Giancarlo Politi, writer, artwork critic, and founding father of Flash Art, one of the crucial influential up to date artwork magazines to emerge from Europe’s postwar period, died on February 24. He was 89. Information of his dying was first reported within the Italian-language press.
Based in 1967 in Rome, Flash Artwork was among the many first often revealed magazines devoted completely to artwork criticism—and one of many earliest to flow into internationally. Over a long time, it expanded to incorporate editions in French, Polish, Chinese language, Spanish, German and Russian-language editions. But every version sought to map the artwork world as an interlinked entity, presenting it not as a scatter of far-flung scenes however as a constellation of overlapping facilities, every in fixed change.
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From its headquarters in Milan, Flash Artwork documented a few of the most seismic artwork actions of the late twentieth century, together with Arte Povera—that means “poor artwork”—the novel Italian ideology outlined by its use of on a regular basis objects and natural ephemera.
Politi, collectively together with his spouse, the artwork critic Helena Kontova, created a launchpad for artists and critics who proceed on to form the up to date canon. Marina Abramović, Maurizio Cattelan,, and Jeff Koons had been these featured in its pages, which likewise noticed bylines by influential artwork world figures similar to Germano Celant, the critic who coined “Arte Povera,” Francesco Bonami, curator of the 2003 Venice Biennale, and the American historian and author Hal Foster.
Kate Shanley, daughter of former Artwork in America writer Paul Shanley and a Flash Artwork worker from 1980 to 2017, shared a remembrance of Politi on Instagram. She recalled choosing up bundles of the journal at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport—the place customs as soon as objected to a problem that includes art work by Pierre Klossowski—and driving them straight to SoHo and the East Village to ship to galleries.
“Giancarlo and Helena Kontova had been fantastic to work for. It was a real collaboration with a dynamic couple who had been each inventive and good,” she stated, noting that they trusted their staff “like a household” because the journal grew, advanced, and weathered the ups and downs of the up to date artwork world over the a long time.
His management, nonetheless, was not with out controversy. In 1972, Politi marketed his companies for $1,000 to “artists, galleries, museums, and universities,” together with “particular preparations for actually handsome feminine artists.” He drew additional scrutiny in 1997 for defending Alexander Brener’s vandalism of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematisme. In 2011, studies surfaced that he had despatched inappropriate emails to a feminine Flash Artwork intern who had allegedly been denied truthful compensation; the messages had been later posted on-line. Politi described the change as “significantly aggressive and underhanded” and expressed his remorse.
Politi was born in 1937 in Trevi, in Italy’s Umbria area. In 1993, he based the Trevi Flash Artwork Museum, which hosted exhibitions by worldwide artists similar to Damien Hirst, Vanessa Beecroft, and Andres Serrano. He departed the museum in 2005; it has since been renamed the Palazzo Lucarini Up to date. Within the early 2000s, he launched a collection of “no-budget biennales,” starting in Tirana, Albania, adopted by six editions in Prague and three editions of the Prague Picture Biennale.
He’s survived by his spouse, Helena, and their daughter, Gea, who has additionally served as an editor of Flash Artwork.
The article can be up to date with further data because it turns into accessible.
