Lucio Fontana

Lucio Fontana. Concetto spaziale, La luna a Venezia, 1961.

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ANTHONY WHITE

Consumption as spectacle contains the promise that want will disappear . . . It is the desire for a new ecology, for a breaking down of environmental barriers, for an esthetic which is not limited to the sphere of “the artistic.” These desires . . . have physiological roots and can no longer be suppressed. Consumption as spectacle is—in parody form—the anticipation of a utopian situation. —Hans Magnus Enzensberger1

In late 1961 the Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana mounted his first North American solo exhibition at New York’s Martha Jackson Gallery. Titled “Ten Paintings of Venice,” the exhibition consisted of canvases that had been punctured with a knife and embellished with unorthodox materials. In these works, dedicated to the Byzantine splendors of Venice, dazzling layers of metallic gold or silver paint had been thickly troweled on with a spatula. Then, with the fingers of either hand, the wet paint was pockmarked with dabs, or raked into dense ridges that roughly formed squares, circles, or decorative swirls. Some works were also encrusted with shattered chips of polychrome Murano glass. In showing at Martha Jackson, Fontana was engaging in a dialogue with the most progressive art in New York of the time. The previous year the gallery had hosted “New Media—New Forms,” where the art of junk and industrial debris found its first uptown venue. In 1961 the gallery showed “Environments, Situations, Spaces,” which included Claes Oldenburg’s garish plaster reliefs of cheap com- modities; Allan Kaprow’s Yard, a courtyard filled with car tires; and George Brecht’s Chair Events, ordinary furniture considered as performance works. By incorpo- rating a heterogeneous range of materials, these American artists broke down the hierarchy of the aesthetic and nonaesthetic. They focused on the “everyday” quality of the artwork through a denial of elevated subject matter, a minimal artistic transformation of readymade or found material, and the physical projection of that material into the literal space of the viewer’s experience. In many respects, Fontana’s Venice paintings belonged within this range of work. Emphasizing the relief quality of the canvas with punctures, cuts, and glass

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 chunks, Fontana disrupted the neutrality of easel painting’s illusionistic “window pane.” In its place was substituted a powerful awareness of the materiality of the canvas surface. Moreover, as Lawrence Alloway argued in his essay for the New York exhibition, “Man on the Border,” Some of the ways in which [Fontana] ignores the borders of painting and sculpture, and of the fine and the applied arts, are: . . . odd-shaped stretchers which explode or implode the customary rectangle; ceramic chips and metal paints which give the surface a sculptural solidity; and various punctures and cuts which create space literally, by opening up a painted surface.2 This last issue was often addressed in Fontana’s writings and statements from this period. In 1954 he argued that “Sculpture and painting are both things of the past. . . . We need a new form. Art that’s movement. Art within space.”3 The ambition to go beyond the art object in order to gain contact with the fluid space beyond was a constant preoccupation. Although Kaprow, Brecht, and Oldenburg were subjected to dismissive and ironic reviews, nothing quite matches the vitriolic attacks against Fontana’s New York show. Sidney Tillim, writing in Arts Magazine, identified with Fontana’s impulse to cut the canvas, to “smash your fist through this mirror of inhibition toying with a man’s illusion that he can be free (of the limits of time, space and death).” However, he then argued that the artist’s work suffered from “sheer mega- lomanic tastelessness,” because rather than destroying painting, Fontana continued to paint, becoming a “successful decorator.” As Tillim observed: The anarchic gash is still there, but . . . these gaping wounds are surrounded by fusillades of tiny punctures, rough chunks of Murano glass and a surf of gooey plastic paint gilding the anti-totem of the hole with a kind of palatial extravagance in gold and silver while purporting to evoke such facets of Venetian enchantment as its moon, its Baroque and its nights of love. But the hole is one kind of fetish, the window dressing another. The latter obviates the reason for having attacked the plane in the first place—as if he now refuses to accept the consequences of his own destructiveness.4 For Tillim it was acceptable to destroy painting, but not thereafter to return to the canvas and treat it as a surface to be richly ornamented. What the critic did not realize was that the two impulses are related, although he hinted at it when arguing that there is something fetishistic about both the hole and the window dressing, albeit of different kinds.

Lucio Fontana. Concetto spaziale, Venezia Barocca, 1961. (Original photo cropped at right.)

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 Indeed, Fontana’s willful savoring of garish materials did not contradict his destructive impulse, but rather went hand in hand with it. In order to understand the marriage between negation and kitsch in Fontana’s work properly, it is important first of all to appreciate the distance between these works and a paradigm of artistic practice still prevalent at the time. Although the holes and punctures convey the sense that an event of sheer physical impact has occurred, Fontana was averse to gestural painting and the types of psychologistic readings that were attached to it. “I am not informal,” he declared, opposing himself to the European Informal school of gestural painting. “[T]he informal seeks the result in the gesture . . .; my nature is attracted rather to space.” While one cannot deny that Fontana’s works are the result of a certain kind of action, they were not intended as records of his own presence. As Fontana argued, “[T]he artist must have the courage to stop idolizing himself, to stop seeing himself at the center of the earth and of all things.”5 By drawing attention to the stubborn materiality of canvas with the puncture, Fontana ruptured the neutral “arena” upon which gestural painting relied in order to provide a coherent background for the artist’s marks. Furthermore, the puncture technique, with its repetitive, machine-gun appearance, does not allow for the kind of expressive effects common to gestural art. Rather, as contemporary viewers noted, it has more in common with the mechanical punches made in a tram ticket.6 In 1957 one reviewer even argued that “like holes in a punched card, like bullet holes in a wall, the holes carry information.”7 This informational quality of the holes is foreign to the deeper sense of authorial presence connoted by con- ventional artistic gesture. Moreover, the fact that the mark is a lack—an absence of canvas—in the pictorial field pointedly withdraws the fullness of the artist’s figure from the work in order to allow another dimension of painting to emerge. This dimension of Fontana’s paintings can be approached through the novel scenographic arrangements and photographs of his first punctured paintings from the early 1950s. In the most unusual of these photographs, published in the magazine Spazio in December 1952, a punctured painting is shown propped on a stool with a light placed directly behind it. Luminous images of the electric lamp’s glowing filament, focused by the holes as if by countless pinhole lenses, are projected onto a darkened wall.8 In an earlier photo, published in Domus in June 1952, three punctured canvases are shown in a loosely architectonic arrangement in Fontana’s studio. In the caption Lisa Ponti comments: [I]n these, which Fontana calls “Spatial Concepts,” punctured and illuminated paper mounted on canvas, there is a distance from the object true and

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Here the paintings are explicitly connected both to the vision of an expanded environmental artwork and to the idea of an art of spectacle. Such a description begs the question of what it might mean to call these works a “spatial spectacle” and whether such a designation is accurate. Answering it will necessitate leaving behind the media of painting and photography to examine the environmental installations that Fontana produced over the course of the decades prior to 1961.

