition, ease with poetic and art historical quotation, and open, suggestive allusion to meaning, and an approach to materials and texture that welcomes comparison to European precedents: Tàpies, Dubuffet, and Klee for Twombly, and for Rauschenberg, Burri.150

In keeping with Alfieri’s hopes that Metro would exhibit a synthesis of art, poetry, and creative literature, Ashton’s and Cage’s texts become poetic, and visually communicative in themselves. In its organization of the biographical and ekphrastic information it presents, Cage’s text actually mimics the combines it speaks of. 42 Reproduced in Cage’s book Silence from 1966, the essay bears an introductory note stating, “It [the essay] may be read in whole or in part, any sections of it may be skipped, what remains may be read in any order,” demonstrating that Cage thought of his essay as a poetic open work ala Rauschenberg’s combines.151 In mid-February, Castelli sends the Ashton text with transparencies of the thirty-four cantos with an accompanying plan for arranging the layout of images and text.152 He also sends Cage’s poetic essay on Rauschenberg with a guide to all the material he has included.

The Cage article is rather difficult, but Piero Dorazio, who read it and found it extremely good, reassured me by telling me that, when you discussed the new magazine with him, this was exactly the kind of thing that you wanted. You can, as is indicated by Cage, use whatever part of the article that you want to, but he would like you to respect the irregular spacing between the paragraphs. Cage tells me that a book of his writing is now in process, and that, therefore, the copyright of the article I sent you should be in his name.153

Dorazio is able to reassure Castelli that Cage’s essay was “exactly the kind of thing that [Alfieri] wanted,” because he understands Alfieri’s interest in curating a challenging mix of avant-garde literature, art, and poetry. Accompanying the Rauschenberg material in Metro 2, Alfieri makes a note for his readers that Cage’s text is surprising in its “unusual layout” but that it represents what Metro wishes to accomplish in terms of “integration of the arts.”154 Perhaps, in his integrating art with avant-garde literature and poetry, Alfieri is attempting to imitate the Roman experimental artists’ magazine L’Esperienza Moderna, which ran from 1957-59.155 L’Esperienza Moderna was founded by Roman artists Achille Perilli and Gastone Novelli, and included primary source texts (manifestos, essays, stories, and poems) by both dada and informel writers and artists. In its second issue, L’Esperienza Moderna reproduces Schwitters’s Merz manifesto, where Schwitters lists old tram or metro tickets, pieces of wood found on the beach, and bicycle spokes as

43 proper materials for art-making.156 This and the following issues also contain poems by Tristan Tzara, Wols, Hans Arp, and others.157 Layouts tended to vary with each issue. Although Cage’s text may have imitated Rauschenberg’s combines in content and composition, Ashton’s text, as it is laid out in Metro 2, imitates the literal shape of Rauschenberg’s thirty-four combine-drawings. The layout for Ashton’s article pairs broken-up segments of Ashton’s text with reproductions of Rauschenberg’s canto drawings, so that the text and the image appear as rectangles of equal size, scattered over the eight pages of the essay (fig. 20). The canto referred to in any one chunk of Ashton’s text may not necessarily be the canto of the adjacent (or nearest) image, however. So, with Ashton’s text, as with Cage’s, there is the suggestion that the reader may re-combine the text as he or she pleases. Whatever Castelli and Ashton originally worked out for the essay’s layout, a letter from Castelli in April, 1961 shows that Alfieri made some of his own changes to the article. Castelli writes to Alfieri, “I think your layout for the Dante article and illustrations is excellent, far better than the one we had planned.”158

Metro’s engagement with avant-garde literature begins with its name. The name Metro itself appears to be a nod to the 1959 novel by French absurdist author, Raymond Queneau, Zazie dans le Metro, made into a movie in 1960.159 Alfieri hints at this connection in his column “Tu Causes, Tu Causes!” parts 1 and 2, which appear in Metro

3.160 The column’s title borrows a quote from Queneau: “Tu Causes, tu Causes! C’est tout ce que tu sais faire!”, the constant taunting refrain squawked by the parrot Laverdure, family pet in Zazie dans Le Metro. Alfieri explains in issue 3 that he appropriates the phrase to refer to the role of the art critic: “Talk, talk, it’s all you can do!” He playfully suggests a comic futility in the practice of art criticism.161 Another way that Metro purposefully incorporates figures from the literary world, is by inviting those literary figures to perform criticism. For example, playwright and 44 author Eugene Ionesco contributes an essay for Metro 2’s section on Gérard Schneider called “Ce qui est mauvais au vernissage,” which, perhaps in agreement with Alfieri’s cynical view of art criticism, begins with Ionesco’s refusing to discuss the artist’s work at all.162 Often, Metro sought to include poetry, and to commission art criticism from French and American poets. Alain Jouffroy, French poet, contributed several works of criticism in French, including one essay on Jim Dine in Metro 3 from 1962.163 Not only did Alfieri solicit art criticism from poets proper, but he also published poems by painters. The piece in Metro 4/5, on painter Jorge Eielson, begins with a photograph of the artist, and a poem Eielson wrote in Rome.164 In Metro 2, an excerpt from Jean Dubuffet’s poem “Fleur de la barbe” appears before the feature on Dubuffet; and an excerpt from O’Hara’s “The Beat Scene” shares the pages dedicated to the Rauschenberg feature.165 Alfieri’s interactions with Frank O’Hara during the project must have been positive, because in July of ’61, he writes to Castelli:

Frank O’Hara wrote me a very nice letter, agreeing to write original poems for Metro on American art. He does not feel like writing the one on the “Cedar Bar,” but he has four poems already prepared on individual artists, and he will write others. In this way we can talk about the bricolage of literature that suits the magazine.166

O’Hara never did produce any new work for the magazine, but rather allowed excerpts from poems of his, already published elsewhere, to appear in Metro 2 and 3. Metro 3 allots three full pages of text and a full-page photograph of Willem de Kooning to O’Hara’s “Ode to Willem de Kooning,” which had been published previously in ODES by Tiber Press in New York.167 Despite Castelli’s reminder in his February, 1961 letter to Alfieri, that the copyright of Cage’s article “Rauschenberg, On the Artist, His Work” should be in John

45 Cage’s name alone, in the pages of Metro 2, a note follows the article, which reads “Copyright 1961 by John Cage and Metro.”168 In this same letter, Castelli adds that credit should be given to the photographers, and he sends to Alfieri an original combine drawing “as a present from Rauschenberg and me to you.”169 In May, Alfieri writes to Castelli that issue two has printed, and is out.170 Metro 2 was apparently a popular issue. When Alfieri writes to Castelli in July 1963 to report how many copies of each issue of Metro 1-8 remain available for purchase, he reports that the

Rauschenberg issue has sold out completely.171

Metro 3 receives very little mention in the letters between Alfieri and Castelli. None of Castelli’s artists receive large-scale coverage, but both Lee Bontecou and Salvatore Scarpitta appear in Metro’s series “Metrorama” where each artist appears with only one or two images and a very brief text.172 While Metro 3 is in the process of coming together, Castelli and Alfieri are already hard at work on Metro 4/5, a double issue, that will feature the paintings of Jasper Johns (fig. 23).

46 Chapter Three: Jasper Johns in Metro 4/5

On September 27, 1961, Bruno Alfieri writes to Leo Castelli to discuss the materials for Metro’s fourth issue, where they have agreed to feature the work of Jasper Johns. Alfieri writes:

Does Johns write? Or does he at least answer questions? Georgine Oeri could interview him, as she did with Higgins, and then we can publish a text, perhaps by Gillo Dorfles, or by an American, if you prefer.173

In this letter, Alfieri also mentions the grand success that the eighth issue of Zodiac has enjoyed—the one with Johns’s Three Flags on the cover—adding that the department of state has ordered many copies and that George Nelson has ordered 5000 reprints, “sempre con il quadro di Johns.”174 In a letter from September 30, 1961, Alfieri writes to Castelli that one of Zodiac’s financial backers, Ugo Galassi, general manager of Olivetti Underwood Corporation (one of Alfieri’s financial backers), is upset that Johns’s flag, as it appears on the cover of Zodiac, has only forty-eight stars:

Please do me a favor. The painting by Jasper Johns published on the cover of Zodiac 8 is causing me a whole load of trouble, because it has forty-eight stars instead of fifty. So I have to explain that it’s a painting, and not a flag, but also that the painting represents a flag. This Galassi… has even requested that we… change the cover!175

Alfieri asks Castelli to please write to Mr. Galassi to explain that the painting is “a very famous masterpiece” (“un capolavoro famosissimo!”) and gives Castelli Galassi’s address.176 In this same year, 1961, Ileana Sonnabend began making plans for her European gallery. She and Michael Sonnabend first traveled to Rome to consider the prospect of opening a gallery there, where the scene was fresh and open to American participation. Rome was emerging as an international city in the 1960s; in 1960 it received an international airport and hosted the Olympics. Rome was home to Italian cinema: 47 Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and the Cinecittà studios. There was the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna Roma, directed by Palma Bucarelli. The painters of the Nuova Scuola Piazza del Popolo thrived in Rome, showing at Plinio de Martiis’s Galleria La Tartaruga, Galleria La Salita, Galleria dell’Obelisco, and then later at Galleria L’Attico.177 Kline, de Kooning, Rothko, Twombly, and Rauschenberg had all shown at Galleria La Tartaruga near the Piazza del Popolo by 1958.178 In 1962, the British Marlborough Gallery opened a space in Rome.179

Nevertheless, after making their tour of the Roman art scene, the Sonnabends chose to settle in Paris, a city much less welcoming to American art. As a provocative gesture of self-assurance, Sonnabend hung a solo show of Jasper Johns’s American flag series for the gallery’s inaugural exhibition in 1962.180 From Paris, Sonnabend continued to stay intimately connected with the Roman scene, showing works of contemporary Italian art, and amassing a collection that included artworks by Mario Schifano, Cy Twombly, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giovani Anselmo, Gilberto Zorio, Mario Merz, and

Jannis Kounellis.181 In issue 10 of Metro, Alfieri contributes an essay entitled “A Critic’s Journal: After the Inferiority Complex of New York to Paris (1900-1963), Here is Paris’s Inferiority Complex to New York Despite De Gaulle (Meanwhile London Grows),” wherein he quotes Julian Alvard in an article from the journal Mardi Samedi, published by the Paul Facchetti Gallery in Paris: “Mon tout est une personne, aussi puissante que savant qui, a répandu la culture dans l’Europe du Nord. C’est Madame Sonnabend.”182 This article was published after Rauschenberg’s win at the Venice Biennale, and Alfieri interprets Alvard’s comments as expressing feelings of competitive jealousy toward Sonnabend and the American art she represented. Alfieri describes Ileana Sonnabend in this article as “the lady who, having come from New York, and after a stay in Rome, is now selling in Paris certain forms of ‘Pop Art.’”183 Jasper Johns debuts at the Galerie 48 Ileana Sonnabend in the same year he debuts in the pages of Metro. In their letters from 1961, Castelli and Alfieri plan Johns’s appearance among the “Metro Young.” In November of ’61, Alfieri is still requesting Johns material from Castelli: four color images of recent works, an interview with Georgine Oeri, a large series of photos in black and white, an “important article” on the artist—“può forse farlo Gillo Dorfles”— and a series of photos by Burckhardt on, “J.J. uomo.” (“Jasper Johns, man”)184 In December, Alfieri writes:

Know that I have very serious intentions regarding the fourth issue of Metro, and we should do something really big. If you were planning to publish a book on J.J. with the text that you give to Metro, we can look into ways of [publishing the excerpted section] with a different cover, if you will agree to it. It will be worth the trouble if you think your gallery can absorb two thousand copies, and in that case, I will print two thousand to sell in the U.S.A., France, Italy, Great Britain, Japan, etc.185

After receiving this news, the next time that Castelli writes to Alfieri, he has selected Leo Steinberg as the author who will pen the Johns essay and subsequent book.

In a statement from 1992, Steinberg recalls receiving the “commission” for the piece.186 He embarked on the project in August of 1961, revealing to Castelli in October of that year what he had produced up to that point. Castelli, seeing that Steinberg had not made definite plans for publishing the work, secured it for Metro. The timeline of events, as Steinberg remembers them, does not contradict the chronology in the Castelli-Alfieri archive. Apparently there had been some controversy over Castelli’s commissioning the article. A rumor spread that Castelli ordered the piece for Metro, and Steinberg demanded from Alfieri a fee of $1,000 for his one month’s work on the piece.187 This rumor does not bear out in the letters between Castelli and Alfieri, which remain cordial throughout this period, despite the fact that Metro’s budget for paying its contributors was rather

49 low.188 Though never mentioning Metro specifically, Castelli biographer Annie Cohen- Solal also alludes to the rumors surrounding the publication of this piece. She concludes that Castelli did not finance the essay, but “arranged to have a magazine commission the piece."189 Steinberg claims to recognize only in retrospect that Castelli must have added some of his own money to the payment made by Metro, an act that was later seen as one of Castelli’s brilliant moments of “fruitful patronage.”190 In the preface to his book Other Criteria, Steinberg recalls that he undertook the

Johns essay for several reasons, the primary reason being to “stave off the psychology of avoidable middle age for a while” by “staying with the enigma” of a strange, new art.191

GILLO DORFLES ON JASPER JOHNS

In Metro 4/5, Steinberg’s essay is prefaced with an article by Dorfles called “Jasper Johns and the Hand-Made, Ready-Made Object”.192 In this article, Dorfles calls upon concepts he had been developing at that time for his book Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti, published by Giulio Einaudi in 1965.193 Previously, in his essay “Rauschenberg, or Obsolescence Defeated,” in Metro 2, Dorfles had credited Rauschenberg with “salvaging” everyday objects and found materials by substituting a symbolic function for their usual utilitarian function. In this brief essay from Metro 4/5, he claims that Johns performs a similar act of “salvaging,” but he finds a different way to describe this act of figurative re-contextualization. He claims that by hand-painting or hand-making “like a craftsman” what one usually finds ready-made by mass-production, Johns “fixes” objects from the surrounding world in an art context, and “fetishizes” them by treating them with craftsmanship and artistic attention.194 For Dorfles, this exemplifies man’s “will to mythopoetic expression.”195

50 Rauschenberg had already used the term “fetish” in the titles for the Cornell-esque boxes and sculptural mementoes he made during his trip to Italy and North Africa in 1953, the Scatole e Feticci Personali.196 To fetishize, according to Dorfles’s definition in Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti, is to associate (often incorrectly) special powers, mysterious qualities, or meaningful values with an object, person, geographic location, ritual, or even word, to the point that the otherwise dumb, or “dis-intentioned,” object, human, piece of land, action, or combination of letters comes to be viewed as an embodiment of those powers, qualities, or values.197 Rauschenberg’s handcrafted souvenirs from 1953 are fetishes in the sense that they stand in either synechdochically or metonymically for the sum of his experiences abroad.198 For an art magazine to discuss the value of an artwork by turning its attention to the artist who made it (as Metro does in its coverage of Higgins, Piqueras, and Noël, et al), is an example of fetishization of the artist and his perceived genius.199 Dorfles sees Johns’s fetishization of the quotidian object in a positive light, as a

“mythopoetic” act. The mythopoetic, according to Dorfles, designates positive mythicized factors (in other words fetishizes), in such a way that it restores some symbolic value to institutions that have lost their usual value, to save them from a kind of “consumo” by endowing them with a “quotient of mythic irrationality.”200 In Johns’s case, the “mythic irrationality” comes from the values that the surrounding culture places on art, prizing the uniqueness and inherent aura of the hand-made craft. Dorfles explains Johns’s meticulous painterly treatment of his banal subject matter as:

…the possibly unconscious will of the artist to impose, through the choice of objects painted by hand, the feeling of very often repeated elements being unrepeatable, and to effect, thereby, an entropic inversion in the process of rapid obsolescence suffered by the objects (the real thing) which the painter reproduces ‘just as it is.’201

51 Dorfles’s allusion to the “entropic” comes from language often associated with information theory, where information that is at first unexpected and novel becomes familiar and passes into a phase of obsolescence, where it becomes already-grasped and rote. Johns’s paintings, however, perform a so-called “entropic inversion,” according to Dorfles. This would mean that Johns begins with the banal, the already-grasped, the rote, and proceeds toward the unexpected, the novel. “Fetishization” in this case, would refer to the process that starts when Johns takes the highly entropic (non-hierarchic, conventionally organized, exhausted) information in subjects like the Alphabet from A to

Z, the numerals from zero to nine, or the American flag, and presents them in their full- banality: all the numbers in order, in generic stencil type, on a surface whose dimensions are determined by the height and width of each stenciled number multiplied by ten (ten being the number of numerals from zero to nine). When Johns applies artistic craftsmanship, or the quality of the hand-made, this array of (non-referring) symbols ceases to exemplify pure entropic information and becomes art, with all its attendant mythic values. This becomes its meaning. Furthermore, the system of symbols itself becomes fetishistically confused with the physical objecthood of its representation (Does Johns’s “5” symbolically refer to a five? Or is it an actual five in the flesh?). Unfortunately, Dorfles does not give any examples of the kind of entropic inversion he has in mind in this text from Metro, and he seems to want to discuss Johns’s use of common “objects (the real thing)” as subject matter rather than Johns’s use of abstract visual sign systems as subject matter.

At several moments in Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti, Dorfles denounces the act of fetishization as a “degradation,” or a reduction, of symbols, rituals, and myths to a “superstitious and dis-intentional” locus.202 Casting the myth in the form of the fetish

52 limits the boundaries of the myth to the physical properties of the fetish, and the result is “mythogogic” (myth imposing) rather than mythopoetic (myth creating).203 One aspect of the fetishistic in Johns’s painting (that Dorfles does not mention) occurs in his brushwork. The “tecnica,” as Dorfles describes it in Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti, refers to any method or operational scheme employed teleologically—toward some goal.204 To lose sight of the goal, and to perform the rituals of the tecnica for its own sake, would be symptomatic of what Dorfles calls the “fetishization of the tecnica itself.”205 He gives the example of yoga practitioners who do not study yoga’s spiritual principles and goals, but nonetheless expect to benefit from going through the motions of the physical yogic practice. Messy and painterly brushwork characterizes abstract expressionism, and becomes a ritual tecnica for communicating heightened emotional attitudes; however, in Johns’s paintings, the painterly brushwork appears divorced from the goal of expressing emotion. It is tecnica sans telos, and therefore, another instance of Dorflean fetishization.206 One reason, perhaps, that Dorfles misses this aspect of fetishization in Johns’s paintings, is that he wants the subject matter of the work to undergo inverted entropy, to escape obsolescence by becoming art, and attaining new symbolic value as an art object—to give “the feeling of very often repeated elements being unrepeatable.” He accepts the brushwork as the unproblematic tecnica appropriate for reaching the goal of art status, while missing the fact that Johns employs the “expressive” brushstroke to be a mythogogic tecnica sans telos in itself.207 Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti, contains a chapter devoted to pop art and neo-dada, “La

‘pop-art’ e il panorama oggettuale,” wherein Dorfles includes a note suggesting that his readers see “an issue of the journal Metro (Milano, 1961) dedicated in a large part to American pop artists; and my article on Rauschenberg in that same journal” for a grounding in the literature on pop and neo-Dada.208 In this chapter, Dorfles makes brief 53 mention of Johns’s flags as “new icons” of our age. He mentions Johns only once in Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti, to comment on the hand-made quality of Johns’s flag. Johns does not, however, serve as the best example of Dorfles’s concept of the new iconography: the flag, the alphabet, and numbers, aren’t “new icons” of the contemporary age in the same way that a Coca-Cola bottle, or Marilyn Monroe are. (In fact, with only forty-eight stars, Johns’s flag is a throw-back!) In this way, Johns actually poses a difficulty for Dorfles, since Dorfles wants to say that American pop’s vision of our age is specifically anthropological (and not semiotic).209

In “Jasper Johns and the Hand-made, Ready-made object” Dorfles neglects to discuss examples of “entropic inversion” in Johns’s work (as I have here), and neglects to recognize Johns’s fetishizing not only commonplace objects and imagery, but sign systems and the tecnica of the painterly brushstroke. Unfortunately, apart from introducing his new language of mythopoetics and fetishization, Dorfles does not distinguish between the art of Johns and the art of Rauschenberg. At one point he even interrupts himself to note parenthetically, “I am referring particularly to those [artistic experiments] of Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, and other artists like them featured in this issue of Metro.” He sees these new observations about Johns as equally applicable to other pop and neo-dada artists, taking for granted that the “trick” to neo-dada is to extract subject matter and materials from their ordinary places in systems of quotidian use and disposal and to raise them to the level of art. This, Steinberg remarks in the essay immediately following Dorfles’s, is the error that many critics commit ever since Art

News printed Johns’s Target with Faces on its January 1958 cover, labeling it “neo- dada”: “People who might have wondered what to say about Johns could thenceforth recite whatever they remembered having read about Dada.”210 In Metro in 1962, Dorfles

54 applies what he knows of dada and “neo-dada” to Johns’s work, but tacks on the parts about the quality of the hand-made. Dorfles leaves the specifics to Steinberg.

