Salvatore Meo Assemblages 1948 1978

Reconstruction: The Art of Salvatore MeoPavel Zoubok Gallery, New YorkNovember 13 – December 20, 2008

Salvatore Meo: Assemblages 1948 –1976

Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, PhiladelphiaOctober 15 – November 26, 2008

These joint exhibitions are the first major exhibi-tions in over three decades. We would like to cite the following for their support in this project:

Fondazione Salvatore MeoItalian Cultural Institute, New YorkJudith Rothschild FoundationPavel Zoubok Gallery, New YorkSala 1, Rome

We would like to thank Mary Angela Schroth for bringing Meo to our attention and Antonella Pisilli for her extensive research into archival materials in Rome. We would especially like to thank Elizabeth Slater, Senior Vice President of the Judith Rothschild Foundation. Without their funding, we would not have been able to produce this catalog, the most extensive survey since 1971 and the only one to reproduce works in color, high-lighting the artist’s sophisticated sensibilities. This catalog will enable another generation to learn about and rediscover the work in keeping with the mission of the foundation.

Our special thanks go to the artist’s sister Rita Meo and to Priscilla Burke, friend of the artist and instrumental, together with Antonella Pisilli, in the founding of the Meo Foundation; to our partners in crime Pavel Zoubok, Maggie Seidel and Steve Weintraub of Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York for their help, sympathetic eyes, guidance and ease in facilitating the loans and for having a gallery with the courage to promote artists not because of name recognition but because of aesthetic and historic merit. Special thanks to Jeffrey and Tondra Lynford. In Philadelphia, Edward Waisnis, Hannah Hefner, and Matthew Caulfield at The University of the Arts should be praised for their expertise honed by years of experience. The exhibition in Philadelphia looked quite wondrous because of their help.

Design: Hyland / Ocko AssociatesPhotography of artworks: Mario Carbone, Rome; Bill Orcutt, New York Bibliographic research: Antonella Pisilli, Mary Angela Schroth, Sid Sachs

Front cover: Burnt Paper, 1973, 14 x 17 inches

Inside front cover: La mia vita, 1951–2006, installation view

of the artist’s studio, Rome 2006. Photo: Mario Carbone

Inside back cover: Stairwell installation in the artist’s studio, Rome

2006. Photo: Mario Carbone

Back cover: The artist in a street “assemblage” on the outskirts of

Rome, 1971. Photo: Claudio Abate Portrait of the artist, 1971. Photo: Achille Bonito Oliva

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Hidden from history for some sixty years, the work of artist Salvatore Meo (1914–2004) represents an important evolution in the narrative of collage and assemblage during the post-war period. A native Philadelphian of Italian origin, Meo studied art at the Tyler School of Art and the Barnes Foundation. He later served in the United States military in Hawaii, where he was introduced to the artists of the so-called “Pacific School” (Calcagno, Deshaises and Reiss), whose poetics drew inspiration from the visual culture of the islands and of Asia. A Tiffany Foundation grant in 1949 allowed the 35-year-old artist to study in Italy. Two years later Meo made the capital city of Rome his home and began to exhibit there, beginning with a solo exhibition at the Vetrina di Chiurazzi gallery. His works from that period were abstract, ranging from monotypes to watercolors to assemblages of found materials. The early 1950s was an exciting and fertile period for contemporary art in Italy, with artists such as Alberto Burri, Riccardo Capogrossi, Lucio Fontana and Ettore Colla changing the scene. This was the period of the Gruppo Origine and the post-Futurist review Arti Visive, which introduced Italian audiences to this new generation of artists, such as Alberto Burri, Piero Dorazio, Enrico Prampolini, Achille Perilli and others. The sixth installment of Arti Visive

marked the introduction of Emilio Villa as Editor-in-Chief and Salvatore Meo as arts editor for the United States. Meo played an active role in the promotion of his Italian colleagues by introducing their work to American audiences through exhibitions in Philadelphia and New York, where he kept a second studio.

An iconoclast and trailblazer from the start, Meo created mixed media constructions that reflected a particular interest in drawing and in the visceral gestures of abstract painting. To say that his collages and assemblages draw upon the most humble of materials would be an understate-ment. His primary sources were broken and/or discarded objects from the street – dresser drawers, old toys, scraps of clothes, torn packages, shoes heels, bones, string, rusted wire and the like. Meo’s work does not concern itself with the alchemical transformation of the common-place, the search for hidden “jewels,” or the Surrealist double-entendre of the objet trouve. It is, rather, a poetic exploration of abandon-ment, decay and destruction. In contrast to his Pop and Nouveau Realist contemporaries such as Robert Rauschenberg and Mimmo Rotella, Meo rejected the seductive imagery of the commercial world. His works reverberate with a melancholy and sense of alienation that reflect not only his estrangement from the cultural mainstream, but his deep empathy for the

dispossessed, be they objects or people. In this sense, his work shares a greater affinity with contemporary figures such as Jannis Kounellis and David Hammons.

Throughout his early career, Meo’s presence on the Italian scene garnered serious attention from leading critics and artists of the avant-garde. He exhibited widely during the 1950s, in the company of contemporaries such as Burri, Capogrossi, Dorazio, Matta, Prampolini, Rotella and others. While Meo’s pioneering use of found materials no doubt eluded Italian audiences, his influence on the artists of the period and those that followed was almost universally acknowl-edged by progressive critics. The curious refusal of Meo’s work by the jury of the 1956 Venice Biennale was reversed by his inclusion in the Biennale of 1958. In 1961, Meo was included in William C. Seitz’s seminal exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition was the first major museum survey of the medium and included important works by modern and contemporary masters including Picasso, Schwitters, Rauschen-berg, Bontecou, Rotella and many others. Simultaneously, the Charles Egan Gallery presented a solo exhibition of Meo’s assemblages from 1946–1961, garnering favorable reviews in The New York Times and Art News. A few years later noted Italian critics Emilio Villa and

Blue Box, 1976, 14.75 x 8.25 x 4.125 inches (exterior)

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Edith Schloss, which included major figures such as Cy Twombly and Sol Lewitt.

The artist’s death in 2004 gave birth to the Fondazione Salvatore Meo, whose mission is to preserve and promote Meo’s rich artistic legacy. His studio on the storied Vicolo Scavolino (directly behind the Trevi fountain) has been preserved in its original state and is home to hundreds of works spanning some five decades. The present day marks a new beginning for the art of Salvatore Meo, with two major exhibitions in the fall of 2008 at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York and at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts in Philadelphia, superbly curated by Prof. Sid Sachs who has also super-vised this publication, the first monograph since 1971 on the artist and funded by the Judith Rothschild Foundation.

We are also indebted to Rita Meo, the artist’s sister and to the Meo Foundation’s Antonella Pisilli together with Renato Miracco of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New York. A final note of thanks to Tondra and Jeffrey Lynford for their ongoing support for this unusual project.

