Criticism Volume 57 Article 11 Issue 4 The Avant-Garde at War

2015 Critical Fontana Howard Singerman University of Virginia - Main Campus, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Singerman, Howard (2015) "Critical Fontana," Criticism: Vol. 57 : Iss. 4 , Article 11. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol57/iss4/11 CRITICAL The subtitle of Anthony White’s monograph on the Italian artist FONTANA Lucio Fontana, Between Utopia Howard Singerman and Kitsch, lays out the terms of the book’s central—and oft-repeated— Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia argument: that Fontana’s art, a and Kitsch by Anthony White. “collision of avant-garde tech- Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, niques and a kitsch past redolent 2011. 336 pp. $29.95 cloth. with outmoded, even infantile desires possesses a critical force” (14). Both Fontana’s avant-garde techniques—the perforations and slashes of his Buchi (Holes, 1949– 68) and Tagli (Cuts, 1958–68), for example—and his embrace of kitsch’s shiny surfaces and ersatz construction worked to desubli- mate and degrade painting, and “only in its decrepitude did Fontana believe painting could have a uto- pian potential” (18). White’s book may well be, as he claims, the first to “systematically account” for the “puzzling paradoxes of the art- ist’s work” (6), but it is not the first English-language monograph on Fontana. There is a good deal of critical and historical writing on Fontana, most of it, particularly in English, has been, as White notes, in exhibition catalogs. The first English-language catalog, with a short, smart essay by Lawrence Alloway, accompanied Fontana’s first one-person show, at Martha Jackson Gallery, in New York City in 1961. And while White’s book covers the entirety of Fontana’s career from the 1920s forward, it is here—with the Jackson show and the reception of the artist’s Venice

Criticism Fall 2015, Vol. 57, No. 4, pp. 697–704. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.57.4.0697 697 © 2016 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 698 HowARD Singerman paintings in New York—that the any false reconciliation or mastery. book begins. In Fontana’s work, both avant- A series of ten five-foot-square garde and kitsch are riven by a Spatial Concepts bearing sub- radical incompleteness: a moder- titles like At Dawn Venice Was All nity rigorously opposed to that Golden or Sun in Piazza San Marco which exists in the present, and (both 1961)—“phrases likely to be grounded in a hopeful, forward- appended to mass-produced post- looking appreciation for what has cards for the Italian tourist market” seemingly passed into historical (9)—the Venice paintings enact the oblivion” (14). collision of avant-garde and kitsch White borrows the phrase that White’s system turns on. They “damaged goods” from Walter are, as befits avant-garde practice, Benjamin, and he links Fontana’s monochromes, or nearly so, and attraction to the outmoded punctured or slashed as Fontana’s (whether to the antiquated dreams paintings had been since the first of a past art, the unfulfilled dreams Buchi of 1949, but the paint is silver of an earlier avant-garde, or the and gold acrylic laid on like frosting, pleasure promised by objects de and Fontana crusted his surfaces luxe or their commodity knockoffs) with Murano glass. The paintings to Benjamin’s idea of the “dialecti- are at once at least ironically aspira- cal image”: “Benjamin’s argument tional and, as White’s chapter title that certain cultural products offer has it, “damaged goods.” While a critical image of modernity’s they evoke the breakthroughs of contradictions has immense sig- the avant-garde and even, in their nificance for Fontana’s work” (13). “lavishly ornament[ed]” surfaces, And over and over again, across “the antiquated luxuries of the four decades of work, White points medieval past” (6), their kitsch titles to Fontana’s “use of outmoded and elaborate surfaces—and their forms to draw pointed compari- empty, seemingly mechanical repe- sons between modernity’s utopian titions of a decade-old avant-garde dreams of fulfillment and their strategy—insist on painting’s fail- fatal obsolescence as kitsch within ure, its “decrepitude.” In White’s commodity culture” (271). While accounting, Fontana’s system is Benjamin’s concept is a fruitful far more complex than the simple, one for White, he acknowledges “Manichean” (11) opposition that that they are strange bedfellows; Clement Greenberg offered in Fontana was, after all, a member “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939).1 of Italian fascist movement and Rather, Fontana’s is doubly articu- “clearly had no ideological oppo- lated, each pole internally divided sition to the theme of Italian mili- against itself, “thereby disallowing tary victory” (96) when, in May ON LUCIO FONTANA 699