LEO STEINBERG ON JASPER JOHNS

For Steinberg, the most important feature of Johns’s targets, flags, alphabets, and numerals is the perfect simultaneity (coexistence, coincidence) of the painted surface and its pictorial subject, a situation where form and content are one and the same. Johns rebuts the “pure painting” that preceded him with a kind of figuration the “pure painters” could never have imagined, let alone denounced. Steinberg suggests that the public had difficulty recognizing that Johns’s flags even were paintings, citing their resistance to formal analysis: “Despite a half century of formalist indoctrination, it proved almost impossible to see the paintings for subject matter.”211

He has regained that perpetual oscillation which characterized our looking at pre- abstract art. But whereas, in traditional art, the oscillation was between painted surface and the subject in depth, Johns succeeds in making the pendulum swing within the post-Cubist flatland of modern art. But the habit of dissociating “pure painting” from content is so ingrained, that almost no critic was able to see both together.212

So Johns’s figuration differs from that of the pre-abstractionists (for pre- abstractionists, Steinberg cites other artists involved in elevating lowly subjects to a status of high art—Courbet, Velasquez, Goya) because the pictured subject never peels back from the surface of the picture-plane. And this has everything to do with Johns’s choosing subjects that are themselves two-dimensional and only recognizable for their linear, planar, and in the case of the flag, chromatic—in other words, formal—elements. The subjects, Steinberg says, “tend to prescribe the picture’s shape and dimensions.” They are themselves flat and non-hierarchic, so that the pictorial field “maintains leveled equality.” Every formal property necessarily belonging to the subject is a formal property 55 belonging to Johns’s painting—although this statement cannot be reversed, since color and texture are often contingent properties belonging to Johns’s painting that do not inhere in the subject. The hand-made quality, it would seem, in addition to Dorfles’s idea of indicating fetishization, could also serve simply to show that the subject (a target, a flag, the alphabet, the numerals 0-9) has no inherent material or textural quality of its own. As Johns’s work demands, Steinberg’s analysis is formal and therefore iconographic, or iconographic and therefore formal.

Johns has built himself a composite language in which paint and words, objects and emblems converge in a single image-meaning. Subject matter is back not as an adulteration, nor as a concession, nor in some sort of partnership, but as the very condition of painting, wherein content and form, life and art, the paint and the message are so much one and the same, that the distinction is not yet, or no longer intelligible.213

Rather than downplaying the role specific images that Johns chooses to work with (as Cage, Ashton, and Dorfles did for Rauschenberg), Steinberg devotes half of his thirteen-page essay to a section on Johns’s imagery, under the subtitle “His Subjects.” Of course, this section of the essay obviates any would-be section devoted to “his compositions” or “his formal decisions.”214 Steinberg points out that it is “never enough to say that [Johns] paints numbers; add that he paints them in proper order (i.e. not in childlike, or ignorant, or esthetic disregard of their meaning). Add that his Alphabets run from A to Z…”215 Interestingly, Jannis Kounellis, a painter of the Nuova Scuola della Piazza del Popolo, also appears in this issue of Metro with his own giant number and letter paintings. Kounellis’s paintings, unlike Johns’s do disregard the conventional meanings of letters and numbers, arranging them interspersed and willy-nilly across large canvases (fig. 24). The images reproduced in the pages of Metro unfortunately fail to show the paintings as Kounellis first exhibited 56 them in his studio in Rome. The paintings originally constituted part of a performance in which the artist “donned one of his letter-paintings as a garment (based on Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916) and performed an action in his studio as, in effect, a part of one of his own paintings (fig. 25).” 216 Thomas McEvilley notes the influence of Johns’s number and letter paintings on this phase of Kounellis’s career.217 Kounellis’s work, however, mixing theater and costume with painting, and flaunting the absurdity of meaning and understanding, appears more deserving than Johns’s of the “neo-dada” label.218 By contrast, Steinberg points out that in Johns’s paintings, “Nothing recalls the irreverence or untidiness of most original Dada productions.”219 Max Kosloff calls them “poker faced.”220

Jasper Johns in Interview

Under the sub-heading “A Johns subject possesses a respected ritual or conventional shape,” Steinberg includes a series of interview questions and answers, an exchange between the artist and himself, in order to illustrate the way that Johns identifies his own aesthetic choice with the way things already are, the way that his own personal artistic preferences coincide with the “ritual or conventional shape” that things already possess. Regarding the casts of “four faces” Johns has placed in a row of boxes atop one of his target paintings Steinberg asks:

Q: Why did you cut them off just under the eyes? A: They wouldn’t have fitted into the boxes if I’d left them whole.

I asked him about the type of numbers and letters he uses – coarse, standardized, unartistic – the type you associate with grocery signs, packing cases, and crates. Q: You nearly always use this same type. Any particular reason? A: That’s how the stencils come.

57 Q: But if you preferred another type face, would you think it improper to cut your own stencils? A: Of course not. Q: Then you really do like these the best? A: Yes

Q: Do you use these letter types because you like them or because that’s how the stencils come? A: But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way.221

Alfieri had originally requested that Johns write the piece himself, or if he would not, that perhaps Georgine Oeri, who had conducted the Higgins interview for Metro 1, could do it. Alfieri had undoubtedly envisioned a conversation in which Johns would talk about himself, the way that Higgins had shared autobiographical tidbits with Oeri. Instead, Steinberg produces a volley of questions and answers in which Johns’s responses are facile to the point of tautology, denying personal preference and subjectivity. Johns is as “poker faced” as his paintings. Steinberg’s interview would likely disappoint Alfieri, who desired to read a more personal account from the artist. But beyond that, the “answers” in Steinberg’s dialogue weren’t even composed of Johns’s own words.

Steinberg admits that he did not tape record his long discussions with Johns. Instead:

The dialogue between Q & A was patched together from things Jasper had said to me, or to others in published interviews, supplemented by things I thought he would say, given the right provocation. The made-up answers were shown to Jasper, and when he agreed, “Yes, I could have said that,” the catechism was sealed. To convey a sense of Johns’ far-out position, I cast myself in the dialogue as a slightly bewildered stooge, not an easy role for [my humble self] to adopt.222

Like Rauschenberg, Johns adopts the attitude of Germano Celant’s “post-informel anti-hero.” But, going above and beyond the anti-hero’s call of duty, in this published interview, Johns allows Steinberg to adopt the non-heroic attitude for him.

58 “JASPER JOHNS” IN METRO AND AFTER

In January of 1962, Castelli writes to say that he has sent the Steinberg text to Milan and includes specific instructions as to the layout, the images, footnotes, sections, and speech will appear in the article.223 In regard to the book project, Castelli writes that Steinberg has already spoken to publisher Harry Abrams, and suggests that Alfieri might consider publishing the Jasper Johns book as a joint venture with Abrams. Castelli requests that Alfieri send Steinberg “a brief note stating that at this point you have simply magazine publication rights.”224 In 1963, Wittenborn Press, Inc. published the book Jasper Johns with a note on the copyright page stating, “This monograph is an enlarged and revised edition of the article which was originally published in Metro, International Magazine of Contemporary Art 4/5, May 1962, Milan.”225 The full-page portrait photo of Johns once more appears before the text—this time with slightly less contrast in gray-tones, and with the background preserved (the same photo in the Metro layout has been cut out around the outline of Johns’s head and set against the plain white page).226 The text of the book remains virtually unchanged from the text as it appeared in Metro; however, the book contains many more images than Metro did—thirty-three vs. the article’s twenty-two. The book also includes a detailed list of illustrations, a bibliography, a list of periodicals, selected exhibition catalogs, a list of major exhibitions, a short section on biographical data, and photographic credits.227 On the inside back cover of the book, Wittenborn prints a list of new book titles and magazines put out by Wittenborn Press. Among the magazines listed are Alfieri’s Marmo, Metro, Pagina, Quadrum, and Zodiac, and among the books listed is the work in progress The International Directory of Contemporary Art, edited by Bruno Alfieri, that would come out in 1964.228

59 After working with Castelli on this project, Alfieri becomes a devoted fan of Jasper Johns. On January 11, 1963 Alfieri writes to Johns directly: “I would very much like to ask your kind authorization to use your target symbol as an emblem for ‘Editoriale Metro,’ and in a wider sense, as a ‘good-luck sign.’”229 Alfieri goes on to apologize for not asking permission sooner. In issue 4/5 of Metro, where the Johns feature appears, the target symbol shows up already in an advertisement for “BA&C Visual Communications” (fig. 26).230 If the first two initials of this acronym stand for “Bruno

Alfieri” then Alfieri had been using this image for two years before finally asking Johns for his written permission. The target symbol appears in Metro 4/5, 7, and 8 and shows up again in ads for Metro’s International Directory of Contemporary Art. Metro’s target logo—though Alfieri’s requesting Johns’s permission to use it indicates that it does come from one of his paintings—is fairly generic: it is reproduced in high contrast in black and white; and cut out from a photographic reproduction of Johns’s painting; its silhouette is therefore circular rather than square. Alfieri’s target could just as easily have originated in any of the illustrations by Paul Davis that appear in Pagina 1 and Metro 6 in 1962, where the illustrator includes the target symbol among caricatured portraits on distressed wooden surfaces, lending the pictures the aesthetic of a carnival shooting gallery (fig. 27- 28). Alfieri’s choosing to appropriate the image of Johns’s target, whose encaustic surface—however reduced by the processes of photographic reproduction—causes uneven gray values among its black and white strata, whose graphic imperfections owe to its being hand-made, reveals Alfieri’s wishes that Metro’s logo recall specifically the target of Johns’s painting. When the logo appears on the title page of the magazine in issues 7 and 8, it declares the Italian magazine’s alliance with American pop and neo- dada (fig. 30).

60 In Metro 4/5, Johns’s target becomes a symbol of the new American art. When Castelli artist Cy Twombly appears in Metro’s sixth issue, however, he does so without overtly connoting American-ness. This is because Metro scarcely recognizes Twombly, an American ex-pat on Italian soil, as a true “New Yorchese” artist ala Rauschenberg or Johns. In the late fifties, Twombly takes part in a Roman proto-figurational movement, “La Nuova Figurazione,” with Roman artists Achille Perilli and Gastone Novelli, showing that Twombly’s brand of figuration has as much to do with a European tendency as with the perceived new American koine.

61 Chapter Four: Cy Twombly and L’Esperienza Moderna in Metro 6

In May of 1962, Leo Castelli (or secretary Connie Trimble on Castelli’s behalf) writes to Bruno Alfieri that he’s “found out” from Milton Herder that there is a Metro 6 due very soon, and he asks what photos he should send for the issue.231 In December of that year, Castelli writes to Alfieri that he is currently working on assembling the “Who’s Who” material that will appear in issue 6.232 These are the only mentions of Metro’s sixth issue in the archive of letters between Castelli and Alfieri, despite the fact that one of

Castelli’s artists, Cy Twombly, would be featured for the “Metro Young” series in that issue. Castelli’s non-involvement in preparing materials for the Twombly article may be due to Twombly’s membership in the Roman Scuola della Piazza del Popolo, his status as a naturalized Italian citizen, and the fact that he had been showing at Plinio de Martiis’s Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome before he entered Castelli’s stable.233 It is quite possible that de Martiis, rather than Castelli, provided the images for the Twombly piece.234 Twombly arguably was a Roman artist, and this is how Metro represents him.

MAKING A SCENE: WHO’S WHO AT THE VENICE BIENNALE

The “Who’s Who” material that Castelli refers to in his letter from December, 1962, would appear in Metro 6 under the title “Who’s Who (XXXI Biennale di Venezia),” in an eight-page spread showing “forty-eight photographs of the ladies and gentlemen whom it will be possible to meet in Venice during the thirty-first Biennale” (fig. 30).235 The photographer Virginia Dortch and Alfieri’s secretary and English translator Faith Pleasanton receive credit for producing the article, though Castelli’s letter from December, 1962 shows that he must have played some part in selecting and providing material. A small photograph of Castelli, looking summer chic in dark

62 sunglasses, appears on the first page of “Who’s Who” (fig. 31). It is accompanied by the caption:

Born in Triest, when the Austrian flag still flew in that city, Leo Castelli is now a New Yorker. His gallery is a [sic] outpost for the “avant-garde” in contemporary painting and sculpture. Works of art and objects confront one another in a bewitched atmosphere. In the gallery, one may meet such artists as: Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jack Tworkov, Edward Higgins.236

The article gives similarly brief, flattering biographies for each of the forty-eight pictured personalities. Among them are Metro frequenters Gillo Dorfles, Dore Ashton, Gastone Novelli, Piero Dorazio, Giuseppe Marchiori, Virginia Dortch, Giulio Carlo Argan, and Bruno Alfieri; and Italian art-world heavyweights Palma Bucarelli, Plinio de Martiis, Beatrice Monti della Core, and Umbro Apollonio; American dealers and curators Leo Castelli, Martha Jackson, Sidney Janis, and James Johnson Sweeney; and a handful of artists. (Alfieri receives the shortest and least-flattering bio: “Bruno Alfieri is only the editor-director of this useless review.”)237 Alfieri’s letter from the editor at the beginning of this issue is titled “The Venice

Biennale, Is it Useful? (Or why this ‘Biennale number’ of Metro is so little a ‘Biennale Number’).” In this preface to Metro 6, Alfieri complains that the thirty-first Biennale of Venezia was not of “exceptional interest,” and that “the direction of the present exposition is so lacking in interest on a cultural level,” that they did not feel it necessary to review it, “But it was certainly worth while to describe to the visitors some of the illustrious people participating at the opening of the exposition…”238 Again, as we saw with the Deux Magots and Caffé Rosati (and attempted Cedar

Bar) features in Metro 1-2, Metro in its first phase of activity creates a scene, peopled with a cast of art-world characters.

63 MAKING A SCENE: THE ARTISTS OF L’ESPERIENZA MODERNA

When Cy Twombly moved to Rome in 1957, he entered a tight social and intellectual circle of Roman painters. The clique included Achille Perilli and Gastone Novelli, the creators and editors of the experimental artists’ magazine L’Esperienza Moderna, which ran from 1957-1959.239 The three painters were recognized as constituting a specific tendency in contemporary abstraction, a tendency that mimicked the graphic linearity of the writing act to bring critical attention to issues of visual communication in abstract art. Perilli describes L’Esperienza Moderna as a journal:

… born out of a friendship and from a common painterly basis with Gastone Novelli and with the collaboration of fellow painters, poets, critics, and musicians, [L’Esperienza Moderna] had as its highest goal the creation of a link between the kind of work that proliferated in Rome and what was going on in the rest of the world, especially in Europe; and to investigate that part of the past avant-garde that was still alive and vital.240

The “common painterly basis” that Perilli shares with Novelli may consist in the similar ways that both artists used improvisational etched and drawn graphic linear elements in their painting, constituting what they called “the new figuration”.241 In the late fifties, when so-called “pure abstraction” still carried expectations of non-figuration, both artists use the magazine L’Esperienza Moderna to promote a type of painting, which, though still a brand of non-mimetic abstraction, would involve a more conscious effort on the part of the artists to engage in (or perhaps merely allude to) acts of visual language construction. In 1957, Twombly, along with Perilli, Novelli, and a handful of other artists, contributed drawings and essays for a section of L’Esperienza Moderna’s second issue called “Documenti di una Nuova Figurazione,” and in November of 1959, the Galerie Ajourd’hui in Brussels’s Palais des Beaux-Arts, in collaboration with the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, hosted an exhibition of the three young artists together titled simply “Novelli Perilli Twombly”(fig. 32). 242 64 Metro magazine’s sixth issue features Perilli, Twombly, and Novelli as numbers 13-15 in its “Metro Young” series.243 The three artists’ affiliation with the Roman avant- garde arts magazine would not have been lost on Alfieri, who himself contributed two articles to L’Esperienza Moderna: “Incorragiare le Arti,” in the first issue in 1957, and in the fifth issue in 1958, an article entitled “Per Una Nuova Biennale.”244 In the article “Perilli: In Search of Effective Communication,” for Metro 6, 1962, Alfieri notes the period of time that Perilli spent in Barcelona with Antoni Tàpies, emphasizing the importance of Tàpies as a model for Perilli’s both developing his own

“scribbled” graphic mark and for his experimenting with the material texture of the painting’s surface.245 In retrospect, Alfieri expresses critical doubts about the quality of Perilli’s earlier paintings from the late 50’s that often consisted in quickly-executed, extemporary graphic marks on a background of white or light, neutral-hued oil paint mixed with ground pumice. Alfieri says this tendency in painting—which he classifies as l’informel—was too conducive to attitudes of randomness, indifference, and chance.246 In the moment when he created these paintings, however, Perilli instead spoke of the irrationality of his own mark-making as a positive quality expressing a new, modern imagination and Weltanschauung, a new mythopoetics.247 The modern experience, he explains, “originates a succession of images and signs (and symbols) that can seem obsessive, irrational, and uselessly accidental, but it is instead the sign of a new imagination, of the living freedom in our field of research.”248 Unlike Twombly’s or Novelli’s linear markings, Perilli’s scrawls and scribbles never coalesce into actual letters or words, and therefore remain truer to his own definition of “the new figuration” which “discovers the capacity to invest all the reality of existence into the most elementary trace, in the most simple impression of the sign.”249

65 At the point that Twombly, Perilli, and Novelli appear in Metro in 1962, Perilli’s scribbles have adopted a new function. They now populate horizontal sequences of rectangular cells drawn within the larger rectangular frame of the canvas, in much the same way that cartoon characters populate rectangular cells on the pages of the Sunday comics (fig. 33). As another nod to the comic book medium, the artist has also added bold primary and secondary colors to his palette. Perilli had already spoken of his previous work of the late '50s, those paintings with more seemingly haphazard compositional structures, as symbolic, and as moving toward a “new figuration,” but in these new works, where his scribbles appear in discrete clusters or tangles within the formal structuring device of the comic book narrative, these “figures” are not just figural in the sense that they are signs set against a ground, but also in the sense that they represent abstractions of the human figure.250 Alfieri praises this new direction in Perilli’s work as more explicitly “symbolic” than his more purely abstract paintings of the fifties. He sums up the new paintings: “Perilli still searches for an equilibrium between elements of visual communication of the masses and an academic composition of informal inspiration.”251 Where Perilli’s earlier linear improvisations may have taken inspiration from Tàpies, Novelli’s paintings in Metro are much more aligned with the linear, graphic, symbolic abstractions of Paul Klee. René de Soliel’s essay “Gastone Novelli: The Dream Web,” in Metro 6, locates Novelli’s subject in the dreamscape, or the unconscious thought, where letters and words appear with no attached expectations for conventional sense-making, despite Novelli’s imposition of compositional structures that suggest a network of linguistic relationships (fig. 34). Novelli had himself touted a sign-system whose roots were based in his own arbitrary, aesthetic choices, but within the composition of the painting becomes regulated by a “syntax whose development is 66 logical, analyzable, and communicative.”252 He cites Klee as an example of an artist who creates “an extremely vast, autonomous linguistic universe, governed by a very precise internal structure.”253 Novelli was a devoted admirer of Klee’s. In 1956, a collection of Klee’s writing came out in German. Feltrinelli later published Klee’s Das Bildnerische Denken in Italian in 1959.254 Wittenborn Press published the English version, Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye, in 1961 with Giulio Carlo Argan’s preface from the Italian version.255 But before all this,

Novelli had already translated a page or two for the first issue of his magazine

L’Esperienza Moderna in 1957.256 In Metro 6, we can see how Novelli’s paintings in the early 1960s have incorporated elements visually reminiscent of Klee’s notebook studies, where Klee systematically figures problems of representing space and movement in terms of linear, graphic Gestalten.257 Novelli’s painting “Il re delle Parole” (1961) contains several of these Klee-esque elements (fig. 35). Comparing “Il re delle Parole” to Klee’s notebook studies on his “Theory of Articulation,” “Weight structure in two dimensions,” and “Irregular projection on an uneven plane,” reveals a shared use of “chess-board imagery” between Novelli and Klee (fig. 36).258 Novelli figures these gridded tables of visual information in graphite on a white background in the left two-thirds of the painting, recalling the look of Klee’s notebook sketches (compare to his notes on ‘dividual structural rhythms’(fig. 37)).259 To endow these fields and tesserae of potentially arbitrary visual information with the look of the personal notebook, invests the image with a sense of usefulness and meaning. Notebook pages save meaningful information (thoughts, ideas, and data, both fragmented and whole), so that the note taker may make use of it at a later moment. Importantly, in the environment of the notebook, these collected signs and gestures bear the burden of sense-making for the note taker alone, and the rules and 67 regulations governing their syntax are likely to change from one page of the notebook to the next. The figures that Novelli produces are “figures” in the sense that they claim dreamily to represent fragments of collected “facts and figures” culled from the artist’s own subjectivity. Here, I would like to apply the Italian word “cifra.” “Cifra” roughly translates to the English word “figure” as it is used to describe some amount, number, or digit. “Cifra” simply refers to a numerical datum, a conventional signifier of measurable meaning or value, yet the closest English cognate for this term is “cipher,” a word connoted with mystery and doubt, as it refers to a secret or disguised way of writing, a code.260 As a species of figuration, I believe that Novelli wished his graphic symbols to exist somewhere between cifra and cipher.

