Germano Celant, the Art Critic, Dies at 79 of Covid-19

Germano Celant, an influential curator, critic and art historian who brought postwar Italian art to international prominence, died on Wednesday in Milan. He was 79.

The cause was complications of the new coronavirus. His death, at San Raffaele Hospital, was confirmed by the Fondazione Prada, the Milan art foundation that Mr. Celant collaborated with for more than two decades.

Mr. Celant at “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum,” a sprawling year-by-year study of the art of Fascist Italy that he organized at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2018. Credit...Ugo Dalla Porta/Fondazione Prada

In 1967, Mr. Celant (pronounced CHAY-lant) wrote a lasting page in art history when, as a 27-year-old curator in Genoa, he mounted an exhibition of five young Italian artists making provisional assemblages of humble materials, which he grouped under the term Arte Povera (“poor art”).

These artists, including Alghiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis and Luciano Fabro, bridled against the conventions of the Italian academies (and American Pop art), and made a virtue of simple everyday objects: melted wax, rusting iron, fallen leaves, ground coffee, even horses munching hay.

Energetic and urbane, with a mane of silver hair in vivid contrast with his usual all-black wardrobe, Mr. Celant championed this generation of artists throughout his 50-year career, presenting large exhibitions of Arte Povera at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.