1936, authorities renamed the “He is the enemy of media purity, Hall of Honor—a commission he and chooses the ambiguous border shared with the critic and architect between the arts, where paintings Edoardo Persico and others at the look like sculpture and sculpture VI Triennale of Milan—the Hall meets painting halfway.”3 This, of Victory in celebration of Italy’s I should note, is the oldest theme invasion of Ethiopia. But White in Fontana criticism; it emerges draws on Benjamin for more than in Persico’s 1936 monograph, the his theorization of the dialectical first extended critical assessment image; he uses Benjamin to give of Fontana’s work, when the art- Fontana his sensibility: “It is no ist’s transgressions—his border coincidence, nevertheless, that in crossings—were those of a sculp- 1936 both the writer and the art- tor rather than a painter: Fontana’s ist were described independently aim was “to resolve sculpture and as being ‘touched by extremes.’ painting,” mustering “all of the The two men were fascinated by acquired taste of the sculptor and the most novel and shocking tech- all of his chromatic obsessions.”4 niques of the avant-garde, and yet White has little interest in pursuing both cherished objects and styles this categorical crossover directly, rendered obsolete by the myth of whether because of its obvious- progress” (14). ness or its formalism; his concern White’s discussion of Fontana instead is with Fontana’s engage- as a dialectician is nuanced and ment with the broader “project of complex, but the presentation of the historical avant-garde, critiqu- Fontana as an artist who works ing the traditional boundaries of the interestingly in between things is autonomous art object” (125)—not a long-standing motif in ­writing the boundaries between métier, but on the artist. The title of Erika those that separate the traditional Billeter’s lead essay in the catalog work of art from its surroundings, for Guggenheim Museum’s 1977 whether physical, spatial (hence Fontana retrospective, his first in Fontana’s “spatialism”), or the the United States, predicts the syn- broader life-world represented by tax, if not all the terms, for White’s applied art, mass culture, and the own work: “Lucio Fontana: kitsch of his title. Between Tradition and Avant- The Fontana that Alloway pres- Garde.”2 Lawrence Alloway’s essay ents in 1961 is already, as White’s for the 1961 Martha Jackson catalog will be, a more complicated artist is entitled “Man on the Border,” than the one Persico has drawn. and while it is quite brief, it plots His trespasses are doubled, and the a number of the strategies and boundaries he crosses have more oppositions that White will pursue: at stake: his work is troubled by “a 700 HowARD Singerman problem at the core.” According to of volume” (47)—as evidence not Alloway, of “all of the acquired taste of the sculptor and all of his chromatic Fontana’s ambiguity has obsessions gathered together in to do with the status of the the perfect unity of the work,”6 but work of art. Ever since Art of the work’s failure to cohere, of Nouveau artists have made Fontana’s conscious refusal of “any the decorative arts expressive false reconciliation or mastery.” and the expressive arts deco- Writing of Fontana’s large poly- rative. This transcendence chrome and gilded plaster sculp- of the traditional limits of tures—works such as Victory of the fine and applied arts is the Air and Seated Young Woman, Fontana’s theme. . . . [H]e both 1934, and both of which fig- ignores the borders of paint- ure in White’s account—Persico ing and sculpture, and of the insists that “the sculptor’s most fine and the applied arts. . . . recent works are neither . . . bizarre [Thus it] is a part of his bor- nor paradoxical but the attempt at der activity that his works extreme coherence [coerenza].”7 Or, often have a connection with perhaps, “extreme consistency.” the chic.5 This is not a passage that White cites—for obvious reasons—but Alloway’s spatial metaphor is I want to use the ambiguity avail- somewhat slippery; Fontana is both able in the Italian word coerenza to on the border and disdainful of it, underline the difference between but it is clear that he needs those Persico’s Fontana and White’s. categories to be felt as set: paint- Neither are interested in Fontana ing and sculpture, fine and applied as a maker of oddities or para- arts, avant-grade and tradition, doxes (accounting for such “puz- avant-garde and kitsch—or at least zling paradoxes” is, after all, the his critics do. Where White differs explicit purpose of White’s sys- from Alloway, and certainly from tematic approach), but where, for Persico, is around the question of Persico, Fontana’s value lies in the resolution, of success. He cannot coherence of the work, its unity, think Fontana’s transgression as for White it is in the consistency of “transcendence,” as Alloway does, Fontana’s attack on just such unity, and he uses the descriptions Persico and his career-long critical “com- recorded in his 1936 monograph— mitment to questioning the sta- of the way in which Fontana’s tus and function of the art object” gold paint “conquered the [plaster (64). It is symptomatic, then, that or terra cotta] mass like a shiver” White translates Persico’s phrase and “represents the decomposition “acutezza critica” (the writer is ON LUCIO FONTANA 701 