Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana
Born	(1899-02-19)February 19, 1899 Rosario Santa Fe, Argentina
Died	September 7, 1968(1968-09-07) (aged 69) Varese, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Field	Painting, Sculpture
Training	Brera Academy, Milan
Influenced by	spatialism (spaziale)

Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth.^[1] He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera.

Early life[link]

Born in Rosario, province of Santa Fe, Argentina of Italian parents, he is the son of Luigi Fontana.^[2][3] Fontana spent the first years of his life in Italy and came back to Argentina in 1905, where he stayed until 1922, working as a sculptor along with his father, and then on his own. Already in 1926, he participated in the first exhibition of Nexus, a group of young Argentinean artists working in Rosario de Santa Fé.^[4]

Work[link]

In 1927 Fontana returned to Italy and studied under the sculptor Adolfo Wildt,^[5] at Accademia di Brera from 1928 to 1930. It was there where he presented his first exhibition in 1930, organized by the Milano art gallery Il Milione. During the following decade he journeyed Italy and France, working with abstract and expressionist painters. In 1935 he joined the association Abstraction-Création in Paris and from 1936 to 1949 made expressionnist sculptures in ceramic and bronze. In 1939, he joined the Corrente, a Milan group of expressionist artists.^[6]

In 1940 he returned to Argentina. In Buenos Aires (1946) he founded the Altamira academy together with some of his students, and made public the White Manifesto, where it is stated that "Matter, colour and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art". In the text, which Fontana did not sign but to which he actively contributed, he began to formulate the theories that he was to expand as Spazialismo, or Spatialism, in five manifestos from 1947 to 1952.^[7] Upon his return from Argentina in 1947, he supported, along with writers and philosophers, the first manifesto of spatialism (Spazialismo)**. Fontana had found his studio and works completely destroyed in the Allied bombings of Milan,^[8] but soon also resumed his ceramics works in Albisola.

Following his return to Italy in 1948 Fontana exhibited his first Ambiente spaziale a luce nera (Spatial Environment) (1949) at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, a temporary installation consisting of a giant amoeba-like shape suspended in the void in a darkened room and lit by neon light. From 1949 on he started the so-called Spatial Concept or slash series, consisting in holes or slashes on the surface of monochrome paintings, drawing a sign of what he named "an art for the Space Age". He devised the generic title Concetto spaziale (‘spatial concept’) for these works and used it for almost all his later paintings. These can be divided into broad categories: the Buchi (‘holes’), beginning in 1949, and the Tagli (‘slashes’), which he instituted in the mid-1950s.^[9]

Fontana often lined the reverse of his canvases with black gauze so that the darkness would shimmer behind the open cuts and create a mysterious sense of illusion and depth.^[10] He then created an elaborate neon ceiling called "Luce spaziale" in 1951 for the Triennale in Milan.^[11][12] In his important series of Concetto spaziale, La Fine di Dio (1963-64), Fontana uses the egg shape. With his Pietre (stones) series, begun in 1952, Fontana fused the sculptural with painting by encrusting the surfaces of his canvases with heavy impasto and colored glass. In his Buchi (holes) cycle, begun in 1949-50, he punctured the surface of his canvases, breaking the membrane of two-dimensionality in order to highlight the space behind the picture.^[13] From 1958 he purified his paintings by creating matte, monochrome surfaces, thus focusing the viewer’s attention on the slices that rend the skin of the canvas.^[14] In 1959 Fontana exhibited cut-off paintings with multiple combinable elements (he named the sets quanta), and began Nature, a series of sculptures made by cutting a gash across a sphere of terracotta clay, which he subsequently cast in bronze.^[15]

Fontana engaged in many collaborative projects with the most important architects of the day, in particular with Luciano Baldessari, who shared and supported his research for Spatial Light – Structure in Neon (1951) at the 9th Triennale and, among other things, commissioned him to design the ceiling of the cinema in the Sidercomit Pavilion at the 21st Milan Fair in 1953.^[16]

