.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘If any of my discoveries are important, the ‘hole’ is. By ‘hole’ I meant going outside the limitations of a picture frame and being free in one’s conception of art. A formula like 1+1=2. I did not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in order to find something else...’
L. FONTANA
In Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, a progression of gleaming glass ‘stones’ forms a progression across a red canvas that has been punctured by a ring of small holes. Concetto spaziale was created in 1953 and forms part of the group of works known as the Pietre These were works in which Fontana explored deceptively complex interactions of space and light, echoing on a more domestic scale the monumental architectural projects that also occupied him for so much of his career. It is only fitting that Concetto spaziale was formerly in the collection of his friend, the prominent Milanese architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers.
By the time that Concetto spaziale was created in 1953, Fontana had become one of the fulcrums of Italian cultural life. He had returned from his native Argentina, where he had spent most of the years of the Second World War, reinvigorated, filled with new ideas surrounding the concept of ‘Spatial Art.’ Using his new-found positivity, his love of technology and his embrace of the future, Fontana helped spearhead some of the initiatives that saw Milan leap into a pole position in the worlds of art, architecture and design. This would result in some of Fontana’s large-scale projects—for instance the ceilings that often incorporated electric light, piercings and mouldings, resulting in complex interplays of light and matter. These are the same factors that drive Concetto spaziale: the coloured glass that articulates the red surface creates a play of shadows and reflections that contrasts with the voids punched into the canvas itself, emphasising the three-dimensionality of the work, but also its ability to change. After all, a shift in the light or the movement of a viewer can alter the way that light falls and bounces off the work.
Fontana had already been piercing the picture surface in his works since the late 1940s, challenging received notions of the supposedly flat picture plane. The addition of glass elements was an innovation that Fontana had introduced only two years before Concetto spaziale was made. Within a short time, Fontana appeared to have a system, even down to supply: Pia Gottschaller mentions two slightly discrepant accounts of sources of glass from Murano (see P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist's Materials, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 38). Fontana would be sent bulk packages of fragments and off-cuts of clear and coloured glass, some of which remained unused in his studio. Photographs show that Fontana would sometimes use a hammer to break these pieces of glass down into smaller fragments for incorporation in his works (see ibid., p. 39).
The interplay between the space of the hole, the opacity of the red canvas and the translucent gleam of the glass, results in a dynamic appearance that is only heightened by the elegance of the composition. In Concetto spaziale, Fontana has heightened the contrast between the elements by separating and juxtaposing them—with the horizon-like sequence of glass ‘stones’ and the ovoid group of holes. There is a hint at figuration, as though this were perhaps an island, or even a constellation, with worlds hanging among the stars. In both this tantalisingly-inscrutable iconography and its use of glass, Concetto spaziale prefigures the 1961 series of ‘Venice’ pictures that Fontana created, in which this iconography exploded in large square canvases often decorated with metallic paint
Fontana was fascinated by the concepts of rockets, space flight, and they appear to have informed the pared-back aesthetic that drives this picture. When he discussed the ‘Spatial Art’ that he had pioneered, its references to Space were both the tiny slivers of it captured within the holes in the canvases of works such as Concetto spaziale and also the vast expanse of the cosmos itself. For Fontana, ‘Spatial Art’ had a conceptual dimension—it was the ephemeral gesture by which he ruptured the canvas that was the artwork, in a sense, or indeed that new sliver of space itself. In 1947, Fontana signed the first Spatial Manifesto, which he had largely written. ‘We plan to separate art from matter, to separate the sense of the eternal from the concern with the immortal,’ it declared. ‘And it doesn’t matter to us if a gesture, once accomplished, lives for a second or a millennium, for we are convinced that, having accomplished it, it is eternal’ (Signed by Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato, ed., Lucio Fontana, exh.cat., Rome, 1998, pp. 117-18). This is the driver behind Concetto spaziale and its fellow works: the creation itself, the almost ritualistic moment in which Fontana pierced the canvas or indeed smashed glass and then attached it, cannot be undone, but becomes a part of eternity.
