Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Nine discourses on Commodus & Study for Triumph of Love

Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Nine discourses on Commodus. Photo Sotheby's

signed, titled and dated 1964, pencil and coloured crayon on paper, 70 by 50cm.; 27 3/8 by 19 5/8 in. ESTIMATE 80,000-120,000 GBP - Lot Sold: 97,250 GBP

AUTHENTICATION: The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by the Twombly Foundation, who have noted that this work is a "Proof for Poster" and as such will not be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné for Works on Paper.

NOTE: Now housed in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao after its acquisition in 2007, the nine canvases that together form the Discourses on Commodus, were only previously exhibited twice; first at the Leo Castelli Gallery for which the present work was created, and then, more than a decade later in 1979, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The series is now understood as one of the most important works not only in the context of the artist's oeuvre but also within the history of Post-War art. When exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery, however, the profound emotion and urgency of the work was received with hesitance by an American audience that in 1964 was still heavily focused on the potential of the future as visualised through the gloss Pop and sleekness of Minimalism. The corporeality of Twombly's working process, the visceral narrative that guides the Discourse of Commodus, and the cerebral investigation of semiotics that resulted in a visual conflation of time, medium and aesthetic, was at the time seen as an antiquated indulgence, however, has now become understood and heralded as an "awesome commentary [that] emerges as the surest grasp of a vulnerable ambivalence of the psyche and its images in reality; creativity heighted to the majesty of atrocity reveals its physiognomy nowhere more lucidly than here." (Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, volume II, 1961-1965, Mosel 1993, p.29).

After moving to Rome in 1957, Twombly became enthralled by Italian history, classical literature and ancient mythology, leading the artist to artistically tether the subjective and elusive experience of abstract expressionism to a weighty historical background. Increasingly projecting a manic anxiety, Twombly's work from the early 1960s matched the insecurity of a world on the brink of nuclear catastrophe and political unrest. Suggestively taking as his theme the fateful identity of Commodus, the son of the great Marcus Aurelius, Twombly systematically charts the instability and descent that eventually led to the implosion of the greatest empire the world had ever witnessed. Grounding the whirls of savage, trembling and explosive colour that bursts from the center of each canvas within a cool grey surround, Twombly masterfully conjures the cruelty and insanity of an emperor and the resulting social and political chaos that erupted within the structured empire to an evocative materiality on the canvas' surface. Of his work from this seminal period, Discourse on Commodus, the artists first unitarily conceived historical series, most acutely brought to bear the monolithic oracle of the past on the restless present.

 

Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Study for Triumph of Love. Photo Sotheby's

signed, dated (at Sea) No 23, 1960 and variously inscribed, pencil, pastel and pen on paper, 27.8 by 35.3cm.; 11 by 13 7/8 in. ESTIMATE 40,000-60,000 GBP - Lot Sold: 49,250 GBP

AUTHENTICATION: This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings being prepared by Nicola Del Roscio

Sotheby's. Contemporary Art Auction, 30 june 2011, London www.sothebys.com

Hommage à Cy Twombly dont je viens d'apprendre le décès. R.I.P.

Yves Klein (1928 - 1962), Monochrome & La Terre Bleue

Yves Klein (1928 - 1962), Monochrome. Photo Sotheby's

pure pigment and synthetic resin on cartoline; 21.5 by 17.8cm.; 8 1/2 by 7in. Executed in 1959.. ESTIMATE 60,000-80,000 GBP - Lot Sold: 73,250 GBP

Yves Klein (1928 - 1962), La Terre Bleue. Photo Sotheby's

embossed with the star on the base and numbered 72/300 on a label affixed to the underside; dry IKB pigment and synthetic resin on plaster cast; 35.5 by 29.5 by 28cm.; 14 by 11 5/8 by 11in. Conceived in 1957, this work was cast in 1990 in an edition of 300 plus 50 hors commerce, edited by Galerie Bonnier, Geneva.  ESTIMATE 10,000-15,000 GBP - Lot Sold: 25,000 GBP

LITERATURE: Paul Wember, Yves Klein, Cologne 1969, p. 137, no. RP7, illustration of the original cast

Jean-Paul Ledeur, Yves Klein, Catalogue Raisonné des Editions et Sculptures, Knokke-le-Zoute 2000, p. 242, no. RP7, illustration of another cast in colour

Sotheby's. Contemporary Art Auction, 30 june 2011, London www.sothebys.com

Four Lucio Fontana sold @ Soheby's, Contemporary Art Auction, 30 june 2011, London

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) , Concetto spaziale, Attese. Photo Sotheby's

signed, titled and inscribed Forse il verde è un bel colore! on the reverse, waterpaint on canvas, 65.3 by 54cm.; 25 3/4 by 21 1/4 in. Executed in 1964-1965. ESTIMATE 400,000-600,000 GBP - Lot Sold: 469,250 GBP

NOTE: In Concetto Spaziale, Attese, Fontana's tagli take their most striking form. A verdant green ground becomes a dramatic stage upon which four trademark slashes play their part. Dancing across the canvas in the curved form of musical notes upon a score, the four dark recesses transport the viewer into a dynamic third dimension, a sculptural space where energy seems to pound through the openings. Recalling the vibrant compositions of the Italian Futurists, Fontana here has taken the painted stroke of movement and transformed it into action. Slim and elegant in their precise positioning at regular intervals across the centre of the picture plane, the slashes catalyse the metamorphosis of the two dimensional canvas into a strikingly beautiful art-object..

The dynamic juxtaposition of dark incisions against a lush field of colour perfectly encapsulates Fontana's visual theatre at its most powerful. The colour of nature, emblematic of regeneration, fertility and rebirth, green also symbolises the cycle of life, and therefore of human energy.

Fontana was captivated by technological advancement, and here, the deep green ground articulates his aim to find a visual manifestation of the progress he witnessed in the immediate post-war period. Arresting in its dramatic chiaroscuro of dark penetrating through a field of colour, Concetto Spaziale, Attese is a work of animated beauty, illuminating Fontana's groundbreaking innovations.

LITERATURE: Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 744, no. 64-65 T 79, illustrated

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) , Concetto spaziale. Photo Sotheby's

signed, painted and glazed terracotta; diameter: 29.5cm.; 11 5/8 in. Executed circa 1965. ESTIMATE 100,000-150,000 GBP - Lot Sold: 121,250 GBP

NOTE: Energetically fashioned in malleable terracotta clay, Lucio Fontana's Concetto Spaziale reflects his desire to make inert material 'live'. A cluster of punctured holes are gouged out from the smooth polished sphere, bringing to the surface the form's inner core in an eruption of encrusted perforations. Recalling the ceramics of the late 1930s that gave the impression of sculptures in the throes of radical violent change, and the monumental Nature of moulded clay, Concetto Spaziale subscribes to Fontana's Spatialist concept of infinite space. In the present work, the flatness of Fontana's attese canvases is translated onto the organic roundness of a sphere, and the violent incisions of the knife have been replaced by the crude penetration of Fontana's own hands. The beauty of the smooth sphere with its interruptions of the artist's invasive sign relate to the key concepts which characterise Fontana's best work: namely the simplicity of and truth to materials, and the expressive potential of a simple gesture like the cut or hole.

The provenance of this particular work bears testimony to the fruitful artistic period which characterised Milan in the 1960s. The original owner of this work was a distinguished Professor of Fine Art at the University of Indiana, and a pioneer in modern jewellery making. During a residency in the Milan studio of the artist Arnaldo Pomodoro in the 1960s, the owner met the artist Lucio Fontana and acquired Concetto Spaziale. The present sculpture therefore illuminates the interchange of the ideas and philosophy between two artists during an era of intense creative energy in 1960s Italy.

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) , Concetto spaziale. Photo Sotheby's

 

each: signed and numbered 445/500 on the underside; polished bronze; 27 by 22 by 22cm.; 10 5/8 by 8 5/8 by 8 5/8 in. Executed in 1967. ESTIMATE 30,000-40,000 GBP- Lot Sold: 79,250 GBP

LITERATURE: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Imago Art Gallery, Lucio Fontana: Beyond Space, Milan 2008, p.9 3, illustration of another example

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) , Concetto spaziale. Photo Sotheby's

 

signed , painted and glazed ceramic; diameter: 44cm.; 17 3/8 in. Executed circa 1960-63. ESTIMATE 30,000-40,000 GBP - Unsold.

AUTHENTICATION: This work is registered in the Archivio Lucio Fontana, Milan under the number 800/2

Sotheby's. Contemporary Art Auction, 30 june 2011, London www.sothebys.com

Three Lucio Fontana sold @ Sotheby's London

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) , Concetto spaziale, Attese. Photo Sotheby's

signed, titled and inscribed ieri ho visto la partita di fobbal on the reverse, waterpaint on canvas; 60 by 51cm. 24 ¼ x 19 ¾in. Executed in 1967. ESTIMATE 500,000-700,000 GBP - Lot Sold: 814,050 GBP

NOTE: "The discovery of the Cosmos is that of a new dimension, it is the Infinite: thus I pierce this canvas, which is the basis of all arts and I have created an infinite dimension, an x which for me is the basis for all Contemporary Art"

The artist cited in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana, Venice/ New York, 2006, p. 19

LITERATURE: Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, pp. 194-195, no. 67 T 91, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 671, no. 67 T 91, illustrated

Annette Kuhn, Zero Avantgarde der sechziger Jahre, Berlin 1991, no. 101, p. 141, illustrated

Mittwoch, Vienna, 12 August 1992, illustrated

Der Standard, Vienna, 12 August 1992, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Ragionato, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 865, no. 67 T 91, illustrated

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) , Concetto spaziale, New York 3. Photo Sotheby's

signed , lacerations and graffiti on copper; 58 by 58cm. 22 7/8 by 22 7/8 in. Executed in 1962. ESTIMATE 400,000-600,000 GBP - Lot Sold: 791,650 GBP

NOTE: Resplendent in the ever-changing reflections of its faceted copper surface, Lucio Fontana's Concetto Spaziale, New York 3, not only sculpts light itself but also lures us through its powerful lacerations into the limitless Spatialist depths beyond the picture plane. Pioneering a unique form of hanging sculpture, this work typifies Fontana's irrefutable status as a genius of European Abstract Art. This reputation is founded not only on his groundbreaking invention and development of Spatialism, but also a tirelessly innovative use of unprecedented materials. Rooted in his training as a sculptor, Fontana's artistic dialect invariably implicates three-dimensions. By the early 1960s he had incorporated his diverse lacerations and punctures into polygonal and oval canvases; invented new forms of paint; extensively incorporated coloured glass, stones and glitter; experimented with neon tubes; and wrestled with vast volumes of terracotta and bronze. However, with the Metalli works Fontana again reinvented his media, creating breathtaking effects with sheets of metals – aluminium, brass, copper – in search of new artistic possibilities. The Metalli produced between 1961 and 1968 were initially inspired by Fontana's trip to New York from Italy in November 1961. Fontana had been invited to exhibit paintings from his Olii cycle dedicated to Venice at the gallery of Martha Jackson, whom he had previously met through the Director of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, Philip Johnson. Of course, it is important to remember that at that time, the Chrysler, Empire State and GE Buildings were barely thirty years old, and Mies Van Der Rohe's extraordinary Seagram Building had been completed in only 1958. The magnificent architecture of New York and the extraordinary light-reflecting sky-scrapers had an overwhelming and inspirational impact on Fontana. After visiting the Seagram Building the artist wrote: "I went to the top floor of the most famous of the skyscrapers...the one made of bronze and gilded glass... It seemed to contain the sun..." (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 42). Indeed, Luca Massimo Barbero has observed how the island of Manhattan "may paradoxically be compared to Venice's magnificence of the past, but New York was vital, teeming with energy, life, the future" (Ibid).

