Lucio Fontana facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Lucio Fontana
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Fontana in a photograph by Lothar Wolleh
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| Born | 19 February 1899 |
| Died | 7 September 1968 (aged 69) Comabbio, Varese, Italy
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| Education | Brera Academy, Milan |
| Known for | Painting, sculpture |
| Movement | spatialism |
Lucio Fontana (born February 19, 1899 – died September 7, 1968) was a famous artist who was both Argentine and Italian. He was known for his paintings and sculptures. Fontana is most famous for starting an art movement called Spatialism.
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Early life and training
Lucio Fontana was born in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina. His parents were Italian immigrants, and his father, Luigi Fontana, was a sculptor. Lucio spent his early childhood in Argentina. In 1905, when he was six, he moved to Italy. He worked with his father as a sculptor and later started working on his own. By 1926, he was already showing his art in Argentina.
In 1927, Fontana returned to Italy. He studied art at the Accademia di Brera in Milan from 1928 to 1930. He had his first art show in Milan in 1930. For the next ten years, he traveled in Italy and France. During this time, he worked with artists who created abstract and expressionist art. In 1935, he joined an art group in Paris called Abstraction-Création. From 1936 to 1949, he made sculptures using ceramic and bronze.
Developing Spatialism
In 1940, Fontana went back to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, he helped start the Altamira academy in 1946. With his students, he wrote the White Manifesto. This important paper said that "Matter, color, and sound in motion are the things that make up the new art." This was the beginning of his ideas for Spazialismo, or Spatialism. He wrote five more manifestos (public statements) about Spatialism between 1947 and 1952.
When Fontana returned to Italy in 1947, he helped write the first Spatialism manifesto. He found that his art studio and artworks in Milan had been completely destroyed during World War II bombings. However, he quickly started making ceramic art again. He also worked with architects in Milan to decorate new buildings as the city was being rebuilt.
Artistic innovations
After returning to Italy in 1948, Fontana showed his first "Spatial environment" (Ambiente spaziale a luce nera) in Milan. This was a temporary art piece in a dark room. It had a large, amoeba-like shape hanging in the air, lit by neon light.
From 1949, Fontana began his famous "Spatial Concept" series. These artworks had holes or slashes cut into the surface of paintings that were usually one color. He called this "an art for the Space Age." He gave almost all his later paintings the general title Concetto spaziale ('spatial concept'). These works are divided into two main types: the Buchi ('holes'), which he started in 1949, and the Tagli ('slashes'), which he began in the mid-1950s.
Fontana often put black gauze behind the cuts on his canvases. This made the darkness shimmer and created a mysterious feeling of depth. In 1951, he created a large neon ceiling artwork called "Luce spaziale" for an exhibition in Milan. In his important series called Concetto spaziale, La Fine di Dio (1963–64), Fontana used the shape of an egg.
With his Pietre ('stones') series, started in 1952, Fontana mixed sculpture with painting. He added thick paint and colored glass pieces to the surfaces of his canvases. In his Buchi ('holes') series, he poked holes through the canvas. This broke the flat surface and showed the space behind the picture. From 1958, he made his paintings simpler by creating flat, single-color surfaces. This made viewers focus on the cuts that broke the canvas. In 1959, Fontana showed paintings with cuts that had many parts that could be combined. He also started Nature, a series of sculptures made by cutting a gash across a sphere of clay, which he then cast in bronze.
Fontana worked with many important architects, like Luciano Baldessari. He designed a neon light structure for an exhibition in 1951 and created the ceiling for a cinema in Milan in 1953.
Around 1960, Fontana started to change his cuts and holes. He covered canvases with thick oil paint and used a sharp knife to make large cuts. In 1961, he created a series of 22 works dedicated to Venice. He used his fingers and tools to make grooves in the paint, sometimes adding small pieces of Murano glass.
After visiting New York in 1961, he created a series of metal artworks. These were large sheets of shiny, scratched copper. They had holes and gouges, with dramatic vertical cuts that reminded him of New York's tall buildings.
Some of Fontana's last works include a series called Teatrini ('little theatres'). These works looked like stage sets, with backcloths inside frames. They made you think about looking at a play. In the front, irregular spheres or wavy shapes created interesting shadow play. Another work from this time, Trinità ('Trinity') (1966), had three large white canvases with lines of holes. They were placed in a theatrical setting made of blue plastic sheets that looked like wings.
In his final years, Fontana became very interested in how his work was displayed in exhibitions around the world. He also focused on the idea of purity in his last white canvases. These ideas were important at the 1966 Venice Biennale, where he designed the space for his art. At a big art show called Documenta IV in Kassel in 1968, he placed a large plaster slash in the middle of a completely white labyrinth, including the ceiling and floor.
Shortly before he died, Fontana attended an art demonstration in New York. He then left his home in Milan and went to Comabbio, his family's hometown in Italy, where he passed away in 1968.
Fontana also created many drawings and prints with abstract shapes and figures, which are not as well known. He also sculpted a bust (a head and shoulders statue) of Ovidio Lagos, the founder of a newspaper, using Carrara marble.
Exhibitions and collections
Fontana had his first solo art show in Milan in 1931. In 1961, his first show in the U.S. was held in New York. His first solo exhibition at an American museum was in Minneapolis in 1966. He participated in the São Paulo Art Biennial and many other shows worldwide.
Major exhibitions of his work have been held at places like the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (2006), the Hayward Gallery in London (1999), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1987). Fontana's work was regularly shown at the Venice Biennale starting in 1930. He won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1966. In 2014, the Musée d'Art moderne de Paris held a large show of his art.
Fontana's artworks can be found in the permanent collections of over one hundred museums around the world. For example, pieces from his Pietre series are in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fontana's jewelry is also part of the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
See also
In Spanish: Lucio Fontana para niños
