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Lot Essay
‘My plastic form is never alien from colour. My sculptures are always polychromatic. Colour and form make up an indissoluble bond, stemming from the same need’ (L. FONTANA)
‘I was born in Rosario de Santa Fe sul Paraná, my father was a good sculptor, I wanted to be a sculptor, I would have liked to be a painter, too, like my grandfather, but I realised that these specific art terms are not for me and I felt like a Spatial artist’ (L. FONTANA)
Executed in 1936, during one of the most experimental and formative periods of the artist’s early career, Lucio Fontana’s Nudo dates from a time during which he was exploring both figurative and abstract sculpture, examining the aesthetic potentials of these two styles. Covered with a layer of wax – a material rarely seen in Fontana’s oeuvre – and coloured with a luxuriant shade of gold and a flash of red for the figure’s hair, this work demonstrates not only the variety of influences important to Fontana at this time, but also his abiding and lifelong interest in the expressive potential of materials, a concept that would guide him throughout his long and prolific career. 1936 was in many ways a breakthrough year in the artist’s life: the first monograph on the artist was published at this time, and his innovative sculptural practice was becoming increasingly renowned within the Milanese contemporary art world.
Gold would remain a central component of Fontana’s work throughout his life. From the dazzling, Baroque and Byzantine-inspired gold pigment used in many of the artist’s famed Venezie, to the sleek, astral or futuristic visions conjured with the golden, light-filled surfaces in many of the artist’s Attese, this evocative metallic tone embodies the trailblazing and innovative nature of Fontana’s oeuvre. In the present work, the gold surface was inspired by one of the most important influences on Fontana’s early sculpture: the Italian Symbolist sculptor, Adolfo Wildt. On his return to Milan from Argentina in 1927, Fontana enrolled at the Brera Academy, where he studied for three years under the guidance of Wildt. Having worked in the Viennese Secessionist style, Wildt’s dramatic and expressive, statuesque marble and gilded busts enthralled the young Fontana. ‘When I enrolled in the Academy’, Fontana recalled, ‘I was twenty-seven. Because I was seriously looking for a radically new way of proceeding, I wanted to give my studies a classical foundation. My guide was a great master, Wildt… I believe that I took possession of his art, to such effect, in fact, that I was considered the best student of my year’ (Fontana, quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., London, 1999-2000, p. 20). With the addition of the gold chalk, Nudo undoubtedly conjures not only the expressive, exuberant art of the Baroque, but also demonstrates the Secessionist influence of Gustav Klimt. Through covering the nude figure with this colour, Fontana was able to accentuate the dynamic, textured surface of Nudo, moving beyond the decorative, symbolic qualities of the metallic pigment to explore how this chromatic shade could heighten the figure’s presence within space, and at the same time fulfilling his desire to create ‘living sculpture like jewels’ (Fontana, quoted in ibid., p. 23).
While deriving from the lessons he had absorbed from studying under Wildt, Nudo nevertheless represents Fontana’s rebellious and radical streak, for though classical in its subject and overall execution, its material construction and textured surface defied the classicising tendencies of traditional sculpture and the prevailing Novecento art movement of the time. Executed in wax, it signifies the artist’s rejection of the many years training he had undertaken both with Wildt and previously with his sculptor father. After years of painstaking labour working in marble and bronze, Fontana greatly appreciated the ease and immediacy afforded by a malleable medium, relishing the expressive malleability of wax, as seen particularly in the work of Medardo Rosso. Wax, as well as plaster and clay allowed him to rapidly mould shapes into being and to explore the nature and meaning of the artistic gesture; concepts that would become intrinsic to Spatialism, the movement he founded in 1947 and continued to explore for the rest of his life.
‘I was born in Rosario de Santa Fe sul Paraná, my father was a good sculptor, I wanted to be a sculptor, I would have liked to be a painter, too, like my grandfather, but I realised that these specific art terms are not for me and I felt like a Spatial artist’ (L. FONTANA)
Executed in 1936, during one of the most experimental and formative periods of the artist’s early career, Lucio Fontana’s Nudo dates from a time during which he was exploring both figurative and abstract sculpture, examining the aesthetic potentials of these two styles. Covered with a layer of wax – a material rarely seen in Fontana’s oeuvre – and coloured with a luxuriant shade of gold and a flash of red for the figure’s hair, this work demonstrates not only the variety of influences important to Fontana at this time, but also his abiding and lifelong interest in the expressive potential of materials, a concept that would guide him throughout his long and prolific career. 1936 was in many ways a breakthrough year in the artist’s life: the first monograph on the artist was published at this time, and his innovative sculptural practice was becoming increasingly renowned within the Milanese contemporary art world.
Gold would remain a central component of Fontana’s work throughout his life. From the dazzling, Baroque and Byzantine-inspired gold pigment used in many of the artist’s famed Venezie, to the sleek, astral or futuristic visions conjured with the golden, light-filled surfaces in many of the artist’s Attese, this evocative metallic tone embodies the trailblazing and innovative nature of Fontana’s oeuvre. In the present work, the gold surface was inspired by one of the most important influences on Fontana’s early sculpture: the Italian Symbolist sculptor, Adolfo Wildt. On his return to Milan from Argentina in 1927, Fontana enrolled at the Brera Academy, where he studied for three years under the guidance of Wildt. Having worked in the Viennese Secessionist style, Wildt’s dramatic and expressive, statuesque marble and gilded busts enthralled the young Fontana. ‘When I enrolled in the Academy’, Fontana recalled, ‘I was twenty-seven. Because I was seriously looking for a radically new way of proceeding, I wanted to give my studies a classical foundation. My guide was a great master, Wildt… I believe that I took possession of his art, to such effect, in fact, that I was considered the best student of my year’ (Fontana, quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., London, 1999-2000, p. 20). With the addition of the gold chalk, Nudo undoubtedly conjures not only the expressive, exuberant art of the Baroque, but also demonstrates the Secessionist influence of Gustav Klimt. Through covering the nude figure with this colour, Fontana was able to accentuate the dynamic, textured surface of Nudo, moving beyond the decorative, symbolic qualities of the metallic pigment to explore how this chromatic shade could heighten the figure’s presence within space, and at the same time fulfilling his desire to create ‘living sculpture like jewels’ (Fontana, quoted in ibid., p. 23).
While deriving from the lessons he had absorbed from studying under Wildt, Nudo nevertheless represents Fontana’s rebellious and radical streak, for though classical in its subject and overall execution, its material construction and textured surface defied the classicising tendencies of traditional sculpture and the prevailing Novecento art movement of the time. Executed in wax, it signifies the artist’s rejection of the many years training he had undertaken both with Wildt and previously with his sculptor father. After years of painstaking labour working in marble and bronze, Fontana greatly appreciated the ease and immediacy afforded by a malleable medium, relishing the expressive malleability of wax, as seen particularly in the work of Medardo Rosso. Wax, as well as plaster and clay allowed him to rapidly mould shapes into being and to explore the nature and meaning of the artistic gesture; concepts that would become intrinsic to Spatialism, the movement he founded in 1947 and continued to explore for the rest of his life.