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Lot Essay
‘I did not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in order to find something else’ (Lucio Fontana)
Held in the same private collection for over half a century—and unseen in public since 1965—the present Concetto spaziale (1960) is an elegant example of Lucio Fontana’s olii, or ‘oils.’ Defined by their rich painterly surfaces, these works combine the artist’s signature piercing of the canvas with an expressive approach to texture and mark-making. Here, horizontal rows of buchi or holes punch through a rippling field of white oil paint, which was laid down with broad sweeps of a palette knife. The holes’ raised edges show they were made while the paint was still wet. They are joined by rhythmic ranks of large black paintstrokes pressed into the white ground. Fontana presents the concept of space in multiple dimensions: physically, as the holes open a new space beyond the picture plane; visually, as his marks map space upon the surface; and imaginatively, as the composition conjures vistas of landscape, stars, and far horizons in the mind of the viewer.
Fontana’s buchi, begun in 1949, represented the first major breakthrough in his Spatialist art. Aside from a two-year hiatus during the 1950s—and in tandem with his tagli or slashes, begun in 1958—he continued to employ this crucial technique for the rest of his life. By transcending the flat surface of pictorial tradition, he sought to make concetti spaziali, or ‘spatial concepts.’ These works were neither painting nor sculpture but a new form, their multi-dimensional presence commensurate with the dawn of the Space Age. Man was reconceiving his place within the universe, and Fontana’s art embodied a spirit of discovery and change. ‘It was, in fact, not an incidental hole, it was a conscious hole: by making a hole in the picture I found a new dimension in the void’, he said (L. Fontana quoted in P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 21).
After initial works pierced into paper mounted on canvas, Fontana introduced colour, gestural signs and glittering sequins to the buchi in the early 1950s. Further cycles during this decade included the pietre, which were adorned with glass fragments, and the barocchi, whose heavily impastoed paintwork flourished into baroque exuberance. The holes themselves receded amid this surface complexity, which contrasted with the more serene, minimal appearance of the tagli. The olii began in earnest in 1960, the year the present work was made. Featuring monochromatic, palette-knifed oil paint grounds, their lush textures balanced their carefully placed holes and stark compositions. Later examples—particularly after Fontana witnessed Yuri Gagarin’s historic space-flight in 1961—would be less orderly, with rough incisions and violent colours that spoke of existential anxiety. They were scored with fine lines which, Fontana said, related to the umbilical cord connecting an astronaut to his craft: ‘the walk of Man in space, his dismay and fear of getting lost’ (L. Fontana quoted in ibid., p. 90).
While conversant with these Spatialist themes, the present work’s monochrome, almost musical structure conveys a more tranquil outlook. The play of light and shadow across the surface relief interacts with the deep space of the holes, and with the painted darkness of black on white. At once sculptural, painterly and something more, Fontana’s evocative pigment and revolutionary buchi together propose a voyage towards the unknown. ‘Fontana spiritualises his art not by dematerialisation’, notes the art historian Lóránd Hegyi, ‘but—on the contrary—by the almost magical intensification of materiality’ (L. Hegyi, ‘Lucio Fontana: Der Universelle Raum als Aktivitätsfeld-Spiritualität, in ZERO-Internationale Kunstleravantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre, exh. cat. Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 54).
***
Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection
Across our 20th / 21st Century London Evening Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale and Post-War and Contemporary Art Online sale in London this season, Christie’s is delighted to present Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection. Led by Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Rome) (1961)—an explosion of painterly joy created in his most celebrated period—this diverse array of works offers a remarkable snapshot of the post-war avant-garde in Europe.
These paintings, drawings and sculptures have been unseen in public since the collection was assembled in the 1970s and 1980s. They were acquired from important galleries of the time such as Galerie Bonnier in Geneva and Galerie Stadler in Paris, and—in the case of the works by Twombly, Hans Hartung, Konrad Klapheck and Ernst Wilhelm Nay—from the esteemed Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus collector Wolfgang Hahn, chief conservator at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. Much of Hahn’s holdings were acquired by the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok) in Vienna in 1978, becoming a central part of the museum’s permanent collection.
The vitality of Art Informel is on full display. From Twombly’s gestural brushwork to the tactile reliefs of Antoni Tàpies, paint becomes sculptural or even archaeological matter, leaping the boundaries between art and life. A superb Concetto spaziale (1960) by Lucio Fontana takes this materiality to its transcendent climax, with the artist punching holes through the canvas to reach a new dimension.
Like Twombly, Sam Francis was an American in Europe: his Red, Yellow, Blue (1957) exemplifies his fusion of Abstract Expressionist ideas with the lyrical light and colour of French painting. Hans Hartung, the German-French painter represented here by an elegant composition from 1952, forged his own language of Tachisme in the same medium, characterised by swift, calligraphic brushstrokes.
Other key names in the collection include the Nouveaux Réalistes Arman, César and Jean Tinguely. These artists sought to bridge the art-life divide with a radical approach to everyday objects, creating something of a European counterpart to Pop Art.
The German artist Konrad Klapheck explored related ideas of mechanisation and commerce. His visionary, dreamlike painting Die Stufen der Ewigkeit (The Steps of Eternity) (1961) presents a surreal scene with a Pop-art sheen, as indebted to Duchamp’s objets trouvés as it is to Klapheck’s deadpan ‘machine’ paintings.
Across a wide range of media, from works on paper and small-scale sculptures to rich, textural paintings, Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection forms a colourful survey of the ways in which artists brought material to life in post-war Europe, keeping pace with an era of dynamic societal, cultural and aesthetic change. They are complemented, finally, by two works from Alice Bailly: a pioneering Swiss artist of an earlier avant-garde era, involved in Fauvism, Dada and Cubism and known for her pictures embroidered in wool.