GILLO DORFLES ON “WRITTEN IMAGES OF CY TWOMBLY”

In Metro 6, Dorfles describes Twombly’s “written images” as:

… something quite different from picturesque scrawlings or from the symbolic musings of so much recent painting. It is rather the case of a true need to ‘write,’ (that is, to project through this highly particular myokinetic activity, in which the artist is almost passive; continuous and fragmentary lines which—as soon as they are set down on paper—become transformed into arabesques, into lacework, like words written on sand with one’s fingertip.)261

Here, “picturesque scrawlings” could refer to the kind of painting performed by anyone from Hans Hartung, to Wols, to Georges Noël, to Achille Perilli in the late fifties.262 The word “picturesque” implies the artist’s aesthetic interest in organizing the pictorial elements (the abstract “scrawlings,” for example) in an overall composition that satisfies the audience’s general formal expectations for “art.” If “picturesque scrawlings” express anything, they express attitudes that are already recognized as being “artistic,” so that their semantic meaning may not interfere with the overall aesthetic effect. 68 “Symbolic musings,” could refer to the kind of painting performed by Novelli and other Klee enthusiasts. “Musings” here may imply that even in the realm of the symbolic, paintings of this category arrive at no conclusive semantic meaning. Dorfles has identified two ways that artists of the informel and immediately post-informel began to allude subtly to the possibility of using abstract painting to perform figuration (to express semantic meaning, or to represent one thing (or idea) in the form and material of another), without veering too far from the non-figurative means of informel or lyric abstraction.263

So what sets Twombly’s “true need to ‘write’,” apart from these other two tendencies? Using language that will appear in his book Nuovi Miti, Nuovi Riti, Dorfles describes Twombly’s writing-like activity as “myokinetic,” a term that simply refers to muscles in motion. In Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti, Dorfles uses the term “basic scribbles” to refer to a class of graphic mark that is gestural, linear, and automatic.264 He borrows this term from Rhoda Kellogg’s text “The Biology of Aesthetics,” where the term “basic scribbles” refers to the “horizontal, vertical, zig-zag, spiral, and grid lines” that appear cross-culturally in the drawings and/or motor experiments of children at an early stage of development.265 These basic scribbles “can be interpreted in part as instinctive myokinetic movements due to a simple muscular impulse in the infant…”.266

Paul Klee had taken an interest in the same phenomenon, stating in his notebooks that the “basic scribble” represents a stage at which “writing and drawing were the same thing”:

…let us content ourselves with the most primitive of elements, the line. At the dawn of civilization, when writing and drawing were the same thing, it was the basic element. And as a rule our children begin with it; one day they discover the phenomenon of the mobile point, with what enthusiasm it is hard for us grown- ups to imagine. At first the pencil moves with extreme freedom, wherever it pleases.267 69 Few would argue that the act of writing is “an almost passive myokinetic activity,” but Klee sees the basic element, line, in itself a mere trace of “a mobile point,” as giving birth to both acts of writing and drawing. Scribbling begins with the mobile point and ends in either pictures or words (i.e. figuration). In Twombly’s paintings— particularly those from 1957-58 reproduced in Dorfles’s article—line plays all three parts in turn, morphing from basic scribbling to the figuration of concepts into words such as “Olympia” or “Rome,” then to the fragmented hints of drawn pictures (fig. 38-40).

Twombly explores line as the “mobile point” where only two forms of figuration take place: the un-intentioned forming of the linear scrawl itself, and the figuration of the artist himself as indexically implicated by the traces of his actions, a representation by proxy.268 Departing from this myokinetic exploration, Twombly’s lines become the raw material from which he refigures pre-existing cultural ideas, ideas of place and time, mythological ideas, only to return again to spontaneous scrawl. Linear figurations crystallize and dissolve, are forgotten and remembered among the variegated layers of fields of white paint. Dorfles addresses the words that appear in Twombly’s paintings. He explains that the words that can be made out in Twombly’s paintings soon become “one with the meaning of the work and serves to give a semantic quality, with categorical precision, to what might seem merely a mesh of oscillating lines.”269 However, I would argue for a different interpretation, one borrowed from Dorfles’s own discussion of the semantic potential of “basic scribbles” in Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti.

Regarding the semantics of the “basic scribble”: in the absence of a proper interpretive code, Dorfles states, the interpreter instead must allow for an elastic sense of meaning.270 For some signs, their meanings exist only temporarily. A scribble or a mark has no decipherable meaning except as it plays a role in the larger composition of the 70 painting. To remove it from this context would render it mute, but within the painting it participates in an act of semantic “investiture.” Its meaning, or its intentionality, are not inherent to it, but temporarily fixed by the surrounding context. 271 I would say that not only the scribbles, but also the words in Twombly’s paintings, function in this way. To imply, as Dorfles does, that the legible words in Twombly’s paintings serve to explain the otherwise unintelligible tangle of abstract graffiti, is to concede too much power to the conventions by which we recognize those words as meaningful. I read the word “Rome” across the bottom of an untitled painting from 1958, and by contrast, the scribbles and marks above that word behave more like pictures than like writing, but still I do not expect for the “mesh of oscillating lines” in the center of the canvas to depict the city of Rome, to illustrate the word pictorially—for one set of scribbles to resemble the Colosseum, another to represent the Tiber (fig. 40). If anything, as it appears here, among these floating scrawls, the word “Rome” too becomes abstract by (dis)association. In Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti, Dorfles hints that when we are made to recognize the arbitrary relationship of the sign and its meaning (in the case of his “basic scribbles” the relationship is more situational than arbitrary), we experience something like “the loss of semantic value” of the whole universe and our whole language.272 Recognizing the word “Rome” as representational, may cause one to seek representation elsewhere, but recognizing that word within a field of abstract scrawls and scribbles can shed doubt on its assumed representational function. The word acts like a shape in the clouds. Figuration spreads, but dis-figuration spreads too.273

Dorfles’s essay in Metro 6 ends with a brief mention of Twombly’s newer, more colorful paintings of the early ‘60s. Dorfles describes these works as “orgiastic” in their “chromatic violence,” “evanescent” in their “impressionistic luminosity.”274 But overall,

71 Dorfles takes more interest in discussing Twombly’s earlier, more “written,” works, probing them for hints of semantic suggestion.

THE NEW FIGURATION OF L’ESPERIENZA MODERNA

Under the aegis of “La Nuova Figurazione,” Perilli, Novelli, and Twombly arrive at quite different results. The “new figuration” that Perilli and Novelli promoted in

“L’Esperienza Moderna” in the late 1950’s, was a step away from French informel precedents in that it focused on questioning the codes, mediums, and methods by which a message is communicated as information. In calling this attitude a form of “figuration” Perilli declared a break with pure abstraction. He meant to emphasize that his “new figuration” was not only concerned with problems of emotional expression or “expressiveness” but was also concerned with problems of semantic expression, and employed the conventional methods of writing—specifically in the scratched and drawn linear graphic mark that his paintings have in common with those of Twombly and

Novelli. Dorfles characterizes this post-informel interest in semiotics and visual communication as a “passage from the ontological to the semantic,” a shift from the study of the “essences” of things to a study of “systems of signification.”275 Importantly, all three artists tend to situate their marks, scribbles, and scrawls on white (or pale and neutral) surfaces, which apart from possibly recalling the whiteness of the blank page to the writer or the marble wall to the Roman graffitist, should make for a clear distinction of figure and ground. All three artists, however, in scratching the

“figure” into the depth, texture, and materiality of the painted white surface, or in layering white paint over and around the graphic scrawl, purposefully confound this

72 relationship, producing a “figure” that is embedded in, rather than superimposed upon, the painting’s “ground.” Though Cy Twombly may have easily blended in with an Italian scene, Roy Lichtenstein, in Metro 8, presents a decidedly American approach to figuration. For Metro, Lichtenstein becomes the paragon of the new American figuration. His pop is equated with a post-abstract “realism,” yet what is “realistic” about Lichtenstein’s painting is perhaps the way he represents ready-made abstractions drawn from a modern

American culture. Lee Bontecou also appears in Metro 8, but her relationship to figuration is more obscure.

73 Chapter Five: Roy Lichtenstein and Lee Bontecou in Metro 8

In a letter from the 28th of November, 1962, Bruno Alfieri writes to Leo Castelli, “We have decided that Gillo Dorfles will do a big, important article on Lee Bontecou for Metro 8.”276 He requests that Castelli send biographical and bibliographical information, images, and notes on Bontecou’s working method.277 Castelli responds that he has received Alfieri’s news about the Bontecou article for Metro 8, and adds “by the way, what happened to Metro 7?”278 Alfieri did not involve Leo Castelli in assembling material for Metro 7, which featured American painter Jim Dine in two different articles as “Metro Young No. 17”.279 In January, 1963, Castelli sends the material on Bontecou for Metro 8, including an article by Dore Ashton that he considers “about the best thing that has been written about her,” adding “I’m sure Gillo will manage to make his contribution in spite of the fact that he has never seen her actual work.”280 Perhaps thanks to Castelli’s backhanded compliment, the Dorfles article would never materialize. Instead Dorfles would contribute two articles to this issue: one called “Obscure Aspects of New Figuration in Italy” and the other about Italian artist Enrico Castellani called “Castellani: Incarnation of a new Structure, Rhythmic, Spacious, Luminous.”

DORFLES AND THE NEW FIGURATION

The “new figuration” that Dorfles summarizes in his opening remarks for Metro

8 is not limited to the specific brand of “Nuova Figurazione” promoted by Achille Perilli and Gastone Novelli in L’Esperienza Moderna, but refers instead to the vast plurality of contemporary approaches to post-abstract depiction that Metro has highlighted throughout its past seven issues, and continues to engage with in Metro 8. Dorfles’s 74 statements here summarize neatly the ideas of “new figuration” as they have appeared in Metro:

…neo-figurative work can take the form of material, sign, or print, and once again seek, with the presence of an identifiable figurative image, to express (and call to the observer’s mind) a more precise and semantically decipherable iconology, provided this is clearly unrelated to the tridimensional, chiaroscuro, volumetrical and—above all, naturalistic and photographical figurative work of the 19th century.

Quite clearly, this figuration can make use of pates hautes, as well as chance objects, emblems and symbols drawn from all sources and even—as we have already said—from the utilization of the debris of photographs, bill-boards, and road-signs, taken just as they are and fitted into the painting; but what this figuration should not do is to return to ‘open-air’ impressionism, to the propaganda of ‘social realism’, or to the even less acceptable ‘neo-naturalism’ which, under the guise of a vague abstractionism, palms off landscapes, nudes, and still-life…”281

Dorfles does not explicitly characterize this “new figuration” as an American phenomenon, but his admonishment against returning to pre-abstract forms of naturalistic, impressionistic, social-realistic figuration recalls comments that Steinberg had made regarding Johns’s particular brand of figuration: that it differed from that of the “pre-abstractionists,” (citing for “pre-abstractionists the examples Courbet, Velazquez and Goya) because the pictured image, itself two-dimensional, does not perform any illusionistic acts of recession from the picture plane.282 In Metro 8 Rosenblum, too, invokes Courbet as the exemplar of “realism” to place in comparison to the “new realist” Lichtenstein, stating that both artists, pre- and post-abstract, match a “vulgar style” to their “vulgar content.” There is the crucial macro- iconographic difference between Courbet and Lichtenstein—that the first paints pictures from life and the second paints pictures of pictures—but for Rosenblum, it is also the “irony familiar to the twentieth-century tradition” that sets his Lichtenstein’s painting apart from its 19th century precedents.283 75 Bontecou is a difficult “fit” in Dorfles’s categorizational scheme. Her work is abstract, but does not “palm off landscapes, nudes, and still-life.” Rather than mimetically rendering with chiaroscuro “tridimensional” and “volumetrical” forms, she enhances with dramatically dark value ranges structures that are themselves already “tridimensional” and “volumetrical.” And as for presenting a more “semantically decipherable iconology,” Bontecou’s work does not contain any recognizable imagery, found or invented, and Ashton argues against easy gestaltist and structuralist interpretations of Bontecou’s deep ovoid forms.

DORE ASHTON ON LEE BONTECOU

Ashton’s “Illusion and Fantasy: Lee” in Metro 8, is a brief two-page introduction to Bontecou’s structural relief paintings—a group of works characterized by planes of canvas in varying shades of brown, black, and tan, stretched between “leadings” of welded steel framework that jut out from the wall and surround concentrically the deep, dark cavity (or cavities) at the artwork’s center (fig. 41). Ashton describes these central cavities as “elaborate recessions” and comments that even in Bontecou’s two- dimensional drawings it is “the black center which is insistent and repeated.”284 Ashton nods to the sexual and structuralist connotations that deep crevasses may engender, but argues for the polyvalence of Bontecou’s cavities. She expresses her distaste for criticism that emphasizes the “aggressive” and “menacing” aspects of the work. Ashton criticizes Bontecou, even, for that “grinning death relief,” with its gnashing teeth (Untitled, 1962), which she finds too obvious in its intention to horrify (fig. 41). She does discuss symbolic implications of the round, concave form, but states that “even shorn of all associations, it stands firmly in its plastic autonomy,” noting the meticulousness and virtuosity of Bontecou’s craftsmanship. 76 Ashton argues also against reading symbolic significance into the found materials that Bontecou employs:

Lee Bontecou has succeeded in using rough and ‘found’ materials so that their origin is of minimal interest. If she uses tent and knapsack canvas, rusty wire, and iron to bind it, she manages to evoke an image that has little to do with the purposes for which these materials were once designated.285

Unlike the metal elements in Higgins’s sculptures, whose ready-made forms help to determine Higgins’s improvised plasterwork; and unlike the self-identifying scraps, detritus, second-hand junk, and borrowed photographs that populate Rauschenberg’s assemblages; Bontecou’s materials do not proclaim their own identity or autonomy. That elements of Bontecou’s works may be “ready-made” is beside the point, for Ashton. Ashton’s essay consciously avoids discussing the place of so-called figuration in Bontecou’s work, but rather talks of how the work presents itself to the viewer. Ashton makes comparisons with theater stage sets with vanishing-point perspective. Regardless of what figurative associations Bontecou’s chasms may call into play, undeniably they

(like stage sets) prescribe a single point of view from which the viewer may interface with their “elaborate recessions.” It is difficult to imagine how Dorfles would have approached Bontecou’s work had he taken the chance. Ashton’s brief summary of Bontecou’s oeuvre seems to proscribe any of the rhetoric that, over the course of Metro’s first eight issues, we have come to expect from Dorfles: Bontecou does not perform an act of “fetishization,” nor of semiotic experimentation, nor does she display an array of information for the viewer’s improvised recombination, nor does “salvaging” of objects from their quotidian functions play a large role in the viewer’s overall experience of the work. Rather, Ashton intimates that Bontecou’s objects are more for phenomenological delectation than for figurative interpretation.

77 ROBERT ROSENBLUM ON ROY LICHTENSTEIN

The Castelli-Alfieri archive bears hardly any mention of Robert Rosenblum’s essay on Roy Lichtenstein, “Roy Lichtenstein and the Realist Revolt.” The only mention occurs in March in 1963 when Alfieri informs Castelli that “In Metro 8, we have presented Lichtenstein in a very luxurious way, and you will be very pleased with it.”286 Alfieri had been eager to publish an important essay by Rosenblum from the very beginning of his correspondence with Castelli, suggesting in July 1960 that Rosenblum could have conducted the interview with Higgins that appeared in Metro 1.287 It is possible that for this piece in Metro 8, Alfieri collected the material from the artist and author directly, as there is no record of Castelli taking part; however, Alfieri may have re- used some of the photo-transparencies of Lichtenstein’s paintings that he collected from Castelli for an earlier Metro piece on American art called “U.S.A. Toward the End of Abstract Painting.”288 Both Ashton’s “Illusion and Fantasy: Lee” (“Metro Young No. 19”) and

Rosenblum’s “Roy Lichtenstein and the Realist Revolt” (“Metro Young No. 21”) are shorter than the “Metro Young” features from previous issues. Like Ashton’s essay, Rosenblum’s is a brief, illustrated introduction to a particular group of works by a single artist; but unlike Ashton’s essay on Bontecou, Rosenblum’s article on Lichtenstein engages in the larger contemporary discourse on figuration. “Roy Lichtenstein and the Realist Revolt,” is the title for Rosenblum’s essay as it appears in English in Metro 8, and this is how the title later appears in the books On

Modern Art, Selected essays by Robert Rosenblum and Pop Art, a Critical History, both of which reprint the essay, crediting Metro as its source.289 However, the Italian title that Metro chooses for the essay reads: “La rivolta ‘realista’ Americana: Lichtenstein” (“The American ‘Realist’ Revolt: Lichtenstein”) implying that Lichtenstein does not rebel 78 against abstraction alone, but that he takes part in a larger American (not European) realist movement (fig. 42).290 Where Metro 4/5 had reproduced Lichtenstein’s paintings before, in the article “U.S.A Toward the End of Abstraction,” Alfieri had also emphasized America’s role in “the rarefaction of the ‘abstract’ and the return to the ‘figurative.’”291 According to Rosenblum, Lichtenstein’s paintings amount to a “revolt” because they attempt “to undermine the authority of both the abstract and the expressionist components of abstract expressionism.”292 Rosenblum focuses on ways that Lichtenstein coolly represents popular imagery—the “ugliest, most ubiquitous kind of commercial imagery: comic strips, soapbox diagrams, cheap advertising illustrations”—in the formal aspect native to its popular sources. Perhaps as a nod to Steinberg’s article on Johns, Rosenblum makes the case that Lichtenstein matches his painting technique to his subject matter, stating, “As is the case with Johns’s early flags, what is important is not only what is painted, but how it is painted,” adding that, like Johns, Lichtenstein starts with images that are prosaic, clean, flat, and obvious, and in the process of rendering them, preserves those qualities.293 It may appear that Rosenblum makes too much of the “interplay of style and subject” in Lichtenstein’s paintings of comic book and advertising images.294 After all,

Lichtenstein’s subject and style both originate in the same source—the comic book cell, or the newspaper advertisement itself. Not until later series in the artist’s oeuvre (i.e.: his “seascapes,” “entablatures,” “modern art” paintings, or his sculptures) does it become obvious that he actually applies a formalized stylistic method in re-figuring his subject. When Rosenblum praises Lichtenstein’s formal techniques in this article, he often praises those pictorial conventions that one could imagine deriving directly, in tandem with pictorial content, from Lichtenstein’s image sources. Rosenblum notes: “In Sponge, 79 for instance, the blank, untextured areas vividly convey textures as unlike as skin, sponge, and enamel, just as the familiar screen of dots derived from cheap printing processes is instantly identified with a coat of dust and grime.”295 Rosenblum’s comment here would seem equally applicable both to Lichtenstein’s painting and his mass- produced printed source image.296 The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has catalogued original image sources, which served as models for many of Lichtenstein’s paintings. For both Sponge and Sponge II, the foundation has identified the illustration from a box of “Soilax” cleaning product for

“wall washing and floor cleaning,” as Lichtenstein’s source.297 If Lichtenstein did actually use this paticular commercial illustration as his source in Sponge and Sponge II, it is possible to see just to what extent he has reinterpreted and re-figured the original image for his painting. He has removed the text, reversed the image from left to right, simplified, centered and enlarged the image of the hand and sponge, but most interestingly, he has wholly invented the “coat of dust and grime,” both illusionistically and conceptually represented by his “screen of dots.” The image on the box of “Soilax” does not contrast areas of dotted grime with literal spotlessness, but rather shows the trace of the sponge as a solid white arc on a solid brown background. Lichtenstein creates a plausible fiction, a way that the mass-printing medium could have illustrated such an image, that having no exact original, still resonates with a type of image that everyone finds familiar. Perhaps the interpretive aspect of Lichtenstein’s figuration exists in his re- figuration in paint of the print medium itself—a medium whose own representational conventions aim a tecnica of extreme visual and material economy at a telos of maximum dissemination and legibility. Hand-painting in acrylic and oil on large canvases what everyone is accustomed to seeing printed on a much smaller scale in ink on paper, 80 Lichtenstein brings attention to formal and optical nuances of the printing medium, the abstraction in the figuration. Turning to Lichtenstein’s Sponge, our eyes readily ignore the tiny, regularly- spaced dots in red on a white field, and instead see that field as pink all over (fig. 43). After all, the dots all seem to exist synchronically (in the printing process, their arrival on the page, too, would be virtually synchronic—but this is a painting), each individual dot sacrificing its identity and motivations to a simultaneous, homogenous whole. Further, we are in the habit of accepting pink tones as appropriate to hand shapes in pictures like this one. But when our eyes see equally tiny, just-as-regularly-spaced black dots on a nearby yellow surface, they represent a layer of grime or dust. The pixilated medium, no longer ignored as such, now aptly describes a pixilated substance. The area of dot-free yellow that reveals the sponge’s path, simultaneously reveals the un-sponged areas that surround that path. The contrast of the dotted (before) and non-dotted (after) areas gives evidence of the sponge’s motion in time, and by understanding the sponge’s motion, we can identify the dot with grime—the area not yet sponged. But how do we recognize the dot-free area as tracing the sponge’s path if we have not already recognized the dot as grime? How do we imagine the hand in motion without first grasping this distinction? In the newspaper, this optical magic sells cleaning products. In art, it sells the picture itself.

