Lucio Fontana View Art Works Renowned in Italy, welcomed in France and Belgium, honored in Barcelona, proudly commented in London, acclaimed in Berlin and Vienna, and represented in famous museums, Lucio Fontana was completely unknown in his own country. Fontana was born in Rosario, province of Santa Fe in 1899. At the age of thirteen he started his art studies at the Carlos Cattáneo Institute in Milan. As a sculptor, his father influenced the artistic education of his son. At the age of twenty-four, Fontana returned to his home province and spent some time working as an apprentice in his father's workshop, whose partner was Scarabelli. He then opened his own studio and worked on some funerary statutes. The monument to Juana Blanco, located in the necropolis of Salvador (Rosario) and awarded to him in a competition, belonged to this period. Some time later, he went back to Europe. He entered the Brear Academy and attended intensive courses guided by his master Adolfo Wildt. During those years he gained recognition in various places, executing religious, epic and ornamental works. In Milan, he is entrusted with the task of building the funerary monuments of the Castelloti and Berardi families, and of the Marquis De Medici, which were erected in the necropolis of the Lombardian capital; he won the competition to build a monument to the heroes of the Great War, in the city of Erba, Lombardy. There is a well-known award in Italy, the Tantardini prize. It was 1934. Fontana participated with a work characterized by noble and agile severe forms and won the contest. The award-winning sculpture was El Pescador. He went on to vary the plastic concept and technique in another competition: the 1936 International Exhibition in Milan. He won the first prize with the giant and dynamic Group of the Victoria Salon (symbolic name). His sculptures gradually acquired greater freedom and individuality during his years of artistic development. Some of his works include: Portrait - a bichromium bronze; and his masterpiece, Señorita Sentada, made of bronze with a silver and black patina. His plastic impressionism arrangement is based on color, harmonies, contrasts, whether in plaster or clay. His wide range of themes, including seahorses, deer, fantastic horses, butterflies, jellyfish, dolphins, flowers, fruits; his sense of reality and his imagery led him to the French porcelain of Sevres, and Paris welcomed him with open arms. His production also includes abstract sculptures and drawings. He won the second national prize and the first prize of the National Commission on Culture. He died in Milan, on 7 September, 1968. During his last years in Milan he engaged in a variant of pictoric abstraction with great success. He called it Spatialism. José León Pagano. El Arte de los Argentinos. Goncourt Publishing House. Fontana and the Manifesto Blanco. Lucio Fontana was born in Rosario, Province of Santa Fe, Argentina in 1899. He died in Comabbio, Varese, Italy in 1968. In 1905 he moved with his family to Milan and started his studies in a school in Varese. By 1910 he had already begun his artist's apprenticeship in his father's workshop. In 1920 he enters the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera, Milan, but one year later he returned to Argentina, and began working as a sculptor in his father's workshop in Rosario (Fontana and Scarabelli). In 1924 he won the competition for the desing of a monument to Pasteur, School of Medicine, Universidad Nacional del Litoral. He exhibited his first sculpture, Melodías, 1925, plaster (unknown collection) at the 8th Salon of Fine Arts in Rosario. In 1927 he won the competition for the monument El Pueblo de Rosario a Juana Blanco, bronze, on San Salvador st. Back in Italy in 1928 he enrolled in the Brera Academy as a student of Adolf Wildt. Influenced by his master, he produced El Auriga (1928). Between 1928 and 1929 he created a sculpture for the Berardi family's tomb, at the Milan Cemetery. He gradually acquired re-known in Milan artistic circles. With the polychromed plaster Uomo Nero (1930) he started a truly original period, leaving behind the naturalist severity of his previous work. In 1931 his sculpture in terracotta and clay, with and without colour, gradually acquired greater freedom and individuality. These sculptures represented round female bodies, basic shapes. By the end of that year he had his second solo exhibition in Milan, in the Milione Gallery. To cap this period, in 1949 he produced Concetti Spaziali. During the second half of the 30s. Fontana performed a series of abstract sculptures, on the verge of a free geometry, but could not escape from figuration. He used