Busto femminile

After six years in Argentina - where his father, a tomb sculptor, was co-owner of the company Fontana y Scarabelli at Rosario, Santa Fe - Fontana settled in Milan in 1927, graduating from the Accademia di Brera in 1930. Thereafter he sought out his own personal path, an alternative to the fascination exerted by the masterly virtuosisty of Wildt's sculpture. His first show at the Galleria del Milione (December 1930) included the famous - but now lost - "Uomo Nero"; a tar-covered gesso, this is a work crtitics have always seen as a peremptory assertion of Fontana's mature artistic personality. Thereafter the artist worked on a series of busts in coloured terracotta, which were axhibited in a second one-man show at the same gallery at the end of 1931. In the first monograph on the artist, written by Edoardo Persico in 1936, the Neapolitan critic speaks of the young sculptor as "searching out a European style", also observing that these female portraits have "a vivacity of expression thet is held in check solely by the 'programmatic' nature of the colours used: black and silver, balck and gold". This early combination of modelled form and painting would in the years to come prove to be particularly fruitful for the artist. Fontana himself would refer to this in a 1939 article in "Tempo", where in discussing his work in ceramic, he points out: "From the earliest to the latest works, my handling of plastic form has never been dissociated from considerations of colour. My sculpture has always been polychromatic. i would colour gesso, colour terracotta. Colour and form were indissoluble, arisinf from the selfsame necessity". In this work, bought at the Galleria del Milione in 1932, gold is used to colour a face whose features are just hinted at, whilst the hair is rendered by a few raw incisions in the terracotta. Both of these features are a good example of Fontana's "rather ingenuous and arbitrary primitivism". However, this archaicism is instinctive and expressionist in inspiration - that is, rather different from the archaeological striving that was widespread in the work of the early thirties. [Mariella Milan]