When Rosenblum discusses Lichtenstein’s paintings of Cezanne’s Man with Folded Arms and Picasso’s Femme au Chapeau, he no longer speaks of the interplay of style and subject, but instead reflects on these works as an anthropological comment on the American way of life.298 Here, the faked half-tone print technique is useful for its mass-cultural associations, specifically as it evokes a familiar tool in cheap marketing. Great works of art, Rosenblum concludes, are now just “another familiar product of American merchandising.”299 81 Lichtenstein seems to represent for Metro, the absolute furthest point of post- abstract American figuration in painting—so much so that he warrants the label of “realist.” But even in Lichtenstein’s veristic approach, there is still an act of re-figuration and aesthetic tinkering.

LICHTENSTEIN DANS LE METRO

Roy Lichtenstein becomes a household name in Metro after his debut in Metro’s first phase of activity between 1960-63.300 Castelli sends Alfieri a design by Lichtenstein to use on Metro 10’s cover, and though Lichtenstein receives credit for the cover in Metro, no title is listed for the work.301 The image consists of one horizontal paint-stripe at the top of the page, and one blob of drippy yellow paint in the center, both in cartoon cloissonisme, on a background of blue ben-day dots (fig. 44). Metro is not subtle in proclaiming its admiration for Roy Lichtenstein. In Metro 11 from June 1966, an anonymous article called “La Biennale!” declares Lichtenstein the rightful winner the 1966 Venice Biennale’s international painting prize:

The prizes. The international prize for painting should go, without question to Roy Lichtenstein, who, of all the artists at this year’s Venice exhibition, most deserves it. If the international jury chooses any other name, this is a wrong that history will correct.302

When the prize does not go to Lichtenstein, but to Op artist Julio Le Parc instead, Metro expresses its disappointment:

Then, the prize has gone to Le Parc instead of to Lichtenstein as we had hoped, because Lichtenstein was the only artist who fully deserved it at this particular time, and this is not to disregard the merits of Le Parc. This is not the place to discuss it.303

In Metro’s third phase of activity, the so-called “New Series,” Lichtenstein returns to the magazine in a special feature, “Lichtenstein at the Piano,” with “photo-

82 reportage” by Gianni Berengo-Gardin and text by Maurizio Fagiolo dell Arco. In this article, from Metro’s very last issue, Lichtenstein assents to the type of biographical, semi-candid photography that Rauschenberg refused to do for Metro 2.304 The article includes three photos of Lichtenstein at the piano and four of the artist in the studio. Four photographs show Lichtenstein at home with his wife, but the overall atmosphere suggested by these images is nowhere near as “domestic” as those of Higgins or Piqueras with their spouses that ran in issues 1-2 (fig.11-12). Instead, Roy Lichtenstein and

Dorothy Herzka traipse around their ample living room—their art collection visible on the walls in the background—and pose together on an antique sofa where flowers lie scattered at their feet (fig. 46). From the Castelli-Alfieri archive, we learn that Bruno Alfieri wanted desperately to do a collaborative Lichtenstein book project with Leo Castelli. At one point he suggests that this photographic essay from Metro 16/17 could expand into a book, and at another point, he goes so far as to draw up a contract for the proposed project

“Lichtenstein, La Scultura,” which he sends to Castelli in August 1970.305 On two separate occasions, Alfieri expresses his frustration that Castelli had chosen another publisher, Mazzotta, to put out a Lichtenstein book in the early 1970s. In these letters, Alfieri calls the book simply “Lichtenstein,” but the project he refers to is probably the book Roy Lichtenstein, with text by Diane Waldman, published in Milan by Mazzotta in 1971.306 Unlike Alfieri, Edizioni Mazzotta continues to publish art books and catalogs into the 2000s.307

After publishing Metro 8, Alfieri subjects Metro to a period of experimental restructuring, at once abandoning his original business partners and expanding his publishing business to take on more collaborative projects with galleries for books and exhibition catalogs. This period between Metro 8 and Metro 9 also marks a watershed for 83 American figuration in Italy, because it is in this gap, in 1964, that Castelli Gallery artist Robert Rauschenberg wins the international prize for painting at the Venice Biennale.

84 Chapter Six: Metro Magazine in 1964

In 1964, Metro does not publish any issues. Instead, Bruno Alfieri and the newly formed Metro Editore publish a book, The International Directory of Contemporary Art.308 In 1962, a press release arrives at Leo Castelli’s gallery announcing Metro’s plans to assemble an international jury to select the “Two Hundred Leading Artists of Today.”309 The press release explains: “The international jury, whose work occurs under the auspices of the review Metro, hopes that such a catalogue will contribute to the reestablishment, in just proportions and under an adequate light, of the principle traits of today’s art.”310 Many of the letters in the Castelli-Alfieri archive dating from late 1962 to 1964 have to do with the Directory project.311 The artists of Castelli’s gallery who appear in the Directory include: Edward Higgins, Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Salvatore Scarpitta, Jack Tworkov, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein.

THE 1964 VENICE BIENNALE

Lawrence Alloway attributes Jean Fautrier’s victory at the 1960 Venice Biennale to Jean Fautrier’s being better promoted to a European audience than runner-up Franz Kline:

Fautrier had a chain of exhibitions around Europe for years prior to the show, ample advertising in the magazines as the summer approached, and he has a literature that included texts by Andre Malraux and Francois Ponge. Nobody had seen Kline’s work before and there was nothing to read about him. (Significantly, the Sidney Janis Gallery, which represented Kline and most of the Abstract Expressionists at this time, did not start putting out illustrated catalogues regularly until 1960.)312

85 By placing Fautrier in the public European eye, the printed media brought him also to the attention of the Biennale’s international jury. Just two Biennali later, however, Fautrier would become outmoded. Alloway remembers 1964 as the year “in which the emphasis of the Biennale shifted to include a substantial number of artists working in a post-informel or post-abstract expressionist styles.”313 When Robert Rauschenberg did, in fact, win the prize in 1964, Castelli had seen to it that Rauschenberg would be well known to an international audience and jury. Rumors of manipulation and bribery aside,

Castelli’s involvement with Metro may have played some part in endearing (or at least familiarizing) Rauschenberg to an Italian audience.314 Here is Alloway again:

The way to reach a juror is the same way that the dealer influences the collector and the public, by taking advertisements and supplying color transparencies to journals, encouraging critics, lending to museums, cutting prices for collectors, and so on… the media are the route to the juror’s attention.315

Castelli’s strategy for success in the 1964 Venice Biennale involved his utilizing all of these promotional avenues.316 In the months leading up to the Biennale, Johns and

Rauschenberg had both enjoyed a string of exhibitions at home and abroad. In March of 1964, Castelli writes to Alfieri summarizing the activity of his stable in the months leading up to the Venice Biennale, placing emphasis on the international exhibitions in which his artists participated.317 Rauschenberg had shown at Whitechapel in London, and in April would have five works at the Gulbenkian Foundation exhibition at the Tate before appearing at the Venice Biennale and the Dokumenta in Kassel, and then the Torcuato di Tella in October. Last but not least, Castelli adds, there will be a show of

Rauschenberg’s new work at the Galerie Sonnabend in May.318 In addition to providing Alfieri with this detailed update, Castelli sends an exhibition catalog for the Whitechapel exhibition and a recent New York Times article

86 about Rauschenberg. He includes a catalog for the recent exhibition of Johns at the Jewish Museum in New York as well and asks:

How many Jasper Johns books do you still have in your possession? I hope quite a few. I think they could all be sold at the Biennale Bookshop in a few days. You could take care of this yourself or, if you prefer, I could buy them (let me know what the price per unit would be) and attend to it.319

Then in May 1964, Castelli’s tone becomes more urgent:

As for the 662 copies of the Jasper Johns book please send them without further delay to Dr. Alan Solomon, U.S. Commissioner for the Biennale, whose headquarters are at the former U.S. Consulate (next door to Peggy Guggenheim) in Venice. He will be very pleased to have them.

Among other reasons, 1964 was a special year for America in the Venice Biennale, because it was the first year since 1952, that the American Pavilion, which at that point had never had official government sponsorship before, would no longer be organized under the auspices of the Modern Museum of Art in New York.320 Instead, Alan Solomon, director of New York’s Jewish Museum, and close friend of Leo

Castelli’s, directed the U.S.’s involvement in that year’s exhibition.321 Alan Solomon would later contribute material to Metro for two different pieces. One piece, published in 1966, was called “American Art between Two Biennales,” and provided an update on the American contemporary art scene.322 The other piece was a vindication of that American gallerist (Castelli) credited with “buying the administration of the Biennale” in 1964.323 It would appear alongside writing by John Cage, and William Seitz in an article in issue 12 entitled “Leo Castelli: Ten Years.” After Rauschenberg’s win at the Venice Biennale, Metro takes part in sensationalizing the controversial American victory. Alfieri’s article “A Critic’s Journal” hypes the event with talk of a French-American cultural rivalry and brings attention to Metro’s role in the perceived trans-Atlantic feud:

87 All the art galleries of Paris are in mourning for “pop art” and the review “Metro” which has never been bribed by “Murder, Inc.” of Brooklyn to destroy Paris in order to please New York, is bitterly criticized and considered as a sort of Trojan horse, introduced by the Americans.324

Not everyone involved with Metro agreed that Rauschenberg deserved the prize, however. In Metro 11, painters Piero Dorazio and Giulio Turcato discuss the 1964 Biennale, and conclude that the prize should have gone instead to “Nevelson, or someone else.”325 And in Metro 12, Dorazio dismisses Rauschenberg’s Bed as a derivative mess, calling it “a Burri smeared by an action painter.”326 For the most part, though, Metro probably did deserve its “Americanophile” reputation.327 In the article “Leo Castelli: Ten Years,” celebrating a decade of activity at the Leo Castelli Gallery, the written tributes of Solomon, John Cage, and William Seitz, are prefaced by an anonymous text in Italian, naming Leo Castelli, “one of the most intelligent art dealers of our time.”328 It goes on to say, “As far as Metro is concerned, our magazine would like to share in those comments by Seitz, Solomon, and Cage, and we wish Leo Castelli an ever happier business.”329

RESTRUCTURING METRO

The year 1964 also represents a period in which Metro undergoes major changes in terms of its financial and administrative structure. In the middle of 1963, Alfieri has already begun to discuss with Castelli his plans for restructuring Metro:

Now I would like to ask you for a bit of advice: what do you think of the possibility of transforming the magazine Metro, merging it with the American magazine Arts and with another [magazine] in London that would publish Metro monthly, with an editorial staff in New York, one in London, but with its general direction in Milan, where it would be printed? What sort of position (not financial, but in terms of “concept) does Arts have in the United States at the moment? (This request for advice is CONFIDENTIAL). 330

88 After this letter, correspondence between the two men resumes as usual. About one year later, on the 5th of March 1964, Castelli writes to Alfieri to inform him of some of the activities of his gallery and expresses a mild concern that Alfieri had not sent any letters during the past four months.331 Four days later on March 9, Alfieri responds to Castelli’s note with the longest letter in the Castelli-Alfieri archive.332 At this point, he explains, he has begun to acquire the entire Metro Editoriale business from his partners, the Società Foscama di Torino (listed as “Balella, Baruchello,

Gritti”). He cites lack of communication and lack of honesty as reasons for his dissolving the partnership. Some of his partners, he continues, have even used Metro to turn a personal profit. Here, he also claims to have abandoned his other backers Olivetti and Henraux; however, in February of 1965 he writes to Castelli that Olivetti has promised to continue to provide an important annual contribution.333 Alfieri lists the projects that he is currently involved in, which are now his responsibility alone: a series of art books and the magazines Metro, Pagina, and

Pacco.334 Alfieri complains that various galleries (Pogliani, La Salita, Fleuve, Tartaruga, Toninelli, Schwarz) still owe Metro for the cost of advertising, but concedes that the London and New York galleries have always been punctual in their payments. He adds, “I am convinced that Metro can only continue on the condition of absolute independence from galleries and of every other kind of influence.”335 He suggests that the magazine should cease to rely financially on galleries’ advertising, or could survive perhaps by selecting “maybe a half-dozen good galleries.”336 After 1964, the number of advertisers does drop dramatically.337 Among those advertisers that remain are The Leo Castelli Gallery, Galleria Lorenzelli, Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Dwan Gallery, and Bruno Alfieri’s own gallery and bookshop.

89 Alfieri includes ideas for how to structure Metro as a business. One of his ideas involves setting up a new partnership like the one he had before, but with different partners.338 Some ideas involve merging the magazine with other international reviews.339 He plays around with the possibility of selling part of the magazine to industrial backers in Turin, and hints at plans to discuss forming a partnership with Franz Larese of Galerie Im Erker—mentioning that Larese has already submitted to Alfieri a proposal to raise the price of Metro from 3,000 lire to 10,000 lire, put the magazine out twice a year, and include original lithographs by his artists (Hartung, Tàpies, etc.) in the journal.340 At this point in the letter, Alfieri begins to solicit Castelli’s assistance:

Why don’t I seek an associate in New York, one who has your complete trust? I would like to have the guarantee of avoiding “trouble” and of dealing with good people. Naturally, this arrangement should have nothing to do with l’Editoriale Metro, though perhaps it would come out under that label…. You know Scull, Tremaine, governor Rockefeller! …We can do really terrific issues, on painters that WE like. 341

Alfieri asks Castelli to let him know right away if he will be able to help, so that

Alfieri can postpone his dealings with Larese of Galerie Im Erker. He signs the letter “Ti abbraccio, Bruno.” In May, Castelli responds:

As far as the problems of Metro are concerned, I am most anxious to discuss them with you when I get to Italy. I shall be in Venice from the 12th to the 19th of June, most probably at the Grand Hotel, and after that for a few days in Milan and Rome. As you can imagine, I am absolutely delighted to see you so soon.342

After this letter, Alfieri continues to write to Castelli to suggest yet more possible solutions for restructuring Metro. Whatever conclusions the two men reached on the subject, they discussed either in person or over the phone, because the written record does not give a clear picture of their final arrangement. Several of the changes that occur, however, are visible in the magazine itself.

90 In experimenting with possible solutions for Metro, Alfieri appears to have, in one way or another, implemented some compromised version of each of the plans that he had shared with Castelli in his letters. As previously stated, in accordance with Alfieri’s wishes to avoid depending on advertisers for revenue, the number of advertisers in Metro drops after 1964 (table 1). Gillo Dorfles and Giulio Carlo Argan become co-directors in 1968, replacing the partners that Alfieri lost in the Societá Foscama di Torino. Also, in lieu of establishing an editorial staff in America and Great Brtiain, as he would have preferred to do, in the first few pages of issues 13-16/17, Alfieri lists his international

“contributors,” many of whom (Dore Ashton, Leo Steinberg, and Georgine Oeri, for example) would, in fact, have nothing to do with Metro during this phase of activity.343 The majority of Metro’s actual contributors in the “New Series” would be Italian critics and artists, though American artists Allan Kaprow, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Smithson, and Dan Graham would participate together in a large piece for Metro 14 called, “Challenging the System: Survey on the Current Situation of Art in the United

States and France,” and David Antin would contribute a piece in issue 13 called, “Differences-Sames: New York 1966-1967.”344 Yet, for the most part, Castelli’s contribution to the writing in Metro becomes harder to find, as Alfieri’s demands for material afer 1964 become at once more insistent and less specific.

If Castelli did become more financially invested in Metro after 1964, which his letters to Alfieri suggest he did, it is difficult to see how his investment paid off for him in these later phases of the magazine’s activity. Metro had become more focused on an

Italian audience, now publishing almost no articles in English (table 1). Italy now had its own contemporary movement, arte povera, which resembled both American conceptual art and minimalism without being directly derivative of either. Art had changed. Castelli’s gallery had changed too, adding a second location, the “Castelli Warehouse” in 91 1968 to accommodate the larger, less conventionally shaped sculptures and installations that characterized his stable in the late sixties.345 Although Castelli may have enjoyed a huge success at the Venice Biennale and assumed more financial and administrative responsibility for Metro in 1964, that year seems to mark the beginning of the end for the mutually beneficial business partnership that he had shared with Bruno Alfieri in the early ‘60s.

92 Conclusion

When conceptual art, minimalism, land art, and arte povera become the dominant tendencies in American and Italian art of the late sixties and early seventies, the figuration/abstraction dichotomy becomes all but irrelevant to contemporary criticism, which in Metro becomes heavily weighted toward institutional critique and social history. Where artists of the post-war period had searched for ways of using both abstraction and figuration to express either “feeling” or “meaning,” minimal artists of the later sixties endeavored to do away with expression altogether, constructing man-made objects as dis-intentioned in their manner of being as natural phenomena. Conceptual art uses figuration (writing, symbolic language, bodily gesture, photography), but does so in a way that is alien to the abstraction/figuration debate—perhaps because this younger group of conceptual artists more readily accept that writing, symbolic language, bodily gesture, and photography, as forms of figuration, are all also forms of abstraction.346

One of the benefits of thinking about the works of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Lichtenstein at this time as examples of “post-abstract figuration,” rather than the more specific stylistic labels “neo-dada” or “pop,” is that the term “figuration” invites an inquiry into the actual functioning of the image unique to the individual work. The term is general enough for the individual artists’ approaches to show and to co-exist, whereas

“pop” and “neo-dada” reduce the encounter with an individual work of art to a set of pre- defined expectations. Lichtenstein and Warhol are more “pop” than Cy Twombly, for example, but what does this distinction really tell us about Twombly? Though Metro is riddled through with stylistic labels, the American and Italian authors who contribute to Metro in the early sixties, manage to preserve the richness of the plurality of methods employed by Leo Castelli’s artists at this time. 93 Looking back at the first few years of Metro, we see a particular moment in art history where American art, specifically that of the Leo Castelli Gallery, enjoys growing fame and popularity on an international scale. When it appeared in the late fifties and early sixties, the so-called “new American figuration” represented a rebuttal to its abstract expressionist precedents at home, and in Europe signaled the end of the more cerebral French informel in painting. Metro magazine stands as one of many promotional tools that gallerist Leo Castelli used to bring about this stylistic change, a change confirmed and formalized in Robert Rauschenberg’s victory at the 1964 Biennale. That

Leo Castelli seems to move on to other projects and partnerships after 1970, when things with Alfieri have slowed and staled, is perhaps just another testament to Castelli’s extraordinary business savvy.

94 Notes

1 Leo Castelli, letter to Bruno Alfieri, 15 December 1962, Leo Castelli Gallery records, 1:15,

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.), (The Archives of

American Art at the Smithsonian Institution hereafter cited in notes as AAA).

2 Bruno Alfieri, “Dear Reader,” Metro 1, (December, 1960): 4-5.

3 Ibid.

4 Leo Steinberg’s famous essay on Jasper Johns, for example, first appeared in the fourth issue of

Metro (Castelli, Steinberg, and Alfieri later developed the essay into a monograph and distributed it at the 1964 Venice Biennale). This topic reappears in Chapters 3 and 6 of the text.

Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” Metro 4/5, (May, 1962): 87-109.

5 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 19 July 1972, Castelli Gallery records, 1:17, AAA.

This is not the last letter in “Alfieri” files in the Castelli archive, but the last letter between Bruno

Alfieri and Leo Castelli. Two letters follow in November, 1972 and in 1973 from publishing companies about a book project that Castelli and Alfieri collaborated on in the early 1970s.

6 In fact, the last issue, Metro 16, still advertises subscriptions to Metro and ad space in the magazine.

7 See note 5 above. Alfieri writes: “Come sai, a New York c’è stato un certo ritardo nell’elaborazione dell’impaginato, ma d’altra parte il libro, pur di poche pagine, era piuttosto impegnativo. Questo ritardo me ha indirettamente danneggiato, per ragioni che esulano completamente dai nostri rapporti Castelli-Alfieri.” (Note: wherever translations are my own, I have included the original Italian text in notes.)

And about Gorgoni he writes: “Domenica scorsa alla Biennale… l’ho incontrato, e mi ha aggredito alla presenza di oltre cinquanta persone. Siccome è una scimmia piuttosto muscolosa (e

95 poco pulita) ha avuto la possibilità di picchiarmi, come hanno poi riportato i giornali locali… e il signor Gorgoni, maoista da strapazzo, si è permesso di molestare mia moglie ed i miei bambini a casa mia durante un mio viaggio con insulti e minacce.”

8 George Wittenborn to Bruno Alfieri, 30 October 1970, Castelli Gallery records, 1:17, AAA.

Bruno Alfieri to George Wittenborn, 29 September 1970, Castelli Gallery records, 1:17, AAA.

