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When we think of Fontana, all too often we think of elegant slashes and constellations of punctures in canvases, metal or even in clay. Yet these are arguably the shards and the by-products of the artistic adventures of a man who was arguably the most influential Italian artist in the post-war period. Revolutionary as they are, the domestic scale of so many of the works that fall under his Concetto spaziale moniker makes them paltry in comparison to the genuinely monumental scale upon which he created some of his most ground-breaking and revolutionary masterpieces. This was his true expression of Spatialism. Looking at Fontana's sculptures from the late 1920s and early 1930s, it is dizzying to see the incredible leaps and bounds with which he and the concepts behind his art developed. With astonishing rapidity, he shed the Maillol-like style that had permeated so much of his work under his father's direction in the latter's statuary company, which mainly produced tomb decorations. Modernism came to dominate Fontana's style, and his figurative works hint at the artist's admiration for Archipenko. An increasing interest in light and shadow, and in the manipulation of negative or empty space revealed itself. At the same time, a distinct interest in materiality was constantly present, not least in terracotta and plaster works of the period such as 1931's Figure neri and Donna distesa. It was in the abstract sculptures that Fontana began to produce during these years that these developments were taken to an extreme. These jutting, angular sculptures, many of them grouped under the generic title Scultura astratta (for instance the 1934 work held in Turin's Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) pierced the space that they occupied. Strange lines of material framed, punctured and occupied their environs like miniature cranes. There is an intense and sharp modernity in these works, hinting that the seeds of something more radical were beginning to sprout. Some of the sculptures resembled stelae, some resembled machinery, but all were linked by a visual elegance and simplicity, and by the dialogue that they introduced with their surroundings. It was during roughly this period that Fontana began to work more and more with architects, culminating in the 1936 Triennale di Milano. There, Fontana displayed works that had been deliberately created for the Salone della Vittoria, a specially designed architectural space. This, and several other early experiences of cooperation with architects, had a huge impact on Fontana. His background already involved plenty of monumentality, whether it was in terms of the pampas of his native Argentina or of the statues and tombstones that his father and he made for a living in the earlier part of his life; this subsequent cooperation with architects appeared to tip the balance. Fontana did not design the light-filled and hyper-modern Salone della Vittoria, but its use of light, space and perspective would have clear ramifications in his Post-War projects. During the Second World War itself, Fontana was in his native Argentina where he began to formulate his plans for an artistic movement suited to the modern age. Under his guidance, a group of his young disciples wrote the Manifiesto Blanco which served as a precursor to the later Spatial Manifestoes. In it, they stated that, 'We live in the mechanical age. Painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist' (B. Arias, H. Cazeneuve, M. Fridman, Manifiesto Blanco, Buenos Aires, 1946). Instead, it was through eternal materials such as light and space, materials that can not be pegged down, that they sought to create their works. To do this, they resorted to superbly modern means, such as the light bulb. On his return to Italy in the late 1940s, Fontana embarked upon an array of projects on a grand scale that made people completely reappraise their understanding not only of art, but also of space and the environment around them. Perhaps the most famous and extreme example of Spatialism during this period was Fontana's 1949 Ambiente nero. This revolutionary work was essentially a room bathed in ultra-violet, and therefore invisible, light. Hanging in the space were forms and wires that had been treated so that they appeared in lurid, fluorescent colour, while everything else remained black. Brand-new technology and a radical vision united in Ambiente nero to give the viewer a whole new concept of space, of solidity, and perhaps most importantly on the eve of the rocket age, of Space. Fontana and the Spatialists believed that Mankind had reached a new level of existence, and therefore had a new perspective for which the old forms of art were redundant. In the Jet Age, it was not uncommon for people to view the ground from above, and increasingly the concept of being able to see the Earth from the Cosmos was looking less and less like science fiction and more and more like science fact. From the perspective of the early Twenty-First Century, when we churn rocket after rocket into orbit, it is hard to conceive of the intense and exciting novelty with which some people anticipated man escaping the atmosphere for the first time. For Fontana, this brought about a new understanding of the vastness of Space which in turn went hand in hand with a new understanding of the vastness of time, adding a new and more complex dimension, a richness. This had revealed itself in the flesh in the Ambiente nero, and in words in 1948's Second Spatial Manifesto: 'The work of art is destroyed by time'. 'When, in the final blaze of the universe, time and space no longer exist, there will be no memory of the monuments erected by man, although not a single hair on his head will have been lost. 'But we do not intend to abolish the art of the past or to stop life: we want painting to escape from its frame and sculpture from its bell-jar. An expression of aerial art of a minute is as if it lasts a thousand years, an eternity. To this end, with the resources of modern technology, we will make artificial forms wondrous rainbows luminous writings appear in the sky. We will transmit, on radio and on TV, artistic expressions of the new type' (The Second Spatial Manifesto, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), exh. cat., Lucio Fontana, Milan, 1998, p.118). From the above quotation, it would be easy to assume that the famous canvases and works on paper had little part in Fontana's idea of Spatialism. Until the late 1940s, the sculptor had seldom dabbled in art in two dimensions. His works on paper tended, with a handful of exceptions, to be sketches and studies for three-dimensional projects. The closest that he really came to paintings were works such as his 1931 Tavoletta graffita, something so textured and self-consciously material that it looks more like a sculpture than anything else. Likewise, his reliefs seemed unable to resist bursting into the third dimension. Yet in the late 1940s, Fontana began to pierce first paper, and then canvas, creating his so-called Buchi. Fontana had never been a painter, but instead a sculptor, and in creating his Concetti spaziali in these media he was claiming them for Spatialism, for an art that was beyond dimensions. Indeed, it is not the canvas or paper that interested Fontana, so much as the space that he sculpted within them. The gesture of puncturing the surface, the slash of the Attese, the sculpting of raw and empty space these were the things that interested Fontana. As the First Spatial Manifesto asserted, 'Art is eternal, but it cannot be immortal'. The gesture is eternal. There is no going back. Fontana was committing a radical act of iconoclasm in slashing the traditional canvas, but was also bringing a redundant artform up to date, reinventing the canvas for the Space Age. And in opening and manipulating the space in the traditional medium of the canvas, Fontana was invoking the same Spatial radicalism that fuelled decades' worth of vast, architectural Ambienti. PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTION

