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Lot Essay
By virtue of both title and appearance, Hommage à Fontana is a singular work in Jan Schoonhoven’s oeuvre. Entitled in honour of the father of Spatialism, Lucio Fontana, Schoonhoven’s Hommage is a large panel covered in irregularly fluted cardboard. A combination of light and dark, short and elongated, and thick and thin ridges come together to create a warmly-toned surface with intermittent dark trenches.
Schoonhoven’s oeuvre can be roughly bifurcated into two artistic pursuits: his series of white grid-reliefs and his black ink drawings. Hommage à Fontana cannot be neatly assigned to either category: its structure bears a strong resemblance to his horizontal line drawings, such as R71-14, executed in 1971, while its size and three dimensionality, combined with a white artist’s frame, encourage an association with his larger reliefs. Hommage finds an early predecessor in the corrugated cardboard reliefs Schoonhoven constructed following a 1964 exhibition of Nul art at the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, including a likeminded but much smaller work in cardboard and wood from that same year, simply titled Relief.
Together with artists Henk Peeters, Armando, and Jan Henderikse, Schoonhoven founded the Dutch Nul Group in 1961 out of ‘a desire for silence, emptiness, and space’ (Henk Peeters, quoted in A. Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, Rotterdam 2015, p. 53). ‘When CoBrA’s belly swelled and finally gave birth to a new generation, it was the generation of the opposite,’ Peeters said of the Nul Collective in 1976. ‘…It was the generation that wanted to be as cool as ice. Against romanticism. Against aesthetics. And in favour of a new objectivity in the most absolute terms’ (A. Melissen, ‘“Zero’s going round the world!” Birth and growth of a transnational artists’ network’, Zero, Cologne 2015, p. 179). Schoonhoven, a civil servant for the Dutch postal service by day, maintained the importance of his repetitious day-job for the integrity of his art. ‘It makes no demands on your aesthetic emotions, abilities, so you feel fit when you return home’ (Jan Schoonhoven, quoted in interview by Flip Bool and Enno Develing, 11 January 1984, unpublished manuscript, Henk Peeters Archive, Netherlands Institute for Art History, the Hague). When offered an early pension by his employer for his contribution to the arts, Schoonhoven declined, stating that ‘the order, the discipline, is mirrored in my work’ (A. Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, Rotterdam 2015, p. 107).
Fontana was viewed by many within the Nul and ZERO generation of artists as a paterfamilias of their collective attitude, citing his 1946 manifesto demanding a clean slate for post-war art, Tabula Rasa, as a proto-document of origin. In 1960, Jan Henderikse travelled back to the Netherlands with a catalogue from the exhibition Monochrome Malerei (Monochrome Painting) in Leverkusen, in which gridded and monochrome works by Mark Rothko, Yayoi Kusama, Enrico Castellani, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, self-declared inventor of the monochrome Yves Klein, and Lucio Fontana were exhibited. The catalogue left such a large impression on Schoonhoven that he later credited it with initiating his true oeuvre: ‘Then I realised, that’s it, that’s the way to go, and so I began working with a plan in my reliefs too, that was the beginning’ (Jan Schoonhoven, quoted in A. Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, New York 2015, p. 32).
Compared side by side, the oeuvres of Schoonhoven and Fontana might be viewed as two polar-ends of the spectrum comprising the Europe-wide ZERO and Nul art collectives. Fontana drew in his spectators by deconstructing space through incising large slashes into canvas; Schoonhoven, by means of the tireless process of papier-mâché, steadily built up a constructed grid. While the former pulls the viewer’s gaze into the an absence of space within the lacerations, the latter permits it to glide vertically or horizontally along the undulating surface of the relief. Hommage à Fontana rests somewhere in between the oeuvres of the two artists, combining lacerated space with built-up surface. The result bears the unassuming, hand-crafted elegance of Schoonhoven’s white reliefs as well as hints of Fontana’s dramatic spatial interjections.
Schoonhoven once wrote a brief text advising against the use of symbols: ‘symbols that are too direct must be avoided. Art speaks primarily for itself and weightiness destroys comprehension’ (Jan Schoonhoven quoted in A. Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, New York 2015, p. 26). Hommage à Fontana plays with this assumption by way of its title, while continuing to pay tribute to the father of Schoonhoven’s artistic generation via its form, which references his cardboard reliefs of the 1960s. As Schoonhoven once said of them, ‘With those works I always felt that they originated from Zero theories, the isolation of materials that thereby acquire a new reality’ (Jan Schoonhoven, quoted in interview by Flip Bool and Enno Develing, 11 January 1984). Composed just two years after Fontana's death, Schoonhoven’s Hommage is a grand return to the ideas and minds at the Nul collective’s very core.
