artist who had brought into being such work as the White Paintings in 1951, tall monochrome panels in several series of canvases that contain no narrative. As John Cage famously commented, they resembled ‘landing strips’ for lights, shadows and dust particles, establishing an enduring understanding of the series as silent receptive surfaces that respond to the world around them. Being able to mix with his American counterparts, at exhibition openings and other visits to galleries and studios, and socially at parties and drinking establishments, such as the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village which had been a regular haunt of the New York School painters in the 1950s, brought him into contact with figures in the city’s creative firmament beyond the visual arts, such as the Beat poet, Gregory Nunzio Corso. Opportunities to show his evolving visual language were also occurring. His first one-man exhibition in New York was held at the Armory Gallery in 1963 but the a more fruitful relationship began in 1965 with Galería Bonino on 57th Street where Gambone was included in two group shows. The gallery had been opened by Alfredo Bonino, a Neapolitan who had emigrated to Brazil where, as well as representing South American artists, he promoted European artists and supported progressive, interdisciplinary projects between art and technology. Prior to opening in New York in 1963 he had set up and maintained galleries in Buenos Aires and in Rio de Janeiro where Gambone’s solo show took place in 1966. The New York gallery’s choice of opening exhibition, by Achille Perilli, serves as a reminder that Italian culture, even its contemporary manifestations, was not an alien presence in the city but an ingredient of its cosmopolitan identity. While there is no question of the far-reaching dominance of English-speaking interests, prospects for Italian artists were marginally more favourable in New York than, for instance in northern Europe. More importantly, in relation to Gambone’s experience, there was the opportunity to contribute to a transatlantic dialogue between the creative centres of New York and Italy. Although distance was
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then an obstacle to communication, artists like Gambone were not excluded from developments relevant to their own that were occurring in Italy. Apart from significant Italo-American presences relevant to younger artists, like Salvatore Scarpitta, who showed regularly in the 1960s with Leo Castelli (himself a native of Trieste who had been in New York since 1941), there was a significant community of expatriates in the city. Fallani, by now exploring figurative idioms in his paintings, had moved from Chicago in 1964 to teach at the Pratt Institute and then at the School for Visual Art in Manhattan, before returning to Tuscany in 1968. By summer 1966, Paolo Icaro was occupying a studio in Greene Street, in the same SoHo neighbourhood of disused cast-iron industrial premises as Gambone’s workplace in Spring Street. He had already shown work in a group show at the Odyssia Gallery, in 1965, and had moved to New York the following year with his American wife before returning to Italy in 1968 to take advantage of his participation in the earliest shows of Arte Povera organised by Germano Celant, in Genoa, in 1967, and in Amalfi in the following year. (Icaro subsequently returned to America in 1971, remaining there for almost a decade.) Like Icaro, Mario Ceroli was emerging onto Italy’s progressive art scene when he arrived in New York in September 1966. He stayed in the USA for 13 months and showed twice at Galería Bonino, receiving a solo exhibition there in April 1967, two months before he moved to Chicago. While New York was a huge metropolis and Gambone’s relationships and exchanges were primarily with Americans, nonetheless, temporary visits by Italian artists he knew can be imagined as having a catalytic effect on his like-minded practices. Gambone’s interest in space and colour in abstract painting echoed one of the dominant debates in postwar modernism surrounding what has come to be thought of as ‘the field’ where the boundaries of traditional pictorial space were crossed and a new realm of abstract theatre was encountered. This complex enquiry was espe-