Art History Associate Professor Tenley Bick published Michelangelo Pistoletto: Figuration and Cultural Politics this spring with Yale University Press. Examining the Italian artist’s career-long exploration of the human figure, the book offers new perspectives on the history of postwar and contemporary art.
Dr. Bick’s book is the first English-language scholarly monograph on the artist and first monograph in any language since the mid-1980s. With 140 illustrations (81 in color), the book features many previously unseen images and works of art, including early drawings and design work. Supported by years of archival research in Italy and the United States, and by Dr. Bick’s many interviews with the artist, the book also includes new exhibition histories and oral histories that will be of interest to scholars, students, and mainstream audiences. Support was provided by Florida State University and the New Foundation for Art History.
Widely regarded as the central protagonist of Arte Povera, the twentieth-century Italian art movement characterized by its rejection of representation, Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933) is known for his movement-defining Minus Objects and iconic mirror paintings, as well as his recent social practice addressing migration and climate change. What has unified Pistoletto’s work over six decades, Bick argues, is his persistent, and seemingly paradoxical, investigation of figuration, most often as a system of representation of the human body.
Michelangelo Pistoletto: Figuration and Cultural Politics traces the figure as a throughline across the artist’s painting, photomontage, sculpture, installation, performance, and social practice, from the formative years of his career in the 1950s to today. It situates Pistoletto’s exploration of the figure within the culture and leftist politics of Italy and beyond in the 1960s and 1970s to examine why, in an era that was defined, for many, by the end of humanism, Pistoletto held on to the figure as an embattled platform for rethinking art and the world.
Praise for Michelangelo Pistoletto: Figuration and Cultural Politics
“Thoroughly researched, Tenley Bick’s deep engagement with Michelangelo Pistoletto represents a significant contribution to art history and offers a wide perspective on Italian cultural and socio-political history.”—Elizabeth Mangini, author of Seeing Through Closed Eyelids: Giuseppe Penone and the Nature of Sculpture
“Michelangelo Pistoletto offers a comprehensive account of a towering figure of Arte Povera and twentieth-century Italian art, as well as his wide influence, while also providing careful new readings of the art itself.”—Jaleh Mansoor, author of Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia
The book will be released on March 18, 2025; learn more and pre-order here.