Abstract
The Italian artistic movement Arte povera / Poor Art was born in the '60s with the atmosphere of the global cultural protest. In November 1967 the theorist Germano Celant published the Manifesto of the movement, "Arte Povera.
Notes for a Guerrilla war". Arte Povera was the real protagonist of a general artistic renewal and its force was the different "attitude" towards life in a cathartic desire to recover the specific cultural origins in a social transformations period.
The common "sensibility" of "poor" artists brought them to take distances both from international tendencies as Informal and Pop Art. On the other hand this "sensibility" induced the artists to react against the excesses of the industrial development in the second post war period with a return to the employment of natural materials reminding to a pre- industrial and agricultural Italian civilization which was vanishing.
Also the definition Arte Povera called into question the contradictions in Italy, a nation whose public opinion was divided between the positivity for the economic rebirth of the country (American Marshall Plan), and a hostility against the foreign interference in the Italian economic system which assisted to the decline of the old agricultural and gentry world. Movement Arte Povera still embodies the criticism paradox which considers movement an emblem of a regained "Italian identity" of 60s avant-garde, right when art critics established a first international position.
It will be enough to remember the effort of Celant to collocate Arte Povera in the worldwide art system. He showed the wish of demonstrating that Italy did not represent an underdeveloped country anymore, but that it was ready to participate in international avant-guarde tendencies and without losing its specificity.
Arte Povera looked for a new Italian identity, because it refused the image of a second post war old country.