assessing the insistence with which with the prevailing artistic tenden- Fontana had distilled the devel- cies of the day” (27), and standing opments of recent European art “at a considerable distance from the and turned them to his purposes) circumstances in which he found as “critical consciousness” (27). himself, exposing them to analysis “Critical acumen,” the more con- and critique” (271). The work of ventional translation, suggests a distancing gives each of White’s professional strategy, an artistic chapters its form—and in each practice both within and in relation chapter Fontana’s work takes its to a field of other practices; “criti- specific form in determinate oppo- cal consciousness” is rather more sition to a cultural practice that it internal and Benjaminian, and it is not (a cultural practice that has works to separate Fontana from failed to account for its historical the sort of avant-garde maneuver- situatedness), and against which it ing within which, as White quotes will make sense. Benjamin, the “newest remains, in White writes in his conclusion, every respect the same” (7). “I maintain that the works make White’s citation of Benjamin on no sense unless they are considered modernity appears in his discus- in relation to historical develop- sion of the Venice paintings and ments such as fascist cultural policy his (and Fontana’s) reading of the and the rise of modern consumer failure of Art Informel: Fontana culture, and the particular form of “was aware that, in his era, avant- those phenomena in Italy” (271). garde attacks on traditional paint- But these broad and somewhat cur- ing often produced nothing ‘new’ sorily sketched historical develop- and did not liberate the viewer ments appear only when Fontana from classical or mythical aspects of casts his referential shadow upon art. He responded to this situation them; they are invoked only inso- by distancing himself from the con- far as they can be linked to one or cerns of contemporary European another of Fontana’s elements of gestural painting” (7). White’s style—his gilding or glazing or Fontana is characterized by his neon—or to a moment of stylis- distance—an insistently critical tic change. And they are mostly and historical distance that mim- seen in parallax, only as they ics White’s own, a position not so are triangulated by another art- much within the “field of cultural ist or movement less critical and production,” as Bourdieu has it, more idealist than Fontana: the but on it. Thus, from beginning to Novecento, the Milione abstaction- end, Fontana is seen “continuously ists, Art Informel. While a number going against the flow of develop- of other artists appear in the book, ments in modern art” (19), “at odds they are there for the most part as 702 HowARD Singerman negative examples, embodiments “on paper he subscribed to their of the “prevailing artistic tenden- ideas,” but he insists (in yet another cies of the day.” White pushes his figure of distance), that “such aspi- artist away from any situation that rations to transcendence could not might embed him within a broader be further from his idea of art” and cultural field or link him to any “his abstract work would continue position other than the one White the critique he initiated” at the stakes out for him. beginning of his career (68). This move is particularly obvious White’s book is an often con- in White’s discussion of Fontana’s vincing reading of a selection of abstractions of the mid-1930s, Fontana’s key works and a strong which were, he admits, “produced rereading of the critical reception in the context of his acquaintance of those works, taking each work with the ‘Milione group’ of abstract and its historical and phenomenal artists” (65), a group “influenced . . . effects both with and against that by the artists of the Paris-based initial reception. One thing White’s Abstraction-Creation group, who rereading makes very clear, but exalted geometry as an expression that seems to run counter to his of a transcendent, universal order” narrative, is that Fontana’s work (68). “Acquaintance” and “influ- has been consistently on exhibition enced” are interestingly anodyne and on the scene from the 1920s words here: Fontana was a mem- on, and has never been without ber of the Gallery Milione and a criticism, for the most part sup- signatory to the 1935 “Declaration portive, certainly attentive. Given of the Exhibitors at the ‘First the incisiveness of Fontana’s cri- Collective Exhibition of Italian tique and the relentlessness of his Abstract Art,’” and he exhibited in critical vision, its embrace of the Paris with Abstraction-Creation. outmoded and the improper, how This affiliation in both its form is it that Fontana’s work appeared and its content runs against White’s so frequently and so centrally— project—and maybe Fontana’s: the in biennials and triennials across Milione group was “simply perpet- Italy—throughout his career? uating the ideals of the Novecento How is it, to take a specific exam- movement in an abstract mode. ple, that Carlo Carra, the primary In their manifestos and writings, practitioner and