1931
At the end of the year, Lucio Fontana is invited by Edoardo Persico to organize a solo exhibition at Galleria il Milione, where he presents work still divided between bronze sculpture and colored sculpture.
He deepens his use of terracotta and color, particularly gold in sculpture, while creating plaster tablets and pigmented cement tablets, scratched and sometimes painted, pursuing a simplification of image and modeling. At the end of this year he exhibits at Galleria il Milione, in addition to the colored terracottas, the sketches for the groundbreaking Vittoria of 1930 in painted and gilded plaster, which, translated into bronze, will later be reused by Giuseppe Terragni in the Monumento ai Caduti di Erba, now destroyed.
Fontana and Milanese Rationalist Architecture
Fontana's environmental training took place in close contact with the protagonists of Italian Rationalism. In 1933 Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini wrote: "Today we do not believe in decorative painting, but in painting without other qualifications, just as we believe in architecture and not in decoration, in art and not in subspecies of art".
Reflections of this kind were formidable stimuli for Fontana. As Carlo Belli recalled in a reflection published in 1968:
Bar Craja and the Milanese Group
Among the patrons of Bar Craja, the main meeting place of this group heterogeneous in disciplines but united in the desire to update Italian art of the ventennio, were:
- Poets and writers: Alfonso Gatto, Salvatore Quasimodo, Leonardo Sinisgalli
- Artists: Atanasio Soldati, Lucio Fontana, Arturo Martini, Carlo Carrà
- Architects: Pollini, Gianni Banfi, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Peressutti, Belgiojoso, Mario Radice, Manlio Rho
- Critics and theorists: Edoardo Persico, Carlo Belli, the Ghiringhelli brothers
The models were Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. They sought a logical and rational architecture, stripped of any decorative artifice, aimed at defending the existence of an international architecture.
The Decisive Collaborations
In the 1930s in Milan, Fontana collaborated with the major architects: BBPR, Figini and Pollini, Giuseppe Terragni. With the latter he created the bronze for the Monumento ai Caduti di Erba (1930) and the abstract sculpture for the atrium of Casa Ghiringhelli (1935).
The friendship with Edoardo Persico, Fontana's early critic and director of Casabella from 1931 to 1936, and the numerous collaborations with Luciano Baldessari—who had been in Berlin before 1922 and knew Gropius's experiments and Mies van der Rohe's early projects—contributed to defining that international Fontana hitherto unexpressed.
1932
The phase of anti-naturalistic and abstract experimentation continues with the scratched tablets, polychrome terracotta portraits and monumental works that highlight the distance from the bloodless Novecento. The Campione olimpionico or Atleta in attesa, a colored plaster, dissolves sculpture into painting, experimenting with new expressive forms.
1933
He continues to exhibit at the Milanese trade union exhibitions of regional and national scope. At the end of this year he begins producing ceramic sculptures. The expressionist accent of his work will emerge more and more, in contrast to the lyrical and emotional component of Arturo Martini, revealing the interest in the organic generation of form, identified by critics as a phenomenological component of his work.
1934
He executes double-sided non-figurative sculptures in bronze and cement, together with wire and clay sculptures that follow a spiral line in the void of space, and more essential scratched tablets. He establishes relations with Carlo Belli, theorist of Italian abstractionism, and forges relationships with the artists of Galleria il Milione, including: Osvaldo Licini, Fausto Melotti, Atanasio Soldati, Luigi Veronesi.
1935
The beginning of the year opens with the solo exhibition of abstract sculptures at Galleria il Milione, where he exhibits mainly cement works completed the previous year.
At the end of the year he begins his activity as a ceramicist in Albisola. He moves with his studio and residence to via Guglielmo Pepe, in a house designed by architects Terragni and Lingeri.
1936
At the Giuseppe Mazzotti manufactory in Albisola, a meeting place for artists thanks to Tullio d'Albisola (Tullio Mazzotti), he creates ceramics and stoneware sculptures, even of large dimensions, for architects who manage the commissions. The theme of the seabed, developed especially at Sèvres, is rendered in infinite varieties, with colors and iridescent bituminous blacks.
He participates in the VI Milan Triennale—International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts and Architecture, presenting Vittoria (now destroyed).
1937
He frequents Lionello Venturi, in exile from the fascist regime, and meets Joan Miró, Tristan Tzara, Constantin Brancusi. In autumn he holds an exhibition in Paris, where he exhibits high-fire ceramics and stoneware made at Sèvres. The first international critical recognition arrives.
1938
He returns to Italy, his ceramicist activity in Liguria intensifies, supported by Tullio d'Albisola. He further investigates the theme of still life and portraiture, with sculptures that shatter monumental plasticity in favor of the dialectic between matter and space, like the mosaic sculptures of this period.
Marinetti, in the futurist manifesto Ceramica e aeroceramica, mentions Fontana as an "abstract" ceramicist. For the entrance of Giancarlo Palanti's house at 4 via Panizza, in Milan, he creates the glazed stoneware sculpture Torso italico, now in a private Milanese collection. He lives on via Plinio, then moves his studio to 25 via Boccaccio.
1939
He continues his work as a ceramicist in Albisola, at the Giuseppe Mazzotti manufactory. He comes into contact with the Corrente group and participates in the second exhibition of the Milanese group in December. Argan, Morosini, Giolli and Carrieri write articles about his work.
1940
In spring, heeding his father's requests, he embarks from Genoa for Argentina; he records his impressions in a travel diary, still unpublished.
Italy's entry into the war prevents his return; he remains in Argentina and settles in his old residence at Calle Rioja 2070. He works as a predominantly figurative sculptor in an environment devoid of stimuli. He creates works such as Mujer con máscara, Descanso, La mujer del marinero, Donne al balcone, characterized by a thinning of figures and a referentiality to impressionist plasticity.
From the beginning of the year he works on full-round portraits and mosaics; with the firm "Giorgio Grapputto" of Milan he creates a gigantic head of Medusa, four and a half meters tall, for the Italian pavilion at the New York World's Fair.
