Lucio Fontana

Lizzola Collection, Milan

A. G. Terruzzi, Milan

Sale: Nuova Brerarte, Milan, Arte Contemporanea Astratto e Avanguardia, 12 December 1989, Lot 105

Gallerie d'Arte Orler, Venice

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner 

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Environments Spatiaux, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 202, no. 68 T 72, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 690, no. 68 T 72, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 883, no. 68 T 72, illustrated 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a minor handling mark towards the lower right corner and a few faint and unobtrusive scuff marks in isolated places, notably to the right hand side of the canvas. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

“My tagli are primarily a philosophical expression, an act of faith in the Infinite, an affirmation of spirituality. When I sit down in front of one of my tagli, to contemplate it, I suddenly feel a great expansion of the spirit, I feel like a man liberated from the slavery of material, like a man who belongs to the vastness of the present and the future.”

Lucio Fontana quoted in: Grazia Livi, ‘Incontro con Lucio Fontana’, Vanità, Vol. 6, No. 13, Autumn 1962, p. 56.

Freed from any ornamental encumbrance, Concetto Spaziale, Attese is primed in a dark and lustrous blue with two dramatic, perfectly vertical tagli (cuts) at the centre of the canvas. Representing a "gesture of liberation” in its purest form, the tagli are arguably Fontana’s most radical and forceful encounters with the notion of time and space (Pia Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 58). "I have invented a formula that I think I cannot perfect. I succeeded in giving those looking at my work a sense of spatial calm, of cosmic rigor, of serenity with regard to the infinite. Further than this I could not go" (Lucio Fontana quoted in: Giorgio Bocca, ‘Il taglio è il taglio: Incontro con Lucio Fontana, il vincitore di Venezia’, Il Giorno, 6 July 1966). This ultimate feeling of the cosmic and the metaphysical is further attested to in the present work by the deep and powerful blue, a rare colour in Fontana’s oeuvre. In its purity of colour and composition, the work evokes a polyphony of impressions and emotions. Wassily Kandinsky, one of the founding members of the German expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, wrote on the subject of the colour blue: “the deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural" (Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Bern 1952, p. 92). Kandinsky and his fellow members of Der Blaue Reiter shared a profound fascination with form and colour, which eventually led to the abandonment of the representational in favour of abstraction. This ideology is echoed and further expanded in Fontana’s work, whose monochrome blue surface with its two cuts absorb the viewer into new spatial spheres.

The present work is a formidable example of Fontana’s tagli since the first published taglio painting was also a blue monochrome. Having dramatically advanced and perfected his technique since the very first incision into canvas in 1958, this striking Concetto Spaziale, Attese from 1968 defies any definite interpretation. Instead, the combination of intense blue and elegant slashes is balanced by an almost scientific exploration of cosmic space towards a sense of universality. Furthermore, in his choice of an immersive and absorptive blue for his first tagli and the present work – the colour previously championed by the Der Blaue Reiter for its mystical properties – Fontana’s work draws a parallel to the inquiry of his fellow artist and friend Yves Klein. In 1957, Klein exhibited eleven identical monochrome canvases in International Klein Blue (IKB) at his exhibition Epoca Blu at the gallery Apollinaire in Milan. Fontana, who was fascinated by the multitudinous effects of the colour blue, became one of the first collectors and supporters of Klein’s works and the two artists began to pursue a vivid artistic and intellectual exchange. As with the works of Klein, Fontana used the perfectly painted surface of the canvas to enhance the viewer’s sensation of space but also to negate painting’s representational obligations. While Fontana was very interested in the effects of science and technology on modern life (such as international space travel) and increasing automation, the cuts themselves are a celebration of the artist’s subjective intervention with the medium, repudiating the total industrialisation and mechanisation of art inherent in some artistic movements of the time, especially in the US and Europe.

Over the course of the last decades, Fontana’s mesmerising tagli have come to symbolise the redefinition of art’s boundaries and its ubiquitous experiments with a myriad of techniques. These works stand at the core of an avant-garde art that radically redefined and advanced the context in which we perceive material. When Fontana created his first taglio in 1958, he had taken the course of abstraction one step further by elevating the canvas from a mere surface towards an end in itself: the canvas is not only a simple means of transmittance but an autonomous tool of expression in its own right. Liberated from traditional two-dimensionality and advancing towards a third, if not even a fourth dimension, the black void behind the cuts of Concetto Spaziale, Attese becomes an actual optical experience of space and time. The viewer is suddenly confronted with a black mass as both a point of origin and ending, juxtaposing the ideas of nothingness and infinity, of divine spirituality and radical thought. By achieving absolute mastery over the technique, Fontana could fully concentrate onhis primary goal, namely to “liberate art from matter, to liberate the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal. Matter decays, but the gesture remains, and the gesture becomes eternal while it is being completed in the minds of future viewers” (Lucio Fontana quoted in: Enrico Crispolti, Ed., Lucio Fontana: Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. I, Milan 2006, pp. 114-15).