MILAN.- The Fondazione Lucio Fontana announced the beginning of a collaboration with Electa Publisher and the release of the first two titles in the Pesci rossi series of critical essays (available in bookstores from November 11, texts in Italian and English): Lucio Fontana. Mecenate Collezionista Militante (Lucio Fontana. Patron, Collector, Militant) by Gaspare Luigi Marcone, and Lucio Fontana in Argentina. Dagli esordi al Manifiesto Blanco (Lucio Fontana in Argentina. From the early years to the Manifiesto Blanco) by Daniela Alejandra Sbaraglia. This synergy has given rise to a special series of publications, curated by the Artistic Committee of the Foundation (Silvia Ardemagni, Luca Massimo Barbero, Maria Villa) aimed at promoting new studies and lesser-known aspects of the artist’s many-sided career.

Marcone begins his research by examining the extraordinary and almost unknown group of artworks by other artists collected by Fontana, now part of the Foundation’s heritage and recently catalogued in greater detail. Through this meticulous analysis, Fontana emerges not only as a collector in the traditional sense but also as a patron and militant whose mythos, built over the years, is here given tangible form for the first time—offering a valuable missing piece in the vast body of Fontana bibliography. Sbaraglia, for her part, draws on years of in-depth research—further enriched by recent Foundation initiatives—to offer readers a tool rich in documentation and previously unknown works. Her volume is essential for reassessing Fontana’s Argentine period and understanding the cultural context in which his work evolved.

Thanks to this perspective, it is finally possible to view Fontana’s entire artistic journey as a coherent whole—one that, on the far side of the world, gave birth to his most radical and avant-garde impulses. Different yet complementary, both volumes contribute to the goal the Foundation set for this editorial project with Electa: to emphasize the vitality and contemporary relevance of Lucio Fontana by creating a platform for new in-depth studies, carefully aligned with the Foundation’s broader mission.

Lucio Fontana. Mecenate Collezionista Militante by Gaspare Luigi Marcone focuses on his aesthetic-conceptual choices, exploring the role he played as a financial and critical supporter as well as a patron of certain developments and key figures in 20th-century art.

The complex and synchronic study begins symbolically with the exhibition 18 opere della collezione privata di Lucio Fontana / 18 opere della collezione privata di Bruno Munari, held at the Galleria Blu in Milan in May 1957. On this occasion, among the works collected by Fontana, there already appear artists destined to become significant figures in art history, such as Alberto Burri, Enrico Baj, Yves Klein, Osvaldo Licini and Emilio Scanavino. As Guido Ballo observed in his review of the exhibition, “Fontana favours imaginative young artists, inclined toward pictorial or spatial invention, with a more adventurous sense of fantasy.” His interest in experimental artists also characterised the following years. In 1959 he bought one of the first Linee (1959) by Piero Manzoni and in 1965 the sculpture Tondo e Rettangolo (1964) by Luciano Fabro from his first solo exhibition. Fontana’s also expressed his support through critical texts, statements and participation in publications and exhibition projects. In the last decade of his life, he was recognised as a sort of “spiritual and conceptual father” by the new generations of artists, in both Italy and abroad, including Gruppo T in Italy and Zero in Germany. His influence grew together with the establishment of his presence in the leading contemporary art venues, from the Venice Biennale to Documenta in Kassel, and European and international museums.

Lucio Fontana in Argentina. Dagli esordi al Manifiesto Blanco by Daniela Alejandra Sbaraglia analyses the two decades of his career in Argentina, his birthplace. This period, long neglected or considered marginal in his development, has been the subject of new studies thanks to recent insights and discoveries that have broadened our understanding of it and enabled us to reconsider its value.

Fontana discovered his vocation for the visual arts in the 1920s, training in his father’s sculpture studio and engaging in his first formal experiments. In an artistic context pervaded by tensions between tradition and innovation, he came into contact with a group of intellectuals in Rosario, including the painter Julio Vanzo, the critic Juan Zocchi and the poet Fausto Hernandez. With them he developed the “new sensibility” through exhibitions, publications and lectures, such as the one that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti delivered in Rosario in 1926.

In the 1930s, while living in Italy, Fontana maintained active ties with Argentina, taking part in competitions and exhibitions, including those devoted to Argentine artists in Italy and Italian artists in Buenos Aires (1936 and 1938).

Finally, in the 1940s, spent between Rosario and Buenos Aires, he established himself as one of the most important artists in the country, winning national awards and extending his research into form, colour and space. During the decade he engaged continuously in experiments into sculpture, seeking new developments in ceramics and devising innovative “baroque” gestures imprinted in plaster, as well as drawings with avant-garde lines (his first “conceptos espaciales”), as well as sculptures of an ephemeral or architectural nature. In contact with his students and stimulated by the avant-gardes Arte Concreto and Madí, he developed the theories that would inspire the Manifiesto Blanco (1946), the founding act of Spazialismo.