Arnaldo Pomodoro Sculpture

Postwar Italian Artists Find Their Niche

MILAN -- Amid the vineyards of Umbria in central Italy, the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, 84, is creating what may be one of his last major works. He calls it La

Tartaruga, or The Tortoise - a venerable creature, old as time, filled with defiant life.

"This project is the realization of a dream," Mr. Pomodoro said last month in his Milan studio. "I always wanted to be an architect. Now I'm doing it. This is sculpture that becomes architecture."

Next Friday, the Tornabuoni Art Gallery in Paris will open a retrospective on Mr. Pomodoro, whose monumental bronzes have made him Italy's best-known postwar sculptor. The anthology will include 50 pieces dating from 1960 to the present.

"Pomodoro is absolutely the leading Italian avant-garde sculptor," Michele Casamonti, owner of the Tornabuoni, said in an interview. "He is to sculpture what Fontana was to painting."

From Mr. Casamonti, the comparison with Lucio Fontana is strong praise. When he opened the Paris showroom in October 2009, with an avowed ambition to bring Italy's modern and contemporary artists to the international market, Fontana was the artist he chose for the inaugural show.

Fontana, inventor of the concept of spatialism, "brought three-dimensionality into canvas," Mr. Casamonti said. "He treated a canvas like a sculpture. He changed the history of art."

Long underappreciated outside their own country, Italy's pre- and postwar conceptualists are now the focus of a rapid re-evaluation in the marketplace, in no small measure because of Mr. Casamonti. Like his father (who founded the gallery on Via Tornabuoni in Florence in 1981), and his grandfather (an upholsterer who in the 1940s recovered artists' tattered furniture for payment in kind), Mr. Casamonti has been an avid collector and champion of the conceptualists' work for decades.

That passion has turned his Paris gallery, on Avenue Matignon, into a beacon of the Right Bank art quarter, alongside the likes of Larry Gagosian and Guy Pieters. (Besides Florence and Paris, Tornabuoni has showrooms in five other cities, focusing more broadly on 20th-century art.)

The Fontana show at the Paris gallery was followed last year by major solo retrospectives of Alighiero Boetti and Mario Ceroli, leading exponents of the Arte Povera movement. In a group show that closed Tuesday, monochrome works by Fontana, the minimalist Enrico Castellani and others were set against work by non-Italian artists like Anish Kapoor and Laurent Grasso. A Castellani exhibition in the autumn will be followed by one for the abstract painter and sculptor Alberto Burri.

Opening in Paris "was a gamble," Mr. Casamonti said, as it fell during the height of the economic crisis. But the gamble has paid off. With increased international exposure, "Boetti and Fontana are beginning to become indispensable to serious collectors."

"With international museums purchasing postwar Italian art for their collections, and prices at auction moving steadily upward, private international collectors are following suit," he said.

At the FIAC art fair in Paris in October, for example, Mr. Casamonti sold an "Aerei" airplane piece by Boetti for more than €2.5 million, or about $3.5 million. In the Paris gallery, which is now the flagship of the business, he says he has works by Pomodoro, Castellani, Boetti and Fontana worth anywhere from €50,000 to €3.5 million each. (He has more than 40 Fontanas, the largest collection in the world.)

In October 1999, when Sotheby's introduced its first London sale of 20th-century Italian art, it brought in just £5.2 million, or about $8.6 million. Last year, the equivalent sale brought in £17.2 million. Christie's London Italian art sale last October posted a record £18.6 million.

In the past three years, sale room records for Boetti have risen from £720,000 to £1.8 million, said Mariolina Bassetti, head of Italian contemporary sales at Christie's. In the past year alone, records have been set for the sculptor Marino Marini, whose 1951 bronze "Cavaliere," or Rider, reached nearly £4.5 million in October at Christie's in London; and for Mr. Castellani, whose 1966 "Superficie Bianca," or White Surface, went for €960,750 at Sotheby's Milan in May.

"There is a very passionate following, both from Italians and from an international audience," said Cheyenne Westphal, head of contemporary art in Europe for Sotheby's. "It's a very solid segment of the art market, and a very big part, now, of our European sales."

At Christie's, Ms. Bassetti said, "Fontana is at the same level as Warhol now, in the same sales," she said.

Auction success has been reinforced by museum recognition. In October, a landmark exhibition of Boetti will open at the Reina Sofia in Madrid before moving to the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

To Mr. Pomodoro, all this may be both gratifying and somewhat beside the point. For artists who emerged from the ruins of war and financial collapse of the early 20th century, record prices are not what it's about. At the Pomodoro Foundation, an exhibition and concert space he set up five years ago in Milan, he is putting the final touches on a basement labyrinth that leads to an inner sanctum, a shrine to the 18th-century adventurer, fraudster and esotericist Giuseppe Balsamo, alias Count Cagliostro.

"Cagliostro disturbed the church," he said. "As a result he was shut away in a medieval castle where, after five years, he died. Afterward, it was found that he had left messages on the walls of his cell. What fascinates me is that, from his prison, the man left a message about liberty." An epitaph for a breakout generation?