Mary Angela Schroth Fondazione Salvatore Meo Pavel Zoubok Pavel Zoubok Gallery New York

Mario Diacono presented Salvatore Meo at the Metropolitan Gallery in Rome. Despite their best efforts, his work remained outside of the mainstream, a condition perpetuated by the artist’s life-long ambivalence toward the commercial art world.

Meo was without question an “artist’s artist” and equally important a “critic’s artist,” but what is clear is that his impact was deeply felt. The catalogue from his 1971 exhibition at the CIAK gallery in Rome documents the depth of his influence and includes writings by key figures from the Italian art world including Achille Bonito Oliva, Mario Diacono, Milton Gendel, Emilio Villa and Cesare Vivaldi. The occasion drew particular attention to Meo’s largely unacknowledged role as a forebear of Arte Povera, a fact substantiated by his much earlier work with humble, or poor, materials. A decade later Sergio Lombardo, artist and director of the artist-run Jartrakor in Rome, organized another survey of Meo’s work entitled “Infor-male Assemblages of the 1950s: Documents on the Decadence of Neo-Dada and the Poetics of Debris).” Meo’s last solo exhibition in New York was held at the Jankovsky Gallery in Soho in 1975, again to favorable reviews. In 1988 his work was included in an important group exhibition entitled “Roman Americans” at Sala 1 in Rome, curated by artist and critic Blue Box, 1976, 14.75 x 16 x 8 inches (interior)

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Some artists are not destined for Great Things. These include anonymous outsiders, makers of haiku and writers with hushed sotto voce voices. Think of the small rag collages of Anne Ryan, the everyday event poetry of Frank O’Hara.

Salvatore Meo was one of these quiet masters. Except for his early color printmaking and painting and some wild colorful paintings towards the end of his life, the majority of his oeuvre consisted of assemblages of found objects; often drab, worn and wan. As such, they predate Neo Dada of the nineteen fifties and the later activities of the Arte Povera movement. Surprisingly Meo has not received his due.

Salvatore Samuel Meo was born at 1015 Morris Street in Philadelphia on September 15, 1914. His Italian immigrant family lived in South Philly.1 He was one of eleven siblings. His older brother Frank also became an artist, as did his brother Giuseppe (Joseph) and his sister Rita, a window designer in New York. His cousin Charles Gangemi became a composer; another cousin Seraphina Gangemi Smith was a dancer with Martha Graham and Hanya Holm. In his humble surroundings, he first became interested in music and art; he listened to jazz and met actors. As a small child he played with old clothes, wood fragments, corks, combs and tin cans making concerts at home.

How Meo became involved in avant-garde practices from such beginnings is remarkable. He studied in 1935–1936 at The Pennsylvania Museum School of Indus-trial Art (now The University of the Arts).2 This coincided with Earl Horter’s tenure at the school (1933–1939) and also the end of Alexey Brodovitch’s influential classes (1931–1940).3 How Meo created his advanced works without strong artistic models in America speaks of his subtle genius.

During this era the Philadelphia Museum of Art had little in the way of a modernist direction as the Arensberg and Gallatin Collections had yet to be acquired. In Philadelphia, a little contemporary work could be seen. For example, Arshile Gorky’s first one-person show was held at the Mellon Gallery on Eighteenth Street in 1934 and a drawing show at Suburban Station the next year.4 Surrealism was in the air. At the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art Alexey Brodovitch students, such as Irving Penn, dressed in costumes reminiscent of manikins from the 1938 Exposition

Salvatore Meo Assemblages 1948 1978

1 The Meo family had fourteen children; three of the children died in their youth. The singer Mario Lanza (1921–1959) and cult photographer Louis Faurer (1916–2001) also came from this neighborhood of Philadelphia.

2 Letter dated June 3, 1936 from Edward Warwick, Principal of the School, Meo Foundation papers, Rome.

3 For Horter’s modernist collection and impact see Innes H. Shoemaker, Mad for Modernism: Earl Horter and His Collection, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999 and Brodovitch see Virginia Smith “Launching Brodovitch,” in R. Roger Remington, The Enduring Legacy of Alexey Brodovitch, New York: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 1994. For another student at the Pennsylvania Museum School in the 1930s see Sid Sachs, Matthew Leibowitz, Modernist, Philadelphia: The Univer-sity of the Arts, 2007.

4 Hayden Herrera, Arshile Gorky, His Life and Work, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Departure from Lisbon, 1951, 20 inches diameter x 4.5 inches

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Internationale du Surrealisme.5 Concurrently, the beginning of World War II and the great invasion of European intelligentsia to America, catalyzed a paradigm shift and a greater awareness of automatism and radical politics. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts also held annual exhibitions with a variety of aesthetics, a tradition that ran from 1807 to 1968.6 The dealer Robert Carlin exhibited Horace Pippin whose naïve oils and pyrographic landscapes were purchased by Albert Barnes. The Print Club and The Art Alliance provided other resources in the Rittenhouse Square area. In 1937 for example, some of the Guggenheim Collection was exhibited at The Art Alliance, to negative criticism from the press.7 Josef Albers exhibited several times at The Art Alli-ance (1939, 1947, 1952, 1954 and 1966) as did Jimmy Ernst (1948), Hans Hofmann (1956), and Milton Avery (1959).

By way of comparison, the situation was not radically different in New York. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, was newly established in 1926 with its first purchase being an Edward Hopper landscape. As late as 1948 that collection con-tained only two Duchamp works, neither of which dealt with the found object. MoMA also had three small flat Schwitters Merzbild, and an atypical Arthur Dove collage.8

In 1939, Meo had his first one-person exhibition at the Gimbels Broth-ers Gallery. The department store venue had some sophistication; it was run by Philip Boyer after closing his New York Mellon Gallery in 1936. According to an Archives of American Art interview with painter Emlen Etting, Franklin Watkins’s wife was a Gimbel and so Meo may have been introduced through Watkins, a teacher at The Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art from 1934 to 1938.9 Today with the plethora of commercial opportunities, we view department store galleries as oddities or commercial aberrations. That was not the case in the 1940s. Until the establishment of the post war American market there were less opportunities to exhibit but also less artists. Sam Kootz for example showed Mark Rothko’s early paintings in a January 1942 exhibition at Macy’s.10

After duty in the South Pacific during the Second World War, Meo re-turned home to Philadelphia. He attended Tyler School of Art from 1946 to 1949 and became a devoted printmaker, which he regarded as a continuation of painting. Meo

was involved with and influenced by Stanley Hayter’s studio. 11 According to Meo, he was responsible for shows of Hayter, Adja Yunkers, Seong Moy, and Gabor Peterdi at the Philadelphia Print Club. He also began to produce assemblages; the titles of several early works pay homage to Tyler School of Art.