Zodiac: Rivista Internazionale d’Archittetura Contemporanea (1957-73). Milano: Edizioni di

Comunità. Distributed by Wittenborn and Co., New York; Quadrum: Revue Internationale d’Art

Moderne. No. 1-20 (1956-1966). Put out by the Association pour la diffusion artistique et culturelle Bruxelles, Distributed by Wittenborn and Co., New York. (In Quadrum, Bruno Alfieri is listed as a “director” of issues 1-6 and “administrator” in Quadrum issues 7-9. That covers the years 1956-60); Pagina: Rivista Internazionale della Grafica Contemporanea. No. 1-7, 1962-

1965, Director Bruno Alfieri. Distributed by Wittenborn and Co., New York; Marmo: Rivista

Internazionale d’arte e d’architettura (1962-65). By Società Henraux S.p.A., Milano: Editoriale

Metro; Pacco: Rivista Internazionale dell’Imballaggio (January 1964), Editoriale Metro S.p.A.

Milano: Bruno Alfieri Editore.

9 Virginia Dwan to Praeger Publishing, Inc., 16 February 1973, Castelli Gallery records, 1:17,

AAA.

There may be a bit of evidence that Bruno Alfieri knew that Dwan was funding this project in part. On July 19, 1972, he writes to Castelli: “…a proposito di Gorgoni. Dovera ricevere da me la soma di lire 1.750.000 (parecchio, considerato quello che ha già incassato da te e dalla Dwan).”

Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 19 July 1972, 1:17, Castelli Gallery records, AAA.

96

10 Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948-64: Italy and the Idea of

Europe (New York: Manchester University Press, 2007). Jachec states that her book, Politics and

Painting, “looks at the rise and fall of gesture painting from a European perspective,” (ibid, 2).

For Fautrier’s Biennale victory see Jachec, 117-118.

She states, “While some scholars have identified 1960 as Informalism’s apex, it began to be supplanted in 1962 by a subtle return to figuration….” (Jachec, 106).

Piero Dorazio alludes to this within Metro: catching up to the artistic evolution that had occurred elsewhere in Europe “nel dopo Guerra era indispensibile, perchè noi siamo stati isolati per quasi

20 anni, durante il fascismo.” Piero Dorazio and Giulio Turcato, “Piero Dorazio and Giulio

Turcato: Conversation on the Art of Today, on the Occasion of the 33rd Venice Biennale,” Metro

11 (June, 1966): 42-59.

11 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 11 September 1963, 1:16, Castelli Gallery records, AAA.

Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 9 March 1964, 1:16, Castelli Gallery records, AAA.

In the letter to Castelli from March 9, 1964, Alfieri names the Societa Foscama di Torino as specifically three men: “Balella, Baruchello, and Gritti.” “Baruchello” is an artist, Gianfranco

Baruchello. It is also quite likely that Bruno Alfieri was using money from the other Northern

Italian industrial businesses: Italsider, Pirelli, and Fiat, to name a few, who contributed advertising to the first eight issues of Metro, but were also hugely featured in the advertising of

Pagina, Alfieri’s magazine whose focus was, in fact advertising, and whose articles would often feature stories on the advertising of these companies. Olivetti was famously interested in becoming involved in culture. The Milanese steel company Italsider also produced its own contemporary arts review called simply Italsider. On September 11, 1963, Alfieri writes to

Castelli that he plans to open a gallery in Genoa “under the auspices of Italsider.” Adding: “Si

97 tratta di una nuova formula che prevede l’estensione di questo tipo di Galleria (che ha scopi culturali) ad altre città italiane sotto gli auspici di altre grandi industrie (Olivetti, Fiat, Perilli).”

12 International Directory of Contemporary Art (Milano: Editoriale Metro, 1964).

13 “Metro Lexikon: Historical Outline of the Art of All Times and All Countries, in Eight Parts,”

Part 2, Metro 8 (April, 1963): 19-27.

14 Dictionary of Art Historians, “Giulio Carlo Argan,” http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/ argang.htm (accessed June 7, 2012).

15 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ed., Arte Povera (London: Phaidon Press, 2005), 193.

16 Quote from: Bruno Alfieri, Metro 1 (December, 1960): 43.

Here, in Metro 1 the series is called “Metro-Youngs.” Leo Castelli corrects Bruno Alfieri error.

Bruno Alfieri thanks him for the clarification: “Grazie per la precisazione ‘Metro Young.’”

Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 22 July 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

17 Somewhere between Metro 3 and Metro 4/5, the numbering for the “Metro Young” becomes confused. In Issue 3, sculptor Berrocal is listed as “Metro Young No. 6,” then next in Issue 4/5, painter Dorazio is listed as “Metro Young No. 9,” with no numbers 7-8 in between. The following young artist in that same issue, Luigi Parzini is also listed as “Metro Young No. 9,” and then Emilio Rodriguez Larrain is listed as “Metro Young No. 11,” with no number 10 between them. Jasper Johns appears under the heading “Metro Young No. 12” and the numbering remains continuous after that. Also, before Lee Bontecou shows up among the “Metro Young,” she had already appeared Metro’s series of shorter essays: “Metrorama” in issue 3.

18 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 7 January 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

19 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 13 January 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA. Castelli:

“I just received [Lorenzelli’s] catalogue for the ‘École de Paris’ show, and I find it really pretty

98 bad. I expect something substantially better, done under your [Alfieri’s] supervision, for

Tworkov.” Alfieri responds: “Lorenzelli è negato per la grafica, e i suoi cataloghi sono pessimi, ma la galleria è buona, centralissima, e il catalogo Tworkov, se vuoi, lo posso curare io. Ti scriverà direttamente Lorenzelli.” Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 17 January 1961, Castelli

Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

20 Georges Noël and Bruno Alfieri, Georges Noël: Gennaio 1961 (Milano: La Galleria, 1961).

Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, February 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

In this letter, Leo Castelli alludes to receiving a “Noël catalog” from the Lorenzelli gallery.

21 Elena Morollo, Galleria Lorenzelli, e-mail to the author, April 24, 2012.

The staff at Lorenzelli Arte were unable to find any records of Bruno Lorenzelli’s relationship with Bruno Alfieri. Elena Morollo of Galleria Lorenzelli also attempted to contact Bruno Alfieri’s son for information, but he too was unable to find any documentation of the relationship between

Bruno Lorenzelli and Bruno Alfieri. This is just a matter of locating the correct archive. Note:

Galleria Lorenzelli became “Lorenzelli Arte” in 1980. (Lorezelliarte.com).

22 Bruno Alfieri’s relationship with Ileana Sonnabend also helped keep him abreast of events in the New York artworld. On December 5, 1961, Bruno Alfieri writes to Castelli that he has just seen Ileana Sonnabend, and that she had mentioned the next exhibition of Tinguely’s in New

York. Alfieri proposes that in one of the coming issues of Metro, they print a sculpture in relief in cardstock, as a gift from Metro to its readers. The Tinguely insert came out in Metro 6 in June,

1962. Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 5 December 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

23 Nicolas Calas, “Jim Dine: Tools and Myth,” Metro 7 (December, 1962): 76-79.

Alain Jouffroy, “Jim Dine: Through the Telescope,” Metro 7 (December, 1962): 73-75.

99

Jim Dine and Ileana Sonnabend first met in 1960, while Dine was still showing at Martha

Jackson. In 1962, Dine joins Sidney Janis’s New York gallery, and in 1963, he begins showing at

Ileana Sonnabend’s Paris gallery. From: Kara Van der Weg. “Chronology,” Jim Dine: Walking

Memory 1959-1969 (New York: Guggenheim, 1999), 232-237.

24 Sonnabend shows Michelangelo Pistoletto in 1964 and again in 1967, and in Metro’s twelfth issue from 1967 Michael Sonnabend contributes an essay on Pistoletto entitled “A Strange

Shock.” “L’attività della Galleria Sonnabend 1962-1988,” La Collezione Sonnabend: Dalla Pop

Art in Poi (Milano: Electa, 1989), 222.

25 Michael Sonnabend, “A Strange Shock,” Metro 12 (February, 1967): 91-93.

26 Pierre Restany, “A Pivotal Figure in American Art: Claes Oldenburg,” Metro 9 (April, 1965):

20-26.

27 Bruno Alfieri, “The Realism of Vasarely,” Metro 13 (February, 1968): 147-151.

Bruno Alfieri, “The Arts Condition: ‘Pop’ means ‘Not Popular’,” Metro 9 (April, 1965): 4-8.

Bruno Alfieri, “The Unreality of Rotella,” Metro 6 (June, 1962): 98.

Pierre Restany, “The ‘Nouveau Réalisme of Rotella,” Metro 6 (June, 1962): 98-101.

28 Bruno Alfieri, “Dear Reader,” Metro 1, (December, 1960): 4-5.

29 All artworks are different from each other, even identical ones—see Robert Rauschenberg’s

Factum I and Factum II (1957).

30 Though we may admit that one style may lead to the next, we could not read that relationship back into the constituent individual works of the style and state, for example, that since A is a work of abstract expressionism, and B is a work of neo-dada, and since ab-ex leads to neo-dada, that A leads to B. That simply makes no sense. The artist who painted B may be aware of abstract experssionism, but entirely unaware of artwork A. Also, A and B could hang on the same wall,

100 and there would be no “leading” or cause-and-effect going on between them, they would simply be simultaneous presences.

31 Gillo Dorfles, “Obscure Aspects of the New Figuration in Italy,” Metro 8 (April, 1963): 4-6.

32 Also see note 10 above.

33 This is a pattern that had been going on since the First World War. The 1924 Biennale showed the work of group Sei Pittori del ‘900, a group of painters that shared its members with the

Novecento Italiano group. In 1918, de Chirico and Alberto Savinio, and Carlo Carrà formed the

Valori Plastici group, and the year before they had been Pittura Metafisica group. Among the groups post-WWII were: Frone Nuovo dell’Arte, Gruppo degli Otto, Forma I, Movimento

Spaziale. Fontana signed the White Manifesto, Michel Tàpie wrote the manifesto for Un Art

Autre; there was the manifesto of Neo-Concretism, and others (Nancy Jachec, 10, 24, 28).

Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale, 1895-1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl (London:

Faber and Faber, 1968), 96.

Piero Dorazio identifies this same pattern: “There was a time when artistic and critical theories were worked out from paintings and works of sculpture; today the reverse occurs. Art movements, schools, and manifestoes spring up every day and immediately become more known for the titles with which they bedeck themselves than fro the quality and originality of their works.” Piero Dorazio, “Neo-Neo-Nuovo-New-Nouveau-No,” Metro 3 (November 1961): 108.

34 To work this way in Italy mid-twentieth century is to reject or ignore the aesthetics of

Benedetto Croce that dominated the intellectual art world. Benedetto Croce was the most exalted

Italian philosophical mind in the beginning of the twentieth century, and remained extremely popular throughout the Second World War and until his death in 1952. Luigi Barzini, in The

Italians (1964), a non-fictional account of popular Italian culture for lay audiences, even praises

101

Croce as the “[Italy’s] greatest philosopher.” Part of Croce’s charm owes to the fact that he remained an outspoken Anti-Fascist under Mussolini’s reign, so that he was well respected even when his aesthetic theories became stale, and other writers hesitated to contradict him. For Croce, art is not history, nor philosophy, nor anything other than the expression of the intuitions felt by the spirit. For Croce, art is an act of meaningful expression, and is therefore linguistic in nature.

For more on Benedetto Croce, see: Benedetto Croce, “Aesthetics,” Philosophies of Art and

Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, ed. Abert Hofstadter and

Richard Kuhns (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 556-577.

Benedetto Croce, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, trans. Colin Lyas (New York: Cambridge Uniersity Press, 1992).

35 “Perilli’s Cartoon Paintings,” Metro 3 (November, 1961): 94-95.

Bruno Alfieri, “Perilli: In Search of Effective Communication,” Metro 6 (June, 1962): 39-43.

36 Figuration is a kind of abstraction. Figuration involves representing one thing in terms of another. We do this when we “figure” things out—mentally representing those things to ourselves in a way we can understand them. We keep track of facts and “figures”—“figures” here referring to numerical data, a system of abstract symbols for representing quantities of things in the world.

We do this also when we represent the human figure in paint or clay, for example. All of these examples involve abstraction—abstracting from the original thing those qualities that can be represented in the adopted medium. Abstraction is a kind of figuration. Abstraction involves reducing the richness of a parent concept or phenomenon into simpler terms. The original concept or phenomenon is re-figured in the process. “Pure” abstraction in art is no less an instance of figuration, since at the very least the artist refigures himself and his tools indexically with his mark making. For more on figuration see: Richard Shiff, “Afterword: Figuration,” in Critical

102

Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2003), 479-485.

37 I mean to emphasize that Metro contrasts pop and neo-dada approaches to figuration with

European informel precedents in addition to American abstract expressionist precedents.

38 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 21 February 1960, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

39 Ibid.

40 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 12 March 1960, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

41 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 28 January 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

42 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 1 July 1960, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid. “Indipendentemente da ciò, appoggerà la rivista anche sfruttando i tremila indirizzi in Suo possesso.”

46 “Caffé Rosati,” Metro 1 (December, 1960): 102-109.

“Piqueras at the Deux Magots and at Dôme,” photog. Hans Haacke and Luc Joubert, Metro 2

(May, 1961): 74-79.

47 Ibid

48 Ibid.

49 Maurizio Calvesi, “Cronache e coordinate di un’avventura: Preistoria della ‘Scuola Piazza del

Popolo’,” Roma anni ‘60: al di là della pittura (Roma: Edizioni Carte Segrete, 1990), 11.

50 Luca Massimo Barbero, “Voci da Roma: Protagonisti e luoghi dell’avanguardia artistica negli anni sessanta,” Gli irripetibili anni ’60 a Roma (Roma: Skira, 2011), 25-29. This is the

103 exhibition catalog for Gli irripetibili anni ’60 at the Fondazione Roma Museo on the Via del

Corso in Rome.

51 Barbero, “Voci da Roma,” 25. “Come se fossimo seduti al caffè Rosati di piazza del Popolo e potessimo idealmente ascoltare le voci dei protagonisti del dibattito artistico e critico, che restituiscono in presa diretta una delle contestualità più effervescenti dell’epoca.”

52 Giovanni Russo, “Quegli irripetibili anni sessanta a Roma,” Gli irripetibili anni ’60 (Roma:

Skira, 2011), 97-101.

53 The Caffé Rosati story is reproduced with images in: Germano Celant, Roma-New York, 1948-

1964: An Art Exploration (Milano: Charta, 1993), 186.

54 Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo Castelli and his Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, trans. Mark Polizzotti

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 245-256. Cohen-Solal describes Leo Castelli’s relationship with Jasper Johns as special (Cohen-Solal, 251). Cohen-Solal refers to Johns and RR as Castelli’s

“Old Masters” (Cohen-Solal, 335).

55 Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Oral history interview with Giuseppe Panza, 1985 Apr. 2-4,

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.).

In Metro, in “Who’s Who,” Larry Rubin is described thus: “Lawrence Rubin, brother of New

York critic Bill Rubin, is a young American who, after spending some time in Rome, decided to open a gallery of his own in Paris’s noted VI arrondissement (Galerie Lawrence). There he has been most successful in launching the ‘post-Pollock’ generation of American painters (including

Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland).” Virginia Dortch and Faith Pleasanton, “Who’s

Who at the Venice Biennale,” Metro 6 (June, 1962): 11-19.

56 Celant. Roma-New York, 1948-64, 18. Galleria dell’ Obelisco was run by dealer Gasparo del

Corso.

104

57 Celant. Roma-New York, 1948-1964, 32. Twombly did not join the Leo Castelli Gallery until

1960.

58 Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” Metro 4/5 (May, 1962): 87-109.

Jachec, 94.

59 Georgine Oeri, “Edward Higgins,” Metro 1 (December, 1960): 74-91. The collections as listed in the image captions are: Michel Warren, The Chase Manhattan Bank, Mr. and Mrs. Robert C.

Scull, André Schoeller, MoMA.

60 Jachec, Politics and Painting, 92.

Richard Armstrong, “Group Shows,” Jack Tworkov: Paintings 1928-82 (Philadelphia:

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1987), 155. Tworkov was the only Castelli artist to appear in The New American Painting exhibition in 1958-59.

61 Cohen-Solal, Leo and his Circle, 245. “After the gestural irruption of the Abstract

Expressionists, who finally signed the death certificate of European dominance after so many decades; after Pollock’s radical and revelatory break from easel painting…what di this return to representation—this polished, refined, but puzzingly ironic work, which brought back impeccable technique—mean?”

62 Jachec, 1-24. Jachec points to how internationalism in the Venice Biennale evaporated in the final phase of Mussolini’s reign (1936-43), “when nationalist themes and conservative forms of representation became more pervasive in Italian visual arts,” calling the Biennale under Mussolini

“a showcase for Axis and Axis-occupied countries” (Jachec, 5). Jachec on cultural “catching up”:

“Thus the post-liberation years were marked by a rapid succession of artists’ groups searching for a new, socially engaged form of artistic expression, and seeking to dispel the feeling of cultural inferiority that had resulted from years of relative isolation under fascism. The resumption of

105 contact with Paris, which was awash in practices exploring themes of Resistance and cultural renewal, was therefore immediate” (Jachec, 24). Jachec does not use the Italian word

“aggiornamento,” but Italian writers on this topic do. Piero Dorazio, for example, states: “Un altro difetto è questo: quello di voler continuare con il processo di aggiornamento, che nel doppo guerra era indispensabile...” Dorazio, “Piero Dorazio and Giulio Turcato,” Metro 11, 48.

Also see note 10 above.

63 Jachec, 23.

“For example, in 1938, Guttoso had been given a reproduction of Guernica from the Paris

World’s Fair, and as Sarah Whitfield has recounted, its influence on his work was immediate. He was so taken with it that he carried the postcard in his wallet until 1943, and referred to it as his

PCI (Parita Communista Italiana) membership card.”

64 Jachec, 31, 75.

65 Jachec, 78. This matches Michel Tapié’s existentialist description of l’informel: “a manifestation of ‘total being’, of the ‘human condition,’ it was the subjective embodiment of expression, rather than the representation, of the experience of contemporary reality.”

66 Jachec, 110. “Argan was, at that time, interested in Sartre, and [Maurizio] Calvesi has highlighted the Italian’s use of “Existential Sartre-like poetics’ as a means of not ‘giving way to the American ‘disengagement’ or to the insufficiently clear poetics of ‘action.’

67 Alloway, 144. Alloway hints at Kline’s having slapped or punched Fautrier after the prize was announced. Jachec also comments on Fautrier and European diplomacy: “The Biennale’s presentation of French Informel as part of a European effort toward post-war cultural reconstruction—partly evident in the retrospective commissioned by the Ente in 1960 of the

106

French painter Jean Fautrier’s work—is revelatory of the Biennale’s strongly diplomatic orientation” (Jachec 9).

68 Longhi had been involved in the Biennale since the 1920s (Alloway, 102).

In 1957, Metro contributors Giuseppe Marchiori, Marco Valsecchi, Lionello Venturi, and Carlo

L. Ragghianti were delegates to the Biennale Consuelenza that called for a new commission to draw up new statutes for the 1960 Biennale. They set up a board of committee consultants, an advisory board to oversee international exhibitions. Among these consultants are Metro contributors Giulio Carlo Argan, Roberto Longhi, Radolfo Pallucchini, and Lionello Venturi.

These all favored gestural abstraction, while Longhi and Ragghianti favored social realism

(Jachec, 81-88). Lionello Venturi refused to swear allegiance to the Fascists and fled to the

United States, teaching at various American Universities from 1932-39 (Berkeley, Baltimore, and

New York) Celant, Roma-New York 1948-64, 17.

69 Longhi, “Due Domande,” Metro 1 (December, 1960): 8. Meanwhile, Longhi complains there were 30 abstract artists in the Italian pavilion when there should only have been ten.

70 Jachec, 106.

71 Alloway, 146.

72 “The Exhibition in 1948,” La Biennale di Venezia, http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/ history/1948.html?back=true&back=true (accessed June 25, 2012).

73 Ibid.

74 See note 66 above.

75 La Biennale di Venezia Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, “ASAC Dati,” Annali. http://asac.labiennale.org/it/passpres/artivisive/annali.php. Alfieri Editori is the publisher again in

1976. Later contributors to Metro Achile Bonita Olivo and Maurizio Calvesi also took their turns

107 as directors of the visual arts sectors in 1993, and 84-86. Germano Celant was the director of exhibitions in 1997.

76 This is specifically in reference to the contemporary artists in this issue. In addition to the material on these three artists, there is an article on the design merits of two Italian armchairs, one article on Poussin, and another on 16th century Venetian painter Cesare Baglione.

77 Valsecchi, Marco. “Visit with Ben Nicholson” Metro 1 (December, 1960): 18-41.

Valsecchi’s text first lingers over the artist himself, describing Nicholson’s face, his “clear eyes,”

“irony on his thin lips,” and high voice. “He likes Mozart and Bach, and he doesn’t read but likes

Proust.”

78 Bruno Alfieri, Metro 1 (December, 1960): 43.

79 Jachec, 100.

80 In interview with Marco Valsecchi Ben Nicholson says that “a good Tobey” maintains a balance between discipline and freedom. Valsecchi, “Visit with Ben Nicholson,” 29.

Anonymous, “Novelli’s Cryptograms,” Metro 3 (November, 1961): 98-99. Remarks that Tobey is very highly thought of in Rome.

