Anthony White’s monograph on Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana is a long overdue intervention in the literature on Italian and South American twentieth-century abstraction. Correcting for a longstanding lacuna in the scholarship, White departs from the tendency on the part of what scant accounts do exist to focus only on Fontana’s post-World War II production, the punctures (Buchi) and slits (Attesse) he famously made up to his death in 1968. Looking at the entirety of the artist’s development, from his early years of training at the Brera Academy in Milan during the years in which Italian Fascism was fomenting—under which artistic pedagogy and image production were rigorously controlled by the cultural arm of the planning state—through to his relative success at Martha Jackson Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East side in 1961, White’s account of Fontana’s arc is invaluable.

White’s choice of the seeming methodological traditionalism of the monograph yields unexpected results in decentering the equally traditional Paris-centrism (with brief detours to Moscow, Berlin, and later, New York) of what passes for Modernism in the discipline of art history. Above all, it provides a rich overview of the conflicting aesthetic practices that influenced Fontana outside of the usual centers of cultural hegemony. Yet this strength is undermined by the book’s stated argument: Fontana’s oeuvre is to be understood as the Benjaminian “dialectical image.” White wants to say that Fontana’s engagement with the art object operates in dialectical relation to the commodity. However, he does not discuss or define the commodity, much less historicize or situate it, as though both the artwork and the commodity were ahistorical, as though the dialectical image were not a function of its historicity. How, for instance, is “the commodity” (much less the dialectical relationship between art and commodity) reconstructed in an aggressive way in Italy’s late yet accelerated modernization between 1947 and 1965, after the economic miracle made possible by the Marshall Plan? Asking after the specificity of objects (high and low, commodity and luxury fetish) in Italy first under the Fascist planning state and then, in the mid-century, under a rapidly shifting social and cultural landscape responsive to an accelerated market in which a new culture of industrial design responded to the economic miracle would surely have much to offer in thinking about Fontana’s “dialectical image.”

The very point of Benjamin’s dialectical image is that it engages its moment with the thickness of form; it can never be an imposed formula. A mobilization of the notion of the dialectical image would demand of White, in turn, an analysis of what “going to New York” would mean other than fame understood in the Warholian, in the Pollock-on-the-cover-of-Time magazine way, i.e., from a U.S. metric. Yet the opening narrative frame for White is that Martha Jackson show of 1961, in other words, from the vantage point of the United States as postwar cultural and economic victor. In White’s words, Fontana’s trip to New York marked the apotheosis of this dialectical image: “Sixty two, riding the wave of fame in Europe due to a startling new series of monochromes that were cut open with a knife, the artist finally realized this ambition” (1).

One issue among many in the imposition of hegemonic cultural terms—the “kitsch” in the subtitle first and foremost among them—is that, again, one loses any sense of specificity. Kitsch, which is understood to function in general within the history of modernism as the dialectical counterpoint to the art object, is derived of course from Clement Greenberg’s 1937 essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch.” This binary, in turn, is mediated for White by Yve-Alain Bois who used the term while introducing Fontana’s work to a broader Anglophone audience in an article that ran in Art in America in 1989 (Yve-Alain Bois, “Fontana’s Base Materialism,” Art in America 77, no.4 (1989): 238–48). If for Greenberg kitsch was the received, warmed-over culture that operated as a form of propaganda for hegemony by preying on the sentiments of an exhausted proletariat, art was to march on the vanguard, keeping the viewer awake and alert to revolutionary struggle. Bois, based on the work’s seeming visual and stylistic resemblance to luxury commodities on the one hand, yet marked by an avant-garde gesture like a cut on the other, maintains that Fontana remained stuck on the delicate seam between the two. What is puzzling about this system (the binary that informs the idea of kitsch) is Bois’s, and later White’s, acknowledgement that “kitsch did not apply as Fontana neither rejected kitsch nor elevated it to the level of pop art. Fontana was so close to kitsch that ‘he worked in its thrall’” (12). Bois himself acknowledged to have not been a part of the historical and geopolitical matrix from which the artwork emerged. As a result, White ends up not looking as closely as he might have at Fontana’s work in relation to its own horizon. Somewhat undermining his own superior contribution, White explicitly states in the first chapter that his own book is an expansion of this short article. “Bois’s interpretation is central to the germination of this book’s argument” (12).

Yet White’s research does have more to offer. His skill at analysis is as strong as his scholarly discussion of the little-known artistic models available to Fontana in Italy and Argentina at the turn of the last century. In these passages, White suggests that the larger arc of Fontana’s project has nothing to do with the commodity spectacle fetish but is really about resolving the contradiction between the visuality of bas-relief sculpture, a problem already informing the neo-classicism of the Novecento movement, and sculptural volume. This formal problem informed Fontana’s emerging autonomy under the Fascist classicism of his teacher Adolfo Wildt at Brera, and Fontana’s own preoccupation with the post-sculptural real: the dissolution of the base/frame and the incorporation of the phenomenological experience of space and light. Similarly, White discusses the way that Fontana defied Arturo Martini’s reactionary hybrid primitive-classicism point for point in the use of non-local and non-traditional chromatic choices. Fontana’s way of working through and negating available sculptural idioms demonstrates the way that he was carefully processing a rich synthesis of twentieth-century sculpture, while refusing to borrow, tout court, any previously constituted practices. But it also suggests something else, namely that the narrative of the end of “the medium” associated with Donald Judd’s and Frank Stella’s challenge to the base and the frame, the threshold between real and virtual space, was broken before 1966, and far from New York. (Incidentally, White does not appear to be particularly interested in Fontana’s use of colored lights two decades before Dan Flavin.)

Respectively titled “The Artificial Figure” and “Between Utopia and Kitsch,” chapters 2 and 3 carefully reconstruct the transformations internal to sculptural practices in Italian Modernism. But by the time readers get to the postwar era, it becomes clear, through both the artist’s practice and his writing, that Fontana’s choices reverberate in a way responsive to shifting object (commodity) experience during the Marshall Plan era (1947–62) as much as to available models of sculptural practice he saw around him. This is the moment where Fontana stopped working with sculpture and turned to, for him, a new medium. He had, after all, declared painting (not his medium to begin) impossible after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, traumatic points at the opening of the Cold War that informed the Marshall Plan, just as he began to paint in 1949. (Now that is a dialectical image.) He also drafted a manifesto addressing what later came to be known as “new media” which he associated with that ur-American object, the television (Lucio Fontana, “Television Manifesto” (1952); reprinted in Germano Celant, ed., The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, New York: Guggenheim, 1995). This is a full decade before Nam Jun Paik. He seems to have been keenly aware of Americanization at a structural level. White cites Fontana saying, symptomatically, “English is very easy! With dollars in my hand everyone understands me!” (4) Fontana said this in New York in 1961, a comment as much about coming to America as America’s having come to Italy fifteen years prior, a presence Fontana repeatedly acknowledged in his journal Il Gesto. (Fontana released the first issue in June, 1955. It was predominantly preoccupied with the question of the possibility of an expressive painterly gesture in the atomic age, and against the horizon of the Cold War.)

Similarly, the formalist conclusions White reaches are not carried to their full potential to intervene in the usual story of the twentieth century, for instance, Fontana’s consistent elaboration of violence against form and the relationship this might have to upheavals in the field of everyday life, as well as his having inaugurated a new formal idiom during, of all decades, that of American-sponsored reconstruction. It is as though decades of the artist’s work was produced in a vacuum tending toward Madison Avenue rather than rigorous formal innovation or historically specific dialectical engagement.