The big break came towards the end of World War II, for most of which Argentina had remained neutral, essentially because the politicians favoured Britain and the Allies while large sections of the armed forces sympathized with the Axis and its fascist philosophy. Argentina finally declared war on Germany in 1944, the year that Arturo , an abstract art review seen as a pioneer in world art circles, was first published. Argentine artists, many of whom were born in Europe, often in the Central and Eastern European countries most affected by both world wars, rejected what they saw as an unjustifiable hegemony, led from countries that had just indulged in such acts of barbarism that they could teach the New World no lessons, in politics or in art. Abstract forms were chosen as a way of protesting against reactionary politics in an indirect way, that could not be readily identified as subversion. Just after Perón came to power, a number of ground-breaking exhibitions were staged in Buenos Aires, including that of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, in March 1946, and Arte Madí, in August of the same year. Three major art manifestos were published that year or the following, the relatively less influential Manifiesto Intervencionista (by Tomás Maldonado and his friends), the Manifiesto Madí, signed by Hungarian-born Gyula Kosice (born 1924) and his colleagues, and the Manifiesto Blanco issued by members of the Academia Altamira, which wanted to create a new art-form based on "matter, colour and sound in perpetual movement". The last of the three was primarily instigated by Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), indisputably one of the twentieth century's key artists and founder of the Informalist movement. Fontana may have done most of his work, and died, in Italy - there is a foundation named after him in Milan - but he was born in Argentina, in Rosario de Santa Fe to be exact, the son of an Italian immigrant and an Argentine actress of Italian origin. For his education he was soon dispatched to Italy, where he studied architecture. A hero during World War I he returned to Argentina in 1940, after churning out a number of monuments for Mussolini's regime, though he never espoused fascism. In Argentina he worked for his father's firm sculpting funerary monuments, a job he quickly gave up for teaching art in the capital. A co-founder of both the Altamira School and the Escuela Libre de Artes Plásticos, on Avenida Alvear, Recoleta, he never recovered, either psychologically or in terms of his reputation in Argentina, from being runner-up in the competition to design the national flag monument in his native city. Perhaps a case of sour grapes, he later described those seven years spent in Rosario and Buenos Aires, as "una vita da coglione" (a shitty existence), and he decided to leave the country "as a more positive alternative to committing suicide". No wonder, perhaps, that Argentina has never gone out of its way to claim Fontana as its own. Back in Italy in 1947, he developed his own theory of art - enshrined in the Spatialist Manifesto issued that year - and his now unmistakeable style: a series of minimalistic monochrome canvases, slashed with one or more incisions or pierced with holes, apparently evocative of restrained violence or simply representing an "exploration of space". Known somewhat irreverently in the art world as "Lucio the Slasher" or "Lucio the Ripper", he has been the subject of a couple of major exhibitions in Buenos Aires in recent years, suggestive of a rehabilitation, but the rest of the world still thinks of him as an Italian creator. Nonetheless a couple of his works, including the somewhat unrepresentative Concepto espacial , are on prominent display inside the entrance to the MNBA. Meanwhile in Argentina the other avantgarde artists seemed more intent on theory than practice, but nonetheless produced some work that is still regarded as significant to this day. Madí, probably a nonsense word like Dada, but sometimes said to be derived from "materialismo dialéctico", was decidedly political in its aims of creating a classless society, and reacted against Surrealism which it claimed was dominated by an elite. One of the movement's most radical ideas, cooked up in the 1970s, was to build a series of "Hydrospatial Cities" suspended in space over water, starting with the River Plate, where the urban environment would be so radically different from those previously created that there would be no need for art; this idea has yet to be put into practice. Back in 1946 Kosice produced a series of works using neon-lighting, thought to be the first of their kind, and he later experimented with glass, plexiglass, acrylic, cork, aluminium and bone - his intriguing Dispersión del aire (1967) at the MNBA is one such work. Kosice's articulated wooden sculpture Röyi , dating from 1944, is also regarded as revolutionary, as it is both abstract and lathed rather than "sculpted". Another member of the movement, Kosice's wife Diyi Laañ (born 1927), created works on a structured frame in an abstract, hollow shape such as her Pintura sobre el marco recortado (1948). Rhod Rothfuss (born 1920) was the Uruguayan leader of Madí, but his enamel paintings on wood, created in the 1940s were highly influential on that decade's art in Argentina. Rivals of the Madí group, partly for personal reasons, the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención or Intervencionistas, were far more radical politically, espousing solidarity with the Soviet Union largely as a means of protesting against growing US interference in Latin American affairs. Artistically they were more conventional than the Madí lot, and tended to produce paintings in traditionally shaped frames; they drew much of their inspiration from artists like Mondrian, Van Doesburg and Malevich. Members included the leading theorist Tomás Maldonado (born 1922), Claudio Girola, Lidy Prati and Gregorio Vardánega, but the most acclaimed artists in the movement are Enio Iommi (born 1926), Alfredo Hlito (1923-93) and Raúl Lozza (born 1911). The first of the three, Claudio Girola's brother Enio, is undoubtedly one of Argentina's greatest-ever artists and he stands out from the other Intervencionistas in part because he works in three dimensions. His exquisite sculptures in stainless steel - such as Torsión de planos (1964) at the MNBA - wood, bronze and aluminium, express his personal "spatialist" credo that in many ways links him more closely to Fontana. More recently Iommi underwent an about-turn and began producing objects with emphasis on the material, using wire, old boxes, industrial and household refuse including rusty nails - his 1977 Retiro exhibition significantly entitled Adiós a una época marked his switch to arte povera , after decades of using "noble" materials. Hlito, meanwhile, was a more "mainstream" Intervencionista, whose work displays the clear influences of people like Mondrian and Max Bill, and even surprisingly Seurat and Cézanne - though it was their use of colour and brushstrokes that most interested him. A very typical work, Lineas tangentes (1955), is on show at the MNBA. Lozza, on the other hand, became so obsessed with the problematics of colour, form and representation in art that he formed his own movement in 1949, called Perceptismo, according to which paintings must first be sketched obeying certain architectural rules before the colour can be filled in. His watershed work Pintura Numero 153 (1948), executed just before he left the Intervencionistas, is on show at the MNBA and its geometric forms against a bright orange background already point to this schism.