Concetto Spaziale, New York 3, executed in 1962 belongs to the first group of Metalli, titled New York, which together with the Venice series is the only group of works by the artist which have a figurative subtitle, although Fontana's intentions were certainly never descriptive or illustrative. In 1962 Fontana returned from New York determined to find a pictorial translation for the inspirational emotions he felt generated by the city, which would subsequently become the New York series. Beyond brilliant architectural feats, sky-scrapers also emblematised a future way of life, implementing technological advances to create a more efficient mode of living and working. While in New York, Fontana had attempted to reproduce the city in the work New York, 1961, an oil and collage work on board, but the medium was not sufficiently dynamic or exciting. Fontana had experimented in the Venice series with metallic colours, whose reflective nature fascinated him, but the oil paint maintained a smooth opacity which failed to convey "a city made of glass colossi on which the sun beats down causing torrents of light" (the artist in: Grazia Livi, Vanita, p. 53).

Back in his studio in Milan, Fontana realized that he would have to enlist unprecedented media that referenced directly the shiny structures of New York's buildings. His choice of metallic sheets came quite spontaneously as the only material able to render the magnificent aura of skyscrapers. After experimentation with aluminium and brass, copper became the principal metal employed in the New York series on account of its comparable malleability, lustrous colour and capacity to reflect light and forms into magical fragmentation. Fontana particularly appreciated its strength and resilience despite the creation of multiple facets and fissures necessary to achieve reflections and shadows throughout the sheet. Indeed, for the Metalli series, Fontana conceived light as a fundamental part of the artwork, creating surfaces which recall the ephemeral patterns of reflections left by the sun on the glass windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. He observed how "no other material so successfully captures the sense of this Metropolis made all of glass, of windowpanes, orgies of light and the dazzle of metal" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Op Cit, p. 45).

Executed in 1962 and exhibited at Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan on that year, Concetto Spaziale New York 3 is a strikingly evocative depiction of the sights, sounds and movements of a city, immortalised by the indelible marks of Fontana's line.

LITERATURE: Leader, no. 1, Milan, December 1963, p. 94, illustrated

Shuzo Takiguchi, 'Fontana, Arte Contemporanea', in: Misuzu, no. 25, Tokyo, 1964, pp. 48-49, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 122-3, no. 62 ME 11, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 411, no. 62 ME 11, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Ragionato, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 598, no. 62 ME 11, illustrated

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) , Concetto spaziale, Attesa. Photo Sotheby's

signed, titled and inscribedﾠChe cielo sereno!! Che serenità d'animo on the reverse, waterpaint on canvas; 55 by 46cm. 21 5/8 by 18 1/8 in. Executed in 1964-65. ESTIMATE 400,000-600,000 GBP - Lot Sold: 758,050 GBP

NOTE: Produced in 1964-65 after having participated in the XXXII Biennale Internazionale d'Arte in Venice, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa epitomizes the artist's groundbreaking explorations of Spatialism. This red variation on Fontana's signature Concetto Spaziale fuses together sensual intimations and the artist's research in conceptually translating infinity of space onto the canvas.

Exquisitely executed, the vertical lyrical slash simultaneously evinces spontaneity and control. The rich, saturated layer of red waterpaint allows the weave of the canvas to show through, insistently drawing attention to the materiality of the artwork. With a sculptor's sensibility, Fontana discarded conventional reverence for the canvas, and instead treated it as an artistic object in its own right.

As an image of spatial reality, Fontana emphasises the canvas' presence with bold, invasive gesture. Fontana cutting directly into the canvas, creates a beautiful contrast to the delicacy of the waterpaint.

In Concetto Spaziale, Attesa Fontana performed surgery on the very concept of painting, committing sacrilege on Clement Greenberg's high altar of Modernism - the flat picture plane. As Fontana declared in his last recorded interview: "I make a hole in a canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art and I escape, symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface" (conversation with Tommaso Trini, July 19, 1968, in Exhibition Catalogue, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 1988, p. 34). This inquiry into the grey area between painting and sculpture takes a particularly alluring form in the brilliant red of the present Concetto Spaziale, Attesa.

LITERATURE: Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Ragionato, Vol. II, Milan 2006, no. 64-65 T 88, p. 745, illustrated

Sotheby's. Contemporary Art Evening auction, 29 june 2011, London www.sothebys.com

Four Lucio Fontana sold @ Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 28 June 2011, London

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) , Concetto spaziale. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2011

signed 'l. fontana' (lower right); signed, inscribed and titled 'l. Fontana "Concetto spaziale" lo e la Carla abbiamo mangiato i pesciolini fritti' (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 39½ x 31 7/8in. (100.3 x 81cm.). Executed in 1964. Estimate £1,000,000 - £1,500,000($1,600,000 - $2,300,000). Price Realized  £2,337,250 ($3,730,251)

Provenance: Marlborough Galleria d'Arte, Rome.
Court Gallery, Copenhagen.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1966.

Literature: E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogue raisonné des peintures, sculptures et environnements spatiaux, vol. II, Brussels 1974, no. 64 O 5 (illustrated, p. 140).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogo generale, vol. II, Milan 1986, no. 64 O 5 (illustrated, p. 482).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, vol. II, Milan 2006, no. 64 O 5 (illustrated, p. 675).

Notes: "Gold is as beautiful as the Sun"
("l'oro è bello come il sole", The artist's inscription on the reverse of Concetto spaziale, 1964 (64 O 11)).

Executed in 1964, Concetto spaziale is a large-scale, radiant, and sensual gold Olii by the pioneering Italian Post-War artist Lucio Fontana. A treasured part of a European private collection, this is the first time this majestic work has been seen by the public for over forty-five years. In Concetto spaziale, Fontana has perforated the rich surface of the canvas with eight bucchi or holes as part of his ongoing Spatialist investigations. He makes direct contact with the sumptuous gold monochromatic surface, violently disrupting its pristine material and moulding the resulting cavities as if with the clay of his earlier terracotta Natura series. In Concetto spaziale, the artist has used his fingers to manipulate the canvas and its wealth of malleable gold oil paint, pulling the holes apart to form extended gouges in the surface. These pregnant ruptures are assembled in a concentric circle, encompassing an illusory taglie or cut in the centre of the canvas, formed by two vertical scratches. Surrounding the whole composition is a freely gestured circle, scored into the paint by a hard-edged instrument. The resulting pattern recalls cosmic constellations, the ripened flesh of fruit and the carnal imprint of female sexuality. At the same time, the gilded opulence of Concetto spaziale, rendered especially lustrous by Fontana's pink preparatory under-painting, pays striking tribute to the Venetian Baroque and its legacy of splendid beauty. Visiting Venice in 1961 to exhibit at the exhibition Arte e Contemplazione at Palazzo Grassi, Fontana was struck by the reflective surfaces of Byzantine gold, the mosaics of the Basilica di San Marco and the golden furniture and decorative curlicues of the city's Rococo ornaments. In Concetto spaziale, created three years later, this debt to the city is particularly evident, with its circular island floating in a lagoon of sumptuous golden oil paint.

'it is necessary to overturn and transform painting, sculpture and poetry. A form of art is now demanded which is based on the necessity of this new vision. The baroque has guided us in this direction, in all its as yet unsurpassed grandeur, where the plastic form is inseparable from the notion of time, the images appear to abandon the plane and continue into space the movements they suggest'
(Lucio Fontana Manifesto, translated by C. Damiano, 1951, reproduced in L. Massimo Barbero (ed.), Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, Venice & New York 2006, p. 229).

Fontana emerged as a leading figure in the European avant-garde upon his return from Argentina in 1947. In Milan he pioneered the concept of Spazialismo, a radical revision of the purposes of cultural production that advocated 'art based on the unity of time and space' (Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires 1946, reproduced in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, p. 116). Turning away from the materialism of recent practice, Fontana began to investigate the possibilities of raw materials, no longer using the canvas as an illustrative carrier of meaning but as an active element in the definition of space. In this project, Fontana was deeply engaged with the geopolitical context of the new Nuclear age, characterised by advances in quantum physics and pioneering space exploration. These developments were rapidly changing the context of contemporary life and Fontana believed that as a modern artist the only way forward was to embrace scientific potential and create a new psychological realm for exploration. In a stunningly simple yet innovative gesture, Fontana replaced painting with a bucchi or taglie opening up a two dimensional canvas into a third plane, disrupting the illusion of the flat surface and exposing it to the concept of 'beyond'; a process that was to define his oeuvre. As Fontana once said of his practice, 'Einstein's discovery of the cosmos is the infinite dimension, without end. And here we have the foreground, middleground and background, what do I have to do to go further? I make a hole, infinity passes through it, light passes through it, there is no need to painteveryone thought I wanted to destroy; but it is not true, I have constructed' (Lucio Fontana in conversation with Carla Lonzi 1967, reproduced in C. Lonzi (ed.), Autoritratto, Bari 1969, p. 176)

In Fontana's Concetto spaziale, he takes his concept further, replacing the raw canvas with a densely laden, oil paint hewn surface. He furnishes a new relationship with the work, creating linear and circular scratches and multiple perforations that emphasise the contrast between material and the void. The resulting appearance seems at once carnal and erotic, celebrating female sexuality in its reference to the intimate contours of the woman's anatomy. At the same time it seems painful, the epidermis of the canvas furled at the edges of each puncture in a mark reminiscent of the stigmata. As Fontana once explained, 'they represent the pain of man in space. The pain of the astronaut, squashed, compressed, with instruments sticking out of his skin, is different from ourshe who flies in space is a new type of man, with new sensations, not least painful ones' (Lucio Fontana quoted in E. Crispolti (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat. Palazzo delle Esposizione, Rome 1998, p. 244).

In Concetto Spaziale, not only does Fontana meditate on space but on movement, temporality and the notion of the eternal. The eight orifices that penetrate the canvas are alive with the air and light that pass through them, yet they are equally suspended in time, infinitely re-enacting the moment of their creation. This continuous dynamic captured in space and time, coupled with the resplendent gold of the canvas recalls elements of the Baroque that Fontana so admired. As Fontana once suggested in his Manifesto Technico dello Spazialismo, 'it is necessary to overturn and transform painting, sculpture and poetry. A form of art is now demanded which is based on the necessity of this new vision. The baroque has guided us in this direction, in all its as yet unsurpassed grandeur, where the plastic form is inseparable from the notion of time, the images appear to abandon the plane and continue into space the movements they suggest' (Lucio Fontana Manifesto, translated by C. Damiano, 1951, reproduced in L. Massimo Barbero (ed.), Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, Venice & New York 2006, p. 229). KA

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Concetto spaziale, Attese. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2011

signed twice, titled and inscribed 'l. Fontana l. Fontana 'Concetto Spaziale' ATTESA era una bellissima Triennale. Ho rifatto due volte la firma' (on the reverse), waterpaint on canvas, 57½ x 44 7/8in. (146 x 114cm.). Executed in 1966. Estimate £2,000,000 - £3,000,000 ($3,100,000 - $4,500,000). Price Realized  £2,057,250 ($3,283,371)

Provenance: Marlborough Galleria d'Arte, Rome.
Paul Haim & Co., Paris.
Galleria Seno, Milan.
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1980.

