That genius Oliviero Toscani, a freak against his will

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Oliviero Toscani died at the age of 82 in Cecina hospital, where he had been admitted on 10 January due to his worsening condition. He had been suffering from amyloidosis for two years.

A genius, a giant, a ham. Oliviero Toscani the greatest enemy of himself. If an artist were able to create his own images today, he would either be the most important artist in the world or the most censored of all. Toscani had understood light years before everyone that images weigh more than words, that images are politics, poetry and lethal weapons. So he angered the Vatican with his Jesus jeans advertisement and the priest and nun kissing. He anticipated anti-racism, political correctness and inclusiveness by being racist, incorrect and exclusive. He spoke of love through pain, the picture of the dying AIDS patient. He spoke of war absolutely with a T-shirt and a pair of trousers stained with the blood of an anonymous Bosnian soldier killed in the Balkan war. An artist cannot be humble, being after woman the closest thing to a possible God. To be humble is to accept the possibility of practical humiliation, which Toscani wisely and exaggeratedly used against stupidity. As a curator I dreamed of doing one of his exhibitions properly but he hated curators, rightly so, and loved himself too much thinking, wrongly, that he could celebrate himself. If he had not had this Ptolemaic vice of thinking he was the centre of the firmament he would today be next to Picasso who also thought he was the centre but only of his own world not that of others.

Oliviero Toscani has revolutionised communication, but he has dislodged himself from the history of art where he should and must be. Usually it is photographers who think they are artists while he paradoxically was an artist who stubbornly insisted on being a photographer. He should have been interned for a few months and had an exhibition at the New York Metropolitan against his will. Now we hope that without the straitjacket but wings someone will make it. He used jumpers and T-shirts to talk about the world, naked, raw, dying and suffering. A pope of the church of advertising. Guru, guru, absolute affabulator, he was the Vittorio Gassman of photography, or perhaps more the intrusive and self-destructive Marlon Brando. 

Like all native geniuses he had become the Buffalo Bill of controversy, a freak against his will. He could say everything about everyone and the others shut up. But I believe that if Caravaggio or Michelangelo had lived today they would have been like him and would also have gone on Fazio. So Toscani was being Toscani. Damn Toscani would have written Malaparte. Gigantesco by falling ill had become an unrecognisable ascetic. He was arousing tenderness in words and images and yet his image at the end claimed profound tenderness. Superhuman had become too human. But respecting his undoubted honesty, he did not hide from the death that held him up by a miracle. He became rich with United Colors, but Benetton made billions at his expense, in the sense that they condemned him to the galley of commercial photographers while he was innocent, the world, like every true artist saw him like this and so photographed him in the face of 100% cotton or cashmere. Toscani has never needed to be evaluated let alone re-evaluated. Today, however, the art world should sanctify him and place him ex officio in the cultural memory of the world. As an apocryphal gospel would say, or, since he lives in Maremma, scrofulous: if the imagination loses Toscani, who will give the imagination another Toscani? Thank you for flooding the world's prairies of images with your overflowing egotism.