From 1948 to 1950, Meo studied at the Barnes Foundation in subur-ban Merion, just outside the city. That same year he also applied unsuccessfully for a Guggenheim grant to continue his experimental printmaking and was in a national show at the Art Alliance. The Barnes Foundation has an idiosyncratic installation. At the Barnes, paintings, sculpture and decorative arts are arranged salon style in set com-positions referencing intrinsic forms within each artwork. Thus a specific shape in a Cezanne canvas may be echoed by the contour of a hand-wrought Pennsylvania Dutch iron hinge, a lock, or in one instance, a seashore trinket created out of a crab craw. Art became another material configuration related by appearance. A similar thing happened within Meo’s work and studio installation. This is not content, nor iconography, but the poetry of formalism. As in Arp or Schwitters, the forms and the fact that they remained detritus was part of Meo’s message. The individual objects coalesce compositionally on a macro level and within the studio as a totality; similar to Schwitters’s Merzbau (1923-1943) in Hannover. The Meo atelier was a slowly evolving situation. Photographs taken three decades apart show many of the same works installed in situ with only subtle relational modifications.

Immediately after Tyler School of Art, Meo had a one-person exhibition at Philadelphia’s Dubin Gallery.12 Hank Dubin, an ex police officer, presented local artists such as Ben Kamihira (1952) and Paul Keene (1952), as well as William Sharf (1950) and some of Kenneth Noland’s earliest exhibitions (1951, 1953). Years later Sam Feinstein, an Abstract Expressionist follower of Hans Hofmann with ties to The University of the Arts had an exhibition (1957).

It is difficult today to realize how radically prescient Meo’s early works would have been in the late 1940s. His paintings and prints exhibit a critical knowledge of Surrealism, the twittery markings of Wols (whose watercolors are at the Barnes) and the Futurists. One can assume some of this came from Hayter’s influence. There is a

5 Virginia Smith, The Enduring Legacy of Alexey Brodovitch. Included are Mary Faulconer photographs of students in Brodovitch’s class presenting a surrealist version of Romeo and Juliet entitled Shakespeare, Paranoically Speaking, p. 9 and Irving Penn as Hamlet posing with an anatomy skeleton, p. 10.

6 Meo later showed in the 1954 PAFA annual with a work entitled Italia, No. 6. Meo was juried by Georg Harding, Charles Sheeler, and Vaclav Vytlacil. That year Hans Hofmann won the J. Henry Schiedt Prize and John Marin the purchase prize for The Jersey Hills.

7 Dore Ashton, The New York School; A Cultural Reckoning, New York: The Viking Press, 1972, p. 111.

8 Alfred Barr, editor, Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1948. Marcel Duchamp, The Passage of the Virgin to the Bride (1912) and Monte Carlo Shares (1924). Arthur Dove, Grandmother (1925). Kurt Schwitters, Merz: Santa Claus (1922) and two others.

9 Less known today, Watkins had won the First Prize in the 1931 Carnegie International and had major catalogs published by The Museum of Modern Art (1950) and The Philadelphia Museum of Art (1964).

10 At the time, Clement Greenberg thought there were only 50 artists of note in the United States. Later, between 1962 and 1971 Vincent Price arranged exhibitions in several Sears Department stores, ultimately selling over 50,000 works of art. Local patron Lessing Rosenwald’s (the owner of Sears) print collection makes up the core collection of the National Gallery of Art. The “Rosenwald” prefix of the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery is in honor of Lessing’s wife, Edith, who was a sponsor of the gallery’s program.

11 Hayter arrived in New York in 1940 and began immediately to teach at the New School until 1945. In 1944, Atelier 17’s work with viscosity and simultaneous color printing was shown at MoMA and had a great impact on experimental printmaking in America.

12 The post-graduation exhibition took place in June 1950. The location of the gallery was at 1319 Irving Street.

Boats, 1962, 14.5 x 40 x 2 inches

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similarity in Meo’s automatic paintings such as Adventurous Pacific (1947) with works by the surrealist Andre Racz.13 The automatism of Philadelphian Arthur B. Carles’s late works and Andre Masson’s paintings may also give a clue to Meo’s sources.14

Meo’s use of found objects, a staple of Dada readymades and Surrealist objet trouvé, would not have the primacy now held in the artworld. It is doubtful that this came merely from one source. Meo would, of course, been informed by Julien Levy’s Gallery, though Levy’s Surrealist sensibility was lyrical. Meo’s works are more abject than the Surrealism published in either VVV or View magazines. His objects are poetic, dusty and quotidian; going beyond simple automatism into using materials as line, mass and form.

In 1945, Dada was a mere memory and Duchamp, surprisingly, was known more as a designer of exhibitions, such as the First Papers of Surrealism in New York (1942), than as a maker of objects. No one except William Copley knew Duchamp was even working and secretly assembling his last masterpiece Étant donnés (1946–1966). His few sculptures of this period were enigmatic and slightly sexual. It was not until the 1951 publication of Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets that the concept of the found object became popular with artists. In 1955, the Arensberg Collection with its wealth of Duchamps was installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The first Duchamp monograph was published in 1959.15 Remarkably, Duchamp’s only lifetime retrospective was organized by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1966.

The Gallatin Collection came to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1952 and with it a small but wonderful assemblage, Merz Construction (1921) by Kurt Schwit-ters. This particular construction had previously been presented in both the 1936 exhi-bition and catalog for Cubism and Modern Art at the Museum of Modern Art and also the catalog for The Museum of Living Art at New York University the same year.16 A.E. Gallatin was a Philadelphia native and some of his collection was often lent to the Philadelphia museum during summers before the entire donation was made perma-nent. Meo could very possibly have seen Merz Construction and absorbed its message consciously or unconsciously. Merz Construction shares some of Meo’s later aesthetic choices and materials including wire mesh, old wood, anonymous detritus. The Schwit-

13 Jeffrey Wechsler, Surrealism and American Art 1931–1947, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Gallery, 1977. Racz was Hayter’s assistant at the New School for two years and had paintings shown at the Whitney Museum in 1945. Jackson Pollock also admired Racz’s paintings according to Wechsler. fn 110, p. 65.

14 Matisse heavily influenced Carles in his early years; his later paintings exhibit a fluid automatism akin to Abstract Expressionism. Masson’s Battle of the Fishes (1927) in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, has passages of glue and sand as does Meo’s Appian Way (April, 1954).

15 Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, New York: Grove Press 1959.

16 The work had been on view at 100 Washington Square East from 1933 on. See Museum of Living Art, A.E. Gallatin Collection, New York: Grady Press 1936.

From Tyler School of Fine Art, Philadelphia, 1948

Appian Way, Rome, 1952, 23.625 x 15.25 inches

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ters is structured around a post-Cubistic frame whereas Meo’s work is more random. Merely referencing Schwitters as an influence may exaggerate his importance to Meo, as Schwitters was less well known during this period. The Gallatin Collection also has a small pertinent Miro assemblage.17

An artist working with trash in the post war period would most probably been guided by personal, poetic and perhaps political issues. Moreover, Meo’s insistence on scratchy gestural markings clearly relate to Abstract Expressionism though removed from The Club, its New York contacts and connections.

