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

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

Two more trips to the U.S. followed in 1982 and '84, and one to Japan in '86. Now nearing 70, the ailing artist continued his serial enterprises. The Autoritratti impertinenti (Impertinent Self-Portraits) of 1981 were a group of leering and occasionally vulgar photo self-portraits with collaged clothing, leaves and stickers. In 1986 he completed an album of 20 crucifixions loosely based on medieval prototypes, with his own mocking face atop the body of Christ. The title--Il sistema mi ha messo in croce (I Have Been Crucified by the System)--says it all. The last living-room exhibition, in 1987, consisted of seven postcards and stamps pairing rainbow-hued Arcimboldesque heads with the head of Cavellini executed in concentric chromatic bands. This little album was another amendatory gesture as Cavellini responded to his "exclusion" from Pontus Hulten's show of that year entitled "The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the 16th to the 20th Century." The decade closed with more reproductions of works by Fontana, Mondrian, Appel, Miro and others each transferred to canvas, painted over by Cavellini and recycled as stamps.

The near-monomaniacal focus of Cavellini's work offers fertile ground for postmodernist ruminations on appropriation, mechanical reproduction and the late capitalist marketplace, but it would be a mistake to make too much the prophet of him. For all his savage gnawing at the institutions of the art world, Cavellini was no deconstructionist. Unlike, say, Mike Bidlo's forgeries of 20th-century masterpieces, Cavellini's parodies left intact the autonomy and uniqueness of the artist, if not the art work. His cannibalizing of art history was not intended to kill the victim; on the contrary, it was his exclusion from the history of art by its official guardians, and not art history's preoccupation with the myth of the individual genius, which galled him. Tellingly, there is nothing to suggest that Cavellini ever made any critical distinction between art history and biography. His own efforts at writing "straight" art history, a survey of abstract art published in 1958 and a 1960 tribute to the painter Birolli, consist largely of reminiscences, diary entries and letters.[11] He reserved his purest scorn for Italian critics like Germano Celant, Achille Bonito Oliva and Tommaso Trini when he found them to be concerned with movements rather than individuals. Even the Brescian collector Feroldi was dismissed for never having shared the lives of the artists whose works he acquired. For Cavellini, art was nothing if not personal.

Before his death in November 1990 Cavellini created a final album of self-portraits. Confined to a hospital room, he sketched his ravaged face on over 50 collages pieced together from the glossy pages of popular monographs on the masters of art history. He carved out segments from the color reproductions along with snatches of the printed biographies. All the Maestri di Colori--Goya, Picasso, Mantegna, Kandinsky, Klee--submitted to his scissors. Each collage is annotated, as faithfully as a Constable cloud study, with the name of the Ospedale S. Orsola, the date, the time and the patient's room, camera 61. In one collage, he has drawn his gaunt head within the circular balustrade frescoed by Mantegna on the ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi. A slender upright fragment cut from an illustrated abstract painting is glued to the balustrade's rim to convert Mantegna's encircled sky into a hand mirror for the artist. Here was no bed-ridden Papa Matisse resorting to collage to celebrate the undying vitality of form. The effect is far more angry and harrowing, closer to the obsessive skull-like heads painted by the aging Picasso. At the very end, then, the self-portrait became both letter and diary, communication and remembrance. In a private Goetterdaemmerung engineered by the man who once called himself "the emperor of presumption," the whole of art history as image and text collapsed beneath the consumed and consuming face of Cavellini.