Literature: E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogue raisonné des peintures, sculptures et environnements spatiaux, vol. II, Brussels 1974, no. 66 T 40 (illustrated, p. 183).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogo generale, vol. II, Milan 1986, no. 66 T 40 (illustrated, p. 637).
Bocola, 2001, no. 773 (illustrated in colour, pp. 121, 128 and 166).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, vol. II, Milan 2006, no. 66 T 40 (illustrated, p. 833).

Exhibited: Venice, XXXIII Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte, 1966.
Milan, Galleria Seno, Fontana, 1973, no. 12 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Lucio Fontana: Retrospektive, 1996-97 (illustrated in colour, p. 195). This exhibition later travelled to Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig.

Notes: 'At the Venice Biennale in 1966 Fontana proposed a room in which were gathered together and disposed according to a particular architectural arrangement some exceedingly pure single tagli in a room which was also entirely white and in which the cuts were the only superficial "cracks" bearing an evident revealing conceptual and metaphysical significance (66 T 35...). White represented, as we know, for Fontana the "purest, least complicated, most understandable colour," that which most immediately struck the note of "pure simplicity," "pure philosophy," "spatial philosophy," "cosmic philosophy" to which Fontana more than ever aspired during the last years of his life'
(J. van der Marck & E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Vol. I, Brussels, 1974, p. 137).

Executed on a rare large-scale, Lucio Fontana's Concetto spaziale, Attese is an exquisite white monochrome tagli, penetrated with three precise, vertical slashes. These cuts, each over a metre long, immortalise the physical act of their creation, Fontana using the full length of his arm and force of his gesture to score through the expansive canvas. Fontana created Concetto spaziale, Attese in 1966, and it was shown the same year as part of a grand installation in the Italian pavilion at the XXXIII Venice Biennale. This installation, entitled the Ambiente Spaziale showcased Fontana taking his iconic gesture of the cut canvas to a new level of ambition. Created in collaboration with the architect Carlo Scarpa, Fontana envisaged a white, luminous maze, filled with examples of his Tagli, the iconic cuts for which he is perhaps best known, acting as a conceptual counterpoint to the gilded oeuvre presented at the Venice Biennale in 1961. As Fontana explained to Pierre Restany: 'I wanted to create a "spatial environment", by which I mean an environmental structure, a preliminary journey in which the "slits" would be as if in a labyrinth containing blanks of the same shape and colour but with one single laceration' (Fontana, quoted in S. Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., London, 1999, p. 200). Following Fontana's acclaimed installation at the Biennale, he won the International Grand Prize for Painting, marking the height of his practice. Received only two years before his death, it paid tribute to Fontana's tireless and continuing ambition to shape the contemporary artistic landscape, as well as a valedictory plaudit for his enduring artistic legacy. Of this extraordinary collection of seven white paintings, two are now housed in museums: one in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart and one in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Fontana completed Concetto Spaziale, Attese, in a series of premeditated iterations. Exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1966, the work first appeared with 'one single laceration' as intimated by its inscription, Attesa on the reverse. It constituted an integral part of the white architectural installation, representing one of almost identical, pure single-cuts 'inserted in box-like confessionals to accentuate their revelatory meaning' (J. van der Marck & E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Vol. I, Brussels, 1974, p. 141). Assembled together the tagli appeared almost monastic in their formal and abstract purity. It was this kind of transformative aesthetic that Fontana would later recreate for Documenta IV in Kassel in 1968, where he positioned a large, revelatory slash as the centre of a totally white room. As Fontana would later comment to Giorgio Bocca, in Venice '[I succeeded] in giving the spectator who looks at the painting an impression of spatial calm, of cosmic rigour, of serenity in infinity' (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti (ed.), Lucio Fontana: Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, Vol. I, Milan, 2006, p. 105). This was an atmosphere that the artist's friend and fellow artist Yves Klein had also engendered in his 'Epoca Blu' at the Gallery Apollinaire, Milan, in January 1957. Klein's exhibition featured eleven identical monochrome, International Klein Blue canvases attached to rods twenty centimetres away from the walls of the gallery. This installation created a powerful optical effect, mediating a new experience of space.
Following the Biennale, Fontana in a rare, expressive act added two further balancing cuts to either side of his central laceration. In doing so, he intensified his concept, creating three shards of space instead of one. These multiple tagli are the supreme, elegant expressions of Fontana's Spatial aesthetic and beliefs, each serial penetration thrown into dramatic relief by the radiant white of the canvas. It is in this striking contrast, between the white of the surface and the darkness of the void, that Fontana's Spatial concept finds its best expression. In Concetto Spaziale, Attese, we are entering the realm of the immaterial, that dimension whole-heartedly embraced by Yves Klein in his exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery in April 1958. Klein conceived of an evacuated space, perfectly white in homage to the Void - a concept that resonated with Fontana's minimalist language of the monochrome tagli.

Concetto spaziale, Attese is a work that transcends the canvas and the formal qualities of painting. In creating the apparently simple gesture of the precise cut on canvas, Fontana aspired to a radical avant-garde art, responding to the new post-Galilean age of quantum physics and international space travel. Fontana had been particularly excited by events in the years preceding the Venice Biennale when Edward H. White II, an astronaut on Gemini 4, had become the first man to perform a spacewalk. He wrote to Enrico Crispolti on the occasion, underling the prescience of his own Spatial Art: 'I am pleased with man's "little trip" in space, between us and the non-figurative "imaginists", or half figurative and the other half what the client wants, etc. etc. now the break is also physical, they are on earth and we are in space, ca va? Are you with us?' (Fontana, letter to E. Crispolti, 12 April 1964, in quoted in ibid., p. 245). KA

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Concetto spaziale, Attese. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2011

signed, titled and inscribed 'l. fontana Concetto Spaziale ATTESE 1 + 1 -7480' (on the reverse), waterpaint on canvas, 31 7/8 x 21 3/8in. (81 x 54cm.). Executed in 1963-64. Estimate: £800,000 - £1,200,000($1,200,000 - $1,800,000). Price Realized £1,105,250 ($1,763,979)

Provenance: A gift from the artist circa 1965 and thence by descent to the present owner.

Literature: E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, vol. II, Milan 2006, no. 63-64 T 19 (illustrated, p. 648).

Notes: 'We have entered the space age, man has discovered the distances between earth and the planets, man's goal is to conquer them, man with his inventions of the last one hundred years has sped humanity to achieve the impossible - all this has influenced the artist's creative spirit'
(L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti & R. Siliganto, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Milan, 1998, p. 146).

'Art is eternal, but it cannot be immortal, we plan to separate art from matter, to separate the sense of the eternal from the concern with the immortal. And it doesn't matter to us if a gesture, once accomplished, lives for a second or a millennium, for we are convinced that, having accomplished it, it is eternal'
(The First Spatial Manifesto signed by L. Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., 1998, pp. 117-118).

The unrivalled elegance of the gently curving incisions that migrate across the surface of Lucio Fontana's spectacular red Concetto spaziale, Attese are among the most graceful marks the artist ever made. The three incisions grow in length as they spread like ripples travelling across a mill pond and combined with the purity of the canvas's surface result in a work of exceptional beauty. Nestled into a canvas of sumptuous rich red with the seductive quality which recalls the evocative forms of the Baroque sculptor Bernini, these openings are not destructive slashes or cuts but instead are Fontana's response to the question that has obsessed every artist through the generations; how can art improve on what has gone before and continue to be relevant to the age in which it was created? Fontana's solution was to move away from using the canvas merely as a support for the medium of paint and instead incorporate it fully into the body of the work, thus opening up, both literally and figuratively, a whole new dimension of possibilities to further advance the course of art. The present work has been in the Minella family for over half a century and was originally a gift from the artist to the present owner's father, Signore Minella. He owned a florist's shop in the via Manzoni in Milan and counted Lucio Fontana as one of his customers. Signore Minella's shop was situated close to the influential Galleria del Naviglio and attracted many important Italian artists who would often stop by the flower shop on their way to and from the gallery. As well as owning the shop, Signore Minella also undertook private work in the gardens of his customers and it was after working in Fontana's garden in Comabbio that the artist gave Signore Minella the present work in heartfelt appreciation of all his efforts. The fact that such a remarkable painting has remained in the family for over half a century is testament to the affection in which it has been held and the strong relationship between the two men.

As the founder of the post-war Spatialist movement, Fontana was concerned with freeing artists from the constraints of artistic tradition. As the space age dawned and the world became dominated by the jet age, Fontana wanted to create art for a new era; art that would show the real space of the world. His solution was to break through the surface of the canvas and for the first time introduce a third dimension into the world of painting. Like portals to another dimension his incisions began to explore a hitherto unexplored world akin to the unchartered territories of the cosmos. Concetto spaziale, Attese is a perfect evocation of Fontana's objectives with its delicate cuts echoing the vastness of the universe. Behind each one, lies the darkness of an infinite space, full of possibilities and mystery. With deliberate flicks of the wrist Fontana produces his elegant incisions which literally open the canvas to new possibilities and interpretations. Enforcing the three-dimensional nature of the canvas, Fontana brings his earlier incarnation as a sculptor to the practice of painting, combining its different processes to forge a hybrid object that is no longer constrained by traditional classifications.

The importance of Fontana's background as a sculptor is clear in his decision to transform the canvas from a two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional object. Furthermore, with his Concetto spaziale, Attese he is not only transforming the canvas but in addition, Fontana incorporates the physical act of cutting into the work so it becomes an important part of the artistic process. These two tangible forces come to be Fontana's medium and support and the graceful gesture becomes his equivalent of using the brush on the surface of the canvas. There is a degree of beauty in the precision with which Fontana arrives at the results; no mess, no hesitation, just cool, controlled movement produced with scientific clarity. The cleanliness of the act bringing about an almost religious purity.

Fontana's sublimely beautiful Concetto spaziale, Attese is a triumphal exploration of the totality of artistic practice. In Fontana's skilled hands, the canvas is opened up to extraordinary new depths of meaning and beauty. There are no distractions; instead Fotanta has given us something that is emphatic, lending it a palpable sense of honesty and truth. The holistic nature of this luxurious red canvas succeeds in demonstrating the timeless beauty of art, fulfilling the dreams that Fontana had prophesied nearly two decades earlier when he laid the foundations for the Spatialist Movement, as he said at the time, 'Art is eternal, but it cannot be immortal,' the First Spatial Manifesto had declared, 'We plan to separate art from matter, to separate the sense of the eternal from the concern with the immortal. And it doesn't matter to us if a gesture, once accomplished, lives for a second or a millennium, for we are convinced that, having accomplished it, it is eternal' (signed by L. Fontana, G. Kaisserlian, B. Joppolo, M. Milani, reproduced in E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh.cat., 1998, pp. 117-18). SJ

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Concetto spaziale, Attesa. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2011

signed, titled and inscribed 'l. fontana "Concetto Spaziale ATTESA" Oggi vado dal Dottore a farmi visitare, para el amigo Soto ciao' (on the reverse), waterpaint on canvas, 25¾ x 21¼in. (65.5 x 54cm.). Executed in 1964. Estimate £800,000 - £1,200,000  ($1,200,000 - $1,800,000). Price Realized  £914,850 ($1,460,101)

Provenance: Jesús Rafael Soto (a gift from the artist).
Galerie Pierre, Stockholm.
Private Collection, Milan.
Anon. sale, Christie's London, 16 October 2006, lot 236.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Property from a Distinguished Private Collector

Literature: E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogue raisonné des peintures, sculptures et environnements spatiaux, vol. II, Brussels 1974, no. 64 T 42 (illustrated, p. 153).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogo generale, vol. II, Milan 1986, no. 64 T 42 (illustrated, p. 523).
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, vol. II, Milan 2006, no. 64 T 42 (illustrated, p. 713).

