Although it does not really matter whether lines are drawn with a ruler, a pencil, or a knife: There had to be someone who would use the knife for the first time in a new way, and that someone was Lucio Fontana. Among the many artists who used destruction as an artistic means of expression in the twentieth century, it was he who carried out this destruction emotionlessly, with extreme “coldness”: unexpressively, without any affect, as pure pictorial events. With these paintings, Fontana became the “father figure” of that broad movement after the middle of the century that ranged from neo-geometry to op art—and thus not least of all to the ZERO group in Düsseldorf. The Friends acquired this painting with ten cuts for the Kunstsammlung in 1984.