Fortunato Depero

“Fortunato Depero's Italian Futurism”

“His playful imagination found expression in the series of Plastic Dances (balli plastici) which he designed in 1917 and produced the next year at the Teatro dei Piccoli (Children’s Theater) in Rome. During the 1920s he designed exhibition booths and pavilions for various firms and events. Depero was in Paris from 1925 to 1926, then in New York from 1928 to 1930 when he designed covers for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and other magazines. Many of his designs were for the Campari company, and he theorized this work in “Futurism and Advertising Art””

“[Depero] did not differentiate between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ arts, putting all on the same level.”

“If a painter once devoted himself to dynamism and now abandons it, denies it and even criticizes it, it is his own business. This does not mean, however that futurism has had his day. It is always worthy of interest and many artists still work in its ranks with unchanged passion. Dynamism is in life and in nature itself.”

“The first and foremost critic of a work of art is the artist who created it. Give him every means to illustrate it and make it known. If an artist awaits celebrity or gratefulness for his work through other people, he will have the time to die a thousand times for sheer hunger.”

“Futurism attracted me and made me better, gave me a new strength, showed me new fields and possibilities.”

“The Futurists were the first painters, poets, and architects who exalted modern work with their art—”

“We Futurists, Balla and Depero, seek to realize this total fusion in order to reconstruct the universe by making it more joyful, in other words by an integral re-creation. 'We will give skeleton and flesh to the invisible, the impalpable, the imponderable and the imperceptible. We will find abstract equivalents for all the forms and elements of the universe, and then well will combine them according to the caprice of our inspiration, to shape plastic complexes which we will set in motion.”