The Hole Thing

Lucio Fontana at the Met Breuer.

- Peter Schjeldahl

There are some melancholy aspects to an elegant retrospective, at the Met Breuer, of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana, who is famous for the monochrome canvases, neatly slashed with knives, that he made—or executed—between 1958 and his death, ten years later, at the age of sixty-nine. One gloom is the awareness that this is among the last of the major shows that the Met will produce in Marcel Breuer’s granite alcazar on Madison Avenue, which it has occupied since the original tenant, the Whitney Museum, moved downtown, in 2015. (The Frick Collection will assume the lease next year, while renovating its Seventieth Street digs.) The annex’s offbeat, lively program will be missed, having featured cleverly themed historical shows, mostly of painting (“Unfinished,” in 2016) or sculpture (“Like Life,” last year), and revivals of what could be termed second-tier canonical artists whose virtues may have been unjustly neglected. The retrospective, two years ago, of Marisa Merz—like her husband, Mario Merz, a practitioner of Arte Povera, the carefully shaggy Italian answer to American minimalism—was revelatory. She proved to have been the most appealing artist in an otherwise all-male movement.

“Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold,” crisply curated by Iria Candela, is less auspicious, though it is instructively timed for reflecting on recently changed perceptions of modern art. Conveniently, the chaste brutalism of the Breuer building—finished in 1966, the year that Fontana won the Grand Prize for an Italian painter at the Venice Biennale—feels perfect for it, as it did for Merz’s show, housing a period style in period style.