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Lot Essay
With its surface filed with rich golden paint and lush impasto, incised with sweeping gestures and adorned with coloured stones, Lucio Fontana's Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert is an important and rare portrait of one of the most influential art dealers of the post-war period. Executed in 1961, this is one of three 'portraits' of Iris Clert - although the term portrait can be seen to be allusive rather than literal. Instead, in its reference to its subject matter, Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert relates to what is perhaps Fontana's most celebrated series, created the same year as this picture and sharing its aesthetic: his Venezia paintings. Like them, Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert makes use of the thick swirls of metallic paint, the contrast with the incisions both in the paint and in the very fabric of the picture, and the ornamentation of the stones to create an incredibly rich, Baroque image that evokes, rather than merely represents, its subject.
From the moment that Iris Clert first opened a gallery in Paris in the mid-1950s, Fontana became a regular feature of her exhibitions. He was one of the artists featured in the exhibition that officially inaugurated the space, the 'Micro-Salon d'Avril', a show whose title wittily and wilfully embraced the incredibly confined space of her first gallery at 3, rue des Beaux Arts (featuring works by dozens of artists including several proponents of 'Nouveau Réalisme', the invitation to this exhibition included the misspelt name Arman, a typological error that that artist would subsequently embrace). The Galerie Iris Clert would become the venue for several of the most important and revolutionary exhibitions of the period, including Fontana's own. She showed his Nature, his large, rough, penetrated globe-like sculptures, as part of a two-gallery show at her new premises on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1961 and his 'celestial eggs', a group of his oval Fine di dio series of Concetti spaziali, in 1964. Fontana also participated crucially in the 1961 exhibition, the same year that Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert was painted, in the show that launched the new space on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Les 41 présentent Iris Clert. This was a group of 'portraits' by 41 artists which included a telegram from Robert Rauschenberg that declared simply: THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF IRIS CLERT IF I SAY SO. Thus she entered the ranks of the most-depicted art dealers of the modern era, alongside Ambroise Vollard.
Another artist whose work and life became intertwined with the Galerie Iris Clert was Fontana's friend, Yves Klein, whom the gallerist met for the first time in 1956 (see www.yveskleinarchives.org). The following year, Klein showed Yves: Propositions monochromes there; it was also in the Galerie Iris Clert in 1958 that Klein showed Le vide, the exhibition in which he controversially removed everything from the gallery space, leaving only the empty room. Klein's interest in materiality and the Immaterial was one that he shared with Fontana, the older pioneer. And these are concepts that are explicitly enshrined in the surface of Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert, both in the Baroque opulence of its golden surface and the emphatic gouge-like slash, the shard of space and infinity that dominates the composition. Indeed, this crucial factor is more emphatic in Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert than it is in either of the other two portraits of the gallerist from this group of pictures: the others feature smaller, more modest cuts. Here, though, with its pronounced ridge-like edges, the aperture that Fontana has created in the centre of the picture is the centre of attention, the focal point, thrust all the more into relief by the contrast with the sheer materialism of the gold background. This, combined with the protruding blue of the pietre, the 'stones' - in fact coloured glass - applied to the surface, concentrates the viewer's gaze upon that shard of the infinite, that space that lies at the heart of so much of Fontana's work.
Another difference between Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert and its two sister-pictures is the incised design in the paint surface. Where each of those other two works features a silhouette that recalls a Rococo picture frame, here Fontana has created a very different composition, one that in fact echoes diagrams of the female reproductive system. It is interesting, in this light, that Enrico Crispolti described the other two 'portraits' of Iris Clert, in his catalogue raisonné of Fontana's works, as containing 'forms that were vaguely erotic' (E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, Vol. I, Milan, 2006, p. 73).
In a sense, the design of Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert is more restrained than in that of its fellows, lacking the scrollwork of the Rococo picture frame embedded within their design. It has a crisper composition, more emphatic and indeed more iconic. In this sense, it may relate less to the Baroque era evoked in some of Fontana's Venice paintings and instead to a more common ground between La Serenissima and Clert: the Byzantine influence. Certainly, the gold, with its blue additions, recalls the colours of the Byzantine enamels prominent in many of the treasures of Venice, not least the Pala d'Oro, the altarpiece whose origins date to twelth-century Constantinople and which was later incorporated into a fourteenth-century ensemble. Like Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert, it is also adorned with coloured stones. These hints of Byzantium may echo Clert's own background: she herself was of Anatolian Greek descent, her family originating in Smyrna, the present day city of Izmir in Turkey.
Like the Venice series from 1961, Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert combines these cultural and historical references with the aesthetic of Fontana's own Spatialism, the movement that he spearheaded and which pushed art into a new era, creating works suitable for the age of space travel, rockets and mass communications. Thus the metallic paint of Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert has a futuristic sheen as well as recalling antique metalwork. The gold foil used in various aspects of space travel is echoed in the gleaming metallic surface. Fontana was able to straddle past and future, stillness and motion, as well as blurring the lines between figurative and abstract, hence Laurence Alloway's reference to him in an essay written to accompany the Venice pictures as a 'man of the border'. This division was all the more marked as most of Fontana's 'portraits' tended to be more literal, embracing his 1930s style rather than appearing as incarnations of the Concetti spaziali as here or in his earlier image apparently depicting Carlo Cardozzo.
