Much of Depero’s design prefigures today’s postmodern and new wave
eclecticism in its form and color.
Depero was an indefatigable proponent of futurism. He wrote for
newspapers, promoted the futurist book, founded and directed the machine
art magazine Dinamo, organized personal exhibitions, and worked in the
theater as a set and costume designer. He was commissioned by Diaghilev
to make a set and costumes for Le Chant du Rossignol.He invented an
“onomalanguage,” a free word, free sounding, expressive verbal rigamarole.
He represented the futurists at the 1925 Paris exposition of modern
decorative and industrial art, exhibiting his life-sized mechanical men. He
produced futurist radio programs. He decorated cabarets, bars, restaurants,
and dance halls. With his wife Rossetta, he opened the Casa d ’Arte Futurist
in Rovereto, Italy, where he made wooden constructions, furniture, and
costumes for a mass clientele. He designed futurist clothing, vests, and
jackets. And in 1923 he moved to New York for three years where on West
Twenty-third Street he opened Depero’s Futurist House, selling everything
from paintings to advertising graphics, and propagating the futurist “style”
to a culture that thought of all European modernism as “futurist.”
Depero triumphed with book design and production. During the
1920 s the “book-object” was seriously practiced as a futurist art form—
the marriage of futurist layout and typographical experimentation. For the
1927 Biennale Internazionale delle Arti Decorativein Monza, Italy, Depero
designed a book pavilion built entirely out of giant block letters. It was a
grand architectural achievement, but not as historically important as his
bolted art catalog, which, along with Tulio D’Albisola’s famous tin book
Futurist Words Set Free: Tactile Thermal Olfactory, is emblematic of futurist
applied arts.Depero: Futurista,as it was called, is a lavish compendium of
his own design work (including many advertisements he had designed for
Campari) covering the years 1913 through 1927. Depero was predisposed
to an “Aztec deco” sensibility that was influenced by set-back skyscrapers.
Depero’s use of bright colors and collaged colored papers was a startling
contrast to the rather conservative realism that then held sway.
Reproduced in letterpress, it was bound, in machine age fashion, by two
stainless steel bolts.
By 1927 Depero was recognized as an innovator. His synthesis of
dynamic and expressionistic graphic forms was undeniably original. He
reconciled craft, fine, and applied arts; and, believing that product
advertising was the means to stimulate a dialogue with the public, he took
on commissions in Italy, including a highly visible series for Campari. In
the 1932 manifesto, “The Art of Advertising,” Depero announced, “The art
of the future will be powerfully advertising art.” And he continued that “All
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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