A Tiffany Foundation grant in 1949 enabled Meo to visit Italy extensively. He was also helped by funds from his two brothers. After his mother’s death, Meo per-manently settled in Rome and rarely left except to visit his remaining family in New York and Philadelphia. As an Italian American, Meo probably felt right at home. He established his studio on via delle Quatre Fontane where his colleague Mimmo Rotella had done the same five years before.

Rome was one of the first urban European centers to be Americanized. Surprisingly even during the war and as early as 1942, Italy turned towards America and its back on indigenous and French culture. Everything Yankee was considered univer-sally progressive with products from comics to advertising, cinema and music consid-ered very modern. After WWII and during the Cold War, America used the Church to combat Communism.18

At this point, Meo quickly becomes part of the Italian art scene. He shared material sensibilities with many of the Italian post war painters and sculptors. You can see perhaps the influence of Lucio Fontana on Meo when he scarifies a plane with an array of broken bottle glass or seizes a pierced piece of rusty iron in a way that mimics Fontana’s Concetto spaziale. Although he didn’t use burlap rags like Burri, torn posters like Rotella’s decollages (first shown in Rome in the spring of 1955), or forged metal like Colla, his use of the poetry of aniconic forms and informal raw materials allied him to this generation and they became friends. They all let mute matter speak for itself, in effect framing reality.

17 John Elderfield’s catalogue for the Kurt Schwitters retrospective at MoMA does not cite any major American exhibition of his work during Meo’s formative years. John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, New York: Thames and Hudson 1985. Miro’s Object (1932), composed of a painted stone, shell, wood with nails, and a broken mirror, is also somewhat reminiscent of Meo’s works.

18 Germano Celant, Mimmo Rotella, Milan: Skira, 2007, p. 14.

America USA, New York City, 1955, 10.5 x 11.75 x 1.5 inches

After Tyler School, Philadelphia, 1950, 12 x 10 x 6 inches

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In 1952, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly met Meo in Italy. They were introduced by William McCord, another American artist, and spent several days with him. At that time they were novices coming from Black Mountain College and still under the spell of John Cage. The implication that Rauschenberg took from Meo’s example might contain a little bit of artistic jealousy/hubris on Meo’s part. However, it should honestly be noted that both Rauschenberg and Twombly became more inter-ested in the quotidian by the end of their European sojourn and that Rauschenberg’s unsuccessful one-person exhibition in Rome19 had attributes of both fetishism but also Meo’s intimate assemblages. Moreover, historians often cite Rauschenberg’s debt to Burri, another comrade within Meo’s circle, so it is not completely outlandish to note that there could be an element of truth to Meo’s claim.

Returning after two years in Italy, Meo brought back over 600 drawings and paintings. In December 1953, Salvatore Meo and his brother Joseph arranged for an Italian Contemporary Art show including his own work and his Italian compatriots at the Creative Gallery on 1903 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. This exhibition includ-ed works of Afro (Basaldella), Giacomo Balla, Alberto Burri, Corrado Cagli, Vincent D’Agostino, Antonio Marasco, Pericle Fazzini, DeTomi, and Marchegiani. In addition to these artists listed on the card, the anonymous review published in the Sunday Bul-letin cited others such as Mirko Basaldella and Omiccioli. Hence Meo was influential in promoting both major Futurist (Balla) and Art Informel (Burri) artists along with other Italian contemporaries to the United States.20

Bandiera (“flag”), 1953 is ostensibly a modified found washboard that eerily forecasts Oldenburg’s Heal Flag of 1960 and also predates Johns’s use of the motif. Meo revisited the American flag in My America (1957–1973), which uses two American Flags; a forty-eight star and a fifty-star flag and flags of other countries in Map (1964), for example, throughout his career. These miniature banners are in keeping with the small scale of Meo’s assemblages. As the flags are often child’s toys, faded or ragged, they often blend into the backgrounds as opposed the large iconic blatancy of Johns’s work. They speak of no-country, of a universal state of displacement.

19 Rauschenberg had his first European one-person exhibition “Scatole e feticci personali” at the Galleria dell ‘Obelisco in Rome, started in 1949 by Gasparo del Corso and Irene Brin. It was critically unsuccessful and Rauschenberg destroyed most of this work by throwing it in the river.

20 Review by an unsigned author (possibly Walter E. Baum), Philadelphia: The Evening Bulletin, December 27, 1953, Metropolitan section MB. Exhibiting Burri in 1953 was the equivalent of showing DeKooning in Rome at the same time. According to Philadelphia art dealer John Ollman, Janet Fleisher knew Afro during this period. Afro was named the best Italian artist in the 1956 Venice Biennale. Mirko Basaldella was Afro’s brother. Meo actually traded or purchased works by Burri, Afro and others though unfortunately the works were later destroyed in a studio fire. It is important that this gallery be noted, as it adds to the history of advanced art in Philadelphia and especially the important cultural presence of the Italian community. For example, the Festival of Italy at the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum was the largest celebration of the centenary of Italian unification in 1961. Nine years later, the Civic Center Museum presented another major Italian exhibition. Italy two: art around ’70 featured the works of fifty two arte povera and nascent transavanteguardia artists including Gainfranco Baruchello, Pier Paolo Calzolari, the first works of Francesco Clemente – then 21 years old – ever shown, Gino DeDominicis, Lucio Fabro, Laura Grisi, Jannis Kounellis, Ketty La Rocca, Mario and Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Michelangelo Pistolleto, and ErnestoTatafiore.

Capricon, New York City, 1976, 10 x 13.75 x 3 inches

Map, c. 1964, 35 x 35 inches

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Meo constructed pictorial vectors like a painter. Lines of string and en-tanglements of wire function as brushstrokes, bottoms of broken baskets function as nimbi, old crates frame pictures like open Cornell boxes or sections of Nevelson’s walls. Then there are the miniature totemic sculptures where stones, bones, parts of dolls and toy cowboys proudly defer gravity and resurrect themselves from the graves of quotidian dustbins. Other assemblages group debris into metaphysical unreal cities like Morandi’s bottles. A less skilled eye would have kicked these objects to the curb, would have lavishly slathered these works with paint, electrifying them with color or unifying them in a blanket of hue. (Think here of Louise Nevelson and Cy Twombly). Meo’s objects retain their autonomous power. His palette was the local color of stuff: the ferric blood of rust, the pallor of weathered wood, the chromatic timbre of old toys. The shocking authority of “neo” is barely there as he acquiesces the simple songs of the things themselves.

A bricoleur, as such, makes do with what he finds. Lapis and gold are not often found on the street; these are easy pleasures that any bourgeois plutocrat could afford. Meo took the harder route. He collected seeds and plowed a seemingly fallow field. Flowers bloomed, grains harvested and milled, bread broken. Bread can be a kind of sharing, a communion more filling than the flash of gems. There is a pleasure from bread that comes from spiritual fulfillment.

Like Francis Ponge, who wrote an entire paean on the subject of meager soap when it became a rare commodity during wartime rationing, Meo used and re-cycled what he found in the streets in a process of aesthetic scavenging.21 His humble objects are both the things themselves and metonymically the words in a poem, a poem displayed against backdrops of found boards. They are malerisch action paintings whose process is like that of a collector of odd abject wunderkammer.

