Arte Povera: the recount: with affinities to neo-Dada, Nouveau Realisme, Conceptualism, Post-Minimalism, Process art and performance, Italy's Arte Povera encompassed the most vital tendencies of the 1960s and early '70s. A major exhibition, now in midtour, documents the movement's breadth and energy

Arte Povera may be the most talked-about neglected movement, the best-fed underdog, of recent all history. Beyond the borders of its native Italy, Arte Povera commands name recognition without commensurate critical esteem, and its apparent familiarity rests on a fundamentally spotty acquaintance. The key word, "povera"--meaning "poor" in Italian--has settled into the international lexicon of art as a convenient but muzzy catchword for a complex field of expressions variously characterized by impermanence, simplicity, nonchalance, the utilization of nonart materials, and an anticonsumerist and sometimes irony-laced invocation of the natural, the alchemical and the numerological. A handful of its original practitioners--Michelangelo Postiletto, Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Alighiero Boetti--enjoy solid reputations, but that renown is based on a few signature materials or forms (mirrors and rags, neon igloos, acetylene torches and horses, word grids and embroidered maps) rather than on a comprehension of the artists' creative development in depth or in context.

At home, where Arte Povera is regarded as having been Italy's principal contender in the vanguard of the 1960s and '70s, an air of injury nevertheless persists. It's not difficult to explain why. There is, for starters, the 800-pound gorilla, American art, which sat atwarth much of the European art world for roughly two decades and often consigned Continental currents to the periphery. On this matter, Robert Rauschenberg's prizewinning turn at the 1964 Venice Biennale is usually cited as the epiphanic moment in Italy.

There are more purely domestic grievances as well. A paralyzing ambivalence toward the new prevailed in a country steeped in historical treasures and was reflected in a shortage of Italian institutions with the will or the budget to do much to encourage contemporary efforts. A congruent scarcity of committed collectors left most young artists without sustained patronage. Italy's few stout-hearted collectors of emerging art, Giuseppe Panza most conspicuously, were inclined to favor the Americans. (Panza already owned Rauschenberg's Coca-Cola Plan when it was included in the U.S. representation at the Biennale.) With some exceptions--notably Marcello Levi and Laura and Corrado Levi in Turin--only a handful of supportive writers and the artists' early dealers, particularly Gian Enzo Sperone, Margherita Stein and Ileana Sonnabend, acquired Arte Povera works.

Arte Povera did have one absolutely crucial asset, a tireless and ambitious front man, Germano Celant, who would go on to secure a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic, even if he couldn't quite deliver the same for all the artists he promoted. A budding critic and curator in 1967, Celant baptized the tendency, appropriating for the visual arts the notion of a "poor" (demotic, pared down, immediate, anti-illusionistic) theater advocated by Polish director Jerzy Grotowsky. With a campaign of exhibitions, articles, books, events and conferences, the Povera brand was established for a clutch of initiatives that had been incubating, principally in Turin and Rome, since the early 1960s.

Though Celant was not an official participant, his influence is more or less ubiquitous in the latest and most far-reaching effort yet to boost the stock of Arte Povera. "Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972" was initiated by the Walker Art Center and realized in partnership with Tate Modern, where the exhibition debuted in May 2001. Fourteen artists (more on this later) are presented as the movement's standard-bearers: Giovanni Anselmo, Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio. The 11-year baker's decade encompassed in the show's title is neatly bisected by Celant's naming of the movement, an event that consequently and correctly emerges as not so much a launch as a consolidation and even, perhaps, a clipping of wings.

The timing of "Zero to Infinity" is impeccable. Over the last decade or so, artists as various as Gabriel Orozco, Mona Hatoum, Ernesto Neto, Martin Creed and Tom Friedman--along with Italy's own more explicitly Arte Povera-conscious Giuseppe Gabellone, Eva Marisaldi, Perino & Vele, Liliana Moro, Paola Pivi and others--have cultivated a new landscape from which to look back at the pioneering art that mixed diffidence and craft, invention and literalness, the performative and the formal. Correspondences, whether close or attenuated, between works from then and now are revealing.

Pistoletto's Lightbulb Curtain on the Wall (1967), with its vinelike cords and pendant incandescent bulbs, shares the improvised, careless elegance of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's lightbulb works without, of course, having to shoulder the burden of the AIDS era's intimations of transience and mortality. Pairing a progressive sequence of neon Fibonacci numbers with 10 photographs of a multiplying throng in a factory canteen, Mario Merz reassuringly posits an order underlying ostensibly random social behavior. His work is years away, in both technology and spirit, from that of the current numbersmith, Tatsuo Miyajima, and his implacable sequences of ominous LED digits.