The Early “Environments”: Events and Projects 1946–1948 Fontana spent the war years in Argentina where he acquainted himself with the writings of Umberto Boccioni and was exposed to the growing local Concrete Art movement in Buenos Aires, which, for the Argentine arts scene of that period, was relatively experimental, particularly in its use of modern technology and in its openness to innovative art forms.10 In 1946, the year before Fontana would return to Milan, he co-authored the Manifiesto Blanco, which signalled a major development in his thinking. Written in collaboration with a group of artists and students in Buenos Aires, the Manifiesto Blanco can be characterized as a call for a synthesis of the arts, for an art that would be “a sum of physical elements—colour, sound, movement, time, space—which completes a physical-psychic unity.” This idea of synthesis is grounded in the concept that certain scientific and philo- sophical developments have transformed the human psyche to such an extent that traditional “static” art forms and the differentiation of artistic disciplines have become obsolete. A new, synthetic art is advocated that will involve the dynamic principle of movement through space and time: “The construction of voluminous forms changing through a plastic, mobile substance. Arranged in space they act in synchronic form, they complete dynamic images.” Arguing that this art will arise from contact with the subconscious and from the application of scientific developments, the authors of the Manifiesto Blanco insisted that scientists “direct part of their research towards discovering this luminous and malleable substance and instruments to produce sounds that permit the development of four- dimensional art.”11 The new art that will arise is envisaged as the product of recent technological discoveries, at this point largely of an unspecified nature. The manifesto synthesizes various avant-garde ideas, ranging from the integration of the arts to scientistic determinism and faith in the subconscious, without specifying how these concepts might be meaningfully related to one another. It is also rather

Top: Attilio Bacci. Photograph of Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, 1952; Concetto spaziale, 1952; and unknown (lost?) work. Published in Domus (June 1952). Bottom: Attilio Bacci. Photograph of unknown (lost?) work by Lucio Fontana. Published in Spazio (December 1952).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 vague on the question of how this vision of a Gesamtkunstwerk was to be realized in practical terms. There are, however, two works from the period in Argentina that seem to have come close. One of these is the art “event” of 1946 that took place in Buenos Aires when a group of Fontana’s students occupied the site of a demolished building. As Jorge Roccamonte recalls, we decided to organize a collective exhibition, to come out into the open, as a group. We agreed to meet at six in the afternoon, and began to paint walls. In Rúa Florida on the corner with Rúa Cordova, we had chosen a demolished house, a baldío, as we say in Spanish. It was a very large area. We painted the walls, attached colorful pieces of cloth: with drums full of paint and tar we managed to soil and mark the walls. We also hung up a few sculptures by their feet. We managed to illuminate the whole area, I don’t know how, so passers-by stopped and looked at us as if we were mad. It was fun but it didn’t last long. Because the police turned up and moved us on.12 In this anarchistic act of mayhem the dismantling of the autonomous artwork engages the environment in a forceful act of “de-sublimation.” Sculptures are hung upside down between the walls of a ruined building that have been “soiled” with color and pieces of fabric. Not only was the artwork degraded, pulled apart, and scattered on the walls, this was an explicitly vandalistic work, involving a deface- ment of architecture and a literal debasement of sculpture. This was the ﬁrst of two prototypes for the environmental works that Fontana would produce after his return to Italy. The second, quite different, prototype was based on the idea of projecting light. While this type of work was never realized in Argentina, the artist often spoke about it in discussions with his students and associates. One account from the Argentine artist Emilio Pettorutti in 1968 recalls conversations held with Fontana in 1947: During the months which preceded his return to Italy, he began to tell me about a nonexistent spatial sculpture that would be projected into the ﬁrmament. It was the total opposite to an earthly sculpture, in his estimation, it did not become concrete except in the mind of the artist, who could however project the sculpture into the night sky, I believe, and without there being any clouds.13 The idea of projecting images into space would become the basis for what Fontana described as a “spatial” art created with the medium of television. While archival evidence of any actual televisual transmission remains to be discovered, in many written statements, manifestos, and interviews, Fontana frequently mentioned

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 television in conjunction with the idea of projection as among his chief aspira- tions for a new art form. In 1947, immediately upon his return to Italy, a number of references to television began appearing in various documents. In the text of an unpublished interview conducted some months after his return to Italy, for instance, Fontana makes the following remarks: [T]he artists that call themselves “spatial” want to break with tradition and are occupied with rendering a spatial vision. Just think that they even come to conceive art in a form that is so new as to make them think of being able to transmit it by means of television.14 The first place in which Fontana’s idea is fleshed out to any extent is in a magazine article published in December of 1947, where the anonymous author reports certain comments made by the artist: The sculptor Lucio Fontana is launching the Spatial Manifesto also in Italy. At the 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, using the conquests of television. By means of a special keyboard the colors of the rainbow will be introduced into the sky, so that we will have multicolored days.15 What is important to note here, apart from the resemblance between this work and earlier avant-garde works such as Fortunato Depero’s Pianoforte motoru- morista of 1915, is the fact that this “spatial” artwork would not, like television, be a means of electronic mass reproduction relaying images to many different viewing units, but rather an artwork projected up into the sky like fireworks. The only aspect of early experiences of television it preserved was that of being watched by a large number of people at once in a public space. Fontana’s “television” project, which foresaw the use of electronic means to produce what was essentially a sin- gular work visible from many places, was never literally realized. If the television broadcast described in the 1952 Television Manifesto did take place, it would have been an entity quite different than the author’s imagined artificial rainbow.16 The environmental sculptures that first appeared in 1949 had their genesis in this light show that would be projected into space. At the same time they also drew upon the desublimatory character of the Buenos Aires art event, with its carnivalesque character and architectural focus. While this combination of ethe- reality and desublimation may at first glance seem contradictory, it was through combining these two qualities that Fontana sought to carry out his utopian impulse while critiquing spectacle.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Spatial Environment of 1949 Fontana’s first Spatial Environment was installed in Milan’s Naviglio Gallery in February of 1949. In it a group of intersecting forms in papier-mâché were coated in polychrome fluorescent paint and suspended from the ceiling, like an abstract piñata. The room in which the Environment appeared was darkened and illuminated with ultraviolet light—known at the time as “Wood’s light” after the American physicist Robert Wood—so that the painted forms gave off an eerie glow. The highly curvaceous “fantastical contours” of the sculpture, the intrusion of space through the central form’s circular opening, and the suspension of the forms from the ceiling put reviewers in mind of open, immaterial forms such as webbing and clouds.17 The curving arms of the sculpture sweepingly embraced the space of the room, filling up the architectural cavity and becoming one with it, in a manner similar to that of Fontana’s remarkable “loopy” drawings that fill up the page with ornamental scribble. As the ultraviolet made the fluorescent paint literally emit light, the forms appeared materially diffuse in a manner that assimilated them to the open space around them. As Guido Ballo observed, “the gallery was transformed: the ceiling was colored with a violet light, full of shadows, in which spatial forms were suspended. . . . [The spectator] did not contemplate a detached form before his eyes, he entered into the pictorial environment.”18 Tying together architecture, painting, and sculpture, Fontana had proposed an art form integrated with the lived reality of ambient space. One of the effects of this installation was to create a dream-like experience of wonder. As Corrado Pizzinelli commented in Il Nuovo Corriere, “barely illuminated by the soft lights of opportunely positioned lamps, are the fantastic contours of the compositions that Fontana has hung from the ceiling. . . . Bathed in electric light, the fluorescent paints vibrate and are com- posed with unreal and fairy-tale hues.”19 This marvelous dream of fusion between the artwork