Exhibited: Stockholm, Galerie Pierre, Fontana, 1971, no. 14 (illustrated).

Notes: Executed in 1964, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa is the perfect expression of Lucio Fontana's Spatialist concept. Previously owned by the Venezuelan artist and major proponent of Op Art, Jesus Rafael Soto, it embodies the zero point or lacuna of painting. Rendered through one tight, vertical incision on a virgin white canvas, the painting no longer acts as a carrier of narrative or illustrative meaning, but as an active element in the redefinition of space and time. Situated perfectly along the central vertical axis of the pristine painting, Fontana's immaculate taglie or cut offers up a new dimension, what he referred to as a 'free space' stretching out beyond the picture plane. This concept was intended to make the viewer look beyond the physical reality of painting and to introduce a sense of time, light and space into an otherwise flat canvas. Resonating with the language of the Futurist manifesto, Fontana's pioneering gesture hoped to embody the dynamism of modern man, accelerated by the innovations of technology and science at the onset of a new Nuclear age.

Fontana emerged in 1947 as a leading proponent of the European avant-garde, eschewing the materiality of recent practice in favour of a new metaphysical approach. This was underscored by a manifesto published the preceding year entitled the Manifesto Bianco, which called for an 'art based on the unity of time and space' (Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires 1946, reproduced in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, p. 116). Fontana had been watching the innovations of space travel and quantum physics with fascination and considered existing modes of painting and sculpture out-dated and unable to reflect the accelerated process of contemporary change. One of the first to appreciate the ramifications of such radical developments, he eagerly sought to find a means of expressing it within art. As he wrote in his Technical Manifesto of 1951, 'the discovery of new physical powers, the conquest of matter and space gradually impose on man conditions which have never existed beforethe application of these discoveries to the various forms of life brings about a substantial transformation in our way of thinking. The painted surface, the erected stone, no longer have a meaning' (Technical Manifesto, reproduced in J. Van der Marck, 'The Spatial Concept of Art', Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Minneapolis, 1966).

Fontana's solution entailed the penetration of a canvas with a vertical tagli or punctured bucchi (hole) to create a three-dimensional object, existing in real space. In Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, one of the most pure examples of this practice, the artist's hand has violently breached the pristine white canvas with one long cut, the moment of its creation forever immortalised through its surface. As the artist once expounded, 'what we want to do is to unchain art from matter, to unchain the sense of the eternal from the preoccupation with the immortal. And we don't care if a gesture, once performed, lives a moment or a millennium, since we are truly convinced that once performed it is eternal' (First Spatialist Manifesto, 1947 reproduced in in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, pp. 117-118).

For Fontana, the practice of creating the tagli was deeply premeditated, the artist ruminating on his approach for hours, or even days. As he once explained, 'they think it's easy to make a cut or a hole, but it's not true. You have no idea how much stuff I throw away. The idea has to be realised with precision' (Lucio Fontana quoted in G. Ballo, Lucio Fontana, New York 1971, p. 45, quoted in S. Whitfield (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1999-2000, p. 42). As chronicled in the famous series of photographs taken by Ugo Mulas in the artist's studio, Fontana would prepare himself, standing erect at some distance from the easel, until he could muster the appropriate physical and mental concentration. As he told Mulas at the time, 'I really have to be in the right mood to perform this task' (Lucio Fontana quoted in U. Mulas, La Fotografia, Turin 1973 quoted in S. Whitfield (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1999-2000, p. 31). The cut itself, was enacted in a sequence, first by saturating the canvas in white emulsion paint allowing it to partially dry, and then by making a small incision with a Stanley knife to be dragged down the full length of the canvas. The canvas would then firm and dry out with time, the cut having been eased apart with the flat of the artist's hand. One of Fontana's close friends described this gesture as a 'caress', the artist tenderly working on the canvas and physically engaging it to gently open each furl.

For Fontana, the single abstract tagli was not a destructive act, but a creative exploration of the possibilities of art. The cut was to reveal the mysteries of light, 'the most intense moment of luminosity [occurring] at the point where the slightly curving planes at each side of the cut meet the slit of dark space' (G. Celant quoted in S. Whitfield (ed.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1999-2000, p. 42). He also sought to depict movement through his work, an ambition shared with the pre-war Italian Futurists, who had proudly declared in their first manifesto: 'the gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It will be dynamic sensation itself' (U. Boccioni et al., 'Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto', 1910 reproduced in C. Harrison and P. Wood (ed.), Art in Theory 1900-1990, Cambridge, 1993, p. 150). Through the apparently simple gesture of striking through the canvas, Fontana remarkably achieved both, permitting air and light to penetrate through it, forever engaging its surface.

Fontana embraced the metaphysical enquiry of his time. As he once concluded, 'Einstein's discovery of the cosmos is the infinite dimension, without end. And so here we have: foreground, middleground and background... to go farther what do I have to do?... I make holes, infinity passes through them, light passes through them, there is no need to paint' (Lucio Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti, 'Spatialism and Informel: The Fifties' pp. 144-150, E. Crispolti & R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Milan, 1998, p. 146). KA

Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 28 June 2011, London, King Street www.christies.com

Second Highest Price Paid for a Work of Art at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Sale

Francis Bacon's 'Study for a Portrait' (detail). Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2011  

LONDON.- A painting by Irish-born artist Francis Bacon sold for 18.0 million pounds ($28.7 million) on Tuesday, the second highest price paid for a work of art at a Christie's post-war and contemporary auction in London.

"Study for a Portrait," depicting a besuited man seated on a gilded armchair enshrouded in a sea of blue, had been expected to fetch around 11 million pounds, although the sale price includes a buyer's premium which the estimate does not.

The most expensive work of art sold at an equivalent sale at Christie's, London, was also by Bacon -- his "Triptych" raised 26.3 million pounds in 2008.

Executed in 1953, between Bacon's famous Pope series that year and his Man in Blue paintings of 1954, "Study for a Portrait" has never come to auction before.

Rodrigo Moynihan, who lent Bacon a studio, was the first owner. It later belonged to Louis Le Brocquy, the renowned Irish painter, who was the last to keep it before its acquisition by the present owner in 1984.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Study for a Portrait, oil on canvas, 78 x 54in. (198 x 137.5cm.). Painted in 1953. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2011

Provenance: Rodrigo Moynihan, London.
Louis Le Brocquy, Carros (Alpes Maritimes).
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1984.

Literature: W. Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts, London 1954, no. 4 (illustrated, titled Man in a Chair).
J. Rothenstein and R. Alley, Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, London 1964, no. 78 (illustrated, unpaged).
D. Ades and A. Forge, Francis Bacon, London 1985, no. 23 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).

Exhibited: London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Francis Bacon, 1955, no. 10.
Paris, Galerie Maeght, Francis Bacon, 1966. This exhibition later travelled to Rome, Marlborough Galleria d'Arte; London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd. and Siegen, Oberes Schloss.
Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon: Paintings 1945-1982, 1983. This exhibition later travelled to Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art and Nagoya, Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery.
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Francis Bacon, Retrospektive, 1987, no. 6 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, 2003-04, no. 89 (illustrated in colour, p. 237). This exhibition later travelled to Basel, Fondation Beyeler.
London, Tate Britain, Francis Bacon, 2008-09 (illustrated in colour, p. 131). This exhibition later travelled to Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Notes: 'He managed in the course of 1953 to produce over twenty pictures in an annus mirabilis as inventive as it was prolific'
(M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich 2006, p. 33)

Situated between the seminal first series of Popes in 1953 and the landmark suite of Man in Blue paintings in 1954, Study for a Portrait represents a highly significant moment in Francis Bacon's oeuvre. Its vast scale makes it larger than most of the aforementioned, with Bacon making full use of the painting's extraordinary atmosphere to comment on the state of man in existentialist post-war Europe. Study for a Portrait is the last painting that Bacon created in his studio at the Royal College of Art, which Rodrigo Moynihan lent to him between 1951-53. It is imbued with all the pioneering works he created there including the Papal portraits and his first ever triptych portrait realised in 1953, Three Studies of the Human Head. All of these works were cast against the exquisite backdrop of his unique, ethereal liquid blue paint so expertly applied in Study for a Portrait. The painting has a distinguished and exclusive heritage of artistic ownership. Rodrigo Moynihan was the first owner and it later belonged to Louis Le Brocquy, the renowned Irish painter, who was the last to keep it before its acquisition by the present owner in 1984.

Enshrouded by a sea of midnight blue, Bacon artfully depicts a besuited man, seated on a gilded armchair evocative of a Papal throne. With his disdainful gaze cast through lightly rimmed, pince-nez glasses, the man imports an aura of authority, isolated and enclosed within the cage of Bacon's architectural spaceframe. His atmosphere is dark, rendered through washes of blue-black oil and turpentine saturated on canvas. The twilight of the painting is broken up by striations of pale parallel lines, evocative of the folds of rich drapery depicted in the artist's studies of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X. Highlights adorn the man's armchair with flashes of ochre tracing its contours like some golden throne for a ruling leader or the corporate seat of the trenchant capitalist. As David Sylvester has described, 'in these claustrophobic curtained settings, there loom up before us beings whose shadowy, ambiguous, unexpected presence takes command of any setting they survey, making real beings seem like shadows. They are as appalling as they are compelling, for these are creatures faced with their tragic destiny' (D. Sylvester, 'Francis Bacon', The British Pavilion: Exhibition of Works by Nicholson, Bacon, Freud, Venice XXVII Biennale, Venice 1954). In Study for a Portrait, Bacon imports a sense of the era's European post-war existentialism, cutting through the veneers of civilised society to distil the raw and visceral qualities of the human character onto canvas. As Michael Peppiatt has suggested, 'Bacon's genius was to have found a single image through which he could express the whole range of his most extreme emotions: fear, disdain, hate, lust, and even a fierce kind of love' (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich 2006, p. 26).

The early 1950s was a time of great interaction between the artist and his friends and peers Rodrigo Moynihan, Lucian Freud and David Sylvester. Indeed as David Sylvester recalls, 'in those early days Lucian clearly had a crush on Francis, as I did. (We both copied his uniform of a plain, dark grey, worsted double-breasted Saville Row suit, plain shirt, plain dark tie, brown suede shoes)' (D. Sylvester, 'All the Pulsations of a Person', The Independent, 24 October 1993). The shadows of all of these men, including the artist's caustic lover Peter Lacy can be found in the face of this extraordinary portrait. KA

Francis Bacon's Study for a Portrait, 1953
By Martin Harrison

'Study for a Portrait (1953) relates to the 'Pope' paintings that preceded it, and it is clear that it anticipates the Man in Blue series commenced in 1954, yet in some decisive respects it conforms with neither of these categories, nor with his other contemporary portraits of seated men, and stands as a unique work'
(M. Harrison, May 2011).

