Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (October Books),Used

Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (October Books),Used

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SKU: SONG0262526158
Brand: The MIT Press
$206.10 $294.43
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A new view of Fontana showing how the artist combined modernist aesthetics with outmoded forms of kitsch.In 1961, a solo exhibition by ArgentineItalian artist Lucio Fontana met with a scathing critical response from New York art critics. Fontana (18991968), 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. 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 avantgarde iconoclasm, but the glittery ornamentation evokes outmoded forms of kitsch. 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 twentiethcentury art by marrying modernist aesthetics to industrialized mass culture, and attacked modernism's purity in a way that anticipated both pop art and postmodernism.Fontana painted expressionist and abstract sculptures in the pinks and golds of massproduced knickknacks, saturated architectural installations with fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light, and encrusted candycolored monochrome canvases with glitter. In doing so, White argues, he challenged Clement Greenberg's dictum that avantgarde and kitsch are diametrically opposed. 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 avantgarde 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.

⚠️ WARNING (California Proposition 65):

This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.

For more information, please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.

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