Top: Lucio Fontana. Ambiente spaziale, 1949. Destroyed. Bottom: Lucio Fontana. Concetto spaziale, 1951–1952.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 and empty space had an enlightened goal. A technological arcadia, the Spatial Environment literally radiated into the environment, creating a “new ecology.” As a reviewer in the Socialist newspaper Avanti! argued, the installation in the Naviglio gallery was “an attempt to bring the life of man into an ambiente formed of colors and sounds more harmonious than that which everyday reality presents us.”20 In Fontana’s utopian vision, aesthetic experience broke through the shell of art’s autonomy and became one with the surrounding empty space in which the viewer lives. This is not to say that Fontana entirely vaporized the materiality of the sculpture. Rather, the papier-mâché reminded Raffaele Carrieri of prehistoric fossils: “We enter into a cabalistic grotto enveloped in black drapery. Is it the first or last night of our planet? In a ghostly sky among the dancing shadows there is a large, tentacular and incomplete form. A fossilized dinosaur? The spine of a mammoth?”21 The references to prehistory in this passage describe the peculiar ugliness of the roughly modeled forms. Indeed, for Lisa Ponti the Spatial Environment—which she dubbed “the first graffito of the atomic age”—would have directly inspired interior designers and architects if it were not so “grotesque.”22 In spite of Ponti’s comments, Fontana did see the Ambiente as a prototype for architectural decoration.23 Indeed, he deliberately drew on the language of interior design and the decorative arts—bright colors and ornamental, arabesque forms—to suggest that this work took on its proper meaning in relation to an architectural context. By evoking the gnarled forms of exhumed fossils, the grotesque folds of the baroque papier-mâché form prevented this “walk-in” artwork from becoming evanescent or spiritual. Moreover, by insisting on the explicit incorpo- ration of the embodied spectator into the work, Fontana emphasized the materi- alist aspect of his installation. The light made the visitor’s clothing glow; as Guido Ballo recently recalled, “the Wood’s light made everything livid, even the spectator became purple and therefore was physically involved.”24 In this way attention was drawn away from the sculptural object and toward the bodily presence of the viewer, who became a physical component of the overall aesthetic experience. This desublimated vision of the artwork, in which both the material basis of the object and the somatic experience of the viewer were emphasized, was reinforced by the cultural references made through the use of light. As contemporary reviews attest, the modern lighting technology of the Environment brought Fontana’s work into an unflattering relation with a broad range of subcultural phenomena, evoking the banal, the childish, and the fraudulent. Leonardo Borgese, calling the Environment a “phosphorescent squiggle under a black sky,” compared it to a series of “strange drawings, vaguely decorative, vaguely symbolic, vaguely abstract,” executed by a charlatan spirit medium during a séance. An anonymous reviewer

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 from Avanti! observed that “the evocative construction by Fontana is not a new thing and we find its antecedents in many decorations of bars or in the lighting of theatrical reviews,” an observation confirmed by other critics’ comments that luminous paint had been used in performances at the Folies-Bergère in Paris and for advertising purposes in America. Lastly, Polignoto observed in L’Europeo that upon entering the environment, “The first impression is of finding oneself in one of those mysterious and macabre booths at the carnival or in the consulting room of the radiologist.”25 Exploiting the wondrous modern devices of nightclub decoration and advertising spectacle, Fontana constructed a fairy-tale space of magical splendor, an other-worldly atmosphere in which the distinction between the material object and the surrounding space was blurred. At the same time, however, this dream is shown to be cheapened by its association with the dubious arts of commodity spectacle. The exhibition clearly had the power to evoke wonder, but it also strongly figured that sense of wonder as something fraudulent or ridiculous.26 It was a “beyond” firmly planted in the here and now. This was Fontana’s response to the difficult challenge of producing a utopian artwork after World War II. In the after- math of fascism’s exploitation of the avant-garde, belief in the effectiveness of radical artistic form and modern technology to create emancipatory conditions of spectatorship seemed less tenable.27 As the use of modern technology for art had shown itself to be perfectly amenable to the cause of human subjugation, one’s approach had necessarily to be transformed. Technological optimism had to be tempered with an extreme self-consciousness on the part of artist and viewer alike. In 1967, looking back on this work, Fontana explained that “The Environment is the sign of the void . . . the room totally black, the Wood’s light, with fluorescent colors that gave this sense of emptiness.”28 The strange effect of “emptiness” that Fontana produced with the vapid radiance of fluorescent paint meant that his Environment was not simply a peaceful vision of paradise. Rather, it also evoked the macabre aspects of scientific technology. The eerie glow of fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light created an air of menace related to the recently discovered scientific applications of these materials, which included the analysis of dead human tissue and of toxic uranium deposits.29 As Polignoto suggested in comparing Fontana’s work

Lucio Fontana. Struttura al neon per la IX Triennale di Milano, 1951. Destroyed. View from upper ﬂoor.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 to the “consulting room of the radiologist,” to enter this environment that turned bodies purple was to undergo an unsettling experience—similar to the sense of mortality experienced by the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain upon seeing an x-ray of his own body.30 Indeed, as Mario De Micheli has argued, Fontana’s interest in technology had its diabolical side: “Fontana is an extroverted primitive fascinated by the technological myths of the twentieth century, with the same stupefying innocence as an Indian bewildered and amazed by the suits of armor worn by the conquistadores.” 31 Fontana himself was to describe it later as an “environment that left the public in a state of shock.”32 In this qualified futurist vision of the artwork, in which the avant-garde project takes stock of its own complicity with the more questionable elements of industrialization, Fontana gave voice to the sinister side beneath modern technology’s often vaunted utopian possibilities.