In evaluating Francis Bacon's entire oeuvre it is evident that between 1948 and 1963 he had a strong tendency to paint in series. These series - several of popes, heads, studies from the life-mask of William Blake, the seven Man in Blue paintings, the seven men in glasses - were sometimes identified as such and each painting numbered, while others constituted, in effect, a series, such as the three dog paintings dating from 1952. In some of these Bacon appears to have been exploring the cumulative impact of a group of paintings in which he made incremental shifts around the formal matrix, adjusting the mood, gestures and emotion of the 'sitter'. As Bacon explained to Ronald Alley, he saw the images 'in a shifting way, and almost in shifting sequences. The pictures are painted one after the other, the last one suggests the next.' 1 This explanation was appended to Alley's entry for Study for Portrait 1 (1953), the first painting in what became a notable series of eight papal portraits, which Bacon completed shortly before commencing the present painting.2

Conversely, other important paintings that Bacon made in this period appear to have been conceived as discrete statements: he may have regarded subjects such as Elephant Fording a River (1952), for example, as too specific to be susceptible to further development. Study for a Portrait (1953) relates to the 'Pope' paintings that preceded it, and it is clear that it anticipates the Man in Blue series commenced in 1954, yet in some decisive respects it conforms with neither of these categories, nor with his other contemporary portraits of seated men, and stands as a unique work.

Firstly, Study for a Portrait (1953) is the most rigorously grisaille among Bacon's paintings of the period. The ground is painted in a dark, stygian register, the deeply-saturated, inky, Prussian blue-black contrasting with the greys of the inner image. The monumental figure, bespectacled and wearing a dark suit and neatly starched (and somewhat constricting) white collar and purple tie, is pictured from a quite low viewpoint. Strictly speaking the 'spectacles' are pince-nez, and thus refer to the film still of the screaming nurse from the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin that Bacon had grafted onto his Pope figures since 1949; this is further indicated by the extra 'falling' lens that Bacon painted under the man's right eye. Frontal, imperious, head raised, he is among the most magisterially aloof of all Bacon's 'authority' figures, be they popes or 'businessmen'. The atmosphere of hieratic indomitability is emphasised by the formal armature - the inner 'spaceframe' that interrupts the ground of vertical 'shuttering' (and secondary traces of curtaining) is virtually symmetrical and eschews the playfully 'incorrect' diagonals of which Bacon was so fond. The confined space that the figure occupies is delineated in pale blue paint, and its darker, receding planes mark this as one of Bacon's most coolly dramatic arenas, the spatial recession and the unlined dark 'roof' intensifying the isolation of the resolutely impassive man.

'Frontal, imperious, head raised, he is among the most magisterially aloof of all Bacons authority figures, be they popes or businessmen' (M. Harrison on Study for Portrait, 1953).

'Study for a Portrait (1953) shares some fundamental characteristics with the paintings of Mark Rothko, conspicuously its soaring abstract planes and subtle chromatic juxtapositions'
(M. Harrison, May 2011).

'In these claustrophobic curtained settings, there loom up before us beings whose shadowy, ambiguous, unexpected presence takes command of any setting they survey, making real beings seem like shadows. They are as appalling as they are compelling, for these are creatures faced
with their tragic destiny'
(D. Sylvester, 'Francis Bacon', The British Pavilion: Exhibition of Works by Nicholson, Bacon, Freud, Venice XXVII Biennale, Venice 1954).
Comparisons have often been made between Giacometti and Bacon, both figurative modernists committed to finding new ways to capture appearance and to represent the human body in space; for example, the the open cage construction of Giacometti's early sculpture The Palace at 4 a.m. (1933; Museum of Modern Art, New York) has been posited as a source for Bacon's spaceframes. The strong influence exercised on Britain's 'Geometry of Fear' sculptors by the gaunt, attenuated figures Giacometti evolved about 1946 was manifested in London in several of the entries to the competition for a 'Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner' in 1953 - contemporaneously, that is, with Study for a Portrait (1953). Bacon professed indifference to Giacometti's sculpture but greatly admired his paintings and drawings and called him the 'greatest draughtsman of our time'.3 In their unflinching frontality, monochrome palette and the device of the rectangular inner frame, Giacometti's Portrait of Peter Watson (1953; Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Bacon's Study for a Portrait (1953) have marked affinities; Bacon was closely acquainted with the art patron and collector Peter Watson, and probably knew this painting. But Bacon must have been familiar with the portrait busts in spaceframes that Giacometti had been painting since 1947, and it is likely that his own portraits were informed by them.

The chair in Study for a Portrait (1953) establishes continuity with the eight Popes that Bacon had painted a few months earlier in that despite being stripped down to a simplified, geometrical shape (it is shorn of the finials, for example) its edges are picked out in running lines and dabs of gold paint that refer back to the papal throne. In fact this was the first painting in which the legs and arms of the chair were painted in this more elaborate manner, and the immediate pictorial inspiration for this treatment was probably the studded armband worn by the king in Velázquez's Philip IV of Spain (c. 1656; National Gallery, London). Similarly, the man's purple tie was doubtless, like the vestigial tassel at the top of the painting, an atavistic reference to a leading motif of his pope paintings: Bacon initially believed, erroneously - he had only seen Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X in black and white reproduction - that the Pope's surplice was purple. The man's mouth is neither open in anguish nor baring teeth, but firmly closed, self-contained. Georges Bataille's observations in 'La Bouche' seem especially relevant here: Bataille claimed that 'human life is concentrated bestially in the mouth',4 and he evoked 'the magisterial aspect of the face with its mouth closed, beautiful as a strong-box'.5

The fleshy pink lips of Bacon's protagonist are unusual, and if they do point to an individual characterization it is possible they refer to David Sylvester, to whom Bacon was very close at the time the painting was made. The artist and critic briefly shared accommodation in 9 Apollo Place at the end of 1953 and lived in the same house at 19 Cromwell Road at the beginning of 1954; Sylvester was lecturing at the Royal College of Art while Bacon was painting there, and also dealing privately in Bacon's paintings during this period. Furthermore, Study for Portrait I (1953) had begun as a portrait of Sylvester 'who sat about four times for it until it turned into a pope'.6 Peter Lacy was possibly in the mix, too, but given Bacon's habit of merging and transposing the representations of individuals the identity of the 'sitter' will probably have to remain conjectural. A more definite comparison with the prominent lips is provided by Velázquez's portraits of Philip IV of Spain; besides the reproductions that Bacon owned of Velázquez's various versions of this subject, the National Gallery, London, held originals of not only the c. 1656 head-and-shoulders portrait, referred to above, but also Philip IV in Brown and Silver, c. 1631-32.

Study for a Portrait (1953), together with the painting that immediately preceded it, Portrait of a Man (1953), in which this detail is more cursorily delineated, represents the first occasion on which Bacon painted a man with his legs crossing. This pose, which recurred frequently in his paintings subsequently, was habitually adopted by Bacon himself when seated. In Study for a Portrait (1953) the suited body is painted quite thinly, with a broad brush, and evidently very rapidly, its energy providing an agitated, abbreviated counterpoint to the calmness and composure of the figure's general demeanour. The high reflectance of the oil-rich pigments in this passage is in marked contrast to the dominant low key of the painting. There is also implied movement in the positioning of the body, which twists round in the diagonally-positioned chair to confront the viewer directly.

Study for a Portrait (1953) was, then, a quintessential Bacon painting of the kind in which the leading art writers of the day found such compelling evocations of the existential zeitgeist. Their critical reception, and the resonance of Bacon's powerful (and powerless) figures, is clearly demonstrated in contemporary descriptions of them. Robert Melville thought Bacon's paintings fulfilled Nietzsche's gloomy prophecy to epitomise 'an age in which the breakdown in values has been completed', and he described Bacon's isolated figures as 'incarcerated' in glass boxes.7 The American critic Sam Hunter commented that Bacon's art was 'thoroughly contemporary in its vitality' and that 'No one has interpreted the acute postwar moods more vividly.'8 David Sylvester might have been addressing Study for a Portrait (1953) specifically in his remarks on Bacon's 'Settings which are luxurious and simple: lush velvet curtains and a gilded armchair. Like prison cells for highborn traitors.' 9

As a consequence of his peremptory departure from his flat at 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, in about April 1951, following the death of his former nanny and companion Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon had no access to a regular studio until the Autumn of that year, when Rodrigo Moynihan lent him his painting studio at the Royal College of Art. Moynihan had been appointed Professor of Painting at the college in 1948, and he was central to the drastic overhaul of its aims and syllabus initiated by Robin Darwin; it was in this studio that Moynihan painted the striking Portrait Group (1950; Tate Britain), which featured nine members of the Royal College's teaching staff. Bacon had already spent some time at the college deputising for John Minton in Autumn 1950. Although Bacon refused to teach any classes on either occasion, Albert Herbert was one of several artists who recalled the students' intoxication with Bacon's 'emotional realism' as well as his unconstrained attitude towards making art. These events serve as a reminder that at this stage in his career Bacon's interactions with London's cultural scene and its artists (Isabel Lambert, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Victor Willing and Michael Andrews) were of reciprocal significance.

Paradoxically, considering he was working in a borrowed space, Bacon had embarked on a creatively extremely fertile period. He began a passionate if turbulent love affair with Peter Lacy in 1952, and although their relationship eventually became problematical at first it undoubtedly acted as a stimulus for new paintings. Bacon was able to use the studio at the Royal College for two years, and Study for a Portrait (1953) was in fact the last painting that he finished there, in about October 1953. He apparently made a gift of it to Moynihan, a gesture of thanks he would repeat in 1969 when he presented the college with Study for a Bullfight No. I (1969), having been loaned a studio there for seven months while repairs were carried out on his house at 7 Reece Mews.10 Study for a Portrait (1953) was subsequently acquired by Louis le Brocquy, and was thus also unique in having been owned by two of Bacon's distinguished artist peers and friends.

That such a major painting as Study for a Portrait (1953) has not featured more extensively in the Bacon bibliography can probably be accounted for by its having been in private hands throughout the fifty-eight years of its existence. Since it had been acquired by Rodrigo Moynihan shortly after it was completed it was never exhibited at the Hanover Gallery and its sole public appearance in the 1950s was in Bacon's first museum retrospective, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in January and February 1955. Thereafter, prior to its spectacular reappearance in the Tate centenary retrospective in 2008-09, it was exhibited only twice during the next thirty years, at Fondation Maeght in 1966 and in Japan in 1983; it was even absent from Lorenza Trucchi's comprehensive monograph of 1975. Interestingly, however, it had been published in 1954 by Wyndham Lewis in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, in which it was illustrated under the title 'Man in a Chair'. Lewis, who was responsible for some of the most perceptive writing on Bacon at this time, considered him 'the most astonishingly sinister artist in England, and one of the most original'.11 Although, in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, Lewis compares him with Goya and Bosch, an analogy Bacon would have firmly repudiated, he observed that 'the ethical and literary impulses throughout the work of Bacon constitute him an artist at the opposite pole to the pretentious blanks and voids of Réalités Nouvelles.'12 Lewis's remark raises the question of Bacon's dialogue with abstract expressionism, about which he was also notoriously dismissive. In spite of his public statements, however, Study for a Portrait (1953) shares some fundamental characteristics with the paintings of Mark Rothko, conspicuously its soaring 'abstract' planes and subtle chromatic juxtapositions.13

Bacon's individual idiom generally precluded all but the most superficial imitations, but Graham Sutherland's controversial Portrait of Sir Winston Churchill (1954), which Churchill abhorred and his wife eventually destroyed, resembled Study for a Portrait (1953) in too many respects for a connection between them to be mere coincidence: in this instance the younger artist appears to have influenced Sutherland. The blurred, ethereal rendition of the man's head in Study for a Portrait (1953) is redolent of a plaster cast, and curiously prefigures the five variations he began in 1955 based on a life-mask of William Blake. The rapt expression and raised head suggest the self-possessed figure may have been involved in activity such as listening to music, or was otherwise deep in thought. Its spectral quality is also reminiscent of an early daguerreotype, as though the man were a sitter in a photographic studio a century earlier. As usual, the greatest attention is reserved for the head, its poignant, urgent brushwork recalling Robert Melville's contemporary remark that Bacon was 'unquestionably, the greatest painter of flesh since Renoir'.14

Study for a Portrait (1953) takes its place, then, in a pantheon of arresting images of male angst and seclusion, extending a lineage that embraces such disparate images as Durer's engraving Melancholia (1514), Rubens's Daniel in the Lion's Den (c. 1615; National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Blake's Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall (c. 1819-20; Tate Britain), to which Bacon added a modern image of unsettling power and distinction.