Germano Celant’s Roma-New York mentions a “Rome-NewYork Art Foundation that, founded and directed by Fancis McCann, organized on Isola Tiberina exhibits by Kline, Fontana, De

Kooning, Colla, Pollock and Tobey…” (Celant, Roma-New York, 28).

81 Bruno Alfieri, “The Painter Jorge Piqueras,” Metro 2 (May, 1961): 63-64.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid.

84 Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” Metro 4/5 (May, 1962): 88. “Art News, flying Johns’s Target with

Faces on its January 1958 cover, labeled it ‘neo-Dada’—and the word untied every tongue.

108

People who might have wondered what to say about Johns could thenceforth recite whatever they remembered having read about Dada.”

There is also the simple fact that Edward Higgins’s work doesn’t require costly color photo reproductions, and his black and white sculptures show just as well in a spectrum of grey-tones as they would in quattrocromie.

85 Georgine Oeri, “Edward Higgins” Metro 1 (December, 1960): 74-91.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid.

88 Charles Estienne, “What do you think of Lolita, Monsieur Noël?,” Metro 1 (December, 1960):

66-72.

89 Jean Cathelin, “The Method of Georges Noël,” Metro 1 (December, 1960): 44-49.

90 Ibid.

91 Marco Valsecchi, “Visit with Ben Nicholson,” Metro 1 (December, 1960): 18-41.

92 Oeri, “Edward Higgins,” 74.

93 Jacques Kermoal, “Psychoanalysis of Fontana,” Metro 7 (December, 1962): 24-27.

Jacques Kermoal, “Psychoanalysis of Enrico Baj,” Metro 8 (April, 1963): 46-51.

94 Celant, Roma-New York, 58. Celant remembers that Alfieri helped organize the show. He says:

“In July, at Venice’s Museo Correr, Peggy Guggenheim organized Jackson Pollock’s first

European exhibition. Her collaborator was Bruno Alfieri, a Venetian publisher, who, during the sixties, would animate a more tendentious kind of criticism for Italian art.”

95 “Chaos, Damn it!” Time Vol. 56 Issue 21 (November 20, 1950): 72. Academic Search

Complete. http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/ (accessed June 15, 2012).

96 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 27 September 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

109

Ibid., 9 November 1961.

97 Ibid., October 1960.

98 Ibid., 7 January 1961.

In this letter, Alfieri begins addressing Castelli with the casual “tu” pronoun and verb forms.

99 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 13 January 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

100 Ibid., 28 January 1961.

101 Ibid., 18 February, 1961.

Ibid., 22 February, 1961.

102 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 14 April 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

O’Hara, Frank. “The Beat Scene” excerpt, Metro 2 (May, 1961): 33.

103 Celant, Roma-New York. 32.

104 Marchiori, Giuseppe. “La Personage Dubuffet,” Metro 2 (May, 1961): 23-31. In this phase of

Metro, with the exception of Dubuffet, who makes humanoid sculptures and drawings with human figures, an inverse relationship appears to exist between the number of representations of

“the figure” that occur in an artists work, and the number representations of the artist’s own figure that occur in magazine articles about him.

105 Faith Pleasanton to Leo Castelli, 11 April, 1962, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

However, this portrait photo appears again in the book version of Steinberg’s piece on Johns. The only difference is that the background is left intact, rather than snipped out.

106 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 25 February 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

Says: “L’articolo di John Cage è ottimo,” and asks for a CV for Cage, explaining that “il pezzo di

Cage è l’unico pubblicato con grande rilievo, come pezzo “letterario”” so it would be nice to have

110 some information for the readers. Alfieri writes also that the impagination for the articles by

Ashton and Cage has gone very well.

107 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 14 April 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

108 Metro’s seventh issue, from December 1962, includes an educational section called “Metro

Lexikon: Historical Outline of the Art of All Times and All Countries, In Eight Parts.” In this first edition of Lexikon, Metro directs its readers to consult several new books for additional information on the history of art and aesthetic theory. Among the suggested titles, are Gillo

Dorfles’s Simbolo, Communicazione, Consumo; and Umberto Eco’s L’Opera Aperta, both from

1962. Again, in Metro’s seventh issue, Rafaello Mazzoletti discusses Dorfles and Eco in a book review appearing in the series “Metrorama”. The article is called “Recent Books of Note: Modern

Aesthetics and Contemporary Art,” and it describes Dorfles’s Simbolo, Communicazione,

Consumo and Umberto Eco’s L’Opera Aperta exclusively. Only the first two parts of this eight- part historical outline would ever materialize, and Metro discontinued the “Lexikon” series along with the “Metro Young” and “Metrorama” series in its second phase, beginning with Issue 9 in

1965.

“Metro Lexikon: Historical Outline of the Art of All Times and All Countries, In Eight Parts,”

Part 1, Metro 7 (December, 1962): 36-47; Raffaello Mazzoletti, “Recent Books of Note: Modern

Aesthetics and Contemporary Art,” Metro 7 (December, 1962): 130-131.

109 Dorfles also appears in the article “Who’s Who at the Biennale” in issue 6 with the caption:

“In the landscape of critics, art historians, an philosophers interested in at is the only ‘free zone’ in Italy ready to examine the complex phenomenology of today’s art without preconceptions. His book “Simbolo, Communicazione, Consumo” just published in Turin, is destined to become a classic” (Virginia Dortch and Faith Pleasanton, “Who’s Who,” 17).

111

110 Clement Greenberg, “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo

Dorfles (New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1969): 116-127.

The publisher Gabriele Mazzotta put out the Italian version in the previous year.

111 Gillo Dorfles, 99+1 Riposte: Una Conversazione con Lorenzo Michelli (Trieste: Comunicarte

Edizione, 2010), 17. Gillo Dorfles: “Leo Castelli era della mia stessa età e lo conoscevo; non ricordo però di averlo visto ad esempio a Villa Veneziani. Lo conoscevo benissimo come tanti altri giovani dell’epoca, però non era frequentatore della Villa… L’ho poi incontrato nuovamente a New York, nei miei diversi viaggi…”

Cohen-Solal’s biography on Castelli shows a photograph of Castelli and Dorfles together in

Trieste in 1928 (image). (Cohen-Solal, Leo and his Circle, 105).

112 Gillo Dorfles, Símbolo, Comunicación y Consumo, trans. Maria Rosa Viale, 4th Edition

(Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1984). Note: I used the Spanish translation of Dorfles’s Simbolo,

Communicazione, Consumo; I was unable to acquire an Italian or English version. In this essay I will refer to it by its Italian name.

113 Dorfles, Símbolo, Comunicación y Consumo, 46-47.

114 Gillo Dorfles, “Rauschenberg, Or Obsolescence Defeated,” Metro 2 (May, 1961): 32-35.

Gillo Dorfles, “Communication and Symbol in the Work of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and

Art Criticism Vol. 15, No. 3 (March, 1957): 289-97.

This quote comes from both sources: the first half is from Dorfles on RR in Metro; the second half is from Dorfles “Communication and Symbol in the Work of Art.”

115 Gillo Dorfles, “Rauschenberg, Or Obsolescence Defeated,” 34-35; Gillo Dorfles,

“Communication and Symbol,” 290. Dorfles gives the first half of this example in

“Rauschenberg,” the second half in “Communication and Symbol.”

112

116 Dorfles, “Rauschenberg,” 35.

But does “a man skating” have any conventional semantic meaning?

117 Dorfles, “Rauschenberg,” 34.

118 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1989).

119 Ibid., 44-49.

120 Ibid., 45, 53. Also, whereas Dorfles makes the distinction between semantic information and aesthetic information, Eco makes the distinction between information and meaning. To illustrate:

“information, being essentially additive, depends for its value on both originality and improbability. How can this be reconciled with the fact that, on the contrary, the more meaningful a message, the more probable and the more predictable its structure? A sentence such as “Flowers bloom in the spring” has a clear, direct meaning and a maximal power of communication, but it doesn’t add anything to what we already know. In other words, it does not carry much information. Isn’t this proof enough that meaning and information are not one and the same thing?”

121 Eco, The Open Work, 1-24. The second chapter is called “Analysis of Poetic Language.”

122 John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and his Work,” Metro 2 (May, 1961): 37-50.

123 Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” 41, 37.

124 Ibid., 44.

125 Cage had previously stated: “Dante is an incentive, providing multiplicity, as useful as a chicken or an old shirt.”

126 Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” 50.

113

127 Eco, The Open Work, 46. Strangely, it seems that dis-intentional phenomena contain a LOT of information, since, as dis-intentional percepts they don’t contain predictable messages, or messages at all. Eco’s requirement that the artist of “an open work” endow that work with a modicum of suggestivity. That prevents natural phenomena from being “open works.”

Eco Actually summarizes the information equation this way: “…we can say that the quantity of information conveyed by a given message is equal to the binary logarithm of the number of possibilities necessary to define the message without ambiguity.”

128 Eco, The Open Work, 32.

129 Dorfles, “Robert Rauschenberg,” 34.

130 Dore Ashton, “Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno,” Metro 2 (May,

1961): 53-61.

131 Ashton decribes the “montage” technique: It “has a realistic significance when the separate pieces produce, in the juxtaposition, the generality, the synthesis of one’s theme” (Ashton,

“Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Illustrations,” 54).

132 Ashton, “Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Illustrations,” 53.

133 Ibid., 55.

134 Ibid., 56.

135 This description of the work comes from an opening note to Ashton’s text. It may have been added by Alfieri or editorial staff of Metro.

136 Ashton, “Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Illustrations,” 55.

137 Ashton, “Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Illustrations,” 53.

138 Umberto Eco, “L’Informel come opera aperta,” Il Verri 3 (1961): 98-127.

114

139 Eco, “The Open Work in the Visual Arts,” The Open Work (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1989), 84-104.

140 Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Oral history interview with Giuseppe Panza, 1985 Apr. 2-4,

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.).

Alfieri records having spoken with Panza, on an occasion when Panza declared himself Fautrier’s

Italian agent. “Guarda che pare che Pana si interessi per divenire una specie di agente di

Fautrier per L’Italia. Così si dice a Parigi.” Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 7 January 1961,

Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

141 This anecdote comes from Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Oral history interview, AAA.

142 From the anonymous afterword to Cage’s, “On Rauschenberg,” Metro 2 (May, 1961): 50.

143 Mariana Elisabeth Turra, conversation with author, Castiglion Fiorentino, Summer, 2010.

144 Cohen-Solal, Leo and his Circle, 259. Here, Cohen-Solal mentions that Castelli read Dante at bedtime, and she later quotes Castelli’s daugher Nina: “Michael and Leo would recite Dante…”

(Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle, 152). She also quotes Harald Szeemann on Castelli’s relationship with the Sonnabends: “Michael [Sonnabend] and Leo laughed uproariously, talking of Dante and Michelangelo and much else…” (ibid., 307).

Pinto, Sandra. “In the Shadow of the Gasoline Pump: Moments of Popular Ideology in

Contemporary Art,” Metro 13 (February, 1968), 39-47. “Per la prima volta, o forse con l’unico precedente del’ futurismo, i giovani fanno della cultura un uso vivacemente anti-convenzionale con un ostentata mancanza di rispetto finalmente verso quell tipo di cultura-ornamento, di cultura-magazzino tipicamente italiana del ‘sapere tutta la Divina Commedia a memoria.’”

145 Cohen-Solal, Leo and his Circle, 308-309. “When the Sonnabends opened their gallery in

Paris…. Could there have been a less propitious moment to show contemporary art from across

115 the Atlantic? Still, the two journeymen gallerists persisted. Let us listen to Michael Sonnabend: “

‘Whatever you do, my friend, no flags!’ René Drouin had cautiously warned us—probably thinking of the ‘Yankee, go home!’ that was sure to greet us in Paris. I said, ‘That’s not how it’s going to be. I’m going to show six flags—not one or two, but six!’”

146 “L’attività della Galleria Sonnabend 1962-1988,” 222.

147 Celant, Roma-New York, 186-7. Germano Celant recalls Metro’s coverage of Rauschenberg’s

“Thirty-four Cantos” here.

148 Umberto Eco, Dire Quasi La Stessa Cosa (Milano: Edizione Tascabili Bompiani, 2010), 11.

149 Celant, Roma-New York, 189. Cesare Vivaldi disagrees with me in a Galleria La Tartaruga

February, 1961 newsletter: “Twombly belonged (if we may express ourselves so clumsily) to the

Neo-Dada group; however, these paintings had none of the literary suggestions that were evident in other contemporary artists like, say, Rauschenberg. If we must refer to another artist, we should look toward Arshile Gorky, the most poetic of the great American artists…” Reproduced in Germano Celant’s Roma New York, 189.

150 Germano Celant repeats this anecdote about Rauschenberg’s trip to Rome in a section of his book Roma-New York, 1948-1964 called “Burri vs. Rauschenberg.” On this trip, Celant recounts,

Twombly and Rauschenberg visited Burri’s Rome studio. Maurizio Calvesi, Cesare Brandi and

Cesare Vivaldi write on Burri’s influence on Rauschenberg, “or at least a tie between them.”

Celant, Roma-New York, 19. For more on Twombly’s associations with European schools and precedents, see Chapter Four of this thesis.

151 John Cage, “On Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work.” Silence: Lectures and Writings

(Middletown: Weslayan University Press, 1973), 98.

152 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 22 February 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

116

153 Ibid.

154 Alfeiri, Metro 2, 50.

155 L’esperienza Moderna: Revista di Cultura, 1957-59 (Roma: Marlborough Galleria dell’Arte,

1976).

156 Kurt Schwitters, “MERZ,” L’Esperienza Moderna Issue 2 (August, 1957): 1.

157 Wols, “Tout ce que je rêve,” L’Esperienza Moderna Issue 2 (August, 1957): 23.

Tristan Tzara, “Omaggio a Arp,” L’Esperienza Moderna, Issue 3-4 (December, 1957): 3.

Hans Arp, “Les saisons leurs asterisques et leurs pions,” L’Esperienza Moderna, Issue 3-4,

(December 1957): 4.

158In April, 1961, Castelli goes on, showing his involvement in the project:

I retranslated the little introduction to Dore’s article because I found the translation you

had sent me not quite accurate. It is enclosed with the proofs….

Another thing I’d like you to do, if possible, is to mention the sizes of the paintings. The

sizes all appear on the photographs in your possession.

I also enclose the translation of the “nota finale”. Tomorrow I shall send you the

corrected proofs of the Chamberlain article and write you about other things.

Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 12 April 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

159 Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro, trans. Barbara Wright, intro by Gilbert Adair,

(New York: Penguin Books, 2000). Giulio Carlo Argan also makes a connection between

Raymond Queneau’s novels and contemporary art in the early 60s. In his essay for the show

Continuità, that Argan curated for Rome’s Galleria Odyssia, he argues that the artists exhibited

(Dorazio, Novelli, Fontana, Perilli, among others) have a history that “runs from Klee’s imagery

117 to Miró’s pictograms and Gorky’s anguished sobbing, with obvious references to the both bizarre and rigorous philology of a Queneau or Dubuffet.” Celant, Roma-New York, 191-192.

160 Alfieri, Bruno. “Tu Causes, Tu Causes! (part 2) The Crisis of Italian Architecture: a Crisis of

Growth or Infectious Disease?,” Metro 3 (November, 1961): 73-79, 122.

Alfieri, Bruno. “Tu Causes, Tu Causes! (part 1) The Good Architecture Continues,” Metro 3

(November, 1963): 63.

161 Alfieri, Bruno “Tu Causes, Tu Causes (part II),” 73-79.

162 Eugène Ionesco“Ce qui est mauvais au vernissage,” Metro 2 (May, 1961): 12-13.

163 Alain Jouffroy, “From the Speed of Steinberg to the Slowness of Baj,” Metro 3 (November,

1961): 56-61; Alain Jouffroy, “Jim Dine, Au Telescope,” Metro 7 (December, 1962): 73-5; Alain

Jouffroy, “Why Collage? Why the Object?,” Metro 8 (April, 1963): 88-91; Alain Jouffroy,

“Jacques Gabriel, or the Will to Surpass the Norm,” Metro 8 (April, 1963): 92-3; Alain Jouffroy,

“Spiritual Revolution of Jean-Jacques Lebel,” Metro 8 (April, 1963): 95-8.

In December, 1961, Bruno Alfieri writes to Castelli to complain that Alain Jouffroy is asking for more than 30,000 Lire (about $90-95) for a three-page article and warns: “Jouffroy è veramente un tipo esoso…. Stai attento a non farti ‘incastrare’ da lui!)”.

Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 4 December 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

164 “Jorge Eielson: One Poem and Seven Paintings,” Metro 4/5 (May, 1962): 145-7.

165 Jean Dubuffet. “Fleur de la Barbe,” Metro 2 (May, 1961): 22.

Frank O’Hara, “The Beat Scene,” 33.

166 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 22 July 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

“Frank O’Hara mi ha scritto una lettera molto simpatico, accettando di scrivere poemi originali per “Metro” sull’arte Americana. Quello sul “Cedar Bar” non si sente di scriverlo, ma ne ha

118 quattro di pronti su singoli artisti, ed altri scriverà. Così potremo conversare alla rivista quell bricolo di letterario che le confà”

167 Frank O’Hara, “Ode to Willem de Kooning,” From Odes published by Tiber Press, 1961;

Metro 3 (November, 1961): 19-21.

168 Leo Castelli, letter to Bruno Alfieri, February 22, 1961, AAA.

For Cage, see note 151 above. The text in Silence reads, “This article, completed in February of

1961, was published in Metro (Milan) in May.”

169 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 22 February 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

170 Bruno Alfieri, letter to Leo Castelli, 19 May 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

171 Ibid., 3 July 1963, 1:16, AAA.

172 “The Terror machines of Lee Bontecou,” Metro 3 (November, 1961): 80-82.

“Optical symbols on the increase: Scarpitta,” Metro 3 (November, 1961): 88-89.

(Dorfles says “aesthetic signs”; Alfieri says “Optical Symbols.”)

173 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 27 Septermber 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

174 Ibid. “always with the painting by Johns.”

175 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 30 September 1961, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

“Ti prego una cortesia. Il quadro di Jasper pubblicato sulla copertina di “Zodiac 8” mi sta procurando un sacco di guai, perchè ha quarantotto stele e non cinquanta. Occorrerebbe spiegargli che si tratta di un quadro e non di una bandiera, anche se il quadro rappresenta una bandiera.

Questo Galassi … aveva chiesto di … modificare la copertina!”

176 Ibid.

177 La Salita was directed by Gian Tommaso Liverani, cited as the first gallery for young artists in

Rome. Galleria L’Obelisco follows (Celant, Roma-New York, 30).

119

178 De Kooning apparently stayed in Rome for a period starting December 1959, when he lived and worked in Afro’s studio (Celant, Roma-New York, 18, 25).

179 Celant, Rome-New York, 30.

180 Cohen-Solal, Leo and his Circle, 308-309.

Also see note 145.

181 In 2011, The Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice showed an exhibition entitled “Ileana

Sonnabend: an Italian portrait.” Illustrating “the central position of the nation in Sonnabend’s career, affection, and aesthetic”—from: “Ileana Sonnabend: An Italian Portrait.”

The Solomon R. Guggenheim foundation, “Ileana Sonnabend: An Italian Potrait,” Guggenheim website. http://www.guggenheim.org/venice/exhibitions/3881 (accessed: June 15, 2012).

182Bruno Alfieri, “A Critic’s Journal II: After the Inferiority Complex of New York to Paris

(1900-1963), here is Paris’s Complex with New York despite De Gaulle (Meanwhile, London

Grows),” trans. Lucia Krasnik, Metro 10 (October, 1965): 4-13.

183 Ibid.

184 Bruno Alferi to Leo Castelli, 9 November, 1961, Castelli Gallery records, AAA.

185 Ibid. 4 December 1961.“Guarda che ho intensioni molto serie per quanto riguarda il numero 4 di “Metro” e dovremo fare qualcosa di molto grosso. Se tu avevi intenzione di pubblicare un libro su J.J. con il testo che darai a “Metro,” potremmo studiare il modo di fare degli estratti con la copertina diversa, se sarai d’accordo. Ne varrà la pena se tu pensi che la tua galleria possa assorbirne almeno mille copie, e in tal caso ion e stamperei duemila, da metter in vendita in USA,

Francia, Italia, G. Bretagna, Giappone eccetera.”

186 Leo Steinberg, “Back Talk from Leo Steinberg,” Jasper Johns 35 Years Leo Castelli, ed.

Susan Brundage (New York: Abrams, 1993).

120

187 Ibid.

188 In July 1961, for example, Bruno Alfieri writes to Leo Castelli that he is planning to pay Dore

Ashton the equivalent in Lire of about $150.00 for her Rauschenberg piece.

On 4 December, 1961, Bruno Alfieri writes to Castelli to complain that Alain Jouffroy is asking for more than 30,000 Lire (about $90-95) for a three-page article.

Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 4 December 1961, Castelli gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

189 Cohen-Solal, Leo and his Circle, 275. The statement Cohen-Solal cites for this argument is from: Leo Castelli interview by Paul Cummings, AAA. Leo: “There was that Steinberg episode where I financed an important study by Leo Steinberg on Jasper Johns!”