The Spatial Concept of 1951 After the Spatial Environment Fontana sought new solutions for integrating art and architecture, proposing art forms that would complement modern developments in building technology. As he argued in 1951, “For this new architecture there is an art based on new techniques and media . . . neon, Wood’s light, television. . . . A new aesthetics is taking shape, light forms in spaces.”33 These ideas were instrumental to the Spatial Concept, a 100-meter-long tangled loop of fluorescent light tubing, installed at the 1951 Milan Triennial of Decorative Arts, Modern Industries, and Modern Architecture. Describing the final form of that work is a difficult task, because it no longer exists except in reconstruction. However, from photographs of the original and of the small-scale model, as well as from some recent installations of the reconstructed

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 work, it is clear that it defied a number of characteristics of the traditional, autonomous artwork.34 To begin with, the choice of neon connoted the world of advertising signage and low cultural entertainments, stripping the artwork of its high-art “dignity” in order to create a more exoteric experience. As Gillo Dorfles pointed out in his review of Fontana’s neon, “With the growth that is occurring in the night life and the luminous splendor of modern cities, there is a need to take into account these new questions which present themselves to the artist.”35 Indeed, Fontana liked to insist in the early 1950s that media such as neon (and ultraviolet light and television) had become a part of what he called “the decorative aesthetic of the man on the street.”36 In the neon work he sought to introduce a taste of the chaotic world of the modern streetscape familiar to the common man into the more hierarchically organized space of the Triennale’s designed interior. As an emitter of light, the work literally radiates beyond the normal physical boundaries of a sculpture, creating a connection between the object and the surrounding space. As photographs show, certain portions of the neon tubing illuminated those parts of the architecture that were in close proximity to them. In this way the building structure became an integral part of the work. As he reveals in a letter of July 1951, Fontana was angered by journalistic descriptions of the work as an arabesque, a piece of spaghetti, or a lasso. This was not merely because such epithets were demeaning but also because they tended to make the work over into a figure.37 What he insisted on calling at various times a “spatial decoration,” an “abstract architecture,” a “fantastic new decoration,” or a “spatial concept”—but never a sculpture or an object—was intended as a critique of the artwork’s dis- connection from its surroundings. Once again, Fontana’s work can be related to contemporary currents in painting. Indeed, not only had several exhibitions of Jackson Pollock’s paintings taken place in Italy in 1950, but the American painter was also entertaining the idea of extend- ing mark-making beyond the canvas at this time. In a contemporary interview he remarked that “I think the possibilities of using painting on glass in modern architecture—in modern construction—terrific.”38 In pursuit of this idea, Pollock had collaborated with Peter Blake on a model for an “Ideal Museum,” published in the journal Interiors in 1950. In the accompanying article Arthur Drexler wrote that the project “suggests a reintegration of painting and architecture wherein painting is the architecture, but this time without message or content. Its sole pur- pose is to heighten our experience of space.” 39 It is not clear whether Fontana had access to these images. However, the way in which his swirling loops of fluorescent tubing mimic the American artist’s poured-paint technique demonstrate his desire to connect this painting to the physical environment. A closer reference for

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 Fontana’s work is conveyed by his instruction to the light manufacturer Compagnia Lampade Pastelor, in which he is recorded as saying that the neon tubing should call to mind “the trail left by a flashlight waved about in the air.” 40 The most direct inspiration for this work was no doubt Picasso’s “light drawings,” long-exposure photographs taken by Gjon Mili of the artist “drawing” in the air with a flashlight, which had been reviewed and illustrated in the Milanese art journal AZ: arte d’oggi in March 1950. In those images the nervous, squiggly line traced with electric light appeared to exist in real space beyond the canvas. As the accompanying article reported, Picasso and Mili hoped to develop the technique into the third dimension, creating a kind of luminous sculpture. In April similar “light drawings” executed by Jean Cocteau and a number of Italian artists were published in the Italian popular magazine Tempo. The author of the article explicitly presented the light drawings as a form of “Spatial art.” 41 If Picasso and Mili’s invention was a kind of spatial art, Fontana was not happy with the way it had been presented. As he commented in his notes from this period, “the photographs of Picasso and Cocteau [are] publications to which we would have remained indifferent if they hadn’t been accompanied by declarations about Spatial Art, declarations that we feel to be mistaken and out of date.”42 Rather than simply appropriating the “light drawing” technique Fontana drew attention to a problem with aggrandizing the painterly mark beyond the canvas. He was fond of deliberately subverting the work of artists more prominent than himself. In 1949, for example, discussing Picasso’s folk-art-inspired ceramics, Fontana had proclaimed that “in reaction to Picasso I will use precious and very refined materials.”43 Now his reaction to the Spanish artist would take the form of an ironic comment on this squiggly line of light suspended in space. In the Tempo article Jean Cocteau had described the “light drawing” technique as a means of “liberating the subconscious.” Adopting the language of Surrealist automa- tism, he saw the images as autographic sig- natures revealing the inner being of the artist. However, there was an awareness in Italy and elsewhere in this period that the language of Surrealism had become compromised. As a 1938 article in the Italian journal Vita Giovanile reported, Surrealist techniques

