The book Lucio Fontana in Argentina. Dagli esordi al Manifiesto Blanco to be published at the same time as Lucio Fontana. Mecenate Collezionista Militante by Gaspare Luigi Marcone in the Electa series of critical essays Pesci rossi, marks the start of a collaboration between the publishing house and the Fondazione Lucio Fontana. This synergy has given rise to a special series of publications, curated by the Artistic Committee of the Foundation (Silvia Ardemagni, Luca Massimo Barbero, Maria Villa) aimed at promoting new studies and lesser-known aspects of the artist’s many-sided career.
An outstanding figure in twentieth-century art, Lucio Fontana spent two decades of his career in Argentina, his birthplace. This period, long neglected or considered marginal in his development, has been the subject of new studies thanks to recent insights and discoveries that have broadened our understanding of it and enabled us to reconsider its value.
Fontana discovered his vocation for the visual arts in the 1920s, training in his father’s sculpture studio and engaging in his first formal experiments. In an artistic context pervaded by tensions between tradition and innovation, he came into contact with a group of intellectuals in Rosario, including the painter Julio Vanzo, the critic Juan Zocchi and the poet Fausto Hernandez. With them he developed the “new sensibility” through exhibitions, publications and lectures, such as the one that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti delivered in Rosario in 1926.
In the 1930s, while living in Italy, Fontana maintained active ties with Argentina, taking part in competitions and exhibitions, including those devoted to Argentine artists in Italy and Italian artists in Buenos Aires (1936 and 1938).
Finally, in the 1940s, spent between Rosario and Buenos Aires, he established himself as one of the most important artists in the country, winning national awards and extending his research into form, colour and space. During the decade he engaged continuously in experiments into sculpture, seeking new developments in ceramics and devising innovative “baroque” gestures imprinted in plaster, as well as drawings with avant-garde lines (his first “conceptos espaciales”), as well as sculptures of an ephemeral or architectural nature. In contact with his students and stimulated by the avant-gardes Arte Concreto and Madí, he developed the theories that would inspire the Manifiesto Blanco (1946), the founding act of Spazialismo.
The Fondazione Lucio Fontana was founded on the initiative of Teresita Rasini Fontana, the artist’s widow, on 29 November 1982. Although it has been active in this form since the mid-eighties, its work began much earlier, when the Lucio Fontana Archive was established around 1970.
From its early years, Teresita Rasini began a careful, precise archiving of Fontana’s work, in order to protect and enhance it. In this she was joined by a small group of professionals including Enrico Crispolti, who has been close to the artist since the fifties. This commitment has led over time to the recognition of a regularly updated corpus of works, collected in the various editions of the Catalogues Raisonnés promoted and produced in collaboration with the Foundation.
Holder of a core group of works by Fontana, as well as by other artists, together with a substantial bibliographic, documentary and photographic archive the Foundation promotes and encourages studies and publications on the artist, while also collaborating in the organisation of exhibitions devoted to him. This commitment of primary importance has made it possible to conduct projects in the most important public and private institutions, in both Italy and abroad.
Since the early years, an Artistic Committee has been established to authenticate and register autograph works, which is still active and, in recent times, also engaged in the production of content capable of eliciting new interpretations and narratives of the master’s work.