clay, terracotta and plaster. In 1935 Fontana had his first exhibition of abstract sculptures in the Milione gallery. In March, in Torino, he participated in the prima Mostra Collettiva di arte astrattta italiana, with Melotti, Soldati, Veronessi and other artists. In 1939, at the age of 40, Fontana returned to Argentina and settled in Buenos Aires with the hope of getting a position as professor. His first sculptures during this period had an expressionist tone, in line with the clay works of previous years. The works seem to underscore the expressive lines of the material, e.g. El Obispo" (polychromed terracotta, 1940) and Mujeres ante el Espejo, polychromed plaster, 1940). However, in other pieces, Perfil (1940) owned by José León Pagano, and in Mujer Peinándose (1940) his forms are more rounded and flat, and the best example of this period is Mujer del Marinero (1940). In November of that year, he exhibited together with Julio Vanzo in the Renom Gallery, Rosario. In 1941, he exhibited in the Muller gallery, in Buenos Aires. With Muchacho del Paraná (1942) he won the first prize in the National Salon of Fine Arts, and one year later, his academic-modeled work, Hombre del Delta (Eduardo Sivori Museum), was awarded the first prize. In 1945 Fontana taught at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, and shortly after (1946) he was invited by its organizer, publisher Gonzalo Lozada, to teach at the Altamira workshop, together with Emilio Pettoruti and Jorge Romero Brest. Some time later, the Altamira workshop became an important centre for the promotion of culture. It was there that, in constant contact with young artists and intellectuals, he formulated his theories on artistic research, which would lead to the publication of the Manifesto Blanco, which was signed by some of his students (Bernardo Arias, Horacio Cazeneuve, Marcos Fridman, Pablo Arias, Rodolfo Burgos, Enrique Benito, César Bernal, Luis Coll, Alfredo Hansen and Jorge Rocamonte). In its pages, he stated "The artistic era of colors and shapes comes to an end. (.) The aesthetics of the organic movement supersedes the depleted aesthetics of fixed shapes." And he went on and stated ".moving matter, color and sound are phenomena whose concurrent development creates the new art". Fontana's manifesto would become, as stated by Gilo Dorfles, "one of the most important theoretical documents of spatial movement in modern art". At the time, as stated by the critic, Fontana had already perceived the insufficiency of the "easel", as well as the usefulness distinction between painting and sculpture. Therefore, he had to project himself beyond the limits assigned by traditional plastic arts and integrate his art with the architecture so as to be "transmissible through space". To achieve this goal he used technological resources. After returning to Milan in April 1947, Fontana founded the Movimento spaziale (Spatial Movement) and, together with other artists and intellectuals -philosopher and painter Benjamino Jappolo, philosophers and critics Giorgio Kaisserlian and Antonino tullier, and writer and journalist Milena Milani- published the Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo (First Manifesto of Spatialism, actually his second Manifesto after the Manifesto Blanco), The following year saw the publication of the Secondo Manifesto dello Spazialismo (Second Manifesto of Spatialism). He published the seventh manifesto in 1952 after the name Proposal for a spatialist movement". In 1958 Fontana started the series Cuts (Tagli), which he continued until the end of his life. These innocent holes or cuts - when they perforate the canvass - depict a sign that he called an art for the spatial era. By 1959, he performed an important series of shaped canvasses with multiple combinable elements on the wall (Quanta). He participated in the Kassel Documenta, in the Biennial of San Pablo and in several exhibitions in Europe and Japan. One year later, he exhibited in London, Paris and New York. Fontana was no longer limiting himself to making holes in canvasses, but was also painting them and applying colors, inks, pastels, collages, sequins and fragments of glass. By now he had gained international acclaim. He took part in numerous exhibitions and international displays and his work was purchased by museums, galleries and the most respected collectors. In 1966, Romero Brest invited him to a solo exhibition at the Di tella Institute. Two years before his death Fontana was present in the group exhibition "Destruction Art, Destroy to Create" at the Finch Collage Museum of Art in New York. Jorge López Anaya, Historia del Arte Argentina. Emecé Publishing House.