Gjon Mili. Picasso “Drawing” with Flashlight, Vallauris, 1949.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 were being adopted as “commercial propaganda” by companies that specialized in fashion items and luxury goods. In 1944 the American critic Clement Greenberg condemned Surrealism’s flirtation with fashion, associating it with the “peace of conscience and the sense of chic” with which the wealthy repel “the asceticisms of modern art.”44 The late 1940s and early 1950s in Europe and America saw the flowering of a Surrealist-inspired repertoire of painterly gestures in exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism and “Informal” painting. Fontana was well aware of this phenomenon and had experimented in this vein. However, as Joëlle Moyne has recently argued, while the fluorescent light sculpture “borrowed its exaggerated gestuality from contemporary painting . . . Fontana spread throughout space a parodic version of the then contemporaneous informal art.”45 Through this parody Fontana suggested that gesture had become a form of popular spectacle. If the artist’s subconscious and physical presence were the ultimate subject of the light drawings, they also presented the artist’s identity as a kind of performance. Far from giving access to an inner essence of the person, they exposed that person in an elaborate form of theater. Fontana responded to this spectacularization of gesture by making it breath- takingly literal. Reaching back into the history of Mili’s work, Fontana reactivated the more ignoble origins of the light drawings technique. Before asking Picasso to perform for him, Mili had used a similar technique in his photograph of a pro- fessional ice skater with lights attached to her ankles. The loopy arcs and squiggles that resulted from these photographs are much closer to Fontana’s light sculpture. De-emphasizing the skilled artist’s presence, Fontana drew Picasso and Mili’s light drawings back into the realm of profane entertainment.46 Thus, if Fontana did encour- age a comparison with autographic gesture, he did so only to undermine it. Walter Teague certainly saw the work as the trace of physical, bodily action: “Twisting loops of a flashlight swung by the arm of a giant are frozen with 200 meters of neon tubing.”47 However, as

Gjon Mili. Traceries with Lights Attached to Skates, 1945.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 Teague’s word choice demonstrates, rather than suggesting the living presence of the author, this loopy neon structure suggests something that has been rigidified, that has had the life drained out of it. Similar to the way in which Fontana—to use his own words—had “petrified” his ceramic sculpture using the harsh light of metallic glazes, or suggested “fossilized” forms using fluorescent paint in his Spatial Environment, the cold glow of the gas in the glass tubing robbed the work of its expressive character. As Leonardo Borgese pointed out in his skeptical review of Fontana’s installation, “gas is not spirit.”48 Pollock’s painting technique was interpreted in Italy at this time as providing living signs of the artist’s presence. As Bruno Alfieri argued in L’Arte Moderna, “[Pollock’s] picture is the most immediate and spontaneous painting. Each one of his pictures is part of himself . . . that is, I start from the picture and discover the man.”49 However, in the months between the Pollock exhibition of 1950 and the realization of Fontana’s neon, Pollock’s drip paintings had appeared in Vogue as backdrops for Cecil Beaton’s photographs of glamorous haute couture fashion models.50 Throughout his career, Fontana’s refusal of artistic conventions was expressed through appropriating female fashion.51 Similarly, with his flashy lighting technology Fontana internalized the appropriation of painting as fashion and décor into his choice of material. Literally converting Pollock’s work into a spectacular medium, Fontana did more than simply enlarge the drip technique to engage with the architectural space beyond the confines of painting. Through this inclusion of mass-cultural elements he subverted the autographic reading of form and robbed the gesture of its capacity to signify a living human presence. The architectural critic Carlo Doglio was alert to the way in which Fontana had accel- erated the commodification of the autographic signature at the hands of the culture industry—he called the Spatial Concept a “Hollywoodian triumph of neon light and luxury.” Fulfilling contemporary painting’s tendency to become what Thomas Crow has described as “stage and backdrop” for a chic culture of high fashion, Fontana travestied the artist’s expressive mark, converting it into a vehicle for the ersatz visions of luxury promised by Hollywood film.52 At the same time Fontana left open a utopian possibility in the conversion of painting into spectacle. In his criticism of the “light drawing” technique he stressed that the truly “spatial” artist “no longer imposes a figurative theme on the spectator, but places him in the position of creating it for himself.”53 Rather than foregrounding the artist’s bodily presence or releasing his subconscious energy, Fontana hoped to emphasize the relationship to space and the experience of the viewer. His Spatial Concept did just that. In an even more compelling way than the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 earlier Spatial Environment, the neon incorporated the physical movement of the viewer into the constitution of the work. The open looping form of the fluorescent tubing, combined with its placement in a stairwell, made the object into an entirely different entity from every viewing angle. As Walter Teague commented, “The volumes it defines change with each step taken by the observer.” This quality of the work was eloquently described in François Stahly’s review in Graphis: The daring neon loop that swings through the air lends the volume of the hall from which the staircase ascends a substantiality measurable to the eye. The visitor who climbs the stairway is no longer the passive observer but takes part at every step in the relative displacement of perspectives and thus in the creation of the spatial design around him.54 The Spatial Concept engaged the viewer with an opulent vision of radiance that extended into real architectural space beyond the limited and private pictorial plane. While drawn from the language of painterly gesture, the fluorescent tubing no longer suggested the authentic being of the author; that had been emptied out by the impulse to be “on show.” Through this inauthenticity Fontana emphasized the physical relationship of the work to its physical surroundings. By making the audience the performer, in a form of public theater where the somatic experience of the viewer was paramount, he suggested that the wonderful visions of luxury held out—but normally kept in abeyance—by spectacle might be made accessible to all.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 Anarchist Window Dressing It is at this point that the spatial aspects of Fontana’s work connect with those elements of kitsch or mass commercial culture so evident in the Venice paintings exhibited later at the Martha Jackson Gallery. The subtitles of those garish paintings beg the viewer’s credulity: “Night of Love in Venice” and “At Dawn Venice Was All Golden” are likely captions of postcard cliches mass-produced for the tourist market. More is at stake in the Venice paintings, however, than simply an ironic comment on the “city of lagoons.” Fontana was also addressing a deeper question about Italian taste. Observing the extensive use of gold and marble in Italian bourgeois homes, Bruno Munari has argued that “Italians have a mania for luxury.” Indeed, critics such as Munari and Penny Sparke have berated mainstream Italian culture—and in particular industrial design—for privileging the aristocratic tradition of the finely wrought, materially rich artifact over the modest, mass produced object serving functional needs.55 Paintings such as Spatial Concept, Sun in Piazza San Marco were Fontana’s response to this pervasive aspect of Italian culture. With ridiculously amateurish, unschooled drawing and crude finger-painted scrawls that form primitive volutes and swirls, Fontana made a mockery of the lyrical and sophisticated caprice of eighteenth-century artistic ornament. The glistening, shiny surfaces trumpet their fraudulent imitation of precious metal, and, as Yve-Alain Bois comments, “even oil paint, the noblest material of pictorial art . . . becomes in his hands a repugnant paste.”56 The dainty Murano glassware, which typifies the precious Italian legacy of preindustrial artisanal practices, is smashed to pieces and arranged like “scattered decorations on cake icing.”57 With his tawdry Venetian romance Fontana travestied the modern Italian aesthetic of pseudo- aristocratic taste. One of the most visible forms of this taste in 1950s Italy was a style of architecture known as “Neoliberty.” Named after Liberty, Italy’s answer to Art Nouveau, this post-World War II historicist architecture reinterpreted a broad range of pre- existing building styles epitomized by the “medieval” skyscraper Torre Velasca in Milan completed in 1958.58 While practitioners of Neoliberty defended their historicism as an acclimatization to the historic built environment, it was also a revival of a past culture. Manfredo Tafuri, describing the “well-calibrated synthesis of compositional savvy and allusive language” in a typical example of Neoliberty building, saw it as evidence of a “real flirtation with the golden age of Italian and European nineteenth-century architecture.”