Meo’s fields are usually framed, not artistically gilded, but, in keeping with his humble choices, encased by other objects like dresser drawers. This containment as such reminds one of Cornell and Nevelson boxes. Yet with these creators, the product is aestheticized, made art-like, holy. With Meo, as with few others from his period, the works remain stuff, matter seen anew, not straining for some extraneous meaning (say

21 In Why Read the Classics? Italo Calvino described Ponge’s method and purpose: “Taking the most humble object, the most everyday action, and trying to consider it afresh, abandoning every habit of perception, and describing it without any verbal mechanism that has been worn by use. And all this, not for some reason extraneous to the fact in itself (for, say, symbolism, ideology or aesthetics), but solely in order to reestablish a relationship with things as things.”

Hands Upward, 1954–73, 15 x 11 x 10.75 inches

Fragile, 1962, 15 x 11.4 x 8.25 inches

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symbolism, ideology or the like) but from the establishment of a novel relationship to reality, “das Ding an sich” revisited. It is quite easy to see why so many Italian writers have mentioned Meo as a precursor to Arte Povera. Perhaps as an American, even an expatriated one, it is easier to connect his work to the California Beats assemblagists such as Bruce Conner and George Herms and also the neglected work of Boris Lurie, Seymour Krim, and Sam Goodman of the No! Art Group in New York. In contempo-rary terms, David Hammons has been very sympathetic to Meo’s works.

In 1961 Meo was selected by curator William Seitz to participate in The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art. Meo was represented by two works, Speranza (1951) and Totem (1961). In the catalog both works were credited to Charles Egan Gallery where he was having a concurrent exhibition.22 Ironically and unfortu-nately for Meo, The Art of Assemblage ostensibly stopped interest in assemblage for years, for the newly emerging and cleaner look of Pop and Minimalism seemed the have more immediacy. This aesthetic shift and the fact that Meo’s work was not illustrated in the catalog (though noted in the checklist) further hurt his standing. Critic Lawrence Campbell remarked that Meo’s work was too subtle and discrete to stand up to louder work while proclaiming him an old master with a “Ryder darkness.”23

In 1963, Meo showed at Galleria George Lester in Rome. As a gallerist Lester made adventuresome choices; he had exhibited Robert Smithson, for example, two years prior to Meo and Jack Levine and Nathan Oliveira the year after. Still for all the interest over the years both by artists and galleries, Meo seemed to resist selling and its commercial demands. When he lost the studio he had in New York, Meo simply piled all his work unceremoniously in a storage unit. In Rome, he continued to accu-mulate and slowly modify his arrangements.

For the cognoscenti in Italy, he was considered a precursor to Arte Povera. In 1971, for example, Bruno Corà and Bonito Oliva assembled Meo’s largest exhibition at Galleria Ciak in Rome, which produced his only monograph Salvatore Meo (assem-blages e disegni) 1945–1971. Simply printed in black and white, the catalog documents works from the early prints done in Philadelphia to his largest installation now in the Meo Foundation in Rome.

In 1980, Meo had his last show in New York. The catalog contains one of his only published statements:

Adventurously so, I accumulate then select and eliminate through a total inner experience, lyrically putting together objects and things to make images. Not making images into an object.

Humble everyday things are words and sentences in which I compose my poems.24

Succinctly then, Meo sums up his praxis not that differently than his friend Alberto Burri’s explanation of his own work,25 except that Meo allows for a more ex-pressive poetry of things. His is a balancing act that teeters on the brink of nothingness, no aesthetic, and muteness.

The next year, Jannis Kounellis recommended Meo for an exhibition at Jankator Gallery run by Sergio Lombardi. Meo was recognized by the artists and critics of Italy but rarely the collectors. Toward the end of his life he was surviving on a total of $571.40 from Veterans Administration disability plus Social Security plus an Italian pension.26 Trash may have been his original artistic material but also possibly now all that he could afford as a material. In his notes he keeps thinking he should get grants (“I was never more sure of my work now than ever. We must be helped – maybe its our moment”)27 but to no avail.

Meo died in 2004 at the age of ninety. A foundation was established in Rome to keep his studio open and disseminate information on his work to a new public. We are grateful to Mary Angela Schroth of the Salvatore Meo Foundation, The University of the Arts, Pavel Zoubok of his eponymous gallery in New York, and the Judith Rothschild Foundation for allowing us to bring this work to a new generation.

Sid Sachs, 2008

22 “Speranza” (Italian for “Hope”) was found in storage in New York and is being shown in Philadelphia; “Totem” is in the collection of the Meo Foundation in Rome. Works in the Egan Gallery, a major Abstract Expressionist venue, were dated from 1941 to 1961.

23 Lawrence Campbell, Art News, November 1961, p. 32.

24 Victoria Oscarsson, New York: Landmark Gallery, The Language of Symbols, March 29 – April 17, 1980 (Robert Beauchamp, Audrey Flack, Mary Frank, Buffie Johnson, Marisol, Salvatore Meo, Daphne Mumford), unpaginated.

25 “Form and Space! Form and Space! The end. There is nothing else. Form and Space!” as quoted in Jamey Hamilton “Making Art Matter: Alberto Burri’s Sochi” October 124, Spring 2008 Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, p. 31.

26 Application for a 1981 Guggenheim grant Meo papers, Rome.

27 Letter August 28, 1981 in Meo Foundation files.

The Red Apple, New York City, 1976, 12.25 x 22.125 inchesSperanza, 1951, 32.5 x 32.5 x 5 inches

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New York Diptych, 1976, 17.75 x 29.875 x 15 inches

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The broken arm of a celluloid doll, a jar or round container—metal, plastic, wood—forgotten for years under a sink, a frayed wicker basket destined to be burnt in a fireplace, a pile of discarded, worn-out and rejected objects; a ball that is scuffed and slightly deflated, ending up in a pile of gravel and sawdust: all these communicate the meaning of “abandonment,” even for those who are not image makers, writers, photog-raphers, etc. These are all objects which represent nothing for the mass of humanity – mass minus one. But it’s the “gesture” of Meo to abstract those residuals—wood, refuse, pipes, keys, small stones for mosaic (even some collected on the Appian Way), barbed wire, etc.—striping them of their distant utilitarian artisan origins. These become a sort of medium, become colors, woven material for construction.

Salvatore Meo, of Lucanian decent but born in Philadelphia, is an inves-tigator of beaches and explorer of basements and places, a free man, like Charlot, who ventures behind the nicked, broken and tapping wood obstacle fences of private lots and construction sites to fish out a brush or a wire meshwork.

