Page 46 - Studio International - April 1972

merchandise so Milan has come to dominate the 3 Edival Ramosa, The Black Arrow 1969
trade. Certainly the major art supermarket of Plexiglas, metal and wood 375 cm high
Photo: Toni Nicolini
Europe, true to its long commercial tradition,
4 Enrico Castellani, White Surface 1971
sells anything and everything, regardless of
Paint on canvas 142 x 215 cm
provenance. There is more than one story
5 Pietro Consagra, Project for the Cittá Frontale 1968
around of works bought, sold and delivered to Photo : Ugo Mulas, Milan
the vaults of a bank, unseen, ever, by either 6 Giuseppe Spagnulo, The Great Trap 1971
dealer or client. Painted iron 35o x 520 x 52o cm
Photo: Mario Carrieri, Milan
For years, now, Milan has sheltered a fairly
7 Marco Cordioli
prosperous art colony, and latterly it has
Installation shot, Salone Annunciata, January 1971
increased and broadened. The immigrants from
8 Marco Gastini, Stain 1971
the rest of the peninsula have been joined by Polythene 300 x 30o cm
those from the rest of the world. There are more
Japanese artists in Milan than in any other city
outside Japan. Critics find work and a living, and
supply the latest jargon—Anglo-Saxon phrases
interlarding the Latin complexities and
sonorities of their prose. What matters if one of
them cites Joseph( !) Greenberg, and another
discusses the 'American' artists, Phillip King
and William Tucker ? Or that a few years ago
Rosenberg could be dismissed as writing in a too
simple style ! And that, in this, the critics were
joined in public séance by pop art neo-collector
Panza di Biumo ?
Since the War, Milan has offered survival to
a number of artists of international as well as
local fame: the late Lucio Fontana, the
Pomodoro brothers, Andrea Cascella, Baj,
Castellani, Dova, Roberto Crippa. Now to these
are added whole new generations, including
Brazilians like Edival Ramosa and Antonio Dias
besides locals like Adami, Arico', Pardi and
Tadini, Del Pezzo from Naples, Spagnulo from
Bari. They are backed by the less staid galleries,
the Studio Marconi and the Salone Annunciata
for example, and thus find a whole new market
open to them.
It is not so many years ago, though it seems
centuries in the light of today's practice, that
many of Milan's artists were often reduced to
selling off electrical domestic equipment, cars,
even hams and salami, received in payment.
There are restaurants still hung with the pictures
given in payment for meals, and in some cases
worth twenty-fold now. The mechanism of the
Boom, the 'miracle', out of phase in the
industrial sphere, is in full flush in the art
market, an area that only yesterday was
disdained and feared, but wherein now the
entrepreneurs, sensitive to transatlantic modes
and mores, deploy the whole apparatus of
scientific salesmanship : loan companies to
facilitate the hire-purchase of works of art; mail
order catalogues; subscriptions to editions of
prints ; the prospecting and invention of new
products and all the ancillaries—prints and
posters of every sort and condition, monographs,
anthologies, glossy publications, multiples and
objects in numbered and un-numbered serial
production (Duchamp's readymades a
particularly visible example), jewellery (that
once sustained the Pomodoro brothers, now
Braque's jewellery is a sell-out at astronomical
prices), every conceivable knickknack that can
support an artist's signature, even photographs
in numbered and signed editions. It's all there,

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