Opposite: Lucio Fontana. Struttura al neon per la IX Triennale di Milano, 1951. Destroyed. View from landing of stairway. Right: Lucio Fontana. Concetto spaziale, Sole in piazza San Marco, 1961.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 To Reyner Banham, however, this movement amounted to a form of “infantile regression” that refused to accept the necessary moral, economic, and aesthetic consequences of modernity.59 Fontana’s Venice paintings were assessed in similar terms by Toni Toniato. Arguing that the “luminosity of the backgrounds is too spectacular, and the artificiality of the colored materials seems forced in a decorative allegoricism,” he criticized them for “a proximity to positions which remain suspect or inflated (such as a certain neo-liberty still fundamental in him).”60 Toniato was on the mark with the Neoliberty attribution; he was certainly not the only critic to identify aristocratic ideals of luxury and sumptuousness in the artist’s painting, and Fontana himself proudly admitted to using “precious” and “refined” materials.61 From the mockery of refined taste in these works, however, it is clear that a certain “infantile regression” was indeed uppermost in the artist’s mind. Fontana’s skeptical attitude toward the ancient splendor of Venice and the high taste it embodies can be understood through the historical problem of the “democratization of luxury.” As Rosalind H. Williams argues, the fantasy of democratic luxury associated with modern industrialization inspired decorative arts reformers to offer the material pleasures of the rich to a broad population.62 However, by the time this ambition was inherited by Art Nouveau and subsequently Art Deco—called “1925 style” in Italy—it had degenerated into a market-driven criterion of fulsome decoration, of the idea that “beauty consists in richness,” leading some in Italy to argue for the attainment of material splendor at any cost, even through the use of fake materials.63 As a result, this new “democratic” luxury, which necessarily relied on cheaper, imitation materials and relatively poor workmanship, was of inferior quality and utterly banal. Nevertheless, the fantasy of egalitarian luxury has persisted in Italy and elsewhere, sustained by Art Deco and Hollywood film. In both, as Rossana Bossaglia points out, the artificial luster of the sequin reigns supreme: “Bourgeois civilization has not yet imagined an equally easy and secure means [as the sequin] for satisfying those not admitted to the banquet table with manifest and unat- tainable images of well-being and happiness.”64 Fontana, who often added dazzling sequins of glitter alongside the colored glass and gaudy metallic pigments of his extravagantly confected canvases, flaunted the aesthetic hypocrisy created by the collision of a regressive taste for the

Ludovico Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti and Ernesto Nathan Rogers. Torre Velasca, Milan 1950–1951.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 opulent with the advent of a modern industrialized society eager to counterfeit it. Furthermore, by puncturing and cutting these canvases, Fontana suggested that the very medium of easel painting itself is caught up in a self-defeating farce of superfluity. In the physical ruptures of the visual field achieved by those repeti- tious, machine-like punctures and the chic colors and low-culture materials such as glitter and metallic paint, Fontana spoke to the fallen condition of painting, which in the light of his environmental works seemed as outdated as the absurdly roman- tic dreams of Venice. Painting’s failure to break the shell of art’s autonomy meant that it would always remain a hopeless fetish with respect to the artist’s utopian ambitions. In spite of this fetishistic character, in the cut canvases there remains what Derna Querèl has called “the expectancy of another ordering of things that we glimpse through those openings.”65 Describing the hole in the canvas as “the beginning of a sculpture in space,” Fontana confronts the viewer with the empty expanse into which the art object should be integrated: These paintings were a means of referring to the utopian artwork which had failed to appear.66 In this sense, the “spatial sculpture” created by the cut painting is as counterfeit as the fake gold paint with which he adorned the surface. In this back-handed valoriza- tion of painting, he suggested that illusion could serve in the cause of its own eradication when understood as an absurd ruin of itself. Although in his late paintings Fontana’s utopianism was drastically qualified, until the end of his life he nevertheless clung tenaciously to the fantasy of a future “end of art,” one that would take place beyond the art object. As he stated in 1968, “Art is going to be a completely different thing. . . . Not an object, nor a form. . . . Nothing more to do with bourgeois consumption, beauty attached to a sellable object. Art is going to become infinite, immensity, immaterial, philosophy. . . . Enough with the bourgeois function of art. Open the doors.”67

