Spatialism – rediscovered today as one of the most significant avant-gardes of the postwar period – was a polymorphous artistic movement that is hard to pigeonhole, with the result that the critics who toed a more official line failed to understand or appreciate it for years. The volume presents for the first time English translations of a broad selection of writings that permit a reconstruction of the context in which it was born. The galleries run by Carlo Cardazzo were the setting for the Spatialist adventure of Lucio Fontana, who was the founder and guide of the movement. Out of the encounter between the gallerist's entrepreneurial skills and utopian aspirations and Fontana's vitality, provocative inventiveness and ability to inspire a younger generations of artist came what was to develop, over the course of a decade, into the group of Spatialist. Through its manifestos, the declarations of the artist and the voices of the critics of the time, the anthology conveys the climate of these relations, opening the way for a more thorough analysis of the movement's individual exponents. 

The historian and critic of modern and conteporary art Luca Massimo Barbero is director of the Istituto di Storia dell'Arte of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice and an advisor of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana. The author of numerous publications and curator of many exhibitions on postwar art in Italy and the United States, he has devoted particular attention in his studies to the work of Lucio Fontana.