Who likes to talk to “barboni”, the old philosophic vagabonds and pen-sioners, with brick masons, with cart-pushing peddlers – not with engineers. His hunt-ing ground is not the antique store in which one might search for the pearl amongst the cast-off clothes and discarded bracelets. No, for Salvatore Meo the pearl does not exist. If it is ever a possibility it is because he is able to make a cork, a pane of glass, a fragment of terracotta become as if it was “a pearl.” The head of a spade placed on a pedestal takes up the role of a hierarctic statue (“Divinità”). A ball, placed near a glove which has been stuffed with rags, becomes a world held in equilibrium by the director of the universe. A stretch of barbed wire from the beach of post-bellum Anzio, becomes the crown of thorns of Christ. A tray of white cardboard with spots of coffee and milk, forgotten by the waiter of some bar, is “chosen” and “selected” as a sublime species of watercolor. The fragment that casts its shadows within a box, which is framed and yet distinct, assumes a significance which is at once sculptural, painterly, and architectural.

The creative gesture and expression of Meo is in the collection and selec-tion and in the isolation of the object and in the montage and their juxtaposition with other objects. “The things,” estranged, assembled and mounted according to some set

of intellectual ideals, are such that the union seems to remain there by chance, without forcing, as if it were by nature. (This thought is by Meo). Those things become “oth-ers,” they release a life that no one would have suspected, those feathers, twigs, thread, wheels, clippers, destroyed rackets, broken toys, lockets, they become “his own.”

But all this, someone might remark, is the normal and usual material of artwork. Look at “Mr. Knife and Miss Fork” of Man Ray, the “Pharmacy” of Cornell (little cupboard with decanters), “The Royal Tide” of Nevelson (with its little pieces of lathed wood), the bottles of Vail, the poetic objects of Mir (parrot, balls, doll’s legs) or the bears of Picabia – but no, it isn’t the same thing! The metals of Meo have a significance and diverse function since they are, instead, keys of usury, of suffering, even of shadows. His cabinets and little cupboards are shelves of the cobbler (with its black and brown heels, new and used), not of the collector, not of the scientist and chemist; the objects, the composition collage becomes for him a poor object, a decomposition. This isn’t the exaltation of the object, of the complete form of ringing color but of wear and tear, of the inevitable marks of use, death and fading. It is as if he were a citizen of a destroyed universe. The oppressed subject of an ancestral anguish from which one defends oneself by artwork and such creative labors which function as catharsis in order to reconstruct and overcome. Yes, but look, another person might add, at the torn sacks of Burri, the folded sheet metal, the pipes and taps of Colla, the decollages of Rotella and the slashes of Fontana, the marks and scribbles of Toby! Aren’t many of these analogous examples? Perhaps, but Salvatore Meo didn’t just begin today practicing this sort of art, art of the tear, scribbles, scratches, or the hole. On the contrary, his swollen plates of metal blis-tered and bubbled by wear, are to be dated from 1948; it is he then who carried his art into Italy! Even before the birth of the Group “Origine” (1952) composed of Burri, Colla, Capogrossi, etc. and it is he who presented this Italian group to New York and Philadelphia, these representatives of an art brotherhood which had returned to its first origins and roots to an art which reinvents its own self. If you ever wished to find some of the precedents for his inspiration, you would have to look for them in “Signorina Flic-Flic Chiap-Chiap” of Marinetti and Cangiullo, presented in London in 1914 as a “combination of objects” and in the “reliefs” of Tatlin, in the pasted objects of Schwit-

The Assemblages of Salvatore Meo

Mario Verdone

Via Dei Torriani #8, Rome, 1952, 32 x 3.5 x 1.25 inches

26 27

ters and Arp. But “Merz-construction” has blazes of color that a “Noah” or a “Totem” by Meo would never have.

This “selection” and “choosing” of that which has been discarded, rejected or that which is dead, this is the action of Meo. It is derived from another action, that of “action painting”, an art which Meo used in the 1940’s,contemporaneously with Pol-lock. He has painted tufts of color, splashes, scratches, plucked plumes stolen from the wind (“Action”), and has never stopped painting, although it interests him more now to choose, to join and paste in order to compose; thus, a wash-board of grooved wood becomes a work entitled “Flag;” a “Letter” crowded with arguments and notices. The colors of Meo are those of straw, of the flower on a faded cloth, a print, of a thread, of twisted white metal which for him can suggest the image of the wind, the color fallen on an old beam, as if it were blood, diluted by time. The brown of a sack, the spots of tar washed upon the beach, the red of aluminum cans, the green of the tops of plastic containers, the orange of corn; – all these enter into the “non-painter’s” palette of Meo. But the thin tones of the watercolor are also pleasing to Meo, the discoloration of frag-ments of wood left out in the open, the rose color of a match tossed along the road after a rain, and “Venice Sleeps,” made with the torn fragment of a poster showing the face of a statue that stands forth in the midst of a grey canvas, like the Church of the Salute, and the red matches that slide away in the empty spaces of the composition like gondolas into the canals. All this has exactly the sensibility of the brushwork of watercolor.

Gluing and mounting dead objects, shadows of the past, working in this “action,” Meo is thus the sustainer of an artistic form which he initiated by his own volition, not a follower or populist. His role is that of harbinger, of vigilant explorer, of sensitive signals. He is the creator of images which derive not from yellow or blue, from ocher and violet, from vermillion and turquoise but from a feather still in flight and caught; or from the spring of a rusted clock or a piece of cord. He is the poet of things around and on the street which have become the possessions of no one, of no value and of the object which has been rejected and considered destroyed, useless; of broken toys, little soldiers, miniature automobiles, broken, old, and unserviceable which no longer represent anything for anyone, just fragments, anonymous material; and for him, they

are the warp and wolf of an image, one which is composed, rising from a discourse that miraculously by means of objects have lived, been destroyed, condemned and turned into ugly materials, becomes a song; in a poem known to be readable, along the edge of the road, even along the edge of the beach waterline, even in a “no man’s land.”

One of the highest moments of poetry in Meo’s work appears from the sensations given by certain simulacra forms, of what appear to be limpid flying creatures. Rauschenberg’s “Canyon” cannot surpass him either in inspiration or song. There are birds (of clay or plaster, of broken wood, from the rifle range, decoys) seen as flowers in a vase or pigeons; they enter as components of a lyric landscape in a window, (not merely as geometry as that of Duchamp) in “Beyond and in front of the window.” It is a poem articulated in more songs, populated in numerous residues. Thronged with elements of attention and attraction is a large composition, an entire wall called “My Life,” where there are drawers, boxes, cages, wooden spheres, and frames that constitute his affresco.

(“Il Margutta,” June 1973 no: 5 and 6)

Life’s Motivation / Homage to Renoir, 1961, 22.125 inches diameter Blaster, 1957–73, 15.5 x 17 x 3.5 inches

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In the artist’s preconsciousness, the painting of the 1950’s is again present, in every way and at all costs: but in Rome more than New York the non-painting of Salva-tore Meo is suspended between adhering to an absolute naturalness and a suspicion for the easiness in which he leaves every “problem” of human “reflection.” A residual in Italy between the opposite trenches of Forma 1 and Origine, straight from the United States Navy in 1949, Meo re-departs—already in 1946—from the glued objects of Schwit-ters and Arp (“time” and “worldly-wise” converted in plastic sensation), experimenting “painting” in the dimension of a man who harvests. Flagellant, anarchistic, introverted visionary, proposing new tables of the basis of existence, linked to the most complete mental homologues of Malloy and Malone. It was the Doganiére and the juggler of god beginning with the neo-dadata period of Informale, elaborating his own neo-Platonic version of the proletarian universe, and ending in a pre-alphabetic nomination of the most desperate dasein (Heidegger’s translation would have been “everyday-ness”).

