Il Gesto. Rassegna Internazionale delle Forme Libere. Nos. 1 - 4. [All published].

Milan.: EPI Editoriale Periodici Italiani., 1955-1959.. Original wrappers. Small stamp numbers in upper corners of covers. Four volumes.. (First issue: 33 x 22.5 cm; issues 2-4: 31.5 x 22.5 cm).. pp. (20; 16, 32; 20). Black-and-white illustrations throughout. Complete set. No. 1: cover after Max Ernst, two original hors-texte lithographs by Lucio Fontana and Joe Columbo, participations by the editors Baj and Dangelo as well as by Fontana, Jorn, Alechinsky, Matta etc. This issue is also the second number of the Bollettino Internazionale di informazione del Bauhaus imaginiste; No. 2: cover after Mesens, participations by Dubuffet, D’Haese, Fontana, Bertini, Restany etc.; No. 3: original cover design by Fontana with circular perforations, double-page lithograph by Arnoldo Pomodoro; No. 4: Interplanetary Art issue, with the title printed in five languages on the front cover. Raoul Hausmann’s manifesto printed on rear cover. Contributions by Baj, Hausmann, Jaeger etc. Il Gesto was the official periodical of the Nuclear Art movement, published in collaboration with the French journal Phases. The first issue, published in 1955, served as an exhibition catalogue of a show at the Schettini Gallery in Milan, and also constituted the second issue of the Information Bulletin of Asger Jorn’s Imagist Bauhaus. The journal was an international collaboration, which documented the work of a very wide group of artists, from virtually every European and Scandinavian nation as well as the USA, Canada, several Latin American countries and Japan. The art reproduced in the first issue of Il Gesto largely conformed to the international Informal and Abstract Expressionist tendency. However, by the time of the next issue of the magazine in 1957, edited by Baj and Dangelo, the attitude of the editors had changed and the journal becomes a venue for publically and explicitly expressing a new dissatisfaction with Informal art. The French critic Edouard Jaguer, who was director of Phases and closely associated with both the CoBrA and Nuclear movements, indicts Informal art in the second issue of Il Gesto for what he saw as its increasingly mechanical appearance and complacent character. Interest in Dada, accelerated by Duchamp’s presence in Italy in 1958, continued to propel this questioning of the Informal movement. The third issue of Il Gesto, published September 1958, edited by Baj, Dangelo, and the young Milanese artist Piero Manzoni, contains a 1956 photograph of Marcel Duchamp before his work, the Large Glass, as well as one of Picabia’s mechanical drawings of 1917. One of Manzoni’s achrome paintings of 1958 was published in issue no.3. The appearance of this work in this issue of the review, was a sign that the Nuclear movement was beginning to distance itself artistically as well as theoretically from the Informal current. The fourth and final issue of Il Gesto was entirely dedicated to Interplanetary Art, which is presented as a desecrating kind of creativity that offers an ironic outlook on cosmic science and extra-terrestrial activities. Includes Baj’s ‘Ultrabodies’. Also present with this complete set is the printed list of 101 works exhibited at the Galleria Schettini show in June 1955. This is often lacking from most copies of the first issue.