School of Altamira

The School of Altamira (Escuela de Altamira) was an avant-garde art school and association founded in 1946 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by the Argentine-born Italian artist Lucio Fontana together with his students, who that year published the Manifiesto Blanco (White Manifesto). The manifesto advocated the integration of art and science and a new, synthetic art based on movement through time and space: "Matter, colour and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art". Its teachers included the painters Emilio Pettoruti and Raúl Soldi, with Jorge Romero Brest as professor of art history; in 1947 Perón ordered the academy dissolved. Fontana did not sign the manifesto but actively contributed to it, and he later expanded its ideas as Spatialism in five manifestos from 1947 to 1952. The academy should not be confused with the School of Altamira founded in 1948 in Santillana del Mar, Spain, by Mathias Goeritz and others, which took its name from the nearby Altamira cave with its prehistoric paintings. The School of Altamira is an important example of how peripheral art centres beyond Europe actively engaged with global modernist debates of the mid-twentieth century, forging their own original versions of the avant-garde.