theorist of the sort [they] associated their work not of Novecento work that Fontana with the materiality shared by the “savagely critiqued” in chapter 2 flat canvas and wall but with the a (127), comes to appear (without priori realm of pure geometry” (67). further comment) in chapter 3 on White acknowledges that Fontana a list of those critics who “wrote signed the Declaration, and that favorably of Fontana’s abstract ON LUCIO FONTANA 703 work” (64)? This is, perhaps, more sense.” Perhaps we need a recep- a sociological question than a criti- tion theory of criticality, or at least cal one; its answer lies in the net- to ask how an artwork is critical, works and institutions of modern or better when is it. It may be that art in Italy rather than in the work. criticality is, as Hal Foster has sug- But it suggests a methodological gested, nachträglich; it has its effect question as well: Where and when only after the fact, only under and to whom is Fontana’s criticality interpretation. visible, legible? In his closing pages, Fontana is the hero of White’s White returns one last time to the narrative in a way that, despite Venice paintings and to artist and the author’s own real critical critic Sidney Tillim’s failure to read acumen, recalls an older art his- Fontana’s paintings as he has: tory—the story of a single artist in his singularity and separate- By relating Fontana’s work ness. Despite Fontana’s refusal of to its specific social and his- the artist’s gift, his “dream,” or torical context, I have sought White’s, “of art released from the to avoid the misunderstand- death sentence of artistic genius” ings that have plagued the (233), White’s artist is omniscient reception of his work. . . . As in relation to his historical posi- an example of such miscon- tion: he and White know the same ceptions I return once again things and share the same values to Sidney Tillim. . . . In his (even the same idealism—the idea writings Tillim praised Claes of a critical work of art that is at Oldenburg’s pop art “adop- once transparent to correct critical tion of traditional kitsch” knowledge and has only now been but condemned Fontana correctly read). “Determining the for his “Venetian enchant- border between working with, and ment.” Whether or not these merely working within, the con- opposing judgments relate to textual factors is an inescapable differences in artistic qual- critical demand,”8 wrote Michael ity, they can certainly be Podro some years ago, in The explained by a critic’s fail- Critical Historians of Art (1982), an ure to appreciate the cultur- intellectual history of the German ally specific kitsch references tradition of art history. Clearly, within Fontana’s work. (271) White has decided—has made “the critical judgment”—that Tillim, it seems, needed the knowl- unlike Carlo Carra or Georges edge that White has, and that Mathieu, Fontana is working White’s Fontana had, without with his historical situation. But which, again, “the works make no it is clear as well that Fontana’s 704 HowARD Singerman

“commitment to questioning in Lucio Fontana, 1899–1968: A the status and function of the art Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1977), 13–20. object” (64)—his “vision of the 3. Lawrence Alloway, “Man on the artwork” (84)—produces an art- Border,” in Lucio Fontana: Ten ist who looks very much like the Paintings of Venice, exhibition catalog historian—a Fontana who dreams (New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, of a critical work of art—one writ- 1961), n.p. ten and ready for reading. 4. “[T]utte le esperienze di gusto dello scultore e tutte le sue ossessioni cromatiche sono adunate nella perfetta Howard Singerman is the author of Art unità dell’opera”: Edoardo Persico, Subjects: Making Artists in the American Lucio Fontana (Milan: Edizioni di University (University of California Press, Campo Grafico, 1936), excerpted in 1999) and Art History, After Sherrie Levine Corrente: Il Movimento di Arte e Cultura (University of California Press, 2012). He di Opposizione, 1930–1945 [Current: is the Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Chair of The movement of art and culture in the Department of Art and Art History at opposition, 1930–1945], ed. Mario di Hunter College of the City University of Micheli (Milan: Vangelista, 1985), 288, New York. my translation. 5. Alloway, “Man on the Border,” n.p. 6. Persico, Lucio Fontana, 288, my NOTES translation. 1. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and 7. “Le ultime opere dello scultore non Kitsch” (1939), in Clement Greenberg: sono, a questa stregua, né una bizzar- The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. ria né un paradosso, ma un tentativo 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, di estrema coerenza”: Persico, Lucio ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University Fontana, 288, my translation. of Chicago Press, 1986), 5–22. 8. Michael Podro, The Critical 2. Erika Billeter, “Lucio Fontana: Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale Between Tradition and Avant-Garde,” University Press, 1982), 205.