text of 1951 we read: «I must confess that, looking back, I felt, before his power, as a ceramicist myself, yet more enamoured of this art that has kept me occupied since I was a boy»51. Picasso, for his part, would perhaps never have fully subscribed to the Italo-Argentinian artist’s earlier, famous declaration of intent («I am a sculptor, not a ceramicist»): in other words, he would certainly have made vases and plates, those practical items that have always been made from ceramic, making use of the Vallauris manufactory [Fig. 45]. Whereas Fontana fought strenuously almost to deprive this medium of its traditional function, Picasso would have glorified it in a different way, without ever negating it. This was a central issue for anyone working in ceramics. For example, Melotti took yet another position: in an interview of 1984 later published in 1992 by Antonia Mulas, he claimed, implicitly, to have embraced ceramics precisely to exploit its ornamental and functional potential, in other words by producing vases, plates, and other objects of small size on a large scale: «Since I wasn’t able to make a living from sculpture and I didn’t like going into debt [...] I began to make ceramics. I invented a sort of ceramics that was very popular and that provided me with money, allowing me to live comfortably [...] Later, at a certain point, people realized that I wasn’t bad as a sculptor either and I gave up ceramics [...] a poet can write wonderful advertisements but at heart is ashamed to do that alone, and so I was ashamed. But when I saw Picasso’s ceramics, I thought there was no need for me to be ashamed, because mine were no uglier than his!»52.
It is no coincidence that Melotti compared his own ceramics with those of Picasso [Fig. 46]: these were pieces that in some ways belonged to the same genre, whereas those by Fontana were truly something different. Melotti, who from the end of the 1920s had developed a close and lasting friendship with Fontana, whose first teacher, Wildt, he shared, had begun to work systematically in ceramic in the mid-1940s. At the start of this experience we find a series of small sculptures, some of which are not so different from the famous terracotta Little Theatres; here we should mention one in particular, the Letter to Fontana of 1944 [Fig. 48], in which the artist almost paid a tribute of gratitude to the friend who had been the first to start working in this medium (it is worth remembering that the careers of the two artists in many ways ran roughly parallel: again in 1935, and again at Il Milione, Melotti too had displayed his first abstract sculptures). Dating to the same year, 1944, is the Story of Harlequin [Fig. 47], and in both these ceramics I seem to sense an affinity with the surrealist paintings of Alberto Savinio (an affinity that can also be seen with some youthful sculptures by Leoncillo). Indeed, if we interpret the Baroque more broadly, as the critics of the time sometimes did, in other words as a principle antithetical to classicism, it is easy to understand how the surrealist style could be brought back to this common denominator, and in
this sense I think that the painting of Max Ernst, who had displayed at Il Milione in 1931, may also have influenced the Melotti of the Story of Harlequin. The ceramics of the following years were completely different: vases, plates, cups and also those cartocci that were always and above all practical objects, which met with that significant commercial success recalled many years later by the artist who, as we have seen, attempted to distance himself from an activity that he claims to have undertaken for purely economic reasons. Already in 1974, in an interview given to Harper’s Bazar, he had stated «I am not particularly fond of ceramics»53. Unlike Fontana, then, Melotti saw a profound difference between the work of a sculptor and that of a ceramicist: whilst the former, in stating that he was a sculptor and not a ceramicist, claimed for this material a status equivalent to that of marble or bronze, the latter never made this leap in part because, as we have said, he had accepted what we might describe as the traditional role of ceramics. This point remains valid even taking into consideration the fact that Fontana himself made plates and decorative objects, in particular from the 1950s onwards, about which Garibaldo Marussi expressed some reservations; reviewing an exhibition by the artist in 1950 (Milan, Il Milione) he wrote: «The works that Fontana presents today are almost all plates, large plates to be hung on the wall to enliven the atmosphere of a room [...] they are overloaded, sometimes overly mellow [...] overabundance [...] turgidity [...] tumefaction [...] are the danger that Fontana runs today»54. It is natural to conclude, in the light of what we have said so far, that Marussi found this Fontana to be a little too Baroque. As concerns this critical issue (ceramics as sculpture versus ceramics as plates and vases) Leoncillo’s position was essentially identical to that of Fontana. Already in 1947, Gio Ponti, in an article published in a Swiss magazine (in German, English and French), devoted mainly to the fine Caryatids for a balustrade of about 1945, wrote: «Now, face to face with his powerful work we see how true this is. And we see that what might separate sculpture from ceramic and relegate the latter to the level of learned infancy and the standard of a vain decorative toy, has been left far behind»55.
Leoncillo’s axiom, to which Gio Ponti referred here, was quoted again by the same author in the aforementioned article of 1948 on the visit to Picasso at Vallauris: «Sculpture without colour is not sculpture, it is architecture»56. The great master of Italian design was responsible for launching Leoncillo on the international stage in 1940 by inviting him to the Milan Triennale, where he won the gold medal for the applied arts. The sculptor from Spoleto had made his debut in 1939 as a ceramicist, and in this same year had modelled the busts representing The Four
53 Carboni 2003, p. 12. 54 Pancotto 1991, pp. 22-25.
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51 Fontana 1951, p. 24.
55 Ponti 1947, p. 217.
52 Mulas 1992, pp. 30-31.
56 Ponti 1948a p. 25.
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