1964-1968: The Years That Changed Italian Pop Art

Born in a Roman cafe in Piazza del Popolo, Italian Pop Art took inspiration from its American counterpart and mixed it with a distinctive home sensibility. Starting from the 1964 Venice Biennale and culminating in 1968 Teatro delle Mostre exhibition at La Tartaruga gallery in Rome, the Piazza del Popolo scene and its maverick artists subverted the rules of Italian art and turned it pop.

Four hours on a train separate Venice from Rome, four like the number of years it took to shape and drastically change the Italian artistic underground, contributing to one of its most exciting creative spells.

Venice, 20 June 1964. The Americans have landed in Italy for the second time in 20 years, this time to take over the 32nd Venice Biennale. The American delegation shocked by bringing to the Biennale the art current that in New York had been on everyone’s lips in 1963, Pop Art. Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, along younger artists John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Frank Stella – this was Uncle Sam’s menu for the Biennale visitors. The Americans, not unusual to ideas and practices of grandeur, decided to exhibit their work not only in their designated pavilion but in the U.S. consulate too, attracting further attention and clamour among critics and the press.

The cover of the American artists’ catalogue anticipated the Pop Art craze to come with a minimalist yet catchy graphic in the style of mid-1960s pop music and advertising design, highlighting how pop aesthetics spread well beyond art gallery environments. The catalogue seemed to justify journalist Ruggero Orlando’s statement that ‘Art or not, Pop is fashion.’

Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, Gian Tomaso Liverani, Giosetta Fioroni at the XXXII Biennale, Venice, 1964.

Despite all the attention on American Pop Art – which also resulted in Robert Rauschenberg being awarded one of the Gran Premi (grand prizes) – around the Biennale buildings a group of Italians – artists Mario Schifano, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, and gallerist Gian Tomaso Liverani – could be seen contemplating and debating paintings. To frame the scene, rigorously on black and white film, was Ugo Mulas, the photographer who documented the emerging faces of Pop Art from New York to Rome. To Mulas and friends, who also included exhibiting Italian artists Carla Accardi and Mimmo Rotella, 1964 Biennale was the confirmation, rather than the realisation, that Pop Art was the way to go. The Biennale was the spark that ignited the Italian Pop Art scene, the moment when home artists discovered the existence of a common feeling to their production and therefore the necessity to share a spirit although operating individually.

USA catalogue at XXXII Venice Biennale - 1964

Essential to cement the spirit of the volatile Italian Pop Art scene was the city of Rome. Over 500 Km South West of Venice, an impromptu gathering of artists contributed as much as the 1964 Biennale to turn the tides of 1960s Italian art. In Piazza del Popolo – a historical square in the centre of the capital – Mario Schifano, Giosetta Fioroni, Tano Festa, Pino Pascali, Mario Ceroli, and Franco Angeli would hang at Caffè Rosati. This intellectual meet-up proved essential to the birth of a shared scene sensibility, although the artists wouldn’t compromise their original styles. This was the so-called Piazza del Popolo scene, or should we say Piazza del Pop.

From one social space to another, the Piazza del Popolo experience acquired a more heterogeneous and consolidated form when art gallery La Tartaruga (the turtle) move to the square, just above the cafè. Opened in 1954 by Plinio De Martiis, La Tartaruga owed its name to artist Mino Maccari who suggested the animal’s name because symbol of longevity, adaptability and, in virtue of its slowness, also wisdom. Although building a name for itself throughout the 1950s, it wasn’t until 1957 that the gallery started broadening its horizons to include American abstract art – a prelude to Pop Art to come – anticipating the enthusiasm for the style that the 1958 Jackson Pollock exhibition in Rome would generate.