Martin Harrison, May 2011
Martin Harrison is editor of the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné being published in 2013.

1. Sir John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, 1964, p. 72.

2. See: Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953, 2002.

3. David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, 2000, p. 200.

4. G. Bataille, 'La Bouche', Documents 2, 1930, pp. 299-300.

5. ibid.

6. Rothenstein and Alley, op cit, loc cit.

7. R. Melville, 'The Iconoclasm of Francis Bacon', World Review, January 1951, pp. 63-64.

8. S. Hunter, 'Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror', Magazine of Art, January 1952, pp. 11-15.

9. D. Sylvester, 'In Camera', Encounter, April 1957, pp. 22-24.

10. In 1975 Bacon exchanged this painting, at the college's request, for Study from the Human Body: Man Turning on the Light (1973-74). See: 'Study from the Human Body: Man Turning on the Light', An essay by Martin Harrison, Christie's, London, Post-war and Contemporary Art, Evening Sale, 14 October 2007, pp. 20-25.

11. W. Lewis, 'Round the London Art Galleries', The Listener, 21 September 1950, p. 368.

12. Wyndham Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts, 1954; in 'Explanatory Notes', (unnum.)

13. The broad, coloured planes in several of Rothko's paintings dating from 1948/49 are comparable with the ground of Bacon's Painting (1950; City of Leeds Art Gallery). Rothko stayed in London twice during a tour of Europe in 1950, although it is not know if he and Bacon met then; but Bacon would certainly have encountered Rothko's paintings by 1953.

14. Melville, op cit, p. 64.

Elsewhere at the auction, "Woman Smiling" (1958-59), a landmark portrait by Lucian Freud, sold for 4.7 million pounds.

The only single portrait of Suzy Boyt, the woman who was to mother four of the artist's children, was last sold at auction in 1973 when it realized 5,040 pounds.

Lucian Freud (b. 1922), Woman Smiling, oil on canvas, 26 x 20in. (66 x 51cm.). Painted in 1958-59. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2011

Provenance: Mrs. Ian Fleming, London.
Her sale, Christie's London, 13 July 1973, lot 324.
James Kirkman, London.
Michael B. Wells, Banbury.
Simon Sainsbury, London (and thence by descent to the present owner).

Literature: L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, no. 68 (illustrated in colour, p. 91).
R. Hughes, Lucian Freud Paintings, London 1993, no. 20 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1996-97 (illustrated, p. 16 and p. 104).
B. Bernard & D. Birdsall (ed.), Lucian Freud, London 1996, no. 93 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York 2007, no. 96 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Lucian Freud: L'Atelier, exh. cat., Paris, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 2010, no. 26 (illustrated in colour, p. 198).

Exhibited: London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Lucian Freud, 1963, no. 1 (illustrated, unpaged).
London, Hayward Gallery, Lucian Freud, 1974, no. 78 (illustrated, pp. 29 and 48). This exhibition later travelled to Bristol, Bristol City Art Gallery; Birmingham, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery and Leeds, Leeds City Museum and Art Gallery.
Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Lucian Freud Paintings, 1987-88, no. 20 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne; London, Hayward Gallery and Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie.
London, Tate Britain, Lucian Freud, 2002-03 no. 45 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Barcelona, Fundación la Caixa and Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art.

Notes: Please note this work has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition Lucian Freud Portraits that will take place at the National Portrait Gallery in London 9 February-27 May 2012 and at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2 July-28 October 2012


'The turning point in Freud's work with the human clay, when he moved decisively away from the Ingriste modulation of flatness by contour, came in 1958 and 1959 with Woman Smiling'
(R. Hughes, Lucian Freud: Paintings, exh. cat., London 1989, p. 18)

Once described by Robert Hughes as 'the turning point in Freud's work with the human clay' (R. Hughes, Lucian Freud Paintings, exh. cat. London, 1987, p. 18), Woman Smiling is a majestic, larger than life-size portrait of Lucian Freud's young lover and prize-winning Slade School of Fine Art pupil, Suzy Boyt. Painted in 1958-59, it represents the only existing single portrait of the woman who was to mother four of Freud's children from 1957 to 1969 (Ali, Rose, Isobel and Susie) and whose friendship with the artist was to last many decades; she reappears over twenty years later, side by side with her son Kai in Freud's Large Interior, W11 (After Watteau) (1981-1983). Woman Smiling marks a landmark departure from the artist's earlier portraits with their careful contours, flat surfaces and empirical precision, influenced by the Neo-classical painter Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres. Instead, in Woman Smiling, Freud begins to embrace a more gestural and painterly mark making offering comparison with the works of Franz Hals, Gustave Courbet and Théodore Géricault, as well as the emotive power of his contemporary Francis Bacon and the modern master, Pablo Picasso. Replacing his fine sable brush with a coarse hog's hair paintbrush, Freud sculpts the paint into a new surface that perfectly expresses the light and modulation of his subject's face, the rich impasto and expressionist brushstrokes building a unique human physicality. This technique has been a celebrated hallmark of the artist's oeuvre ever since. Woman Smiling is a tender and captivating portrait of a young woman caught in a moment of happy reflection. Smiling softly with her lips slightly parted and her eyes bashfully averting the artist's gaze, she appears enamoured, radiant with a bright blush illuminating her cheekbones. Executed early in their relationship, this deeply affectionate painting, perfectly captures the intimacy and attraction that existed between the two lovers. As the artist once said, 'Painters who use life itself as their subject-matter do so in order to translate life into art almost literally, as it were. The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for' (L. Freud, 'Some Thoughts on Painting' Encounter, July 1954 quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, London 2002, p. 26).

Woman Smiling was formerly owned by two distinguished collectors and early patrons of Lucian Freud, Lady Rothermere and Simon Sainsbury. Lady Rothermere, who married Ian Fleming, the author of James Bond in 1952, introduced Freud to one of the great loves of his life, Caroline Blackwood in the early 1950s. She began to collect works by Freud in the late 1940s and amassed an exceptional group from this time as well as becoming the subject of two celebrated portraits in the early 1950s. She acquired Woman Smiling directly from the artist around the time of its execution and kept it until 1973 when it was sold at Christie's in London, alongside other works from her collection. Simon Sainsbury became one of Freud's greatest patrons and upon his death bequeathed three important works from across Freud's career to the Tate, London including Girl with a Kitten (1947) and The Painter's Mother (1972). One of the greatest collections of twentieth century British art ever assembled, he too was the subject of a much-celebrated portrait, Red Haired Man with Glasses realised from 1987-88.

In Woman Smiling, Freud fully embraces the possibilities of his medium replacing the thin and pliant brushstrokes of his sable brush for a coarse, hog-hair brush pushing the rich paint in such a way as to define the physiognomy and the muscles that constitute the contours of the face. In this respect, Freud was integrating his earlier influence of Ingres with the lively strokes of painters such as Franz Hals, Gustave Courbet and Théodore Géricault. Courbet and Géricault, two great exponents of modern realism, deeply eschewed the theatricality and classicism of the French Academy in favour of the depiction of physical reality, regardless of how blemished or imperfect. This essence of the real, fallible, living person was to find its way into Freud's method and most effectively in Woman Smiling. As Robert Hughes so eloquently describes, '[in Woman Smiling] the marks are brusquer; they find their equivalent for stringy hair and blotched complexion with improvised force, and their light from the white ground shows through. Now the small forms beneath the skin, the small bunches of muscle and little tossing wedges and crescents claim Freud's attention. In their folding, puckering and slippage there is more protuberance and pressure, linked to greater agility and freedom of drawing. The shadow under the left cheekbone, prolonged in a line to the raised corner of the mouth and joined by the serpentine shadow of the buccal muscles, is disturbing almost like a scar: it perverts the wholeness of the face, while giving it a pleated solidity' (op. cit., p. 18). This pronounced effect and the newly found plasticity of Freud's composition was to be carried over into his portraits and nude figures of the 1960s such as Pregnant Girl (1960-61) depicting Bernardine Coverley lying heavy, asleep against the worn upholstery of an armchair. The contrast of her skin and dark curl of her hair are made up of confident brushstrokes, the whole painting conveying a sense of light and atmosphere. This method, which was initiated with Woman Smiling, has become a hallmark of Freud's practice ever since.

Freud first seriously embarked upon painting in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In his paintings from this period, particularly those depicting his first wife Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, Freud's attraction to the modern classicism of Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres is particularly apparent. In Girl with Roses (1947-48), Kitty appears fully illuminated, the flat shapes and smooth contours of her face and body carefully attended to by the artist. Each precise detail, from the unravelled caning of the chair to the small intricate light reflections in her large hazel eyes, is incorporated into the painting. Once described as the 'Ingres of Existentialism' (Ibid., p. 16), Freud's interest in the artist is perceptible in Girl in a Green Dress (1954) painted of his second wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood a few years later. Here Freud retains the same careful attention to detail but begins to add the effects of chiaroscuro, of light and shade, to his rendering of the figure.

'Around 1956, Freud exchanged his finely pointed sable brushes for stiffer hogshair and began to loosen his style, gradually amplifying his touch. Woman Smiling (1958-1959) marked a transformation in his painting style and can be seen as a landmark work'
(Tate Britain exhibition, Lucian Freud, June-September 2002).

During these early years Freud encountered Weeping Woman (1937), a work by fellow artist Pablo Picasso depicting his lover Dora Maar. Roland Penrose, a friend of Freud's had commissioned the artist to travel with the painting from London to Brighton to be showcased in an exhibition. Freud installed the painting on a seat opposite him in his railway carriage and studied it closely for the entire journey. Here was a painting, deeply transfigured without any striking likeness to the sitter, yet it projected a concrete sense of the woman's aura. As the artist said, 'I was so amazed that the bright sunlight in no way made it any worse or more garish or weaker or more painty. It seemed it was as powerful as possible' (Lucian Freud quoted in W. Feaver, 'Beyond Feeling', Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p. 13). For Freud, this encounter with Picasso, a few years before the creation of Woman Smiling laid early ground from which to reconsider his own rigid and precise portraiture. By the middle of the 1950s, Freud himself professed, 'I got very tired with the way that I was working: I felt that it was a limited and limiting vehicle for me, and I also felt that my drawing and my making artefacts - graphic artefacts - stopped me from freeing myself' (Ibid.)

At this time, Freud's friendship with his contemporary, the painter Francis Bacon was especially close. The mid 1950s had been an equally important moment for Bacon with the emergence of his landmark first Papal portraits and the Men in Blue series and the two artists were engaged in intense discussion about how to depict physical presence. Bacon was devoted to the process of transmitting the raw, visceral reality of the figure to canvas, what he called 'the pulsations of a person' (Francis Bacon interview with David Sylvester quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1987, p. 174). As Bacon went on to elaborate, in a portrait 'you have to record the face. But with their face you have to try and trap the energy that emanates from them' (Ibid.). This practice, particularly manifest in Bacon's paintings depicting the screaming images of Pope Innocent X, helped to inform Freud's novel approach to Woman Smiling. As Freud said of his friend, 'his work impressed me, his personality affected me. He talked a great deal about the paint itself, carrying the form and imbuing the paint with this sort of life. He talked about packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me the idea of paint having that power' (Lucian Freud quoted in W. Feaver, 'Beyond Feeling', Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p. 13).