The history of Concetto spaziale is itself tied to that first Spatial Manifesto. In 1947, its appearance was recounted in the magazine Tempo: ‘The sculptor Lucio Fontana is launching the Spatial Manifesto in Italy. At a meeting held at the studio of the architect Rogers, chaired by the painter Cesetti, the discussions went on until dawn. It is about an art that will be transmitted in the ether’ (‘Arte nelle nuvole’, Tempo, 6-133 December 1947, p. 23, reproduced in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, 2011, pp. 136-37). By that time, Fontana had collaborated with Rogers, the former owner of Concetto spaziale, on a number of occasions. In 1933, Fontana had worked with BBPR, the architecture firm founded by Rogers and his colleagues Gian Luigi Banfi, Lodovico Barbiano di Belgioioso and Enrico Peressutti, to design the Casa del Sabato per gli Sposi, which they showed at the 5th Milan Triennale. In 1937, Fontana collaborated with them again, creating four large sculptures for the pavilion dedicated to Italian shipping at the Exposition Universelle in Paris—the same event in which Pablo Picasso presented Guernica. Rogers had also written several times about Fontana’s ceramics and their place within the domestic and design realms.
In the 1940s, Fontana had reconnected with Rogers in order to help reinvigorate Milan and Italy in the wake of the Second World War. By the time he created Concetto spaziale, then, they had known each other for a long time. Rogers was a hugely influential architect—he even helped to inspire his young Italian-born cousin Richard Rogers, now Lord Rogers of Riverside, to choose that vocation. Rogers’ influence was repeatedly apparent in the post-war era in particular: as well as teaching, he was editor of Domus magazine, and later of Casabella.
Rogers had returned to Italy after being interned in Switzerland during the Second World War and become a beacon of hope and positivity, trying to use his influence to reconstruct Milan in a viable way that embraced elements of tradition but also espoused modernity and anticipated the future. Fontana had been working with BBPR the year before Concetto spaziale was created, on plans for an unrealised monument to the engineer and inventor Camillo Olivetti, founder of the company that bears his name. Rogers and Fontana would both feature in an anthology exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1954, The Modern Movement in Italy: Architecture and Design. A few years before that, in 1951, they had both been among the high-profile speakers at the important conference, the Primo Convegno Internazionale sulla Proporzione nelle Arti, alongside such varied figures as Le Corbusier, Max Bill and Rudolf Wittkower. This was an event in which various speakers proposed a return to order of a new kind, intending to base design on an understanding of proportions that owed much to the Renaissance. Fontana’s own sense of underlying order is in evidence in the rigorous proportions of Concetto spaziale, a picture which thus dates from, and provides an insight into, a period of renewed and frequent contact between these titans of post-war Italy.
L. FONTANA
In Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, a progression of gleaming glass ‘stones’ forms a progression across a red canvas that has been punctured by a ring of small holes. Concetto spaziale was created in 1953 and forms part of the group of works known as the Pietre These were works in which Fontana explored deceptively complex interactions of space and light, echoing on a more domestic scale the monumental architectural projects that also occupied him for so much of his career. It is only fitting that Concetto spaziale was formerly in the collection of his friend, the prominent Milanese architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers.
By the time that Concetto spaziale was created in 1953, Fontana had become one of the fulcrums of Italian cultural life. He had returned from his native Argentina, where he had spent most of the years of the Second World War, reinvigorated, filled with new ideas surrounding the concept of ‘Spatial Art.’ Using his new-found positivity, his love of technology and his embrace of the future, Fontana helped spearhead some of the initiatives that saw Milan leap into a pole position in the worlds of art, architecture and design. This would result in some of Fontana’s large-scale projects—for instance the ceilings that often incorporated electric light, piercings and mouldings, resulting in complex interplays of light and matter. These are the same factors that drive Concetto spaziale: the coloured glass that articulates the red surface creates a play of shadows and reflections that contrasts with the voids punched into the canvas itself, emphasising the three-dimensionality of the work, but also its ability to change. After all, a shift in the light or the movement of a viewer can alter the way that light falls and bounces off the work.
Fontana had already been piercing the picture surface in his works since the late 1940s, challenging received notions of the supposedly flat picture plane. The addition of glass elements was an innovation that Fontana had introduced only two years before Concetto spaziale was made. Within a short time, Fontana appeared to have a system, even down to supply: Pia Gottschaller mentions two slightly discrepant accounts of sources of glass from Murano (see P. Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist's Materials, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 38). Fontana would be sent bulk packages of fragments and off-cuts of clear and coloured glass, some of which remained unused in his studio. Photographs show that Fontana would sometimes use a hammer to break these pieces of glass down into smaller fragments for incorporation in his works (see ibid., p. 39).