Those boundaries were areas that he explored, probed and stretched beyond their normal limits. This was especially the case when it came to the line that divided painting from sculpture, a line that he himself demolished with his slashing of the canvas, as well as his building up of the picture surface, techniques that insisted on the three-dimensionality of his works. They occupy architectural space, and indeed, with the hole and with the metallic paint, Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert employs a rich arsenal of devices, from the multimedia composition to the incision, from the undulating paint to the play of light on the metallic, reflective surface. This allowed Fontana to embrace the interests that lay behind his architectural works on a more manageable scale and on canvas.
From the moment that Iris Clert first opened a gallery in Paris in the mid-1950s, Fontana became a regular feature of her exhibitions. He was one of the artists featured in the exhibition that officially inaugurated the space, the 'Micro-Salon d'Avril', a show whose title wittily and wilfully embraced the incredibly confined space of her first gallery at 3, rue des Beaux Arts (featuring works by dozens of artists including several proponents of 'Nouveau Réalisme', the invitation to this exhibition included the misspelt name Arman, a typological error that that artist would subsequently embrace). The Galerie Iris Clert would become the venue for several of the most important and revolutionary exhibitions of the period, including Fontana's own. She showed his Nature, his large, rough, penetrated globe-like sculptures, as part of a two-gallery show at her new premises on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1961 and his 'celestial eggs', a group of his oval Fine di dio series of Concetti spaziali, in 1964. Fontana also participated crucially in the 1961 exhibition, the same year that Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert was painted, in the show that launched the new space on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Les 41 présentent Iris Clert. This was a group of 'portraits' by 41 artists which included a telegram from Robert Rauschenberg that declared simply: THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF IRIS CLERT IF I SAY SO. Thus she entered the ranks of the most-depicted art dealers of the modern era, alongside Ambroise Vollard.
Another artist whose work and life became intertwined with the Galerie Iris Clert was Fontana's friend, Yves Klein, whom the gallerist met for the first time in 1956 (see www.yveskleinarchives.org). The following year, Klein showed Yves: Propositions monochromes there; it was also in the Galerie Iris Clert in 1958 that Klein showed Le vide, the exhibition in which he controversially removed everything from the gallery space, leaving only the empty room. Klein's interest in materiality and the Immaterial was one that he shared with Fontana, the older pioneer. And these are concepts that are explicitly enshrined in the surface of Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert, both in the Baroque opulence of its golden surface and the emphatic gouge-like slash, the shard of space and infinity that dominates the composition. Indeed, this crucial factor is more emphatic in Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert than it is in either of the other two portraits of the gallerist from this group of pictures: the others feature smaller, more modest cuts. Here, though, with its pronounced ridge-like edges, the aperture that Fontana has created in the centre of the picture is the centre of attention, the focal point, thrust all the more into relief by the contrast with the sheer materialism of the gold background. This, combined with the protruding blue of the pietre, the 'stones' - in fact coloured glass - applied to the surface, concentrates the viewer's gaze upon that shard of the infinite, that space that lies at the heart of so much of Fontana's work.
Another difference between Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert and its two sister-pictures is the incised design in the paint surface. Where each of those other two works features a silhouette that recalls a Rococo picture frame, here Fontana has created a very different composition, one that in fact echoes diagrams of the female reproductive system. It is interesting, in this light, that Enrico Crispolti described the other two 'portraits' of Iris Clert, in his catalogue raisonné of Fontana's works, as containing 'forms that were vaguely erotic' (E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, Vol. I, Milan, 2006, p. 73).
In a sense, the design of Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert is more restrained than in that of its fellows, lacking the scrollwork of the Rococo picture frame embedded within their design. It has a crisper composition, more emphatic and indeed more iconic. In this sense, it may relate less to the Baroque era evoked in some of Fontana's Venice paintings and instead to a more common ground between La Serenissima and Clert: the Byzantine influence. Certainly, the gold, with its blue additions, recalls the colours of the Byzantine enamels prominent in many of the treasures of Venice, not least the Pala d'Oro, the altarpiece whose origins date to twelth-century Constantinople and which was later incorporated into a fourteenth-century ensemble. Like Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert, it is also adorned with coloured stones. These hints of Byzantium may echo Clert's own background: she herself was of Anatolian Greek descent, her family originating in Smyrna, the present day city of Izmir in Turkey.
Like the Venice series from 1961, Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert combines these cultural and historical references with the aesthetic of Fontana's own Spatialism, the movement that he spearheaded and which pushed art into a new era, creating works suitable for the age of space travel, rockets and mass communications. Thus the metallic paint of Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert has a futuristic sheen as well as recalling antique metalwork. The gold foil used in various aspects of space travel is echoed in the gleaming metallic surface. Fontana was able to straddle past and future, stillness and motion, as well as blurring the lines between figurative and abstract, hence Laurence Alloway's reference to him in an essay written to accompany the Venice pictures as a 'man of the border'. This division was all the more marked as most of Fontana's 'portraits' tended to be more literal, embracing his 1930s style rather than appearing as incarnations of the Concetti spaziali as here or in his earlier image apparently depicting Carlo Cardozzo.
Those boundaries were areas that he explored, probed and stretched beyond their normal limits. This was especially the case when it came to the line that divided painting from sculpture, a line that he himself demolished with his slashing of the canvas, as well as his building up of the picture surface, techniques that insisted on the three-dimensionality of his works. They occupy architectural space, and indeed, with the hole and with the metallic paint, Concetto spaziale: Ritratto di Iris Clert employs a rich arsenal of devices, from the multimedia composition to the incision, from the undulating paint to the play of light on the metallic, reflective surface. This allowed Fontana to embrace the interests that lay behind his architectural works on a more manageable scale and on canvas.