RIP Germano Celant – Art Historian, Critic, Champion of Art Povera
Germano Celant (1940-2020) ArtForum
Art or Sound, curated by Germano Celant
Germano Celant, the towering Italian critic, curator, and art historian whose wide-ranging writing, exhibition-making, and scholarship altered the trajectory of contemporary art and made him a leading voice in the field, has died in Milan at eighty years old due to complications from Covid-19. The author of hundreds of books, essays, and articles that coincided with as many large-scale shows, Celant is most closely affiliated with Arte Povera, a term he coined in 1967 for the association of avant-garde artists who made meaning from mundane materials and challenged art’s symbolic function, formal conventions, and commodity status in postwar Italian culture. (
