Professor Butter Beard and Lucio Fontana’s “Concetto Spaziale”
I'm watchin' sis go pitterpat.
Said, “I can do that,
I can do that.”
Knew ev'ry step right off the bat.
Said, “I can do that,
I can do that.”
- Lyrics by Wayne Cilento from “A Chorus Line”
My naive twenty-five year old self: While viewing Mark Rothko’s painted crimson squares – “I can do that!” While viewing Piet Mondrian’s subway map of intersecting lines of color in space – “I can do that!” And, while viewing Jackson Pollock’s textural splattering of paint on a wall-size canvas – “Oh dear Buddha, I can surely do that!”
But the epitome of my naïveté surfaced when I first saw Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases while working as part of the exhibition marketing team at Christie’s. I was fresh out of graduate school steeping in my own belief that the only works that really mattered were created by Greeks and Romans centuries in the past. With just one “hit,” or a couple of stiff martinis, I could easily grab a box cutter and dive deep into a blank canvas and then sell it for a couple million.
I honestly could slap my younger face.
By ripping through his canvases, Lucio Fontana changed what a painting could be, and the course of art history. Fontana was born to Italian immigrants in Argentina in 1899 and schooled in Italy from 1906 until 1922, when he came home and worked as an aide to and collaborator with his father, who sculpted funerary monuments. Fontana would remain fundamentally a sculptor, taking to canvas only at the age of fifty. He moved back to Italy in 1927 and studied with a prominent sculptor in Milan and produced a range of statuary and reliefs, often in showy materials such as gold leaf and colored mosaic, displaying a lifelong decorative bent.
Fontana moved back to Argentina when World War II broke out. He became a teacher and founding member of the Altamira Cultural Center. As the professor of sculpting, he helped to promote the school’s philosophy that in light of recent scientific discoveries, a new art was necessary to reflect the modern world. He encouraged his students to embrace new conceptual approaches to creating art, urging them to forsake painting in favor of making innovative art, for example projecting light. By formulating his ideas on artistic research, he defined a new kind of art and rejected old traditions that laid out the foundations of the movement he started in 1946, which became known as “Spatialism.”
The main idea behind Spatialism was to create a form of art that would make a synthesis of sound, color, movement and space in one single artwork. As he explained in Manifesto Blanco, his ultimate desire was to create a unity of art and space. “Colour, an element of space; sound, an element of time; and movement, unfolding in space and time,” Fontana wrote. He became obsessed with the conceptual dimension of the art and perceived it as an instrument for research, rather than a mere matter of aesthetic.
As he put it, “I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.” His new works were painted in matte, bright secondary colors or, most effectively, in warm whites, and inflicted with one or more slits, usually vertical. He would do the cuts while the paint was wet, then mold their shapes by hand when it was dry and apply black gauze behind the spaces to yield an impression of measureless depth. The fissures feel precisely placed, compositionally just right, which can’t have been easy to achieve. “You have no idea how much stuff I throw away,” Fontana once said.
Fontana was subsequently invited by Michel Tapié to exhibit his 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. The works consisted of large sheets of shiny and scratched copper, pierced and gouged, cut through by dramatic vertical gestures that reviewers wrote recalled the force of New York construction and the metal and glass of the buildings.
“He made abstraction look dangerous,” wrote The New York Times in their review.
“Fontana radically expanded the picture plane into a third dimension. His groundbreaking approach represents a seismic moment for 20th-century art, transforming paintings, sculptures, and objects into new concepts of space and experimental environments,” said Max Hollein, Director of The Met.
If only I could do that! Now I limit that entitled reaction to when I read baking cookbooks, page-by-page, like a mystery novel. My latest journey was spent with Jürgen Krauss while perusing his exquisite “The German Baking Book.” I studied his “Sunken Apple Cake” and thought immediately of Fontana and how I could adapt Jürgen’s equation into something special celebrating autumn and the bounty of apples and pumpkins appearing at the farmer’s markets. I actually witnessed a youngster this morning at the market check out my mini gift cakes, smile and then whisper to his mother, “Mommy, you could do that.” And I giggled.
Pumpkin Apple Cakes
Adapted from a recipe by Jürgen Krauss
16 mini cakes
Prof BB Autumn Spice Mix:
1 Tbsp ground cinnamon
1 Tbsp ground ginger
½ tsp ground allspice
½ tsp freshly ground nutmeg
Cakes:
4 medium “Honeycrisp” apples
One recipe Prof BB Autumn Spice Mix
1 1/3 cup granulated sugar (plus an additional 1/2 cup for apples)
18 Tbsp unsalted butter, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla paste
6 large eggs, room temperature
2 Tbsp buttermilk
½ cup pumpkin puree
3 ½ cup all-purpose flour
2 Tbsp plus 1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp fine sea salt
1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and prepare two mini cake pans (8 cakes each) with baking spray and parchment paper.
2) In a medium bowl, whisk together your dry mix: the flour, baking powder, salt and 1 Tbsp of the spice mix. Set aside.
3) In a large bowl, mix ½ cup granulated sugar with the remaining spice mix. Quarter and core the apples. Make about 5-6 “slashes” lengthwise through the skin of the apples. Add the apples to the bowl and toss with your hands. Toss again occasionally while you complete the rest of the batter.
4) In a standing mixer, cream together the 1 1/3 cup granulated sugar and the butter, scraping the bowl occasionally. Add the vanilla paste and mix to incorporate. Add the eggs, one at a time, and mix to fully incorporate. Add the pumpkin and mix to fully incorporate. Add half the dry mix, then the buttermilk and then the remaining dry mix. Remove from the mixer and do the final folding of the batter by hand.
5) Portion the batter into the prepared pans (roughly ½ cup per cake). Toss the apples one last time and then slightly press one quarter into the top of each mini cake. Bake for 25-27 minutes until the cake is golden and solid to the touch. Cool at least ½ hour before serving – the apples will be HOT!
6) I serve the cakes as is, but you could brush the tops with jam while still warm or dust the tops with confectionary sugar.