In Woman Smiling, Freud adapts this approach to the canvas with a new and constructive energy, creating a sense of 'living volume' (L. Gowing quoted in Lucian Freud, London 1982, p. 118). The wedges of colour and form radiate with Suzy Boyt's inner spirit, apparently fulfilled and smiling with contentment. As Freud described, the difference between the photograph and the painted portrait is 'the degree to which feelings can enter the transaction from both sides. Photography can do this to a tiny extent, painting to an unlimited degree' (Lucian Freud, quoted in R. Hughes, op. cit., p. 18). It is this intimate relationship between painter and sitter that Freud so artfully transmits through his painting.

'Painters who use life itself as their subject-matter do so in order to translate life into art almost literally, as it were. The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for'
(L. Freud, 'Some Thoughts on Painting', Encounter, July 1954 quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, London 2002, p. 26).

The transition to this method however was not an easy one. As Freud once admitted, 'I remember everything [about the period] because it was done with great difficulty' (op. cit., p. 132). It was partly this challenge that forced such a radical change in the artist's practice. Freud recognised the limitations of his existing approach to painting, explaining that 'by working in the way I did, it didn't evolve. Small brushes, fine canvas, used to drive me more and more agitated. I felt I wanted to free myself from this way of working. Also people said that they liked it, which I thought was really suspect' (Lucian Freud quoted in W. Feaver, op. cit., p. 19). He gave up the process of sitting in front of an easel in favour of standing, a ritual that allowed him greater movement and gestural freedom, resulting in a more painterly approach that he sustains to this day. However he could not altogether renounce the detailed practice of his earlier oeuvre. 'Sometimes when I've been staring too hard' he confessed 'I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye' (Lucian Freud quoted in W. Feaver, op. cit., p.28). More than anything, Freud had a determined curiosity and ambition to change his painting from the middle of the 1950s and this came to fruition with Woman Smiling. As the artist once said, 'I felt more discontented than daring. It wasn't that I was abandoning something dear to me: it was more that I wanted to develop something unknown to me' (Lucian Freud quoted in W. Feaver, op. cit., p. 20).

Suzy Boyt reappears again in Freud's oeuvre over twenty years after Woman Smiling, to feature in his large group work, Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) (1981-1983). Seated on the bed in a staging of Jean-Antonie Watteau's masterpiece Pierrot Content (1812), Freud assembles individually from left to right, the painter Celia Paul, his daughter Bella Freud holding a mandolin, Suzy Boyt's son Kai as Pierrot, and Suzy Boyt herself. In front of the adults, lying supine, is the sister of Ali Boyt's girlfriend, a young child called Star. As Freud has often emphasised, 'my work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings' (Lucian Freud quoted in W. Feaver, op. cit., p.35). In this respect, the artist's sitters are most often his close friends or family. Indeed as the artist once said, 'who closer than my children?' (Ibid., p. 20).

Freud's children by Suzy Boyt have been the subjects of many of the artist's works. The paintings investigating their characters and characteristics have included in addition to Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait) (1965) depicting Rose and Ali, Large Interior Paddington (1968-9) depicting Isobel affectionately nicknamed Ib, Portrait of Ali (1974), Ib (1977-78), Portrait of Rose (1978), Ib (1983-84), Head of Ib (1988), Susie (1988), Susie (1988-89), Susie (1989), Drawing of Ib (c. 1989), Rose (1990), Ib (1990), Kai (1991-92), Ib and her Husband (1992) and Ib Reading (1997). Ali, Rose, Ib and Susie Boyt were all named as he painted them unlike the many other elusive titles employed elsewhere in the artist's oeuvre. As William Feaver has explained, 'to name them was to acknowledge them; to paint them was to get to know them after missing the childhood years' (Ibid., p. 20). Freud once rationalised, 'if you're not there when they are in the nest you can be more there later' (Ibid., p. 20). For Rose Boyt, leaving home at the age of fifteen to live in a flat near her father's studio in West London, was the beginning of a new relationship with her father, 'he'd come round, and I'd make him a fried egg on toast and a cup of tea, and we used to just talk; I suppose that's when I started to know him as more of an adult' (Rose Boyt interview with Michelle Green in People, vol. 34 no. 12, 24 September 1990). The relationship between Freud and Suzy Boyt was equally unconventional, Suzy taking her young brood away with her alone on a series of travels aboard European cargo ships lasting eighteen months. Later they spent five months exploring Trinidad and the West Indies together, all without the company of the children's father. As Rose suggests 'both of my parents had very traditional families and maybe they wanted to be free of those kinds of constraints' (Ibid.). Nevertheless, the repeat appearance of Suzy Boyt and her children by Freud, as well as her son Kai, over the span of the artist's long career pays testimony to the deep bond he continues to share with the family.

Woman Smiling marks a decisive watershed in the practice and process of Lucian Freud's painting. Executed in 1958-59, it offers a technical departure, engaging in the emotive strength of his contemporaries Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso as well as the liberated brushstrokes of his forbearer Franz Hals, and the modern realism of Courbet and Géricault. In embracing these approaches to using paint, Freud was engaging with a new kind of energy and ability to engage the viewer on a personal level. When looking at Woman Smiling one is capable of understanding the depth of feeling that existed between the two lovers, through the simple yet revealing smile and tempered expression of the young Suzy Boyt. It is this ability to capture the essence of the sitter that has established Freud as one of the greatest European chroniclers of the human experience of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. KA

'[In Woman Smiling] the marks are brusquer; they find their equivalent for stringy hair and blotched complexion with improvised force, and their light from the white ground shows through. Now the small forms beneath the skin, the small bunches of muscle and little tossing wedges and crescents claim Freud's attention. In their folding, puckering and slippage there is more protuberance and pressure, linked to greater agility and freedom of drawing. The shadow under the left cheekbone, prolonged in a line to the raised corner of the mouth and joined by the serpentine shadow of the buccal muscles, is disturbing almost like a scar: it perverts the wholeness of the face, while giving it a pleated solidity'
(R. Hughes, Lucian Freud: Paintings, London 1989, p. 18).

A large scale portrait of Chairman Mao by Andy Warhol dated 1973 fetched 7.0 million, in line with expectations.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Mao, signed and dated 'Andy Warhol 73' (on the overlap), acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 50 x 42in. (127 x 106.7cm.). Executed in 1973. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2011

Provenance: Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.
Knoedler and Company, New York.
Todd Brassner, New York.
Irving Galleries Fine Arts, Milwaukee.
Dr. and Mrs. Donald M. Levy, Milwaukee.
Armand P. Bartos, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Literature: Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1989 (installation view illustrated, p. 332).
Andy Warhol: Paintings 1960-1986, exh. cat., Luzern, Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1995 (installation view illustrated, p. 63).
Andy Warhol: A Factory, exh. cat., Bilbao, Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, 1999-2000 (installation view illustrated, p. 399).
S. King-Nero and N. Printz (eds.), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Sculptures, 1970-1974, vol. 03, New York 2010, pp. 167, 176 and 181, no. 2300 (illustrated in colour, p. 205 and installation view p. 180 and p. 254).

Exhibited: Paris, Musée Galliera, Andy Warhol: Mao, 1974.
Bogota, Museo de Arte Moderna, Color as Language, 1975. This exhibition later travelled to Sao Paulo, Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo.
Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum, Warhol-Beuys-Polke, 1987, no. 15 (illustrated). This exhibition later travelled to Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum.
Hong Kong, Christie's, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, Mao, 2008, no. 3 (illustrated in colour).

Notes: 'If Warhol can be regarded as an artist of strategy, his choice of Mao as a subject - as the ultimate star - was brilliant. The image of Mao taken from the portrait photograph reproduced in the Chairman's so-called Little Red Book, is probably the one recognised by more of the earth's population than any other - a ready-made icon representing absolute political and cultural power. In Warhol's hands, this image could be considered ominously and universally threatening, or a parody or both.'
(K. McShine, Andy Warhol Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 19).

'Oh, That's a good idea. But I was just reading in Life magazine that the most famous person in the world today is Chairman Mao. Shouldn't it be the most famous person, Bruno?'
(Andy Warhol quoted in B. Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, New York 1990)

Now seeming to stand like prophetic symbols of the end of the Cold War and of the strange marriage of Communism, Consumerism and Western Fashion that so distinguishes 21st Century China, Andy Warhol's portraits of Chairman Mao rank among the most powerful and enduring of all the artist's images. Part icon, part portrait, part abstract expressionist painting, part Communist propaganda infused with disco kitsch, these extraordinary portraits mark both a comparatively rare Warholian incursion into the realm of political iconography and his very first post-modernist experiments in painting.

Staring incongruously through a thick, sumptuous, and textural play of apparent abstraction rendered by broad, vibrantly coloured brushstrokes of acra violet, napthtol crimson and dioxazine purple, the painting presents its famous sober-faced icon as if lost or dissolving into a glamorised swathe of synthetic colour. A comparatively large portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong, it belongs to the series of 50 x 42 inch portraits of the Chinese leader that Warhol made in the first months of 1973. It is also one of eleven portraits made in this format that Warhol chose to represent this series at the landmark exhibition of Mao paintings he presented at the Musée Galliera in Paris in May 1974, where it was displayed in a dramatic row of vibrant and differently coloured Mao images hung on a wall plastered with 'Mao' wallpaper.

Comprising solely of highly painterly images of the same icon-like portrait of Mao Zedong executed in a range of different and deliberately garish colours, styles and sizes, this Mao exhibition in Paris marked, in many respects, Warhol's first major statement in painting of the 1970s after what had been a long hiatus begun in the late 1960s. Now widely recognised as one of the defining moments in the artist's career, it was this exhibition and the Mao series in particular that seemed to dramatically reaffirm Warhol's commitment to the art of painting and which re-announced him on the international stage as an artist with his finger still very much on the pulse of contemporary culture.

Warhol had begun to paint Mao in the spring of 1972 in the immediate aftermath of Richard Nixon's historic visit to China. Largely preoccupied with his films, the running of his new magazine Interview and the establishment of what he described as 'business art' throughout the late 1960s and early '70s Warhol had, initially, to be encouraged back to painting by his European dealer Bruno Bischofberger and his assistant Fred Hughes. As Bob Colacello remembered, the Mao paintings 'began with an idea from Bruno Bischofberger...Bruno's idea was that Andy should paint the most important figure of the twentieth century', that he should not just 'go back to painting' but begin a whole new body of work, distinct from portraiture with an ambitious theme. (B. Colacello Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, New York, 1990, p. 110-111) Bischofberger suggested Albert Einstein, but Warhol is said to have replied, 'Oh, That's a good idea. But I was just reading in Life magazine that the most famous person in the world today is Chairman Mao. Shouldn't it be the most famous person, Bruno?' (Andy Warhol quoted in ibid).

