Guglielmo Achille Cavellini

Who was Guglielmo Achille Cavellini?

Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, also known as GAC was an influential Italian art collector and mail artist.

Cavellini was born into a merchant family in Brescia, Lombardy, where he ran a dry-goods shop through the post-war years following World War II.

He produced many reinterpretations of concurrent artistic works, often distributed extensively by mail. He invented the term autostoricizzazione 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". 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.