Around 1960, Fontana began to reinvent the cuts and punctures that had characterized his highly personal style up to that point, covering canvases with layers of thick oil paint applied by hand and brush and using a scalpel or Stanley knife to create great fissures in their surface. In 1961, following an invitation to participate along with artists Jean Dubuffet, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, and others in an exhibition of contemporary painting entitled "Art and Contemplation", held at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, he created a series of 22 works dedicated to the lagoon city. He manipulated the paint with his fingers and various instruments to make furrows, sometimes including scattered fragments of Murano glass.^[17] Fontana was subsequently invited by Michel Tapié to exhibit the works at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. As a consequence of his first visit to New York in 1961, he created a series of metal works, done between 1961 and 1965.^[18] The works consisted of large sheets of shiny and scratched copper, pierced and gouged, cut through by dramatic vertical gestures that recall the force of New York construction and the metal and glass of the buildings.^[19]

Among Fontana’s last works are a series of Teatrini (‘little theatres’), in which he returned to an essentially flat idiom by using backcloths enclosed within wings resembling a frame; the reference to theatre emphasizes the act of looking, while in the foreground a series of irregular spheres or oscillating, wavy silhouettes creates a lively shadow play.^[20] Another work from that time, Trinità (Trinity) (1966), consists of three large white canvases punctuated by lines of holes, embraced in a theatrical setting made from ultramarine plastic sheets vaguely resembling wings.^[21]

In the last years of his career, Fontana became increasingly interested in the staging of his work in the many exhibitions that honored him worldwide, as well as in the idea of purity achieved in his last white canvases. These concerns were prominent at the 1966 Venice Biennale, for which he designed the environment for his work.^[22] At Documenta IV in Kassel in 1968, he positioned a large, revelatory slash as the centre of a totally white room (Ambiente spaziale bianco).^[23]

Shortly before his death he was present at the "Destruction Art, Destroy to Create" demonstration at the Finch College Museum of New York. Then he left his home in Milano and went to Comabbio (in the province of Varese, Italy), his family's mother town, where he died in 1968.

Fontana created a prolific amount of graphic work with abstract motifs as well as figures, little-known in the art world, at the same time as he was producing his abstract perforated works.^[24] He was also the sculptor of the bust of Ovidio Lagos, founder of the La Capital newspaper, in Carrara marble.

Exhibitions[link]

Fontana had his first solo exhibitions at Galleria del Milione, Milan, in 1931. In 1961, Michel Tapié organized his first show in the U.S., an exhibition of the Venice series, at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York. His first solo exhibition at an American museum was held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1966.^[25] He participated in the Bienal de São Paulo and in numerous exhibitions around the world. Among others, major retrospectives have been organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2006), Hayward Gallery, London (1999), Fondazione Lucio Fontana (1999), and the Centre Georges Pompidou (1987). Since 1930 Fontana's work had been exhibited regularly at the Venice Biennale, and he represented Argentina various times; he was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale of 1966.

Collections[link]

Today Fontana's works can be found in the permanent collections of more than one hundred museums around the world. In particular, examples from the Pietre series are housed in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, and the van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.^[26] Fontana's jewelry is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.^[27]

Art market[link]

A rare, large crimson work with a single slash, which Fontana dedicated to his wife and which has always been known as the Teresita, fetched a record £6.7m ($11.6m) at Christie’s London in 2008.^[28] Even more popular are the Fontana's oval canvases. Sotheby’s sold a work titled Concetto spaziale, la fine di dio (1963) for £10.32m in 2008.^[29] Part of Fontana's Venice circle, Festival on the Grand Canal was sold at Christie’s in New York for $7m in 2008.

Gallery[link]

• Photograph of Lucio Fontana by Ugo Mulas.jpg

  Photograph of Lucio Fontana by Ugo Mulas

• 'Concept Spatiale', 1959 painting by --Lucio Fontana--, 100 x 125 cm.jpg

  'Concept Spatiale', 1959 painting by Lucio Fontana, 100 x 125 cm.