Mao was not merely the most famous person on the planet but a figure whose image had almost certainly been reproduced more times than any other. In addition to this, in the wake of Nixon's visit, Warhol had also become intrigued by the idea of a figure such as Mao being 'in fashion'. 'Since fashion is art now and Chinese is in fashion', Warhol reasoned, to do 'Mao would be really nutty not to believe in it, it'd just be fashion but the same portrait you can buy in the poster store.' (Andy Warhol, quoted in David Bourdon, Warhol, London, 1995, p. 317) As a result of this thinking, Warhol's original idea with his proposed Mao portraits, was not to 'do anything', just to 'print up' the image (that one can buy in the poster store) 'on canvas.' (Ibid, p. 317) But, he soon afterwards became fascinated by both the visual and conceptual possibilities offered by the clash of Communist propaganda imagery and Western fashion kitsch. In a progressive sequence of images of Mao taken from the American edition of the 'little red book', he then increasingly glammed up this iconic image, seemingly translating this powerful, mysterious, and to American eyes, strangely alien and threatening image of Communist propaganda into a glamourised 1970s pop idol reminiscent of his own celebrity portraits. The iconoclasm of this approach and the apparent clashing of two very different cultures within one single image - something typical of so much of Warhol's art in general - was such that it ultimately opened up a new world of painterly possibility that he was to pursue throughout much of the 1970s from the ensuing fetishism of the Hammer and Sickles and the Guns, to the playful pseudo-abstraction of his Shadows and Camouflage paintings.

Between May 1972 and June 1973 Warhol produced five series of paintings of Mao, a portfolio of prints, a series of drawings and a design for wallpaper all based on the colour photograph of the Chinese leader that appeared as the frontispiece of the American edition of his "Little Red Book" - The Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. Warhol had established the format and style for this series in a sequence of eleven 2m-high works that he made in the spring of 1972 soon after the Nixon visit. Towards the end of the year he then made four giant paintings of Mao - the largest single-image works of his career - that stood at over four meters high and which would, he hoped approximate the vast (though actually different) single image of Mao that still hangs today from Tiananmen Gate in Beijing. These four giant works, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nationalgalerie, Berlin and a private collection, together with the eleven early Maos from 1972 all, in the main, followed fairly closely the format of the original source photograph, maintaining its grey-blue background and using naturalistic skin colouring. In the four giant Mao paintings there are traces in some, of a deliberately humorous and iconoclastic cosmetic enhancement of the Chairman's face, using colours that hint at rouge and lipstick. But this apparent 'slapping up' or 'camping up' of the famous Chinese icon is slight in comparison with some of the extremely painterly disco-glamour enhancements Warhol made in the further series of Maos made in 1973.

'I've been reading so much about China. They're so nutty. They don't believe in creativity,' Warhol said at this time, 'The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong. It's great. It looks like a silkscreen'
(Andy Warhol quoted in D. Bourdon, Warhol, London, 1995, p. 317).

In contrast to the fifteen Mao paintings of 1972, Warhol deliberately made his 1973 Maos all unique and clearly individual works, distinguishing each of them from the others by using a wide range of different colours and a demonstrably textural and highly painterly style that brilliantly and humorously evoked a sense of painterliness or what the French call 'peinture'. 'I've been reading so much about China. They're so nutty. They don't believe in creativity,' Warhol said at this time, 'The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong. It's great. It looks like a silkscreen.' (Andy Warhol quoted in D. Bourdon, op cit, p. 317) Exploring a paradoxical sense of unity and diversity in these works by colouring each uniform image differently, Warhol has, in this series, also deliberately chosen to employ a demonstrably exaggerated play of brushwork. As a rare video of him painting a giant Mao reveals, Warhol began the Mao paintings by liberally splashing his colours onto the raw canvas in a loose, gestural and semi-abstract manner. It was then over this almost-free-style painted surface that the imposing image of Mao's face was then silkscreened.

Warhol's painterly style, was a deliberately sumptuous and mock-gestural approach that he once described as his 'just be sloppy and fast' method of painting. His aim he said was to emulate in paint the way that Julia Child - presenter of the TV programme The French Chef - cooks. Here, in this work, this seemingly nonchalant but also clever post-modernist take on the lofty tradition of 'peinture', has been deliberately applied to the Mao image to humorously assert the supposed genius and individuality of the artist's hand and project a sense of the uniqueness and colourful desirability of the art object onto the work. These, highly marketable qualities, so admired by the Western art world with its cult of the individual genius, are all, of course, ones that stand at complete odds with the Mao's subject-matter and the solemn, penetrative gaze of the authoritarian icon of uniformity and Collectivism that they depict.

Warhol's presentation of his Maos in rows at the Musée Galliera exhibition - all different, yet all the same - reinforced this contrast, seemingly transforming the instigator of China's Cultural Revolution into not just another cosmetic icon of decadent Western fashion but clearly also into a collectible - a fashionable and desirable art-market commodity. The use of Chairman Mao wallpaper as a setting seemed also to reaffirm this transformation of the Chinese leader into a tame bourgeois fashion motif. Warhol himself, seemed keen to make this point at the show by reportedly responding to any French critic who asked him why he had chosen Mao as a subject by saying that he had always been interested in fashion. And, indeed, it was this aspect of these Maos, along with their apparently deliberate play on the demystifying aura of painterly technique - that was picked up after the Musée Galliera show by most the French critics. Bernard Borgeaud for example, saw the exhibition as a kind of post-modernist critique of the whole concept of the cult of the individual genius and the peinture-peinture or 'painterly painting' tradition, which was then enjoying a brief resurgence in the post-minimalist era of the early 1970s. For Bergeaud these paintings represented a brilliant Warholian fusion of Chinese collectivism and the individualism of American DIY. Warhol here, in his portraits of Mao, he said, 'liquidates the myth of the creative artist and transgresses doubts about art. Do it yourself, like in China where one might expect the fracture of a master, one finds instead a facile execution deprived of craft, which places the myth of the unique, creative genius in questionhe does not shrink from striking the fatal blow to that galloping new mode which embraces the return to painterly painting, to craft, to finish.' (B. Bougeraud, Pariscope, 27 February 1974, p. 92)

It is this unique Warholian fusion of East and West in these works - the apparently wry subsuming of two seemingly opposed political ideologies to the playful and superficial worlds of Pop and fashion, that endows them with the prophetic qualities they have today. Seeming to anticipate the Coca-Cola-drinking images of Mao that so distinguished Chinese Pop art of the 1990s along with much of the stereotypical images of modern China today, Warhol's radiant disco-coloured Maos now serve as powerful icons of today's brave new world. RB

Overall the auction raised 78.8 million pounds. Rival auction house Sotheby's holds its equivalent sale on Wednesday during a key few weeks for the art market, which has rebounded strongly from the slump of 2009. (Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

Abstract Expressionist New York: Masterpieces from The Museum of Modern Art @ Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)

Mark Rothko, No. 5/No. 22. 1950 (dated on reverse 1949). Oil on canvas, 9’ 9” x 8’ 11 1/8”. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging Services.

TORONTO.- Jackson Pollock. Mark Rothko. Robert Motherwell. Joan Mitchell. Franz Kline. Lee Krasner. Willem de Kooning. These are just a few of the legendary 20th-century artists whose artwork is now on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in an unprecedented international exclusive. Abstract Expressionist New York: Masterpieces from The Museum of Modern Art, on view until September 4, features more than 100 works from the unparalleled collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by the legendary artists whose drips, splatters, and fields of incredible colour catapulted New York to the centre of the international art world in the 1950s and changed the course of art history forever.

“MoMA’s collection of Abstract Expressionist works is not only unparalleled, it is defining. To be the only international art museum to be given the opportunity to share the highlights of this collection is a tremendous honour,” says Matthew Teitelbaum, the AGO’s Michael and Sonja Koerner Director and CEO. “From the wild abandon of Pollock to the distilled emotion of Rothko, this exhibition comprises a group of artists who responded to the seismic shifts of the 20th century with revolutionary innovation and visionary insight, changing the way we view art and, in turn, changing our world. We are so pleased that our visitors will be able to take in these essential and inspiring masterworks.”

“We are delighted to be able to share this exhibition with the Art Gallery of Ontario. The Museum of Modern Art has long and deep ties with the AGO, and I, of course, have a very personal one, and I can think of no better exhibition than Abstract Expressionist New York to reaffirm our admiration for what the AGO has achieved over the years, and especially since its reopening in 2008,” says Glenn Lowry, Director of MoMA. “These masterworks reflect MoMA’s preeminent collection of Abstract Expressionism, and include not only the most important and well-known works, but also key works by lesser-known artists such as Norman Lewis and William Baziotes. Taken together they provide an extraordinary overview of Abstract Expressionism in New York and a unique insight into one of the most important American art movements of the 20th century.”

Abstract Expressionist New York is drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection of works by the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, from its beginnings in the 1940s through its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibition features works across a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawings, and photographs, including 12 era-defining works by Pollock, and multiple works by Rothko, Motherwell, de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, David Smith, and others.

Jackson Pollock (American, 1912 – 1956), Number 1A, 1948. 1948. Oil and enamel paint on canvas, 68” x 8’ 8” (172.7 x 264.2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase© 2010 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging Services

Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia. 1904-1948) , Garden in Sochi, c. 1943. Oil on canvas, 31 x 39" (78.7 x 99 cm). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. © 2011 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York .

 

Willem de Kooning (American, born the Netherlands. 1904-1997), 1948. Enamel and oil on canvas, 42 5/8 x 56 1/8" (108.3 x 142.5 cm). Purchase. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

 

 

Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968), Concetto spaziale, Teatrino.

Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968), Concetto spaziale, Teatrino.

stagnola e cartoncino giallo; firmato e numerato 5/50; Estimate 4,000—6,000 EUR. Lot Sold 10,625 EUR

Eseguito nel 1966

Opera registrata presso la Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, con il n. 618/20
L'opera è accompagnata da certificato su fotografia rilasciato dalla Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano

PROVENANCE: Milano, Libreria Internazionale
Ivi acquistato nel 1968

NOTE: Siigned and numbered 5/50, tinfoil and yellow cardboard

L'opera fa parte di una cartella curata da Sergio Tosi, stampatore a Milano, contenente quattro découpages in alluminio di Lucio Fontana numerati e firmati a mano dall'artista, e due poesie di Salvatore Quasimodo.

Sotheby's. Modern & Contemporary Ar t25 May 2011, Milan. www.sothebys.com

Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968), Battaglia.

Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968), Battaglia. Photo Sotheby's

ceramica policroma smaltata, firmato, siglato e datato 47 sul retro; cm 22x29x15. Estimate 15,000—20,000 EUR. Lot Sold 27,150 EUR

Opera registrata presso la Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, con il n. 3761/1

PROVENANCE: Dono dell'artista alla famiglia dell'attuale proprietario nel 1960 circa

NOTE: signed, signed with monogram and dated 47 on the reverse, polychrome glazed ceramic

"Io sono uno scultore e non un ceramista. Non ho mai girato al tornio un piatto nè dipinto un vaso. Ho in uggia merletti e sfumature. [...] I critici dicevano ceramica. Io dicevo scultura." Lucio Fontana

Sotheby's. Modern & Contemporary Ar t25 May 2011, Milan. www.sothebys.com

Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968), Concetto spaziale

Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968), Concetto spaziale. Photo Sotheby's

matita e strappi su carta, firmato; cm 34,8x26,1. Estimate 10,000—15,000 EUR. Lot Sold 36,750 EUR

Eseguito nel 1960-1965

Opera registrata presso la Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, con il n. 4025/1
L'opera è accompagnata da certificato su fotografia rilasciato dalla Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano

PROVENANCE; Collezione Topazia Alliata, Roma
Ivi acquistato dalla famiglia dell'attuale proprietario nel 1974

NOTE: signed, pencil and tears on paper. Executed in 1960-1965

Sotheby's. Modern & Contemporary Ar t25 May 2011, Milan. www.sothebys.com