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968)

Concetto spaziale, Attese

Details

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968)
Concetto spaziale, Attese
signed, titled and inscribed 'Concetto Spaziale ATTESE l. fontana 1+1 88884' (on the reverse)
waterpaint on canvas
24 x 18in. (61 x 46cm.)
Executed in 1961

Provenance

Jean-Paul Meulemeester, Brussels.
Serge de Bloe, Brussels.
Acquired from the above by the previous owner in 1966.
Anon. sale, Christie's London, 4 February 2004, lot 8.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Literature

E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana catalogo generale, vol. II, Brussels, 1986, no. 61 T 77 (illustrated p. 439).

Special notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

Lot Essay

Executed in 1961, Concetto spaziale, Attese shows a group of symmetrical, tapering slashes in an intense red canvas. These slashes are the openings of Space, the fragments of infinity that Fontana has carved out of a deep red that itself throbs with the fundamental and elemental energy of creation.

These curving slashes, arranged in this formal grouping, are unique amongst Fontana's Attese. Flexing towards the centre of the canvas, they introduce the sense of a vanishing point. In one way, this gives a sense of zoom, of the bending and altering of reality and of moving at infinite velocity, all themes fitting for the artist laureate of the Space Age. The curving slashes in Concetto spaziale, Attese are designed to induce a mock vertigo, to make us feel dizzy as we contemplate the depths of Fontana's infinity.

At the same time, it was precisely this type of representation and of artificial, pictorial perspective that Fontana's art had escaped. He had liberated the canvas from the confines of figuration. That these seemingly perspectival lines have been cut into the canvas and not painted upon it allows Fontana to display, not without a sense of irony and a sense of victory, the extent to which his Spatialism had rendered redundant the concepts of 'foreground, middleground and background.' As he stated, 'I make holes, infinity passes through them, light passes through them, there is no need to paint' (Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti, 'Spatialism and Informel. The Fifties', pp.144-150 in Lucio Fontana, E. Crispolti & Rosella Siligato (eds.), Milan, 1998, p.146). The symmetry and iconic bravura of Concetto spaziale, Attese, combined with the sheer vitality of its transcendental red, makes this a poster, a standard and rallying point for Spatialism and for the Space Age.

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