Cohen-Solal continues, “In fact, Castelli had arranged to have a magazine commission the piece

(ibid.).

190 Steinberg, “Back Talk from Leo Steinberg.”

191 Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1972), vii-viii.

192 Gillo Dorfles, “Jasper Johns and the Hand-made, Ready-made Object,” Metro 4/5 (May,

1962): 80-81.

193 Dorfles writes later books on these topics: L’estetica del Mito (Milano: U. Mursia, 1967), and

Il Feticcio Quotidiano (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1988).

194 This idea of Dorfles’s echoes Robert Rosenblum in “Jasper Johns” from 1960, who writes:

“Most often he works with a finely nuanced encaustic, whose richly textured surface not only alleviates the puritanical leanness of his pictures, but also emphasizes the somewhat poignant fact that they are loved, mandmade transcriptions of unloved, machine-made images.” Robert

Rosenblum, “Jasper Johns (1960),” On Modern American Art: Selected Essays by Robert

121

Rosenblum (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999.) 150. The essay was originally published in

Art International 4, no. 7 (September 1960):74-77.

195 Dorfles, “Jasper Johns,” 80-81.

196 Celant, Roma-New York, 79-80.

197 Gillo Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti (Torino: Einaudi, 1965).

Dorfles uses the word “disintenzionata” referring, I believe, to the philosophical idea of

“intentionality”—the quality of “aboutness,” where culture and language is linked to the world, and the world is linked to language and culture. An object that is “dis-intentioned” would exist as a phenomenon, a dumb object. It has no inherent meaning. I use this word again in this thesis in the same way.

198 The souvenir represents the journey synechdochically, as it is a part, or a piece that stands for the whole; metonymically, as it is an object outside of the journey itself, that comes to represent the journey by being strongly associated with it. I am extrapolating from Dorfles, who does not use this example or these terms in his analysis.

199 This is a conclusion I am drawing about Metro, using Dorfles’s analysis of the fetishization of talent (Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, Nuovi Miti. 31). Here, Dorfles claims that the fetishization of the tecnica, resides in the “cult of the exceptional.” “These evaluations, that evidently have nothing to do with the aesthetic element, find an absolute equivalence in analogous axiological evaluations reguarding atheletes, craftsmen, workers, sports…” (ibid.).

200 Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 17. “…userò il termine “mitopoetico” per designare quei fattori mitizzanti positivi, in quanto capaci di restituire alcuni valori simbolici a istituti che li avevano perduti, sia pur valendosi—e ne vedo il rischio—d’un quoziente di irrazionalità, quale del resto è insito nello stesso carattere del mito.”

122

201 Dorfles, “Jasper Johns,” 80-81.

202 Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 16. “Non tutti codesti elementi, simblici d’una particolare situazione della nostra Weltanschauung, si potranno considerare positivi; lo si vedrà nelle pagine che seguono; e saranno codesti che dovremo considerare come “feticci”, ossia come simboli, miti, e riti, degradati, ridotti a fattori superstiziosi e disintenzionati.”

203 Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 17.“Ecco perché io mi propongo di usare il piú delle volte il termine

‘mitagogico’ (a indicare un’accezione deteriore, di fattori mitizzanti, anzi feticisticamente mitizzanti).”

204 In a footnote, Dorfles offers Károly Kerény’s translation of tecnica to the English “technique,” but this word becomes too suggestive of qualities that Dorfles does not intend. Tecnica refers to the actions themselves, not just the way those actions are carried out. “Ma, quando dico

“tecnica”… intendo questo termine nella sua sccezione piú lata, nel suo significato piú vasto: quello d’un dominio dell’uomo sulla natura, ovvero quello d’uno “schema operativo”, d’un metodo…” (Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 25, 39).

205 Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 36. “Il pericolo maggiore dell’uso di codesti elementi tecnici si nasconde, evidentemente, in un impiego degli stessi che sia avulso da un preciso e chiaro telos, col rischio, perciò, di condurre ad una feticissazione della tecnica stessa.”

206 Rather than itself being either mythopoetic or mythogogic, I would argue that Johns’s brushwork would show how the abstract-expressionist brushtroke is already “exhausted,” banal, understood semantic information. Robert Rosenblum on the staleness of “expressive brush stroke”: “Even in the hands of the most gifted satellites, [abstract art] has often turned into a kind of academic product in which rapid, calligraphic brushwork—once the vehicle of daring innovation and intensely personal expression—was codified into a mannered, bravura handicraft

123

à la Sargent…” Rosenblum, Robert, “Roy Lichtenstein and the Realist Revolt,” Metro 8 (April,

1963): 38.

207 Though he does not mention this “consumato” gestural brushstroke in the Johns essay, Dorfles does make the point that Gestural art has lost sign of its telos (Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 93).

208 Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 187. “Riccorderò tra i molitissimi un articolo di Alan Salomon [sic] nel catalogo della XXIV Biennale, un numero della rivista “Metro” (Milano, 1961) dedicato in gran parte agli artist pop americani; un mio articolo su Rauschenberg sulla stessa rivista.”

209 Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 192. “...ci potrà forse aiutare a comprendere il perché dell’importanza della pop-art (specie di quella Americana) per una visione antropologica della nostra età.”

210 Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” 88.

211 Ibid.

212 Ibid., 90.

213 Ibid.

214 André Hayum’s Review of Other Criteria in Burlington Magazine even goes so far as to call the Jasper Johns essay a “veritable hermeneutic exercise.” André Hayum, “Steinberg on

Twentieth-Century Art,” Burlington Magazine, Vol. 116, No. 852 (March, 1974): 157-159.

215 Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” 94.

216 Thomas McEvilly, “Mute Prophecies: The Art of Jannis Kounellis,” Jannis Kounellis

(Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986), 25.

217 Ibid.

218 Ibid.

219 Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” 94.

124

220 Edward B. Henning “Reconstruction: A Painting by Jasper Johns,” The Bulletin of the

Cleveland Museum of Art. Vol. 60, No. 8 (October, 1973); 238, 241.

Quoting: Max Kosloff, Jasper Johns (1967), 15.

221 Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” 94.

222 Steinberg, “Back Talk from Leo Steinberg.” Note: [my humble self] appears in the original text abbreviated as “mhs.”

223 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 18 January 1962, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

224 Ibid.

225 Leo Steinberg, Jasper Johns (New York: Wittenborn Press, 1963).

226 Could this be what Faith Pleasanton’s note from April 11, 1962 referred to: “It’s too late to change the portrait cliché”? Faith Pleasanton to Leo Castelli, 11 April 1962, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

227 Steinberg, Jasper Johns, 42-45.

“I thought that it would be more in the nature of a slender book. When I spoke to BA over the phone, I told him that I wanted to add a certain number of photos, and some biographical and bibliographical data.” Leo Castelli to Faith Pleasanton, 18 April 1962, Castelli Gallery records,

1:15, AAA.

“…the actual text will be identical to that which appears in metro (32 pages in all). Bruno Alfieri is awaiting the arrival of the cover design and additional text material—biography, bibliographical data—at your earliest convenience. The additional text (including the title page) should not comprise more than eight pages, so that the book will total 40 pages in all…. With regards to the new photos, they could appear with the new text, but it is not possible to modify the

125 existing article as such, as it has been printed, in its entirety.” Faith Pleasanton to Leo Castelli, 26

April 1962, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

In January, 1963, Bruno Alfieri writes to Castelli that the total production should cost Castelli about $1,500, for which he would gladly accept a Jasper Johns picture in lieu of payment. Alfieri requests an additional $500 for “immediate production costs (in addition to the $500 which you sent on account three months ago).” Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 21 January 1963, Castelli

Gallery Records, 1:15, AAA.

An Invoice for Castelli’s payment of $1000 to Metro Editoriale for “ ‘Jasper Johns,’ Edizione speciale Americana con plastificatura” appears in the archive dated August 22, 1963. It is marked

“paid.”

228 The books are listed in alphabetical order, but The International Directory is marked with a pointing index finger arrow symbol.

229 Bruno Alfieri to Jasper Johns, 11 January 1963, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

230 Advertising pages from Metro 4/5 (May, 1962). Does the “C” stand for Castelli? I haven’t been able to determine whether this ad refers to a side project of Leo Castelli’s and Bruno

Alfieri’s. Is this just filler for ad space?

231 Anonymous to Bruno Alfieri, 12 May 1962, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

Milton Herder, the advertising agent, did the ads for the Leo Gallery in Metro.

232 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 15 December 1962, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

233 Celant. Roma-New York, 189. Cesare Vivaldi writes in a February, 1961 newsletter for

Galleria La Tartaruga. “We need only briefly survey Twombly’s career since his return to Rome three years ago after a short visit several years earlier. This time, he put down strong roots—a wife, a house, a son—so that he could be considered a naturalized citizen of Rome.”

126

234 All of the privately owned works pictured in the article belong to European collections, and the images do not always bear complete meta-data in their captions. If Castelli had provided the photo-reproductions, he would not have failed to give dimensions and to list materials for each one.

235 Bruno Alfieri, “The Venice Biennale, Is it Useful? (Or why this Biennale number of Metro is so little a Biennale number),” Metro 6 (June, 1962): 5-6; Dortch and Pleasanton, “Who’s Who,”

11-19.

236 Dortch and Pleasanton, “Who’s Who,” 12.

237 Ibid., 19.

238 Alfieri, “The Venice Biennale, Is it Useful?,” 5-6.

239 L’Esperienza Moderna: Revista di Cultura, 1957-59 (Roma: Marlborough Galleria dell’Arte,

1976). Note: Page numbers for this source will be approximate, because I am using a photocopied facsimile of the exhibition catalog, where original page numbers do not appear.

240 L’Esperienza Moderna, 18. “… nata da un rapporto d’amicizia e da una base commune pittorica con Gastone Novelli e con la collaborazione di un gruppo di amici pittori, poeti, critici e musicisti aveva come primo scopo quello di creare un collegamento tra il lavoro che andavamo elaborando a Roma e quanto avveniva nel mondo, soprattutto in Europa e di indagare nel passato dell’avanguardi storica ciò che era ancora vivo e vitale.”

241 “La Nuova Figurazione.”

242 L’Esperienza Moderna regularly ran articles addressing the issue of “New Figuration:”

Achille Perilli, “Nuova figurazione per la pittura,” L’Esperienza Moderna 1 (April, 1957).

“Documenti di una nuova figurazione: Sciajola, Novelli, Alechinsky, Perilli, Twombly,”

L’Esperienza Moderna 2 (August 1957); Cesare Vivaldi, “Nuova figurazione nella giovane arte

127

Italiana,” L’Esperienza Moderna 3-4 (December 1957); “Documenti di una nuova figurazione:

Boille, Bryen, Capogrossi, Viseux, Bertini, Koenig e Vandercam, Sterpini, Lacomblez,”

L’Esperienza Moderna 3-4 (December, 1957); Cesare Vivaldi, “Ancora una nuova figurazione,”

L’Esperienza Moderna 5 (1959).

243 Bruno Alfieri, “Perilli: Alla ricerca della communicazione efficace,” Metro 6 (June, 1962): 39-

43; Gillo Dorfles, “Written Images of Cy Twombly,” Metro 6 (June, 1962): 63-71; Rene De

Solier, “Gastone Novelli: The Dream Web,” Metro 6 (June, 1962): 73-75.

However, there are a couple of essays on Paul Jenkins that separate Perilli and Twombly.

244 Alfieri, Bruno. “Per una nuova Biennale,” L’Esperienza Moderna 5 (March, 1959).

245 Alfieri, “Perilli: Alla ricerca della communicazione efficace,” 41.

246 Ibid.

247 From the “letter from the editor” in the first issue of L’Esperienza Moderna: “Sotto il segno dell’irrazionale procede l’umanità e, questo continuo scendere in profondità, nel più segreto io è parte imporatnte della ricerca contemporanea, (word) a ricreare in nuove forme e in nuove immagini la mitologia del nostro mondo” (L’Esperienza Moderna, 5).

248 L’Esperienza Moderna, 18. “Da ciò trae origine una svolgersi di temi di immagini di segni (e simboli) che può sembrare ossessivo, irrazionale ed inutilmente accidentale ed è invece il segno di una nuova fantasia, della viva libertà del nostro campo di ricerca.”

249 Cesare Vivaldi, “La rivista della nuova cultura romana, ” L’esperienza Moderna: Revista di

Cultura, 1957-59 (Roma: Marlborough Galleria dell’Arte, 1976), 15.

“Una ‘nuova figurazione’ che non doveva intendersi come un ritorno alla figurazione ma

(scriveva Perilli nel numero 1 della rivista) come un “ritrovare la capacità di investire tutta la realtà nella traccia più elementare, nell’impronta più semplice di un segno.”

128

250 These would also be figuration in the sense that they indexically represent Perilli’s physical presence, and that Perilli formed them, figured them, used one material and method to represent another kind of thing or idea.

251 Alfieri, “Perilli: Alla ricerca della communicazione efficace,” 42. “Perilli cerca ancora un equilibrio tra gli elementi di comunicazione visuale di massa, e una composizione academica di ispirazione informale.”

252 Gastone Novelli, “Il linguaggio figurativo e la sua funzione,” Novelli, ed. Zeno Birolli

(Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976), 68-69. “Il linguaggio figurative non può essere un semplice gisticolare, nè usare sistemi or strutture che gli siano estranee. La sua radice può essere arbitraria, ma esso deve essere retto da una precisa sintassi interna; il suo svolgersi (la ricerca, lo sperimentare) è logico, analizzabile, comunicante.”

253 Novelli, “Il Linguaggio figurativo,” 98. “L’opera di Klee è un esempio di universo linguistico autonomo estremamente vasto e retto da uno struttura interna molto precisa.”

254 Nello Ponente in an untitled essay from L’Esperienza Moderna, 10.

255 Paul Klee, Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York:

Wittenborn Press, 1964).

256 Ponente, L’Esperienza Moderna, 10.

257 Notebook pages observed in: Klee, The Thinking Eye, 223, 58, 253. For more on Arnheim’s

Gestalt theory and Paul Klee see: John Willat. “Rudolf Arnheim’s Graphic Equivalents in

Children’s Drawings and Drawings and Paintings by Paul Klee.” Visual Thought: The Depictive

Space of Perception. Ed. Liliana Albertazzi. John Benjamin’s Publishing Company. Philadelphia,

2006. 195-220.

129

258 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 58. “Facsimile page from the “Theory of Articulation” with stress on the major-minor function: fifty days and fighty nights (major); among them three hot days and four cool days (minor).” “Weight structure in two dimensions” Chess board imagery. “Two values of different weight added to form a rhythm which when repeated produces a diagram of linear two-part time. Extended in two dimensions in the simplest synthetic order, the diagram becomes a chess-board” (ibid., 223). “Irregular Projection on an uneven plane. Attempt to produce a rhythmically distorted structure while preserving regularity” (ibid. 253). These are all images (#-#).

259 Ibid., 230. “Dividual Structure Notebook Page.”

260 Oxford Dictionaries Online, s.v. “Cipher,” http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ english/ cipher (accessed July 15, 2012).

261 Dorfles, “Written Images of Cy Twombly,” 64.

262 I would argue however, that among the artists I list here, Hartung is the MOST picturesque,

LEAST scrawled. Georges Noël is more scrawled, but his all-over compositions make it difficult for me to call him picturesque; however, all-over compositions would have been recognized as

‘artistic’ and at least ‘picture-like’ in the early 1960s.

263 Again, Hartung may not be the best example here.

264 Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 264.

265 Ibid.

266 Ibid.

267 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 103.

130

268 For a brief, but enlightening, look at different possibilities for the term “figuration” in art history and criticism, see: Richard Shiff, “Afterword: Figuration,” Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 479-485.

269 Dorfles, “Written Images of Cy Twombly,” 68.

270 Dorfles, Nuovi Riti, 264.

271 Ibid. “Certo occorre attribuire al termine semantico un carattere assai piú ampio ed elastico di quanto di solito non si sia soliti fare. Molto spesso occorrerà intendere tale attributo come applicabile ad una situazione segnica che sia fornita di tale proprietà solo temporaneamente, soltanto per una "investiture" nostra o di altri. Per cui potremmo ammettere che una semantizzazione del mondo esterno, o del nostro privato microcosmo, esista non come dato di fatto ma come dato "situazionale"; e potremmo anche ammettere l'improvvisa "messa tra parentesi" (Einklammerung).”

272 Dorfles, Gillo. Nuovi Riti, 265. “E, del resto, bastarebbe accennare—sia pur tra parentesi—a tutti quegli stati patologici cui l’uomo va incontro e che sono per l’appunto caratterizzati da una perdita di valore semantico dell’universo, della parola, o d’un determinato settore del nostro patrimonio segnico: ecco i casi di afasia, ma anche quelli di aprasia, di agrafia, asimbolia…”

273 “Figuration spreads” is a quote from Shiff, “Afterword: Figuration,” 479.

274 Dorfles, “Written Images of Cy Twombly,” 71.

275 Dorfles, Novi Riti, 267. “Il passaggio dall’ontologico al semantico, infatti, dallo studio delle

“essenze” a quello delle “significanze” degli oggetti artisti, è uno dei punti cruciali dell’estetica contemporanea…”

131

276 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 28 November 1962, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

“Abbiamo deciso con Gillo Dorfles di fare un grosso articolo su Lee Bontecou per Metro 8

(febbraio).”

277 Ibid.

278 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 15 December 1962, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA;

Jouffroy, “Jim Dine Through the Telescope,” 73-75; Calas, “Jim Dine: Tools and Myth,” 76-79.

279 Jim Dine had joined Sidney Janis’s New York gallery in 1962, having been with Martha

Jackson before then, and in that same year had his first solo exhibition in Europe at the Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan. Vander Weg, 234. Dine would never show at the Leo Castelli Gallery. The

Leo Castelli Gallery. “Exhibition History.” Castelli Gallery website. http://www.castelligallery.com/history/4e77.html (accessed June-July, 2012).

The other American to appear in Metro 7 is Peter Forakis.

280 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 3 January 1963, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

281 Gillo Dorfles, “Obscure Aspects of the New Figuration in Italy,” Metro 8 (April, 1963): 4-6.

282 See note 212 above.

283 Rosenblum, Robert. “Roy Lichtenstein and the Realist Revolt.” Metro 8, 39.

“With an irony familiar to the twentieth-century tradition, he has transformed non-art into art.”

Compare to Steinberg’s insistence that Johns in un-ironic in his approach: “In Jasper Johns, the conventional meaning is never flouted. No personal attitude of anger, irony, or estheticism alters the shapes he transcribes.” Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” Metro 4/5, 94.

There is a difference here, however. Rosenblum’s “irony” seems to refer to a kind of self- consciousness of the act of translation inherent in every act of visual representation. Here, irony acknowledges the artist’s saying one thing to mean another. Steinberg’s “irony” refers to an

132

“attitude,” which adds to Rosenblum’s irony hints of the “irreverence, or untidiness of most original Dada productions” (Ibid. 94.)

284 Ashton, Dore. “Illusion and Fantasy: Lee,” 29.

285 Ashton, Dore. “Illusion and Fantasy: Lee,” 29.

286 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 17 March 1963, Castelli gallery records, 1:16, AAA.

287 Ibid., 1 July 1960, AAA. Again Alfieri suggests that Rosenblum might write the Higgins piece on September 30, 1960.

288 Bruno Alfieri, “U.S.A. Towards the End of ‘Abstract’ Painting,” Metro 4/5 (May, 1962): 10-

11. In January of 1962, Alfieri began asking for images of Lichtenstein’s work for this article in issue 4/5. This article reproduces eight works by Lichtenstein, nine by Jim Dine, three by

Chryssa, and two by William Copely. The images that appear in both this article from issue 4/5 and Rosenblum’s article in issue 8 are: The Kiss (1962), Step-On Can with Leg (1961), Black

Flowers (1961).

289 Robert Rosenblum, “Roy Lichtenstein and the Realist Revolt,” Pop Art: Critical History, ed.

Steven Henry Madoff (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 189-194.

Robert Rosenblum, “Roy Lichtenstein and the Realist Revolt,” On Modern American Art:

Selected Essays (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 190-197.

290 Otto Hahn had stated that Johns and Rauschenberg had “established the grammar that regulates the new realism.” Cohen-Solal, Leo and his Circle, 311.

291 Alfieri, “USA: Toward the End of ‘Abstract’ Painting?,” 4.

292 Rosenblum, “Roy Lichtenstein,” 39.

133

293 Rosenblum, “Roy Lichtenstein,” 39; ibid, 38. This point is less emphasized, for example, in

Rosenblum’s own essay on Jasper Johns from 1960, also titled “Jasper Johns,” where Rosenblum comments more strongly on the quality of the “handmade” in Johns’s work. See note 194 above.

294 “Interplay of style and subject” quotes Rosenblum, “Roy Lichtenstein, 40”.

