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Cavellini
1914 – 2014
 
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, also known as GAC (1914–1990) was an 
influential Italian art collector and mail artist.
 
He produced many reinterpretations of concurrent artistic works, often 
distributed extensively by mail. He invented the term autostoricizzazione 
(self-historicization) upon which he acted to create a deliberate popular 
history surrounding his existence. "In the mountain of documentary material 
he left behind, Cavellini planted enough sly exaggerations and outright 
falsehoods to stymie the most intrepid historian" (Vetrocq 1993, referencing 
interviews with the artist's son, Piero Cavellini). Cavellini even wrote his own encyclopedia entry, the Pagina dell'Enciclopedia. He declared:
 
    The biography of an artist is frequently written after his death, imperfectly 
and incompletely. Since I don't want any such biography to be written about 
me, I've decided to write my own.
 
He began collecting abstract art at an early age by artists such as Giuseppe 
Santomaso, Giulio Turcato, Emilio Vedova, and Renato Birolli. A friendship 
with fellow Brescian Pietro Feroldi, including exposure to Feroldi's impressive
 art collection, provided a stepping stone to extensive travels visiting Europe's
 modern galleries and museums.
 
His collection grew rapidly, adding works from School of Paris figures, 
Dubuffet, Brauner, Jorn, Baumeister, Matta, Dominguez and others. Over 
two dozen of his collected holdings were included in the 1955 first documenta 
exhibition of modern and contemporary art. 1957 brought a showcase of over 
180 of his works at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, Italy.
 
Cavellini's obsession with collecting never ceased, though his holdings 
changed continuously as he sold earlier acquisitions.
 
One of the Cavellini's famous stickers distributed extensively around 
the world.
 
Cavellini's artistic career found its beginnings from a talent for brush and 
ink script, used on windows and price cards at the family business. He later 
found himself scripting Mussolini's slogans during his army service. Dabblings 
with painting and drawing through the mid-1940s were eventually replaced in
 the early 1960s by works best classified as Neo-Dada or Nouveau Realiste. 
He would continue this diversion from traditional forms into the 1970s and 
1980s with Mail art and Conceptual art.
 
"As these artistic activities unfolded Cavellini formed two essential convictions. 
First, art making is fundamentally a form of behavior. In this he embraced a 
20th-century tradition stretching from Dada through Fluxus and Austrian 
Actionism. Second, and more distinctively Cavellinian, art history and all 
that accompanies it--biography, taste, market values, reputations--are malleable 
fictions and therefore suitable materials for the artist" (Vetrocq 1993).
 
His eventual reputation as a mail artist resulted in part from the sheer 
number of individuals with whom he corresponded. In 1978, he sent his 
work Nemo propheta in patria, by post, to over 15,000 recipients.

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