A visionary of history’s detriments, and things that are “used” (string, wire, glass, rags, cardboard, nails, tar, cement, broken dolls, ruined feathers and so on), contem-plated in an innocence of line, of texture, of color, corners, flat and variable geometry: as in the most non-intellectual of forms – by exercise and investigation, appearing to be “Extended,” mythology and monologues of “fallen” form, iliomorphologies of the most negative descent into the Hell of our generation.

Mario Diacono, 1965

Nel suo preconscio la pittura degi anni cinquanta si è repressa, in ogni modo e a tutti i costi: ma a Roma più che a New York sospesa tra l’inadesione a una naturalezza così assoluta e la diffidenza per la facilità con cui vi veniva lasciato cadere ogni “problema” di “riflessione” umana, la non-pittura di Salvatore Meo. Residuato in Italia fra le opposte trincee di Forma 1 e di Origine dalla United States Navy nel 1949, Meo ripartiva – già nel ’46 – dritto dagli objets collés di Schwitters e Arp (“tempo” e “vissuto” convertiti in ‘sensazione’ plastica), sperimentando la “pit-tura” nella dimensione dell’introverso, proponeva retablos dell’esistenza elementare, diramando le più complesse omologie mentali di Maloy e Malone. E’ stato il doganiere e il giullare di dio dell’età informale neodadata, elaborando una sua versione neo-platonica di universo proletario, conclusa nella dominazione prealfabetica dei typoi più disperati di dasein. Visionario del detrito storico e della cosa ‘usata’ (spago, filo di ferro, vetro, straccio, vimine, cartone, chiodi, catrame, calcinaccio, bam-bole rotte, piume stemperate, etc). contemplati in innocenza di linee, gesti, colori, angoli, geometria piana e variabile: come le forme più in intellettuali – per esercizio e indagine – di apparizione dell’estenso, mitologie e monoloqui della materia “caduta”, ileomorfemi decifrati dal più abnegative descensus ad inferos della nostra generazione.

Take, 1962, 12.2 x 6.7 x 4.7 inches Alone, 1949, 9.5 x 6.7 x 3.5 inches

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A new explosive apparition of Salvatore Meo: one of those cyclic acts with which he propels his luminous trajectory onto the shadow of an active definition. Caught in the most salient and transilient moments of an orbit apparently devoted to the painter’s secret, to the nurturing of his most ingenuous fire.

Salvatore Meo’s quarter of a century old activity identifies itself with his own secluded and aloof but peremptory destiny. He has refined and consummated his inquiry into the proposition of those signs that must be assessed as the most significant clues of our time, as the most penetrating responses to a yet unformulated question: not only through his “action”-like original spurt but through the overwhelming entirety of his journey.

Salvatore Meo links the purity of his art to the essence of life, rather than to poetics. He produces a continuous investigation of the former; a life, construed of silences and in some sense of dreams. He achieves an absolutely intelligent and unique cohesion of spirit.

Meo’s work has never been menaced or intimidated by the sudden shifts and reversals in art trends or by the disintegration of schools. His first raving gestures (even before Pollock) commanded and actualized the obliteration of all closures and consistencies. They are today still the symptoms of an actual and irreplaceable pres-ence; they continue to propitiate arcane colors, labyrinthine memories, intersections, perennial acts, immense vertices; they persist in recovering lost objects that encompass irretrievable and unaccountable territories.

Meo’s intimate and effusive work delves more and more profoundly into the deserts of emotion, requests a wider extension of the shadow (either conceptual or actual), demands of darkness neater contours and of the breath of life truly substantial offerings.

Emilio Villa, Roma, 1975 (Translated from the original Italian by Luigi Ballerini and Richard Milazzo,1977)

Red Brush and Thimble, 1974, 20.25 x 7.625 x 2.5 inches

Return from South Pacific, 1945, 22 x 22 x 4 inches

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Salvatore Meo could be well called the father of “Arte Povera.” Not so long after Schwitters and the Dadaists, this Philadelphian began to play a seminal role in the art world in America and Europe. The artists using found materials after WW II made their first steps under his influence. His status as pioneer and master has not yet had the proper recognition it deserves.

He is the avenger of the throw-away, finding intrinsic beauty in the weave and wool of the small, the aged and worn remnants of everyday events. Each beach bone, each sandblasted bottle, each weathered decoy, rusty can, dented plastic toy and frayed cloth to his attentive eye reveal the echoes of the past which shaped but not ruined them.

The innocence of the silent witnesses and the companions of our ordi-nary existence, that which consumer goods society has manufactured to be ruthlessly discarded is resurrected and freshly dignified. Each despised object is picked up humbly and blessed by a new context.

An empty paint can is housed in the shrine of a splintered box. A group of bleached plastic bottles loom like a monument. Disks of blue felt from a printing ma-chine become stars in a constellation of wires and nails on a firmament of woven straw. A group of empty used tea cans in a salute to all the tea in China.

The allusions are not literary as in Surrealism, but are rather based on the congruity of variously textured surface united by a visual logic.

Salvatore saves and salvages with a generous hand. He has no use for the recherché, the new, the cool and the obviously elegant, but like the mushroom gatherer with an eye for the sudden bright colonies on the forest floor, he seeks for the little things guarding the mystery of their own past. He has raked and rooted in the dead for-ests of our modern world – the sidewalks of Manhattan, the alleys of Rome, the empty lots of New Jersey and Tuscany with unflagging interest. He regards the debris around us with steady faith and childlike wonder, and like a benign witch-master, bestows on it another and splendid new life.

Edith Schloss, catalog essay in “Roman Americans,”1988, edizioni Sala 1

Vento, 1955, 19.7 x 7.9 x 11.8

Riposo, 1963, 32.7 x 15 x 13.75 inches

34 35

1949

Stuart Preston, “Artists not Fazed by Warm Weather.” The New York Times.

“Self-Portraits Exhibit Opens May.” Art Alliance Bulletin, Philadelphia, May.

“The Artist Looks at Himself.” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, May 6.

Margaret Lowenground. “On My Rounds.” The Art Digest, New York, v. 23 n. 15, May 1, p. 23.

Dorothy Drummond, “Color Print Annual.” The Art Digest, New York, v. 23 n. 12, 15 March 15, p. 21.

1950

Walter Emerson Baum, The Sunday Bulletin, Philadelphia.

Margit Varga, Life Magazine, March.

Dorothy Grafly, “Joseph and Salvatore Meo.” Art in Focus, Philadelphia.

