Lucio Fontana: The Complete Story
Lucio Fontana was the artist who cut the canvas and called the wound space. Born in Argentina in 1899 to Italian parents, he spent thirty years as a sculptor before the slashes of 1958 made him the father of Spatialism and a grandfather of installation art.
One gesture, endlessly repeated, endlessly argued about. Here is what thirty years of preparation put behind the blade.
Lucio Fontana at a glance:
1899: born in Rosario, Argentina, son of an Italian sculptor of cemetery monuments.
1946: signs the Manifesto Blanco with his students in Buenos Aires: art should use space, light and time, not just paint.
1949: punches his first holes, the buchi, through canvas in Milan, and builds the first Spatial Environment in a blacked-out gallery.
1958: makes the first clean cut, the taglio, and finds the gesture he will repeat and refine for the last decade of his life.
1968: dies at Comabbio months after showing an empty white environment at Documenta: one last room with almost nothing in it.
Rosario, Milan, and clay first
Fontana was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1899; his Italian father carved cemetery sculpture, and the son trained the traditional way, at Milan's Brera academy under the sculptor Adolfo Wildt. For decades he was a sculptor and ceramicist, sacred figures, glazed crabs, expressionist clay, and that manual mastery is the buried foundation of everything the knife did later.
Manifesto Blanco, and the holes
Sitting out the war in Buenos Aires, he and his students issued the Manifesto Blanco in 1946: art should leave the flat picture for space, light and time.
Back in Milan he founded Spatialism with the first manifesto of 1947, and from 1949 he punctured canvases with fields of holes, the Buchi.
The same year he built an ambiente spaziale, a blacked out room with ultraviolet shapes, walk in art decades before the word installation.
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1958: the cut
The slashes, the Tagli, began in 1958: a prepared monochrome canvas, a blade drawn down in one breath, black gauze behind the opening so the dark reads as depth.
He titled almost all of them Concetto spaziale, Attese, spatial concept, expectations. The gesture looks instant; the preparation was exacting, and he destroyed the canvases where the stroke faltered.
The myth: a one trick gimmick
The cut is easy to parody and hard to survive.
What the parody misses: Fontana was nearly sixty when he made the first slash, with a lifetime of sculpture behind the decision, and he had already drawn in the air with neon, his 1951 arabesque for the Milan Triennale, and opened rooms of black light.
The cut was not a shortcut. It was a conclusion, and the argument it ended, whether the picture is a window or an object, had run for five centuries.
The last decade, and the egg
In the 1960s came the Fine di Dio series, huge egg shaped canvases punctured like meteor fields, one of which sold for 29.2 million dollars in 2015, and the Teatrini, cut skylines framed like toy theatres. He died at Comabbio, his father's Lombard village, in 1968, a year after retiring there, with the young artists of Arte Povera and Minimalism citing him on both sides of the Atlantic.
Where to see Fontana
Milan is the capital: the Museo del Novecento keeps a whole Fontana floor with the neon arabesque, and the Fondazione Lucio Fontana guards the estate. The Tate, MoMA and the Pompidou all hang slashes; the ceramics hide in Italian churches and cemeteries, where he started.
Black light and a hundred meters of neon
In 1949, in the Galleria del Naviglio, Fontana hung floating forms in a blacked-out room under ultraviolet light and called it a Spatial Environment. Visitors walked into a work that offered nothing to buy.
Two years later he bent roughly a hundred meters of neon into a giant scribble above the staircase of the Milan Triennale.
Installation art and light art were being invented in those rooms, decades ahead of the names. The cut canvases everyone knows were one room of a much larger building.
A manifesto on state television
Fontana wrote manifestos the way other artists sketch: the White Manifesto in Buenos Aires, then a run of Spatialist texts in Milan.
In 1952 his group broadcast a manifesto on RAI, Italian state television, barely three years into the medium's existence, proposing TV itself as an artistic material.
The argument never changed: art should occupy space, light and time. The slash in a canvas was that argument, compressed to one second.
The stones, the glitter, the Venices
Between the holes and the cuts came less famous families: the Stones, canvases studded with lumps of colored Murano glass, and the Baroques, thick with impasto.
For Venice in 1961 he gilded a whole series, gouging and swirling gold surfaces, then took his slashes to New York on sheets of polished copper and brass.
Critics who call the cut austere forget how much of Fontana glitters. He liked sequins, glass and gold; the purity came wearing jewelry.
The Lucio Fontana questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? The slashed monochrome canvases, Concetto spaziale, Attese, begun in 1958.
Why did he cut the canvas? To open the flat picture onto real space: Spatialism's whole argument in one stroke.
Was he a sculptor first? Yes, for thirty years, trained under Wildt at the Brera; ceramics throughout.
When did he die? In 1968, at Comabbio in Lombardy, at 69.
How much does a Fontana cost? La Fine di Dio, one of the egg-shaped canvases, sold for 29.2 million dollars in New York in 2015. Single-cut canvases usually trade between one and three million.
Did he cut in anger? No. He waited for the right mood, cut in one calm motion, then backed the slit with black gauze so it reads as depth, not damage.
More secrets to unlock
Small talk behind the cleanest gesture
Turn a slash around and Fontana talks to you: on the backs of the canvases he wrote small private notes alongside the title, complaints about the weather, thoughts from that morning at the studio. Museums photograph the versos like diary pages. The cleanest gesture in modern art has small talk hidden behind it.