• 'Spatial Concept (Concetto spaziale) No. 18 and Nature (Natura) No. 28, bronze sculptures by Lucio Fontana, 1959-60, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.JPG

  Spatial Concept (Concetto spaziale) No. 18 and Nature (Natura) No. 28, bronze sculptures by Lucio Fontana, 1959-60, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

• 'Concetto Spaziale', waterpaint and oil on canvas by Lucio Fontana, 1964, 55 x 46 cm.jpg

  'Concetto Spaziale', waterpaint and oil on canvas by Lucio Fontana, 1964, 55 x 46 cm.

See also[link]

• Michel Tapié

Source[link]

• This article draws from the corresponding article in the Spanish Wikipedia.
  • http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=282

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lucio Fontana

• Fondazione Lucio Fontana

Erminio Blotta and his family, c.1925.

Erminio Blotta (November 8, 1892 – January 23, 1976) was an Argentine self-taught sculptor of Italian origin.

Biography[link]

He was born in Morano Calabro (province of Cosenza, Calabria). His birth certificate records his name as Erminio Antonio Blotta Mainieri, but his Argentine identity papers have Carmen Erminio Blotta instead.

A bust of Giuseppe Garibaldi by E. Blotta, at the Hospital Italiano of Rosario.

Blotta's family came to his adoptive country when he was only a child, at the beginning of 1894, during a major wave of Italian immigration to Argentina. They settled in Rosario, Santa Fe Province, about 280 km northwest of Buenos Aires. Two of his father's brothers were already living in Argentina, in the town which would then be called Lucio V. López, 40 km north-west of Rosario. Blotta was the eldest of nine siblings.

He was an apprentice worker in the Ferrocarril Central Argentino railway company, where he developed his basic sculpting skills by modelling figurines with clay. He then worked in a medal workshop with Marcos Vanzo, and modelled plaques and funeral portraits. In 1909 he studied with sculptor José Nardi.

At only 17 he travelled to Montevideo, Uruguay, where he stayed for one year (1909–1910) and then another year in Buenos Aires (1911–1912). He returned to Rosario, and with the assistance of his friends and the financial support of an amateur art fan he opened an exhibition gallery and presented his first bass-reliefs in bronze. He lived for four years in conventillos (cheap pensions), until in 1915 he managed to get a piece of land and set up a workshop, where several of his friends lived, at the expense of surgeon Artemio Zeno. He came in contact with many other poor intellectuals and artists (poets, painters, sculptors) and with the anarchist movement.

Blindness[link]

In November 1917, while he was finishing his monument to Juan Bautista Alberdi, a chip of marble (which was being worked by his assistant) broke Blotta's glasses, and glass splinters wounded both his eyes. He spent several months completely deprived of sight, until he was operated by surgeon Dr. Pedro Lagleyze. He only recovered the sight of his left eye. Blotta would later thank the physician with a sculpture.

Dr. Lagleyze sent him to recover at a friend's house in Villeta, 30 km south of Asunción, Paraguay. Blotta did not find the person he was looking for, but instead met the father of Paraguayan artist Modesto Delgado Rodas, who took him in as a guest. In Villeta, Blotta also met Carmen de Jesús Prieto Ruiz, a young schoolteacher and a few months later, on September 4, 1918, he married her.

During his stay, he collected aboriginal Tupi-Guarani art, and created some works that can be found still in several cities of Paraguay. Years later he was declared Honorary Citizen of Paraguay. In 1970, six years before his death, Blotta confessed in a newspaper that his most fervent wish would be to die a Paraguayan.

Family[link]

Blotta moved back to Rosario in mid-1920, after learning that his study had been robbed. His first son, Herminio, was born at that time. He moved several times until finally settling in a house on 3160 Marcos Paz St. (in Barrio Echesortu). He had five other children, the last of whom (a daughter) died as a baby. His residence gradually became the home of his Paraguayan in-laws.

Artistic work[link]

A bust of Dante Alighieri by E. Blotta, on Oroño Boulevard, Rosario.