C. H. Bunti, Philadelphia Inquirer.

1952

Giordano Falzoni, “Salvatore Meo da Chiurazzi.” Bollettino di Informazioni (Bulletin of the United States Information Service), usis, Rome.

1953

Walter Emerson Baum, “Salvatore Meo.” The Sunday Bulletin, Philadelphia, December 27.

1954

Emilio Villa, Arti Visive, Rome, n. 6, January.

1956

Howard Devree, “Young Americans Working in Europe.” New York Times, September 9, Arts and Leisure, p. 11.

1958

XXIX Biennale Internazionale d’Arte di Venezia. Catalogo della mostra, Galleria Bevilacqua La Masa, Venezia, Stamperia di Venezia s.p.a., Venice, p. 397.

Carlo Giacomozzi, “Lettera al pittore americano Salvatore Meo.” La Fiera Letteraria, October 19, Rome, v. XIII, n. 42, p. 8.

Janice Jordan, “Decorators’ Showing Opens at Gallery.” Columbus Dispatch, Ohio, October 2.

1959

C. Constantini, “Gli arrabbiati ripudiano tavolozza cavalletto e pennelli.” Il Messaggero, Rome.

1961

Lawrence Campbell, “Review and preview: Salvatore Meo.” Art News, v. 60, n. 30, p. 32.

Stuart Preston, “Art: At the Guggenheim.” The New York Times, October 13, Business Financial, p. 69.

William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, p. 161.

Thomas B. Hess, “Collage as an Historical Method.” Art News, v. 60, n. 30, p. 3.

“Exhibition at Egan Gallery.” Art News, v. 60, November, p. 13.

1963

VIII Premio Termoli, exhibition catalog. Edizioni dell’Ateneo.

1965

F. Gismondi,“Questioni di Estetica, La Pittura non pittura di Salvatore Meo.” La Sonda.

1966

John Samuel Lucas, “Rome: Habitat of American painters.” Arts Magazine, v. 40:43, February, p. 43.

Floriana Vella, “Frammenti di realtà e sintesi.” Studi Cattolici, Rome.

Milton Gendel, “Art News from Rome: Ninth National Quadrennial of Rome.” Art News, v. 65: 73, March p. 22.

1968

U. B., “A Roma artisti americani.” Bollettino Italiano, Rome.

1970

Emilio Villa, Attributi dell’arte odierna – 1946 – 1967. Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, pp. 121 – 123.

Sandra Pinto, Due decenni di eventi artistici in Italia.Prato-Centro di Edizioni, Florence.

1971

Dulio Morosini, “Salvatore Meo: magia degli oggetti.” Paese Sera, Rome, April 15.

Franco Mieli, Mostre d’arte a Roma. Umanità, Rome, May 14 – 15, v. III, n. 109, p. 3.

Bruno Corà, Bonito Oliva, Salvatore Meo (assemblages e disegni) 1945 – 1971, exhibition catalog. Galleria Ciak, Rome.

1972Edith Schloss, “Around the European Galleries.” The Herald International Tribune, Paris, December 23 – 24, n. 27.

Toni Bonavita, “In contamostre.” Il Tempo, Rome, December 16, v. XXIX, n. 326, p. 9.

Berenice, “Meo 50 – 60.” Paese Sera, December 9.

1973

Mario Verdone, “Gli Assemblages di Salvatore Meo.” Il Margutta (periodico di arte contempo-ranea), May – June, v. 6, n. 5 – 6, pp. 9 – 12, (7 illustrations).

Claudia Terenzi, “Salvatore Meo raccoglitore di oggetti.” Paese Sera, January 11, v. XXIV, n. 32, p. 11.

1975

Edith Schloss “Art in Rome.” The Herald International Tribune, Paris, November 22 – 23.

Carlo Giacomozzi, “Salvatore Meo.” La Fiera Letteraria, December 28, v. 51, n. 52.

Sandra Orienti, “Esplorando l’informale.” Il popolo, November 28.

1976

Gerrit Henry, “Six Artists.” Art News, October, v. 75, n. 8, p. 114.

1977

Madeleine Burnside, Art News, Summer Special Issue, p. 194.

Frances Beatty, “New York Exhibitions.” Art World, New York, April, v. 1, n. 8, pp. 7 – 8.

Palmer Porner, “East Side Express.” Gallery Guide, March 10.

1978

J. Kyd, “Landmark Gallery, New York; Exhibition.” Arts Magazine, v. 52, May, p. 6.

Art News, March, v. 77, p. 111.

Selected bibliography

36 37

1980

Salvatore Meo, ARTform. May – June.

“Spring Art Showcase.” The New York Times, March 30, p. 27.

Palmer Poroner, “Symbols visit us from the nether world.” Artspeak, v. 1, n. 10, April, p. 4.

Flora Whitney Miller, “50th Anniversary Party for Artists.” Whitney Museum of American Art, January 9.

1981

Mario de Candia, “La settimana delle mostre.” La Repubblica, March.

1988

Guido Montana, “Roman Americans’ at Sala 1.” L’Umanità, Rome, November 24.

Jacopo Benci, “Roman Americans at Sala 1.” Wanted in Rome, Rome, November 17, v. 4, n. 17, p. 7.

Marina Mojana, “Arteprima.” Il sole 24 ore, n. 294, November 13, p. 22.

“Arts.” Financial Times, November 18.

Domenico Scudero, “Roman Americans.” Sottotraccia, Rome.

Enzo Bilardello, “Americani a Roma, cocktail di stili.” Corriere della Sera, Rome, v. 27, n. 42, November 7.

Linda de Sanctis, “Dodici artisti d’oltreoceano ‘folgorati’ dalla bella Italia.” La Repubblica, Rome, November 8.

Edith Schloss, “Roman Americans.” Galleria Sala 1, exhibition catalog, Edizioni Sala 1, Rome.

2004

Edith Schloss, “Four Poets in Rome.” Wanted in Rome, Rome, July 7, p. 17.

Paola Ferraris, Psicologia e arte dell’evento – storia eventualista 1977 – 2003. Gangemi Editore, Rome, p. 54.

2006

Val Van Meter, “Love of Art Motivates Profes-sional Direction for Native.” The Winchester Star, Winchester, Virginia, August 30, Section d, Life, pp. d1 and d2.

2007

Edward M. Gomez, “Sleeping Giants – Artists Art History Left Behind.” Art & Antiques, New York, September, p. 77.

Robert Hobbs, in context Collage + Abstraction. New York, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, exhibition catalog, July – August, p. 72.

2008

AA.VV., Emilio Villa poeta e scrittore curated by Claudio Parmiggiani, Reggio Emilia, Chiesa di San Giorgio, exhibition catalog, Edizioni G. Mazzotta, Milan, p. 520, (section Meo pp. 251–255). isbn 978-88-202-1875-1

Edith Newhall, “The reemergence of a late Philadelphia artist.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 26.

Andrea Kirsh, “Reviewing American Art History: Aaron Douglas and Salvatore Meo.” artblog, http://fallonandrosof.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html.