Category: art

For a split second after @octavio-world brought this image of the back of a little Lucio Fontana that sold this week in Milan into my tumblr timeline, I had to process the ghost of the World Trade Center. Then I marveled that I’d never seen the back of a Fontana before, and did they really all look like this?

Fontana, whose whole spatial concept for his Concetto Spaziale was the piercing and slashing of the picture plane, then carefully bound it back up with black tape?

Yes, yes he did. This remarkably similar little Fontana was found at the flea market on 6th Avenue in 2001, was cleaned up, consigned at Christie’s, and then withdrawn after being declared by the Fondazione Lucio Fontana to be authentic but “irremediably damaged.”

When Wright20 sold it in a design auction in 2014 [for $50,000, a tenth of what the Milan painting just sold for], they noted this alleged but unspecified damage was not apparent to the conservators or auctioneers.

But in addition to some discloration and unevenness to the field of color on the front, the back shows this black tape has been frayed, torn, or itself punctured anew. Was this black fabric strip, ostensibly meant to ensure a featureless backdrop to the slashed void, and to prevent further tearing, also actually holding the work together conceptually?

A third Fontana makes me wonder if what’s going on in the back has been more important than we realize. This Concetto Spaziale on paper, with a series of orderly stabs contained in a roughly outlined egg shape, sold at Rago Arts in September 2024.

Comparing the recto and verso, and the direction of the tears and paper residue, it looks to me like Fontana stabbed it in the back. We may have been looking at the wrong side of these works the whole time.

Martin Herbert on Marion Baruch:

In her studio, many dozens of these works, constituting acres of potential wall space, were folded into little boxes, closely stacked: the canny stratagems of an artist without much money, physical mobility, arm strength, storage space, or external expectations of what she should be doing, but with an inextinguishable urge to make art. I thought about that, afterward, whenever I saw a show where an artist had evidently been handed a large production budget and acquiesced to making more of the stuff that demonstrably sold.

The particular work he’s describing is made from the textile offcut/void/remains Italian fashion designers. Which is fascinating enough, but he also considers other artists not producing on an assembly line: Paul Chan, Duchamp, Bruce Connor, Sarah Rapson, Sara Deraedt. No one writes better than Martin Herbert about artists thwarting the art world in the name of art.

“You made me do this.” Martin Herbert [moussemagazine.it via geraldine]

What an extraordinary piece of research, and an equally amazing finding.

For at least a century, an 18th century portrait in the V&A of a free, Black Jamaican man named Francis Williams was considered to be a racist caricature of Williams cosplaying as a gentleman. But after a team of experts and conservators imaged and studied the painting anew, Fara Dabhoiwala discovered Williams was demonstrating not only his rare mastery of then-new Newtonian astrophysics. He was documenting his observations and calculations of the first documented return in 1758 of Halley’s Comet, at a moment when he was one of the only people alive who’d known Newton and Halley at the time they’d first published their theories.

If this feels like a spoiler, you can still read Dabhoiwala’s account in the LRB to see how he pieced Williams’ history and the painting’s history together from the most hostile sources and the barest archival traces.

A Man of Parts and Learning: Francis Williams Gets His Due [lrb.co.uk via @caleb.crain.bsky.social]