295 Rosenblum, “Roy Lichtenstein,” 42.

296 In this article, a small reproduction of the work Sponge II from 1962 appears rotated 90 degrees to the right. Sponge II differs from Sponge in a couple of ways. The clean streak that the sponge leaves behind in Sponge, originates in the upper right corner of the canvas, whereas in

Sponge II it leads off the right edge of the canvas. Also, Sponge has more tones. There is more visual description of the skin of the hand in red dots on a white field, and the grime and dust are in black dots on a yellow field. In Sponge II, the background is white, and the hand is white. I believe that Rosenblum’s comments actually refer to Sponge II rather than Sponge.

297 Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. “Image Duplicator.” Roy Lichtenstein Foundation website. http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/frames.htm (accessed July 25, 2012).

298 Rosenblum, “Roy Lichtenstein,” 44.

299 Ibid.

300 This article was Lichtenstein’s first appearance in Metro. This is the first article to specifically feature Lichtenstein, but Alfieri had used Castelli’s images of Lichtenstein’s paintings in:

Bruno Alfieri, “U.S.A. Towards the End of ‘Abstract’ Painting,” 10-11.

301 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 11 May 1965, Castelli gallery records, 1:17, AAA. Alfieri on

Metro 10: “Per la copertina attendo qualche tua idea.”

134

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has the image cataloged as simply “Cover of Metro 10

Magazine.” Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. “Image Duplicator.” Roy Lichtenstein Foundation website. http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/frames.htm (accessed July 25, 2012).

302 “La Biennale!,” Metro 11 (June, 1966): 18. “I premi. Il premio internazionale per la pittura vada sè, dovrebbe andare senza discussione a Roy Lichtenstein, che degli artisti presenti a questa edizione della rassegna veneziana, è il più meritevole. Se la giuria internazionale vorrà scegliere un altro nome, sarà questa una stortura che la storia dell’arte correggia.”

303 Editorial staff, “A few words against Restany in Metro 11,” Metro 12 (February 1967): 8.

“Che poi, il premio sia andato a Le Parc invece che a Lichtenstein, come noi speravamo, perchè

Lichtenstein era l'unico artista che lo meritasse appieno e in questo particolare momento, e ciò sia detto senza nulla voler togliere ai meriti di Le Parc. Questa non è la sede adatta per discuterne.”

304 Maurizio Fagiolo dell’ Arco and Gianni Berengo-Gardin, “Roy Lichtenstein at the Piano,”

Metro 16/17 (August, 1970): 216-235.

305 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 23 August 1970, Castelli Gallery records, 1:17, AAA.

Here, in the contract, Alfieri does not name the author or photographer for the project, leaving the decision up to Leo Castelli. However, on October 12, 1970, Bruno writes to Leo that Maurizio

Fagiolo has signed the contract to do the text for “Lichtenstien, Scultura,” but that Gandolfi had not yet sent word about doing the photography.

306 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 19 March 1970, Castelli Gallery records, 1:17, AAA.

Ibid., 10 December 1970,.

“Il ‘Lichtenstein di Mazzotta non è mai uscito. Se lo affidavi a me, a quest’ora sarebbe già nelle librerie. Pazienza.”

135

307 “Nuove pubblicazioni,” Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, www.mazzotta.it (accessed July 31,

2012).

308 See note 13 above.

309 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 8 September 1962, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

310 Ibid.

311 Leo Castelli may have played some part in naming the book “Directory.”

In January of 1963, Alfieri’s secretary Faith Pleasanton writes to Leo Castelli’s secretary Connie

Trimble to ask whether Castelli preferred the title “International Catalogue of Contemporary Art” or “International Directory of Contemporary Art.” Faith Pleasanton to Connie Trimble, 8 January

1963, Castelli Gallery records, 1:15, AAA.

312 Alloway, 144.

313 Alloway, 146.

Jachec, too remembers the 1964 Biennale as the year of the end of gesture painting as the dominant style of the Biennale. (Jachec, 8).

314 Alloway, 20. Alloway calls the win a surprise for Castelli; says the hints about “arrangements” are not credible.

315 Alloway, 21. At the next Venice Biennale, in 1966, Hilton Kramer described for The New

York Times having seen three international journals featuring Lichtenstein’s work on their covers at the bookshops in Venice. No doubt, Metro was one of these journals, Lichtenstein having produced the cover for Metro’s tenth issue published April, 1965.

Alan Solomon agrees with Alloway: “[Castelli] did pass out stacks of publications about his artists when the jury came through the pavilion; none of the other dealers had all this material about their artist. This is the clue to his accomplishment, more than anything else. He has always

136 understood the importance of publication, the value of spending money to send pictures to Europe as any Americans have ever been, because he himself has made them so accessible.” John Cage,

William Seitz, and Alan Solomon, “Leo Castelli: Ten Years,” Metro 12 (February, 1967): 108-

109.

316 For a detailed account of Leo Castelli’s involvement in the 1964 Venice Biennale see Cohen-

Solal, Leo and his Circle, 286-304.

317 Leo Catelli to Bruno Alfieri, 5 March 1964, Castelli Gallery records, 1:16, AAA.

318 The Gulbenkian Foundation exhibition at the Tate was called “54/64: Painting and Sculpture of a Decade,” (From Gulbenkian.org. uk). The Torcuato di Tella is in Argentina. The Sonnabend exhibition in May showed Rauschenberg’s Dante series. “L’attività della Galleria Sonnabend

1962-1988,” La Collezione Sonnabend: Dalla Pop Art in Poi (Milano: Electa, 1989), 222.

319 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 5 March 1964, Castelli Gallery records, 1:16, AAA.

320 Jachec, 3. U.S. involvement in the biennale had been minimal between 1948-1964, Jachec states, citing lack of official government sponsorship, and MoMA’s organizing U.S.’s participation between 1952-1962.

321 For more on Solomon’s friendship with Castelli, see Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle, 253,

271-85.

322 Alan Solomon, “American Art between Two Biennales,” Metro 11 (June, 1966): 24-36.

323 Solomon wrote: “Leo is very misunderstood. In Venice, 1964, he was supposed to be buying me, the jury, the administration of the Biennale, exercising his enormous power to win the prize for Rauschenberg. Actually he was busy sorting out tickets for the Cunningham concert, helping us paste up labels (on other dealers’s artists), and getting hoarse in the piazza talking in those six

137 languages while most of the other Americans shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.” Solomon,

“Leo Castelli: Ten Years,” 108-109.

324 Alfieri, “A Critic’s Journal,” Metro 10, 5.

325 Giulio Turcato, “Piero Dorazio and Giulio Turcato,” Metro 11 (June, 1966): 52.

326 Piero Dorazio, “The Next Step,” Metro 12 (February, 1967): 33.

327 Alfieri complains to Castelli at one point of accusations of “American-o-philia”: “Aggiungi la situazione di isolamento che in Italia mi circonda per le mie idée “americanofile”!” Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 9 March 1964, Castelli gallery records, 1:16, AAA.

328 Anonymous introduction to “Leo Castelli: Ten Years,” Metro 12, 108. “…uno dei più intelligenti mercanti d’arte dei nostri tempi…”

329 Ibid. “Per quanta riguarda Metro, la nostra rivista si associa a quanto dicono Seitz, Solomon, e

Cage, ed augura a Leo Castelli una sempre più felice attività.”

330 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 17 March 1963, Castelli gallery records, 1:16, AAA.

“Ora, ti chiedo un consiglio: che cosa pensi dell’eventualità di trasformare la rivista “Metro”, fondendola con la rivista Americana “Arts” e con una di Londra e cioè pubblicando “Metro” mensilmente, con una redazione a New York, una a Londra, ma con la direzione generale a

Milano, dove verrebe stampata? Che situazione (non finanziaria, ma di “concetto”) ha “Arts” negli Stati Uniti in questo momento? (Questa richiesta di consiglio è RISERVATA).”

331 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 5 March 1964, Castelli gallery records, 1:16, AAA.

332 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 9 March 1964, Castelli gallery records, 1:16, AAA.

333 Ibid., 25 February 1965.

334 Ibid., 9 March 1964.

138

335 Ibid., 9 March 1964. “Sono giunto alla convinzione che ‘Metro’ possa continuare soltanto se in condizione di assoluta indipendenza dalle Gallerie e da qualsiasi altro ambiente.”

336 Ibid. “Abbandonando quasi completamente la fonte di finanziamento delle Gallerie per la pubblicità, anzi selezionando solo una mezza dossina di buone Gallerie (Castelli, Green,

Marlborough, Meght, ecc.)…”

337 Forty-four ads in issue 8 vs. nine ads in issue 9.

338 Bruno Alfieri to Leo Castelli, 9 March 1964. “Io sarei disposto ad impostare la rivista così, se si riuscisse a combinare:… Formazione di un comitato direttivo, composto da me a da altre due persone delle mie idee…”

339 See note 330 above. Alfieri also mentions the possibility of merging with Arts, or L’Oeil

(ibid.).

340 Ibid. “Nei mesi scorsi ho esaminato due possibilità. La prima era di vendere mille copie di ogni numero ad una grande industria torinese che si era dimostrata interessata; la seconda era di studiare una proposta giuntami da Franz Larese della Galerie Im Erker.” “L’idea di Larese sarebbe di alzare il prezzio di ogni numero di “Metro” da 3000 a 10,00 Lire, ma di farla due volte l’anno, con una litografia originale dei suoi artisti (Hartung, Tapies, ecc.).”

341 Ibid. “Perchè non mi cerchi un socio a New York, che fosse però di tua assoluta fiducia?

Vorrei la garanzia di non avere “rogne” e di avere a che fare con persone per bene. Naturalmente questa combinazione non dovrebbe avere nulla a che fare con l’Editoriale Metro, anche se forse converebbe che uscisse sotto la sua etichetta. Oppura potremmo studiare una sigla speciale… Tu conosce Scull, Tremaine, il governer Rockefeller!... Potremmo fare dei numeri formidabile, sui pittori che piacciono a NOI!”

342 Leo Castelli to Bruno Alfieri, 12 May 1964, Castelli gallery records, 1:16, AAA.

139

343 Before issue 9, Metro generally lists Bruno Alfieri as “Editor/Direttore,” Faith Pleasanton as

“Assistant to the Editor,” Jasia Reichardt as “British Editor.” Then there are some Advertising

Editors, Staff Translators, and photographers listed.

344 Dan Graham, Don Judd, Allan Kaprow, et al, “La Sfida del Sistema: Inchiesta sulla situazione artistica negli Stati Uniti e in Francia,” Metro 14 (June, 1968): 34-72.

David Antin, “Differences-Sames: New York 1966-1967,” Metro 13 (February, 1968): 78-104.

List Italian critics?

345 The Leo Castelli Gallery. “Exhibition History.” Castelli Gallery website. http://www.castelligallery.com/history/4e77.html (accessed June-July, 2012).

346 See note 36 above.

140 Appendix A: Table

Issue Number Number of Number of Number of Number of Total Number Total Number of Articles in Articles in Articles with Articles in Other Number of of Number of Articles in English French no text Languages Articles ads Pages Italian 1 10 12 14 0 16 19 116 2 19 20 7 0 28 21 102 3 21 20 6 2 28 33 121 4/5 17 18 4 5 1 Spanish 26 45 153 6 11 12 3 1 20 54 116 7 18 10 6 2 27 48 131 8 13 8 9 3 28 44 110 9 11 5 1 1 16 9 73 10 11 5 1 0 14 9 101 11 14 3 2 0 18 9 109 12 12 4 2 3 19 8 177 13 18 3 2 0 22 4 237 14 16 7 8 0 31 6 174 15 16 2 2 0 1 German 16 8 178 16/17 15 4 1 0 2 Spanish; 1 18 11 309 Portuguese

(Table 1) Metro, Information by Issue: Languages, Length, Advertisements.

141 Appendix B: Figures

(Fig. 1) Three full-page ads for galleries in Metro 13: Alfieri Libreria/Galleria, The Leo Castelli Gallery, and Galleria Lorenzelli; images from Metro 13 (February, 1968).

142

(Fig. 2) Cover and pages from Zodiac 8: “America.” The cover features Jasper Johns’s Three Flags (1958); the pages show an installation view of paintings by Jasper Johns; images from Zodiac 8 (1961). At top left: Preliminary sketch of the cover by Bruno Alfieri; image from a letter to Leo Castelli, 25 January 1961, The Leo Castelli gallery records, 1:15, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute (Washington D.C.). 143

(Fig. 3) Photograph of Jorge Piqueras at Les Deux Magots, from “Piqueras aux Deux Magots et au Dôme,” in Metro 2; images from Metro 2 (May, 1961).

144

(Fig. 4) Pages from the article “Caffé Rosati,” in Metro 1 with photographs by Virginia Dortch; images from Metro 1 (December, 1960).

145

(Fig. 5) Caffé Rosati in 1963, photograph by Mario Dondero; image from Gli Irripetibili Anni ’60.

146

(Fig. 6) “Biennale 1960: Jean Fautrier,” photograph by Ugo Mulas; image from “Due Domande” in Metro 1 (December, 1960).

147

(Fig. 7) Images from “A Visit with Ben Nicholson,” photographs by Felicitas Vogler; and Ben Nicholson, November 1959 (Paros, 2 Circles); collection Felicitas Vogler. All images from Metro 1 (December, 1960).

148

(Fig. 8) Images from “A Visit with Ben Nicholson,” photographs by Paolo Monti; and Ben Nicholson, 1955 Diagonal and August 1958, drawings on paper; Milan, private collection; images from Metro 1 (December, 1960).

149

(Fig. 9) Pages from “Georges Noël: Metro Young No. 1,” photographs by Paul Facchetti and PH Boubat. Two paintings by Georges Noël; left: from the collection of Paul Facchetti; right: from the collection of Theodor Arensberg; images and information from Metro 1 (December, 1960).

150

(Fig. 10) Images of artworks from “Edward Higgins: Metro Young No. 2,” in Metro 1; left: Sentinel I (1959); top center: Manifold I (1960); top right: Pair (1960); bottom center: Gothic (1960); bottom right: Torso (1960). All are welded steel and plaster; images from Metro 1 (December, 1960).

151

(Fig. 11) Images from “Edward Higgins: Metro Young No. 2,” photographs by Charles Rotmil; images from Metro 1 (December, 1960). 152

(Fig. 12) Pages from “The Painter Jorge Piqueras,” in Metro 2, with photographs by Hans Haacke and Luc Joubert (bottom left and right); images from Metro 2 (May 1961).

153

(Fig. 13) Photographs of Gérard Schneider and his work in Metro 2, photographs by Paolo Monti and Herbert Maeder (top); images from Metro 2 (May, 1961).

154

(Fig. 14) Pages from “A Visit to Dubuffet” in Metro 2, photographs by Paolo Monti; images from Metro 2 (May, 1961).

155

(Fig. 15) Pages from “Robert Rauschenberg: Metro Young No. 3” in Metro 2. Works shown, bottom, left to right: Autobiography (1960); Untitled Combine (1955); Monument (1958); Bed (1955); Winter Pool (1959), Trophy II (1960), Trophy I (1959); Talisman (1958); Odalisque (1955); Canyon (1959), Coca-Cola Plan (1958). Images from Metro 2 (May, 1961) 156

(Fig. 16) Portrait photograph of Jasper Johns by Ed Meneely in Metro 4/5 (May, 1962).

157

(Fig. 17) Michelangelo Pistoletto, Photo of Jasper Johns (Minus Object), 1966, photograph on paper, 98 ½ x 39 ½ in.; image from Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1959-1974. (Fig. 18) Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jasper Johns’s Ears (Minus Object), 1966, photograph on paper; image from Michelangelo Pistoletto. 158

(Fig. 19) Photograph of Leo Castelli and Gillo Dorfles in the garden of the Krausz Villa in Trieste, 1928. Leo is in back with arm raised, Dorfles is at right with dark jacket; image from Cohen-Solal, Leo and his Circle.

159

(Fig. 20) Eight-page layout of Dore Ashton’s “Thirty four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno,” in Metro 2 (May, 1961).

160

(Fig. 21) Robert Rauschenberg, Dante’s Inferno: Dante and Virgil are Still in the Heretic’s Realm #10 (detail), 1959-60, graphite pencil, gouache, transfer; 14 ½ x 11 ½ in.; image and information from artstor.org.

(Fig. 22) Robert Rauschenberg, Dante’s Inferno: At the Trumpet Signal, Dante and Virgil Approach the Middle Pit #30 (detail), 1959-60, graphite pencil, gouache, transfer; 14 ½ x 11 ½ in.; image and information from artstor.org.

161

(Fig. 23) Pages from “Jasper Johns: Metro Young No. 12,” from Metro 4/5 (May, 1962). Works shown, top, left to right: Highway (1959); Large White Flag (1955); bottom left to right: Three Flags (1958); Target with Four Faces (1955); 0 Through 9 (1960); 0 Through 9 (1961); Target with Plaster Casts (1955); Flag above White (1954).

162

(Fig. 24) Pages from “Jannis Kounellis: I simboli grafici diventano pittura,” in Metro 4/5 (May, 1962).

(Fig. 25) Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1959. Performance by Kounellis in his studio in Rome, 1960; image from Jannis Kounellis.

163

(Fig. 26) Advertisement for “BA & C Visual Communications,” in Metro 4/5 (May, 1962)

(Fig. 27) Illustration by Paul Davis from Metro 6 (June, 1962).

(Fig. 28) Illustrations by Paul Davis from Pagina 1 (November, 1962).

164

(Fig. 29) Metro’s Target Logo on title pages of Metro 7 and Metro 8 (December, 1962) and (April, 1963).

165

(Fig. 30) Eight-page layout of “Who’s Who (at the Thirty-first Venice Biennale)” from Metro 6 (December, 1962) Article by Virginia Dortch and Faith Pleasanton.

166

(Fig. 31) Leo Castelli in the article “Who’s Who” from Metro 6 (December, 1962).

167

(Fig. 32) Cover of the exhibition catalog for “Novelli Perilli Twombly” exhibition at the Gallerie “Aujourd’hui” at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussells (November, 1959); image from L’Esperienza Moderna: 1957-1959.

168

(Fig. 33) Pages from “Achille Perilli: Metro Young No. 13” in Metro 6 (June, 1962). Works shown, top left to right: Rapporto sulla paura (1962); Gli amori di Cleopatra (1961); bottom left to right: La civiltà del ragno (1961); La polvere d’oro (1961); I dialoghi delle ombre (1961); Georgia in Wonderland (1961); Manoscritto per Carla (1962). 169

(Fig. 34) Pages from “Gastone Novelli: Metro Young No. 15” in Metro 6 (June, 1962). Il re delle Parole (1961) appears at the top of the page at bottom, right.

170

(Fig. 35) Gastone Novelli, Il Re delle Parole, 1961, 138 x 87 in.; image from http://milano.corriere.it.

171

(Fig.36) Images from Paul Klee’s notebooks and lecture notes. Top left: “Irregular projection on an uneven plane;” top right: “Theory of Articulation;” Bottom: “Weight structure in two dimensions.” From Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye.

172

(Fig. 37) Paul Klee, “Dividual Structural Rhythms, ” notebook page; image from Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye.

173

(Fig. 38) Pages from “Cy Twombly: Metro Young No. 14” in Metro 6 (June, 1962). Olympia (1957) and Untitled 1958 (Rome) appear in the page at center, right.

174

(Fig. 39) Cy Twombly, Olympia, 1957; Oil-based house paint, lead pencil, colored pencil, and wax crayon on canvas, 78 ¾ x 104 in.; image from “Cy Twombly Gallery 1951-59,” at cytwombly.info.

(Fig. 40) Cy Twombly, Untitled (Rome), 1958; Oil-based house paint, lead pencil on canvas, 52 ¾ x 62 3/8 in. (134 x 159 cm). Private Collection, Greenwich, Conn.; image from Cy Twombly: A Catalogue Raissone.

175

(Fig. 41) Pages from “Lee Bontecou: Metro Young No. 19” in Metro 8 (April, 1963); works shown, top right: Untitled (1962), collection of Houston Museum of Fine Arts; bottom, right: Untitled (1962)—Ashton refers to this work as “that grinning death relief.”

176

(Fig. 42) Pages from “Roy Lichtenstein: Metro Young No. 21,” showing Robert Rosenblum’s “Roy Lichtenstein and the Realist Revolt,” in Metro 8 (April, 1963).

177

(Fig. 43) Roy Lichtenstein, Sponge, 1962, oil on canvas, 68 x 56 in.; private collection; image from Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective.

178

(Fig. 44) Roy Lichtenstein, Cover of Metro 10 magazine, 1965; from Metro 10 (October, 1965).

179

(Fig. 45) Images from “Roy Lichtenstein at the Piano,” photographs by Gianni Berengo-Gardin; images from Metro 16/17 (August, 1970).

180 Bibliography

Alfieri, Bruno. “A Critic’s Journal II: After the Inferiority Complex of New York to Paris

(1900-1963), here is Paris’s Complex with New York despite De Gaulle

(Meanwhile, London Grows).” Translated by Lucia Krasnik. Metro 10 (October,

1965): 4-13.

------. “Perilli: Alla ricerca della communicazione efficace.” Metro 6 (June,

1962): 39-43.

------. “U.S.A. Towards the End of ‘Abstract’ Painting.” Metro 4/5 (May, 1962):

10-11.

Alloway, Lawrence. The Venice Biennale, 1895-1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl.

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