Fortunato Depero

Watercolors, collages, inlays of colored fabrics and oils, as well as preparatory drawings and magazine covers: a glimpse that goes from 1917 to 1947 on the works of the futurist artist, exhibited in the exhibition “Fortunato Depero”, thirty years of “eclectic and pyrotechnical” production as defined by the art historian Maurizio Scudiero who edited the catalog.

26 works by the great futurist artist Fortunato Depero (Fund, 30 March 1892 – Rovereto, 29 November 1960) coming from prestigious private collections, in an overview of thirty years of activity, pieces ranging from “Hunchback Construction” (1917, pencil and watercolor on paper) to “Dance of cones” (around 1947, pencil and ink on paper), from the series of collages of colored papers dedicated to “Numbers” (circa 1926), to the “Women of the Tropic” (1945, oil on table).

The exhibition features several futuristic “tapestries”, actual mosaics of colored fabrics (such as the executive project for a fantastic “Cavalcata” tapestry of 1920), and numerous studies for advertising posters such as those for Campari, for which Depero during his career made hundreds of proposals. Among others in the exhibition “Also the cat drinks Campari” from 1927 and some studies for the “Numero Uno Futurista Campari” of 1930-31, “The Art of the future will be powerful advertising“ writes Depero in his “Manifesto of advertising art”, still in 1931, covers of prestigious magazines, made in the New York period as” Vogue “of 1930, or immediately after as” La Rivista “of 1930-31.

Both on the side of advertising graphics and in that of the realization of the covers, Depero remains faithful to a continuous iconographic reinterpretation: the characters of his works are made up of flat and stylized shapes coming from the world of theater. To give dynamism to the compositions it almost always uses the expedient of a certain diagonalism. The geometric figure used par excellence is the parallelepiped: lights and colors are played on strong contrasts, with a predilection for the use of white, black and red, with an aggressive approach that has influenced a large part of the subsequent advertising graphics. Just as one cannot fail to notice the influence that works such as “The gondoliers (or Venetian coleopterans)” of 1924-25, exhibited, had on the serial art of Andy Warhol.

“Depero anticipated the Pop art by fifty years”  – explains Maurizio Scudiero – “Although his was not an industrial seriality, but a craft one: every job was unique even in the multiplicity of its accomplishments”.