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 Notes Fontana did not sign this manifesto, it appears 1. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents that the text was a joint project, drawing on the of a Theory of the Media” (1970), in Raids and input of certain signatories—including some of Reconstructions: Essays on Politics, Crime and the artist’s students—as well as Fontana’s ideas. Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1976), 36–37. The artist’s stamp is certainly present in the text’s 2. Lawrence Alloway, “Man on the Border,” in emphasis on the Baroque and in the desire to Lucio Fontana: Ten Paintings of Venice, exh. cat. connect the art object with space. At the same (New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, 1961), n.p. time the manifesto reﬂects a broad range of ideas 3. Hedy A. Guisti, “But Nobody Mentions that were circulating in Argentina among the Milan Art,” Rome Daily American, 9 July 1954. Arturo and Madi groups about the importance of (Many of the contemporary references cited in new technology. Jorge Roccamonte argues that this paper were found as clippings in the archives the text was largely written by the three main of the Fontana Foundation in Milan. In such cases signatories and that Fontana played the role of page numbers were often unavailable.) “the promoter, the catalyst, the spring that brought 4. Sidney Tillim, “Lucio Fontana,” Arts Mag- out a kind of chain reaction.” See Jorge Rocca- azine 36, no. 4 (1962): 37. monte, “On Fontana and the Maniﬁesto Blanco 5. See Marco Valsecchi, “L’uomo ora é nello in Buenos Aires (1973),” in Lucio Fontana (1998), spazio e l’arte viaggia con lui,” Tempo, 9 May 102–07, 105. The former student also points out 1964, 49. In the same interview Fontana makes the that Fontana’s failure to sign the text was a cau- following remarks: “I would like to see a coura- tionary strategy designed to avoid censure by the geous country that knew how to use its artists for Argentine academic establishment, which could public works, for architecture, painting, sculp- prevent the exhibition and sale of his work. ture to use in a new social dimension. . . . The 12. Roccamonte, 106. Fontana’s full account artist should participate in things.” of this event is as follows: “At the same time as 6. Antonio Cederna, “Cosi bella quando é the manifesto we planned a demonstration on a bella,” L’Europeo (Milan), 30 April 1953: “paint- piece of land in the center of Buenos Aires. ings of monochrome paper or canvas with lots Buckets of paint on the walls, rags, all sorts of of holes . . . like those on tram tickets.” things. Unfortunately the police came and we 7. Lawrence Alloway, “Commentary,” Ark! no. were not able to bring this experiment to con- 24 (1959). clusion.” There is at present no archival docu- 8. Luigi Moretti, “Arte e televisione,” Spazio, mentation for this work. no. 7 (1952): 74. 13. Emilio Pettorutti, Un Pintor ante el Espejo 9. “Idee di Lucio Fontana,” Domus, no. 271 (Buenos Aires: Solar, 1968), 312–13, quoted in Jole (1952): 33. De Sanna, Lucio Fontana: materia, spazio, con- 10. The best English source for Fontana’s cetto (Milan: Mursia, 1993), 54. See also Rocca- Argentine period remains Dominique Liquois, monte recorded in 1973: “[W]e wanted the whole “Fontana, Argentina and Modernity,” in Lucio world to be able to see masses of color projected Fontana, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundació Caixa de in the Buenos Aires sky by giant floodlights or Pensions, 1988). other mechanical means.” Roccamonte, 106. 11. B. Arias, H. Cazeneuve, and M. Fridman, 14. Lucio Fontana, manuscript of an interview “The Manifiesto Blanco” (1946), reprinted in by Raffaele De Grada, 1947, Fontana Foundation Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposi- archive. zioni, Rome (Milan: Electa, 1998), 115–117. While 15. “Arte nelle nuvole,” Tempo (Milan), 6

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 December 1947, 23, quoted in Paolo Campiglio, Fontana: Eidografia” (unpublished academic “Fontana ispano o lombardo,” in Lucio Fontana thesis, Accademia di Belle Arti Brera, Milan, e Milano, exh. cat., Museo della Permanente, 1990), 302. Milan (Milan: Electa, 1996), 40. 25. See Leonardo Borgese, “Disegnano dall’al 16. In a late interview Fontana commented di là,” Corriere d’informazione (Milan), 13 that “I also did the Manifesto on television. I February 1949, 3; “Gli spaziali,” Avanti! (Milan) 8 wanted to have an exhibition simultaneously in February 1949, 3; Polignoto [pseud.], “Illumina- New York, Milan, Berlin, the whole world over, zione a luce nera: La sola novitá della mostra del to transmit forms. They didn’t let me do it. . . . Moviment spaziale,” L’Europeo (Milan), no. 8 Television did not understand, they rejected our (1949); and Pizzinelli, “Una singolare mostra a idea.” “The Last Interview Given by Fontana Milano.” (1968),” Studio International 184: no. 949 (1972), 26. See Jack De Ment and H.C. Dake, Fluores- 164. cent Chemicals and Their Applications (Brooklyn: 17. Corrado Pizzinelli, “Una singolare mostra Chemical Publishing Company, 1942), 52–53. a Milano: Con la pittura fosforescente creiamo “Fluorescent objects have been used widely for ‘l’ambiente spaziale,’” Il nuovo corriere (Florence), purposes as diametrically opposed as physics 5 February 1949. demonstrations and fraudulent psychic 18. Guido Ballo, “Pitture a gran fuoco,” Bellezza, schemes. . . . In theater and hotel decoration flu- no. 9 (September 1949). orescent objects and textiles create much com- 19. Pizzinelli, “Una singolare mostra a ment.” See also the caption on p. 98: “Night view Milano.” For more information on the history of the spectacular lighting effects at San Francisco and contemporary applications of fluorescent Golden Gate Exposition of 1939. Wide use was chemicals and ultraviolet light, see H.C. Dake made of fluorescent paints and ultraviolet light and Jack De Ment, Fluorescent Light and Its flood lights.” Applications (Brooklyn: Chemical Publishing 27. “Art is another lie put at the disposal of Co., 1941), ix. “Fluorescence is a spectacular all the parties and religious creeds. . . . The truth phenomenon, and even the casual observer can is that art has served and serves as propaganda for not help but stand in awe at the sight of a drab every ideal.” Fontana to Paolo Edelstein, Milan, substance seemingly become living matter under 25 March 1949, Lucio Fontana: Lettere 1919– the invisible radiations emitted by an ultravio- 1968, ed. Paolo Campiglio (Milan: Skira, 1999), let light unit.” 108. 20. “Gli spaziali,” Avanti! (Milan), 8 February 28. Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto (Bari: De Dontao 1949, 3. editore, 1969), 95. 21. Raffaele Carrieri, “Fontana ha toccato la 29. See Jack De Ment in “I raggi invisibili nel luna,” Tempo (Milan), 19 February 1949: 28. cuore della natura,” L’Italia, 1 June 1949. 22. L.P. (Lisa Ponti), “Arte: Primo graffito 30. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924; dell’età atomica,” Domus, no. 233 (1949): 44. reprint, New York: Vintage, 1969), 218–19. 23. This is evident from comments in reviews 31. Polignoto; Mario de Micheli, Scultura ital- of this work. One critic, for example, relates that iana del dopoguerra (Milan: Schwarz, 1958), 69. “a number of proprietors have begun negotia- 32. Fontana, interview by Carlo Cisventi, tions for the decoration of interiors.” Pizzinelli, quoted in Bose and Locatelli, 53. “Una singolare mostra a Milano.” 33. Fontana, “Technical Manifesto” (1951), 24. Antonella Bose and Chiara Locatelli, “Lucio reprinted in Lucio Fontana (1998), 175.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 34. The model of the work, Sketch for Neon tion for the 1951 Spatial Concept was the 1946 Structure, is partly visible in the picture of Fontana neon light sculpture Structure luminique Madí that appeared in Arte Spaziale, exh. cat. (Milan: by Fontana’s friend and colleague Gyula Kosice. Naviglio Gallery, 1952). The picture was repro- 42. From the artist’s notes, reprinted and trans- duced in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre lated in Guido Ballo, Lucio Fontana (New York: Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art mod- Praeger, 1971), 252. erne, 1987), 277, and incorrectly dated to 1949. 43. Fontana to Pablo Edelstein, 6 September 35. Gillo Dorfles, “L’architettura e le arti alla 1949, Lucio Fontana: Lettere 1919–1968, 114. IX Triennale,” Letteratura e arte contemporanea, 44. See Ernst [pseud.] “Di un surrealismo no. 9 (1951): 67. commerciale,” Corrente 1, n. 15 (1938), n.p.; and 36. “Wood’s light, neon, television etc., have Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and already entered unawares into the decorative Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: aesthetic of the man on the street. . . . Reinforced University of Chicago Press, 1986), 225–26. concrete has given us a new architecture. What 45. Joëlle Moyne, “Lucio Fontana,” in Light goes well with this architecture is light and space.” Pieces, exh. cat. (Luxembourg: Casino Luxem- This quotation appears in Raffaele Carrieri, Pittura bourg, 2000), 15. e sculture d’avanguardia in Italia: 1890–1950 46. Gjon Mili, Gjon Mili: Photographs and (Milan: Edizioni della conchiglia, 1950), 288. Recollections (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 37. “The ‘Spatial Concept’ that illuminates 1980), 178–79. the stairs at the 9th Triennale of Milan is not a 47. Walter Dorwin Teague, “The Ninth lasso, an arabesque, nor a piece of spaghetti . . . Triennale,” Interiors 111, no. 2 (1951), 94. it is the beginning of a new expression; in col- Emphasis added. laboration with the architects Baldessari and 48. Lucio Fontana, “La mia ceramica,” Tempo Grisotti we have simply substituted for the dec- (Milan), 21 September 1939; Carrieri, “Fontana orated ceiling a new element which has entered ha toccata la luna”; Leonardo Borgese, “Si apre into the aesthetic of the man on the street, neon, oggi a Milano la Triennale d’arti decorative,” with this means we have created a fantastical new Corriere della sera (Milan), 12 May 1951. decoration.” Fontana to Gio Ponti, 30 July 1951, 49. Bruno Alfieri, “Piccolo discorso sui quadri Lucio Fontana e Milano, exh. cat., Museo della di Jackson Pollock (con testimonianza dell’artista),” Permanente, Milan (Milan: Electa, 1996), 57. L’Arte Moderna, 8 June 1950, quoted in B. H. 38. See “An Interview with Jackson Pollock” Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (1950), Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 158. Museum of Modern Art, 1967), 81. 50. Cecil Beaton, photographs in Vogue, 1 39. Arthur Drexler, “Unframed Space: A March 1951. Museum for Jackson Pollock’s Paintings,” Interiors 51. As Leonardo Sinisgalli has argued, “against 109, no. 6 (1950): 90–91. See also Jackson Pollock, every ephemeral ‘emotional trace’ his drawings exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, affirm the sculptor’s sympathy for . . . common- 1999), 57, figs. 26–27. place fashion plates. Rather than going to muse- 40. See Lucio Fontana, exh. cat. (Milan: ums, Fontana has amused himself flipping through Palazzo Reale, 1972), 283. the pages of Vogue and Harpers Bazaar.” 41. “Picasso e i disegni luminosi,” AZ: arte Leonardo Sinisgalli, Corrente di vita giovanile 3, d’oggi 2, no. 3 (1950): 1; “Disegnano con la luce,” no. 1 (January 1940). Tempo (Milan), 1 April 1950. Another inspira- 52. Carlo Doglio, “Accademia e formalismo