Schoonhoven’s oeuvre can be roughly bifurcated into two artistic pursuits: his series of white grid-reliefs and his black ink drawings. Hommage à Fontana cannot be neatly assigned to either category: its structure bears a strong resemblance to his horizontal line drawings, such as R71-14, executed in 1971, while its size and three dimensionality, combined with a white artist’s frame, encourage an association with his larger reliefs. Hommage finds an early predecessor in the corrugated cardboard reliefs Schoonhoven constructed following a 1964 exhibition of Nul art at the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, including a likeminded but much smaller work in cardboard and wood from that same year, simply titled Relief.
Together with artists Henk Peeters, Armando, and Jan Henderikse, Schoonhoven founded the Dutch Nul Group in 1961 out of ‘a desire for silence, emptiness, and space’ (Henk Peeters, quoted in A. Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, Rotterdam 2015, p. 53). ‘When CoBrA’s belly swelled and finally gave birth to a new generation, it was the generation of the opposite,’ Peeters said of the Nul Collective in 1976. ‘…It was the generation that wanted to be as cool as ice. Against romanticism. Against aesthetics. And in favour of a new objectivity in the most absolute terms’ (A. Melissen, ‘“Zero’s going round the world!” Birth and growth of a transnational artists’ network’, Zero, Cologne 2015, p. 179). Schoonhoven, a civil servant for the Dutch postal service by day, maintained the importance of his repetitious day-job for the integrity of his art. ‘It makes no demands on your aesthetic emotions, abilities, so you feel fit when you return home’ (Jan Schoonhoven, quoted in interview by Flip Bool and Enno Develing, 11 January 1984, unpublished manuscript, Henk Peeters Archive, Netherlands Institute for Art History, the Hague). When offered an early pension by his employer for his contribution to the arts, Schoonhoven declined, stating that ‘the order, the discipline, is mirrored in my work’ (A. Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, Rotterdam 2015, p. 107).
Fontana was viewed by many within the Nul and ZERO generation of artists as a paterfamilias of their collective attitude, citing his 1946 manifesto demanding a clean slate for post-war art, Tabula Rasa, as a proto-document of origin. In 1960, Jan Henderikse travelled back to the Netherlands with a catalogue from the exhibition Monochrome Malerei (Monochrome Painting) in Leverkusen, in which gridded and monochrome works by Mark Rothko, Yayoi Kusama, Enrico Castellani, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, self-declared inventor of the monochrome Yves Klein, and Lucio Fontana were exhibited. The catalogue left such a large impression on Schoonhoven that he later credited it with initiating his true oeuvre: ‘Then I realised, that’s it, that’s the way to go, and so I began working with a plan in my reliefs too, that was the beginning’ (Jan Schoonhoven, quoted in A. Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, New York 2015, p. 32).
Compared side by side, the oeuvres of Schoonhoven and Fontana might be viewed as two polar-ends of the spectrum comprising the Europe-wide ZERO and Nul art collectives. Fontana drew in his spectators by deconstructing space through incising large slashes into canvas; Schoonhoven, by means of the tireless process of papier-mâché, steadily built up a constructed grid. While the former pulls the viewer’s gaze into the an absence of space within the lacerations, the latter permits it to glide vertically or horizontally along the undulating surface of the relief. Hommage à Fontana rests somewhere in between the oeuvres of the two artists, combining lacerated space with built-up surface. The result bears the unassuming, hand-crafted elegance of Schoonhoven’s white reliefs as well as hints of Fontana’s dramatic spatial interjections.
Schoonhoven once wrote a brief text advising against the use of symbols: ‘symbols that are too direct must be avoided. Art speaks primarily for itself and weightiness destroys comprehension’ (Jan Schoonhoven quoted in A. Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, New York 2015, p. 26). Hommage à Fontana plays with this assumption by way of its title, while continuing to pay tribute to the father of Schoonhoven’s artistic generation via its form, which references his cardboard reliefs of the 1960s. As Schoonhoven once said of them, ‘With those works I always felt that they originated from Zero theories, the isolation of materials that thereby acquire a new reality’ (Jan Schoonhoven, quoted in interview by Flip Bool and Enno Develing, 11 January 1984). Composed just two years after Fontana's death, Schoonhoven’s Hommage is a grand return to the ideas and minds at the Nul collective’s very core.