Franco Assetto

Who was Franco Assetto?

Franco Assetto was an Italian sculptor and painter, who lived in the United States for much of his life.

His early work anticipated Pop Art. At the Bread Show at the Galleria della Bussola, Turin, in 1952 he presented the public with a number of Turin loaves cast in bronze, eight years before Jasper Johns thought of casting his two famous beer cans.

He was one of a handful of artists who, like Fontana, Capogrossi, Burri and few others, started again from zero acknowledging the informal experience as the essential condition for the artistic quest in which Form is given as the primary possibility to build the artists own existential experience.

When experiments with informalism reached saturation point he developed the Baroque Autre.

He later became interested in the artistic potential of water and designed a number of public fountains. There is a museum of his work in Frontino, Italy, where one of his fountains can be seen.

Other public art includes the Via Crucis in Saint Basil's Catholic Church, Los Angeles, and The Big Candy in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles.

For some 20 years he had been married to the prominent U.S. West Coast music patron Betty Freeman; composer Lou Harrison wrote for the two a "Serenade for Betty Freeman and Franco Assetto".