A Magazzino Museum lecture by Leslie Cozzi on the star couple of Arte Povera Marisa and Mario Merz which continued the series reminded me of the pow I got on seeing her retrospective at the Met Breuer, The Sky is a Great Space and again at the Hammer in 2017.

Here was a woman with a young child and a husband who was making art and willing to take over her own apartment with an installation of The Living Sculpture--Notice Me!—but was unwilling to engage with a public dialogue until decades later. This was complicated. In between the hours of feeding and caring, she made these incredible, large sculptures out of aluminum sheeting. They are thrilling. She also made little knit scarpette-booties-and other knitted sculptures that so reminded me of Ruth Asawa's work. Those women made lemonade....mothers everywhere take heart!

To round out the Magazzino lecture please take a look at a talk from that Met show from pre-Zoom days with the beloved, late, Germano Celant on the panel who knew the Merz family very well. It's so moving to hear him talk about this couple.

What may have slipped under the radar is a splendid four part lecture series, Arte Povera: Art of Collaboration, from Magazzino Italian Art Museum just up the Hudson River from NYC which continues to provide fascinating behind-the-scenes scholarship about known and lesser known Italian artists, writers and thinkers.

The first quiet effort by Lucia Re, a professor at UCLA who made me want to go back to school, focused on creative couples (mostly Italian) who fed off each others work (not just Arte Povera) I did not know of some of these enduring partnerships, many of which did not follow the mold of mentor and muse, but where the two lovers seem equally obsessed and reverent.

Included were Eleanor Duse and Gabriele D'Annunzio, Marta Abba and Luigi Pirandello, Benedetta and Marinetti, Antonietta Raphael and Mario Mafai, Lucia and William Demby, among others. Re makes sure to note that some of these women have been more obscured.

Pictured are Futurists Benedetta and Marinetti. More on them and on the Magazzino series in coming days.