Dispatches from the jungle of art - Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, collector and collage artist

Art in America, April, 1993 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

An Italian collector-turned-conceptualist who called himself the "emperor of presumption," G.A. Cavellini waged a determined and frequently outlandish campaign to win a place in the annals of art history.

The biography of an artist is frequently written after his death, imperfectly and incompletely. Since I don't want any such biography to be written about me, I've decided to write my own.

--G.A. Cavellini (1914-1990)

The name Guglielmo Achille Cavellini is little known outside two autonomous and seemingly anomalous art-world circles.[1] To survivors and chroniclers of the postwar years in Italy, he is the merchant-collector of Brescia who gave sustained support to the new abstract art of the late 1940s and 1950s. The provenance "Brescia, Collezione Cavellini" has accompanied literally hundreds of paintings and drawings into public and private collections. But ask mail artists from Budapest to Vancouver whose letters, stamps and sketches fatten the fullest file in their home-grown archives, and the answer is likely to be: Cavellini's. His artist's books are well represented in the permanent holdings of New York's Franklin Furnace and in the archive on 20th-century art maintained by the Venice Biennale. In 1985 Cavellini even infiltrated the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities when it acquired Jean Brown's vast archive of artists' books, posters, correspondence and--that most oxymoronic of curatorial categories--collected ephemera.

In each of his roles, as a prosperous retailer, committed collector and late-blooming artist, Cavellini was entirely "self-made." Angered by the art establishment's indifference to his own creative activity, he responded by placing the subject of his life at the center of his work. This campaign of "self-historification" (autostoricizzazione), launched in 1971, took the form of books, published diaries, self-portraits and portraits commissioned from other artists, posters and stamps bearing his image, photomontages, documentary photos and videos, and concrete poetry based on the story of his life. The text of that story came from an adulatory but poker-faced "encyclopedia article" which Cavellini himself authored from the retrospective vantage of a 21st-century writer. He planned international centennial exhibitions of his work for the year 2014, authorized their organizers and fashioned postmarks and stickers to announce and commemorate the shows. It was all a brazen and wickedly knowing manipulation of art history in the service of reputation. In the mountain of documentary material he left behind, Cavellini planted enough sly exaggerations and outright falsehoods to stymie the most intrepid historian.[2] The manic thrust of this burlesque, the full weight of its fabulous excess, was brought to bear on the equation of biography with fame, a pairing which has been art history's legacy since the age of Vasari. As for history, Cavellini simply decided to make it up as he went along. Never was revenge against the system so sustained, or so funny.

Cavellini's accomplishments are supremely unlikely given the narrow horizons of a merchant's life in provincial Brescia. There, with his brother, he transformed the family business from a small dry-goods shop into a thriving department store. All but alone in the years right after the Second World War, he endorsed the new abstract art and used his limited means to collect emerging painters such as Giuseppe Santomaso, Giulio Turcato, Emilio Vedova and the slightly more established Renato Birolli. He bought on impulse, without advisors and usually directly from the artists. At the start he had little visual preparation for what would become an uncontrollable urge to collect. ("A disease. An incurable illness," he later called it.) By his own account, his knowledge of modern art had been limited to reproductions of Cezanne and van Gogh until he paid an epiphanic visit to the home of the Brescian collector Pietro Feroldi, who owned works by Modigliani, de Chirico, Carra, Matisse, Morandi, Rousseau, Derain, Sisley and Cezanne.[3] He first encountered Vedova and Santomaso in Venice in 1946. His growing friendship with Birolli led to a 1947 trip to Paris, where his art education truly began.

More trips followed to galleries and museums in Rome, Milan, Turin and London. Cavellini was drawn to works by younger Italians (Burri, Dova, Brunori, Aimone) and by artists outside Italy. In short order he assembled a panoramic sampling of European developments from new School of Paris figures (Bazaine, Esteve, Gischia, Hartung, Pignon, Singier, Tal Coat, Vieira da Silva, Poliakoff) to Dubuffet, Brauner, Jorn, Baumeister, Matta, Dominguez and others. More than two dozen works from his holdings were lent to the first Documenta in 1955. By 1957 he possessed the finest comprehensive collection of postwar European art in public or private hands in Italy. Yet in his native Brescia there was little communal enthusiasm for Cavellini's activities. Neighbors looked with suspicion at his consorting with artists, many of whom were Communist. A long-term loan exhibition (1964-72) never matured into an outright gift of the collection to the city which seemed indifferent to its worth.