Held in the same private collection for over half a century—and unseen in public since 1965—the present Concetto spaziale (1960) is an elegant example of Lucio Fontana’s olii, or ‘oils.’ Defined by their rich painterly surfaces, these works combine the artist’s signature piercing of the canvas with an expressive approach to texture and mark-making. Here, horizontal rows of buchi or holes punch through a rippling field of white oil paint, which was laid down with broad sweeps of a palette knife. The holes’ raised edges show they were made while the paint was still wet. They are joined by rhythmic ranks of large black paintstrokes pressed into the white ground. Fontana presents the concept of space in multiple dimensions: physically, as the holes open a new space beyond the picture plane; visually, as his marks map space upon the surface; and imaginatively, as the composition conjures vistas of landscape, stars, and far horizons in the mind of the viewer.
Fontana’s buchi, begun in 1949, represented the first major breakthrough in his Spatialist art. Aside from a two-year hiatus during the 1950s—and in tandem with his tagli or slashes, begun in 1958—he continued to employ this crucial technique for the rest of his life. By transcending the flat surface of pictorial tradition, he sought to make concetti spaziali, or ‘spatial concepts.’ These works were neither painting nor sculpture but a new form, their multi-dimensional presence commensurate with the dawn of the Space Age. Man was reconceiving his place within the universe, and Fontana’s art embodied a spirit of discovery and change. ‘It was, in fact, not an incidental hole, it was a conscious hole: by making a hole in the picture I found a new dimension in the void’, he said (L. Fontana quoted in P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 21).
After initial works pierced into paper mounted on canvas, Fontana introduced colour, gestural signs and glittering sequins to the buchi in the early 1950s. Further cycles during this decade included the pietre, which were adorned with glass fragments, and the barocchi, whose heavily impastoed paintwork flourished into baroque exuberance. The holes themselves receded amid this surface complexity, which contrasted with the more serene, minimal appearance of the tagli. The olii began in earnest in 1960, the year the present work was made. Featuring monochromatic, palette-knifed oil paint grounds, their lush textures balanced their carefully placed holes and stark compositions. Later examples—particularly after Fontana witnessed Yuri Gagarin’s historic space-flight in 1961—would be less orderly, with rough incisions and violent colours that spoke of existential anxiety. They were scored with fine lines which, Fontana said, related to the umbilical cord connecting an astronaut to his craft: ‘the walk of Man in space, his dismay and fear of getting lost’ (L. Fontana quoted in ibid., p. 90).
While conversant with these Spatialist themes, the present work’s monochrome, almost musical structure conveys a more tranquil outlook. The play of light and shadow across the surface relief interacts with the deep space of the holes, and with the painted darkness of black on white. At once sculptural, painterly and something more, Fontana’s evocative pigment and revolutionary buchi together propose a voyage towards the unknown. ‘Fontana spiritualises his art not by dematerialisation’, notes the art historian Lóránd Hegyi, ‘but—on the contrary—by the almost magical intensification of materiality’ (L. Hegyi, ‘Lucio Fontana: Der Universelle Raum als Aktivitätsfeld-Spiritualität, in ZERO-Internationale Kunstleravantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre, exh. cat. Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 54).
***
Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection
Across our 20th / 21st Century London Evening Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale and Post-War and Contemporary Art Online sale in London this season, Christie’s is delighted to present Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection. Led by Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Rome) (1961)—an explosion of painterly joy created in his most celebrated period—this diverse array of works offers a remarkable snapshot of the post-war avant-garde in Europe.
These paintings, drawings and sculptures have been unseen in public since the collection was assembled in the 1970s and 1980s. They were acquired from important galleries of the time such as Galerie Bonnier in Geneva and Galerie Stadler in Paris, and—in the case of the works by Twombly, Hans Hartung, Konrad Klapheck and Ernst Wilhelm Nay—from the esteemed Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus collector Wolfgang Hahn, chief conservator at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. Much of Hahn’s holdings were acquired by the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok) in Vienna in 1978, becoming a central part of the museum’s permanent collection.
The vitality of Art Informel is on full display. From Twombly’s gestural brushwork to the tactile reliefs of Antoni Tàpies, paint becomes sculptural or even archaeological matter, leaping the boundaries between art and life. A superb Concetto spaziale (1960) by Lucio Fontana takes this materiality to its transcendent climax, with the artist punching holes through the canvas to reach a new dimension.
Like Twombly, Sam Francis was an American in Europe: his Red, Yellow, Blue (1957) exemplifies his fusion of Abstract Expressionist ideas with the lyrical light and colour of French painting. Hans Hartung, the German-French painter represented here by an elegant composition from 1952, forged his own language of Tachisme in the same medium, characterised by swift, calligraphic brushstrokes.
Other key names in the collection include the Nouveaux Réalistes Arman, César and Jean Tinguely. These artists sought to bridge the art-life divide with a radical approach to everyday objects, creating something of a European counterpart to Pop Art.
The German artist Konrad Klapheck explored related ideas of mechanisation and commerce. His visionary, dreamlike painting Die Stufen der Ewigkeit (The Steps of Eternity) (1961) presents a surreal scene with a Pop-art sheen, as indebted to Duchamp’s objets trouvés as it is to Klapheck’s deadpan ‘machine’ paintings.
Across a wide range of media, from works on paper and small-scale sculptures to rich, textural paintings, Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection forms a colourful survey of the ways in which artists brought material to life in post-war Europe, keeping pace with an era of dynamic societal, cultural and aesthetic change. They are complemented, finally, by two works from Alice Bailly: a pioneering Swiss artist of an earlier avant-garde era, involved in Fauvism, Dada and Cubism and known for her pictures embroidered in wool.