There are some melancholy aspects to an elegant retrospective, at the Met Breuer, of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana, who is famous for the monochrome canvases, neatly slashed with knives, that he made—or executed—between 1958 and his death, ten years later, at the age of sixty-nine. One gloom is the awareness that this is among the last of the major shows that the Met will produce in Marcel Breuer’s granite alcazar on Madison Avenue, which it has occupied since the original tenant, the Whitney Museum, moved downtown, in 2015. (The Frick Collection will assume the lease next year, while renovating its Seventieth Street digs.) The annex’s offbeat, lively program will be missed, having featured cleverly themed historical shows, mostly of painting (“Unfinished,” in 2016) or sculpture (“Like Life,” last year), and revivals of what could be termed second-tier canonical artists whose virtues may have been unjustly neglected. The retrospective, two years ago, of Marisa Merz—like her husband, Mario Merz, a practitioner of Arte Povera, the carefully shaggy Italian answer to American minimalism—was revelatory. She proved to have been the most appealing artist in an otherwise all-male movement.
“Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold,” crisply curated by Iria Candela, is less auspicious, though it is instructively timed for reflecting on recently changed perceptions of modern art. Conveniently, the chaste brutalism of the Breuer building—finished in 1966, the year that Fontana won the Grand Prize for an Italian painter at the Venice Biennale—feels perfect for it, as it did for Merz’s show, housing a period style in period style.
Despite pleasant surprises—notably involving the artist’s less-known ceramic sculptures, which, at their peak, from the late nineteen-thirties through the forties, veer between figuration and abstraction and suggest the euphoric neo-Baroque of a drunk Bernini—the show has a droopy feel of avant-gardism left out in the rain of subsequent history. So does a lot of once radical twentieth-century art these days, as myths of progress in culture complete their long collapse and mystiques of innovation gravitate from individual genius to corporate branding. Fontana’s Cuts, as he termed his meticulously violated canvases, could seem like a big deal in 1966. Now their success at the time points up the oddity of a modern tendency to esteem artists less for what they make than for what they do.
Not that the Cuts are nugatory art. I was disarmed by some of them in the show: painted in matte, bright secondary colors or, most effectively, in warm whites, and inflicted with one or more slits, usually vertical. (He would do the cuts while the paint was wet, then mold their shapes by hand when it was dry and apply black gauze behind the spaces to yield an impression of measureless depth.) The fissures feel precisely placed, compositionally just right—which can’t have been easy to achieve. “You have no idea how much stuff I throw away,” Fontana once said. The failure-prone, one-shot knifework would seem an inefficient way to produce attractive art works, but the gesture, more than the results, put him on the map at a time when violations of traditional mediums could be confused with global upheaval. For a sense of how different things are today, visit the new Whitney, in the meatpacking district, where wood-floored capacious spaces with glass walls afford panoramas of Manhattan and the Hudson River. A Fontana might look like a fussy scrap there.
The white Cuts, their non-hues at times continuous with those of the walls they hang on, put me in mind of the American Robert Ryman, who in the same period began his experiments with subtly varied all-white painting. I remember the art-world prestige of that work in the sixties and seventies. I still admire it, but I can’t not be aware that its hermeticism has a smaller fan base in 2019. Ryman is a finer, more sensitively exploratory artist than Fontana; but he is apt to provoke a similar impatience with pursuits that squeeze what drama is possible from tweaking the established formal repertoires of painting.
Obsolete now is the modernist rhetoric of revolution that hailed Pablo Picasso’s shattering of pictorial form, Jackson Pollock’s expansive drip technique, and Andy Warhol’s artisanal proliferation of demotic imagery. Fortunately for those masters, the art of each is about something permanently engaging: libido or lyricism or worldliness. But even they must endure a twenty-first-century test of application to life outside art games. The perennially interesting Marcel Duchamp, who made so very little and did so very much, takes on new if modest lustre for having treated artistic invention as pure sport. (It’s a neat trick, which none of Duchamp’s epigones even begin to pull off, to conduct a multifarious, lifelong career in art without for a moment seeming serious about it.) These thoughts swarmed me at the Met Breuer—not happily. Futile talent saddens.
Fontana was born to Italian immigrants in Argentina in 1899 and schooled in Italy from 1906 until 1922, when he came home and worked as an aide to and collaborator with his father, who sculpted funerary monuments. Fontana would remain fundamentally a sculptor, taking to canvas only at the age of fifty. He moved back to Italy in 1927 and studied with a prominent sculptor in Milan and produced a range of statuary and reliefs, often in showy materials—gold leaf, colored mosaic—displaying a lifelong decorative bent. He also took on official commissions, including, in 1939, a pompously classicist ceiling relief of flying female nudes for the Shrine of the Fascist Martyrs, in the new headquarters of the Federation of Fascists, in Milan. Fontana returned to Argentina in 1940, at the request of his father, but stayed partial to Mussolini, lamenting Il Duce’s fall from power, in 1943. Writing in the show’s catalogue, the art historian Emily Braun adduces, in Fontana, a temperamental identification with “the Fascist viewpoint of a Latin and Catholic culture in epochal conflict with a materialist, Protestant one.” But his politics, like his aesthetics, seemed fluid. In Buenos Aires, he aligned himself with artists and intellectuals opposed to the authoritarian regime of Juan Perón. Back in Italy for good, in 1947, he became the doyen of a movement that he called Spatialism, which favored abstraction but did not deter him from making sentimental statuary for the Vatican in 1956.
Fontana continued to create ceramics but began to punch holes in them, making empty space the focal point. He extended the idea to works on—or, rather, in—paper, puncturing and incising it from behind. He was decisively affected, in 1957, by an encounter with the art of the French avant-garde paladin Yves Klein. Among Klein’s many japes was his use of the paint-smeared bodies of naked women. The more circumspect Fontana had to notice that, however outrageous its means, Klein’s output was unfailingly handsome. Fontana seized upon that note of insolent suavity at a time in Italy of economic boom and cultural éclat—most brilliantly evident, of course, in film. For full “Dolce Vita” effect, imagine a Cut hanging in a chic living room with cool jazz wafting from the record-player. Critical paeans to his work, in Italy and, increasingly, abroad, yawed between symbol-mongering—the apertures as female genitalia or the wounds of Christ—and poetic lucubration on themes of space and time. (You know you’re in the twentieth century when people sagely invoke “the fourth dimension” as if they know what they’re talking about.) Still, Fontana earned his vogue. The best Cuts exercise firm aesthetic command, which will count for those, like me, who are residually enamored of art for art’s sake.
Likely more popular in the Met Breuer show, and perhaps of interest to current artists, are some of Fontana’s ceramics—free-form to the verge of exuberantly form-free, and gorgeous. Also beguiling, if only because they are unfamiliar, are such installation works as “Spatial Environment in Red Light” (1967/2019, reconstructed for this show). It’s a walk-through enclosure containing six parallel corridors and suffused with a neon redness that, having saturated your optic nerves, turns the world green when you exit. With that, Fontana was onto a new international trend in art, yet again and for all it matters now. ♦