Blotta was the literary commentator of the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación, for which he wrote regularly, between the 1910s and the 1930s. His contributions were signed as "Herminio Blotta".

In his youth Blotta worked on marble and stone, besides clay, but in the mid-1920s he started producing less marble busts and tends to produce more works in clay, then cast in bronze. There are records (especially from La Capital newspaper) of more than 200 works of this type.

Blotta also worked as a Message Therapist in the Ports Direction of Rosario, and collaborated as a plaster artisan in the scale model of the thalweg of the Paraná River. Additionally, he earned a living with funeral art, producing (for example) several hundreds of bronze objects for headstones, often with his colleague Pedro Cresta (1912–1970).

In his old age the Municipality of Rosario granted him a special pension for his artistic labors. Erminio Blotta died surrounded by his family in Rosario, in 1976, at the age of 83.

Legacy[link]

Works by Erminio Blotta can be found in the Argentine provinces of Santa Fe, Buenos Aires, Mendoza, Córdoba, Tucumán, Entre Ríos (specifically in Concepción del Uruguay), and Chaco (in the capital city, Resistencia), as well as in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and in the Mefalsim kibbutz in Israel.

In 1978 a minor street in Rosario was renamed Escultor Blotta (Sculptor Blotta). It is a one-block passage formerly known as Pasaje Mercado, located 250 m from Blotta's monument to J. B. Alberdi.

References[link]

• Erminio Blotta (in the Spanish Wikipedia)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Erminio Blotta

Paul Schimmel
Born	Hartford, Connecticut
Nationality	American
Fields	Chemistry

Paul Schimmel (born 1940) is an American biophysical chemist and translational medicine pioneer.

Life[link]

Paul Schimmel was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He is currently Ernest and Jean Hahn Professor at The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at The Scripps Research Institute. He formerly was the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the Department of Biology at MIT. Schimmel is author or co-author of more than 450 scientific papers and of a widely used three volume textbook on biophysical chemistry.^[1] For his achievements and discoveries in scientific research in the biological sciences, Schimmel has been elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute of Medicine. Additional honors, among others, related to research and educational achievements include the American Chemical Society’s Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry, the Stein and Moore Award (the highest honor of The Protein Society), the Biophysical Society’s Emily M. Gray Award (co-recipient) for significant contributions to education in biophysics, the Chinese Biopharmaceutical Society’s Brilliant Achievement Award, the Perlman Award (Lecture) of the American Chemical Society, and the Nucleic Acids Award (Lecture) of the Biochemical Society and Royal Society of Chemistry, UK. He has been active in many scientific and academic organizations and committees, including service as Chairman of the Division of Biological Chemistry of the American Chemical Society and as an editorial board member of ten different scientific journals.

For his entire career Schimmel’s research focused on a group of universal enzymes known as aminoacyl tRNA synthetases. The synthetases are believed by many to be among the first enzymes to arise on this planet in the early stages of the evolution of life. These enzymes translate the genetic information in all living organisms. In each cell, there is a separate tRNA synthetase for each of the 20 amino acids. In translating, or interpreting, the genetic material, they catalyze reactions whereby each amino acid is matched with a nucleotide triplet embedded in its cognate tRNA. In this way, the tRNA synthetases establish the rules of the genetic code and, because of this role, tRNA synthetases are essential for all forms of life. Because of decades of research of Schimmel and others, this group of enzymes is now understood to have additional novel functions, and to have deep-rooted connections to human diseases.

Schimmel and his wife Cleo have 2 daughters and 8 grandchildren.