American pavilion at Venice Biennale, 1964 - Ugo Mulas

With the advent of the 1960s, the gallery started to acquire a more precise identity, taking the abstract path of the new enfantes terribles of pop over the figurative one made popular by the likes of Guttuso. The gallery along with the aforementioned artists, would host exhibitions by the likes of Burri, Manzoni and Rotella. The fascinating aspect of the Piazza del Popolo scene that revolved around La Tartaruga was its distinctive Italian nature despite the obvious American influence. If American artists drew inspiration from their interactions with the consumerism of everyday life practices, Italians did the same. However, living in Rome the chances of coming across a Leonardo painting or a Michelangelo sculpture were undoubtedly bigger than those of finding a can of Campbell’s tomato soup.

In 1960s Italy, classic art mixed with the economic boom, generating a cultural clash that caught the eye of the Piazza del Popolo scene. Tanto Festa’s The Creation of Man (in Black and White) (1964) and From Michelangelo series (1965-1978) – both based on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting – can be considered a manifesto of Italian Pop Art. As Festa explained ‘When I did these Michelangelos, moreover, I never went to see the Sistine Chapel. They were things deeply bound up with Rome, with a kind of image that is consumed here. Remember my argument, then: an American paints Coca-Cola as a value and, for me, painting Michelangelo is the same thing, in the sense that we are in a country where, instead of consuming canned food, we consume the Mona Lisa on chocolates.’

Similarly acted Mario Ceroli with his Goldfinger/Miss (1965), a three-dimensional wooden transposition of the iconic Botticelli Venus silhouette painted in gold, which simultaneously played with the role of the female figure in renaissance and in James Bond films.

Left: Tano Festa - From Michelangelo (1965) / RIght: Mario Ceroli - Goldfinger/Miss (1965)

The Piazza del Popolo experience culminated in 1968, when reached the peak of the Pop Art trend, gallery owner Plinio de Martiis decided time had come to call it a day. La Tartaruga closed its headquarters in the square and moved elsewhere in the city under the direction of his wife Ninni Pirandello, starting a slow decline that eventually ended with its closure in 1984. To celebrate the end of the Piazza del Popolo gallery and, at the same time, to capture the artistic ferment of the ’68 counterculture, De Martiis put together and curated Teatro delle Mostre, Roma, May ’68.

The event, which spread across three weeks, exhibited a different artist every day with the aim of surprising, provoking and conveying feelings of irony and poetry. Teatro delle Mostre questioned the role of the gallery in the arts industry by challenging the shared perception of works of art as finished, self-contained commercial products. This ‘dematerialization’ of the arts not only subverted the role of the artist, but also the way the audience and critics approached the exhibition. The centrality of the body and human action in performances was key to achieve so.

The festival resulted in a testament to both La Tartaruga ethos and the zeitgeist of 1968. Painting and sculpture mixed with performances and happenings, which culminated in Nanni Balestrini’s The Walls of Sorbonne. The artist, just landed in Rome from Paris, rang the gallery to dictate over the phone the writings left by French rioting students on city walls. De Martiis, on the other end, took note and inscribed the slogans on La Tartaruga’s walls, in a performance that captured the European spirit of the times as it happened.

Members of the Piazza del Popolo scene at La Tartaruga gallery, 1966.

Nanni Balestrini - The Walls of Sorbonne (1968)

La Tartaruga had an approach to the arts that resembled more a social research institute rather than a mere exhibition space. In the event's catalogue Maurizio Calvesi wrote ‘It’s not about what’s happening, it’s the succession of events what we’re interested by; succession not as a stream, but as a process, as a rhythm, as a verification of events within time and events of the time.’ Afterall, La Tartaruga wasn’t simply a gallery.

Although the closure of La Tartaruga coincided with the beginning of the dawn of Italian Pop Art, its work didn’t go in vain, as its spiritual and ideological legacy were crucial in starting a process of democratization in the arts, which started with the 1968 Biennale and the appearance of the first performances and multi-medium works in a traditionally high art environment. In just four years, from Venice to Rome and back, a group of bonvivant Italian mavericks with a thing for New York left a lasting legacy and subverted the rules of Italian art, turning it pop.