Depero

Fortunato (1892-1960). Italian artist. In 1919, in Rovereto, he founded the Casa d’Arte Futurista (House of Futurist Art) in which he applied the concept of the creative unity of the arts: painting, architecture, decorative arts, and fashion, just as the artist hoped for in his Manifest for the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe. At the Depero House of Art, together with his wife Rosetta, he planned and created, in addition to advertising graphics, interior décor items such as furniture, cushions, tapestries, and clothes, including shawls and scarves with geometric patterns and stylized elements of naturalistic origin, as well as fabrics for furniture. But Depero’s most famous article of clothing remains the Futurist Waistcoat, expressly conceived for the artists belonging to the movement. They were manufactured in multicolored fabrics with arabesques and naturalistic patterns. The 1923 model for Azari had blue fish in the design; the one for Marinetti, likewise from 1923, had red, yellow, and orange inlays. Also in 1923, he designed shawls and geometric patterns for the Piatti silk factory in Como, and presented his sketches at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Among the few projects connected to women’s clothing were the sketches for Vogue covers during the 1930s. During the 1940s, Depero was influenced by the decorative motifs of Futurist Aero-Painting found in the fabrics of the Franco Scalamandré-Silk factory of New York, whose echo can be heard in the 1942 manifesto The Suit of Victory. Several of his fashion-works are on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, the latter being the town where he died.