Principal Scientific Contributions[link]

Correcting Mistranslation of Genetic Material[link]

Schimmel’s laboratory discovered a universal mechanism for correcting errors in the translation (mistranslation) of the genetic material. This mechanism is regarded as one of the most fundamental in biology. Specifically, they discovered an activity in aminoacyl tRNA synthetases that removes an amino acid that has been charged to the wrong tRNA.^[2][3] He later discovered the novel module in synthetases that encodes this deacylase activity.^[4][5] In mammalian cell-based experiments, and in experiments in mice with collaborators at The Jackson Laboratories, they showed that defects in this translational error-correction mechanism gives rise to profound pathologies, including neurodegeneration.^[6][7] These error correction activities were shown to be intimately associated with the beginnings of living organisms.^[8][9][10]

Discovery of “The Second Genetic Code”[link]

Schimmel’s laboratory discovered what has been referred to as a “second genetic code” that relates specific atomic determinants in small RNA substrates to specific aminoacylation.^{[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]} This RNA code is considered to give critical insights into the development of the modern genetic code and protein synthesis.

Discovery of the Modular Design of Aminoacyl tRNA Synthetases[link]

Schimmel and coworkers were among the first to use genetic methods to establish the modular design of proteins in general and of aminoacyl tRNA synthetases in particular.^{[19][20][21][22]}

Development of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) for Genomics[link]

While Schimmel’s research program has largely focused on aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, in a separate line of research published back in 1983, Schimmel developed the concept of what are now known as ESTs (expressed sequence tags) and the strategy of shotgun sequencing, approaches that several years later were adopted for the human genome project.^[23] ESTs provide a way to identify all genes that are expressed in a specific tissue, such as muscle, among others. Nature magazine listed Schimmel’s work on ESTs as one of the four key developments that launched the human genome project.^[24]

Expansion of the Functional Genome[link]

The Schimmel laboratory discovered how tRNA synthetases undergo functional “metamorphosis” in human cells to acquire novel activities in signal transduction pathways ranging from the inflammatory response to angiogenesis.^{[25][26][27][28][29]} This work led to efforts to commercialize applications of human synthetases to treat diseases.

Education[link]

A.B. (1962) Ohio Wesleyan University
Medical Student, (1962–63) Tufts University School of Medicine
Ph. D. (1966) MIT, Department of Biology, mentor: Gordon Hammes

Academic and Research Appointments[link]

• Postdoctoral Scientist, Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, 1966–67; mentor: Paul Flory.
• Assistant Professor of Biology and Chemistry, MIT, 1967-71.
• Associate Professor of Biology and Chemistry, MIT, 1971-76.
• Visiting Scientist, Department of Biological Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1975-76.
• Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, MIT, 1976-1992.
• John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, MIT, 1992- 97.
• Professor and Member, The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, 1997-2000.
• Ernest and Jean Hahn Professor, The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, 2001-
• Visiting Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2008-

Editorial Boards[link]

Paul Schimmel has served on the editorial boards of the following scientific journals:

• Accounts of Chemical Research, 1988-94.
• Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics 1976-80.
• Biochemistry, 1988-2007.
• Biopolymers, 1979-1988.
• European Journal of Biochemistry, 1991-1996.
• International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, 1983- 1989.
• Journal of Biological Chemistry, 1977-82.
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1993-1999.
• Protein Science, 1991-1994.
• Nucleic Acids Research, 1977-80.
• Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 1984-2010.

Translational Medicine Contributions[link]

With his longstanding interest in the applications of basic biomedical research to human health, Schimmel holds more than 25 patents and is a cofounder or founding director of several companies. These companies have created FDA-approved medicines and are developing new medicines to treat patients for infections, mental disorders, cancers, diabetes, and inflammatory conditions, and have provided over a thousand jobs in the US and China. Seven of these companies became publicly traded and three were acquired by other companies. Examples of these companies are:

• RepliGen Corporation ^[30]
• Alkermes ^[31]
• Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc.^[32]
• Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc.^[33]
• Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc.^[34]
• Sirtris, a GSK Company ^[35]
• aTyr Pharma ^[36]

In recognition of the broad impact of his translational medicine activities, he received the Chinese Biopharmaceutical Association’s Brilliant Achievement Award in 2006.^[37] The European-based Science Alliance and Technopolicy Network named Schimmel "Most Entrepreneurial Scientist of USA" in 2007 at a ceremony in Washington DC.^[38]

External links[link]

• Official website

References[link]