The interplay between the space of the hole, the opacity of the red canvas and the translucent gleam of the glass, results in a dynamic appearance that is only heightened by the elegance of the composition. In Concetto spaziale, Fontana has heightened the contrast between the elements by separating and juxtaposing them—with the horizon-like sequence of glass ‘stones’ and the ovoid group of holes. There is a hint at figuration, as though this were perhaps an island, or even a constellation, with worlds hanging among the stars. In both this tantalisingly-inscrutable iconography and its use of glass, Concetto spaziale prefigures the 1961 series of ‘Venice’ pictures that Fontana created, in which this iconography exploded in large square canvases often decorated with metallic paint
Fontana was fascinated by the concepts of rockets, space flight, and they appear to have informed the pared-back aesthetic that drives this picture. When he discussed the ‘Spatial Art’ that he had pioneered, its references to Space were both the tiny slivers of it captured within the holes in the canvases of works such as Concetto spaziale and also the vast expanse of the cosmos itself. For Fontana, ‘Spatial Art’ had a conceptual dimension—it was the ephemeral gesture by which he ruptured the canvas that was the artwork, in a sense, or indeed that new sliver of space itself. In 1947, Fontana signed the first Spatial Manifesto, which he had largely written. ‘We plan to separate art from matter, to separate the sense of the eternal from the concern with the immortal,’ it declared. ‘And it doesn’t matter to us if a gesture, once accomplished, lives for a second or a millennium, for we are convinced that, having accomplished it, it is eternal’ (Signed by Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato, ed., Lucio Fontana, exh.cat., Rome, 1998, pp. 117-18). This is the driver behind Concetto spaziale and its fellow works: the creation itself, the almost ritualistic moment in which Fontana pierced the canvas or indeed smashed glass and then attached it, cannot be undone, but becomes a part of eternity.
The history of Concetto spaziale is itself tied to that first Spatial Manifesto. In 1947, its appearance was recounted in the magazine Tempo: ‘The sculptor Lucio Fontana is launching the Spatial Manifesto in Italy. At a meeting held at the studio of the architect Rogers, chaired by the painter Cesetti, the discussions went on until dawn. It is about an art that will be transmitted in the ether’ (‘Arte nelle nuvole’, Tempo, 6-133 December 1947, p. 23, reproduced in A. White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, 2011, pp. 136-37). By that time, Fontana had collaborated with Rogers, the former owner of Concetto spaziale, on a number of occasions. In 1933, Fontana had worked with BBPR, the architecture firm founded by Rogers and his colleagues Gian Luigi Banfi, Lodovico Barbiano di Belgioioso and Enrico Peressutti, to design the Casa del Sabato per gli Sposi, which they showed at the 5th Milan Triennale. In 1937, Fontana collaborated with them again, creating four large sculptures for the pavilion dedicated to Italian shipping at the Exposition Universelle in Paris—the same event in which Pablo Picasso presented Guernica. Rogers had also written several times about Fontana’s ceramics and their place within the domestic and design realms.
In the 1940s, Fontana had reconnected with Rogers in order to help reinvigorate Milan and Italy in the wake of the Second World War. By the time he created Concetto spaziale, then, they had known each other for a long time. Rogers was a hugely influential architect—he even helped to inspire his young Italian-born cousin Richard Rogers, now Lord Rogers of Riverside, to choose that vocation. Rogers’ influence was repeatedly apparent in the post-war era in particular: as well as teaching, he was editor of Domus magazine, and later of Casabella.
Rogers had returned to Italy after being interned in Switzerland during the Second World War and become a beacon of hope and positivity, trying to use his influence to reconstruct Milan in a viable way that embraced elements of tradition but also espoused modernity and anticipated the future. Fontana had been working with BBPR the year before Concetto spaziale was created, on plans for an unrealised monument to the engineer and inventor Camillo Olivetti, founder of the company that bears his name. Rogers and Fontana would both feature in an anthology exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1954, The Modern Movement in Italy: Architecture and Design. A few years before that, in 1951, they had both been among the high-profile speakers at the important conference, the Primo Convegno Internazionale sulla Proporzione nelle Arti, alongside such varied figures as Le Corbusier, Max Bill and Rudolf Wittkower. This was an event in which various speakers proposed a return to order of a new kind, intending to base design on an understanding of proportions that owed much to the Renaissance. Fontana’s own sense of underlying order is in evidence in the rigorous proportions of Concetto spaziale, a picture which thus dates from, and provides an insight into, a period of renewed and frequent contact between these titans of post-war Italy.