"Il gesto: Global Art and Italian Gesture Painting in the 1950s" is an illuminating case study of an Italy emerging from Fascism to reconnect to an international post war art world and to become a cosmopolitan centre for art practice. Relating Fontana’s art to the political and social context in which he worked, White shows how Fontana used the materials and techniques of mass culture to comment on the fate of the avant-garde under Italian fascism and the postwar “economic miracle.” At a time when Fontana’s work is commanding record prices, this new interpretation of the work assures that it has unprecedented critical relevance."
In doing so, White argues, he challenged Clement Greenberg's dictum that avant-garde and kitsch are diametrically opposed. Fontana painted expressionist and abstract sculptures in the pinks and golds of mass-produced knick-knacks, saturated architectural installations with fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light, and encrusted candy-colored monochrome canvases with glitter. In Lucio Fontana, Anthony White examines a selection of the artist’s work from the 1930s to the 1960s, arguing that Fontana attacked the idealism of twentieth-century art by marrying modernist aesthetics to industrialized mass culture, and attacked modernism’s purity in a way that anticipated both pop art and postmodernism. One critic described the work as "halfway between constructivism and costume jewelry," unwittingly putting his finger on the contradiction at the heart of these paintings and much of Fontana’s work: the cut canvases suggest avant-garde iconoclasm, but the glittery ornamentation evokes outmoded forms of kitsch.
#Lucio utopia series#
Fontana (1899–1968), well known in Europe for his series of slashed monochrome paintings, offered New York ten canvases slashed and punctured, thickly painted in luridly brilliant hues and embellished with chunks of colored glass.
Thus in the ensuing counter-discourse, which the essays paradoxically unmask (and disguise), "'pseudo-architecture' with 'new architecture'" (35), "historic modernity" (79) with the "extension of a colonial aesthetic" (80), and visual homogeneity with blunder.Īn intriguing element of the collection is its ever-present suggestion that as Brazilian society inhabited the superquadras and the new modernist capital of a newly industrialized Brazil, the architectural and."In 1961, a solo exhibition by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana met with a scathing critical response from New York art critics. Nonetheless, el-Dahdah succeeds in countering the urban planner's discourse of power by demonstrating that the discourse itself creates conditions over which the planners stumble. El-Dahdah premises the collection on refuting a reading of Brasilia "only in terms of its performance as a spatial utopia rather than considering its conditions of daily life" (12). But this reaction to the criticism leveled at the Brazilian modernist utopia "leaks" as well.
The introductory essay on the "importance of leisure," for example, directs the reader's attention to the presumed failure of the complex of residential buildings, and by extension to the presumed failure of Brazil's new capital, as a postmodern "misreading" (11). Fares el-Dahdah's fascinating collage of historical, legal, social, architectural, and urban-studies essays uncovers Costa's utopian urban plan for Brasilia (1957)-and more precisely, the twelve-kilometer highway lined with rows of large residential slab blocks-as a perspectival, architectural arche-writing imbued with visual and textual symbolism and utopian abstraction. But the statement carries supplementary signage. This remark by Brasilia's urban planner Lucio Costa, in Matheus Gorovitz's essay on Brasilia's "Neighborhood Unit," appears to support the notion of Brasilia's superblock residential area as open to the public rather than a closed-off, gated and privatized enclave. "Neighborhood areas are not waterproof-they leak" (44). New York: Prestel Verlag Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2005.
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