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 alla base della Nona Triennale,” Metron, no. 43 discussion of the “Torre Velasca” and the broader (1951): 19; and Thomas Crow, “Fashioning the context of Neoliberty, 52–53; and Reyner Banham, New York School,” in Modern Art in the Common “Neoliberty: The Italian Retreat from Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, Architecture,” The Architectural Review 747 1996), 48. (1959): 235. 53. “Proposal of Regulations. Spatial Mani- 60. Toni Toniato, “Lucio Fontana,” Evento delle festo” (1950), in Lucio Fontana (1998), 174. arti 14–15 (1961): 41, 56. 54. Teague, 94; and François Stahly, “IX 61. Fontana to Edelstein, 6 September 1949, Triennale: A New Style of Three-Dimensional Paolo Campiglio, “La parola dell’artista: Lettere Exhibition Design,” Graphis 7, no. 38 (1951): 458. di Lucio Fontana (1919–1968)” (unpublished 55. Bruno Munari, “Luxuriously Appointed academic thesis, Universita degli Studi di Siena, Gentleman’s Apartments,” in Design as Art 1996), 90. See also Norbert Lynton, “Fontana,” Art (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971), 135. See Penny International 7, no. 1 (January 1963): 86. “[A] Sparke, “‘A Home for Everybody?’: Design, vast range of works linked by an all-pervading Ideology and the Culture of the Home in Italy, aroma of aristocratic taste and preciousness. This 1945–1972,” in Modernism in Design, ed. Paul makes him unmanageable for Anglo-Saxon stom- Greenhalgh (London: Reaktion, 1990), 191. achs, but that is their loss, not his.” 56. Yve-Alain Bois, “Fontana’s Base Material- 62. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: ism,” Art in America 77, no. 4 (1989): 248. Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century 57. See Paul Oliver, “Lucio Fontana,” Art France (Berkeley: University of California Press, International 6, no. 2 (February 1962): 40. 1982), 94–106. 58. For the origins of the Italian name “Liberty” 63. Rossana Bossaglia, Il Déco Italiano: Fisio- for Art Nouveau, see S. Tschudi Madsen, Art nomia dello stile 1925 in Italia (Milan: Rizzoli, Nouveau, trans. R. I. Christopherson (New York: 1975), 8, 21. McGraw-Hill, 1967), 27. “In Italy . . . the com- 64. Bossaglia, 23. monest designation was Stile Liberty, after Liberty 65. Derna Querèl, “Art Centre,” This Week in and Co. in London, one of the leading fashion Rome, 27 March 1964. stores in Europe and a manufacturer of printed 66. Mario Pancera, “Sfregia i quadri alla ricerca cotton cloth.” del dolore degli astronauti,” La notte, 19 December 59. Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Archi- 1962. tecture, 1944–1985, trans. Jessica Levine 67. “Fontana,” Art et création 1 (1968), 78. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 54. See also Tafuri’s

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