Lucio Fontana: At the Roots of Spatialism

Date: 08-07-2007
Owning Institution: The Estorick Collection
Publication:       
Subject:     20th Century  

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), the subject of a small, tightly focussed and beautifully displayed exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, was an artist known for his acts of calculated violence. In the name of “Spatialism” – a new art for a new era, as he saw it – he would slash his canvases repeatedly with a razor blade, or riddle them with holes. Fontana was a contemporary of the American Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock,  whose skeins of flicked paint earned him the nickname of Jack the Dripper. “Lucio the Ripper”, as Fontana was once dubbed, was another ready target for satire. Italian cartoonists of the 1940s and 1950s invented fishermen who took to the sea at his approach, fearful that he might puncture the keels of their boats. They devised the Lucio Fontana parasol, pierced with multiple holes, which left sunbathers as spotted as leopards.

Fontana was well aware that, like many another artist of the avant-garde, he was all too easy to mock. In one of several texts written to justify his approach, the defiantly entitled “Why I’m a Spatial” of 1952, he railed against his light-heartedly shallow opponents: “I consider artists that smile as mediocre and imbecile those critics who write jokingly about the spatial environment.” With the passage of time, he is the one to have had the last laugh. His works, once dismissed as the antic gestures of an eccentric experimentalist, are now rightfully considered among the classic creations of twentieth-century Italian art. Fontana’s Spatial Concepts – the generic title he gave to his slashed and scarred canvases and drawings – are eloquently uneasy objects. Their forms are as elegant as their meanings are ambiguous.

Fontana was born in Argentina, to an Italian mother and an Argentinian father who was both an architect and a sculptor. His family moved to Milan in 1905 and he was educated in Italy. Despite his youth, he fought in the First World War, before moving to Buenos Aires in 1924 to help in a commercial sculpture business his father had set up there. He returned to Milan at the end of the 1920s, enrolling in the city’s leading art school, then in 1935 moved to Paris, where he joined the Abstraction-Creation association and learned to work in the medium of ceramics. By 1940, he was back in Argentina, where he spent the next seven years formulating the principles of Spatialism but struggled to create an art capable of expressing its ideals. It was only a year after his return to Milan, where he would spend the rest of his life, that he made what he regarded as his great breakthrough. Enraged by a failed painting, he slashed and ripped the offending canvas to shreds. He was pleased by what he saw. “Spatialist” art was born.

The bare facts of Fontana’s peripatetic life suggest that he was a footloose, restless artist who only really found himself in late middle age. But the intellectual foundations of Spatialism were laid early in his career. In the late 1920s, he had fallen under the influence of Umberto Boccioni and the Italian Futurists, who had famously called for the destruction of Italy’s museums and churches, announcing the urgent need for the creation of a new art to express the realities of a new machine age. Futurist painting, with its stuttering forms suggestive of sequential movement, and its shattered perspectives, was an attempt to embrace the restless dynamism of modern urban-industrial experience. The Futurists never actually set fire to museums, as they threatened to do in some of their more extreme manifestoes, but they did so metaphorically – creating an art so at odds with the conventions of the art of the past as to decare it dead, finished and irrelevant. Fontana inherited the Futurist’s millenarian conception of high modernist endeavour. His work, like theirs, is shot through with an angry, iconoclastic violence. Fontana’s early “Spatialist” canvases are brutalised, wounded objects – paintings forged, as it were, from acts normally associated with the destruction rather than creation of art.

Like the Futurists, Fontana considered himself to be a kind of prophet of a new age. He had also been influenced by Malevich and other abstract artists of the post-revolutionary Russian avant-garde. Until their efforts were cruelly curtailed by the Stalinist authorities, Malevich and his colleagues saw themselves as the creators of a dematerialised art perfectly adapted to the expression of the beliefs of a new and revolutionary society – one in which mankind, free from the materialism and greed of the past, would live ever-increasingly higher, freer and more spiritual lives. A similar idealism animated Fontana’s Spatial Concepts, to judge by the way in which he wrote about them. He thought of the slashes and holes that scar their surfaces as windows into a mysterious “fourth dimension”, intimations of an infinity to which man would become increasingly attuned. Spatialist art was meant to go beyond the anger of Futurist art, and to transcend its preoccupation with describing the realities of urban experience. Fontana was a mystic and a visionary, but in many ways he was more conventional – or at least more closely tied to the traditions and beliefs of the past – than he liked to appear. 

He was very much a Milanese artist, both in his techniques and his sensibility. He sometimes called his slashed canvases “tagli”, a word that in Italian evokes the cut of a suit as well as the mere act of cutting. In the venerable tradition of Milanese tailoring, those who cut cloth are also encouraged to see themselves as draughtsmen, people who draw lines with scissors and knife. Fontana cuts his canvases with all the nervy elegance of a high-end fashion designer. The slashed lines that dance across his canvases of the early 1950s have been placed and considered with utmost delicacy, the fastidiousness of an out-and-out aesthete. To underline this aspect of the artist’s personality, room has been found at the Estorick to display an actual dress designed by him in 1955-6. Pierced through with numerous, delicate side vents, it is entitled Unique Dress (A Spatial Concept Free to Roam). This is uniform for the enlightened: a modern-day version of the ascetic robes of a Capuchin friar, who is to roam the world preaching the words of prophecy.

With his dreams of the infinite, Fontana does in fact resemble a Catholic visionary in modernist disguise. Some of his work explicitly evokes the Counter-Reformation art of the Baroque – about which Fontana had kind things to say, seeing in it an early attempt to liberate forms and figures into infinite space. The show contains several distinctly baroque drawings of angels, as well as a knobbly sculpture of an outstretched figure in ceramic, of 1955-6, entitled Spatial Concept (Christ). This puts an interesting perspective on Fontana’s so-called “Buchi”, his paintings that are not slashed but instead riddled with holes like gaping wounds. The paradox of these works is that, despite the declared spiritual ambitions animating them, they should seem so pathetically rooted to this world. These are canvases that look like literal skins, pierced or lacerated, subjected to extremes of physical violence. Like the Roman Catholic faith itself, Fontana’s art oscillates between intimations of mystical, out-of-body experience and a countervailingly intense world of suffering and pain. Spatialism set its face to the future but secretly looked back to the past as well – to the visions of the martyrs and the terrible deaths suffered by them; to the promise of the afterlife and the bloody wounds of Christ.